Plato's Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics 0813219795, 9780813219790

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Religion, Socrates, and the Platonic Socrates
2. Scrutinizing Character, Scrutinizing Moral Propositions
3. The Discovery of Separate Form
4. Forms and Erotic Passion
5. Ethics, Psychology, and Metaphysics in the Phaedo
6. The Republic: The Finished Theory of Forms?
7. Reconstructions: From Parmenides to Philebus
8. Gods, God, and Goodness
9. Ethics and Metaphysics: Then and Now
Appendix A: Republic Book Five: Some Background to Eugenic Theory
Appendix B: Literature and Platonic Transcendentalism
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Plato’s moral realism

Plato’s moral realism

The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics   • 

John M. Rist

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Design and typesetting by Kachergis Book Design Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rist, John M. Plato’s moral realism : the discovery of the presuppositions of ethics / John M. Rist. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-8132-1979-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8132-1980-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Plato.  2. Ethics, Ancient.  3. Plato. Republic.  I. Title. B398.E8R57 2012 170.92—dc23   2012004507

Contents



Acknowledgments

Introduction

vii

1

1. Religion, Socrates, and the Platonic Socrates

15

2. Scrutinizing Character, Scrutinizing Moral Propositions

23



3. The Discovery of Separate Form

43



4. Forms and Erotic Passion

66

5. Ethics, Psychology, and Metaphysics in the Phaedo 90 6. The Republic: The Finished Theory of Forms?

106

7. Reconstructions: From Parmenides to Philebus 165

8. Gods, God, and Goodness

213



9. Ethics and Metaphysics: Then and Now

242

Appendix A: Republic Book Five—Some Background to Eugenic Theory

271

Appendix B: Literature and Platonic Transcendentalism

275

Selected Bibliography

279

Index

283

Acknowledgments

Many students and friends, in Toronto, Rome, and elsewhere, have encouraged me—both in classes and without—to attempt this book, and I thank them all for their help. Douglas Hedley read a more primitive version and suggested a number of significant improvements, as have other talkers and readers, not least from the Catholic University of America Press. Jim Kruggel, the philosophy editor there, has been exceptionally helpful at all stages of the production of a rather unorthodox offering. Anna Rist, as usual, corrected many errors of content and infelicities of style and worked hard to get me to write in a way that would be helpful to the kind of readers I hoped might profit from a wide-ranging, if general and unprofessional book on Plato’s views—perhaps important now as almost never before—on the possibility of ethics. Cambridge, U.K., February 2011

  vii 

Plato’s moral realism

Introduction

Whenever “men of the world” have to get into a personal argument about ideas they find fault with, and are prepared to stand their ground bravely for a long time and not flee the field like cowards, a strange thing happens: they eventually become dissatisfied with themselves and their claims. That famous rhetoric of theirs somehow fades away so that they seem like children. Plato, Theaetetus 177b Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle, were much more able than most people to bring things to light . . . they must have been not just excellent stylists of language but thinkers; that is, they excelled in veracity. Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person

In the West we now live in a post-moral society. That may seem an extraordinary claim in view of the endless public and private debate on all kinds of apparently moral questions: on the distribution of the world’s wealth, the control of crime, the necessity or undesirability of capital punishment and of punishment in general, the rights and wrongs of abortion, of warfare, indeed on a whole range of inalienable rights, most particularly the right of choice, however to be determined. Most of this discussion, however, is free-floating, depending only on prudential or arbitrary beliefs and judgments about the good we ought to pursue. We try to engage in what is taken to be moral reasoning without recourse—since recourse is   1 

introduction deemed impossible—to moral foundations. We “just know” that we can determine the right course by reference to canons of morality we erect for ourselves, while chattering of the guidance of right reason, of a moral sense, of duty or obligation, of wise and shrewd decision-making. Under one or other of these guises we seek to promote the good of some or all of the human race, and more particularly of ourselves, even though we do not know who we are and tend to assume that we are the autonomous products of a blind evolutionary process. While traditional moral thinkers, from the time of Socrates, concerned themselves both with our psychological capacity for making moral decisions and with an objective and defensible good that we want or need to pursue, their modern successors regularly wish to deduce what we want or ought to choose solely from the psychological condition in which we find ourselves from time to time, assuming that we can investigate that condition without reflecting on whether or not it would need to be very different were there objective moral foundations on which we could and must rest, objective moral goals that we might rationally pursue and discover. If we were pursuing “happiness,” as the ancient Greeks universally believe we are, we would need to identify the psychological state demanded of us as a condition of that happiness. We might have to recognize, for example, that achieving our own happiness entails pursuing the good for its own sake. Happiness, though sought, would thus be a by-product of that recognition. I argued in Real Ethics that the results of our contemporary ethical proceedings are almost daily more evidenced: as mindless in theory, intolerant, self-deluding, even brutal in practice. Logically we are confronted with two alternatives: if not a reconstructed foundationalism, then an amoral individualism in which each of us invents the right to construct his own “moral” universe and to promote the cultural consequences of that universe as widely as he deems necessary and useful. Ultimately this course is for moral nihilism, often dressed up in Western societies as democratic egalitarianism, preferably in an ignorant and therefore more “democratic”   2 

introduction form: we look for techniques of survival in a value-free universe. Some, however, think to find an escape route by taking refuge in some variety of religious fundamentalism or cultish fantasy that may be of a philistine, censorious, and again even brutal sort, sharing with the nihilist option a denial of any possibility of a rationally defensible moral universe, and instead relying on the blind acceptance of the supposed will of fate or of some god or gods. Here, then, are the logical alternatives; in practice most of us indulge in fudges, adopting some intermediate (or even Laodicean) position that feels comfortable, but that not only neglects the old Socratic demand for philosophical justification, but impudently claims that “foundationalist” justification (that is, one based on objective truth and objective standards) no longer is a rational or even a “moral” possibility. In the same book I also argued, if briefly, that Plato long ago identified dangers similar to those we now face and proposed the basis for an alternative, more humane, and more rational vision. Until comparatively recent times many of the key elements of that vision survived as developed in Christian (and to a degree other theistic) guises: sometimes unrecognized, but always dependent on the existence of a world of human values we discover without need to invent. Those key elements were often grouped into systems that bore Plato’s name; they might, for example, be labeled neo-Platonism or Christian Platonism, or they might underlie other less obviously Platonizing theories, such as those of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, or even—surprisingly—Kant. From a contemporary standpoint, however, neo-Platonic or other theories dependent on Platonism for much of their conceptual force, even if true, can remind us of a parent trying to deliver his cherished beliefs to his children while unable to hand on simultaneously those life experiences through which he has acquired them. To the more skeptical child— of whatever age—such beliefs can seem not just old-fashioned, but arbitrary. Such concerns about the attitudes of later Platonists have determined the structure of the present book. For I not only want to   3 

introduction show how in dialogues like the Meno, Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus Plato tries to establish a radical, metaphysically based defense of morality, but by examining his earlier writings to trace the stages by which he came to believe that such a defense is necessary. For self-confessed Platonists—or metaphysicians influenced more than they know by Plato—though they have learned from Plato much that seemed (and is) true, have regularly failed to examine or understand how he was driven philosophically to the beliefs he promulgated. They have not understood, for example, why he came to say what he said about the relation between goodness and beauty, or what he may have gradually learned that might help with the more saliently contemporary problem of the distinction between facts and values. Since their primary concern has been with key aspects of his developed metaphysics, they have often neglected his destructive, frequently ad hominem, even skeptical arguments against his opponents and predecessors, without realizing that these point to the path by which he reached his revolutionary views and sought to defend them. Equally misguidedly, and in contrast to that sort of dogmatic Platonism or neo-Platonism, others have emphasized only what may be read as skeptical in Plato, ignoring or abandoning his developing metaphysics—or claiming that the Platonic metaphysic is an esoteric vision to be revealed only to a self-renewing or self-deluding élite. In the present study I certainly wish to suggest that something recognizably similar to a revised version of Plato’s “foundationalist” meta-ethics is necessary if a morality that is more than a conventional code is to be defended. Yet although in my final chapter I shall touch on contemporary alternatives to Platonic ethics—with a glance at their weaknesses—and although in Real Ethics I tried to indicate how many of our present difficulties arise from false assumptions about the inadequate foundations of Platonic moral realism, my principal aim in the present book is not to defend Platonic realism against contemporary skeptics or nihilists. Rather I wish to show in much more detail how Plato arrived at his realism (to  4 

introduction gether with his complementary claims about philosophical psychology) and how he defended it—as well as some of the alternatives he himself rejected en passant. Yet nor will this be an archaeological book listing what exactly Plato meant to tell us from time to time; rather—with an eye to the current impasse in ethics—I shall try to see, perhaps with benefit of hindsight, where over time Plato is going—whether consciously or not; how far he arrived where he came to think he needed to arrive; and what he believed to be the intellectual and social consequences if he failed to defend his metaphysics of morals. Only then shall I also look briefly in my final chapter at where we should stand once we have learned what we can from Plato and from the standpoint toward which Plato’s theories point—recognizing too, as I proceed, some of the difficulties he failed to see or to resolve. Let me state again, therefore, that my aim is less to argue for the existence of Platonic Forms than to urge that without such Forms (developed in ways that here I can only sketch), moral nihilism—in Plato’s view (and my own)—cannot be defeated philosophically. Hence if we could find good arguments—not mere aspirations—for rejecting any improved version of Plato’s position, I would suggest that we need the courage to face the possibility that all available alternatives are inadequate, that we do indeed live in a value-free universe, and that we should accept (at least in philosophy) the consequences of such an admission. What we might then choose to do by way of political and social lying to the “unenlightened” is not my present concern. But for the most part, I emphasize again, such matters are touched only in the brief and necessarily sketchy final chapter of the present account of the moral and metaphysical journey of Plato himself. I have no wish to present Plato anachronistically, least of all in matters of terminology. That is why I shall frequently (though not universally) use the word “separate,” rather than “transcendent,” in referring to his thesis that intelligible Forms are ontologically distinct—because although Plato’s separate Forms are indeed transcendent, the word “transcendent” for us carries implications that   5 

introduction could extend our concept of Forms in a theological direction further than Plato intended or would find palatable That example of restraint can serve to introduce a more general but not unrelated point: for I believe that in Plato’s time, as in that of all other philosophers, certain philosophical difficulties could not yet have been resolved; that much work in related intellectual areas would have had to be completed before significant stumbling blocks could be disposed of. Later on, those stumbling blocks might be removed, still in the spirit of the man who originally tried to remove them and with a view to advancing in the way he would have wished to advance. This is a book that looks to Plato’s resolution of problems that also dog contemporary debate about ethics, or meta-ethics, and philosophical psychology. Hence it is not offered as a study of Plato’s thought as a whole, still less as a defense of his broader understanding of the metaphysical nature of the human individual. That means that I shall have almost nothing to say of a number of dialogues, such as the Statesman, or of important themes such as pleasure. Nor would I wish to deny that Platonists have always had to learn that, though Aristotle’s account of human individuals leaves much to be desired, he it was who first recognized the raw substantiality of physical particulars. Now, however, I am concerned only with those aspects of Plato’s thought that relate directly or indirectly to what was always his primary and Socratic concern: that is, to make the soul as good as possible. Yet even that more limited task demands a wider-ranging account of his thought than might at first sight seem necessary or desirable—but for many reasons that is unavoidable. Thus when Plato decided to posit transcendent Forms as an essential part of his defense of objective morality, he found he could not avoid also treating, not only of physical objects, but of semantics. The Cratylus, as I shall argue, is perhaps the earliest dialogue in which “separate” moral and aesthetic Forms are introduced; certainly it is the first in which we meet Forms of material particulars. It is no accident that it is also the first in which Plato raises the ques  6 

introduction tion of the intelligibility of “false” statements. That implies, inter alia, that the chronology of the dialogues has a certain importance. As a result, although this is a book about Plato by hindsight, I shall broadly assume the principles of what is now widely accepted as a plausible chronological sequence of the dialogues, based largely on philosophically neutral stylistic considerations. Stylometry, however, can demonstrate no more than the division of Plato’s work into three stages. Thus my own division—intertwining stylometry with philosophical considerations—will not correspond exactly to the philological consensus. Among the earliest group of dialogues I shall include the following, and probably (but sometimes far from certainly) in the following order: Apology, Crito, Hippias Minor, Ion, Gorgias, Menexenus, Charmides, Laches, Protagoras, Euthyphro, Lysis, Meno, Euthydemus. In the “middle” group will be the Cratylus, Symposium, Phaedo, Republic, Parmenides, Theaetetus, and Phaedrus— though on purely stylistic grounds the Cratylus, Symposium, and Phaedo (all of which variously deploy the “full-blown” theory of separate Forms) would belong to group one and can thus be assumed to predate the others in my group two—while the latest group will consist of the Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Critias, Philebus, Seventh Letter, Laws and Epinomis (though the last seems more probably the work of Philip of Opus). The precise position of the Timaeus and the Critias (whether before or after the Sophist and Statesman) remains uncertain, though for reasons that will become apparent I incline to put them later. I accept the Seventh Letter as genuine, while being disposed to reject the remaining correspondence; certainly the influential Second Letter is spurious. Other titles that have come down to us as Platonic I also regard as non-Platonic or probably so. In either case their presence would make no substantial difference to the present book. It is important to note that in adopting a developmental approach to Plato underpinned by the basic discoveries of stylometry, I do not want to be misunderstood as suggesting that the pre-Form dialogues represent any kind of failure on Plato’s part. I certainly   7 

introduction believe that Plato reformed various theories to be found in these dialogues, especially the uncertain status of the objects of thought and a psychology and theory of action that apparently deny the existence of a “divided self ” and of weakness of will. But these earlier dialogues are no record of failure; rather they show us a first-rate philosophical mind making progress at work: the mind of Plato who found his original inspiration in the life and philosophical methodology of a Socrates whose historical beliefs can only partially be discerned. It has always been true that commentators on Plato are also interpreters of Plato, and that the indirect approach to philosophical truth that the dialogue-form proposes has encouraged all kinds of subjective interpretations of the original discussions presented. In recent times, however, the loss of faith in grand narratives and the accompanying hostility to metaphysics of any sort has led to the appearance of a number of studies of Plato whose chief aim seems to be either to develop a new hermeneutic fashion or to subvert—rather in the manner of an academic parlor game—some older and more established tradition. Often such readings begin with a legitimate concern about a particular manner of interpreting the dialogues, then degenerate into a rival overemphasis on the again limited merits of the novel approach. Thus in reaction against those who have tended to interpret a particular dialogue—or a particular argument in a particular dialogue—by reference elsewhere in Plato’s writings, some scholars will emphasize the immediate “dialectical project” of a particular argument in its particular context. There is much to be said for this move—not least because it pays due attention to the circumstances and characters chosen by Plato for his treatment of each individual theme. That said, it still seems perverse to neglect similar approaches to similar themes occurring in a number of dialogues, so indicating that Plato wishes not only to show how dialogue and dialectic will reveal the complexity of philosophical problems, but also that he has clear and overarching philosophical interests that persist from dialogue to dialogue and so reveal the overall move  8 

introduction ment of his mind. It should not be forgotten that even in his varying portraits of Socrates, Plato himself, not his characters, pulls the strings. That fact cannot be sacrificed for any fashionable wish to see Plato as a philosophical multiculturalist whose chief concern is to let a thousand philosophical flowers bloom. Plato’s moral thought developed over time, and at least the principal features of this development can be recognized. I believe that some of its early stages can be identified as historically Socratic, though I would allow considerable agnosticism as to where the historical line should be drawn. I cannot therefore recognize the kind of “unitarian” Plato offered by most pre-nineteenth-century Platonists and revived by a number of contemporaries, though sometimes now in anti-metaphysical and anti-neo-Platonic versions. Such scholars—fortified by implausible theses about the unchangingness of Platonic vocabulary, and hence, they imply, of concepts—assume that the Master’s entire philosophy can be retrieved from each and all of his writings, and that his apparently more shadowy claims in one dialogue must always be correctly interpreted as in perfect harmony with clearer versions in another: very frequently, in the Phaedo, the Symposium, the Republic, the Phaedrus, and the Timaeus. Nor can I express much sympathy for the increasingly popular revisionist view—again offered in reaction to excesses of developmentalism—that Middle or neo-Platonic readings in antiquity should enjoy some privileged status as guides to contemporary interpretation, for though these ancient writers admired many of Plato’s conclusions (while often ignoring or perverting what was less palatable), they show almost no interest in the process by which Plato found himself forced to offer bold proposals contradicting the received “wisdom” of his own day. Yet whether the dialogues represent Plato’s developing understanding of a particular ethic and metaphysic or only his developing exposition of what he always believed, is in one sense unimportant, since questions of development or exposition do not affect my primary purpose, which is to follow Plato along a road down which I   9 

introduction myself would wish us to proceed—and proceed further—if we are to recover the possibility of ethics, of meta-ethics, and their corresponding philosophical psychology. There now exist hundreds of books on Plato, thousands of articles; and hundreds more appear every year. No one is able to read them all, and in recent times many have “solved” the problem by reading and adopting only expositions in their own language, commonly English, and their own philosophical tradition. In this book, which avows itself an interpretation of Plato and of Plato’s intentions both conscious and unconscious, I make no claim to control of all this secondary literature, and have no wish to follow any ephemeral canon of commentators. My aim is to help beginners in philosophy who are more concerned to understand Plato’s basic orientation than with more technical details, as well as those whose knowledge of Plato is more extensive. But above all—and as the result of repeated requests to do so—I want to reach an intelligent general audience, and that generates a peculiar difficulty about the presentation of my material. The magisterial literary style of Plato’s writing conceals thought of great complexity, and that complexity has evoked widely different interpretations among contemporary scholars. So I have tried to provide enough detailed discussion of the text to protect myself against charges of bland oversimplification, but not so much as to render the book dauntingly technical. I am sure that in treading this fine line I have not always been successful, but it was with such aims in mind that I decided to cut off the burgeoning Hydra’s heads by omitting footnotes, hoping that a selective bibliography will provide a certain indication of why I have presented Plato as I have and where more detailed arguments for and against some of the more influential recent interpretations of his thought can be found. My present aim, then, is to propose an account of Plato’s ethics as a developing whole—which means that I must ultimately invite the reader to take it or leave it (as Plato himself in the Republic invites us to take or leave the life of the philosopher-king or the tyrant   10 

introduction as he has presented them). Any reader who wishes to pursue Plato in greater detail will have to look more widely, not only for alternative readings of key passages, but for more elaborate defenses of what I present as my own reading of the text. For had I attempted to review even all the more influential of contemporary interpretations, whether supportive of my own view or the reverse, I should have required hundreds of pages and thereby a very different—and far more limited and purely professional—audience from that which I presently envisage. For, as I have already observed, every book on Plato is itself a (partial) interpretation of Plato, an attempt by the author at what the Master said, could have said, or should have said, in noticing which—while shuddering at its implications for the wouldbe student of Plato—I find myself in agreement—if perhaps more brashly—with a tradition of dealing with Plato dating back at least to Thrasyllus, astrologer to the Roman Emperor Tiberius, early editor of Plato’s writings and probable composer of his Second Letter. To him we are still much indebted, as also to those members of Plato’s own Academy, who almost from their master’s death disputed heatedly about how his so subtly crafted writings should be interpreted. It is a contemporary commonplace to point out that Plato, unlike most philosophers, wrote dialogues, not treatises, and to suggest that he had a variety of reasons for doing so. I need make no further comment on the postmodern opinion that this procedure is to be read as implying that he had no fixed views of his own, that he merely enjoyed presenting the cut-and-thrust of endless debate; that is, that in the Gorgias he would as likely have endorsed the ideas of Callicles as those of Socrates. For one reason—perhaps the earliest—that Plato chose to compose dialogues was to keep the memory of Socrates green, to show him in action—though this motivation, with its associated concern for a more historical presentation, will be better discerned in Plato’s earlier writings. A second reason Plato chose to compose dialogues is underpinned by his enduring sense (explicit in the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter) that philosophy cannot be well presented in written   11 

introduction texts, since texts cannot talk back, with the result that, of all written forms, the dialogue best captures actual philosophical conversations and the excitements of philosophical inquiry. A third argument is that by representing the interplay between character and topic a writer can best show how particular individuals, because of their character and upbringing, are neither able to see the truth even when it is laid out for them in good arguments, nor to understand why an argument is good or bad. That points to Plato’s belief that to establish the foundations of ethics he must identify not only the objective status of moral judgments, but promote a right understanding—and hence education—of our inseparable powers of thought and desire. A fourth—and far from least—reason for dialogues is that by thus presenting philosophical ideas Plato can point his readers along the right intellectual path without telling them the answers to particular philosophical difficulties: not, that is, merely handing out true opinions, but letting each member of his audience work out for him- or herself a proper knowledge and understanding of the subject under debate. I have observed that there are thousands of books and articles in which we can find information about Plato, about the quality of his individual arguments and the point of some of his proposals. Yet very few recent studies help us understand the rationale behind certain key projects in which he is engaged—not least those discussed in the present book. That, I suppose, is largely due to the fact that many of our academic contemporaries are unsympathetic to such projects, and find Plato’s overall concerns endlessly fascinating but ultimately futile: something to be outgrown. Over many years of attempting to teach Plato, I have found myself at a loss as to what I should recommend to people seeking a holistic introduction to our author written by a scholar who recognizes not just his methodology and literary artistry, but also his central philosophical conclusions as immensely attractive. Nevertheless, though I have tried in some limited degree to appease those whose estimation of the value   12 

introduction of Platonism differs from my own by providing a very select bibliography where readers can inspect current attitudes to Plato and choose for themselves how they wish to conclude, I cannot but mention in this introduction three fairly recent books that have been of particular help in my own thinking; they are Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, by Charles H. Kahn, Plato’s Parmenides, by Constance Meinwald—I largely accept her interpretation of the second part of the dialogue—and Plato’s Theory of Understanding, by Jon Moline. Thirty or forty years ago it was not difficult to find wide-ranging books on Plato with titles like Plato: The Man and his Work or Plato’s Theory of Ideas, but more contemporary academic developments have generated not only the postmodern view that Plato is detached from the varying perspectives of his characters and that we cannot penetrate the mask, but also the not unrelated approach whereby we assume or assert that what is perennially important is to watch Plato at work on particular problems: what matters is not the results he arrived at, but only the methodology he developed. Certainly such contemporary dogma has made us think more precisely than our predecessors about Plato the philosophical worker, but it has also ensnared us into losing sight of the wood for the trees. Contextual analysis is essential, but we cannot afford to overlook Plato’s own dictum in the Republic that the dialectician is “synoptic.” It is not enough to reduce our text to a beautifully constructed collection of disparate problems generated by Plato’s philosophical and historical situation as a follower of Socrates and as an Athenian of the fourth century B.C. We cannot ignore his individual preoccupations within those settings: that is, we need to observe that there are recurring Platonic themes and that these themes reflect the principal philosophical concerns, directions, intentions, and anxieties of their author. There is a final cause to be identified within Plato’s body of writing: only in that sense should all his interpreters be “Unitarians.” And in that sense the present book can be described as conservative, or even neo-Platonic. It is often said that the best way of introducing a student to phi  13 

introduction losophy, as distinct from facts about philosophy or philosophers, is to get him or her to read a Platonic dialogue, and that the next thing to do is read another one. I shall argue further that in regard to the subjects with which I am here concerned, Plato should be read not only to learn how to think philosophically, but to acquire some of the most important content philosophy can propose to us. That is indeed the only non-careerist and nonfinancial justification, now more than two thousand years after the Master’s death, for writing what might seem to be but another rather general book about him. For the claims of this general book are not only about how to think platonically, or about what Plato argued from time to time, but about how to advance with Plato into intelligible, basic, but largely forgotten or rejected philosophical territory. Most modern studies of Plato are too detached, too academic, in the worst sense of that word, lacking in the Master’s erotic passion for truth. Whatever its weaknesses, I trust the present book will not fall into that category.

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 1  Religion, Socrates, and the Platonic Socrates

Socrates was born in 470 B.C. and died in 399, victim of a judicial murder at the hands of an Athenian democracy restored to power after a brief period of oligarchic tyranny in which some of Plato’s relatives had played a prominent role. His father was a stonemason, and Socrates belonged to the middle class of Athenian society, able therefore to serve as a “hoplite” infantryman, as he did with distinction during the Peloponnesian War. He had, however, many friends among the aristocracy and the political élites, was endlessly fascinating to bright young men, and became sufficiently well known to the Athenian public at large to be fit subject for caricature by the comic playwright Aristophanes. In The Clouds the poet was able to represent Socrates as a typical “sophist”: atheist, freethinker, charlatan, skilled “to make the worse argument appear the better.” Entertaining and unfair though the portrait is, it sheds light on Socrates’ fame as in some sort a representative of the new enlightenment, as well as on the popular view of that enlightenment. It is normal for satirical writers to present themselves (when it suits) as conservatives, defending the good old days and ways, but there can be little doubt that in portraying Socrates as subversive, Aristophanes was   15 

Religion, Socrates & the Platonic Socrates touching a chord with his Athenian audience. In the Apology Plato himself, who would later depict a very sympathetic Aristophanes in the Symposium, has Socrates tell the jury at his trial that The Clouds had considerably damaged his reputation, indeed had hindered his chances of obtaining a fair hearing on charges revolving round blasphemy and “atheism.” Scholars agree that it is immensely difficult to be precise on what Socrates’ views (as distinct from those of the “Platonic” Socrates) actually were, but all accept the testimony of Aristotle that a major effect of his career was to direct thinkers of the age away from natural science to ethics. In confirmation of this, it is as moral philosopher that he is portrayed in the other principal contemporary witnesses to his life: Plato himself and the historian Xenophon, the latter no close member of the Socratic circle and composer of a portrait of Socrates so banal that one would be mystified as to how such a person would be considered a dangerous subversive, even by the philistine demagogues who ran Athens after the Peloponnesian War. I have no wish to construct yet another account of the moral thought of the historical Socrates. This is a book about Plato and what Plato took to be the outcome of reasoning in a Socratic spirit. I shall assume that Plato considered himself the true heir of Socrates and that his own ideas burgeoned at the point where he came to think Socrates had left off or failed. That means that in Plato’s portrait of Socrates it will be impossible to determine exactly where the historical Socrates ends and the idealized Socrates takes over. For my present purposes that is unimportant, even irrelevant. Plato built upon Socratic ideas and could claim to have improved them; his portrait of Socrates reflects that development, though the growth of his own thought was a gradual process, and I have here no full-scale scheme of demarcation to propose. Nevertheless, it will become clear—at least on some issues—roughly how I would construct such a scheme. Socrates’ philosophical life spanned the end of the Sophistic period of Greek thought, so we must first look at those aspects of   16 

Religion, Socrates & the Platonic Socrates that movement with which he was concerned and determine why, in general, he was critical of the Sophists while recognizing the philosophical importance of many of the ethical problems they raised. Fifth-century Greeks had become aware of the diversity of religious, cultural, and social practices, not only among their own cities, but in the wider world. No longer content simply to assume superiority to their “barbarian” (that is, non-Greek-speaking) neighbors, they began to ask whether their own cultural habits and beliefs were necessarily so much more advanced, and if so, why—and in terms of the history of philosophy, that led to ethical relativism. But relativism, the idea (in one variant) that “when in Rome one does what the Romans do,” was not the only possibility. Perhaps beneath the variety of local conventional behaviors there lies some law of nature to which these local variants may approximate, or to which they should yield if one finds such a law’s superior claims compelling. So in addition to relativism there is now the possibility of what we should think of as a universal “naturalism.” What is this naturalism? Does it depend on the gods? Or should the gods themselves be subject, not only to fate (as in the poems of Homer), but to morality? Then to whose or to what morality? With the old certainties under scrutiny—as Aristophanes, Euripides, and others loved to present them—who is to determine which, if any, moral laws should regulate the behavior of men and gods? In earlier days Xenophanes had castigated Homer for portraying the gods as criminals and adulterers, and Herodotus had explained that Homer and Hesiod had invented them some four hundred years before his own time; now Critias, Plato’s uncle, was urging that they were the construction of a sophisticated tyrant who supposed that religious belief affords a weapon for himself and his like with which to frighten the weak into doing what they are told, for fear of being caught out in thought-crime by the omniscient divine policeman. Meanwhile Protagoras, the most influential of the Sophists, had proclaimed that man is the measure of all things—within which proclamation he included his conviction that mankind in   17 

Religion, Socrates & the Platonic Socrates general determined the distinction between right and wrong, just and unjust—though, as Plato and no doubt others would come to realize, he had opened the door to the more radical interpretation that each and every man is “the measure of all things.” Moral nihilism—or ideas approximating it—was widely available. In his “Melian dialogue,” Thucydides presents Athens telling the inhabitants of the island of Melos that justice is intelligibly invoked only when antagonists are of equal strength; when they are not, the stronger has no need of it and should only consider his advantage, while the weaker would do well to think only of their own survival (History 5.89). The gods, however, were not yet dead. In his Antigone Sophocles had shown his heroine advocating that family ties, backed by immemorial religious custom, may take precedence over the decrees of powerful rulers, and as ready to die for this claim. Yet when Socrates was young, the traditional norms of Greek, and especially Athenian, society—along with veneration of the good old days of those who fought at Marathon (as populists put it)— were under critical review. Few of the Sophists were Athenians, but their influence and the debates they provoked were brought to the attention of the Athenians by their playwrights Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, and by their own historian, the former politician Thucydides. Athens was the epicenter of democratic movement in the Greek homeland, and the ability to speak—the ability, as some said, to make the worse argument appear the better—was a prerequisite for success in the even murderous rough-and-tumble of the Athenian Assembly and the highly politicized law-courts. Athens, led through the central years of the fifth century by Pericles, had become rich and attracted the best Sophists money could buy. Plato, speaking through Socrates’ mouth in the Gorgias, was to castigate Pericles and the other democratic imperialists for filling the city with “arsenals and shipyards and defensive walls and that sort of garbage” (519a) instead of encouraging their fellow citizens to live virtuously, to care Socratically for their souls. He had Socrates himself claim to be the only serious “politician” (that is,   18 

Religion, Socrates & the Platonic Socrates public figure) among the Athenians (521d). For Plato had come to believe that the highly paid professors encouraged by the ruling élite were the source of philosophically puzzling but morally and socially corrosive ideas. Whether Socrates himself was as clear about this we do not know, but the questions he put to the trendy Sophistbred generation of young men in the dramatic years of the Peloponnesian War certainly imply an intense suspicion, not, perhaps, of the motives, but of the effects—and above all the intelligibility—of the new enlightenment. It is commonly if conveniently forgotten that Socrates was devoutly religious. Both Plato himself and Xenophon bear witness to that. In Plato’s dialogues he is regularly shown deferring to the gods and to “divine destiny” (theia moira), and that it is from some sort of religiously fortified belief that he derives what Plato would later call true opinions about morality and the need to look after one’s soul (as also the souls of brilliant if dangerous and potentially sinister young men like Pericles’ would-be successor Alcibiades) is confirmed by another of Socrates’ followers, Aeschines of Sphettus (fr. 12 Nestle). Socrates patently thought of himself as a gadfly providentially sent to the Athenians to keep them morally awake. He feels constrained by a “divine sign” if he may be about to act unjustly or misguidedly, yet he cannot give an account of its admonitions. At his trial he relies on this sign for assurance that his coming death is no bad thing (Apology 40a ff.), an attitude he maintains at the end of the Crito (54e), insisting that it would be wrong for him to attempt to escape from prison: for he has been so guided by God. Even Socrates’ accusers argued not that he was an atheist, but that he worshipped gods other than those the city worshipped—in other words, that he was unpatriotic and only in that Pickwickian (or we might say “established”) sense irreligious. His questioning of contemporaries was, according to the Apology, spurred on by the desire to understand the response of the god at Delphi to a question of his friend Chaerephon, to whom the Oracle had proclaimed Socrates the wisest of the Greeks. Socrates himself maintained that   19 

Religion, Socrates & the Platonic Socrates he knew nothing, so what could the Oracle, which must be believed, have in mind? One of Socrates’ more paradoxical beliefs—that it is better to suffer wrong than to do it—is also rooted in a religious appeal, namely that “it is against divine governance (ou themiton) for a better man to be harmed by a worse” (Apology 30d1). In the Crito Socrates is represented as believing himself treated unjustly, but unwilling to respond to injustice with the wrongful act of dis­ obeying the law. Yet civil laws can and should be broken if they enjoin us to disobey god’s command—the view Sophocles had attributed to Antigone. Socrates is therefore unwilling to disobey the divine call to philosophize (Apology 29b ff.). He has no doubt that God’s commands and the results of his own hard thinking will be in harmony. Plato would remember Socrates’ religious concerns and their close connection with his philosophy until the end of his life. In his last work, the Laws, apart from devoting much space in book ten to an analysis of different varieties of atheism, all in varying degrees undesirable in a well-run state, he returns to the Protagorean dictum that man is the measure of all things (4.716c ff.). Only that measure, he insists, is no transient and changing power, but the unchanging and eternal God. Yet in tracing the continuity of religious thought from Socrates to Plato we can also discern a change. Socrates, the man who claimed to know only his own ignorance, affirmed his sense of the divine and providential goodness; Plato, after decades of thought, believed that he knew a good deal about the nature of the divine. Not only did he sense and experience this higher level of reality; he believed he had good reasons to posit its existence and its nature. He could give an account of what many men—and all good men—“know” instinctively. Where Socrates claimed knowledge only of his own ignorance, the Platonic Socrates has come to know a great deal more. It must be our concern, therefore, to investigate how that change came about, reflecting as it does an advance from Socrates’ albeit preliminary exposure of the moral confusion of layman and professor alike to the first, if underdeveloped, pre  20 

Religion, Socrates & the Platonic Socrates sentation of what remains the only basis for a significantly objective morality. In following “Socrates’” road, and the subsequent road on which Plato at times allows others to guide us, we shall notice that the elaborate metaphysical construction by which he views morality as underpinned is designed less to replace than to restore and justify moral intuitions deeply rooted in human nature. In a prephilosophical society—or at least a society in which moral beliefs are unchallenged and largely bereft of philosophical reflection, such as at least Plato and Aristotle supposed existed in Greece before the Sophists and Socrates—our moral intuitions will often work themselves out in crude, inconsistent, even barbarous conclusions. For they are as yet unexamined and, as Socrates says in the Apology (38a), an unexamined life is unworthy of a human being. Prephilosophical ethics will be crude because not yet subjected to the scrutiny of reason, and its teachers—who are often the poets—will literally not know what they are talking about. (This is argued, we shall see, in the Apology, as also in the slightly later dialogue named after Ion, a professional reciter of Homeric verse). After the Sophists, however, such primitive morality is no longer intellectually respectable, and may even cause social confusion. Yet in criticizing the difficulties of earlier moral beliefs—while at the same time as “literary” specialists making selective use of convenient ideas and techniques of the traditional culture—the likes of Protagoras (who in the dialogue named after him is prepared to use a poem of Simonides for his own purposes) have thrown away the baby with the bathwater. In challenging instinctive and culturally governed ideas they have given the impression—even where they have not actively promoted it—that all must be scrapped and that our native and collective sense of an objective good is part of a primitivism now to be outgrown. That similar views are widely held in our own day is an indication of the importance of following in Plato’s Socratic footsteps. For Plato saw that mere reaction is inadequate; moral purity, like virginity, once lost, cannot be merely reasserted. And enlight  21 

Religion, Socrates & the Platonic Socrates enment must not be simply rejected, but transcended: its gains must be preserved while the disastrous social and philosophical consequences of its unthinking acceptance of (at best) wishful thinking in ethics must themselves be dissolved by the power of right reason—of what Plato was eventually, if un-Socratically, to term dialectic.

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 2  Scrutinizing Character, Scrutinizing Moral Propositions

Socrates’ major insight, which he derived from reflecting on the enigmatic judgment on his own wisdom pronounced by the Oracle at Delphi, was that most people, if not everyone, do not know what they are talking about when they pronounce on ethics. The need to examine that insight more carefully goes far toward explaining why he is insistent that his interlocutors say exactly and truthfully what they think, and why they are thanked if they do so (Crito 49de; Gorgias 495a). For if they do not know they are ignorant, they do not know who they are—and the Oracle also prescribes self-knowledge. That becomes particularly clear to Socrates (and to us) when he cross-examines people who—really or apparently—exhibit moral virtues. We can see it if we look at some of Plato’s earlier dialogues: the Apology, Charmides, Laches, and Euthyphro; indeed the Charmides specifically links knowledge of what knowledge is with knowledge of oneself. But the rot goes deeper than ignorant or deluded individuals and permeates approaches to education. The poets, represented by Ion, and the Sophists, represented by Hippias in the Hippias Minor and later by Protagoras himself in the dialogue named after him—those, that is, who purport to teach us both in the old style and in a new,   23 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions more “sophisticated” version—are ignorant either of the nature of what they are teaching or of whether it is teachable, or of both. In an extreme case, that of Gorgias, the influential rhetorician who professed to teach his skills to aspiring politicians, it becomes clear in the dialogue bearing his name that he understands neither what rhetoric is, nor whether there are beneficial and harmful versions of it, nor even that he himself is faced with a moral problem if some of his followers do not know the difference between right and wrong. His comment on this last point is not reassuring: If they don’t know the difference between right and wrong, I’ll teach them that too! (460a) The Gorgias does more than puncture sophistic vanity. In presenting the possibly fictional figure of Callicles, Plato indicates the nature of the moral confusion confronting his society. Socrates defeats both Gorgias himself and his young and impetuous disciple Polus, a would-be Machiavellian, by turning their residual acceptance of parts of conventional morality against their radical political “realism.” Callicles too is eventually trapped in similar fashion, and thus defeated ad hominem, but he holds out longer, since he is clear that traditionally acceptable behavior is a subservience to convenient “moral” conventions that there is no reason to uphold if one is “strong” enough to get away with ignoring them. Thus Callicles advocates the use by the strong of all available means to get what they want and calls such behavior “natural.” Plato indicates thereby that moral nihilism—though as a believer in the law of nature, Callicles would not call it that—is not to be defeated by unreasoned conventionalism; indeed, if advocated by a more skillfully radical thinker than Callicles, it might seem the only rational way forward. If that conclusion is to be defeated, something more philosophically persuasive than conventionalism is required. Any version of “man is the measure of morality” can always be collapsed into possessive individualism: the Hobbesian struggle of all against all, in which, Callicles thinks, the strong will naturally (and therefore in some sense rightly) prevail. Some of the characters in early Platonic dialogues may be charla­ tans, hypocrites, or merely confused insofar as their behavior gives   24 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions little evidence of the virtue they profess and promote. The Charmides is rather different. Though it is a dialogue in which Socrates tries to identify a particular virtue, Charmides, unlike Laches and Euthyphro in their dialogues, does not claim the relevant virtue, sophrosune (meaning self-restraint or moderation), for himself; had he done so, he might have looked immodest, apparently lacking the very virtue others attribute to him (158d). That piece of dramatic verisimilitude entails that Socrates cannot readily show that Charmides does not know what he is talking about, nor that his life belies his professions. Nevertheless, what needs to be done is no mere sorting out or rationalizing of Charmides’ beliefs; the problem of his radical ignorance cannot be evaded. Socrates will investigate whether Charmides possesses the virtue of self-control and, characteristically, whether, if he does, he knows what it is: “It is clear that if you have sophrosune you can have an opinion about it” (158e), he remarks provocatively, without adding as yet whether that opinion might be right or wrong, or even well- or ill-founded. For in this dialogue (which perhaps for the first time is no simple mime, but is given a narrative “frame”), we find a dramatic technique that Plato will later develop on a grander scale, especially in the Symposium. The dramatic date of the Charmides is 432 B.C., for Socrates says that he has just survived the opening battle of the Peloponnesian War at Potidaea. His return to Athens is welcomed, not least by the “crazy” Chaerephon (153b)—identified by Aristophanes in the Clouds as his fanatical admirer, and whose question it was to which the Delphic Oracle, according to the Apology, fatefully replied that Socrates was the wisest of the Greeks. The principal character with whom Socrates converses, however—apart from Charmides, himself who was Plato’s uncle—is another uncle, the “wise” Critias (161c, cf. 162b), the author, as we have noticed, of a “sophistic” book on the origin of the gods. Critias does indeed claim to know about sophrosune and connects it with the Delphic Oracle’s “know yourself ” in what is to be the principal section of the debate. In 432 B.C. Critias and Charmides can still rejoice in their fame   25 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions and noble birth, as can their relation Plato, whereas readers of the Charmides in the fourth century would be well aware of their crimes in later life. Critias would be the violent leader of the oligarchic faction ruling Athens with Spartan support at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and Charmides his willing accomplice. These indeed were the people, as we also read in the Apology, who tried to involve Socrates in a political murder and whose behavior in office appalled Plato himself, whom, according to the Seventh Letter, they vainly invited to join their government. The first readers of the Charmides knew, that is, that however they might profess knowledge of sophrosune, Critias and Charmides were themselves wholly devoid of it— though they might resort to changing the connotations of the word (cf. 163d). The Charmides is a particularly puzzling dialogue, apparently critical both of traditional morality and of some of Socrates’ own techniques of revealing confusion in his interlocutors, the latter critique perhaps pointing to Plato’s later distinction between dialectic (aiming at truth) and eristic (aiming at winning an argument). Though its analysis of a particular virtue uniquely introduces complex problems of self-knowledge, its early dramatic date, total lack of metaphysical speculation, and constant reminder of Socrates’ personal preoccupation with the god at Delphi might make it seem rather more historically Socratic or to represent an earlier stage of Platonic thinking than Plato’s other “dialogues of definition,” the Laches and Euthyphro. Yet insofar as it eventually suggests that knowledge of what one knows (or that one knows) and what one does not know is only intelligible if one knows the difference between good and bad, it is already teasing out a more positive but necessary reading of Socrates’ claim in the Apology to know only his own ignorance about moral questions—though he certainly professes an array of moral beliefs, presumably derived from tradition and traditional religion as well as personal reflection. With Critias’ complaint (166bc) about the misapplication of arguments by analogy, the Charmides also throws doubt on what we   26 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions can properly infer from Socrates’ frequent use of comparisons between moral goals and the goals of non-moral skills (Apology 20c ff.; Gorgias 464b ff., 511e–512a; Laches 195bc; Euthyphro 12e–13a; Protagoras 328e ff.; Republic 1, 340ff., etc.). Yet although its main positive point seems to lie in its suggestion that sophrosune should be understood less with reference to the cognitive state of individuals than with their knowledge of an objective good and evil, there is no attempt to suggest (as will appear in the Laches and Protagoras) that Critias is confusing the definition of a single virtue, sophrosune, with that of virtue in general. In that sense, then—there is no problem about the possible “unity” of the virtues—the Charmides is “primitive,” though Socrates’ probing of the true nature of a particularly “Delphic” virtue (and of its misuse) might put him in danger from the traditionally religious. Socrates might reply that people who fail to understand the special virtue of the god at Delphi, especially those who, like Critias, claim to be conservatives, are themselves religious offenders, even perhaps in appropriating traditional religion for their baser purposes (as did the historical Critias in his poem). Socrates’ concern with the Delphic Oracle and with its special understanding of sophrosune is particularly apparent when, after Charmides has failed to identify sophrosune as quietness (159b) or a sense of shame (aidos) (160e), the youth proposes that it is “looking after one’s own affairs”: that is, not meddling inappropriately (161d). Meddling would be excessive, so an offense against the Delphic precept “nothing too much” and thus “not-sophron,” nonrestrained. For an Athenian that sort of talk has an oligarchic ring about it, and Charmides’ identification is eventually allowed to derive from Critias (161c, 162c), who immediately wants to clarify it in oligarchic fashion—in a manner ironically described by Socrates (163d) as “in the spirit of [the Sophist] Prodicus.” For the word I have glossed as “looking after”—in Charmides’ “looking after one’s own affairs”— might mean “making” or “doing,” as in the work of “low” trades—so Critias notes (163b)—like making shoes or running a brothel. Or it might refer to “doing” things that are useful and honorable, presum  27 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions ably especially in public life. It is, of course, the latter sense that Critias is advocating. Socrates soon induces Critias to admit that if a man is “moderate” he must know he is moderate (which might seem to rule out the youthful Charmides, who relies on the judgments of others). Critias insists on this: “[I would not concede] that a man ignorant of himself is moderate. . . . I would almost say that self-knowledge is sophrosune” (164d). So sophrosune is “almost” a special kind of knowledge, knowledge of oneself: that sounds impressively “Delphic” and Socratic. Socrates himself, though, claims he does not know what the word means. Perhaps, it is suggested, it means knowing what you know and what you do not (167a). Socrates still does not understand that how to know what you know and what you do not is to know yourself—rather than, perhaps, something about yourself (169e). Knowledge of medicine enables one to know health, but knowledge of self might mean only knowing that you know, not knowing that you know something of what you know (170d), and that would be of no benefit to anyone (171d). The only knowledge that would make us happy would be knowledge of good and evil (174c), and that is not knowledge of the self, but of something outside the self. So that if Charmides is self-controlled as we apparently are now to understand “self-controlled,” that is of no use to him (175d); however, perhaps we do not know whether he is self-controlled or not, or indeed what sophrosune is. Charmides now admits his own ignorance, while Critias— and note the irony—says that if he submits to being instructed by Socrates “and in no way forsakes him,” that itself will be a proof of his sophrosune. “What are you two plotting?” Socrates then asks. We have made our plan now, replies Charmides, and will use force— which may be a “playful” allusion to rape as well as to oligarchic politics—to impose it. To which Socrates replies, at the very end of the dialogue, and with the reader attuned to the later activities of Charmides and Critias, that no one could withstand the force the two of them can bring to bear.   28 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions Satire aside, what conclusions are we supposed to draw from all this? Certainly that the traditional conception of sophrosune is not transparent; certainly that neoconservative appropriations of it turn out to be subjective and hence defective; certainly that it has something to do with knowledge of good and evil, whatever that may be; certainly that moral skills may be distinct from other skills, as Socrates “dreams” (173a): a point also emphasized in the Gorgias not only, as we have seen, when Gorgias appears not to appreciate the basic difference between the mere exercise of an art and its use for a beneficial purpose, but also when a sea captain is held in virtue of his seamanship alone not to know whether it is a good thing to save the lives of his passengers (511e–12a): the point recurs in the Laches (195c). The Charmides is a curiously enigmatic dialogue, but may point to similar texts written at approximately the same time. Let us therefore keep its positive yield clear as we proceed.   •  In the dialogue named for him, Euthyphro, a self-declared expert on piety, now intent on prosecuting his father for the murder (by criminal neglect) of a slave, may or may not be genuinely pious (as Charmides may or may not be self-controlled). Clearly the case is controversial in that even if the father is guilty, it may not be right for the son to bring him to justice. In the Laches, however, the courage of the general after whom the dialogue is named—who also professes to know about courage—is impugned neither by Socrates nor by Plato as author. He is therefore more interesting in that, although he is certainly courageous, it turns out in cross-examination that he cannot identify the specific nature of courage. To put it in other terms, he knows how to be courageous, but does not know what courage is. He can also recognize instances of courage when he sees them: indeed he cites Socrates himself as a brave man on military campaigns. If the rest had been like him, he asserts, we should not have suffered disaster on the retreat from Delium. But why should one need, for practical purposes, to know what courage is if one can recognize it easily enough? Plato is to make the point in a later dia  29 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions logue that there are circumstances where true opinion may be as practically useful as knowledge. We should not forget, however, that Socrates’ world in the Laches is that of the Sophists, the questioners. In such a world, if a traditionalist praises courage but cannot explain what it is, he is going to look a fool—though a newly “enlightened” soldier, eager to throw away his shield and run, and encouraged to do so by an argument that courage is no virtue, may have more immediate fears that will prevent him from taking to his heels. But other virtues may not have such protective sanctions available. Truth-telling may be condemned as inexpedient; concern for the well-being of an aging parent (as Aristophanes pointed out) can be undermined by appeal to the behavior of the gods in their own families! (“Zeus, after all, castrated his father Kronos.”) In the early Socratic dialogues—as well as in the Apology, which strictly speaking is not a dialogue—it is the men, not their beliefs, who are put to the test. In the Apology Socrates discovers that poets, politicians, and artisans, possessed of considerable professional skills, believe, on the basis of those skills, that they have knowledge of how to care for their own souls; indeed there may be some sort of skill in being virtuous. It is precisely because they lack such moral skill—that is, because they have no knowledge of the techniques required to care for their own souls, even though they believe they possess them—that Socrates recognizes that he is wiser than those he interrogates. He at least, though apparently agreeing that some such skill (techne) or know-how (episteme) is required, will admit the truth: he does not possess it. But if virtue is a skill, it must, Socrates will say, concern itself with the good of its object. The skill of horsemanship looks after horses; the ox-herd’s skill is to look after his oxen (Euthyphro 12e). All skills have a particular purpose, and, Socrates comes to think, if they are exercised for any other purpose, they cease to be skills, remaining merely images or lookalikes of skills. Thus the skill of medicine is concerned with the well-being of the body; its counterfeit is exercised for a different purpose, namely   30 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions the “knack” of concocting fine spices for food, and designed only to give pleasure (Gorgias 464–65). Doubtless the skill of the doctor will give pleasure to the patient when he is cured, but it is not deployed for that purpose. Pleasure, it would seem, is an effect but not a goal of any skill, except presumably the skill—if there is a specific skill—of giving pleasure. But if such is to qualify as a skill, it must be only at inducing a pleasure beneficial to the person pleasured. In the “early” Platonic dialogues, as we have noticed (Apology 20c; Gorgias 464 ff., 499e; Charmides 166bc; Laches 195c; Euthyphro 12c; cf. Protagoras 328e), Socrates is often portrayed as thinking of the virtues as skills, so the question will arise as to what it is to have a skill. If certain behaviors will help us become good lyre players—that is, will help us play the lyre—and if the virtues too are the result of the acquisition of a certain technique, then what can that technique be? In the Laches the speakers are interested to know whether teaching young men to fight in armor will promote the virtue of courage, and hence it is easy for Socrates to move the debate into an inquiry into the nature of that courage which such training, such know-how, is intended to promote. Then he is able to show that Laches, who knows how to be brave, does not know what it is to be brave. He can talk about courage; he can be courageous; but in an important sense he neither knows what he is doing nor what he is talking about. The Greek word episteme is useful in showing this: it can mean both know-how (in this looking like a skill) and knowledge of what is the case. It does not, however, indicate a mere intuition. In preliminary discussions of this sort it is important to recognize that Socrates does not begin by asking what courage (or piety, or self-control) is. In the Laches he selects courageous or apparently courageous people who naturally think that they understand their own behavior—and indeed that they can recognize it, as Laches can recognize the courage of Socrates—but who are apparently unable to give an account of themselves. That is important, because in an age of skeptical inquiry, to be unable to explain what courage is   31 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions is to invite the question of whether we really know, or how we can know, that it is good. And, as we have observed, awkward questions, once asked and however corrosive, cannot be withdrawn from a culture—except perhaps in a tyranny—but must be answered. It becomes clear in the examination of prominent public figures in the early dialogues that they are living an unexamined life, as likewise are their traditional teachers, the poets. In “his” dialogue, Ion, the reciter of Homer, claims he knows how to do things that he cannot do, and utters possible truths without understanding how they could be true. Perhaps, suggests Socrates, he has been vouchsafed such knowledge by divine dispensation (535a; cf Apology 22c), and perhaps that would have sufficed in the good old days, but no longer. In that brute fact we recognize the germ of Plato’s belief, as also probably that of Socrates: that a new kind of education must be developed to match the new version of political science that is required in a city where Socrates claims to be the only true politician. And there is a further moral problem with Ion and his like: they are emotionally aroused by what they recite, and need to arouse their audiences, but, adds Ion, “I laugh when they cry at some recited horror because there is money in it for me” (535e). Thus Ion admits to pandering to public taste (good or bad)—a charge that Socrates repeats about poets in the Gorgias (502b). Socrates pushes his interlocutors not only into recognition of their ignorance about ethics, but into identifying what appears as the cause of that ignorance: that they do not know what courage, piety, and the rest of the virtues are. In recent times some have supposed that their discomfiture depends on a fallacy that Socrates has imposed on them and that even he has failed to notice—this fallacy lying in the claim that it is necessary to know what something is— whether a virtue or a piece of iron—in order to deploy it or make use of it or exhibit it, whereas “true opinion” would do just as well. In the earlier dialogues Socrates has nothing to say about true opinion—though he seems to assume he has some—but the topic will later reach center stage in the Meno.   32 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions Socrates, however, does not commit himself to the idea that “knowledge” is necessary, even though he allows his interlocutors to assume it. It is not even clear in these dialogues that Plato has Socrates make any claim about what knowledge is. The only form of knowledge immediately proposed is, as we have seen, a kind of know-how. Only in the course of cross-examinations does Socrates induce people to think that to have know-how, at least about how to live rightly, must somehow involve knowledge or understanding of what one wants to do. Thus Nicias in the Laches recalls that he has heard Socrates imply that courage is the knowledge of good and evil (194d; 198c)—which certainly suggests he has heard or assumed Socrates to be discussing what good and evil are. But Nicias is roundly refuted for his pains, it being shown he cannot distinguish a particular virtue, namely courage, from virtue in general. Readers of the Laches would remember: Yes, Nicias was courageous, but he was also the fool whose superstition led to the annihilation of the Athenian grand army in Sicily. It is natural for an interlocutor to jump from the acceptance that courage is some sort of skill to the belief that such a skill involves certain kinds of objective knowledge: that knowing how to be brave (or at least claiming to know it) entails some knowledge of what bravery is. For how can I praise Socrates as brave if I have no clear idea of what it is for which I praise him? To show a general that he does not know what courage is might seem to entail that he does not know how to be brave, yet Laches is able to recognize courage when he sees it, though he does not know what it is he recognizes. Thus, although know-how works in practice, it cannot explain the nature of its knowledge (or its true belief). In the case of many other skills, that may not matter. I know that it is possible to swim, and I can swim, without knowing the physics of moving through the water. So either the ability to explain oneself should matter in the case of swimming, or the skill of courage and the truths I need to know to be courageous are of a different order. But is it truths I need in order to be courageous? Socrates—both the historic and the Platonic—   33 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions assumed that it is. Our next question must be: What did he mean by that? One of the few certainties about Socrates is that he held—and Plato maintained a revised version of this idea throughout his life— that no one does wrong willingly. That is because we possess a rational inclination toward what is good for us (Gorgias 500e; Charmides 167e; Protagoras 340a), and the gods want what is good for us: that is why, as we have seen, it is against divine ordering that a better man should suffer at the hands of a worse. When we do wrong, we think that we are doing good for ourselves, but we are mistaken. If we knew what is good for us, we would never do wrong, for in doing wrong we do ourselves an injury, making our souls worse. It is a question of false belief, of ignorance: so when we do wrong we make a mistake about what is good for us. The problem would seem to be: Why do we make such a mistake? How is it that we do not know what is good for us, though we all want our own good? Socrates knew that contemporary thinkers, not least Euripides, took a very different view from his: in the Medea (1075–79) and in the Hippolytus (380–81) we meet characters who know the better and do the worse, knowing that the “worse” that they do is against their own best interest. Aristotle drew attention to such situations in his attack on the Socrates of the Protagoras (Nicomachean Ethics 7, 1145b). Nevertheless, in insisting that to do wrong is to make a mistake about our own good, and that such mistakes indicate the evildoer, Socrates is drawing on other parts of the Greek literary tradition. Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy seems condemned in just this way: he is mistaken when he kills a man he never supposed to be his father and when he marries a woman he never supposed to be his mother. But what Socrates is proposing differs in an important respect from what we see with Oedipus. It seems that Oedipus offends less against a moral law than a law of taboo, thus incurring pollution, but Socrates makes no reference to that kind of religious theme. For him, the mistake is to be ignorant of one’s own best interest, and this sort of secularizing brings new difficulties. In the bleak world   34 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions of Sophocles (and of even earlier Greek culture) Oedipus is both unfortunate and morally guilty. That suggests a very different view of morality from what pertains in the world of Socrates. In a sense, there is no explanation of Oedipus’ tragedy, even if a “tragic flaw” in his character makes him prone to some forms of “wrongdoing.” A rather different answer is proposed by Socrates for the fact that we are in a condition in which we both desire our good and yet do not accept what that entails in practice. In such a case we wonder what kind of ignorance Socrates is pointing to and what causes it. If wrongdoing is (at least inter alia) a mistake about our own best interests, it does not follow, as Socrates seems originally to have supposed, that we simply make an intellectual error; perhaps there is also a sense in which we do not want to know what is in our best interest. That would not be the case if we were simply rational beings, but Plato’s Socrates moves—eventually—from holding that we are thus rational to concluding that (in this life at least) we are not entirely rational (though we may always at least be rationalizers). In the Republic he recognizes the seriousness of what has traditionally (in the language of Aristotle) been called the problem of acrasia, and to search for an explanation of how it is possible for us to know the better and yet do the worse. But this is to proceed too fast. I noted that in what appear to be Plato’s earliest writings—those that have the best claim to represent the views of the historical Socrates—the hero’s concern is to scrutinize people, not concepts—yet we can see how easy it is for the former to expand into the latter, with obvious epistemological implications. And if it does, we are confronted with another traditionalsounding philosophical problem. Characters like Laches think they know about courage, and are certainly clear that they can identify courageous acts and individuals when they see them. But when we begin to ask not “Does an interlocutor (Laches, Euthyphro) know what he is talking about?” but “What is it that he is trying to talk about?” we approach the problem of definitions. Aristotle was convinced that a major contribution of Socrates to the development of   35 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions philosophy was that he sought for definitions of moral terms (Metaphysics A. 987a ff.; Metaphysics M. (1078b, 1086b). Certainly such seeking was one of the effects of his teaching, but Plato never uses the technical term (horismos) adopted by Aristotle for definition, though he writes of identifying or “marking out” (horizein) the virtues in question. In the Laches, as we saw, it was precisely the failure of Nicias to distinguish courage from the other virtues, and more specifically his providing what looks like a definition of courage—as knowledge of what is to be welcomed and what is to be feared, hence of good and bad—that led to his failure to defend what to many readers still seems a Socratic-enough account of that virtue. In brief, while the scrutinizing of an individual, testing to see whether he knows what he is talking about even when his subject is his own virtue, may be carried on without entailing that the search for an identifying mark of a particular virtue must lead on to the search for a definition of that virtue, yet once we move to asking the direct questions “What is courage? What is piety? What is self-control?” then Aristotle’s account of Socrates’ contribution to ethics looks more plausible. Here we can recognize the first advance within the Platonic ethical writings: from seeing whether a man knows what he is talking about to asking what indeed he is trying to talk about: the famous Socratic “What-is-it? Question” will always point not merely to an identifying mark, but toward a definition. If the man in the street, or even, as in the case of Euthyphro, the would-be expert in the street, does not know what he is talking about—and we have seen in the Apology and the Ion that the poets too are unable to explain themselves—what about the new educators who specifically claim to be able both to understand and to teach virtue: the Sophists who are the protagonists of the Hippias Minor and the Protagoras? For the moment, however, I leave aside the teachers of rhetoric, as represented by Gorgias, for in Plato’s presentation a rhetorician scarcely understands the difficulties that might arise if—not knowing the difference between right and wrong, good and bad—his pupils misuse the skills they have acquired from him   36 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions (a “knowledge” that both the Charmides and the Laches regard as essential). Plus there is a further and related reason for leaving Gorgias aside: he claims that rhetoric is an art, a skill, a know-how, but cannot explain the nature of skills, for that would entail reflection on the purpose—not least in this case the moral purpose—of those skills. In other words, he bucks the question “Is moral skill just like any other?”—that is, can it be a mere value-free ability to do something—a kind of technique or even knack? We have already seen how in the Charmides Socrates and Critias agree that possession of an awareness of an objective good and evil is precisely what makes equating the skill of the morally good man and the skill of a craftsman so misleading. And if, as Socrates argues—and Callicles in the Gorgias in effect agrees—the purpose of Gorgias’ rhetoric is to promote the immediate pursuit of pleasure, that will amount, in Plato’s book, to promoting an immoral view of the relationship of pleasure to the good life. Pleasure, however, will require much more careful consideration, and in one of his very latest dialogues, the Philebus, Plato’s Socrates is still pursuing the topic.   •  Let us next then turn to the Hippias Minor, certainly one of the earliest dialogues, perhaps composed shortly after the Apology and the Crito and more or less contemporary with the Ion. Like the latter it is concerned with philosophical or more generally educational interpretations of characters and events in the works of Homer; indeed it has been plausibly argued that it is an attack by Plato on the misuse of such literary musings by Antisthenes, also an associate of Socrates, with whose muscular but unsophisticated moral preaching Plato could hardly have felt satisfied. In the course of the discussion Socrates seems to persuade Hippias, a prominent representative of the new educators, that it is better to do wrong deliberately than unintentionally: a paradox illustrative, in Plato’s view, of what might have delighted a Sophistic audience and that the puzzled Hippias cannot refute. Socrates seems to be showing that he can come up with subversive conclusions as well as any Sophist, and   37 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions that manifestly fallacious arguments producing such sensational conclusions cannot be refuted by a leading “professional.” All this is caricature and satire, but when Plato comes to write the Protagoras it is clear that although the satire and to some extent the caricature remain, far more serious issues are in full view. Protagoras’ arrival in Athens has caused a stir; the great man will display his method. The trendy and leisured young will all be out to hear him, not, Plato emphasizes, because they want to become professional Sophists themselves—that would be rather disgraceful—but because they hope to learn to be virtuous. Protagoras claims to be able to teach excellence, specifically the ability to manage one’s household and city. Come to Protagoras, pay money, and learn how to be a skilled and successful politician. There is no need to recount the rich details of the debate between Protagoras and Socrates—only the major themes. Initially, Protagoras claims to teach virtue, and Socrates is skeptical, invoking what should by now be a familiar concern: that we should be very careful about how we educate, for mistakes about that put the well-being of a soul at risk (313a). It seems, says Socrates, that both the public—those who in the Assembly have little regard for technical training in choosing their political leaders—and the successful politicians themselves, who, like Pericles, fail to bring up their sons to match their own greatness, bear witness in their different ways that political skill is not teachable. Apparently it cannot be picked up by osmosis, or by exposure to democratic institutions. Whether or not virtue is to be connected with the political skill taught by Protagoras, we do not as yet know what it is; it must almost unavoidably be thought of as some sort of “thing” (pragma, 330c), like piety. Socrates asks whether the separate virtues (courage, justice, and the rest) are really identical, only the name being different, or whether they are separate items like parts of the human face (329c). Protagoras opts for the latter, and so allows himself to be trapped by a series of arguments that depend on ambiguities in the difference, or contradictoriness, or oppositeness of one thing to   38 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions another. Later, however (after Socrates has given a long and fashionably sophistic exposition of a poem of Simonides in which he stresses—significantly—the difference between being good and becoming good), he claims that while all the other virtues are more or less different names for the same excellence, courage is distinct. That being proposed, the concluding pages of the dialogue introduce, without resolving, a whole series of philosophically important issues—many of them more or less for the first time—and it is clear that although Protagoras avoids a number of the traps into which he has fallen earlier, he too is only able to speak at length about what he does not understand: in modern jargon he might be called not a Sophist, but a bullshit artist. Protagoras begins by eluding a sophistic move on Socrates’ part. Having allowed that the courageous are bold, he rejects Socrates’ attempt to commit him to the further claim that the bold are always courageous. But he pays a price for this: the genuinely courageous are those who know what is to be dreaded and what is not—which means, again, that the virtues are, or at least closely involve, some kind of knowledge. But what kind? Clearly it is not merely a matter of know-how, of knowing how to avoid what is cowardly, though the brave man will in fact know how to act bravely. The courageous man seems also to know facts about the world: some courses are good and should be pursued even at personal risk; others are bad and should be avoided at all costs. But though now it appears that courage and the other virtues (or other names for virtue) are not merely skills (or names for skills), but involve a certain knowledge of facts, there remains the problem of what kind of facts need to be known. We seem to be moving toward the conclusion that morality must involve objective knowledge, if the difference between mere boldness (or recklessness) and courage is to be sustained; yet the nature of that knowledge remains uncertain. Plato depicts Socrates at the end of the dialogue as having reversed the position with which he began. When he started to talk to Protagoras, he was skeptical about whether virtue could be taught, at least by Sophists, but now that   39 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions he thinks it is to be identified as some kind of objective knowledge, it would appear to be teachable. Of course the possibility remains, though Plato does not touch on it here, that such knowledge is teachable, but that there are no available teachers. Rather he seems to conclude here that we do not know who these could be; the problem will recur in the Meno. At various points in the Protagoras Plato drops anti-Sophistic methodological hints. At 333d Socrates explains that in the first instance he is testing the argument, but then—reverting to an earlier and probably historically Socratic theme—adds that this will lead on to a testing of the respondents. And indeed Protagoras, as the Sophist par excellence, is tested in an important respect when Socrates maintains that, for him, a difficulty with long speeches is that as they proceed he misses the details of the argument; the implication is less that he is forgetful, as is suggested ironically, but that an effect, perhaps an intentional effect, of speechifying is that the listeners may lose their bearings: in other words, that such displays are designed to inhibit precisely the kind of honest analysis that Socrates himself regards as essential. When in the later part of the dialogue we return to a more Socratic way of proceeding, new and substantial themes can be introduced. Readers of the Protagoras have often been puzzled—not least in view of what they have learned from the Gorgias—by Socrates’ apparent defense of hedonism when in these later pages he appears to equate the good with pleasure. But to view it like that is to miss the point. The argument is designed to show that, even if in some undefined sense pleasure is the good, the role of knowledge in the good life cannot be neglected. Pleasure has already assumed its necessarily important role in earlier (or perhaps, as some might prefer, more or less contemporary) Socratic discussions. In the Gorgias, as we have seen, Gorgianic rhetoric is rejected at least in part because it is merely designed to please and flatter and to encourage a direct search, even by violent means, for pleasure. Thus Callicles thinks that the strong man, the man who follows the law of nature that   40 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions “might is right,” is concerned to maximize pleasure. He is tripped up by an ad hominem argument over the question of the shameful pleasures of the catamite, the passive homosexual. How does one know whether a pleasure is shameful? In the search for the best life, if we admit at least that shameful pleasures are undesirable—this Callicles, from a debating point of view, makes the mistake of admitting—then the ability to discriminate, and thus to possess some kind of knowledge, must also be allowed its place in any complete account of the human good. The same question is pursued in the Protagoras. People often suppose, it is observed, that knowledge is kicked around by the passions like a slave (we cannot but think of Hume at this point), because it seems merely instrumental in deciding which pleasures are to be preferred, and which, in the interest of maximizing pleasure, should be abandoned altogether. But even if knowledge is to be deployed solely in the service of the passions, it must still have some role to play in the “best life.” Here Socrates makes no attempt to determine how pleasures are to be measured or maximized; his concern is simply to establish that on any hypothesis about the good life, knowledge of some kind is important. There are at least hints, however, that recognition of the objects of different “desires” may play a role in good living, and we may note again the distinction between (rational) wishing and desiring (340a), though that theme—important in later dialogues like the Symposium and the Republic—is at best still in the shadows. Plato appears as yet not sure enough—or as yet unwilling to say enough—about the relative importance of different kinds of objects of desire, and to be concentrating primarily on establishing at least this much of Socratic “intellectualism”: that even on what amounts to a utilitarian calculus, in which reason may indeed be the slave of the passions, no ethic is complete that does not take account of knowledge. Pleasure will always have its place—Plato never excludes it altogether from the good life—but whatever that place may be, we must also give knowledge its due. By now the question of what kind of knowledge, and of the dif  41 

Scrutinizing Character, Moral Propositions ference between moral knowledge and a mere skill or technique, can hardly be deferred. If so far we are still with the historical Socrates, we must soon face head-on the implications of that Socratic progress that has led us from scrutinizing the intelligibility of those unthinking traditionalists, poets, or Sophists who merely “talk the talk” to asking whether moral know-how must include some sort of cognition of objective truths. In a curious foreshadowing of the Republic (where the context is quite different), Socrates in the Protagoras speaks of the salvation of our life lying in the right choice between pleasure and pain, for if we make the wrong choice we are overcome by ignorance (358d). Certainly no one willingly pursues what he thinks is bad; but does that mean “bad for him,” or just “bad” or both? What is the relationship between genuine selfinterest and self-knowledge? Before reaching “salvation” Socrates will need to settle some fundamental if preliminary questions that remain unanswered in the Protagoras as in the Laches (not to speak of the Gorgias): What is the nature of virtue or of the virtues? What is the difference between divining or intuiting a virtue—that is, being able to recognize it pre-philosophically—and knowing (in some sense) what it is? In what sense is what is good for me also good intrinsically? To achieve what is good for me, do I need to know what is good intrinsically? To progress with the first of these topics we must look further at another “dialogue of definition,” the Euthyphro.

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 3  The Discovery of Separate Form

Euthyphro, the self-declared pious man, that is, the man with a proper attitude to the gods, has had a bad press, while Sophocles’ Antigone, who also puts the gods first, has had a good one. The two are similar in that they both advocate a morality higher than the merely conventional—indeed a universal, “natural” morality. An important difference is that whereas Antigone sets the claims of family duty—backed, she believes, by divine decree—above the duty she also owes to the city and its rulers, Euthyphro thinks that the claims of the gods override even those of the traditional (and therefore, it might be supposed, god-validated) family. Hence readers approaching the Euthyphro with the Republic in mind might expect a sympathetic portrait, but Plato presents Euthyphro as opinionated and muddled in his piety (6b), so that it might seem that a typical “what-is-it?” question, raised with such an interlocutor, would be an unlikely starting point for advances in metaphysics, and thus for laying the foundations of a revised, if still somehow traditional, ethics. Yet the Euthyphro throws much light on Plato’s developing account both of moral qualities and moral knowledge, and of the gods who must somehow be concerned—so Socrates had always thought—with such knowledge. The structure of the Euthyphro is that of a simple mime without   43 

The Discovery of Separate Form any kind of frame, which gives it the appearance of an early Platonic work. But that it is almost certainly later than the Laches, and probably the Protagoras too, is shown not least because now Plato introduces what looks like the semi-technical terminology of what has come to be known as the Theory of Forms. This indeed has often induced his readers to suppose that a fully developed version of that theory is to be found here, for which there is no substantial (as apart from terminological) evidence. The dialogue itself is straightforward, and a brief summary of its main themes will suffice, but we should notice the more positive suggestions that Socrates himself proposes—and not merely, as at times in the Gorgias and the Protagoras, because an interlocutor is trying to back out of the debate. Admittedly these are only proposals, but it looks as if Socrates’ selfdeprecating claim to ignorance is wearing ever thinner; at least his beliefs seem more focused. He knows where to go, not merely on intuitions about morality (such as that no one does wrong willingly), but along more unusual paths in epistemology. As the dialogue begins, we are back to Socrates’ trial, not to scrutinize the proceedings or their immediate consequences, as in the Apology and the Crito, but to watch the master discussing religion just before he is in court himself, and on a religious charge. Thus it is appropriate that he is talking with a man who claims to know many unwelcome truths about religion, and who quickly understands why Socrates’ own views are unwelcome. Socrates begins by recounting his legal situation ironically, noting that his accuser Meletus has recognized him as an ignorant old man, but when Euthyphro hears that Socrates’ religious ideas are said to be corrupting the youth, in that he invents gods and does not believe in those traditional in the city, he immediately recalls the “divine sign” (daimonion) that warns Socrates of potential wrongdoing (3c). This is Socrates’ cue to mention a godlike feature of his character: he is a lover of humanity; that is why he tries, without payment, to discuss serious questions with his young friends. Plato may seem to have given Euthyphro an absurd task. He is   44 

The Discovery of Separate Form a defender of religious morality, and he thinks its claims are overriding. But Plato offers him as a “limit case.” He is prosecuting his father for the murder of a slave who, when drunk, has himself murdered one of the household servants. And the murder is by omission. Euthyphro’s father, pending a reply to his request to the religious authorities as to what should be done with the murderous slave, has tied him up and thrown him into a ditch, where he has died of neglect. It is not surprising that among Athenians—and that apparently includes Socrates himself—the behavior of Euthyphro seems bizarre. But Euthyphro defends himself. He has an overriding obligation under divine law to seek justice, he insists (4b), whether it is his father or his mother or anyone else who has committed an impious act: think of the pollution involved in such behavior! Clearly Euthyphro both believes in the justice and piety of his cause and knows what piety is (4e). That gives Socrates two chances to develop his own thoughts. When Socrates asks him about his “accurate” knowledge of religious behavior, Euthyphro (as Laches had done with courage) claims that what he is doing is what piety is. He is not put off by the oddity of prosecuting his own father, but, like a (corrupt) character in Aristophanes’ Clouds, he adduces the behavior of Zeus to his father Kronos. Again as with Laches, Socrates says that he wants to know not examples of right behavior, but what that right behavior is (6d). He goes out of his way to suggest that the old stories of quarrels and hostilities among the gods are unbelievable, but in any case insists that what is holy must please all the gods. Euthyphro accepts “What is pleasing to the gods” as the answer when the meaning of Socrates’ question is explicated. But what I want to know, says Socrates, is the eidos by which what is holy is holy; I am interested in the idea of the holy: what holiness looks like; how I can see or recognize what it is. I want a paradeigma, a template I can look at every time there arises a possible candidate for holiness. Eidos, idea, paradeigma: these words are later to be part of the technical language of the theory of transcendent Forms, but no one who has read only the   45 

The Discovery of Separate Form dialogues I have considered thus far would be aware of that. What Socrates is doing with them is asking what holiness is: he wants no mere indication of how I can recognize holiness, but an idea of its intrinsic nature. Later on (11a) the word ousia, reality, is used for that nature or essence, and Socrates explains that he is not seeking a feature of holiness, or anything that might “happen” to holiness, any experience or quality (pathos) of holiness such as being loved by all the gods. He wants an account of what it actually is. The idea or eidos of holiness is to be that by which all that is holy is holy. That might suggest that the eidos is somehow causal of the particular instance, and Plato is probably moving toward that, but he does not develop it here: there is no indication of what kind of cause or condition the eidos should be. Yet although Socrates is still concerned with recognition, he now wants to know not merely how to recognize what is holy, but to recognize what it is to be holy; he wants to know what kind of thing holiness invariably is. Note, however, that this does not mean that he wants to know what is unique about any person or situation—otherwise there would be, as there are in Plotinus, eide of particulars, at least of individual human beings; but Socrates wants to know what identical “thing” is in common to all similar particulars. At this point the discussion between Socrates and Euthyphro is less ad hominem—about whether Euthyphro knows what he is talking about and hence what is good for his soul (it is clear enough that he does not)—than about the more abstract problem of the nature (as distinct from the experiences or qualities) of a particular moral “thing”: in this case holiness. I use the word “thing” deliberately and with Plato’s term pragma in the Protagoras in mind, because it is not clear whether understanding the nature of holiness is yet seen to include the ability to solve problems about the relationship between particular (even inessential) qualities of a subject and the qualified subject itself. Universals have been proposed here, but Socrates’ language, however technical it may look, sounds noncommittal about their ontological status vis-à-vis the particulars whose nature they   46 

The Discovery of Separate Form indicate. And so long as there is no unambiguous ontological commitment to separate eide, there are no urgent difficulties about “selfpredication.” We do not yet have to ask about whether something called Piety is pious in the same sense as Euthyphro claims to be pious, let alone similar questions about other possible eide, such as “Is Largeness large?” In the Euthyphro all we know is that it is “by” Piety that pious acts are pious. Difficulties can be seen on the horizon by us with benefit of hindsight, if not yet by Plato or at any rate the historical Socrates. Socrates will not accept that the gods are hostile to one another, so Euthyphro settles for the apparently more Socratic-seeming view that what is dear to all the gods is what is holy. In the later pages of the dialogue Socrates reveals more revisionist theological views. His last suggestion (which Euthyphro also accepts) is that holiness is a part of justice. Here—without technical language—Socrates approaches a definition in terms of genus and species (but again as yet with no ontological commitments). Clearly, however, we must identify the feature or features of holiness that make it a variety and not the totality of justice. In the first place it is justice toward the gods, but what would that mean? Eventually Euthyphro settles for the view that piety is that form of justice toward the gods indicated by our skill in offering them prayers and sacrifices (14b). Normally, however, as we have seen, an art or skill is to be seen as exercised for the benefit of the person or object affected. So of what benefit are prayers and sacrifices—assuming that we are not engaged merely in a form of barter whereby we and the gods give each other what we both need? But what could the gods need? Much more might be said about what we “give” to the gods, but the matter is not pushed much further; Euthyphro is merely shown that he does not understand the view he has accepted. However, it is clear that Socrates worships gods rather different from those worshipped by the city—and by Euthyphro himself. Sometimes more is made of the religious discourse in the Euthyphro. At one point Euthyphro is compelled to admit that the   47 

The Discovery of Separate Form gods love what is holy because it is holy. They do not make it holy by loving it; they recognize it as holy (11a). This shows that holiness is somehow objective (even for the gods), but there is no sign of how the metaphysical relationship between the gods and their holiness is to be understood. Plato will return to this problem, not least in the Phaedrus. What is missing in the Euthyphro is any mention of a third (neo-Platonic) possibility: namely that the gods and their moral qualities are to be identified, so that for the gods loving what is holy is a form of self-love. So Plato does not (and cannot as yet)— though this is often suggested—make Socrates formally reject a “divine command morality”: that is, he does not reject the view that we should recognize what is holy as holy solely because the gods will it to be so (though it seems he would certainly find that unacceptable). Plato’s main point in the Euthyphro is to establish that holiness has a recognizable nature that can be identified whenever we properly label a person or action “holy.” He is chiefly interested not in the possible rights and wrongs of strict divine command moralities, but in the epistemological problem of what a particular moral quality can be known to be. He raises that question, he identifies it, but he does not answer it. Before he could do that he would need to know much more both about the nature of the gods—he has made a start in the Euthyphro—and about the nature of that “objectivity” that they and we can know. It is with this latter question that we are now primarily concerned, though before leaving the Euthyphro we should notice that Socrates concludes, expectably and ironically, by lamenting that he had hoped his ignorance about what is holy would be corrected by Euthyphro; had it so been, he would have been able to show his accuser Meletus that he is no longer a revolutionary in religion and would thus be able to live a better life (15e).   •  It might seem logical, after considering the Laches and the Euthyphro, to go back to the last of the short dialogues in which Socrates tries to identify a moral virtue, namely the Charmides—presumably written at approximately the same time—but that would not now   48 

The Discovery of Separate Form be helpful; there is no further advance in the metaphysics of morals in the Charmides; its contribution is on the psychological side: in the attempt to link the virtue of self-control with that specifically Delphic excellence, knowledge of oneself. It will be better to move immediately to the Meno, a much larger and more complex text, probably written in about 384, apparently both some sort of summary of Socrates’ earlier attempts to identify the virtues and a fresh starting point, via new and unexpected metaphysical and epistemological proposals, from which we can avoid the dead end to which the earlier dialogues have at least superficially brought us. The Meno returns to the problem of the teachability of virtue, prominent in the Protagoras, and proceeds to a clearer indication of how the mysterious understanding that we seem to have of morality (unless corrupted by poets or sophists) might be given a firmer foundation. It also brings out into the open some hitherto unexamined difficulties about the relationship between knowledge and true opinion: Socrates himself, as we have seen, claims to have no knowledge of morality (as of anything else), but certainly has opinions about how one ought to behave. In addition, through the warning of Anytus, the Athenian power broker behind the charge of impiety brought against Socrates soon after the dramatic date of the Meno (about 402), Plato now dramatically reemphasizes the dangers, already noted by Callicles in the Gorgias, that Socrates’ philosophical activity almost necessarily brings upon himself. Overall, therefore, we can recognize that the groundwork is being laid for the straightforward conclusion that Socratic questioning—a dangerous activity not least because itself open to abuse—though essential for clearing away rubbish cluttering our minds so that we recognize our own ignorance—is only the first stage of a desirable philosophical journey. If we are to proceed further we need new ideas about the soul, new claims in metaphysics, and a new and more formalized methodology, the latter to be distinguished from various lookalikes. If in the Meno the theme of teaching virtue reminds us of the Protagoras, the sequence Gorgias-Meno-Anytus echoes the Gorgias  49 

The Discovery of Separate Form Polus-Callicles of the Gorgias itself. But while the historical Polus of Acragas was a low-grade rhetorician, merely aspiring to be a man of violence, Meno—at least according to Xenophon, who witnessed his behavior as a fellow military professional—was to reveal himself as a thoroughly unpleasant “practitioner” of Gorgias’ new wisdom. The Meno can be roughly divided into three sections, thus again revealing a certain parallelism with the Gorgias, which Plato is now starting to replace: a process, as we shall see, that he will continue in the Republic. We start with typically Socratic questions: “What is virtue?” “Can virtue be taught?” (70a–79e). We then move, in Part Two, in order to refute Meno’s “Paradox” that it is impossible to learn anything, to ask what learning is, and Socrates introduces the thesis that knowledge is recollection. That accepted, we meet a methodological novelty in the form of a theory about “hypotheses,” the immediately relevant example being, “If virtue is knowledge, how is it taught, and by whom to whom (80a–89e)?” The apparent difficulty arising that there appear to be neither teachers nor students of virtue, we are introduced, unexpectedly (Part Three), to Anytus’ claim that any decent citizen can teach virtue. When on scrutiny this seems highly implausible, Socrates draws the conclusion that Anytus’ heroes, the great democratic leaders of fifth-century Athens, possessed not knowledge, but at best true opinion. By now Meno has begun to despair about the possibility of there being any virtuous people at all, but Socrates rescues him—up to a point. Since for many practical purposes true opinion—even perhaps about virtue—seems to be as effective as knowledge, what precisely is the difference between the two? So finally we return, in a modified ring construction to be repeated with far greater elaboration in the Republic and the Sophist, to our original questions: What is virtue? How is it acquired (89d–100b)? The Meno begins unsurprisingly, if abruptly. Meno, a young Thessalian nobleman now visiting Athens, inquires of Socrates whether virtue can be taught, whether it comes by practice, or whether it is just natural (70a). Socrates replies that he does not know what it   50 

The Discovery of Separate Form is—nor does anyone else—let alone how it is acquired. Meno is surprised; he knows that Socrates has met Gorgias, and he himself has also sat at Gorgias’ feet and imbibed his teaching about the nature of virtue. But though Socrates knows that Gorgias has made the Thessalians “lovers” of wisdom (as Aristippus is the lover of Meno, who, as is the wont of “beauties,” is overly demanding [76b]), he cannot himself quite remember what Gorgias said about virtue—but Meno can speak for him, which, Socrates observes, is all right then. So Meno, taking over from “Gorgias,” as did Polus in the Gorgias itself, begins in a manner that recalls figures in earlier dialogues: Gorgias himself, Laches, Protagoras, and Euthyphro. He knows what is the virtue of a man, of a woman, a child, a slave (71e), but Socrates, as we should now expect, pushes him toward a more general definition. Here in Athens, he says, he has remarked that no one knows what virtue is, nor obviously what sort of thing (hopoion) it is (71b). For all virtues must have the same eidos—in the language of the Euthyphro—whereby they are all virtue (72c). Meno accepts this and eventually offers a definition himself: first that virtue is the ability to govern mankind, then that it is the ability to do so justly (73d). This leads him into problems similar to those that had plagued Protagoras, about how justice relates to the other virtues. So Socrates offers to help him out, explaining how one can define “figure” (and “color”) rather than list different types of figures (76a)—and also distinguishing the more friendly “dialectical” skills from those of the professors of contentiousness (75c). These skills not only involve giving truthful responses, but examining what the interlocutor agrees he knows. We note the mathematical example—figure; concern with mathematics and mathematical learning is one of the important new themes of the Meno. So we sum up. We are talking definitions of the virtues, and it seems a virtue—say justice—is the common and invariable character (eidos) through which its instances can be recognized. But there is no advance at the ontological level from what we have found in the Euthyphro, and Socrates makes no attempt to pursue that further.   51 

The Discovery of Separate Form Perhaps Meno, apparently intent on leaving Athens without “being initiated into the mysteries” (76e)—a precursor of the language of Diotima in the later Symposium—is not yet adequately prepared. Prepared or not, however, he has picked up enough from the Sophists to be able to counter his failure to handle Socrates’ questioning by coming up with a famous “eristic” argument (80a), even though he complains (in the manner of Adeimantus in a pivotal passage of the Republic [6.487b]), that the effect of talking to Socrates is like being numbed by a stingray—and hence emerges more development on the proper nature of dialectical debate (80e). We are no longer concerned with the speechifying of Gorgias and others whom Socrates had earlier been concerned to deflate. Question-and-answer has apparently won the day, but it can be used philosophically or eristically: to find the truth or merely to win the argument. An earlier Socrates might seem at times to argue “eristically”; however, his approach then was rather to play on the character weaknesses of his opponents, to induce them to recognize that even if they thought they had been unjustly outmaneuvered, they could not see, being the people they are, what was wrong with the argument itself. Callicles in the Gorgias is one of those made to suffer in this way, but that sort of approach is not what Socrates wants in the Meno, where his new target is those who want to argue merely to win: neither, that is, to provoke a healthy confusion in an interlocutor nor to advance toward the truth. If question-and-answer is used philosophically, we are speaking “more dialectically” (75d); the word seems original to this passage, and the verb dialegesthai is set for a semi-technical future as pointing to this revised “Socratic” inquiry. But “dialectic” is no mere elenchus or testing, whether of a man or of his beliefs; it is not merely, or at least not formally, negative. It is the mode in which we are to proceed in later dialogues as well as in the Meno itself to construct philosophical theories, to advance beyond the clearing away of ignorance in oneself and others to the forming of what, in the Meno and later, are to be called “hypotheses.” Note again that this term derives from mathematics   52 

The Discovery of Separate Form and refers to an explanatory thesis that is assumed to be true, the implications of which can then be worked out logically and tested for coherence. Later, in the Phaedo, the hypothesis deployed will be the socalled Theory of Forms—that is, an ontological proposal about the nature of all or some of those eide to which the Euthyphro and the Meno have pointed; but in the Meno the hypothesis is epistemological. Plato seems to have supposed that no further advance can be made in explaining the still mysterious eide—the natures in common of moral, aesthetic, mathematical, and (soon to be added) physical “items”—until we know how to understand the cognitive capacities with which we scrutinize them. For Meno has challenged the whole process of identifying what things really are—though in a manner that Socrates damns as eristic, not dialectical. What Meno proposes (We are now into Part Two) has earned the name “Meno’s Paradox,” and purports to cut at the heart of Socratic proceedings (80d). If we did not know what a thing is, Meno argues, we would not be able to recognize it when we meet it: hence it is logically impossible to get to know anything at all. Socrates’ search for “knowledge” would be vain, and opinion all we could have. In response to that, Socrates advances an astonishing metaphysical claim about the nature of knowledge itself: it is simply recollection of what we have once “known.” By implication maintaining his own ignorance, he insists that he has heard this from priests and priestesses (81a ff.)—though what they tell him is not entirely clear. Certainly they teach that the soul is immortal and has been born many times, and therefore one should lead a holy life; there will be trouble in the afterlife, as the Gorgias has already told us, if we do not. Unsurprisingly, Meno asks Socrates to justify his claims about recollection, and Socrates obliges by inducing one of Meno’s slaveboys to derive, from certain basic geometrical ideas he possesses— the dialectical method, as we saw, proceeds from what we assume we know—something very much more elaborate that previously   53 

The Discovery of Separate Form he did not recognize that he knew (82b). Socrates has thus shed a certain light on what truths can be recalled: they include the basic principles of mathematics. But that is only an example; his claim is that all basic truths about the universe, moral as well as physical, are thus recoverable. Yet the metaphysical nature and status of these recoverable truths are still in limbo. In the course of its eternal existence the soul has seen and understood all things—including virtue—both in this world and “in Hades.” Thus although the precise nature of the objects of this understanding is left imprecise, Socrates is in no doubt that there are two kinds of items that the soul can know. These, as we shall see, are what we know as the result of individual experiences in our earthly life, and more general items (such as mathematical axioms) that we know “in Hades.” Nevertheless, no identifiably transcendent “objects” of knowledge—such as the later Forms—are introduced in the Meno. The metaphysical analysis of “universals,” as we noted, seems no advance on the Euthyphro; what has changed is the epistemology. Which leaves us with the question: What precise “kind” of “thing” does the soul know “in Hades”? We notice, of course, that the priests and priestesses do not say that we learned all these things or got to know them in Hades—otherwise Meno could propose his paradox again as to how we could get to know what we were learning in any previous life. We simply knew what we know. Plato does not want to discuss the precise nature of our earlier knowledge, at least not yet; what he wants to show is that captious arguments about the impossibility of knowledge can be overcome dialectically by examining the implications of a well-chosen hypothesis: in this case that learning is a kind of recollection of something already known, if half forgotten, by the soul. We can see that this hypothesis is well chosen in that it would explain how in prephilosophical times we men could “discern” or “divine” the existence of the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, but could not explain them. Plato must have supposed that if the soul did not have preexistent knowledge—or was not otherwise naturally construct  54 

The Discovery of Separate Form ed as capable of genuinely moral truth—our pre-philosophical intuitions would derive from society; they would have to be merely conventional, and Protagoras would be right. Socrates in the Meno has moved beyond writing off speechifiers such as Gorgias to attack a further breed of charlatans—those who use question and answer as a showcase for versatility rather than a means for the pursuit of truth. He will pursue this enemy further in the Cratylus—which deals with the relation of words to things and teaches that we must use things to explain language, and not vice versa, if we wish to be dialecticians—and more particularly in the Euthydemus—almost a sister-dialogue to the Meno, but in a more light-hearted mood—where a good deal of knockabout fun is had at the expense of two “eristic” interlocutors portrayed rather in the spirit of Punch and Judy. But there is still much work to be done in the Meno itself, where (at 86c) Meno reveals his inability to understand what he has “learned,” for he wants to go back immediately to his original question, “Is virtue taught or acquired naturally or in some other way?” and has to be reminded by Socrates that we still have not answered the prior question about virtue’s nature. To progress further, therefore, Socrates will test out his new approach via hypotheses: the hypothesis is to be “If virtue is knowledge (as implied by the theory of recollection), then it must be taught (87c)”—and we note how Plato assumes that what will work with a mathematical example will also work with a moral one, at least at this level of generality; also that virtue cannot just come “naturally” (89a), which here (in contrast to themes to be developed in the Republic) is taken to be a strictly alternative possibility to acquisition by learning. At all events Socrates is still puzzled: if there are no teachers and no pupils, it would seem that we were right in concluding that virtue could not be taught. That dilemma introduces the final act of the dialogue. Just by chance—Or is it by blundering interference?—Anytus, Socrates’ future nemesis, now turns up and sits down next to him, which gives him the chance to eliminate at least one version of the   55 

The Discovery of Separate Form idea that virtue, given the right circumstances, just comes naturally, as well as to develop a theme already introduced in the Apology and at a more personal level in the Gorgias. For the Apology was a manifesto to the Athenians about the overriding importance of philosophy, not simply on behalf of Socrates, who prefers death to disobeying the god, but of Plato himself, while in the Gorgias (513b–d) Callicles, the “lover of the [Athenian] people” reminds Socrates that bucking public opinion could be very dangerous (521c): “You seem to me, Socrates, not to believe. . . . that you might be dragged into court by some probably worthless individual.” To which Socrates merely replies that he would be a fool if he did not realize that “in this city” anyone might find himself at risk. When invited to join the discussion, Anytus, puffed by Socrates as the son of a rich and wise father whose wealth depended on his own skill and hard work, and himself honored by Athens in being chosen to hold high offices of state, is soon seen to have strong opinions whether there are teachers of virtue as of professional skills like medicine, but they are the opinions, not of an intelligent conservative, but of a reactionary—proud of his egalitarian hostility to professionals—who wants to put the clock back to an ideologically idealized past. Although he has had no personal experience of Sophists, and does not intend to get it, he insists that although to learn medicine one should study with a doctor, one should certainly not go to people like Protagoras to learn virtue. They are the scum of the earth; the young men (and their families) who pay to be corrupted by them are crazy (91c, 92a). In effect, this outburst means that unwelcome intellectual challenges can be ignored, or suppressed by the use of force, as historically Anytus himself was to suppress Socrates, whose mission depended on his belief that the Sophists cannot be suppressed, but must be answered. Suppression may work in the short run, but subsequent admiration for Socrates (and indeed Protagoras) and vilification of Anytus, who failed to extinguish the teaching either of the Sophists or of Socrates himself, shows that in the longer term it fails.   56 

The Discovery of Separate Form If a young man needs education, Anytus tells an ironically skeptical Socrates, he can pick it up from any decent Athenian. And where did that decent Athenian acquire his wisdom? From his ancestors, says Anytus, but when Socrates objects that “great” democratic statesmen like Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles, and Thucydides (not the historian) failed to pass on their wisdom even to their own sons—surely Themistocles, like any good man, would not grudge his wisdom to his own son (93c)—and concludes that it does not seem possible that virtue is learned simply by exposure to democratic individuals and institutions, Anytus turns threatening: “Socrates, you are too ready to speak ill of people; I would advise you to watch your step, especially here in Athens” (94e). He leaves abruptly, while Socrates blandly remarks to Meno, “I think Anytus is angry”—and puts it down to ignorance (95a). But the point has been made: virtue does not seem to be passed on merely by osmosis, by following the crowd, even if the crowd is democratic, any more than by paying Sophists (or reading Homeric epics). It begins to look (again) as though it cannot be taught after all, not even by Sophists. Meno is not sure what to think, and quietly changing his view of Gorgias, now claims that what distinguishes him from the rest of the new teachers is that he is more modest: he does not claim to teach virtue, but only the ability to speak (95c). Meno is discouraged: if there are no teachers of virtue, perhaps there are no good men at all (96d). That gives Plato the opportunity to have Socrates revert to the question of knowledge: less the sort we had “in Hades” than what we acquire and need for at least some aspects of our ordinary daily life. Indeed, perhaps knowledge is not always needed; perhaps true opinion will do for many practical purposes. This may seem un-Socratic, though Socrates, as we have seen, is certainly shown as possessed of true opinions, and already in the Gorgias (454d) has made an important distinction: while knowledge is always true, beliefs may be true or false. Yet in the Meno, although knowledge is (or is believed to be) recollection, Socrates has as yet failed to distinguish between our recollection of things there,   57 

The Discovery of Separate Form “in Hades”—that seemed to be of abstractions such as the theorems of mathematics—and our recollection of things “here.” The example he now selects highlights this difficulty. If we want to travel from Athens to Larissa, we do not need to know the road—though such knowledge is available and appears when we (presumably) recollect direct experience, or as Meno’s Paradox would have it, we cannot know the road unless we get to know the road—yet we can learn well enough from someone who has traveled it and who can provide us with true opinion about it. Indeed, Socrates appears to have been convinced of this distinction all the way along; he has already pointed out that it is possible to have true opinion about things of which we have no knowledge at all (85c). Meno is forgetful once more, this time about the implications of the theory (which he has accepted) that knowledge is recollection, since he now says that if true opinion is of such great practical value, he wonders why people think it inferior to knowledge (97d). So Socrates, significantly without commenting that there seem to be two different sorts of knowledge, one of abstractions, the other of facts that we discover in our present lives by first-hand experience, now sets out to explain the relationship between knowledge and true opinion. He reminds Meno that we can convert true opinion into knowledge and thus possess it more securely (98a)—as happened with the slave-boy’s geometry—if we explain the causes of things, binding down our opinions through the process of recollection. If, however, all recollection is of what we knew in a previous life, that would seem to do little to explain how one man could know and another merely have true opinions about the road to Larissa. But if we remember that our recollection is also of what we learn here, the problem disappears. Once I have traveled from Athens to Larissa, I can remember how I did it. So again it seems that one kind of knowledge, of a general sort, is acquired by remembering what we once knew—in a previous life—while another kind depends on particular present-life experiences that are then held in memory. So long as I can remember how I got from Athens to Larissa, I know   58 

The Discovery of Separate Form how to travel from Athens to Larissa. When I say I know how to get to Larissa, I assume that I can give an explanation of my knowledge (logismos): the explanation is that my knowledge really does depend on my experience, just as with the other “knowledge” it depends on my pointing to analogous experience in an earlier life. As for people like Themistocles and the other Athenian politicians, true opinion was arguably the best they possessed (99b). If so, they were like “wise” soothsayers who often speak the truth by “divine dispensation” (100b) but—again—do not know what it is they are talking about (99c). Or perhaps, we might think, like the cooks in the Gorgias, they possess a certain knack. In any case we can now see why they could not hand on their skills to others. When Meno comments that Anytus might not be happy with this verdict on the heroes of democratic mythology, Socrates replies that that is no concern of his—though Meno himself might be able to persuade Anytus of the error of his ways, and that would be a good service to the people of Athens!   •  The Cratylus, an inquiry into whether names are natural or conventional and whether there is a “correctness” of names, must have been written at approximately the same time as the Meno, and probably a little later. Its underlying concern is with the problem of whether we (groups or individuals) can call things whatever we like, or whether names can and should give a clear notion of what is named. Socrates, near the beginning of the dialogue, connects the question of names with offering a radical interpretation of the dictum of Protagoras: that man is the measure of all things (386a), interpreting Protagoras—as he will do again in the Theaetetus—to mean that each of us is free to construct his own world as he sees fit and describe it as he sees fit. That being so, it is hardly surprising that the Cratylus also introduces another theme to which Plato will return frequently (and with greater elaboration) in the latter part of his life, namely the apparent impossibility of false statement (and ultimately of false belief) (429d)—for that too might seem deriva  59 

The Discovery of Separate Form tive of the Protagorean dictum and the subjectivism (even if tempered by conventionalism) to which it points. We note that Socrates also connects the falsity of Protagoras’ ideas with the mistakes of Euthydemus (“eristic” protagonist of that somewhat earlier dialogue) and with Prodicus, presented as a pedantic linguistic expert in the Protagoras, who for fifty drachmas can set you right about the nature of language (384b). Socrates has only been able to afford his one-drachma course! From the start the Cratylus is concerned with the possible abuse of language, and therefore with the relationship between language and reality. That being so, it is hardly surprising that Plato has some revolutionary things to say in the dialogue about what “reality” is: indeed it seems to be the first dialogue in which his most significant advance in metaphysics is presented—almost casually and in a form laden with difficulties that it will require many dialogues to sort out. We already know from the Euthydemus that the dialectic arrived at in the Meno is a “royal art” (291b) whose practitioners synthesize and expand the work of geometers, astronomers, and arithmeticians. In the Cratylus Socrates introduces the dialectician as a man able to determine whether the “name-giver” has allocated names correctly (390d); because he knows what Name really is (auto ekeino ho estin onoma, 389d; cf Symposium 211e; Phaedo 75b, 78d; Parmenides 129b), he can look directly at it. And there is more in the same vein: if a shuttle is broken, we can repair it by looking not at the broken specimen, but back to the form (eidos) that was looked to when that one was made. Here certainly is much of the developed language of the Theory of Forms, and it is clear that while the Form of Shuttle is perfect, the individual specimens are made with reference to it; that is, the maker knows what a shuttle is (and would presumably retain that knowledge even if all actual shuttles ceased to exist). What is particularly striking about this passage is that the Form introduced is of a physical object. Normally—and even later in the Cratylus itself—Plato will speak first of Forms of moral, aesthetic,   60 

The Discovery of Separate Form or mathematical qualities (goodness, justice, equality); even in the Republic “substantial” Forms (in this case that of Couch) are only introduced in a puzzling passage of Book 10, which we shall consider in due course. However, the positing of both “substance Forms” (like Shuttle) and “value Forms” (such as Beauty) should only surprise us if we expect Plato always to limit himself to Socrates’ traditional ethical concerns. For the dialogues we have considered thus far—though admittedly all treating of virtues—suggest that it is on “one-over-many” arguments that Plato has come to rely in identifying universal “items”—justice, beauty, and the rest—whatever their ontological status (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 13, 1078b). So that just as if a, b, and c are beautiful, there is a Form of Beauty itself, why, if a, b, and c are shuttles, will there not be, as in the Cratylus, a Form of Shuttle itself? It remains to be seen how far Plato will become aware of the difference between these two types of Forms (those indicating objects and those indicating values) and want to distinguish between them. We may observe immediately, however, on the basis of evidence supplied, not only by Plato himself in the Parmenides (130c), where Socrates hesitates over Forms of man, fire and water, but also from Aristotle, that there was much debate in the Academy about the possible existence of Forms of (at least some) material objects. “We,” he says, speaking as a member of the Academy, “deny the existence of Forms of house and ring” (Metaphysics 1, 991b, cf. 13, 1079a). With the second reference to Forms in the Cratylus we are on what is to become more familiar ethical (and Socratic) ground. After Socrates has persuaded Cratylus that whatever the truth about naming, it is better to learn how to use names by understanding the nature of the world than contrariwise, he proposes, in an attempt to rebut the Heraclitean doctrine that all things are in flux, that there is a “Beauty itself and a Good itself ” and so on in other cases (439c). The question to be asked at this stage, of course, is: Is Plato now proposing Forms that are objective, separate, and transcendent realities? The emphasis on solving problems of flux suggests that he   61 

The Discovery of Separate Form is, and that was certainly the interpretation of Aristotle, who was in a good position to know. For whether Aristotle refers to Cratylus himself or—as many think—to the Platonic Cratylus of the dialogue is irrelevant to the substance of his comment in Book 1 of the Metaphysics (987a ff.) that Plato’s position on “universals” was dependent on, but differed from, that of Socrates. Aristotle is not concerned with the question of when Plato made the remarkable proposal that the “Ideas” are separate from the “flowing” particulars. What he wants to say is that Plato avoided difficulties about “flowing” particulars by postulating the real existence of such Ideas. His text runs as follows: When he was young Plato first became acquainted with Cratylus and the Heraclitean notions that all sensible things are always in flux and that there is no knowledge of them, and later on he still held that view. But when Socrates concerned himself with ethics and not at all with physics and sought in that area for universals and first turned his mind to definitions, Plato followed him, supposing that definitions related not to sensible things but to something else. . . . These things he called Ideas and he thought that sensible things are named after them.

And again in Book 13 (1078b ff., cf. 1086a) Aristotle tells a similar story about those who first proposed the theory of Forms and concludes: “But Socrates considered neither universals nor definitions as “separate,” but they (scil. Plato and others, perhaps including those whom Plato in the Sophist himself called the “Friends of the Forms”) did separate them.” In our second passage about Forms in the Cratylus Plato introduces goodness and beauty and similar “beings” (439c), without specifying the relationship between goodness and beauty; though we may remember from the Gorgias (499d) and the Meno (87e) that good things (understood in the earlier dialogues as what are good for us or perceived to be so) are, at least if genuinely good for us, “beautiful” or “fine”: exact translation of kalon is impossible. But now he also shows that he has recognized that Cratylus’ “Heracliteanism,” in combination with the thesis of Protagoras that man   62 

The Discovery of Separate Form is the measure of all things, presents a radical challenge to any revised version of Socratic ethics. Formal analysis of the universe in terms of a contrast between being and becoming—the neo-Eleatic language prominent in the Symposium and the Phaedo—is absent from the Cratylus, but the substance of that distinction is already there. And the ethical implications are obvious: if moral terms are in flux, any sort of moral definition is vain, and moral knowledge is impossible; each of us, Protagorean-style, is free to invent his (or her) own moral universe—and in morals and politics the results would be disastrous. When we come to the Republic, we shall see that Plato is aware, if not of a specific notorious text from the History of Thucydides, then at least of utterances of the sort we find there, and that he wants to correct the dangerous Heracliteanism he has highlighted in the Cratylus; for Heraclitean relativism about fixed characteristics provides a metaphysical defense for the morally obnoxious language to which Thucydides draws attention. The passage in Thucydides reads as follows (3.82.4): “Men changed the accreditation of words to things [exactly the problem of the Cratylus] at their own discretion. Mindless audacity was considered to be the courage of a true party-man, thoughtful hesitation to be specious cowardice, restraint an excuse for lack of virility.” Without a fixed notion of goodness and beauty, a notion of what goodness and beauty really are, the way is open to this sort of “nihilist” political prevaricating. If, as is likely, the Cratylus is to be dated not very differently from the Republic, its concern with language, and Socrates’ association of its subjectivism with the views of Heraclitus, will also connect it with the later Theaetetus. In light of a combination of philosophical and stylistic reasons, however, it must belong to the beginning of the “middle period” of Plato’s writing; hence we can see why Plato goes out of his way at its end to conclude a discussion of the proper relationship between things and their names by introducing what Aristotle supposed—surely rightly—to be “full-blown” separate Platonic Forms of ethical qualities. But although full-blown Forms are now fairly on the table, the   63 

The Discovery of Separate Form Cratylus also makes us aware of difficulties to come, concluding ominously with Cratylus insisting that he still believes the theories of Heraclitus to be correct and presumably complete (440d). For difficulties in Socrates’ position are obvious. Now that ambiguities about the ontological status of Forms have been removed and they are clearly “separate,” we can ask the question: Is the Form of Shuttle a perfect shuttle? For if it can only be recognized by the mind it cannot be a material object—but what is an immaterial shuttle? Related (though less immediately difficult) problems arise with goodness and beauty. Is the Form of Beauty beautiful? And there is more. In the Cratylus we have found Forms of both material and immaterial “things,” and we see why Plato has claimed them, but can that really be? Must there not be important differences between them, perhaps to be connected with a distinction between things or events on the one hand and values (and actions) on the other: between the world of brute facts and the world of values? Or is Plato saying that values just are brute facts? At this stage that would be a mere assertion. Nor has the Cratylus done anything to resolve a key question hanging over from the Meno: we do not yet fully grasp the relationship between knowledge and true opinion. Could one have true opinion rather than knowledge of a Form? Does Cratylus, when he agrees with Socrates about Forms, have true opinion? And that may be connected with yet another unresolved difficulty: the Cratylus repeats something of the earlier claim that it is by or through the Form that the individual object or quality can be recognized as possessing particular characteristics; yet how is such possessing to be explained? Without the “separate” Form the particular could not exist, but does that make the Form (which exists apart in any case) a condition or—as is more probable—a cause? How can the existence of a Form bring a particular into existence? Or does the existence of the Form merely enable us to describe the particular? Has Plato offered some sort of epistemological theory and magnified it into an ontology? He may seem to have done that with “substance Forms,” but value Forms must entail a good deal more, for—were   64 

The Discovery of Separate Form they merely universals—they would generate nothing beyond some sort of conventionalism (which Plato certainly rejects) to account for our sense of moral obligation. If, however, they are brute facts in the universe, then to deny that they are each what they are, and unchangingly, would be as absurd as to claim that a shuttle as we traditionally know it is not really a shuttle. Something else could just as reasonably be called “shuttle.” Overall, Plato’s discussion thus far points as much to problems as to solutions.

  65 

 4  Forms and Erotic Passion

In the dialogues examined thus far Socrates believes that if we can recognize the mistakes we make in judgments about what is good for us, we shall be able to take due care of our souls. But why do we make such mistakes? Is it that we are stupid or misled by the conventions of our flawed societies or by wicked Sophists—which would suggest a purely intellectual weakness—or is it that we are more specifically deluded by bodily pleasures and desires? And if bodily desires are a large part of the problem, what happens to them when we recognize and act upon our new moral knowledge? In the Gorgias (500e), the Charmides (167e) and the Protagoras (340a), admittedly with limited fanfare, Plato has made an important distinction between rational willing, directed at the good or what we suppose to be our good, and desire (epithumia), which aims at pleasure or satisfaction. Thus far I have largely left such questions aside— though just glancing at the uncertain relationship between pleasure and knowledge—in pursuit of Socrates’ thesis that we can correct our moral mistakes if we submit the logic of our behavior and beliefs to cross-examination. Even in the Meno, which sums up much of Plato’s earlier writing and introduces radically new ideas about the nature of knowledge, the emotional side of our characters and its possibly necessary adaptation to the demands of the philosophical life are left aside.   66 

Forms and Erotic Passion Nevertheless, Plato had drawn an “erotic” picture of Socrates in the Charmides, where it is male beauty that attracts him: unsurprisingly in Athenian society, where homosexual relations between an older man and a youth—preferably at puberty but before his beard has fully developed—are a conventional rite of passage, at least among the aristocracy. And that sort of relationship is to prove especially significant both in the Lysis and in the Symposium because it was unequal and substantially nonreciprocal. The active elder male plays a socially accepted role in seeking gratification; the youth is supposed to be captured only with difficulty and after tireless courtship. He is the object sought, the object of pleasure. He is supposed to be passive, not to seek pleasure himself; indeed to do so would be shameful. In an often-cited passage of his alternative Symposium (8.21) the historian Xenophon, who here and elsewhere developed his banal portrait of Socrates, explains the social situation as follows: “The boy does not share the man’s pleasure in intercourse, as a woman does; while himself is cold sober he sees the other drunk with sexual desire.” In the Charmides Socrates is overwhelmed by the sight of Charmides’ beautiful body (155d), but turns the conversation to the state of his soul—as is appropriate in a dialogue about self-control. Yet the historical Socrates is consistently said to have been an erotikos, a passionate lover, as was noted not only by Plato, but also by Xenophon, Aeschines of Sphettus, and other of his followers. “Urban myths” were constructed around this characterization: thus a certain physiognomist named Zopyrus, according to Phaedo in a largely lost dialogue of the same name, came to Athens and, judging from his appearance, pronounced Socrates a lecher. This aroused mockery, not least from Alcibiades, the would-be seducer of Socrates according to the Symposium, but Socrates himself remarked that he had strong natural tendencies that way and had overcome them with the help of reason. All Socratics connected Socrates’ eroticism with his passion for philosophy, and Plato was soon to set about explaining why this was both natural and necessary.   67 

Forms and Erotic Passion Before the Lysis, a small and difficult (even confused) dialogue largely about philia, a word normally and rather reductively translated as “friendship,” Plato had made no attempt to explain the redirection of erotic desire as the emotional motivation for philosophy. Thus the Lysis sets the stage for more elaborate theorizing in the Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus, much of its more constructive material marking it out especially as an early draft of many of the ideas of the Symposium. With its references to “eristic” (204a, 211b) and “logic-choppers” (216a), it also bears comparison with the Meno and the Euthydemus, and is probably of roughly similar date, though with very different subject matter. For Plato had increasingly come to believe that the “Socratic” thesis that moral improvement is concerned primarily, if not entirely, with the elimination of ignorance is overly optimistic. To examine his subsequent reaction we must follow his reflections on the emotions, in the Lysis and the Symposium, before moving to more un-Socratic psychological theories in the Republic and Phaedrus. These last will be left for later chapters, when Plato’s revised insights about the soul can be set alongside what has by then become the “classic” Theory of Forms. For before Republic and Phaedrus comes a dialogue that is one of Plato’s great masterpieces and at the same time the source of much misunderstanding (not least among Christians) of his more developed accounts of the relationship between soul and Form and between the good and our Socratic inclination to pursue it—in accordance with the claim that “no one does wrong willingly”: a claim found in earlier and more “Socratic” as well as in later dialogues. That ultimately misleading text is the Phaedo, Plato’s dramatically controlled but emotional presentation of Socrates’ heroic death as a martyr for philosophy, with its radical metaphysical (and not merely moral) dichotomy between the concerns of soul and body and its consequently ultra-ascetic account of the nature of philosophy itself. To see how there is a sense in which the Phaedo is an anomaly in Plato’s intellectual development, let us therefore turn to the Lysis,   68 

Forms and Erotic Passion where for the first time Plato tries to explicate the sense in which we desire the good, where for the first time we start to inspect Platonic eros, the yearning through which we can ascend from immediate this-worldly concerns with beauty to that Form of Beauty itself which provides the most immediate gateway to the world of Forms and the moral, emotional, and intellectual journey by which we can come to “know” them. For unless it is the case not only that Forms exist but that we want to know them, then they are of no help in our moral lives—and for Plato also for our intellectual lives—and for practical purposes might as well not exist at all. Indeed in the Parmenides (written after the Republic) Plato will discuss the related possibility that Forms exist, but that we have no knowledge of them (and similarly that a god might have knowledge of them and, if so, would have no knowledge of human affairs—in effect the variety of atheism that denies the existence of that Providence of which the historical Socrates was so certain). This difficulty, according to the Parmenides of the dialogue, is a major problem for the whole theory of Forms. It was in part to defeat it that Plato had already developed the idea that we cannot know the Forms unless we love the Forms, and vice versa. How then do we or can we come to love (have erotic desire for) a Form? In the Lysis Socrates avows himself generally a poor specimen, but claims that one gift he has received “from god” is that he can recognize a lover and his beloved (204bc), and in his provocative attitude to young men and their fancied boys, we recall something of his behavior in the Charmides—which is perhaps a signal that in the subject matter of the Lysis we are to recognize an early stage of the discussion of a new and important theme. In the erotically charged atmosphere of Miccus’ wrestling school, Socrates meets the young bloods Hippothales and Ctesippus and their adolescent objects of desire, Lysis and Menexenus. Like Charmides earlier, Lysis is now the celebrity of the day: not only handsome but a young gentleman (kalos te kai agathos, 207a). And Plato is going to concentrate for the first time, on the first adjective of this pair, the kalos that indi  69 

Forms and Erotic Passion cates the intrinsic value of its referent, and not merely its apparent or real usefulness, as is to be expected in a dialogue in which eros is to be at least sketchily isolated from other sorts of philia. For eros is primarily love of the beautiful, though its scope can be extended— sometimes disastrously, rather as we may speak about love or lust for money or fame. Hippothales is amorously disposed toward Lysis and hopes to secure him as his boy-love (paidika)—which gives Socrates the chance to investigate the peculiar nature of such eros and how it relates to the wider notion of philia (friendship). That the two ideas are related is suggested by the Greek language itself: the erotikos “loves” (philein as well as eran) that object that is “dear” to him. Plato wants to identify the specific type of philia that is erotic, because he also holds erotic desire to be what drives Socrates and those who resemble him into philosophical pursuits. Here then we recognize the very special Platonic interest in eros, quite different, for instance, from the later attitude of Aristotle. Indeed, while Aristotle has no particular concern with eros, thinking of it simply as an excessive form of philia (Nicomachean Ethics 9.1171a), Plato wants to identify it as the essential motivation of a seeker after wisdom, playing the role that boulesis—our common rational desire for goodness or what is good for us—plays in the Gorgias (499e ff.), Charmides (167e), and Protagoras (340a). But whereas in the Charmides Socrates limits eros to sexual desire, thus separating it from rational will, his thinking in the Lysis points to a transcendental rapprochement. As we shall see, eros is indeed to be the philosophical version of rational willing, but as a “madness” it also transcends the merely “rational” mind, being thus envisaged as desire for a “more than human” immortality of which Plato becomes increasingly convinced, and that he will associate in the Phaedo with soul’s “likeness” to the Forms qua immaterial substances, and—from the Republic on—with the idea of improving on our natural immortality and thus obtaining (rather in a sense recovering) a wider “likeness to god.” Already in the myth of the afterlife in the Gorgias—though   70 

Forms and Erotic Passion there is as yet no allusion to the soul’s preexistence—Plato has left behind Socrates’ apparent (though perhaps only ironic) agnosticism about immortality in the Apology. Nevertheless, in the Gorgias, although Socrates asserts that his account of post-mortem rewards and punishments is no mere muthos—the word can indicate at best a plausible and popular approximation to truth, at worst an oldwives tale—but a logos (implying something more securely grounded), there is as yet no philosophical argument for immortality: that can only appear when Plato has become certain of the existence of immaterial substances. The ontological connection between immortal Form and immortal soul is only developed in the Phaedo, though the Meno—in which Forms do not yet appear—has pointed the way. In the Lysis Plato begins to separate eros from other forms of love by moving away from the erotic desire of Hippothales to the friendship between the adolescents Lysis and Menexenus, who become each in turn Socrates’ interlocutors. Their friendship is unambiguously reciprocal, though it would seem that Socrates is not ultimately concerned with reciprocal relationships. He therefore inquires first about the relationship between Lysis and his parents (207d ff.), drawing attention to the fact that Lysis is a dependent and therefore has to be obedient to those who want him to be as happy as possible, at the cost of giving up what might seem more immediately satisfying; his parents are strict about this, even setting slaves over him at times, and Lysis recognizes that this is because he is comparatively immature (209a). At this point (211a) Menexenus, who had earlier been called away by the wrestling master, returns, and Socrates brings him into the discussion, which now, appropriately, moves to the reciprocal relationship between the two boys. What Socrates wants to discover is who is dear to whom, and why, and thought is given to whether like attracts like or unlike. There is no need to investigate the rather contorted arguments that follow, except to note that reciprocal friendship seems to depend on a certain mutual needi  71 

Forms and Erotic Passion ness in the parties, a felt lack of something good. For he who is not particularly endowed in some respect desires what he lacks: thus unlike the gods, who are already wise, those who are neither wise nor unwise desire to be wise (philo-sophein), so, in a sense, to philosophize (218a). So although friends are friends for their own sake (220b), joined by a certain natural kinship (221e), they still seem to be “really” (though not consciously) loved as instantiations of what is “primarily” dear to us (219d)—whatever kind of thing that may be. So we recognize that—unless we tolerate an infinite regress of “dears”—we have reached a first principle (archen, 219c) for the sake of which everything we value in a particular friend is valued. But note the “in”; it seems to be the qualities of the beloved, not the beloved himself, that are loved. And it is an axiom that what is not lovable is not loved. Thus those who are loved cannot be loved simply because they are human, but because they are a certain kind of human. That presumably implies that there will be humans devoid of the desirable qualities and that they are not and could not be the fitting objects of love. Some of the less attractive results of this attitude will become apparent in the discussion of eugenics in the Republic, and though Plato moderates it in the Phaedrus, he never entirely repudiates it. Although we should see in Plato’s argument against an infinite regress of “dears” a sign of his concern to reach toward an unchallengeable first principle in moral reasoning, we cannot avoid noticing more immediately in the Lysis that with the introduction of philosophers we have also surreptitiously returned to eros. And sure enough we soon read: “If one person desires or loves (era) another, he loves him because there is something akin to be found in the beloved”—which entails—to the delight of Lysis’ lover Hippothales—that the beloved should be fond of the lover because by nature they have something in common. Of course the question is: What? And because A is akin to B, does it follow that B is akin to A in the same sense? Here we see why Plato wants to talk about an eros for what is “primarily dear” rather than about friendship with it.   72 

Forms and Erotic Passion For in the kind of erotic relationship in view between Hippothales and Lysis, the relationship is not reciprocal. It would be improper, certainly not the deportment of a “gentleman,” for Lysis to welcome any consummation. Lysis is “handsome,” “beautiful,” the object of eros; Hippothales is a mere lover of beauty, no possessor of it. It is not difficult to see how for Plato, if the philosopher “loves” a Form, say the Form of Beauty, then there may be a certain kinship between them, and that kinship may be increased by a vision or experience of the Form; but the lover of Beauty, that is, the philosophic soul, will remain in nonreciprocal kinship. He is lover while the Form (like Lysis) is object of love. The Form, being unchanging and impersonal, will not reciprocate the desire. We are now within sight of the Symposium, with its stupendous claims and its problems still hidden, at least from the Platonic Socrates. And it is clear that eros (with its special attitude to what is beloved by or dear to the erotic lover) is a candidate to take over the work of the earlier “Socratic” rational will to what is good—while at the same time it looks, un-Socratically, more than rational. In the Symposium that more-than-rational desire is explicitly to be aimed, as it is not in the Lysis, at no mere instantiation (like Lysis) of the intrinsically dear and beautiful, but at that Beauty itself “by which” all that is dear and beautiful is dear and beautiful. We await the effect of such a targeting!   •  As in the Charmides, so in the Symposium—composed sometime between 385 and 378—Plato has constructed a fantasy about people who formed part of a sophisticated clique; with the exception of Aristophanes they had already all appeared in the Protagoras hobnobbing with the celebrated Sophists Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus. But the less happy latter days of most of them were well known to Plato’s readers and could be recognized as in sharp contrast to the carefree mood of the dramatic setting—as is indicated when early in his introduction Apollodorus tells us that Agathon has been away from Athens for many years (172c). For most of the participants in   73 

Forms and Erotic Passion the symposium were faced with the disastrous repercussions of their behavior soon after 415, the dramatic date of the text, having been involved in the mutilation of the statues of Hermes that stood before many of the houses of Athens, as well as in blasphemous parodies of the “Mysteries,” a comparatively recent form of “mystical” religion performed at Eleusis in rural Attica. Both these acts involved their perpetrators in the gravest disrepute and public hostility. In the Symposium itself, however, “mystery religions” are invoked in a far more reverent spirit, both by Socrates and by Diotima, the wise woman who is said to have been his instructor in “erotics” (201d). The dreamlike world of love and happiness is set further back in the distant past by means of the elaborate frame within which Plato casts his narrative of the festivities in celebration of Agathon’s first victory as a tragic poet. The tale is recounted at third hand: it is what Apollodorus (a devotee of Socrates in his later life) heard from Aristodemus (who had been a follower many years before). Socrates is presented almost from the start as a “mystic”: a role appropriate to his new and bold metaphysical claims about beauty and love, but which he hardly takes on in earlier Platonic writings. On the way to the symposium he turns aside into a porch to meditate in his accustomed manner (175b), hence arriving late for dinner. He then finds himself unable to reject the idea that this time, as distinct from the previous night of excess (at which he was not himself present), the revelers should deliver speeches rather than proceed yet again to drinking or entertaining themselves with the flute girls. The subject is to be love as desire (eros, the “neglected” god) at a more theoretical level, and Socrates has to avow himself, as in the Lysis, a man who knows nothing about anything except “love matters” (177e). Plato’s repetition of the point indicates that it is appropriate and significant so to describe Socrates’ love both of philosophy and of bright young men; without eros there will be no philosophy, no love of beauty and truth, only rhetorical displays among the “chattering classes,” whether in Athens or elsewhere. The Symposium presents metaphysics in the abstract, but with   74 

Forms and Erotic Passion Socrates as the living exemplar of the philosophical life—and not only as narrowly understood. We have already seen him in the Gorgias as the model of proper public life and deportment; he is the true politician whose concern is, as it should be, with the well-being of the citizens. Plato probably wrote the Symposium a little earlier than the Phaedo—at least the metaphysics and consequently the ethics are presented in a less developed form—but the two should be read as a diptych. The Greeks generally held that the twin threats to the good life and “happiness” (eudaimonia) are mistaken attitudes toward pleasure and pain, and these threats are often viewed in their extreme forms as sexual excess on the one hand and torture and death on the other. The Symposium thus presents Socrates as the philosopher who knows how to live the “good life”—as we shall see, the point is made explicitly by the drunken, and hence truthful, Alcibiades—while the Phaedo indicates how, in light of a proper understanding of the eternal destiny of the soul, he also has engaged in philosophy as practice for death. The six speeches that form the main part of the Symposium— preceding the more personal angle following on the eruption of Alcibiades and “the boys” and the eventual collapse of orderly talk— can be divided into two groups. The first three (those of Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Dr. Eryximachus) are earnest, not to say pompous and self-serving, and Pausanias’ speech is subverted by the persistent hiccoughing of Aristophanes, who consequently has to yield place as third speaker to Eryximachus until he can recover under medical supervision. Although the earnestness and pomposity of these three still make important contributions to the general direction of the dialogue, the second group of speakers—Aristophanes, Agathon, and Socrates—though less earnest, are deeper and even “mystical,” with Socrates introducing clear proposals about the relationship between the philosopher as erotic searcher and the Form of Beauty as the natural and most typical object of his search. Within the first group the speeches are cumulative, and none of the speakers starts from exactly the standard view of eros. In each   75 

Forms and Erotic Passion case the erotic leanings discussed are, as in the Lysis, primarily homosexual. Phaedrus’ contribution is simple: eros is a great good, a source of virtue and, as he particularly emphasizes, a stimulus to self-sacrifice, even of one’s life. Strikingly, in view of the homoerotic context, one of the examples he cites in corroboration is Alcestis, whose affection for her husband led her to die for him—which was more than his parents were prepared to do. Phaedrus says that her affection arose because of her eros; yet it was a response to his eros— though women too are allowed to be “loving” (179b)—and, as Phaedrus goes on to suggest, the [original] lover is always more divine than the beloved. That is presumably why, as he claims, Achilles was even more honored by the gods than Alcestis. Nevertheless, Phaedrus makes several important, indeed contextually controversial claims: that the lover can rightly expect an affectionate response; that this reciprocated affection—even love—is possible for women as well as men, though it is of subordinate value; that love provokes noble deeds and makes us ashamed of their contraries: in fact such deeds—whether in public or private life—are impossible without it: a theme subject later to a peculiarly Socratic development. Yet apart from various, perhaps significant, linguistic confusions in his account of Achilles and Patroclus, there is a huge weakness in Phaedrus’ position, which Pausanias, who is himself the lover of Agathon, is soon, and self-servingly, to correct: Phaedrus’ account of eros is grotesquely optimistic in holding that all eros is good and inspiring—which is contrary to Greek (and our own) commonsense outlook and linguistic usage. There seems no place in Phaedrus’ schema for distinguishing between love and lust, or between the love of power and of beauty. In what sense can one say that one is “inspired” by a lust for power? But perhaps Plato wants also to allude to Socrates’ own idea that we all—unless deceived— desire our own good. Pausanias proposes a substantial correction to Phaedrus’ thesis. There are two varieties of eros, as there are of Aphrodite, the mother of the personified Eros, who is worshipped at Athens both   76 

Forms and Erotic Passion as “heavenly” and as “common.” The latter is directed at women as well as boys, and being concerned with bodily gratification rather than with care of the soul, has no interest in the spiritual; its acts are performed without reference to the moral categories of good and evil. The heavenly love, by contrast, has no truck with women and is untainted by sexual violence (181c); it is only directed toward older boys (as was conventional) and endures throughout life as friendship and the joint pursuit of excellence; doubtless Pausanias has his own relationship with Agathon in mind. This sophisticated eros is a mark of the free citizen of the more urban type of Greek community: above all of Athens herself, where it is associated with hostility to “tyranny.” The “heavenly” lover should do all he can to encourage virtue in the favorite who accepts him; the boy should “assist” the lover who makes him “wise and good” (184d). Again, as with Phaedrus, love (this time only the heavenly variety) is valuable both for the individual and for the city (185b). After this disquisition Apollodorus concludes his recounting of the speech with a “Gorgianic” pun on Pausanias’ name (185c)—clever people, he says, have taught him to do that stuff—before evoking the hiccoughs of Aristophanes: Plato is puncturing Pausanias’ proposal, which misuses an important distinction as a self-serving half-truth. Eryximachus need not detain us long: he accepts Pausanias’ distinction and gives his two varieties of love more universal application. The doctor can apply his knowledge of “erotics” to the treatment of the human body, because he knows about how the four elements of the physical world are related. Doubtless there are deliberate echoes, not only of Heraclitus (whose theory of music, says Eryximachus, can be clarified by medical professionals), but also of Empedocles, who interested Plato in later life when he began to think about causes of motion. With all its pseudo-scientific talk of harmony, rhythm, disease, and the community of gods and men, Eryximachus’ speech is largely a caricature. This doctor never wearies of emphasizing that he is a professional, but he lacks selfknowledge, and among his final words is a vanity-fueled suggestion   77 

Forms and Erotic Passion to Aristophanes that he may be able to patch up the poet’s (far more daring) presentation (188e). We can recognize the pretentious (even dangerous) claims of the scientific philistine pontificating outside his own specialty. Aristophanes’ presence in the company might seem surprising, since we remember from the Apology that Plato (and it may be Socrates himself) believed he had seriously damaged Socrates’ reputation by presenting him in the Clouds as a master Sophist, a man who makes the worse argument appear the better. He is the first of the speakers to offer any sort of philosophical explanation of love’s nature, and a brilliantly imaginative explanation it is, perhaps developed by Plato from scraps of Aristophanes’ own ideas in the The Birds. Now the comic poet constructs a “myth” in the Platonic sense of the word—that is, an imaginary tale that points toward a metaphysical and psychological truth. According to Aristophanes, human beings were originally divided into three sexes, not two. There were males, females, and a combination of the two. Endowed with twice as many limbs and other bodily parts as we now display, they grew arrogant and attempted, like Ephialtes and Otus in the Odyssey (11.305ff.; cf. Iliad 5.385ff.), to climb up to heaven and dethrone the gods. Unwilling to eliminate the human race altogether—for that, the poet wryly observes (190c), would deprive the gods of the honors and sacrifices men bestow on them—Zeus decided to split each of us in two, so that we should spend the rest of our lives trying to find our other half. This explains sexual orientation: there are male and female homosexuals as well as heterosexuals. All depends on our original state before the bisection. But when the now divided human beings spent all their time looking for their other halves and would have died (and died out) in lonely frustration, Zeus told Apollo to bring their genitals round to the front so that in sexual intercourse we should feel at least temporarily satisfied, get on with whatever work needed to be done, and in the case of heterosexuals, enable the human race to survive. But if we cause the gods any more trouble, Zeus will split us in half again so that we have to hop about on our one remaining leg!   78 

Forms and Erotic Passion The thesis behind the myth is clear enough, however comically presented: eros is a desire for needed completion, for recovery of the superior state possessed by humanity in the past. Our present condition is the result of a primeval offense against the gods; only love will bring back the happiness we crave. In such wise does Aristophanes gives a comic twist to a “primitive” religious view Plato alludes to elsewhere, referring in the Cratylus (400c) to the “Orphic” notion that we are imprisoned in our bodily tomb as a penalty for some ancient sin. Earlier the poet Pindar had spoken in this context not of Otus and Ephialtes (as in the Symposium), but of the Titans— whom Aristophanes surely also had in mind—from whose ashes men arose and from whose fate we derive our “ancient grief.” We should notice, however, that Aristophanes neither accepts nor improves a major contribution to the earlier discussion: he makes no distinction between “better” or “worse” forms of love, an omission that the wise priestess Diotima, according to Socrates, would foresee and correct (205e). We only seek our other half, she insists, if we believe that course to be morally good for us. Diotima thus interprets Aristophanes’ idea about satisfying a need in accordance with the familiar Socratic theme: that we all seek what we perceive to be our own good—and hence, of course, that no one willingly does wrong except inasmuch as he mistakes the good he seeks. Diotima’s eros is already beginning to share features with Socratic boulesis (rational will for the good). For his part, however, Aristophanes shares the “optimistic” view of Phaedrus that love is always good, mentioning, we should note, conventional wrongdoers such as adulterers without evaluative comment (191e). In the valuefree world he portrays (arguably the “proper” stance of the Greek comic poet of his age, varying his moralizing according to the demands of the plot), he evokes happiness but not virtue, nor, like Phaedrus, self-sacrifice. Be that as it may, even the pedantic Eryximachus is impressed by Aristophanes’ performance and protests a certain anxiety—except that this is belied by his knowledge of the skill of Agathon and   79 

Forms and Erotic Passion Socrates—that the rest will be an anti-climax (193e). At this point Plato chooses to emphasize that Socrates, despite his unusual circumstances, is his usual self; hence he tries to lure Agathon into an argument, playing on the young man’s snobbishness: “I wouldn’t do you a wrong by imagining you thinking like a peasant.” From which Agathon is recalled by Phaedrus: If you answer Socrates’ questions, he tells Agathon, he will lose all interest in the matter in hand, preferring to get into a debate, especially with a handsome young man (194d). Yet although Agathon then proceeds to develop a virtuoso eulogy of love that reminds us of the rhetorical displays of Gorgias, we have been warned that the tone and temper of the evening’s entertainment are about to change. Agathon proposes to describe the nature of Eros: he is young, despises the old—with a wink at Socrates—and he is good and beautiful—and he is presented in “beautiful” prose full of all the latest stylistic tricks. Socrates claims to be aghast: the beauty of the words and phrases has astonished him; how can he compete? Indeed he did not even know what a eulogy was; naively he had supposed it must have some connection with the truth—a complete mistake (198e)! Do they want him to tell the truth or not? Of course we do, carry on however you like, says Phaedrus, and this time makes no demur when Socrates wants to ask Agathon a few preliminary questions. We could hardly have a clearer signal that the next speech is to introduce the philosophical summit of the evening’s “erotic” entertainment. Essentially Socrates gets Agathon to recognize the point Aristophanes has already made: eros is the desire to acquire something lacking. The lover is neither good nor beautiful, as Agathon proclaims (nor of course bad and ugly), but he is engaged in a “loving” search for goodness and beauty. And he not merely searches for what is beautiful; he wants to hold on to what is beautiful in the future (200e). Whereupon Agathon is ready to admit that he has suffered the same fate as many of the interlocutors in more extended debates with Socrates: “I don’t know what I was talking about.” He may be a   80 

Forms and Erotic Passion lover and handsome, but he knows the nature neither of love nor of beauty; he can merely display a collection of fulsome conceits in the Gorgianic style. Socrates has already claimed to fear that he will be turned to stone by Agathon’s display of the Gorgias’ (i.e., Gorgon’s) head (198c). Perhaps Plato wanted to recall Gorgias’ party piece In Praise of Helen. In the Meno, we remember, Socrates says that he has heard about the immortality of the soul—and hence that knowledge is recollection—from priests and priestesses. Something similar is now to occur in the Symposium. We are to recognize that new and probably historically un-Socratic material is going to be laid out, at the very least that important advances are to be made in the presentation of Socrates’ alleged ignorance. For Socrates now tells Agathon, thus saving his blushes, that he himself has made similar mistakes about love in the past, but that he has learned better from a priestess of Mantinea, Diotima, already famous for advising the Athenians how at least to delay the onset of plague by offering the appropriate sacrifices. Now she will advise, so we infer, how to avoid plagues of the soul. But here we need some comment on Diotima herself, not least on why Plato has decided, uniquely, to present a woman as the source of important new ideas about love and Beauty. There are few fictional characters in Plato’s writings; in fact in the earlier texts the only possible other is Callicles in the Gorgias, though many have claimed to find him, too, a reconstructed historical figure. Be that as it may, Callicles and Diotima represent extreme philosophical positions, perhaps positions that no one had yet espoused in fully conscious form, but that Plato had come to think of as the logical ends of the road for ethics, whether non-Socratic or Socratic. If that is the case, however, we shall see him revise his view of Callicles, when an even more extreme position is put into the mouth (as also the heart) of another reconstructed historical figure, Thrasymachus, in the Republic. But if Diotima is to present the justification for a developed “Socratic” position, why has Plato chosen an apparently fictitious   81 

Forms and Erotic Passion female figure? Certainty is unattainable, but plausible comments can be advanced: we know that within the Socratic circle there was widespread interest in the possibility of women in public life and in philosophy—an interest that was satirized by Aristophanes and other comedians. We know that in Plato’s Academy—founded not long after the likely date of the Symposium—there were female members, and we may surmise that the name “Diotima of Mantinea” refers obliquely to two of them. We know that in the Republic Plato will advocate female guardians of the State who will be fully trained in philosophy. All this is relevant, but a further important reason for the sex of Plato’s spokeswoman is to be found in the nature of her proposals themselves, as we soon discover. First, however, it will be helpful to eliminate ideological versions of Diotima recently in fashion: that she is not a “real” woman, but that she represents a man’s notion of what women’s interests should or must be in Greek culture. That hardly accounts for the radical nature of her proposals. Or that she is Socrates in drag? That hardly solves the problem, either. If Diotima really talks about women as a man would, why does Plato bother with presenting a female to the homosexually oriented group of the Symposium: unless perhaps she is to represent a reconstructed female voice of the Oracle at Delphi—reconstructed because, unlike the Pythian priestess, she understands the truths she utters? The claim that Diotima is not a “real” woman depends on modern notions about the biological and reproductive concerns of women, emphasized by Diotima herself: that they mask a masculine construction of the feminine gender. But until sexual difference can be wholly reduced to culturally generated role-playing, this too is a hard case to argue. More relevant may be the belief (which is mine) that Plato thinks of the mind as male (or at least not female)—but that hardly settles the matter, either. We have already noticed in the speech of Phaedrus lurking ambiguities in the traditional notions—as well as in his own—about women’s excellence, when he introduces the heroine Alcestis—who will be mentioned again by Diotima (208d).   82 

Forms and Erotic Passion We proceed to a sketch of the powerful novelties in what Diotima actually says. Her speech falls roughly into two sections: the first, from 201d to 209e, concerns the attitudes of the lover and the nature of loving; the second, from 209e to 212e, identifies the proper and ultimate object of love. That is, we are given an account jointly of the soul and the Form of Beauty to which it is attracted. Diotima delivers the first clear explanation of why philosophers must be “erotic” in close association with the most detailed account Plato has yet offered of the nature of that goodness, in the form of beauty, to which all love, and most immediately philosophical love, is directed. Diotima speaks in the Symposium of love as “the desire for good things (that is, that which will benefit us) and for being happy.” This means that a Platonic psychology, where eros represents and replaces the Socratic will to goodness, is linked to metaphysical claims whereby the Forms, already—it seemed—on view in the Cratylus, are presented in their full splendor as explanation of the hidden goodness that Socrates intuited by “divine dispensation” and that Plato in his earlier dialogues had stumbled toward identifying. Thus parallel with Plato’s expansion of a specifically “Platonic” thesis about the proper use of the mind in dialectic, we now find the developing account of a proper use of the emotions—above all of eros, the most powerful emotion to drive us. For, as the Lysis has already indicated, the philosopher is not merely a man who wants to be wise—as Diotima will repeat (203e)—but he who loves the wisdom he seeks. The Lysis had spoken of a “first beloved”; we are now to learn that the ultimate object of love must be Beauty itself. The first section of Diotima’s discourse is in two parts. The first concerns love’s nature, the second the benefits “he” bestows on mankind: a distinction, as we saw, that underlay much of the earlier part of the Symposium. Diotima affirms that eros is neither beautiful nor ugly, just as opinion is neither ignorance nor knowledge. As personified, he is neither man nor god, neither mortal nor immortal, but an intermediate spirit (daimon) linking the two, and his parents are Resource and Poverty; thus does Diotima mythically   83 

Forms and Erotic Passion evoke his conception, on Aphrodite’s birthday. Gods, of course, are not philosophers, not lovers of wisdom in the sense that they desire to acquire it, as they have it already. But a question arises as to the relationship between a god and the wisdom he has acquired, for surely he cannot cease to love it, in the sense of ceasing to value it, and indeed in the Symposium, as we shall see, we humans are said not merely to want beauty, but to want to retain it forever. But such further questions about the gods take us beyond the Symposium and must be deferred. Diotima turns to love’s benefits and rewards (204c). If we are in love with beauty, what good will we gain from acquiring it, from satisfying our need for it? The first answer is that we shall be “happy”—as all men wish; that, however, needs further analysis. Love in general is for anything deemed good and supposed to bring happiness—it may be money, or athletics, or philosophy, but the term is normally referred to sexual attraction. Here follows the allusion to Aristophanes, who is corrected both “morally” and prudentially: love completes one by the acquiring of a missing good that is genuinely good (206a), and not merely for the overcoming of loneliness. And we want not merely to acquire that good, but to enjoy it forever. That good is not merely a state of possession of a good, but an act (ergon 206b). Here we recognize Diotima’s specifically womanly language: the goal of love, she tells us, is “begetting and giving birth in the beautiful” with body and with soul. The claim, in brief, is that the aim of eros is to create “in the beautiful.” What one creates will depend on the kind of love object one pursues. Aristophanes, of course, had paid very limited attention to creativity, and only in its physical form. Before proceeding to that love object, Diotima expands on “begetting,” making clear that she is referring the language of both male and female reproductive functions to the entire human race (pantes anthropoi, 206c). We are all able to be “pregnant” in body and soul; we naturally, and at the appropriate time, want to beget, and such is only possible “in the beautiful.” We are “pregnant” in female terms,   84 

Forms and Erotic Passion all experience labor pains (206c), and we all wish to beget as males. The mixture of terminology (recalling Aristophanes’ notion of our once double existence) means that we have both the male and female capacities within us; this is perhaps more obviously relevant in relation to spiritual creativity. That spiritual creativity (and even its physical—for Diotima inferior—alternative) arises because it is in our mortal nature to seek to be immortal as far as possible. Immortality, however, can be achieved in various ways: by physical reproduction, by the search for eternal fame available to the pregnant soul, as by becoming poets like Homer or statesmen like Lycurgus and the Athenian Solon, whose works are long remembered. All of us in our different ways want to “bring forth and beget” (209b), and it is beauty in some form or other that inspires us to seek so to do. In Diotima’s account there is no sharp distinction between the unitive and reproductive goals of eros, and certainly no emphasis on merely overcoming loneliness. As adults we all pursue immortality in our various ways and seek for the beautiful object “in which” to generate it. If a man pregnant in soul meets a fair and well-endowed adolescent, he will want to take his education in hand, to make him better; he will be inspired to create by the beauty he sees in the other. “So far, perhaps, Socrates, you may be initiated, but the higher revelations are probably beyond you,” says Diotima (210a). What does Plato mean by that? One explanation is that he is giving a hint that he is speaking no longer in the name of the historical Socrates but in his own, and there may be something in that; the identification of some kind of eros as love of the beauty of wisdom and as the mark of the philosopher as such has already come near the surface in the Lysis, and may be a Platonic comment on the life of Socrates rather than any specifically Socratic thesis. Perhaps, however, we can see further if we recognize that what Diotima has revealed up to this point depends on no metaphysical claim—certainly none about the ultimate object of our love and the ultimate beauty by which we might be inspired to “beget” and bring something beautiful to birth in ourselves, though the representation of Socrates in a   85 

Forms and Erotic Passion kind of trance before he reaches the party and the language of the mystery religions in Diotima’s speech are already markers of a new religious intensity absent from most of the earlier Platonic writings, but prominent later in the Phaedrus, which presents philosophic eros as a kind of divine madness. Up to 210a we have the notion of seeking immortality as far as we can, and the immortality of which Diotima speaks is vicarious, through family or fame. The “higher revelations” will point to something very different. Socrates could perhaps have developed the theme that the love of beauty is creativity; inspiration is no new idea in Greek culture, and is present in all the speeches thus far in the Symposium. But we are now to recognize the ultimate external cause and motor of human creativity. If our soul is capable of immortality, what ultimately actualizes our power to create and to become immortal “as far as possible” (207d)? The potential limitation (and its problematic) in those last words should not be forgotten. And we shall also see why the nonreciprocal character of Greek eros is curiously appropriate to the ultimate love object and why the relationship between human lovers is eventually left aside in the Symposium. Plato will return to it in the much later Phaedrus and specify his own reconstruction of love via the (reactive) eros/anteros to which the love of Alcestis has pointed, and in the context of a new psychological theory still unknown to the symposiasts. Given, however, the nonreciprocal relationship with which Plato is concerned in the Symposium, the culmination of Diotima’s speech need cause little surprise. What she offers has come to be called a ladder of love. The philosopher starts with the love of a particular body, then of a particular soul, then of all souls, then of laws and institutions—this is less strange in light of the nonreciprocity we have observed; it is unsurprising that one should be inspired by the beauty of a law or of a mathematical solution—then finally of Beauty itself— that is, the Form. Beauty itself is purely beautiful and can no way appear other than beautiful; it cannot be recognized by the senses and therefore is no further physical object; nor can it be reproduced,   86 

Forms and Erotic Passion like a fine law. But the vision of it (210d) enables us to bring forth the beauties of fine and above all philosophical discourse. In the account of Beauty that follows, Plato offers the first fullscale description of a transcendent, immaterial reality existing eternally “in itself and with itself,” while other “beautiful things” partake of it (211b). Whereas these particulars come to be and pass away, and in any case can in no way be recognized as wholly and unambiguously beautiful, Beauty “becomes neither more nor less and is affected by nothing.” That distinguishes it from any particular, for in itself it is not in any particular, though our immediate road to knowing it is via the particulars in which it is present. There is an immanent beauty in particulars that may remind us or inform us of the “real thing,” but immanent beauty is ontologically different from and inferior to transcendent and unchanging Beauty itself. Beauty itself is no mere quality of an existent particular, but a “being” (and no mere “becoming”) in its own right. Though Plato does not say so specifically, the implication of his argument is clear enough: Beauty would still exist if there were no beautiful particulars, and were this not the case, the “beauty” of particulars would be inexplicable. In order to use the Theory of Forms, Plato may not always have to invoke their independence and separateness; for some purposes an immanent beauty, present so long as there exist particular items, might suffice. The stronger claim is now on the table and, as we shall see, is necessary to justify Plato’s larger metaphysical, moral, and political proposals. As for us, the particulars are steppingstones on the path to that special reflection on the nature of Beauty itself. In comparison with Beauty, all other “beauties” will seem merely mortal and like shadows. We see it through its visible representations, but after seeing it we generate not shadows of virtue, but true virtue. In recognizing this Beauty, the philosopher, if anyone, is properly immortal; that is, he reaches and is characterized by the unchanging and eternal world. Yet we should be careful not to adopt a fully neo-Platonic reading of the Symposium, which is incorrect in an important par  87 

Forms and Erotic Passion ticular: Diotime speaks not of a union or identification of the soul with Beauty, but of an ennobling vision—though her remarks may invite us to develop a neo-Platonic reading. For now, however, we see the Forms, or rather—in particular—the Form of Beauty; we are not “united” with it, but like the gods, we are characterized by it. By seeing it we are made beautiful human beings, as the gods are made beautiful gods. In the language to follow in the Phaedo, we are most like the Form. But the “gap” between Forms and souls is maintained: a thesis that may require correction. In the Symposium the soul (or god) is no Form, the Form no soul. Later on, as in the Sophist, Plato will wish to reformulate that disjunction. Socrates had said in the Apology that the unexamined life is not worth living; now Diotima tells him that a life contemplating Beauty is indeed worth living (211d), but in the Symposium itself Plato does not allow him much time to ponder that, for a riotous Alcibiades is at the door, and while refusing to join directly in the general debate, insists on talking instead about Socrates himself: his unshakeable self-control, his physical ugliness, which conceals the beauty within, indeed his existence as the very model of a philosopher, of a devotee of philosophical eros who is not to be distracted by its physical alternative. Alcibiades is in love with Socrates, and Socrates has tried and failed to convert him to a love of philosophy. Alcibiades for his part has tried to seduce Socrates into loving him physically, to barter sex for wisdom, but Socrates, as “transcendent” object of love, has not reciprocated when tempted. In the Gorgias, Socrates is the only true statesman; now he is the only true philosopher and master of distracting desires. We are pointed toward the Republic, where after Socrates’ death Plato sets out to display an educational program that will ensure that his kind of philosopher-statesmen will flourish where other philosophers and statesmen have failed. In the final pages of the Symposium we find only two of the participants still present and sober enough to carry on talking to Socrates, though the wine has almost finished them off, too. Tirelessly, and holding his liquor, Socrates is trying to per  88 

Forms and Erotic Passion suade Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comic playwright that the same person ought to be able to write both tragedy and comedy: that, we may surmise, is because both genres depend on exploiting humanity’s failure at Delphic self-knowledge, not least in handling pleasure and pain One Form, the most specific and immediate object of eros, has been introduced in its full splendor in the Symposium. But it has left a host of problems behind it. What effect does it have on the soul of the lover, and how is that effect to be explained? In what sense could other beauties “partake” in Beauty Itself, and what do we mean when we call a particular thing beautiful? When Diotima makes clear that the Form of Beauty must somehow itself be beautiful—otherwise it could not inspire us—what does this tell us about the “self-predicational” character of other Forms? If Beauty itself is beautiful, is the Form of a shuttle some kind of shuttle after all? And in any case how many other Forms are there? Beauty may seem obviously immaterial, but how is it possible for Shuttle to be immaterial, though it too is recognized only by the mind? And if our rational will to the good is seen to be eros, what does this suggest about that weakness of will that Socrates had seemed to deny? For, as Diotima notes, there are many kinds of love. In short, is the psychology of the Symposium adequate for the philosophical burden Plato wants to put upon it? Before examining Plato’s supreme attempt to pull all the threads together in the Republic, we must look at how Socrates fares, and how Forms and souls fare, in that partner dialogue of the Symposium where Plato shows Socrates confronting the second enemy of the good life: namely pain and death. That dialogue is the Phaedo.

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 5  Ethics, Psychology, and Metaphysics in the Phaedo

The Phaedo is the story of Socrates’ death in prison, as recounted to two of his Megarian admirers, Eucleides and Terpsion, by Phaedo of Elis, who had been present at the end along with many other of Socrates’ closest associates—but not Plato, who was ill (59b). Its basic theme is that philosophy is practice for death (64a ff.; 67e). In so presenting Socrates’ last conversations and immortalizing his memory, Plato aims to show that the “genuine philosopher,” so far from being sad or afraid at the moment of death, welcomes it as a release from what has ultimately impeded the full realization of his search for truth and happiness. Already in the Gorgias and more recently in the Cratylus (400c) we read of the body as the tomb of the soul (soma-sema)—and in the Phaedo the man who fears to die is no true philosopher, but a “body-lover” (68c). Suicide is against the divine decree, forbidden as a soldier on guard is forbidden to abandon his post, but at God’s word we should be content to leave this present life, for death is nothing more than the separation and release of the soul from the body (67d). That leaves Socrates with the task of explaining how the soul, when separated, actually survives the body—which he tries to do as the dialogue proceeds. It also leaves   90 

The Phaedo him with other problems, but since these are not treated directly in the Phaedo, they are only to be noted here. If we leave aside the question of the soul’s precise relationship with the body and what we might think of as the unity of the “person,” the most important of these problems arises from the fact that, according to Socrates, the body fills us with loves and desires and fears and fantasies and all kinds of nonsense; hence arise wars and battles and civil strife, all aimed at getting wealth to satisfy the body and its demands for pleasure (66c). But the problem then is: Why does the soul cave in to the body so easily? Or is it not a matter of caving in, but merely of being inevitably obstructed? And what does all this tell us about the nature of the soul itself? Are the soul’s difficulties an inherent weakness, or does Plato see them solely as arising from contamination and the need for “purification”? The latter may seem the more reasonable explanation, for if the soul is removed from bodily contact it would seem to be safe. And the likening of the soul to a sea god covered with barnacles and other sea-wrack (which appears in Book 10 of the later Republic) may seem an echo of this way of thinking. But again, why is the soul so easily contaminated? If such are among the questions Plato is pondering, the soul and body must be only extrinsically connected, and “we” must ultimately be identified with our souls, which Plato never claims specifically in any of his certainly authentic writings, though it is proposed directly in what I believe to be the spurious dialogue Alcibiades 1 (129a–130e). Yet if the Alcibiades (a favorite neo-Platonic text and taught as the best introduction to Platonic thinking in the schools) is spurious, its author may be pardoned for attributing expressly to Plato a doctrine that he seems to accept in the Phaedo. In any case, after the Phaedo Plato’s account of the soul itself changes, though the full implications of that change for what he holds to be the real “I” are only finally clarified in the Timaeus. The difficulty about what “I” am is highlighted by the account Plato gives of being born. In the first of Socrates’ arguments for im  91 

The Phaedo mortality—the so-called argument from opposites—the soul is indeed said to be born, that is, to come into the body, to be made “incarnate”—which (following the Meno) begs the question in favor of its preexistence, since it is taken as axiomatic that all, not just some, opposites derive from their opposites and thus being alive must derive—as an “ancient tale” has it—from being dead: that is, from existing in another place (70c). On the other hand, of course, one might object that “we” are born—or better, conceived—when the body comes into existence. Plato seems simply to assume that “being born” is a way of describing the soul’s being attached to the body, so has he ducked the direct question of the difference, if any, between “us” and our souls? That was to worry Plotinus. Be that as it may, the problem of explaining the soul’s apparent weakness is hardly tackled directly in the Phaedo. We might expect and hope that at some later stage more will be said about why it is so susceptible to “corruption” by the body. And there will indeed be more—however to be interpreted—in the Republic and the Phaedrus. For now, however, we should merely note that the soul risks becoming the slave of the body (66c). But what kind of acts will it then perform?—the acts of a mere instrument. But surely the immortal soul cannot be the mere instrument of anything mortal. Leaving the future aside, let us return to Plato’s immediate concerns in the Phaedo. Since Socrates claims that a future life—for the good—will offer more scope for true philosophy than the life we live now, we shall expect to hear more about the soul’s immortality, and that “more”—especially in one of the arguments proposed—brings the soul closer to the other set of “immortal” beings who have already turned up in the Cratylus and reach to the very heart of Plato’s thinking in the Symposium. That other set is the “separate” Forms, and Plato will spend long years trying to determine the exact relationship between souls and Forms—whether the souls in question be human or divine. That difficulty is necessarily linked to another that has already entered our story. Eventually we shall need to know not only what Forms there are, but whether Plato recognized (or   92 

The Phaedo should have recognized) that there are different kinds of Forms: of moral qualities, of the qualities of physical (and mathematical) objects, and of physical entities themselves, like shuttles. We return then to the text of the Phaedo, specifically to the arguments for the soul’s immortality. As a preliminary to the first of these arguments, Socrates gets involved in a conversation with Simmias about the philosophical practice for death. That enables him to expatiate on the different activities of souls and bodies respectively, apparently assuming, as we have seen, that they are separate “substances”; that in turn enables him to offer further thoughts about Forms. When the soul is largely free of bodily interference, it is best able to reach out to “what is” (65c), says Socrates, and he immediately introduces the Forms of Justice, Beauty, and Goodness. These are the examples of “what is” that first occur to him, but he then proceeds further, speaking of size, health, strength, and indeed the “reality” (ousia) of everything. But we should recognize that, though this passage is normally taken to refer to full-blown Platonic Forms, it could be understood, in the manner of the Euthyphro, without reference to a “separate” ontological commitment— although that is extremely unlikely. Yet the mere ambiguity of the passage suggests that Plato has not entirely grasped the implications and difficulties of the special ontological status he has now assigned to the Forms. So far in the Phaedo goodness and the rest can only be contemplated by the mind, but are recognized in and through the sensed particulars. Their status would remain ambiguous if we could merely “remember” them rather than “see” them through the objects of our senses. But uncertainty does not remain for long. When we are dead, says Socrates, and the soul is freed of all bodily encumbrances, we shall acquire knowledge of them (66de). This, in a world without sense perception, must mean that the Forms can be seen as existents without any preliminary contact with their material instantiations. Socrates is now free to finish his discussion of why suicide should be rejected and to argue that most “bourgeois” virtue is pur  93 

The Phaedo sued through some sort of “calculus” of pleasures and pains—this we have already met in the “hedonistic” passage of the Protagoras— without serious opposition from Simmias. Eventually Cebes brings him back to the main point. Most people think, he points out (70a), that when the soul leaves the body it perishes—that is, that death is not merely the separation of body and soul, but that that separation entails the destruction of the two substances separated, and that then the soul “does not exist anywhere.” Cebes can see Socrates’ reason for optimism if the fate of the soul were as he believes, but good arguments are needed to show not only that the soul exists after death (as it does as a shade in the Homeric poems), but that it lives an intelligent life. Such arguments must show that the soul exists “of itself ”—language characteristic also of the intelligible Forms. Socrates proceeds to the arguments, of which the first—the socalled argument from opposites—is, as we have seen, extremely weak. Nevertheless it generates the conclusion “on its premises,” as Cebes says (72a), that after death our souls exist “somewhere” (72a) or “in Hades” (71e): note again the assumed spatial location. But then Cebes remembers the Meno (where we also knew things “in Hades”) and what Socrates is always saying: if our learning is really recollection, then our souls must have existed before coming into our present bodies (72e). So this second argument is much less questionable than its predecessor. Now there are no general appeals to the way “everything comes into existence”; instead we are to consider the particular phenomenon of our capacity to learn, and a theory generated to explain it—which it does if and only if our souls existed before our present bodies. Socrates now goes beyond the Meno, though in doing so retains the Meno’s mathematical orientation in its account of learning. Does equality exist? “I do not mean equal sticks and stones but something ‘beyond’ all such things, the equal itself.” That looks like the Form of equality, a puzzling case, because Socrates mentions not only “the equal itself ” but “the equals themselves” as well as   94 

The Phaedo “equality.” And these items (whether identical or disparate), which we grasp and of which we have knowledge (74c), are separate from the “equal” sticks and stones we recognize with reference to them. However the details of all this are to be explained, Socrates is claiming that “equality” is that by which we judge the comparative or apparent or enduring equality of various sticks and stones. The fact that a particular is not enduringly as it is described from time to time is later to be further expounded in a “Heraclitean” passage of the Republic (479ab): particulars no more are than are not invariably what we call them. According to Socrates, we must have possessed an ability to recognize sticks and stones as equal before we saw material sticks and stones. That suggests both that the soul is immaterial and existed in a previous life and that the objects of its knowledge—assuredly not simply the concepts that it forms—are available to it in that previous life. So whatever the Meno has taught us about our previous objects of knowledge, we now know that what we knew before being born are the Forms, however these are to be explained. We knew the Forms not only of Equality, but of Beauty, Goodness, Justice, and Piety, which dialecticians would speak of as existing in themselves (75cd). Here, then, are moral and mathematical forms, as the Meno might have led us to expect, and though there is as yet no mention of the likes of shuttles, they would certainly be included in the wider list, including a variety of “substances,” offered a little later (78de). Simmias is convinced that Forms exist and that we start to recover knowledge of them through the senses. It is important to notice that Socrates wants to tie Forms and immortal souls together. If there are Forms—which Simmias accepts—then “before taking on human form” (76c) souls had knowledge of them. It is clear too that the Forms to which Simmias refers are eternal, immaterial entities existing prior to the physical world we recognize through our senses. Hence Socrates is also able to claim that our souls existed before we were born and that they had intelligence: this is no mere shadowy Homeric persistence. So at this point Simmias makes the   95 

The Phaedo by now familiar acknowledgment that previously he did not know what he was talking about (76d). For if explanatory Forms exist, the soul precedes incarnation; if not, not. Socrates has hung the preexistence of the soul not merely on the fact that Forms exist, but on his theory that knowledge is recollection. Neither Simmias nor Cebes is as yet fully satisfied. The argument “from opposites,” though mentioned again by Socrates (77c), can be forgotten, for they now want Socrates to give further evidence, not merely that the soul existed before its incarnation, but that it will continue to exist even after it is separated from the body at death. To answer that difficulty, the Forms (though now not recollection) are again invoked. For Equality, Beauty, and all similar substances (ousia, 78d) admit of no change. Equality is always equality, but— note the point now made explicitly—those particulars that have the same names as the Forms (men, horses, cloaks, equals, beauties, for the list now includes Forms of physical objects [78e]) are constantly changing and never remain exactly as they were. Hence we have two kinds of beings, one visible, the other invisible; one changing and the other unchanging. Then, asks Socrates, to which class does the body belong? Clearly to the visible and changing. And the soul (our other part)? It is invisible, at least to human beings. And insofar as the soul has knowledge outside the body it resides in the world of the pure, ever-existing, deathless, and changeless (79d); the language recalls that of the Symposium. Hence the soul in its pure state is like the unchanging Form, while the body is not. Provided there are Forms, Socrates concludes, it is to that pure unchanging world that his soul, God willing, will soon return, there joining the gods. As for non-philosophical souls, Plato indulges his taste for a mixture of the serious, the mythological, and the comic. If in life a soul has come to believe that everything is corporeal (81b), it will itself become corporealized and flit around tombs, eventually to be reincarnated into the body of whatever animal represents the vices to which it has become accustomed. Those who have pursued bourgeois or conventional virtue, without philosophy, will take on the   96 

The Phaedo bodies of social insects like bees, wasps, or ants (82b), while those who philosophize are purified and freed from the lusts of the body, thus no longer subject to reincarnation. In this satirical attack on conventional virtue, there is a serious point. In the language of the Meno, the conventionally virtuous who live in secure societies may indeed have true opinion, but not knowledge. The practical weakness of true opinion is that it is not stable because it cannot justify itself. When times are hard, either politically under a tyrannical régime or socially under pressure from current trends and fashions (as Plato believed was the fate of young men in Athens who had been exposed to “Sophists”), true opinion will easily give way to false. We have now reached the core of the Phaedo. Thus far Simmias and Cebes appear to have been won over to Socrates’ position, but this is far from the case (85d), and now they propose major objections. Simmias thinks that the soul might be an epiphenomenon—in his language a “mixture” or “harmony” (86b)—of various bodily qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry). When these qualities are well arranged, the arrangement is called the soul. Hence as soon as the arrangement is shattered at death, the soul is destroyed; far from lasting longer than the body, it disappears long before the material components of the body disintegrate. As for Cebes, his disappointment with the agreements reached thus far is direct: he accepts that the soul exists before the body, but not that it is immortal. Why should it not perish eventually, even if it survives several bodies? Perhaps like the weaver whose last cloak outlasts him (87a ff.). If so, there would be no reason to feel confidence at a death that may be the soul’s “last hurrah.” We cannot be sure that it will continue to exist “somewhere” (88a). When Cebes has concluded, Plato goes out of his way to indicate the seriousness of the challenges. Everyone present, he notes, felt extremely uncomfortable. Perhaps they have shown themselves to have poor judgment in going along with Socrates too easily; or perhaps certainty is unattainable. But Socrates is not impressed, and proceeds with his response, prefacing it, however, with a warn  97 

The Phaedo ing against a group of people he has already identified in the Meno and the Euthydemus: those “haters of argument” (89d) whose philosophical confidence has been eroded by constantly finding themselves, for lack of skill, deluded into accepting an argument too easily. Eventually these may become “anti-logicians” or skeptics, believing themselves clever because they have concluded that no argument is sound. That danger must be resisted; we must simply learn to think more precisely. But for Socrates himself there is a second danger. Because he is facing imminent execution, he will want to weight the arguments for immortality in his own favor. Socrates proceeds to answer Simmias and Cebes, getting them to admit that they do not hold all the arguments set out up to this point to be inadequate. Both are willing to accept that knowledge is recollection of what the soul knew before it was imprisoned in the body (91e); that disposes of Simmias, for how could the soul be a harmony of bodily qualities if it existed before being in a body? Simmias has to admit that if he has to choose, as he does, between believing the soul to be a harmony and the theory that knowledge is recollection, he would unhesitatingly choose the latter (92d); the harmony theory, though attractive, has not been demonstrated. And Socrates has a further point: if the soul is a harmony, it cannot admit of moral qualities, nor can one soul differ morally from another or from its earlier or later self. Socrates now turns to Cebes (95a), apparently admitting that his objection is more serious, and demands a broader investigation of the causes of generation and destruction (95e). Here, indeed, is a problem that Plato is going to treat again—though differently— at the end of the Republic: What, if anything, can destroy the soul? Before he can approach the argument itself, however, Socrates feels he should recount something of his own intellectual biography. (I prescind from the question of in what sense or degree this will be a biography of the historical Socrates, of the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, of Plato himself, or of some combination of all of these.) To begin with, however, he reminds us of what has been demonstrated   98 

The Phaedo earlier in the Phaedo, in the argument about the likeness between souls and Forms, namely that materialist (or better vitalist) explanations of nature are at least incomplete. There must exist some kind of immaterial and incorporeal substance. But what kind? After finding earlier explanations of the nature of physical change puzzling, Socrates tells us that he heard a man reading from the book of Anaxagoras that mind arranges and causes all things. He inferred from that—presumably in light of his own deeply held belief that we (as minds) wish for the best and strive to achieve it, that being the nature of a mind—that Anaxagoras’ Mind arranges as is best for the things themselves (97c). It was his hope, Socrates says, that Anaxagoras would explain whether the earth is flat or round and whether it is at the center of the universe, and how these things came about and why it is best for things to be as they are. In other words, he was looking for a final cause as well as the efficient cause that Mind seemed to represent. But he was disappointed as he read on (98b), for although Anaxagoras had started with Mind he soon came to rely on the old material causes: air, ether, water. That, Socrates says, is rather like explaining his presence in the prison not as a result of his condemnation by the Athenians and his own decision not to escape, but by considerations about his bones and his sinews: to offer, that is, not an explanation that would invoke the planning and deciding capacities of a mind, but merely material causes, which the example of Socrates’ own behavior shows to be absurd. To produce an account of the necessary material condition of actions is not to account for the actions themselves. For that we need a providential assumption: we need to invoke “the good which must bind all things together” (99c). “But that defeated me,” says Socrates, so “I embarked on a slower but surer approach.” That new approach is to look not at “things themselves”—that is, to follow Anaxagoras and his fellow “physicists” in offering apparently scientific explanations of the world in which we live, but to seek understanding more indirectly by proposing propositions (logoi) that, if on inspection seeming coherent, will at least provi  99 

The Phaedo sionally increase our understanding. We are to select what looks the best explanatory hypothesis in the circumstances (as in the Meno), take all that is consistent with that hypothesis as true, and see where it leads us. The hypothesis this time is to be the existence of Forms (Beauty, Goodness, Greatness). Given that hypothesis, says Socrates (and not, this time, the theory of knowledge as recollection), I can prove that the soul is immortal. By this he means that if you grant that there are immaterial beings I can show the immateriality, and therefore imperishability, of the soul. Socrates has said that he is appealing to a well-known theory, but Cebes needs further information. Socrates tells him that the Forms are the causes that “make” particulars what they are (100d), either by their “presence or by some kind of communion.” At first glance this does not seem to give us much information about the Forms themselves: it is obvious that in some sense unless there is beauty in a beautiful object it would not be beautiful; we have known that since the Euthyphro. But when Socrates says he prefers to say that one man is greater than another by greatness rather than that he is greater by a head, he is coming up against the necessary separation of material from immaterial explanations. The only way something can come into existence is by “participating” in the particular “substance” (ousia) of that which it is to be. So “two” exists “by participating in duality.” The language of participation has not appeared in the Euthyphro, where, as we saw, we have the “substance” of holiness by which what is holy is holy, but in the Phaedo (in line with Symposium 211b) we have what looks like a more technical language being deployed to link what are now clearly two separate, though related worlds, the world of sensed particulars and the world of Forms. Whether the problems of participation have been resolved or merely re-described will remain to be seen; however, Socrates is not immediately concerned with that. Rather he proceeds to explain his methodology. We have posited a hypothesis, namely the existence of separate Forms. In such cases the first stage of an inquiry must be to outline the consequences if the posited hypothesis is accepted   100 

The Phaedo as true. Thus, if there are Forms, what must follow? (We shall see this method being further developed in the Republic.) That being duly set out, however, it will then become necessary to look at the hypothesis itself; if that is challenged, a more basic (“higher”) hypothesis must be proposed in support of it, and so on until we come to “something adequate.” It remains uncertain whether “adequacy” here is to be assessed ad hominem—that is, that the final hypothesis satisfies the challenger, or whether it is to be ultimate—that is, logically beyond further challenge, as it is to be in the Republic. For the present, Socrates is content to observe that what is important is not to confuse debate about the consequences of a hypothesis with debate about its adequacy (as the “anti-logicians” do [101e]). Given a hypothesis, one must go wherever the argument takes us, until such contradictions appear as reveal the hypothesis unsafe and unsupportable. What Socrates wants to emphasize is that a Form can never be imperfectly itself or perceived as such: greatness (of size) can never be both great and small; hence even when talking about “the greatness in us”—that is, that we are great—we can never explain such “greatness” with reference to what is small. And Simmias is not greater than Socrates (who is smaller) in virtue of being Simmias, but with reference to greatness. Plato now makes an interesting back-reference to the argument from opposites; he apparently again wishes to separate what was said then from the later discussion. For one of the speakers—his name is forgotten, which perhaps indicates Plato’s authorial voice—observes that in the earlier argument it was agreed that the greater comes from the less, and vice versa. In reply to that Socrates now offers a distinction: then they were talking about concrete objects (pragma [103b]), whereas now it is a matter of “opposites” as such, whether “in ourselves” (i.e., in particulars) or “in nature” (that is, in what is going to be known as the intelligible world [103b]). That much established, Socrates can proceed with his final argument for the immortality of the soul. His first move is to distinguish   101 

The Phaedo between fire and its heat and snow and its coldness: a distinction between substances and essential qualities. Snow “admits” cold but will not “admit” its opposite hot. Similarly fire is always hot and never “admits” cold, while three is an odd number and will never “admit” being even. Then Socrates returns to the life of the body and secures agreement that it is the soul that brings life to the body (105c). Death, however, is the opposite of life, and so the soul, which “admits” life, will never “admit” death; it is necessarily deathless. And if deathless, indestructible. The argumentation here may not be strong: Does it merely prove that souls do not “die” (for death has already been defined as a separation of the soul from the body), rather than that they are indestructible? Be that as it may, a curious and perhaps significant addition has been thrown into the pot. Everyone would agree, says Socrates, that both God—or the god— and the Form of life can never perish (106d). This may look like another example to be compared with snow/cold and fire/heat: namely that godness could not admit the Form of death. But it raises the general question as to the relationship between gods and Forms, for it is not the case, at least at this stage in Plato’s intellectual career, that the Forms (or some of them) are merely essential qualities of God or the gods. On the contrary, even in the later Phaedrus, “it is by knowledge of the Forms that the gods are divine”; in other words, the gods partake of the Forms, which are ontologically prior to them. Perhaps this is just another version of the problem about the relationship between an object and its essential qualities, but if so, Plato seems unclear about what that relationship is. We shall return to it in a later chapter. Whatever the weight of the arguments for immortality in the Phaedo—and I have noted that an important feature of them is that Plato constantly wishes to reaffirm different versions of the claim that there exist immaterial substances—Socrates secures assent to them, and with his myth of the afterlife and finally with his execution the dialogue closes. It is impossible to miss the parallel with the end of the Symposium: there Socrates is able to control the   102 

The Phaedo pleasures of the drinking party (thus securing the near-worship of the hedonist, i.e., Alcibiades) and still engage and triumph in arguments with the poets at its close. Now in the Phaedo, but still in the spirit of the earliest dialogues, Socrates is shown to be the man who knows what he is talking about. His character in facing death bears witness to the theories about immortality he propounds: he has succeeded in the test both of his character and of his philosophical propositions. He is master of pain and death as he was earlier master of pleasure. And just as Plato uses the dramatic irony technique in the Symposium, where the audience knows the fate of the characters on stage, though these do not yet know it themselves, so in the Phaedo we recognize another piece of the art of the tragedians. Death by hemlock poisoning is not the calm affair that Plato presents in the dialogue. There is only the slightest allusion to its more unpleasant features: the nausea, vomiting, loss of control of one’s organs, and the rest, which modern medical students know as well as did the ancient Athenians who imposed this unpleasant and humiliating form of execution. But Plato wants to present not the chaos of the dying body, but the serenity of Socrates’ immortal soul, the substance that, whatever its relationship to “us,” is capable of living with the gods in harmony with at least the moral Forms. And Socrates’ last words are religious. He has neglected an obligation: he tells Crito that he must sacrifice a cock owed to Asclepius, god of the good health that he will soon attain. Unlike the ill and absent Plato, Socrates is well. What should we say, however, of the myth of the afterlife that Socrates has related in great detail as his last prophetic offering before his death? Indeed, what are we to make of Plato’s eschatological myths in general? Socrates has already recounted such a myth in the Gorgias to explain in graphic and almost populist terms his conviction that after death the just will be rewarded and the unjust punished. Souls have had to present themselves naked at judgment day: that is, without any ostentatious trappings that might indicate worldly successes while concealing evil natures. Such myths are in a   103 

The Phaedo sense neither true nor false, as is often the case, in Plato’s view, with literary and more broadly cultural material. They are “false” in that the details of the myths are culturally conditioned and cannot be proven: a “myth” is no piece of philosophical argument. They are “true,” on the other hand, in that they give an indication of what is philosophically plausible, and which Socrates certainly believes to be the case; that is, they are popular representations of such “facts” as the immortality of the soul and the justice of divine dispensation, pour encourager les autres. Plato is probably more or less unconcerned about how literally they are read. Like depictions of the Last Judgment, of heaven and of hell, in medieval churches, they can be taken as literally as their readers may be inclined. Reflection on them may even incite the still unsophisticated to pursue the ideas they evoke more philosophically. In that sense they function as examples of the “good” rhetoric that Plato was later to profess in the Phaedrus. But myths aside, how much more do we know about the Forms after reading this dialogue? Indeed, rather little; the Phaedo fills out much of what Plato has already said about Forms rather than adding new material. There can now be no doubt that Forms are separate and “transcendent,” but no advance has been made on the question of how many Forms there are, nor on the matter of “selfpredication,” nor on how particulars partake in them—though as we have seen, a certain development of more “technical” terms may indicate a growing awareness of the vastness of the problems that must be confronted. At the very least, however, we have learned that the existence of a whole panoply of “moral” Forms enables us better to understand the nature of virtuous behavior, not least that of Socrates himself. To establish that—over and above immortalizing Socrates (again, and supremely) as the hero of the philosophical life—is Plato’s main philosophical project in the Phaedo. To see how after the Phaedo Plato tried to give more universal application to what he had now discovered about the basis for philosophical heroism, we must turn to what should be recognized   104 

The Phaedo as the highest point of his philosophical career thus far: a culmination that at the same time sets the stage for his later work. So we move to the Republic, where the achievements of the Symposium, the Phaedo, and indeed the now-distant Gorgias are to be synthesized, surpassed, and (it might seem) completed in the most ambitious attempt in Western philosophy to establish morality on firm metaphysical foundations. As Plato proceeds, however, we shall notice a different mood music from the Phaedo. That dialogue of pain and heroism, with its display of the practice for death, is Plato’s most “ascetic” work, and its extended other-worldliness is to be repeated only briefly and nostalgically in the Theaetetus’ admonition that we must flee from the present corrupt political scene (176b): a text much loved by the neo-Platonists. The Phaedo tells of two substances, and the time when the soul, with God’s permission, will be freed from the body. The Republic, as we shall see, has much more to say about what the philosopher-king must do, and why he must do it, in the here and now. The Republic has more about returning to the “Cave” and less—though not nothing—about the afterlife of the undoubtedly immortal soul. In the Republic some of the weaknesses of the Phaedo’s philosophical psychology, as of the relationship between the soul and the body, will be corrected and a more coherent view of our human situation advanced. While in the Phaedo Socrates’ last day seems to overwhelm Plato with thoughts of immortality, in the Republic he is far more concerned with the implications of that immortality for man in society. Perhaps the latter is a truer representation of the mind of Socrates himself.

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 6  The Republic The Finished Theory of Forms?

The Republic is Plato’s most ambitious and elaborate composition. While accomplishing considerable further steps in metaphysics, ethics, psychology, and aesthetics, it is also a Summa of insights gained in previous dialogues. It represents a sustained attempt to defend the possibility of morality by giving it as full a metaphysical underpinning as Plato can yet provide—for, as we shall see, that metaphysic will undergo modification and correction in later dialogues. In its present form—I shall look briefly at the view that the first book was originally a separate work—the Republic is an example of ring composition. Book one—set in the Piraeus, where the old arms manufacturer Cephalus is trying to put his life in order before his death—introduces the controlling theme of the Republic: the nature of justice, whether in the individual or in the state—and via the views of Thrasymachus presents a powerful account of the nihilism that Plato believes is the basic threat to morality and ethical politics (and the logical last stage of all “non-Socratic” accounts of morality) and that, he will argue, can only be escaped by resort to a substantive and objective metaphysics of morals. Books two to four offer an account of growth in the virtues from childhood on and of the appropriate psychological conditioning with which the full-fledged philosopher-statesman, adumbrated in earlier dia  106 

The Republic logues, must be equipped if he is to succeed in his eventually more mature search for practical and theoretical wisdom. With books five to seven we reach the core of the work: the metaphysics on which morality and rational politics must ultimately depend. With books eight and nine we watch a process opposite to that of books two to four: the slow decline, that is, of both society and the individual, from the philosopher king in charge of an ideal society to the tyrant struggling to maintain a despotism of his personal will. At that point we are finally positioned to give the only serious philosophical reply to Thrasymachean nihilism. Finally, with book ten, we first revisit a number of difficulties in the earlier books that could not then be tackled directly because books five to seven, treating of the theory of Forms, had not yet been proposed, before concluding with a response to Cephalus’ concern with his personal fate after death: a further “myth” of the afterlife and the general destiny and possible “salvation” of the human soul, whereby the antiThrasymachean can be seen not only to be “happier” in this present life, but also in the hereafter. Many scholars believe that the first book of the Republic was originally a separate “dialogue of definition.” As the Laches sets out to identify courage, so the first book of the Republic sets out to identify justice. That thesis cannot be refuted, but there is no reason to believe it true. The treatment of justice superficially resembles what we find in a number of the smaller, earlier Platonic dialogues, but a careful look at the present text reveals many important differences. All that may reasonably be said is that if there was an earlier version of the first book (perhaps entitled The Thrasymachus) we cannot know what it contained, and it is unlikely that it looked very similar to book one as we now have it. Our present text, as we shall see, is ideally suited to introduce the Republic as a whole, and both the character and the ideas of Thrasymachus represent, better than anything we have previously found in a Platonic dialogue, the kind of threat Plato saw hanging over objective morality and to which he offers his own answers in the course of the Republic itself. I shall   107 

The Republic therefore not linger over any possible earlier version of the first book of the Republic; rather I treat it as an essential and integral part of the Republic as a whole. That stated, the methodology employed by Plato through his character Socrates is different in book one from that of the rest of the Republic. Book one resembles the earlier dialogues in that first Cephalus, then Polemarchus, then Thrasymachus are subjected to Socratic questioning: the manner of it must remind us of the triple movement of the Gorgias. Callicles, as he “ought” to have presented himself if he were to win the argument, appears as Thrasymachus. In the remaining books, after Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus attempt to “restate” the position of Thrasymachus in what they see as more challenging versions—though what they offer is a less comprehensive challenge at the theoretical level than Thrasymachus himself has proposed—Socrates embarks on a long exposition of growing complexity on the ideal individual and the ideal society. Only a pretense of dialogue form is maintained; there is no real debate, only demands by his interlocutors that Socrates advance his proposals in a more specific manner. What happens, then, in brief, is that Socrates draws a portrait of his ideal society and ideal individual and asks whether such a person would be happier— given the correctness of our psychological understanding—than a Thrasymachean tyrant. To the man who continues to prefer to live à la Thrasymachus, Socrates has nothing further to say, having, as he claims, shown such a choice irrational, psychologically perverse, and metaphysically indefensible. One might still choose it, but in effect we are invited to agree that “we would not buy a second-hand car” from a person who did! Returning to book one, we find that Cephalus, trying to set all right before he dies, not least his obligations to the gods, is let off lightly—as Plato would hold appropriate to his age. His heir, Polemarchus, takes over the argument comfortably enough, but soon has to admit that he does not know what he is talking about (334b). He makes a number of rather elementary errors and offers   108 

The Republic traditional sounding formulae (“It is just to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies”) without thinking them through: he typically confuses “harming” with “punishing.” But his most interesting mistake sends us back to the early dialogues and the ongoing debate about the notion of skills, not least about what might be seen as moral skills: “In warfare the man who is good at guarding camps is also good at deception. He can steal the enemy’s plans.” Here it turns out, disconcertingly, that the just man is a kind of thief. This argument is of special interest because it draws attention to the fact that, in traditional Greek, “being good at” something may indicate merely an admirable skill, without any moral connotations. Autolycus in Homer is a good thief. The ambiguities of Polemarchus’ position are perhaps clarified if we consider a parallel case. The good doctor could be a good torturer: that is, he might use his skill without reference to the good to which, by definition, it is directed. It is a skill looked at in itself, without reference to its “final cause”—which shows that skills may or may not be morally deployed. In the Gorgias a similar problem arose about rhetoric, and there Socrates, as we saw, will not allow rhetoric, if deployed without reference to a human good and to justice, to be called a “skill” at all. A skill without morality is a mere “knack.” As we proceed to the argument with Thrasymachus, we see how Socrates is clear, where his opponent is not, that “skills” are to be applied to the good of that with which they are concerned. Hence the skill of the shepherd (and of the ruler as shepherd) is exercised for the good of the sheep, while its perverse “shadow” is exercised otherwise, i.e. for the (mistaken) “good” of the master. The discussion of skills thus serves to introduce us to a wider theme. In earlier dialogues Socrates seems to speak both of the good for us and the good in itself, and there are certainly passages that suggest that we should simply look out for what is good for us. I might argue, however, that there is a conflict between what is good for us and what is good intrinsically. And I do not need to be a moral nihilist to argue further that, even if there is an intrinsic good, we may rational  109 

The Republic ly put our own good first. It is Plato’s aim, however, to show that what is really good for us is intrinsically good, and that we should pursue what is intrinsically good—that is, as will turn out, the Forms—in the knowledge that Goodness is good for us, even though we should not pursue it solely to benefit ourselves. Happiness, like pleasure, is to be sought not directly, but as an effect of a successful aim to live rightly. Nor can it be attained in any other way. Before allowing Thrasymachus to take the stage he so much covets, we should notice that the setting of the Republic—and especially the character of Polemarchus—shows Plato again playing a familiar and sinister game in tragic style. The dramatic date of the Republic is probably 423, but the work itself was written some forty to fifty years later, by which time we know that Plato’s uncles, those heroes of the Charmides, had murdered Polemarchus and appropriated his inheritance. The debate about justice—even whether it at all exists—can be seen here in “real” terms; it matters who is right about it. The later interlocutors of Socrates, Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, are themselves drawn to evil, at least to the degree that they are puzzled as to how the immoralist can be defeated, even though they would like him to be. Before looking at the discussion between Socrates and Thrasymachus in some detail, I should defuse a familiar objection to the interpretation I offer. I shall argue that the Republic seeks to present a metaphysical basis for serious moral inquiry and that without that metaphysic of morals, Thrasymachus—or at least a revised Thrasymachus—cannot be defeated. The objection can be made that the argument between Socrates and Thrasymachus is simply between two eudaimonists who disagree about what makes the “best” people happy. But, as I want to argue, although there is a sense in which both antagonists are eudaimonists, Plato believes that the dispute between them cannot be settled by a straightforward debate about how we are to be happy, because Thrasymachus, in his ignorance, does not know what it takes psychologically to be happy, nor does he know the realities of the moral universe that alone make a resolution   110 

The Republic of the debate possible. In brief—and not unrelated to the discussion of moral and amoral skills—Thrasymachus does not understand that there has to be a specifically moral sense of the word “good” that cannot be simply discounted in the pursuit of happiness. Thrasymachus is presented from the outset as the most unpleasant character in the dialogues: rude, blustering, opinionated, and at times crudely offensive, as when he insists on being paid for giving the “right” answer. When he bursts in on the conversation (336b) he is compared to a wild animal about to spring on its prey. He immediately challenges Socrates and Polemarchus with failing to discuss justice seriously: they give way to one another in a pathetic and unreasonable manner. Then, as if to clear the decks, he lists a number of accounts of justice he will not accept: it is no use saying that it is what is necessary, or beneficial, or advantageous, or profitable, or what is good for you. It is important to see why he wants to start with that established; it is because all these are supposedly factual claims. They suggest something true about justice as such, but Thrasymachus has no time for justice as such or for any objective account of it whatsoever. He wants to propose a new and radical thesis about “justice”; what he will offer is to be quite different from the possibilities he has ruled out. Justice, he then states, is nothing but the advantage of the stronger. That is not intended as a definition of justice of the same sort as he has ruled out; indeed, as we shall see, in Thrasymachus’ view, justice cannot be defined, since it is a mere figment of the naïve imagination. What he offers is the claim that when the word “justice” is rationally used, it refers to a false belief, in reference to which the knowing strong can impose their will by playing on the ignorant and moralizing weak. The thrust of Thrasymachus’ position becomes evident when he observes that whatever the group that happens to form the government, whether democratic, oligarchic, or despotic, it makes laws to profit itself, and not least to keep itself in power. It presents these laws as just (338e3, cf. 2.359b3) and, with luck, or better by calculation, persuades its subjects that they are so; hence the application of   111 

The Republic the word “justice” will vary according to the régime that proposes it. There will be no necessary common feature in “just” acts, only that they will all benefit the strong, the rulers. Of course, in the real world rulers make mistakes, but in Thrasymachus’ view the really strong man, the ruler as defined or in the “strict” sense, will not (340e). His “justice” (that is, his perfectly self-serving activity) is therefore the perfect “justice.” Insofar as he makes mistakes about what is “just”—that is, about his own interest—he is not the strong man. The difficulty that dogs Thrasymachus, however, when he tries to explain himself, is that he in effect wants to use the word “justice” in two senses. Properly speaking, “justice” will represent behavior by subjects that benefits their masters, while in the eyes of the subjects justice is some conventional virtue, perhaps fairness. This becomes clear when Thrasymachus refuses to call justice a vice (for no subject would so call it), but labels it “noble naïveté,” which is how the ruler would mockingly describe it (348c12ff.). Similarly, injustice is not malevolence (for no ruler, but only a subject, would so describe it), but prudence. Such explanatory difficulties arise because the subject thinks that “justice” refers to a world of values that the ruler “knows” does not exist. But the ruler can play on the subject’s naïveté for his own advantage, for as we have already seen in the Cratylus, it is important to use words correctly—that is, to name particulars after realities and not name or infer realities from mere names. We have also seen how one of the major challenges Socrates must face in dealing with Sophistic education is the need to “fix” the meaning of moral terms—and, if Heraclitus is to be answered, of non-moral terms, too. We may now consider the “Thrasymachean” alternative. Thrasy­ machus knows (as every generation before and since has known) that publics are inclined to assume that laws, however “positive” they may be, have some objective moral standing and therefore should be obeyed. He also knows that they assume they should treat people fairly, “justly” (in his view mistakenly)—for in contrast to what we have identified as the view of Socrates in earlier dialogues—and shall find again in the Republic—he holds such “primi  112 

The Republic tive” beliefs to be ill-founded: they are beliefs from which the strong man will know he should be cured (if necessary) by what, in modern parlance, would be called an “error theory.” Among the weak, of course, delusions about what is just can be reinforced by terrorist tactics, à la George Orwell, or President Nixon: “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will surely follow!” In Plato’s time the Sophist Antiphon seems to have regarded justice in some Thrasymachean sort, and we know that Plato’s uncle Critias (whom we have already met) similarly explained the gods; they were invented by a clever tyrant who wanted to make sure that his subjects not only obeyed the letter of the law—his police could do that—but also its spirit. And how better to persuade them that it is “right” to obey him than to have them believe in gods whose “justice” coincides with what he himself wants to impose, and who can moreover also inspect the innermost thoughts of his subjects? Plato, from the outset, was a practical man: one might say—and I shall argue—that ethical and political questions eventually drove him into metaphysics. And other practical men recorded historical versions of Thrasymachean moral nihilism; as we have seen, the historian-general Thucydides put together a uniquely “Platonic” construct, the so-called Melian dialogue, to make a similar point: the Athenians finding it unnecessary to invoke “fine words” to justify attacking the island of Melos, since considerations of “justice” arise only when the disputants are on more or less equal terms. Otherwise the strong prevail and the weak submit (History 5.89). This is tyrannical behavior—the Athenian leader Cleon had avowed it such a few years earlier when similar circumstances had arisen in connection with the people of Mytilene (3.37)—but that is irrelevant. Such attitudes might look more like the position of Callicles in the Gorgias than that of Thrasymachus, except that the Athenians invoke no law of nature; they simply point to what happens in the world. In the situation of the Melians, ideas about injustice are irrelevant, and the implication is Thrasymachean: if the Melians believe in the universal claims of justice, they are naïve, “living on another planet.”   113 

The Republic Reflection on Thucydides’ Melian dialogue shows that in the Republic—even in the first book—Plato is not simply rewriting the argument with Callicles. In the Gorgias Socrates does not disagree with Callicles about the possibility of moral rightness; where he disagrees is in his account of what moral rightness is: that Right is not Might. For Thrasymachus, morality of any kind, whether Calliclean or Socratic, is a fiction. Hence the argument with Thrasymachus is of less immediate practical import than that with Callicles, since wrongdoers normally claim that a special kind of right is on their side; few propose the Thrasymachean view that there is no such thing as right, but only what the stronger can “sell” to a gullible or terrorized public as right. But at the theoretical level the argument with Thrasymachus is the more fundamental, although when in book two Plato’s brothers attempt to “revive” the position of Thrasymachus, they do so by arguing that justice is a human construct; hence, though indeed “virtual,” it has wider uses than would be possible if everyone actually believed what Thrasymachus is saying. If one is a Thrasymachean, one finds it is helpful for élites of whatever political stripe to deceive the public into the belief that whatever ethical norms the rulers favor have objective weight: it would be inconvenient for any regime if everyone actually believed that values are only a convenient fairytale. But philosophically speaking, that is what the Thrasymachean nihilist does believe, and it is therefore the function of the Socratic philosopher to expose it as such. In grasping the only proper way in which, for Plato, that exposure can be achieved, we have in hand the key to the last nine books of the Republic. For Plato, as we shall see—and precursors of this view have already appeared, not least in the Phaedo—all “third ways” between Socrates and Thrasymachus are logically confused or fudges. Any non-Socratic proposal will ultimately be found to be on the Thrasymachean side of the line. Philosophically, they will all be attempts to revive the position of Thrasymachus in a theoretically, but not practically, emasculated version. At the end of book one of the Republic Thrasymachus is angry   114 

The Republic and frustrated. He has lost the argument with Socrates, but cannot understand where he has gone wrong, and believes he has somehow been tricked. That Plato means us to take this seriously as more than mere pique is confirmed by the fact that Glaucon and Adeimantus attempt to restate his argument and take over the debate, as he himself had taken over from Polemarchus. But before coming to that we need to ask two questions—the first relating to the progress of the Republic itself, the second concerning why, after the Gorgias, Plato felt obliged to investigate extreme “immoralist” positions at all. In other words, we need to ask why Plato came to believe that the argument of the Gorgias is inadequate. Thrasymachus certainly makes mistakes: his distinction between the public and the private sphere allows his “hero” less room for maneuver than would a contemporary exponent of his position. It is the mark of modern totalitarian theories and régimes that the private is to be subsumed within the public. Big Brother is everywhere. Thrasymachus also neglects a necessary theoretical feature of his position, namely that reason is always to be understood as instrumental, as the slave of the passions. Glaucon and Adeimantus correct him in this, and in Socrates’ account of the “tripartite” soul it will later become clear that for the extreme anti-philosopher, the tyrannical man, that Humean relationship between reason and the passions is an essential part of his world outlook. Thrasymachus is also too inclined to suppose that the “stronger” will always act in a manner that would conventionally be described as “unjust” (as at 349cd), but he should do that only if it were to his advantage, for sometimes it will pay to act “justly.” For whatever reason, Plato has not given Thrasymachus the best construction of his case, and insofar as such a version would involve a more sophisticated psychology than Thrasymachus is capable of, that is dramatically sound. Indeed we may recognize a certain parallel between Thrasymachus and Hobbes, and where Thrasymachus is corrected by Glaucon and Adeimantus, Hobbes is corrected by Hume—for any Hobbesian stance stands or falls by the claim that   115 

The Republic all significant human acts are driven by self-interest, whether that self-interest be understood under Hobbesian or Thrasymachean guise. Yet one aspect of the position of Thrasymachus does indeed lead us back to our more basic question of why, after the Gorgias, Plato felt obliged to write book one of the Republic at all: a concern that would be all the more important if—as I have denied to be the case—Republic 1 was originally intended as a separate book. This aspect of the theoretical situation concerns Thrasymachus’ view of a theme we have studied in earlier dialogues as well as in the debate with Polemarchus, namely the nature of a skill and the possibility of there being something special about a moral skill, and therefore about the moral knowledge in light of which that skill is exercised. We recall from the Gorgias that rhetoric pursued without regard to the good, or, in politics, lacking concern with whether or not it promotes a just society, is not a skill at all, but a “knack,” a mere parody of a skill. A knack is no more than a clever act performed without reference to values and driven solely by desire for power or pleasure, or for getting power by bestowing the pleasure of flattery. Now Thrasymachus too thinks of his “strong man” as in possession of a skill; indeed he thinks that a whole range of professionals, from shepherds to accountants, are in possession of the same skill, that of getting profit for themselves out of their professional activities (see especially 343b ff.). Socrates rejects that view, basically on the ground that there must be a difference between the art of the shepherd or of the doctor, on the one hand, and that of the profiteer on the other. What Thrasymachus wants to say, however, is that in the case of the strong man, there is only one skill, that of profiteering. Other distinctions between the professions are merely different ways in which the profiteering is accomplished. The objection to that is analogous to the objection of Hume to Hobbes: that the Thrasymachean doctor will never just want to cure someone, but will always be considering whether it is profitable to do so is an extremely counterintuitive claim. To that objection, however, Thrasymachus can always reply that his critic does not understand what   116 

The Republic the strong man is really like; he has only a “bourgeois” or “conventional” notion of strength. To reply to this sort of claim by merely maintaining the contrary—which is roughly what Socrates had done in the Gorgias— will never in itself be persuasive. Thrasymachus’ position is basically that unless corrupted by “morality” the strong man will be governed only by self-interest. And the only adequate reply to that would be to show that human “nature,” whether in the realm of psychology or in the world of affairs, is not as Thrasymachus presents it. Socrates needs to explain both that Thrasymachus’ account of human motivation is seriously flawed and that the “real” world, which is beyond ourselves, but to which we are connected through our minds and souls, is very different from what Thrasymachus takes it to be. To achieve that far more complex reply—not only to Thrasymachus but, in passing, to Callicles as well (as we shall see)—Plato needs the next nine books of the Republic. In the eyes of Thrasymachus, Socrates, like other “just” individuals (343c6), is naïve (euethes, 336c, 343d2, cf. 349b5)—as in the eyes of Callicles he had not yet grown up; was not a real man, but living in a kids’ world of make-believe. Similarly in his History Thucydides had presented his power-driven figures (Cleon in the speech on Mytilene, the Athenian in the Melian dialogue) as suggesting that their less brutal political rivals were simpleminded, unwilling to face “realities.” As Cleon put it (3.37), “You do not reflect on the fact that your empire is a tyranny”: a bad thing, that is, if we are silly enough to accept the bourgeois inhibitions aroused by the word “tyranny.” Yet democracies, he has already said, have their own inherent weakness: they are too soft, hence incapable of ruling others. But Thrasymachus also maintains what conventional morality would assess as a more cynical thesis: those who condemn injustice do so not through fear of practicing it—as they would often like to do—but for fear of suffering it (344c). As we see, if we wish to reply fully to the nihilism of Thrasymachus, we shall have to recognize that mere rebuttal, in the manner   117 

The Republic of the Gorgias, is inadequate; we have already found Thrasymachus unconvinced by “mere” rebuttal. What Socrates needs—and here in the Republic attempts to provide—is no dialectical refutation (however effective) of his opponents, but an explanation that the traditional alternative to ethical nihilism and the various “morality substitutes” it encourages can and can only be established by empirical argument supported by metaphysical claims. Thus human beings are not as Thrasymachus describes them—though Thrasymachus has drawn on aspects of human behavior that the Socrates of the earlier dialogues underestimates. More significantly, justice is not a fiction; it exists and can be found in the Real World. Thus to deny it is to deny what is the case. Thrasymachus thought he was telling the plain unvarnished “truth”—not least that the sense of moral words can be altered at will—but he is mistaken: the unvarnished truth is metaphysical, and hence, though primitive insights about justice may be expressed in primitive fashion, they may, despite all, be real insights. Only in conditions of a savagery inimical to serious thought (or among a corrupt intellectual élite) will we find a socially subversive moral relativism such as is deplored by Thucydides in his account of civil strife in Corfù (3.82.4). I referred to the passage earlier, but it is so important for an understanding of Plato’s composition of the Republic that it may claim repetition. It runs as follows: Men changed the ordinary accreditation of words to things at their own discretion. Mindless audacity was considered to be the courage of the true party-man, thoughtful hesitation to be specious cowardice, restraint an excuse for lack of virility. . . . Careful planning a plausible pretext for failing in one’s responsibilities. . . . The political leaders on each side took up pretty slogans, one speaking of equal civic responsibilities and obligations for the people under the law, the other of a moderate aristocracy.   • 

The Republic, I have proposed, is an example of ring composition (a technique that, as we shall see, Plato is to use again in the Sophist). The introductory book one, starting with Socrates going down to the Piraeus and finding Cephalus preparing for death, is eventual  118 

The Republic ly—after we have read of ethics and its foundations in books two to nine—to be “recapitulated” in book ten, where the whole dialogue closes with a “true” account—but in the form of a Platonic myth— of the fate of the soul after death, complete with various corrected comments on the nature of the gods and their attitude to mankind. Books two to four (and part of five) deal with the construction of an ideal society (as yet unjustified by the necessary metaphysics), while books eight and nine present its progressive disintegration: the decline of the best state to the worst, that is to tyranny, and of the best man, the philosopher-king, to his antithesis, the tyrant. At the end of the first book of the Republic Socrates finds himself in a position similar to that in which dialogues like the Laches, Euthyphro, and Protagoras close—which has doubtless encouraged some to think it was originally a separate dialogue. He has been seeking the nature of a virtue, in this case justice, but has failed to find it, partly because he has rushed off to pursue related questions, such as whether it is more profitable than injustice. Be that as it may, he now discovers that the debate with Polemarchus and Thrasymachus was only an introduction. Glaucon is dissatisfied. After getting Socrates to declare that justice is both good in itself and in its effects (358a), he revives Thrasymachus’ position that most people value justice merely because it brings honors and other rewards: a claim, he insists, that Thrasymachus has been seduced into abandoning much too readily. He proposes to speak at length on the apparent rewards of injustice and evaluate Socrates’ hoped-for refutation. And when he has finished, his brother Adeimantus will take up the same cause. It is not difficult to see that Glaucon believes he is indeed reviving Thrasymachus’ position, if not exactly, then in spirit. The thrust of his argument will be made clearer if I render the Greek dike not as justice or right, but as unselfishness, and adikia not as injustice, but as an overriding concern for oneself. People say, according to Glaucon, that it is good always to look after yourself, to put yourself first. That means they calculate whether they risk suffering from the “injustice” of others if they treat them “unjustly.” Since most peo  119 

The Republic ple judge the risks are too great, they make deals with one another (359a): I won’t hurt you and you won’t hurt me. They pass laws to effect that deal and call obedience to such laws not simply lawful, but “just.” In this, like Thrasymachus’ original proposal, Glaucon’s theory views all law as “positive,” while he diverges from his “master” in arguing that normally such laws and such justice are constructed as an implicit social contract by the weak and fearful, to protect themselves from the strong. But, Glaucon adds, if a “real man” thought he could get away with it, he would have no time for such dealings. He would do what comes naturally, recognizing that “nature” is valuefree. Give him the ring of Gyges by which he could make himself invisible and thus avoid the consequences of self-seeking, and he would of course take the Thrasymachean line and make himself a despot. And if he were rich and powerful he could pay off the gods and be their favorite (362c), a theme that Adeimantus embellishes further (364b–365e). In any case, perhaps there are no gods, and even if there are, they may have no interest in the doings of men (365d). What matters is not to be just, but to seem it: that gives us honor and rewards, which is what we really want. Self-indulgence and “injustice” are universally attractive; the only problem with them is that they bring shame, conventionally damaging our reputations (364a)—though injustice on a large scale can win both public and private respect (as Thrasymachus had earlier intimated). Adeimantus picks up his brother’s argument and concludes in unexpected fashion, perhaps already hinting that their brother Plato will now speak clearly in Socratic voice, as in the Symposium he has spoken through Diotima. Adeimantus does not want to hear Socrates demonstrate by a dialectical argument (like those against Thrasymachus) that justice is better or stronger than injustice; he wants to know what effects justice and injustice have on the soul of the individual. Does justice, regardless of reputation and rewards, help the individual? That question, he concludes, is what you, Socrates, have been spending your whole life on (367d). All of this seems to leave Socrates with several problems. First   120 

The Republic he must propose another approach than the line he has pursued with Thrasymachus; then he must examine the nature of the soul, and how it is to be (either) improved or corrupted. To that must be linked a further inquiry: if there are gods, are they providential and moral, or uninterested or corruptible? The latter two inquiries will be related, since, as we shall see, the human soul—perhaps in line with the underlying theme of the Phaedo that the soul is “us”—is in some sense a fallen god, yet akin in its nature to the immortal, immaterial, and unchanging Forms. Socrates begins with a new (and “un-Socratic”) method (368c ff.). But before examining it to see what it can do and what it cannot, we should note that, although Glaucon and Adeimantus have offered only one “un-Socratic” account of justice, that is all they need. Social contract theories do afford one possibility of survival in a Thrasymachean world. There are other possibilities, but one can serve as an example for all, for all view justice as an epiphenomenon of human choice and human decision (especially, but not necessarily only, if there are no gods). All will require a theory of positive law and in effect deny the possibility of universally valid and defensible moral norms. What then is Socrates’ new method? He compares his procedure with storytelling, which inevitably takes a long time (376d). If we want to find out more about justice, we shall do well to start not with the individual, but with the city; there we can see justice upon a larger canvas. So we must outline the basic features of a city, and that may enable us to recognize how questions of justice and injustice will arise. In using this model Socrates assumes that there is a certain parallel between the structure of the individual and that of the city, as in that cities and individuals both have “parts”; yet he is not committed to the belief that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. More important is his obvious intention to argue that public and private virtues are ultimately identical: raisons d’état cannot be used to override the genuine good of the individual citizen, though in a “philosophical” city there will be occasions when   121 

The Republic the individual citizen must sacrifice him- or herself (as in warfare— or childbirth) for the common good. That is the inevitable price and responsibility necessary for generating the benefits citizenship brings. Socrates, basing himself on the premise that cities come into existence because human individuals cannot be self-sufficient (369b6), begins by describing a city where all that is provided are the necessities of life. To provide such bare necessities, we need a group of people with individual skills, each bringing what he is best fitted to contribute. But Glaucon objects: such a basic society is a “city of pigs” (372d)—perhaps Plato is suggesting that it is not a city at all, but an impossibly mythological fantasy. Socrates agrees (though with a certain nostalgic glance back at an innocence lost) that if we go on to describe what he calls the “luxurious” or “inflamed” city, we may the more easily recognize where and how justice and injustice become endemic. There is obvious irony here as Socrates notes that the expanded city will generate more than the necessities of life (373d)—indeed will offer all kinds of luxuries, from perfumes and cakes to call girls—but we should look beneath the surface: Glaucon is perhaps suggesting that only with a certain degree of sophistication—far beyond the mere contentment of the city of pigs—can important human potentialities be realized (albeit at a price), and that these further goods, as we shall soon see (375e), include the possibility of philosophy and the education of philosophical natures. It is no good dreaming nostalgically of primitive times, seems to be the message in what is perhaps an encoded claim that for the “modern” educationist it is impossible to put the Athenian clock back to the days before “sophistic” questioning arrived on the intellectual scene. Some of the ensuing comment on proper education also points in that direction. Be that as it may, it is the “luxurious” city—the city where philosophy is possible—that Socrates proceeds to describe, first pointing out that its population will be much larger than previously envisaged, and that it will therefore need more territory. That will mean   122 

The Republic warfare (373e) and—on a principle of the division of labor that has already been accepted, though its ramifications and implications have not yet been explored—a warrior caste—that is, a professional army. The principal difficulty, however, with standing armies rather than citizen militias (374a), is that we have to guard against soldiers using force not just against foreign enemies, but against their fellow citizens. Thus, without justice, we will have embarked on the road to a tyrannical state such as Plato will show evolving in books eight and nine. Hence close attention must be paid to both the nature and nurture of the “guards” (375b): by nature they must be highspirited, brave, and also gentle (375c8)—a combination hard to find, but not impossible; even among animals, like pure-bred dogs, we recognize those naturally gentle to their friends and ferocious to their enemies. That all means that for our military class we must find people who combine full-blooded spirit with a temperament suited to philosophy: both the philosophical and the “spirited” aspects of their souls need proper training to be brought into harmony (412a). These rare spirits are soon to be identified as “complete guardians” (414b2). The exercise of such gifts demands a proper education from earliest childhood, and this must be both physical and mental. Excess of the former will produce brutes, enemies of rational discussion (411b) through an overdevelopment of the spirited element; excess of the latter produces “softies” (410d). Such training indicates not merely a distinction between mind and body, but also, and more importantly, between the “parts” of our souls. Hence our guards must receive a proper balance, and naturally the mental training will start first. We must look at the myths about gods and heroes on which children are reared from their earliest days (377a), for when they are young and tender they are also peculiarly impressionable. Unfortunately Homer, Hesiod, and the tragedians are radically unsatisfactory. They inculcate false and deceptive beliefs about the gods that may lead later to a disbelieving cynicism, and such misdescriptions will be associated with a presentation of “divine” and “heroic” be  123 

The Republic havior (or rather misbehavior) that will pervert our human emotions, encouraging vice rather than virtue. In brief, both intellectually and emotionally we need a better class of myth, though at this stage in the educational process myths are still necessary. Such myths, though not literally true, must be edifying, indicative of truths that at a later age can be better understood. They must never ascribe false and evil characteristics to gods and heroes (377e). It is important to see these remarks in their historical context. The poems of Homer and Hesiod formed the staple of Athenian education, and were indeed subject to misuse in “sophistic” argument to defend anti-social behavior. Socrates begins by rejecting the tales told by Hesiod of the various wars, tortures, murders, and castrations carried out in “heaven.” If believed, they give a wrong impression of the divine; if treated cynically, they are socially dangerous. When Socrates is made to mention a god beating his father (378b), he is echoing an argument in Aristophanes’ Clouds: Of course I can beat my father; after all, Zeus did that, and who am I to claim to be better than the immortal gods? Nor can allegorization be allowed to justify such stories; the young are unable to recognize that a myth is to be read allegorically (378e). Speaking in a tradition already going back to Heraclitus (DielsKranz 22 B42) and Xenophanes (DK 21 B11), Plato’s Socrates has very specific ideas about the gods and the lies spread about them by the poets. His historical counterpart, as we have seen, was a deeply religious man who believed in divine providence and concern for humanity. Now in the Republic his Platonic avatar insists that the gods are good and that they only cause what is good; Zeus is not the source of both good and evil, as the poet would have it (379e). Nor does he encourage oath-breaking, nor appear in varying guises, for he is already perfect, and any change would be for the worse; nor does he engage in lying or deceit. In fact, untruths come in two varieties: there is the “real” lie that is the result of living a corrupt life, an ignorance in the soul that is “hated by gods and men” (382c); and there are the lies necessary in human life, such as those useful to   124 

The Republic mislead our enemies. But even those “verbal” falsehoods are unnecessary for the gods, and overall the poets tell tales that are unholy, harmful to their hearers insofar as they teach falsehood, and inconsistent (380c). We must defer more detailed consideration of Plato’s developing revisionist attitude to the gods (or God) till a later chapter, only noting here that false belief about them is a threat to the good life and the souls of the citizens. So much then for false belief. In books three and four Socrates spends much time on the damaging emotional and moral effects of such. And we recall that books two to four and beyond represent Plato’s ascent toward the ideal state—as yet but proposed, without benefit of metaphysical defense. Firstly, then, and within what appear initially as the ordinary parameters of a Greek city, what can we discover about the virtues? The first to be tackled is courage, and that turns out to be freedom from the fear of death, coupled with perseverance in right despite the temptations of pleasure and pain (413c; 429c); we compare Socrates in the Symposium and the Phaedo. This in its turn will mean that the young should not be exposed to lying and morally threatening tales about the underworld, nor more generally to false beliefs about gods and heroes. Indeed they need to be protected against any form of “imitation” on stage, indeed any representation that may encourage character weaknesses: such are undue lamentation and excessive laughter—the better the poet who chants such seductive tales, the more morally dangerous (387b). And their lives must be ascetic, as those of athletes in training: no homosexual copulation (403b), which indicates ill-breeding and blindness to beauty; no Sicilian cooking, no Corinthian call girls, no Attic pastries (404c–e)—and no excessive and debilitating concern with one’s health and mere physical survival (406ab). A major difficulty with courage (to which Plato reverts as late as the Statesman) is how to combine it with moderation and selfcontrol, especially in its public manifestation as the virtue with reference to which we recognize who is fit to rule and who is not. If we are to combine these two virtues, we must, as children before the   125 

The Republic age of reason (402a), develop the right habits. Such young children will appear naïve because they have no example of evil in their souls (409b), but only these will be capable of discerning between good and evil as they mature (402a). Note, however, that we are still at the unphilosophical stage of social development (or, if you like, of a pre-Sophistic, “pre-enlightened” society), and Socrates is prepared to say (413a) that having one’s belief in accord with the way things are is to be aware of the truth. He avoids what is to become the more technical term “knowledge.” At the end of book three Socrates starts to emphasize a further essential factor: the guardians must love their country above all else (412cd). The myth of the “noble lie” is introduced to show how they must revere the city as their mother (414e), but also that they must treat their brothers, her children, unsentimentally as unequal in their natural abilities and therefore in their civic duties. Guardians must always be prepared to sacrifice their private desires for the public good. But a city in which, as we shall see in book four, there are rich and poor populations, is not really a city at all, but two cities. To avoid the guardians being objects of envy and subject to the temptations of greed, it is therefore essential that good though they are, they have no opportunity for personal gain. Hence Plato’s most notorious and disconcerting proposal: that those who control the city (and only these) should have everything in common, beginning with their property (at the end of book three), and going on to wives (and husbands) and children. “Friends have all in common” (cf. 424a). This thesis, soon to be seriously challenged by Aristotle, is founded, as we can see, on a basic (Socratic?) over-optimism in the Republic that Plato later, and with regret, will find he has to abandon. For now he thinks—though at times he wobbles—that he can perfect a system of education whereby the guardians are incorruptible, not least in controlling their sexual drives. In the Republic itself, as we shall see in book eight, allusion to their “corruption” is partly a literary device to show how degeneracy could creep into the Ideal City, but by the time Plato reaches the Phaedrus his investiga  126 

The Republic tions into human psychology have convinced him that with no educational system is such perfection possible on earth—and by the time he reaches the Laws he seems prepared to leave community of property and wives to the world of wishful thinking. At the opening of book four the abolition of private property brings protest from Adeimantus: a protest that not only draws attention to the radical nature of “Socrates’” proposal, but that, in its failure to comprehend how the guardians might be happy in such a life, gives Plato the opportunity to point to that special philosophical knowledge that will ensure happiness—and even pleasure—as well as to the hindrances, both practical and metaphysical, that may seem to beset the entire project. These are going to preoccupy the disputants in books five to seven. Of course, even the preliminary discussion of courage and self-control is incomplete, while justice has as yet hardly appeared. Adeimantus’ complaint depends on the assumptions of the “ordinary” world. Thus if material rewards do not accrue to the guardians, they cannot be happy. Socrates in reply evades saying that they are in fact happy, merely commenting, “We would not be surprised if the guardians too were well off in their lives”; for thus far in the Republic he would have little means of justifying such a claim. Instead he comments (rather tersely) that he is concerning himself not with the happiness of a section of the city, but with how the city as a whole will be happy: clearly this is unsatisfactory, because the best he could offer would be some sort of inadequate and inaccurate utilitarian calculus by which to measure whether the city as a whole is happy or happier. Then he reverts to the earlier and related theme of wealth and poverty more generally (421d ff.)—but now with a new urgency. The guardians must not only avoid temptations to greed that would lead to lust, but ensure that extremes of wealth and poverty are wholly absent from their society—for both, in their different ways, will generate revolutionary activity (422a), so undermining the unity of the city so essential even in determining its most appropriate size (423b). For then there would be, at the   127 

The Republic least, two cities: a city of the rich and a city of the poor (423a). One of Plato’s principal reasons for writing about politics rather than becoming a practicing politician (according to the Seventh Letter) was his wish to avoid the excesses to which he had come to believe both democrats and oligarchs are prone: the former desiring radical redistribution of wealth—by revolutionary violence if necessary, or even by preference—at the expense of others, the latter oppressing the poor to protect their own excesses. Plato believes that the longed-for civic unity will only be secured if the citizens recognize their own strengths and limitations. Each citizen must do only what he is competent to do; thus if a member by birth of the guardian class turns out not to be up to the demands of the job, he must do something else. Only so can we become “unified persons” (423d). (The theme of such unity at the personal level will be significantly developed later in book four.) We cannot be unified if we are constantly striving to do what is beyond our capacities, though in normal political systems we are regularly impelled to follow such “natural” but counterproductive desires. Then again—still leaving any substantial reply to Adeimantus aside and thus whetting our appetite—Socrates reverts to education and to expounding how cultural changes seep into the life of the body politic. Changes in styles of music, he tells us (424c9), are always politically revolutionary, and should be noted, though they rarely are. For they induce the desire for innovation for its own sake, and where culture changes, the society as a whole must change with it. It obviously follows that if such cultural change derives from elsewhere than what Plato will call the Good, society will suffer accordingly. But Socrates declines to go into detail: if the guardians are educated aright, their good judgment will carry them through And so, it seems to Adeimantus, we have concluded the blueprint of the ideal city envisaged in book two, in which we thought to see justice “in large letters.” But Socrates, characteristically, corrects him (427b). Something of the greatest importance has been omitted. Our city is not to be a   128 

The Republic secular city: we need to invoke the religious authorities about the building of temples, services of worship, the burial of the dead, and their cult. In all such matters we are ignorant, our best hope being to follow the advice of the God at Delphi, as Socrates himself had done when setting out to determine whether he had been justly described as the wisest of the Greeks. Now that at last we seem to have completed the project of an ideal city, the search for justice “in large letters”—not to speak of the other virtues—can begin in earnest. We recall again that Socrates has thus far constructed his state on conventional lines, speaking in conventional Greek terms of the virtues. He now proposes to be more precise about these. He begins with wisdom, in its practical application as the capacity for good judgment (euboulia [428b]). This is a special quality that the guardians will possess, but Socrates, unsurprisingly, tells us rather little about it. He thus avoids the question “Knowledge of what?” and limits himself to emphasizing its unique character. Instead he goes back to courage (429a), of which a working definition is quickly established: it is that preservation, among the military class, of an understanding of what is properly to be feared—regardless of the challenges of pleasure and pain—that has been developed by good education in those capable of benefiting from it (429c–30a). Which leaves self-discipline and justice itself, which will turn out to be very closely connected. Selfdiscipline will also lead us to the by now predictable advance on the psychological ideas of the Phaedo and the Symposium. Naturally, self-discipline involves controlling one’s passions, but Socrates immediately alludes to an enigmatic popular saying: that it is being master of oneself, being stronger than oneself. For who is master (and who is slave) of whom? Who is stronger than whom and who is weaker (430e)? We recall from the now-distant debate with Thrasymachus that the latter had spoken of the “advantage of the stronger” (or “better”), leaving it debatable who is in fact stronger or better. Now analogous questions arise at the psychological level, and Socrates allows himself to be diverted from his main theme   129 

The Republic into consideration of the structure of the human soul that makes such language appropriate. He starts by observing that unlike the two previous virtues (and comparably, as we shall see, with justice), self-discipline is not the virtue of any single class, but rather it is the agreement by all that those best fitted by nature and education should rule; it is thus a kind of harmony (431e). That leaves only justice, which could not be usefully identified until adequate attention has been paid to self-discipline. After a certain amount of byplay about how hard it is to spot the quarry, Socrates goes into reverse, claiming that we have all along been assuming the nature of justice in our original principle of the division of labor: each should do and want to do that for which he is fitted (433a). But he now explains why that principle had to be assumed, for without it none of the other virtues could come into existence nor abide (433bc), the relationship of justice to self-discipline also becoming clearer, in that they must both be spread throughout the entire city. In a foreshadowing of books eight and nine Socrates also maintains that without such a principle of justice, various individuals would wish and try to achieve that for which they are not suited, thereby bringing disaster on themselves and their city. We should, of course, remember what in Plato’s day (and not only) could be the consequences of such “mistakes”: murder in civil strife for the individual, for the city as a whole a possible annihilation from the face of the earth, its men slaughtered, its women raped, and then with their children sold into slavery. Thucydides had observed how this had happened on Melos, and only Spartan magnanimity prevented a similar fate befalling Athens itself at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The analogy between state and individual entails that if there are three kinds of citizen, if the citizen body can be integral in terms of its division into guardians, soldiers, and workforce, similar distinctions will exist in the individual soul. This conclusion is introduced with a certain fanfare, as well it might be. There are three aspects of the soul, says Socrates (435c). Not such a simple little matter, comes the reply from one of his interlocutors. Perhaps, agrees Socrates,   130 

The Republic there is something in the popular saying that the good is never easily discovered, and note again how popular wisdom regularly gets right what it cannot explain. And the three aspects indeed have proved deceptive, for it has often been assumed that Plato (as distinct from later Platonists) is talking about “parts” of the soul. But Plato himself never uses the commonly deployed term “tripartite” (though for convenience I shall retain that practice). Frequently, indeed, Greek syntax enables him to avoid using any particular term, but when he comes up with one it is normally “kinds” or “aspects” (eide, 435c, 439e). This is confusing if one fails to realize that the word eidos, while one of Plato’s regular terms for a Form, can still be used in its nontechnical sense, the most literal translation of the word being “appearance” or “what we see of something.” That usage is preserved for the second aspect of soul in the untranslatable neologism, to thumoeides—so that when Plato, as we shall see, wants to reflect on our multifaceted personalities he is able to say that we present ourselves in many versions, depending on which “aspect” (eidos) of our soul currently predominates in our character; on whether, as book nine has it (588b ff.), we develop the human being in us, or the lion, or the many-headed monster. In the perfected individual, of course, the three aspects of the soul are harmoniously reconciled, and the good man is all of a piece. That is why Plato prefers to talk about aspects rather than about parts. The three “aspects” represent (inter alia) three possible lifestyles, hence three possible “selves,” but only in the life of the good man is the eventual soul harmonious. Thus the three aspects and possibilities of our souls, which Plato sometime refers to as capacities, are the power of reason, the “spirited” or ambitious element—which I shall henceforward call the “affective” element—and the element by which we desire physical or “worldly” goods. This last is not simply the “desiring element,” as is also sometimes supposed. Plato makes clear, more especially in book nine, that each of our aspects, capacities or features—one might say potential selves, for they may come to dominate our personality as a whole—has its own special objects of desire.   131 

The Republic When we are thirsty we simply desire to drink (437e): that is a function of the desiring element. When we desire a particular kind of drink—especially since when we desire to drink we desire some sort of good drink—some other element of the psyche than raw desire is involved. That becomes particularly evident when, though thirsty, we check ourselves and do not drink; Reason then restrains raw desire (439d). But what about the second aspect, which I have translated the “affective”? To illustrate it, Socrates tells the story of Leontius (439e), who, walking along the walls of Athens, noticed newly executed bodies. He was tempted to gape at them and tried to resist what he clearly found a shameful urge, but being unable to do so he rushed over to the bodies and forced his eyes open, saying to himself “Have a good look, isn’t it a fine sight”! So it matters to separate mere physical desire from a sense of shame, a sense of honor, a sense of self-respect that, along with high-spiritedness and a desire for glory, make up what I have called the “affective” sort of soul. That soul is distinct from rationality, too, for it is clearly visible in high-spirited children long before the ability to reason has developed (441b). In this almost casual way Plato has introduced what was to be called the problem of acrasia or weakness of will. And the difference from the psychology of the Phaedo (where we recall a simple battle of the soul’s desires with those of the body) is immense. Yet the line of development is obvious, for—as we there wondered—if the soul is perfect, why is it so weak as to give way to merely bodily desires? Plato, in criticism (or development) of the historical Socrates, no longer wants to say that all our desires are for what is good; that when we pursue what is not in our best interest, we have simply made a mistake. The “mistake,” if that is what it is, is more ambiguous. Yes, we do all desire what is good, but not only. And once this fault line in the soul has been opened up, we recognize the beginning of the end of Plato’s educational optimism. But that is not yet. Also particularly worth comment is the very close relationship between self-discipline and justice. Justice lays down the principle   132 

The Republic that people should do what they are suited by nature and nurture to do, while self-discipline is the ability to promote the harmony of both soul and city by having the strength of character to recognize and enforce that judgment. But we remember that the city is thus far devoid of philosophical grounding. The various evil actions listed (443a ff.)—temple robbery, adultery, neglect of parents, swindling —are conventionally evil in a Greek city, so the challenge of Thrasymachus in book one has not yet been met. It is easy enough for Socrates to secure the agreement of Plato’s conventionally minded brothers, who can at least agree that what Socrates has defended thus far makes good sense: it is a possible world. But like other possible worlds, if one part of the structure is mistaken, the rest falls. So far, however, Socrates can go no further. What he has achieved—and his interlocutors are all unaware of the deeper problems—is to present a revised version of the conventional city in which the conventional virtues will be maintained and the primary form of injustice, namely civil strife, eliminated (440b, 444b). People like Thrasymachus will in effect be censored out, as will the traditional poets. But Socrates can go no further because, although he has shed new and important light on the condition of the human soul, he has in no way touched on the higher education—or only on its necessary but preliminary stages—of the guardians. We might, however, have recognized a foreshadowing of what is to come in books five to seven when, at the beginning of book four, Adeimantus raised the objection that the guardians would not be happy. That objection depends on an ultimately un-Socratic view of the guardians’ character and knowledge. It was the abolition of property that aroused Adeimantus’ concern, so we need not be surprised that it is the abolition of the traditional family that eventually pushes Socrates in books five and six toward his explanation of the true characters of the guardians (without which they could not do their job) and of the metaphysical status of the virtue and goodness that underpin their knowledge. At the end of book four Plato makes another gesture toward ty  133 

The Republic ing the Republic together, though his interlocutors will not allow him as yet to pursue this line of argument. He observes that there is only one form of virtue, but four significant forms of vice, both in the individual and in the city (445c), and is about to explain the relationship between the ideal form of government and its four alternatives (the subject in fact of books eight and nine) when he is pulled up short. The end of book four might have seemed the end of the reply to Thrasymachus, but it turns out only to be the start. Yet of one thing we can be clear: just as there are non-ideal states, so there will be different sorts of non-ideal individuals, and we shall see that in opposition to the philosopher-king, whose affective and desiring elements are subordinate to reason, Socrates will eventually present the “democratic” and the “tyrannical” man, for whom, as Hume put it, reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. To avoid the undesirable social consequences of that belief, Hume fell back on the conservative morality of his day. Plato could, at the end of book four, have done the same, but chose a wholly different course, only defensible by the positing of a metaphysical universe. For thus far, to put it in more Platonic language, we have been working in the world of belief: true belief, as it turns out, but still only belief, and Plato has held since the Meno that, though this may at times be all that is needed to deal with practical problems, it is inherently unstable, being liable, as the Phaedo implied, to buckle in times of adversity (or of intellectual sharp practice).   •  Book five begins with Polemarchus and then Adeimantus, soon to be backed by the rest of the gathering, including Thrasymachus (whose intervention is characteristically colorful), calling Socrates to account. He is trying to slope off (449c) without providing more information about the “community of women and children” that he finds adumbrated by the proverb “friends have all things in common.” And so, as Socrates puts it—hinting to readers of the Republic that the literary form of the dialogue is influenced by the mimes of Sophron—after the men’s drama we proceed to the women’s (451c).   134 

The Republic Socrates’ reply to his interlocutors, however, is prefaced by an admission that he feels himself on very uncertain ground (450e). His primary concern is to defend the thesis that, while women are importantly different from men, these differences have nothing to do with their suitability as guardians. Such ideas probably reflect not only historical debate among his younger followers, but also popular mockery by comic playwrights, the effects of which on readers of the Republic may well be contributing to his feigned hesitation. Aristophanes in the Ecclesiazusae (393 B.C.) had satirized both women in political office and the idea of a community of wives and children—the latter affording obvious scope for bawdy humor. The position that Socrates is going to take, however, depends not only on avant-garde views about female emancipation, but on a common Greek assumption about the nature of the human person, namely that sexual differentiation is purely bodily, hence that there are or should be no radical psychological differences to be taken into account in evaluating feminine capacities. In the Republic that is coupled with the idea that in the present life the value of a human being is not intrinsic; rather it is acquired through the particular excellences displayed in society, which, as we shall see, will make the virtuous capable of what for the first time in book ten—and later in the Theaetetus, Timaeus, and Laws—Plato will refer to as attaining likeness to God. Since, however, such larger ideas about human value—associated in Plato with eugenic theorizing—do not affect the immediate thrust of Socrates’ specific argument in book five—that women are capable of undertaking the responsibilities of guardians (except insofar as they may make his project seem less practical [cf. 450c]), I leave them for an appendix. My main concern is not the linking of Socrates’ views of human sexuality and human value with a distasteful eugenics, but with the nature of the guardians and their education and the resultant claim that moral conventionalism (such as we have seen still predominates among the disputants at the end of book four) can only be defeated by strong metaphysical claims about the nature of the human mind and its proper objects.   135 

The Republic That, Socrates wants to argue, must be recognized and promoted by guardians both male and female. Yet in the discussion of the community of women and children itself the metaphysical dimension is still kept closely under wraps. Near the beginning of his presentation Socrates asks whether female nature is completely different from male (453b), and elicits the reply that it is different. The question might generate a contradiction: if women are completely different, they would be unfitted to be guardians, yet it has been agreed that they should pursue the same occupations as men. Logical tricksters would make much of this (454a), though the resolution is simple enough: there are differences between males and females, but not relevant differences (454d). As far as guardian qualities are concerned, men may be generally superior, but women are good enough. Hence there is nothing “unnatural” about giving the appropriate women a full cultural and physical training (456b). It is contemporary society that is unnatural. My proposals, concludes Socrates, are both feasible and beneficial (457c). The next few pages deal with the need to end traditional family relationships among the guardians: a proposal intended to prevent family rivalries from undermining loyalty to the wider community, as regularly happened in Greek cities. The aim, as Socrates explains (462b), is to ensure that all the citizens have similar experiences of pleasures and pain: all will grieve when the city is in trouble and rejoice when it prospers (465c). But, despite the complacency of Socrates’ interlocutors, the scheme seems highly impractical. As Aristotle was among the first to point out, the desired loyalty to the wider group is not to be so easily generated. “Better a real cousin,” he commented drily, “than a Platonic son” (Politics 2, 1262a). Indeed in the Laws, although Plato (in the guise of “the Athenian”) continues to insist that women should undergo similar intellectual and physical training to men and should be eligible for public office, he has abandoned the Republic’s ending of the traditional family (6.770d, 785b; 7.804d). In the Republic itself, Socrates presses on, insisting   136 

The Republic that under such arrangements the guardians will be happy (466a), and thus allaying a doubt raised at the beginning of book four. The question of how this happy outcome is to be secured is still delayed as he proceeds to lay down rules as to how children, born for the city (460e, 461a), are to be habituated safely to military campaigning (467ff) and how campaigns against fellow Greeks are to be waged more humanely. But before Socrates is allowed to proceed with such details, Glaucon again pulls him up short (471c), demanding to know how the whole project might be achieved, a demand that Socrates compares to the proverbial third wave (472a). Further byplay signals how important is the stage we have now reached in the argument. For we are now at the center of the ring composition that is the Republic. As in the Symposium Diotima moves from the lesser to the greater mysteries, so now conventionalism in morals and politics is to be superseded, and Plato goes ahead to complete the project that, with benefit of hindsight, we can see him developing since the beginning of his career. The educational scheme presented thus far is incomplete; the guardians must understand the metaphysics of morals if their actions are not to be governed at best by true opinion rather than by knowledge. The guardians are to be “Platonic” philosophers, for, as Socrates puts it, since our inquiry is into the nature of justice and injustice (472b), and since we want to envisage an actual perfect society, not the theoretical model we have so far constructed (472e, 473a), “there is no end of evils for our cities, nor, I think, for the human race, unless either philosophers become kings in our cities or those now called kings and rulers become genuinely and adequately philosophical” (473d)—which means that Socrates must spell out the nature, not merely of a cultural, but of a philosophical education by identifying the transcendent values with which that education must be concerned. That will entail a going back to the Forms of the Phaedo and the Symposium, but in addition, as we shall see, a substantial development of his metaphysics. Plato’s first move in identifying the true philosopher brings him   137 

The Republic back to love. Just as lovers are attracted to any example of what they love (beautiful boys, wine, honor), and not merely to a single example, so the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, loves every form of wisdom (475b). But, objects Glaucon, that is to identify as philosophers those who rush from one theatre to another to be spectators as often as possible, but who would never get involved in a philosophical debate. There is something in that, replies Socrates; philosophers are indeed spectators, but in a very special sense. They are spectators of “the truth”: that is, of something objective existing beyond their own minds. By this route is Socrates able to introduce the Forms into the Republic for the first time. The manner of their introduction is unexpected (476a). Moral terms, says Socrates, come in sets of opposites: beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, good and bad, and “all the Forms of things.” This might give the impression—for the first time—that there are Forms of negatives (ugly, unjust, bad), not least because it appears that Plato was inclined in the early days of the theory to think of Forms as implied wherever there is a common name—to deploy, that is, what I have called the one-over-many argument. But these apparent counter-Forms play no role in the Republic, and it is probable that Plato already held that a moral negative can be recognized without invoking a negative Form, so long as we know its positive opposite. Thus the lover of beauty will recognize its absence—that is, ugliness. Yet the apparent difficulty, when recognized, indicates that a crude application of one-over-many arguments for the existence of specific Forms will have to be modified. Socrates makes no further attempts to justify the existence of Forms, soon to be clearly recognizable as the separate and transcendent realities we have already met in the Phaedo and Symposium. Rather he assumes them, and observes that those who enjoy being spectators of Forms are the real philosophers. Such people—few in number—take pleasure in viewing “the nature of beauty itself” (476b). While the viewer only of beautiful particulars is living in a dream and will not understand if you point him to the knowledge—   138 

The Republic note the word—of beauty itself, the philosopher can recognize both beauty itself and that which participates in it without confusing the two. He alone is truly awake, and while the ordinary spectator may have opinions or beliefs (which may be true or false, but are not selfjustifying), only the philosopher will have knowledge, for, as we shall see, he is able to account for the special and unchanging objects he knows. This entails that moral values cannot be explained or justified without reference to Forms, and that, though theatre-spectators are familiar with what they see, they cannot understand it. Without Forms nothing can be understood, and that use of understood is intelligible if we think back to the man in the Meno who knows how to travel from Athens to Larissa. He knows the road, because he has been there, but does not understand it (indeed the notion of understanding it would be unintelligible), since it is not a Form. It seems that individuals can be known (as well as known about), but that understanding demands an intelligible world. The Meno at least foreshadows that distinction; later the Theaetetus will develop it further. That said, Plato needs to tell us more about these Forms, now to be recognized as the subject matter of the guardians’ higher education. So far Socrates has concentrated largely on epistemological claims, distinguishing between what he now labels “knowledge,” which is infallible, and “belief,” which is not (477e). To proceed further, however, he has already turned, without naming him, to Parmenides’ claim that if one knows, one must know something rather than nothing. (We must await the Timaeus to see how Plato explains a claim to know nothing.) And that something must exist (476e). But, he continues, pace Parmenides, perhaps there is something that can be said both to exist and not exist—and by that he means particulars. But here we must be careful; Socrates is not thinking about existence as such: he would not want to deny that particulars exist in some way. The question is in what way. There are in fact many ways in which particulars do not exist in the way Forms exist: thus they do not exist eternally; they neither always look the same nor indeed always remain the same as they were. All of which implies,   139 

The Republic Socrates claims, that “belief ” and “knowledge” have different objects. Otherwise they would have to be indistinguishable—which in turn would imply that I cannot know whether a mere “belief ” about Forms (I may have read about them in a Platonic dialogue) is true or not. In the case of Forms, either one knows them or one does not. Knowing and “knowing about” (or “believing”) would therefore be very different. And as we shall see, to know means to have “seen” with one’s mind. To illuminate all this Socrates returns to the theatrical spectator (479a) and puts to him the question: Cannot all these apparently beautiful, just, and holy things at times appear ugly, unjust, and unholy? And the same goes for what is double or large or small. Hence those who judge such ambiguous qualities as though they were unambiguous are mistaken. The ordinary man’s judgments about them are merely more or less helpful opinions, since what he claims to know both is and is not what he calls it. But those who look at things in themselves and take pleasure in them as always the same and unchanging are philosophers and have knowledge (480a). It has already been agreed that the philosophers understand what participates in the character of the Form as well as the Form itself, and without confusing the one with the other (476d). So now we know what kind of spectator a philosopher is, and book six opens with a choice. Which kind of spectator is suited to rule, to be a guardian? And some of the distinguishing marks of the philosopher are rehearsed once more. He is in love with learning; he has a hatred of falsehood and a love of truth (a presumption that highlights unresolved tensions, both in the earlier tale of the “noble lie” and in the treatment of eugenics—cf. 490b—to which I shall return in an appendix). Being concentrated on the pleasures of the mind, he will give up the pleasures of the body (485d), and he will have no fear of death: an echo of the Phaedo, though the asceticism is less blatant. At this point Adeimantus raises an interesting methodological objection, which again reminds us of a key section of the Meno,   140 

The Republic this time of Meno’s complaint that Socrates can paralyze you like a stingray. No one could argue against what you say, Socrates (487b), says Adeimantus, but your opponent will be uneasy, feeling like an inexperienced draughts player up against an expert. He makes a false move and finds himself trapped, as you trap your opponents in argument, but he is not persuaded, convinced that most of those addicted to philosophy, even the best of them, turn out quite useless in society, of no help to the city. The “victim” of Socratic draughts playing could well be Thrasymachus at the end of book one. This objection—serious, though ad hominem—gives Socrates his chance. It is true, he allows, that in our society this is how philosophers turn out. That is because in our society philosophical natures have little chance of avoiding corruption. (Here we may think of the autobiographical section of the Seventh Letter and Plato’s conclusion that none of the existing political options offers any chance of good government [cf. 497b].) In contemporary polities, continues Socrates, those endowed with a philosophical nature are at great risk. If they get a bad education, as is likely, they will become notorious villains (unless they get divine assistance [492a, 492c], as did Socrates himself through his “divine sign” [496c]). It is not so much a matter of their being corrupted by a few Sophists as of the weight of public opinion. Few unaided can withstand the immense pressures of that opinion in the assembly, in the courts, at the theatre, and elsewhere. What Sophists do, in effect, is flatter those who promote the dominant opinion—like giving a wild animal what it likes. Popular opinion, like that wild animal, is incapable of distinguishing beauty from beautiful things. In such a world the philosophical nature grows ambitious, arrogant, and ostentatious. It is hard not to fancy that here Plato alludes to Alcibiades, the drunken truth teller of the Symposium who might have become a great Socratic, but gave up philosophy in favor of vain political ambition. As the Gorgias had claimed long ago, Socrates himself is the only true politician among the Athenians. And his death was only too predictable, for the philosopher is like a man falling into a den of wild animals; they will   141 

The Republic kill him before he has the chance to do himself or anyone else the good that they resist (496d). Given such a situation, Socrates at last concludes, only if philosophers themselves can be in positions of power is political sanity possible—an unlikely but not an impossible outcome (499d, 502c). The general public will have to realize that the true philosopher can only do them good, because only he can plan the fortunes of the city with reference to a “divine pattern” (500d). And that brings us to the very core of the Republic: the theory of the Form of the Good and the precise nature of the special education the guardians will need if they are to understand its nature and the guarantee of moral and political rectitude it provides (502d). Starting his exposition, Socrates says that we must go back to the beginning, and he recapitulates some of the qualities his educational scheme has developed thus far, emphasizing above all that the philosophical nature must be trained in the right attitudes toward pleasure and pain (503e). But all this preliminary training must be directed to what is most important, that theme “which you always hear me discussing”—though as far as the dialogues are concerned, this is not the case. What Socrates has been always discussing, he says, is not merely Forms in general, but the Form of the Good (505a). However, since he goes on to assimilate the good with the beautiful, perhaps the reference is to the Symposium (505b). What he then says, however, is to be the key to his entire meta­ physics of morals—and in it we can recognize something of Socrates’ own original stance. Every soul follows the good and directs its actions toward it. We have a certain divine intuition of the existence of this good, but cannot get a firm grasp on what it is. Nevertheless, we all seem to be turned in some way toward an objective good. Our own modern contemporaries may suppose this to be the primitive error of a pre-philosophical mind or a mere “projection.” Plato, however, is insistent that it is an independent reality—indeed the key to an understanding of our entire universe, moral and physical. Naturally, therefore, knowledge of it by the philosopher-guardians will   142 

The Republic provide the only secure hope of good government, for without it opinions are blind: “Can you see any difference between people who have [only] a true opinion without understanding and people who, though blind, are going along the right road” (506c)? Socrates had thus far given only a negative account of the good: some people, he notes, say that the good is knowledge, but they are reduced to absurdity when they have to answer the question “Knowledge of what?” For then they reply, “Knowledge of the good”—which hardly helps (505b)! And those who talk about pleasure as the good are similarly mindless, for they cannot deny that in some sense there are bad pleasures. Naturally, however, Glaucon wants Socrates to give a more positive account of the Good, as he has of virtues such as justice and self-control. But that this is not possible is immediately signaled by Socrates saying that the dynamic of the present discussion is inappropriate for talk about the Good as such, but that he will discuss its “offspring” (506e). And he commences that investigation by again laying down the principles of his theory of Forms, expectably taking the basic exemplar, Beauty, as his prime model. There are many beauties and many goods, and there is also Beauty itself and Goodness itself (507b), Forms recognizable not by the senses, but by thought. But knowing is analogous to sense perception. Just as we require light to see an object of sense, so we need the Good to understand the objects of thought. And though the sun is not sight but a necessary precondition for sight, so is it with truth and knowledge. Beautiful though these are, the Good is more so. Truth and Beauty are like the Good, but are not the Good itself (509a). At this point Plato offers a characteristic moment of light relief. Glaucon, having apparently not understood that Socrates has already dismissed the claim that pleasure is the good, remarks, “Surely you are not suggesting that the good is pleasure?” For which he is immediately rebuked as a blasphemer before Socrates calls for further examination of the question. Which then brings us to the Platonic text (509b) perhaps most cited in antiquity, but normally   143 

The Republic explained away, diminished or passed by in embarrassed silence in recent times. Socrates tells us that the Form of the Good is the “cause” of the existence and nature of all that is known, as well as of its knowability. Without the Good, the Forms (and thus indirectly everything else) could neither exist nor be known. But the Good itself is “beyond being”; this, in light of the classical Greek assumption that to be is to be a finite, defined thing, apparently indicates that Plato is not only proposing that the Good is different in kind from the other Forms. but that it is non-finite. How precisely he understood that, and whether he was clear that the first principle must be infinite, as the neo-Platonists assumed that he must have held, is a question to which Plato himself provides no clear answer. We can, however, glean a little more about what Plato wants to say in this obscure section of the Republic. First there is no doubt that his position is an advance on anything we have seen before: neither with emphasis on a single Form in the Symposium nor in his treatment of the multiplicity of Forms in the Phaedo has Plato given any indication that, without the Good, nothing could exist and nothing could be intelligible. To deny the Good, he implies here, would negate the intended benefits, specifically for morality, of the Forms in general, thus leaving us in the world of unstable and unjustifiable opinion (508d). What Plato fails to explain, however, is the kind of “cause” the Good is intended to be—though the analogy of the Sun might suggest that he thinks of it as an essential precondition— though still as a separate essential substance—for the existence of the other Forms rather than as their directly creative principle. Yet if the Good is to be only an essential precondition for the existence of all else, another factor, namely some kind of active principle, must be invoked, and that formed principle, in defiance of the text of the Republic, would not be caused by the Good. That this difficulty must color our account of the relationship between Forms and gods—in Aristotelian terms between formal (and final) and efficient causes— is obvious and will be treated in a later chapter in connection with the Timaeus, Laws, and the so-called “unwritten doctrines.”   144 

The Republic However, at least one widely popular and reductionist explanation of the Good must be rejected. If the Good excels the Forms in such a way as to make Socrates’ interlocutors gasp (509c), it cannot be identified simply as the Forms as a whole—an idea that seems to derive from a misreading of Plato’s noting that Forms constitute an “ordered world” (kosmos, 500c). If Forms are “beings” while the Good is “beyond being,” it is highly implausible to read “beyond being” as simply “the sum of beings”; to be a sum is to be neither a cause nor a condition. Yet though the Good is not to be identified as the formal world as a whole, it is intended to explain not merely the existence of the Forms, but also that they are interconnected in various complex ways, as in the Phaedo it is clear that there is always a connection between threeness and oddness, even though all odd numbers are not threes. In his recognition that in “causing” the Forms the Good also unifies them while leaving them distinct, we may perhaps identify one reason Plato seems later to have preferred to speak of the One rather than the Good. That development, however, may also serve to focus our attention on what might seem an objection to my construction of Plato’s project in the Republic as a whole—and elsewhere. If the designation “the One” is more informative than “the Good”—and assuming that the change of name implies no substantial retraction of the metaphysics of the Good in the Republic—can we be sure that, when thinking of the Good, Plato is especially concerned to see the Good as the first principle of morality? Indeed we can, since books six and seven of the Republic are the culmination of a full-scale discussion of specifically moral terms, in particular “justice.” Although Plato introduces the Good as the “cause” of the existence and intelligibility of all the Forms—not simply the “moral” group—there is no reason to suppose that he has forgotten or changed his intentions in composing the Republic as a whole. By describing the Good as he does in the Republic—as in renaming it “the One” later on—he shows that the source (or sources) of the moral universe must also be seen as the source (or sources) of the universe as a whole, but the   145 

The Republic latter truth in no way replaces the former; hence it is in the light of the Good as the root of morality that Plato proceeds to draw his moral and political conclusions in the rest of the Republic itself. The details of the so-called Divided Line section at the end of book six (509d–511e) need not detain us at length, but two important features of Plato’s discussion should be noted: first, the intellectual importance of mathematics in general: an importance to be expected since the Meno and echoed in the discussion of the mathematical sciences in book seven as a necessary prelude to dialectic. For, as the Meno would lead us to expect, they accustom the mind to think about incorporeal substances, and with the Divided Line Plato begins to reflect on the exact relationship of mathematical activity and the objects of that activity, to dialectic properly so-called: namely the study of Forms, each of which is an exact “thing-in-itself.” Yet there is an apparently special problem for Plato in mathematics, since while the Form of Two (for example) might seem analogous to the Form of Justice, in that in each case there is a one-over-many, the status of the many might seem peculiar in the case of mathematics. Later, in the Philebus (56d), Plato will distinguish between “philosophical” and “popular” arithmetic, the former dealing with, for example, twos and threes, the latter with, say, two or three sheep. Leaving the latter objects aside, however, we should still remember that whereas philosophical arithmetic deals in twos and threes, dialectic would discuss the Form of Two (in the singular). According to Aristotle (Met. A, 987b15; M, 1076a9ff.), at some point Plato recognized this distinction, separating Forms from the “objects of mathematics,” which latter are like the Forms in being immaterial, but unlike them in being a plurality. Comment on Plato’s ultimate view of the ontological status of the “objects of mathematics” is outside the scope of my present discussion, but it is certainly necessary to ask about his views in the Republic itself. The Divided Line begins with a distinction between objects of sense perception (“what is seen”), hence of opinion, and what is understood, namely incorporeal “objects” (509d). Note that the world   146 

The Republic of opinion is the world of which we have opinion; no mention is made here of the kind of first-hand “knowledge” (with the possibility of handing on true opinion) we have seen in the Meno of, say, the road between Athens and Larissa. Next, each group is itself divided into two parts: all that is “seen” is divided between the reflections and shadows of physical objects and the physical objects themselves, the latter being less unambiguously intelligible than the former. As for the world of understanding, it too is divided between the ultimately arbitrary world of (say) mathematics, where the first principles are treated as axioms, and the upper section, where we can advance dialectically to an “unhypothetical” first principle—which we must consider further. Our immediate concern, however, is with the axiom-based section, and our question is whether this is filled entirely with mathematical objects, viewed as pluralities, as in the axiom “there are three angles in a triangle and their sum is 180 degrees.” We note that Socrates tells us that geometers, thinking about these objects, use perceptibles to explain themselves, as by drawing a diagonal, though thinking about diagonals in themselves. This part of the discussion of the Divided Line may seem disappointing, since all it seems to teach us (as we might already have inferred from the Meno) is that mathematics accustoms us to thinking abstractly, thus preparing our minds for the dialectical discussion of Forms. But it sometimes also misleads its readers into wondering whether Plato is already concerned about the exact ontological position of “mathematicals.” In fact he is not so concerned, at least directly: mathematical objects (explicated with the help of visual images) might even seem no different from the plurality of justices in different just acts or agents. Yet there is an important difference: whereas mathematics demands axioms to do its work, these axioms, though ultimately undefended, are not unintelligible—but the situation is different when we think of “just” acts or agents. For in the latter case our conventions (or axioms) are driven by the value judgments of individuals or groups of individuals (in the absence, as yet,   147 

The Republic of moral foundations), while in the former they are the products, in Plato’s view, of formally correct logical thinking. And although in the “mathematical” section of the Line Plato only talks of mathematical objects, precisely because of their pedagogical value, there is no reason to suppose he is not assuming that, just as there is a single unique Form of Justice (or of Virtue), so there is a single unique Form of Two (or of Number). The second matter of great epistemological import in the Line (ontology for the moment aside) is that Plato distinguishes (within the general rubric of intelligibles, as distinct from sensibles) between knowledge of a first principle and other kinds of knowledge—certainly of mathematical objects, and presumably of the Forms in general; he refers to the First Principle, that is, the Good (which he has just examined in the image of the Sun), as no mere hypothesis or assumption (510a). This is an unambiguous reference to theories expounded in the Meno and Phaedo, especially to the teaching of the Phaedo that in disputation we are to seek ever more general principles (“something higher”) until we reach something adequate. Yet as presented, we there recognized that “something adequate” is problematic for at least two reasons—first, because it leaves us uncertain whether Plato is thinking of something that would satisfy the disputants in a particular case, which would leave open the possibility that they would both be in error and thus agree on something in fact inadequate; and second, because in the Republic Plato is now proposing a single principle that must underlie all intellectual debate and without which no serious problem can be solved. The mathematical features of the Divided Line imply that this is not only so in morals and politics—the immediate concerns of the Republic—but that in all areas of inquiry the Good must be invoked, not least, as the Timaeus will later insist, in that understanding of the physical universe is dependent on understanding its mathematical infrastructure. That patently must be the case if the Good is to be invoked to explain, not only the existence of all that exists, but also whatever intelligibility it may possess. Plato seems to   148 

The Republic imply, here and elsewhere, that the mere fact of intelligible speech is an argument for the existence of the “unhypothetical” first principle—that is, of the Good. Moving on to book seven, we now find ourselves in the famous Cave, where we are prisoners in a world of unreality just so long as we have no philosophical enlightenment concerning the Good. And Plato seizes the chance to reiterate an earlier point: the man who somehow manages to climb out into the sunlight and then decides to return—which, we shall see later, he will be under obligation to do—will seem eccentric and out of his depth while in the darkness of the Cave—not least if he is to be involved in the courts of that shadow-land (517e). If he tries to free his fellow prisoners and lead them up into the sunlight, he will probably be killed (517a). In that upper world to which the guardian must ascend, Socrates continues, what is last seen, and that only with great difficulty, is the Form of the Good, “the cause of all that is good and right for everything” (517c). The ascent is far from easy, even for those with the appropriate talent and training. The guardians themselves are still philo-sophers, lovers of wisdom, not possessors of it as are the gods. In that sense they are like the rest of us, unless we have been corrupted by Sophists or the pressures of public conventions or the desire for fame among the ignorant, for we all have a certain native moral intuition of what is good and true and beautiful. Nevertheless, to become a guardian one must experience a conversion, a complete turning around of the soul from sense to understanding, from the physical world to the spiritual world that enlightens it (518c). For without attaining the Good, that mark at which all education— no mere stuffing in of data, but a developing of capacities—must aim, right action is impossible. This evocation of the journey to such a goal reminds us that in the Republic Plato’s metaphysics and psychology are introduced to justify an account of how a moral life and a morally run city can be achieved. The attainment of the good life is no mere theoretical exercise, but has very practical expression. Hence the good man must return to the Cave.   149 

The Republic That elicits another and predictable protest from Glaucon: Socrates is making his philosophers live a worse life when they have the prospect of a better. The retort from Socrates is that, since the guardians have benefited from the city and have indeed gained access to the best possible life, they must be just people. The call back to govern is a just demand, and so they, as just men, must obey it (520c), although as an unavoidable but proper burden rather than, as it commonly is for politicians, something to be grasped at. That is a reminder that the guardians are men and women living in society, not gods, existing in “intelligible place” (517b). At the same time it disposes of all concern that the guardians might fall victim to acrasia, to “knowing” the right course and not enacting it. For in Socrates’ view, even if I claim to know the better and yet do the worse, I merely demonstrate that I do not know the better. Thus seeing the Forms, and above all the Form of the Good, guarantees, for the Plato of the Republic—not, it will appear, for the eventual Plato—the impossibility of acting unjustly. Nevertheless, Socrates’ position has often been misunderstood. He is not saying that there is a kind of pure cognition that will invariably impel the knower to act in accordance with his knowledge. The Socratic person, as we have seen, is a philo-sopher, a lover of wisdom, an erotikos, as has been emphasized in the Symposium and will be again in the Phaedrus. His knowledge of the Form is inseparable from his love of it; he is as committed emotionally as he is intellectually to the world of Forms and the Good; his mind is not that of a Cartesian calculator, but of a Socratic lover. In book nine of the Republic, Socrates will speak of the loves of each of the three “kinds” of soul that are our potential selves. The thinking self is as much a lover of the Good as the “desiring” self is a lover of material goods and of nonmaterial goods reduced to items of consumption. Socrates is now ready to give details of the higher education of the guardians. This is to be mathematical—because mathematics raises the mind above the merely physical and material, Plato being a “Platonist in mathematics”—and dialectical—because dialectic   150 

The Republic will afford us glimpses of the metaphysical and epistemological status of the Good. Socrates spells out why this advanced education must be different in its effects from what can now be recognized as the propaedeutic courses outlined earlier in the Republic. This “tertiary” education is to be neither physical nor the kind of “musical”—that is, cultural—training we have seen hitherto, and that gave the guardians not understanding, but only the prerequisite good habits and true opinions that, based on the best conventions, still lack philosophical justification. I pass over the details of the mathematical training that Socrates intends to prescribe, pausing only to notice a bold and informative anachronism. After dealing with plane geometry, Socrates wants (before reaching astronomy) to encourage the study of the geometry of three-dimensional solids, to which Glaucon objects that solutions in such advanced matters have not yet been formulated (528b). This is true for the dramatic date of the Republic, and for Socrates’ own lifetime, but one of Plato’s own mathematical friends—the young Theaetetus, after whom the later dialogue is named—by the time Plato wrote had achieved distinguished work in this very area, and Plato pays him this tribute at the price of depicting a Socrates whose perspicacity is beyond the ken of his historical counterpart—and on a strictly non-philosophical subject. Finally (531d) Socrates reaches dialectic, to which mathematical studies are a prelude; for a mathematician (as we can already realize from the comments on hypotheses in book six, reiterated in book seven at 533c) is not a dialectician, not a philosopher in the SocraticPlatonic sense. For the dialectician can identify not merely coherence, based on ungrounded axioms—Plato would have little sympathy for a theory of truth as coherence—but reality as such. His knowledge and understanding, that is, embrace not only the nature of each thing, but the Good itself (534c), the coping-stone and validating principle of the whole educational structure. All this looks clear enough, but it again reminds us of the salient ambiguity in the metaphysics of book six, where we noted that, al  151 

The Republic though the Good is to be distinguished from the other Forms, the precise nature of that difference—and of the Good’s causal character—remains obscure. At 506c Socrates says that he is only claiming to expound the “offspring” of the Good, a point he reiterates in book seven when he warns Glaucon that he will not be able to follow a detailed account of the dialectic of the Good (533a)—which surely must be approached in a different way from the techniques used to treat of other Forms. Emotionally, too, we will react in a special way to the vision of the Good. For the other Forms are seen in the light of the Good, but to look at the “sun” itself is blinding; we have to accustom ourselves to the brightness, like those who escape from the Cave. And a moment’s reflection will make the accompanying epistemological constraint equally clear, for the existence of the universe as a whole, and of the Forms in particular, is to be explained with reference to the existence of the Form of the Good— whether as a necessary condition or as something more—but the Good itself cannot be accounted for in similar fashion: it would be pointless to say, without further explanation, that the Good is the cause of the Good; at very least it would “cause” itself in a sense very different from that in which it causes anything else. Either Plato is not clear as to the precise nature of the Good and of its powers, and hence of quite how it must be tackled philosophically, or he has decided that such a discussion is out of place in the context of the primarily moral and political concerns of the Republic. Whatever the explanation—and I shall return to the matter in a later chapter— Socrates makes clear that the central section, the metaphysical core of the Republic, is as detailed as it needs to be for present purposes when, at the end of book seven—the book distinctions are not Plato’s own—he agrees with Glaucon that the discussion of the best individual and the best city is now complete (541b).   •  However, the original challenge posed by Thrasymachus’ nihilism has not yet been fully answered. We now know that, if he is to justify his position, the anti-Thrasymachean must appeal to the nature of   152 

The Republic the “real” world; to the existence of objective moral realities; above all, to the Forms of Beauty, Justice and Goodness. Yet though we now have a metaphysical basis for our claims about the proper mentality and consequent behavior of the philosopher-king, and must accept that in the absence of that basis morality cannot escape from conventionalism and its counterpart, positive law, we still do not know enough of the character of the tyrant who is the Thrasymachean hero, hence cannot yet properly compare what Socrates and Thrasymachus would see as radically alternative polities. That sets Plato a literary problem. It would appear implausible that if the ideal state could be established and the character of its guardians perfected—though we shall have noticed hints that a mere mortal cannot “yet” be absolutely perfected—it could ever decline from that perfection. Yet Plato needs to show that even the second-best state bears a certain resemblance to its ideal counterpart, while at the same time harboring vices that the ideal state does not know. And these vices will have their spuriously attractive side, thus making the second-best constitution more seductive than it should be. Plato believes that if the ideal state were to falter in even comparatively minor particulars, the trend from then on could only be exponentially downward. His ultimate purpose is to show the anti-hero of Thrasymachus as the logical end-product of that trend, and to do that he proceeds through a developing series of worsening constitutions, indicating the nature of their increasingly flawed principles and eventually ending up in tyranny. He has already warned us that the “perfect” tyrant would be the philosopher-king corrupted (495b). Books seven and eight of the Republic are the counterpart of books two to five, for whereas two to five expound the genesis of an ideal society, these latter books detail its degeneration. Plato admits that it is not easy to see how the perfect city could decline (546a), but he offers a metaphysical principle to explain how it must: everything that has come into existence—which excludes Forms and other possibly immortal entities—must also pass away. The reason he finds for the passing away of the ideal city will be a   153 

The Republic mistake in the eugenics program, a possibility for which an elaborate mathematical explanation is offered—not seriously, it might seem. But be that one way or another, inferior beings will emerge to become officeholders and will tend to neglect not only philosophy, but both cultural and—to a lesser extent—physical education, while a love of commerce, accompanied by greedy rivalry and only tempered by a sense of honor linked to power and success (549a), will lead to both hoarding and secret extravagance. This sort of constitution he designates “Spartan” or “Cretan” and eventually “timocracy”; already its more oligarchic features—not least the hostility between rulers and ruled—are visible. The “timocrat’s” is a divided soul in which the reasoning element is threatened by an alliance between the other two human capacities (550b). Plato’s hostility to the accumulation of wealth as pandering to the lowest desires of the soul stands out in his prescriptions for the daily life of the guardians, and was certainly justified by contemporary history. Even a blind man, observes Socrates, can see how a timocracy will degenerate into oligarchy, that domination of the despised poor by the wealthy few (550d ff.). The love of money will engender among the rich a contempt for the law: the greater the love of money the less will be the love of virtue, and the effects will be obvious: public offices will go to the rich rather than to the competent (551c); the city will become two perpetually feuding cities, one of the rich, the other of the poor; the rulers will be too few to defend their city and too mean to supply even the necessary revenues; an increasing number of the citizens will be reduced to beggary, which is always accompanied by crime. In the case of the oligarchs themselves, disorder in the soul, already observable in the timocrat, is much increased: now the reasoning and honor-seeking elements in the human character are wholly subordinated to the desire for wealth. Rationality becomes merely a means to successful acquisition—indeed a slave to it—while honor is given not to the philosophically wise, but to the rich (553d). In the oligarch, of course, there will also develop other lusts, kept strictly under control lest they interfere   154 

The Republic with profits. Thus division in the soul is increased, with “material” desire set against material desire, though in the civil war in the oligarch’s soul the apparently more decent and respectable desires will normally win the day. Yet in Plato’s judgment, and in many of the historical circumstances of his time, oligarchy bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The rich will aim to possess the wealth of others of their own number and, as these are driven into poverty, a discontented and violent group, intent on revolution, is drawn from the ranks of the oligarchs themselves (555d), who, though personally mean and miserly, will tolerate luxury and idleness among their children, who now fail in the basic tests of moral education as outlined for the guardians, being unable to resist either pleasure or pain (556b). In these circumstances the oppressed see their chance: it is mere cowardice to submit any longer—a belief that takes a firmer hold when the city is at war and the unpreparedness of its rulers becomes apparent. Hence comes civil strife, which may be exacerbated as the oligarchs call for help from other oligarchic cities, and the revolutionaries—now terming themselves democrats—similarly seek help from likely sympathizers abroad. Hence arises democracy, viewed as a paradise of freedom— meaning lack of restraint and absolute equality—in which anyone can do and say what he likes. There is no pressure on the competent to hold office, or to obey the government (557e)—indeed those who do are despised (562d)—while rulers who attempt to restrain “freedom” are cursed as “oligarchs” (in modern-speak, “fascists”) (564d). The few restraining laws are treated with contempt, while to be a successful politician one has only to pose as a “friend of the people.” There is no respect for merit; the dominant ethos favors egalitarianism, absolute personal autonomy, and tolerance of whatever is offered. There is no distinction between the satisfaction of necessary and unnecessary desires with their associated pleasures (558d ff.). Here we see a radical difference from oligarchy, where other desires are repressed in favor of the lust for money, whereas in the soul of   155 

The Republic the democrat any extravagant behavior can be justified by some sort of seductive argument, the mind being again, and more radically, an instrument of the passions. These habits will involve the corruption of moral language so as to promote the disastrous relativism that the Theory of Forms was invoked to counter: shame is simplemindedness, self control is cowardice, economy is peasant meanness, anarchy is freedom, shamelessness is courage (560de); all pleasures are equal and of equal value. Democracy thus understood passes easily into tyranny, as Mirabeau is replaced by Robespierre, Kerensky by Lenin, and certainly there are features of Greek democracy that align it with the People’s Democracies of more recent time: not least in that there is no appeal (as Socrates found) from the will of the sovereign “people” as enacted in their courts. We can also perceive features of an ideologically liberal dictatorship, not least in the relativism. In democracy as viewed by Plato, respect is lost: a father will come to fear his sons (563a), whose only wish is to be free. He tries to humor them by behaving youthfully himself, in dread of being seen as autocratic. Below the surface of such a society more dangerous trends are developing. Democracies seem to generate three classes of citizens: the ruling group consists of loud-mouthed louts who dominate the Assembly and prevent rival voices being heard. Then there are the rich, ever intent on making money. Finally there is the mass of ordinary people who are kept on the side by “honey” extracted from the rich by the ruling élite. Naturally this is resented, and the rich, willy-nilly, become genuine oligarchs, against whom the “Leader of the People” (emerging from among the rulers) is fattened up and glorified by the mob (565c), on which it suits him to fawn just until he can exile or murder his political opponents and eventually secure a corps of bodyguards for his protection. Those who form it are likely to be foreign adventurers and mercenaries after the “leader” eventually alienates even those citizens through whom he has come to power, and whose revolt will be signaled too late. Meanwhile the leader will try to distract attention from himself   156 

The Republic by stirring up foreign wars. These and his other “expenses” are paid for by money expropriated from temples, then from victims of his political purges. He has indeed now become a tyrant. Modern and historic parallels are all too easy to find. We are at the end of book eight of the Republic, and it only remains to describe the tyrannical character in more detail. Before embarking on that, however, Socrates observes that he is dissatisfied with what he said earlier (558d–59d) about desires and their consequent pleasures. The analysis that follows not only completes the more recent discussion, but fills out the earlier treatment of the various kinds of soul we harbor: the rational, the “spirited” or “affective,” the materially desiring. Socrates observes that some of our physical desires (and pleasures) are natural and necessary (e.g., for food and shelter), others natural and unnecessary (e.g., for sex), and the majority neither natural nor necessary. As for the tyrannical man, he is the democrat with all semblance of law and order removed (574e); no lust, no crime is too base for him, whether in his attitude to his parents, his country, or anyone else. Surrounded as he is by foreign mercenaries and flatterers, he will have no true friends (576a). The evil acts of which even the good man dreams, the tyrant performs. His soul is driven by a mélange of desires and tormented with frustration at being unable to satisfy them (577e). In his eros—the word might in this context be translated “lust”— for domination and for every degraded pleasure, he is the malignant shadow of the philosopher-king. Such, with fear as his attendant, will be the lot of a tyrannical man if unfortunate enough actually to become a tyrant (578c). He will be envious, distrustful, unjust, friendless, impious. And reverting once more to the aspects and types of soul, Socrates notes that the lowest or “desiring” element lusts for food, drink, sex, and the money that seems to be the key to the other “pleasures”; the spirited element concerns itself with power, victory, and fame (581b), while the better soul seeks for truth. Hence three basic types of human being, depending on which possibility of the soul is most instanti  157 

The Republic ated: the lover of wisdom, the lover of honor, and the lover of material gain (581c), each arriving at his peculiar pleasure. But the lover of truth recognizes that the pleasures of the materialist, who allots unnatural pleasures the same status as necessary ones, are delusory, being neither pure nor lasting (586a). Thus finally Socrates, throwing in another bizarre piece of mathematics, rejects all possibility that the tyrant could be happy; he is 729 times less happy than the guardian (587e)! Thrasymachus has now been answered. The guardian, we now know, is happy so far as happiness is possible in our present life, but he is happy not because he has sought happiness directly, but because the good life will bring happiness indirectly, and the guardian has come to understand that it will. Adeimantus’ anxiety about the guardian’s happiness in book four (echoed by Glaucon’s in book seven) has now been assuaged. There is a sense, Socrates concludes, in which it makes no difference whether the ideal city is achievable or remains a pattern in heaven (592d); it is the proper model for the city as for the soul, and the true philosopher will be a politician in none other.   •  It might seem that the original project of the Republic has been completed and the work should conclude with book nine. Socrates has drawn pen portraits of the philosopher-king on the one hand and the tyrant on the other. His presentation has not been dialectical in the manner of the argument with Thrasymachus. Admittedly he has “proved” that the philosopher king is 729 times the happier of the two, but his wider message and tactic—with the appropriate metaphysical infrastructure—is clear enough. We have examined the souls of the two rivals and are invited to choose which we would rather resemble. If this psychological inspection is accurate and we are still prepared to prefer the brutal, fearful, and friendless tyrant, Socrates has nothing more to say. So why is he not silent after speaking of the ideal city as, at the very least, a “pattern laid up in heaven”? I have argued that the Republic as a whole is a ring composition. Its central core is the metaphysics, the account of the Forms and   158 

The Republic above all of the Form of the Good. But if the ring is to be complete, we can expect it to finish as it began, with anticipations of death. And so it does, not with book nine, but at the end of book ten, where the elaborate “myth” of Er gives us a picture, a fanciful, nonscientific account pointing toward a truth, and describing the fit rewards of the just and penalties of the unjust in the afterlife, complete with a warning that we ourselves are responsible for the evils we do and there is no use in ignorantly blaming the gods (617e). This theological myth is distinct from the argument that Thrasymachean nihilism is philosophically flawed and psychologically disastrous; it is added by Socrates at the end of the debate to indicate that things are providentially arranged at the cosmic as well as at the earthly level (612bc). The Republic concludes with Socrates saying that if we accept the lessons of the myth, we shall be “saved”; our souls will escape pollution, and in this world and the next we shall be friends both with ourselves and with the gods (621c). Yet—at first sight surprisingly—there is more to book ten than eschatological myth. We find in it further analysis of the “imitative” arts, especially poetry and painting, and analysis now of a metaphysical as well as a moral sort, while the renewed discussion provides Plato with an opportunity to develop the account of Forms beyond what has been proposed in the earlier books. And all is followed, as a prelude to the myth, by a new argument (distinct from those of the Phaedo) for the immortality of the soul. There are two possible explanations as to why these subjects should be situated where they are—unless they are a later addition to the original Republic. In the first place there was nowhere else to put them: in a modern book they would perhaps be labeled appendix A and B, but ancient books were innocent of appendices; “additional” material has to find a place in the main body of the text. The second, not unrelated explanation applies at least to the revived analysis of art—namely that the earlier discussion took place before Forms had been introduced, so what we find in book ten could not have appeared in books two or three.   159 

The Republic The renewed analysis of the arts is certainly introduced rather abruptly, and at first sight it may seem strange that Socrates begins with painting; “fine arts” were hardly prominent in the earlier discussion. Nevertheless, painting is perhaps the most obvious example of an “imitative” art, and imitation is what Plato wants to consider further, with Socrates saying that he does not understand its purpose. In developing this theme he immediately reintroduces the Forms, but in a much more generalized way than appeared in the earlier books, where only moral and mathematical Forms were considered. Here in book ten Socrates looks at a wider group, and more as he did at the end of the Cratylus, proposes the existence of a Form wherever we find particulars with a common name (596a). We have noticed this idea underlying the discussion from the time Forms— albeit not yet separate—were first introduced, and it has already generated ambiguity in book five, where there seemed to be Forms of negative qualities: of bad as well as good, of unjust as well as just. In book ten there are no moral forms at all, and nothing further about the Form of the Good. Socrates concerns himself with Forms of physical objects such as the painter will imitate: hence couches and tables (596b). These the painter imitates not as they are, but as they appear to be (596e), thus interposing an imitation of an imitation refracted through his own mind. While we might argue that this allows the artist to draw attention to reality through what he highlights in his art, Socrates’ concern is that it is more likely to distract the viewer from even the limited reality of physical objects, thus leading him into a delusive world. So he distinguishes three types of “couch”: the Form, the couch the carpenter makes, and the painter’s imitation of it. But having identified first the carpenter, then the painter as maker of their respective couches, he tells us that the maker of the “natural” couch—i.e., the Form of couch, is a god (597b). And the Form he makes must be unique, for if there were a plurality, another “hyper-Form” would be generated to account for the common characteristics of the two—and a vicious regress might seem to follow: a theme to which Plato will return directly in the Parmenides.   160 

The Republic Most commentators dismiss the introduction of the god on the grounds that nowhere else does Plato attribute such superior status to a god or gods. Normally the gods, as is specifically said in the Phaedrus, are ontologically inferior—since it is by knowing the Forms that they are divine. In Plato’s later thought, however, such ideas seem to be called into question, and it is not unreasonable to see that change beginning at the end of the Republic itself. For to say that Plato introduces a god as maker of the Form of couch merely to produce a symmetrical relationship with the work of the carpenter and the painter is to ignore the careful construction of most of the early and middle dialogues—not least of the Republic—and this current section (597b–d) is too extended to be ascribed to a mere slip of Plato’s pen. We should therefore be more attentive to the implications of Plato’s proposing of Forms of radically different sorts, apparently driven by the idea (made explicit in book ten) that there is a Form wherever we find particulars with a common name. That would entail generating Forms not only of what Aristotle will call qualities (“good,” “just,” “round”), but also Forms of substances (as bed and couch; or as shuttle in the Cratylus). But while it might seem easy to think of God (or a god) making the Form of bed—that is, being the constructor of the idea or concept of bed—it is much harder to think of him “making” justice and beauty—though reckless theologians have sometimes attributed such activities to God. It would make much more sense, of course, to say that God is good and just and that he makes (or creates) beds and trees. The central argument of the Republic, however, turns only on “moral” Forms; only in book ten does a general argument for the existence of Forms generate Forms of a wholly different class. But after the Republic Plato will become increasingly aware that the argument from common names will introduce unwelcome varieties of Forms (we have already noted Injustice); he then seems to have determined that the common name indicates a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the existence of a Form, so that further, and disputable, criteria will also   161 

The Republic have to be met. Indeed, already in book ten of the Republic, we see him moving toward supposing that “substance Forms” are best described as the products of a god’s mind—in which case they will be divine concepts, whereas “moral” forms would be divine attributes, therefore not concepts, but themselves substances viewed as aspects of the divine substance. In later chapters I shall inquire more precisely how far he would advance along that road—which will in turn shed further light on the plausibility of those separate realities whose existence he here sees as implicit if the binding force of moral language is to be explained and justified. Any such development, of course, would have implications for the self-predication problems that, as we have seen, arose when Plato decided to advance from ontologically “nondescript” Forms in the Euthyphro to full-blown “separate” entities in the Cratylus, Symposium, and Phaedo; but on this score there is no further advance in the Republic. It is not only details of the theory of Forms that are called into question in book ten. As we have observed from earlier dialogues, Plato accepted the “Pythagorean” tenet that the soul is immortal, and in the Phaedo proposed four arguments to prove it. It now appears that his account in the Republic of the “kinds” of soul that we are or have may cast doubt on such arguments; hence, and again rather abruptly, after Socrates has enumerated the blessings of virtue in this present life, he comes back to the question of immortality (rendered more puzzling by “tripartition”), since Glaucon (608d) asserts that he has no certainty on the matter (608d). His argument in brief is that if vice cannot kill the soul, viewed as potentially separable from the body, then nothing else can. The problem is that if the soul is composite, it must be liable to disintegrate (611b, 612a). Hence, as Socrates puts it, we need to know whether it is ultimately simple (as in the Phaedo) or composite—the latter being what the theory of “tripartition” might imply. Certainly we need to consider it in its pure state (611c), but what is the nature of that state? Ultimately, in the Republic the question seems to be left in abeyance, though the emphasis on the soul’s potential for purity   162 

The Republic suggests that Plato inclines to the view that “tripartition”—indicating the possibility of variety of lives and variety of conditions for the soul—obtains only when the soul is accompanied by the body; however, bodily effects—stains, as it were, on the soul—will persist in the afterlife, as the account of post-mortem rewards and punishments proposed both in the Republic and elsewhere requires. Plato will return to the question, but from a rather different angle, in the Phaedrus, and differently again in the Timaeus. Perhaps his growing uncertainty is revealed when Socrates is made to speak, a little later in the present book of the Republic, not simply of attaining likeness to god, but likeness to god so far as is humanly possible (613ab). But that latter phrase needs closer attention: likeness to god is not mere immortality, for vicious souls are also immortal. The relevant sort of likeness to god is not something with which we are born, but something we attain. A corollary of that is the callousness visible in the eugenics theory of the Republic itself, where our mere existence (even as immortal souls) has no immediate value; value, as a possible consequence of immortality, is something our soul-body combination earns, not something we (as distinct from our purified souls) possess by nature. Most commentators, and not least Christian ones, have missed this essential point in appropriating Platonic themes.   •  Now that we have reached the end of the Republic, it is time to take stock. From the point of view of the first principles of ethics, two substantial developments have been identified. Plato’s new account of the “empirical” soul is much improved since that of the Symposium and the Phaedo. It now enables him to combine Socrates’ original claim that we all seek the good—and that therefore there is a sense in which failing to live well derives from a primarily intellectual mistake (though it is possible not to want to know what appears as inconvenient)—with his own more commonsensical view that weakness of will is possible, that there is a genuine sense in which we can know the better and do the worse. For the Republic   163 

The Republic now teaches that at least while in the body, our soul is not simple, but composite. Recognition of that is essential if we are to explain the conflict between our various sets of desires, for the good and for lesser or apparent goods: that is—given that we shall become what we most desire—between potential selves: between resemblance to the philosopher-king or to one of his rivals, even to his ultimate antithesis, the tyrant. But we have also understood that the possibility that the soul is composite by nature would threaten it with disintegration; only the simple can be immortal. Thus there have been substantial advances in psychology, and so in expounding how it is possible to develop the capacity to live the good life. More fundamental to the thesis of the present book are at least three substantial advances in metaphysics. Most importantly, all other Forms have been subordinated to the Form of the Good, without which they could not exist, though the exact mode of their dependence remains obscure. Secondly, the introduction of the Form of the Good would appear to eliminate the possibility of “negative” Forms—though Plato does not draw that conclusion explicitly. And if that is the case, then doubt is cast on the axiom that there is a form corresponding to each set of particulars with a common name, even though in book ten that is formally proposed (perhaps with reference to an original and presumed complete explanation of the very necessity for Forms). Thirdly, serious doubts arise in the same book ten about the “origin” of substance-forms, perhaps especially the Forms of artifacts, but also of natural objects. It is suggested that they are constructs of a god—which might further reinforce doubts about the criteria by which we identify “freestanding” Forms in the first place. We should reasonably expect that when moral and political issues are less central to Plato’s deliberations than they are in the Republic, these metaphysical difficulties remaining at the heart of his defense of moral truths will be further investigated.

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 7  Reconstructions From Parmenides to Philebus

Composed in the mid-360s, the Parmenides, Theaetetus, and Phaedrus form a revisionary triptych, the principal targets of which are the Phaedo and the Republic. The Parmenides affords an opportunity to start reshaping the Theory of Forms, adding precision and eliminating possible misinterpretations—chiefly about the scope of the intelligible world and the relationship of Forms to particulars. Plato progresses in the latter case while leaving the former still problematical, not least as to whether any distinction should be made between substance—forms, perhaps, as the Republic said, made by God, and forms of values. For its part, the Theaetetus expands the Republic’s epistemology, while in the Phaedrus we meet a different sort of reconstruction: in light of the Republic’s “tripartition” of the soul, Diotima’s account of eros in the Symposium needs to be adjusted. For my dating of the triptych, a hint may be given in the Parmenides: in the second part of that dialogue Parmenides’ interlocutor is a young man, chosen as likely to give little trouble. His name is Aristotle, which might denote a late-fifth-century oligarch but also looks like a Platonic joke at the expense of a young and brilliant new recruit— perhaps already skeptical about Forms—who had joined the Academy in 367, and who apparently first attached the name “Third Man” to one of the more important arguments of the Parmenides itself.   165 

From Parmenides to Philebus Like the Symposium, the Parmenides is largely in the form “He said that he said.”—Antiphon said that Pythodorus said . . . but the purpose of this elaborate device must now be different. Whereas in the Symposium Plato wants to situate the discussion of love in an apparent “Golden Age” of Athens, before the disastrous Sicilian expedition and the ruin of several of the participants, this elaborate device of indirect speech seems now intended to show that the meeting between Socrates and Parmenides (which the dialogue supposes to have taken place in about 450 B.C.) and the consequent dissection of the Theory of Forms does not take place in historical time. The Parmenides falls into two sections, with a linking passage between. In the first part Parmenides criticizes the Theory of Forms; in the second he gives an example of the kind of dialectical analysis “Socrates” will need if he is to justify his metaphysical claims. The linking passage explains that Parmenides accepts the broad outline of the theory, but insists that much more logical work is required if Socrates is to avoid misleading or imperfect representations of his proposals. That passage shows that those are in error who read the second part of the dialogue as a joke at the expense of logic choppers or as a mere example of logical skill, with no reference to the metaphysics of the Theory of Forms—as also are neo-Platonists who take it to be that exposition of the nature of the Good that Plato declined to present in the Republic. However, there is metaphysics in the second part of the Parmenides, and it is associated with advanced logical techniques to enable a more sophisticated presentation of Socrates’ theory, not least with regard to predication and to the self-predication of the Forms. The opening of the dialogue deliberately recalls the Republic, for the scene is set with Cephalus having just met Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. Cephalus wants to know the name of their half-brother Antiphon, a former friend of Pythodorus, himself a friend of Zeno of Elea, the pupil of Parmenides. Pythodorus had told Antiphon about a meeting of Socrates with Parmenides and Zeno; Socrates had wanted to hear Zeno reading from his own writ  166 

From Parmenides to Philebus ings. Antiphon himself now relates the supposed meeting in which an absurdly young Socrates presents the Theory of Forms roughly as Plato had developed it in the Phaedo. As for himself, says Antiphon, he had long given up philosophy in favor of the management of horses (126c)—but it looks to be not entirely an accident that, before talking about the youthful Socrates, he dismisses a blacksmith with a commission to make him a bridle. In the discussion of the imitative arts in the last book of the Republic, bridles are one of the examples chosen by Plato to illustrate that it is only the user, not the maker or the painter of bridles, who knows what they are for. For although the Parmenides is concerned primarily with the Theory of Forms as presented in the Phaedo—Aristotle refers to the original or “classical” theory as that of “Socrates in the Phaedo”(De Gen et Corr. 335b)—it may rather have been some of the difficulties identifiable in the Republic that drove Plato back to first principles: thus it is not the young Socrates so much as a “young” version of the Theory of Forms—the philosophical origins of which Plato had always credited to Socrates—that runs into criticism in the Parmenides. Be that as it may, if serious criticism of the Theory of Forms can be upheld, this also affects Plato’s ethics and politics, threatening the elaborate defense of morality developed in the Republic. Such criticism, whether ill- or well-founded, has to be taken seriously. Why does Plato decide on Parmenides (here directly, indirectly in the Sophist) and his pupil Zeno as appropriate persons to criticize the Theory of Forms? The question gains added piquancy if we remember that Aristotle, who certainly knows of the kind of criticisms Parmenides is to make, never mentions the Parmenides itself. Yet we know Parmenides was in Plato’s mind well before he stars in his dialogue. In book six of the Republic Socrates rejects the view of the unnamed Parmenides: that in epistemology (but with corresponding implications in metaphysics and daily life) there is only knowledge or ignorance; for there is also opinion, the subject of which both is and is not—that is, the world of changing particulars. Knowledge— at least as the Republic is concerned with it—relates not to that world   167 

From Parmenides to Philebus of particulars, but to the intelligible World of Forms. Zeno, however, in the reading that sparks the debate of the Parmenides, assumes that there is only one world, and wants to show that that world cannot be a plurality, but must, as Parmenides had argued in his poem, be a unity. It looks as though the Parmenides is to be the next stage in the unrolling of an already serious debate as Plato begins further to refine the Theory of Forms. Replying to Zeno, Socrates immediately introduces the separate Forms: first of all Likeness and Unlikeness (suggesting problems similar to those raised by Equality in the Phaedo). Like things may become unlike (129a), says Socrates, but Likeness cannot become Unlikeness. The same would apply to the Eleatics’ favourite concepts, unity and plurality. If anyone could show that Likeness and Unlikeness, Unity and Plurality, Rest and Motion and all those opposites—“the separate Forms in themselves,” which are “grasped by reason” (130a)—can be “mixed and separated,” Socrates would indeed be surprised. Parmenides and Zeno are impressed by this clear disjunction of the world of visible particulars and that grasped by reason—as indeed they might be, since in his poetical account of the One, Parmenides had recognized it as grasped by the mind while describing it in a confusion of immaterial and material terms—and ask Socrates whether the idea is his own. Parmenides then fills out Socrates’ theory by adding that particulars “partake” of the Forms (130b), though neglecting an ambiguity, already visible, as we have seen, in the passage of the Republic where Forms were first introduced (476a): for there we seemed to meet Forms of negatives (unjust, bad, etc.). It will soon appear that in the Parmenides—despite this omission—Plato wants directly to challenge the assumption he has regularly made: that in the intelligible world we can identify Forms corresponding to all items that have a common name; that is, to call in question the view that the possessing of a common name provides not only a necessary, but a sufficient condition for the postulation of a Form. Such a challenge is certainly needed, for in the Republic   168 

From Parmenides to Philebus Plato seems to have already realized that “negative” common names only indicate a Form’s absence. Parmenides immediately proceeds to the question of how many Forms there are, though ignoring particular concerns about “negatives” to raise wider difficulties about the implications of Socrates’ theory. In particular, he focuses on problems that might arise from book ten of the Republic, when Socrates proposes Forms of physical objects, such as tables and couches. The Symposium and Phaedo had afforded little scope for discussing such entities, though they had already cropped up more significantly at the end of the Cratylus. Parmenides himself starts with the “mathematical” forms (such as likeness) that Socrates had mentioned first, and then asks about the just, the beautiful, the good, and suchlike moral notions. Socrates has no hesitation in affirming that these Forms exist. Then Parmenides turns to physical objects (but not to artifacts), such as man, fire, and water. Socrates hesitates; he has often been baffled about these. Parmenides presses home: what about mud, hair, and dirt? These “mass words” look “unworthy”—thus seeming unrelated to the Good— and certainly also in the case of dirt suggest a lack of unity—and therefore might be supposed not to indicate a corresponding Form. Here Socrates is willing to be clearer, though he offers no argument: such things are simply as we see them, though he admits that his own reasoning should indicate Forms in such cases. But such putative Forms never reappear in the dialogues. Presumably Plato is willing to stand by what Socrates says about them here, but if he comes to hesitate more seriously about Forms of physical objects, we can at least infer that the possibility of Forms for such “unworthy” examples may have been one of the fears urging him further in that direction. In any case, it is clear that in the Parmenides Socrates is puzzled about some of the implications of the single criterion—the apparent one-over-many—but that as yet he is not sure how to proceed, and in some cases “runs away to avoid an abyss of nonsense” (130d). Parmenides, here taking upon himself the role Plato usually allots to Socrates, indulges in a certain irony. Perhaps Socrates’ dif  169 

From Parmenides to Philebus ficulties are the result of his extreme youth; he is as yet insufficiently gripped by philosophy and too beholden to common opinion. But the point has been made, and the single criterion for the identification of a Form seems to have been put in question. That reading is confirmed when, introducing his next objection, Parmenides alludes specifically to the Socratic idea that particulars that do partake of Forms derive their names from the Forms in which they partake; thus while only Justice is really just and only Likeness really like, we name participating particulars after their “original.” Which would raise the question of how we know that we are right to call a particular action just or a particular object like another: that is, the question of the exact nature of the relationship of participation between the Form and the particulars that should, we think (perhaps wrongly), be identified by that name rather than by another or by its contrary. A just man, though not identical with Justice, is not unjust, nor qua just is he necessarily tall. As Parmenides pursues the relationship between Forms and particulars further, he argues that the Form must be present in many different particulars, making it therefore different from itself. That objection may sound as though it has come from someone who has not grasped that the Form is not physical, and we have already noted that the historical Parmenides had failed adequately to separate the two “worlds.” Moreover, when Socrates replies that the Form is present as the same day is present in many places at once, thus indicating a nonmaterial model, Parmenides immediately turns this back into: “You mean it is like a sail, being over a group of people, part over one, part over another”? Socrates—perhaps with the immaturity of his youth—is now caught napping: perhaps it is like that, he says, thereby allowing Parmenides to conclude that the Forms are divisible and therefore apparently material. I take it that part of Plato’s aim here is to indicate how difficult it is (and was for Parmenides) to grasp the idea of a purely intelligible, nonsensible reality, whatever its ontological status. Be that as it may, the formal conclusion of Parmenides’ argument, which leaves Socrates baf  170 

From Parmenides to Philebus fled, has to be that particulars cannot partake or participate in the Forms, either in whole or in part. A more notorious challenge now follows, traditionally referred to as the “Third Man Argument,” though the “third man” himself awaits Aristotle’s version. In both philosophers, the challenge to the Theory of Forms again depends on unclarities about the nature and variety of nonphysical objects, especially apparent when Plato proposes that Forms exist in a “separate” world. If Beauty is beautiful (as it must be if it is to inspire us), is Largeness large and Shuttle a shuttle? If a, b, and c are large, they point to a Form of Largeness, and if (as we have seen to be the case), there is a sense in which Largeness is large, then one can—ignoring the ontological difference between physical and nonphysical objects—say that if a, b, and c and the Form of Largeness are all large, then another Form of Largeness will appear to explain what is large in both the original Form and the particular. And so ad infinitum. However, this dilemma does not arise if we stick with the Platonic thesis that, strictly speaking, only the Form can be said to be large; the particulars are large only by reference to the Form, and in a different sense. Parmenides seems to be thinking throughout of the Form and the particular as in a relationship like that of a man and his image in a mirror. The one looks like the other, but Parmenides forgets that such similarity requires no third item to explain it, as is shown by the fact that if you destroy the mirror the man remains, but the converse is not true: the image in the mirror and its similarity to its original are to be entirely explained by the presence to it of the man. In this respect, then, Parmenides is willfully ignoring the ontological difference between an object and its image, as will become even clearer when the discussants move from talking about the particular participating in the Form to talking about it directly as a likeness of its Formal exemplar. But if this sort of difficulty is to be removed by attention to “ontological difference,” that very difference seems to generate other and more serious problems about the very nature of the Form.   171 

From Parmenides to Philebus Rightly, Socrates attempts to dissolve Parmenides’ objections by concentrating on the nature and status of the Form itself. Perhaps, he suggests (132b), the Form is a noema that comes into existence nowhere else but in souls. However, the term noema is ambiguous and highlights the difficulties inherent in grasping Plato’s move from the mere universals of the Euthyphro to the ontologically superior Forms Socrates is now defending. Clearly the Form is thought about, but is it merely a mentally generated concept or an objective reality discerned in the lens of the mind? (We must notice that only human, not divine minds are in question at this point.) If it is only a concept of which particulars partake, then particulars are concepts, too. And if it is a concept, it must be a concept of something or of nothing. If it is a concept of nothing, then particulars become thinkers without thought! If it is a concept of something, then a regress would again follow, though that conclusion is not drawn. Nor is Socrates allowed to insist on the alternative sense of the word noema whereby it would indicate no mere concept, but the effect on the mind of its recognition of a separate Form as an objective reality—which is what a clear-headed proponent of the Theory of separate Forms must insist on. Rather, he is doomed as he replies: “Perhaps the Form is only a noema in the soul.” Socrates is now driven back to what was to become Plato’s preferred language about the relationship between Forms and particulars (132d): the Forms are [separate] patterns in nature (which might rule out Forms of artifacts) of which particulars are likenesses, though in Plato’s view this comes to be a better way of talking about the relationship than is the language of participation (or of presence, as in the Phaedo); since Socrates has done nothing to clarify the nature of the immaterial Form except for the abortive move about noemata, we soon see Parmenides again successfully invoking the “Third Man.” We must, he concludes, find “some other way of participation” (133a). So, Socrates, he continues, you can see how difficult it is to claim that Forms are separate entities—though he might have added   172 

From Parmenides to Philebus (which would have been impossible for the historical Parmenides), unless you better explain the full import of the difference between a physical and a nonphysical object. And now we should recall that, quite apart from the objections of Parmenides, a related difficulty had already arisen in the Republic about the scope of the world of Forms. For it seemed that we should have recognized a difference between a Form intended to explain a quality like justice and another intended to explain a physical object like a man or a couch—unless the Form is to be described in both material and immaterial terms, as Parmenides now seems to suppose. In any case, Parmenides has not finished: we have still to face what he sees as the greatest difficulty about separate Forms (133b): a difficulty that sums up and completes those wider problems about the relationship between Forms and particulars already considered. Parmenides, however, is unwilling to say that Forms cannot be defended, only that to do so would require a man of exceptional experience and talent (133b). For the “greatest difficulty” is that, since we agree that the Forms are not “in us”— since if so they would not be “in and of themselves”—they must, he claims, be entirely separate from us, and we can have no knowledge of them. Similarly, physical particulars would be related to themselves, not to the Forms, and we would have, in effect, two entirely separate worlds. Thus even if Forms existed, they would solve none of our philosophical problems: masters would be relative to slaves, Mastership itself to Slavery itself; our knowledge would relate to masters and slaves, while the knowledge of the gods would relate to the Forms. Thus the gods will have no knowledge of our affairs, any more than we of theirs. Again, Parmenides declines to follow this argument to its devastating conclusion, noting only that in view of this “greatest difficulty” and of other arguments, one would be tempted to deny the existence of independent Forms, but then again, a quite exceptional man would be able to resolve the problems and explain how he has done so to others, since if he failed, then philosophy would be impossible, since we could have no clear idea of what we are talking   173 

From Parmenides to Philebus about (135c). Socrates, continues Parmenides, has introduced his Forms of justice, goodness, and beauty without undertaking the hard work required to resolve the problems they seem to generate. Of course, we have already been told which is the greatest problem: the apparently absolute separation of Forms from particulars entails the explanatory uselessness of the whole theory. We should therefore expect that when Parmenides sets out to explain the “troublesome game” by which Socrates must hone his dialectical skills if he is to resolve his difficulties, he will pay particular attention to that “greatest difficulty.” An important part of the training in which, says Parmenides, Socrates must engage is to consider not only the consequences if a hypothesis is true, but also what follows if it is false (136a)—as Zeno had done for Parmenides himself, pointing out that greater absurdities would follow if his basic hypothesis about unity were false than those that followed if one accepted the hypothesis as true. Apart from that methodological point, we need little comment here on Parmenides’ demonstration, except to observe that the exercise is no mere training course in formal logic, but a particular program designed to show that the “greatest difficulty” (as well as others) will arise if and only if we fail to distinguish what is predicated of a proposed entity in relation to itself from what is predicated of it with reference to other things. The point will be repeated in the Sophist (255c ff.). Thus (inter alia) we can show that qualities cannot be predicated in the same sense of a Form and of its “dependent” particulars: this was the root difficulty in the Third Man argument, and would not be remedied if, as Socrates suggests, the Form is identified without more careful analysis as an “object of thought” (noema). All of which means that after the Parmenides we shall not find Plato worrying about participation; on the contrary, we shall find him perfectly willing to speak of Forms as paradigms and of particulars as copies. What we shall find is an increased concern with how particulars “get to” participate in anything at all, even in their own “existence”: that is, with further reflection on the implications of the   174 

From Parmenides to Philebus “greatest difficulty” of the apparently separate worlds of Forms and particulars. So the Parmenides is indeed a metaphysical text, though its metaphysics is not that of the neo-Platonists. These seem to have had no idea as to Plato’s purposes in writing it. Yet although Plato can show us that we should not allot predicates in the same sense to Forms and particulars (so generating a “Third Man”), there is a further difficulty to be resolved about predication in the case of Forms. This is especially obvious in the case of Forms of physical qualities, as in “Largeness is large.” Plato clearly wants to say (for example) that when we speak of Largeness, we are speaking of nothing more than largeness, whereas when we speak of a large particular we are speaking of what may be a large mountain when compared with Snowdon, but a small mountain when compared with Everest. Yet if Largeness is an immaterial Form, it cannot be materially large in any respect. A descriptive and definitional account of Largeness would be possible if Largeness only exists in the human mind—which Plato wants to deny. But if it exists in an independent world, we need to know what it is, for all large things are material objects. In what sense, if any, that is, can Largeness be “ontologically distinct” but still “large”? There are different but related problems with value Forms. Clearly Beauty is nothing but beautiful, but it is also infinitely more inspiring than physical beauties. Again, we know that Plato thinks it is independent of the human mind; it is not simply a concept. He would not say that when we are inspired by Beauty we are inspired by some mental construct of our own. In their different ways, indeed, both Largeness and Beauty pose the same problem, if they are both qualities that can only exist in or as a substance. In themselves Plato is trying to envisage them as substances, and it is this that causes problems that can only be avoided if they can be viewed not as substances, but in substances. But in what substance can they both inhere as immaterial qualities? It seems Plato in the Parmenides has still not realized the full extent of the difficulties he generated when he moved from his position in the Euthyphro—where he in  175 

From Parmenides to Philebus troduced common qualities or “forms” without making any ontological commitment to them—to dialogues after the Cratylus, Symposium, and Phaedo, where there certainly is such a commitment. It looks as though he may have solved apparent logical difficulties with his theory without coming to grips with the more basic problem of how to envisage, not just an immaterial concept, but an immaterial, existent “thing.” Perhaps after the Parmenides he will become more aware of how such problems might be resolved—and of how resolution must entail a different status for substance Forms (like Ox), for nonvalue qualities (like Largeness), and finally for value Forms like Beauty. For, as we have seen, he had already begun to think about some of these possibilities by the last book of the Republic. There is nothing in the second part of the Parmenides, the “dialectical exercise,” which would resolve problems about the scope of the world of Forms, nor at least in any detail about the status (ontological or other) of the mind that is required to think about them. And though Plato shows there that there is no logical error in predicating “large” of the Form of Largeness, and that such predication entails not that Largeness is a large object, but that it is the standard by which we recognize the sense of the word “large” when applied to physically large objects, he has not shown why such a Form needs to be a self-standing entity. Nor, despite Socrates’ doubts and hesitations, has he shown that, as regards the required number of Forms, or kinds of Forms, he has worked out any positive proposals to advance beyond the position assumed in the Cratylus, Phaedo, and Republic. In fact, however, problems arise for lack of a special sense of self-predication for “moral” and “aesthetic” Forms, but which is unnecessary—and which he should reject—for substance Forms or Forms of physical qualities. Since he has not realized that, a fortiori he cannot have realized what kind of Form a substance Form or a Form of a physical quality must be if it is to be a separate Form at all. It is interesting, however, to notice that, although Parmenides challenges Socrates about the Forms of Justice, Goodness, and Beauty (133c), he expresses his intentions for his own dialectical dis  176 

From Parmenides to Philebus play in terms of likeness and unlikeness, motion and rest, comingto-be and passing away, and even being and nonbeing (136b). We are going to hear more about the prospects for these “greatest kinds” (as Plato will call them in the Sophist), and we shall consider the implications of such further investigation for the improved defense of ethics for which, I have argued, the theory of Forms was originally and primarily developed. We are also going to hear more in the Sophist (and its sequels) about the mind. We have identified something of what Plato thought still needed to be done about the Theory of Forms—and what he did not yet recognize should be done—when he composed the Parmenides, and we have recognized in Parmenides’ critique a mixture of legitimate fault-finding—whether about the substance or the presentation of the Theory of Forms—and willful or unavoidable misunderstanding. But the Theory is still on the table, and we shall eventually have to ask, when all due reformulations have been made and all serious misunderstandings (particularly about ontological difference) have been eliminated, what still remains to be done if it is to provide a better, even an adequate, underpinning for ethical and aesthetic propositions, now as then.   •  The Theaetetus apparently refers back to the Parmenides (183e), while reverting stylistically to a much earlier form of composition. The discussion between Socrates, the mathematician Theodorus, and the latter’s young pupil Theaetetus, who died from wounds and dysentery after a battle at Corinth and to whose memory the dialogue is dedicated, is framed by an introductory prologue featuring—as in the Phaedo—Socrates’ Megarian friends Eucleides and Terpsion. Eucleides tells the story of Theaetetus’ death, adding that he has compiled a written record of a discussion between Theaetetus when still a young lad and an elderly Socrates who—as in an anachronistic passage we noticed in the Republic about solid geometry—foresaw his brilliant intellectual future. The Theaetetus also resembles many of the earliest Platonic dia  177 

From Parmenides to Philebus logues in that it is formally inconclusive: no agreement is reached about the nature of knowledge; however, the date and the technical character of the work tell us unambiguously that it is later than the Republic. Thus it is reasonable to ask why Plato is now anxious to come to apparently negative conclusions about knowledge: a topic on which he appears to have had very positive ideas in the Republic. Just as in the Parmenides we have seen how Plato is seeking to set out the theory of Forms with more precision, so we can expect a similar concern in the Theaetetus to be more precise about what it means to have knowledge, whether of Forms (to which there are few direct references in the Theaetetus, though we should note the comments on justice and injustice at 175c), or of anything else. Yet is there much more to be said about the nature of knowledge and of its relationship to opinion than we can infer from the Republic? It may be that the Republic has neglected some of the epistemological concerns of the Meno and the Cratylus in its pursuit of more immediately pressing themes. Perhaps Plato may want to correct the possibly false and certainly counterintuitive impression left by the central books of the Republic that knowledge is only of Forms and that there can be no real “knowledge” of particulars—or true opinion of Forms. As we shall see, the Theaetetus proposes a certain knowledge of particulars, and the nature of that knowledge may tell us more of the nature of knowledge in general. In the Parmenides we noted the “greatest objection” to the Forms: that, even if they exist, they may be unknowable to us. It is plausible to suppose that when Plato became aware that he had not given enough detail about Forms to satisfy professionals, he also realized that his account of what it is to know also needed refining. For arguments about Forms and their status had soon emerged in the Academy, with Plato’s nephew Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Aristotle among the chief disputants. In the Parmenides Socrates was presented as young and enthusiastic but inadequately trained in dialectic; in the Theaetetus he is back in the role of protagonist, but in a new and unexpected light.   178 

From Parmenides to Philebus His religious character is emphasized; we hear a good deal about the inner voice (daimonion, 154a) that helps him act rightly. Unexpectedly, he now gives a lengthy account of the dialectical skills he has displayed in the earlier dialogues. Like his mother, he is a midwife—only for the soul, not the body. He no longer describes himself as investigating what the Oracle meant in acclaiming him the wisest of the Greeks for his understanding of his own ignorance. He still claims ignorance, but specifically prides himself on bringing wisdom to birth in the minds of others. Whether the historical Socrates actually used this image we do not know, though if his mother really was a midwife it is not unlikely. What is certainly unlikely is that he would have presented himself and his role as they are presented in the Theaetetus. What is displayed here is surely modeled on what was supposed to happen in the Academy, that school established by Plato to institutionalize the providential gift of philosophizing that the gods had given to Socrates. Theaetetus, whose days of young promise the dialogue commemorates, is himself a forerunner of the skills the Academy aspired to encourage. As Socrates brought wisdom to Plato and to others, so the Academy, as the new Socrates, acts as midwife for the new generation that the “pregnant” Theaetetus will represent (148e). The Socrates of the Theaetetus recalls the Diotima of the Symposium, while the characteristics apparent in Theaetetus are those of the desiderate Guardians of the Republic (145e). Socratic midwifery is superior to the common variety, not only in that it ministers to the soul rather than the body, but in that it determines whether what is born in the soul is genuine wisdom or a fraudulent impostor (150b): indications of this are the renewed concern in the first part of the dialogue to account for false belief if a Protagorean relativism is correct, as well as the more generalized concern in “act two” to distinguish between true and false belief, not least if true belief, as Theaetetus there suggests, is to be identified with knowledge. The Theaetetus is regularly divided into three unequal acts (in this resembling the Gorgias). Each act presents a different attempt   179 

From Parmenides to Philebus to identify the nature of knowledge. In Act One—interrupted by a digression on the life of the public arena, in contrast to that of pursuing likeness to God, to which we shall return in a later chapter— knowledge is identified with perception. In a manner unparalleled before the Theaetetus, Socrates links that thesis both with Protagoras’ book entitled Truth, in which it is argued that man is the measure of all things, and with the claims of the followers of Heraclitus that everything is in constant flux—a topic that recalls the earlier Cratylus. It is clearly Socrates’ intention in this first section of the Theaetetus to defend knowledge against that version of relativism that claims that whatever we perceive is true for us. Whether that entirely captures the intent of Protagoras himself may be left aside; Plato is certainly thinking about interpretations of Protagoras, accurate or not, current in his own day. Socrates rejects such relativism with a variety of arguments largely outside our present concerns, but three of the points he raises should be noted. The first is that, with a theory that knowledge is perception through the senses, we cannot account for the nature of justice and injustice (175c). Forms seem to be in Socrates’ mind at this point, though other possible objects of knowledge might also be problematic, and “negative” Forms are again ignored or shelved. Secondly—and perhaps significantly in a discussion that introduces not only the Heraclitean “flow-ers,” but also briefly Parmenides and other Eleatics, who hold that all things are one (180e)—with the aid of a neologism (poiotes, 182e), Socrates draws a distinction between qualities and items qualified. That distinction, in effect of “categories,” might enable him to distinguish forms of “substances” or of qualified items from forms of qualities themselves; this in turn would help with the problem of the “scope” of the world of Forms, not least when it generates a distinction between an intrinsically good object qualified, say a god viewed as just, and a quality he necessarily exhibits, here justice. But a question might arise about the status—if any—of justice, if there were no beings qualified as just. Socrates’ third point of immediate interest in the “Act” is spelled   180 

From Parmenides to Philebus out by Theaetetus (185c), who asks how we should explain features common to all that is. There follows a list similar to the basic list of the Parmenides: being and nonbeing, likeness and unlikeness, identity and difference, unity and plurality. Presumably rest and motion are omitted as controversial and moot; on the theory of those said to prop up the claim that knowledge is perception (that is, Heraclitus and Protagoras) rest does not exist, while for the followers of Parmenides—of whom in the Theaetetus discussion is significantly deferred—there is no motion. Be that as it may, Socrates and Theaetetus move on to beautiful and ugly, good and bad—these will be identified directly by the soul after much study—and to hard and soft, which, first recognized physically by the senses, are to be grasped in their being (that is, their nature) by the mind. Since those who cannot turn their minds to the theme of being will not reach the truth, perception is thus shown to be insufficient for knowledge, and accordingly Theaetetus admits that his identification of knowledge with perception will not do. Realizing now that knowledge must be in the mind, he makes a second suggestion, thus ushering in the second act of the dialogue. Knowledge, he says, is true opinion, though opinions may also be false, and obviously such cannot be knowledge (187b). Much of the discussion that follows centers on this possibility of opinion being false—that is, “not true.” This foreshadows the Sophist, but also reminds us again of the Republic, where Socrates argued that opinion, lying between knowledge and ignorance, deals with what both is and is not—that is, inter alia, with what is not perduring. But how can we even talk about what is not? The Sophist and the Timaeus, in their different ways, will address that problem—which might invite further reflection about “negative” Forms: how is one to think about what is not just (unjust), not good (bad), not beautiful (ugly)? The overriding concern in this section of the Theaetetus, however, is with the claim that knowledge is identical with true opinion, but after Socrates has offered fascinating comparisons of the mind, first to a wax-block to be inscribed by the senses, then to an aviary   181 

From Parmenides to Philebus full of “knowledge birds,” candidates for knowledge about which we may easily be in error (do we then also need negative ignorance birds?)—Theaetetus is compelled to refine his position. He thus inaugurates Act Three of the dialogue, claiming that he has heard his new definition somewhere before (201c), by allowing that true opinion could only constitute knowledge if it were accompanied by reason. He might have heard of this—or something rather like it— by reading the Meno, and we shall find that a revised version of the distinction there drawn between knowledge and true opinion about the road from Athens to Larissa is developed in the Theaetetus. In amending his definition, Theaetetus accepts that there must be a difference between knowledge and true opinion, because jurymen who have never seen or been in other sense-contact with the events of which they are judges can only have true opinion. But if knowledge and true opinion were identical, since they could not have knowledge, they could not have true opinion either. It appears (again) that knowledge, in contrast to true opinion, has to be firsthand, in this case through the senses (201b ff.). Yet although Socrates and Theaetetus are talking about sense perception, when Socrates insists that to claim knowledge we have to “give and receive an account” (202c), he cannot but remind us of the discussion of knowledge in the seventh book of the Republic. The present problem, however—not raised in the Republic—is what kind of account could be given, and by implication by whom. We noticed in book seven of the Republic that Plato at least implied that an “account” of the Good would have to be different from an account of the other Forms—and we were driven to speculation, unsupported by the text, as to what the difference might be. Now, in the last Act of the Theaetetus, Socrates proposes three explanations of logos that might convert true opinion into knowledge—none of which turns out to be satisfactory. The first suggestion is that what we want is a clear syntactical expression of what we are trying to represent (206d). The second is to list the “elements” of what is to be known; for, as Hesiod says, a hun  182 

From Parmenides to Philebus dred pieces of wood make a wagon (207a). That, however, does not capture the wagon’s essence (ousia). The final proposal is to discover an identifying characteristic (208c), but in the case of “knowing Theaetetus,” this does not capture the man himself. And if to know a man is to know what differentiates him, what does “knowing what differentiates” mean? No further attempt to identify the required logos is made, and perhaps we can see why not. No amount of theorizing or explanation will be an adequate substitute for the firsthand knowledge of a witness to a crime—or for the knowledge of a Form, if we choose to pursue the matter further in that direction. No amount of circumstantial “knowing about” something, whether Form or particular, will—though perhaps for different reasons—act as an adequate substitute for firsthand experience. If we insist on “knowing about” something, that “knowing about” will not be full knowledge if it is learned secondhand. Knowing about—and thus being able to give a logos—will never turn into “knowledge” as such without some further experience. If I know a Form, I know more than if I “know about” it; if I know the road to Larissa, my knowledge cannot be communicated by any variety of explanation. Knowing about, in and of itself, is no more than having a correct opinion. Thus, as in earlier dialogues, Theaetetus and Socrates have formally failed to account either for knowledge or for what it is to give an account. Socrates’ midwifery, which he acquired from a god and from his mother, has shown that in this case only a wind-egg has been produced (210b). We hoped we were thinking about something, but we find we are thinking of nothing, or at least nothing coherent—and the midwife image may also be in Plato’s mind in the Timaeus when Timaeus says that somehow “bastard reasoning” enables as to “think,” though uncertainly—perhaps because we do not “see,” even with the mind, but can only refer—about what is not (52b). In any case, if the Theaetetus presents a new Socrates pursuing a more sophisticated discussion with a more sophisticated and able interlocutor, Plato has still concluded that there is far more   183 

From Parmenides to Philebus philosophical work to be done if we are to grasp the complexities of knowledge. For our immediate purposes, however, the dialogue as a whole yields significant results. The philosophical basis of relativism, with its obvious relevance to ethics, has been located in theories such as those of Heraclitus and Protagoras, and the final overthrow of Thrasymachean “ethics” will entail the uprooting of its metaphysical roots. In the Republic we were offered a metaphysic adequate for the development of a genuine morality; now we are to learn how to reject an alternative metaphysic on its own terms. We were surely aware that this was needed in some of the earlier dialogues; now the challenge has been confronted head-on. In failing to explain the nature of knowledge—though this had appeared to be settled in the Republic—Socrates indicates that he must pay more attention to epistemological difficulties, perhaps not least to the intelligibility of false and negative propositions and to discussion of what is nonexistent or not as it seems to be. Yet, as we have seen, the Theaetetus has done more than leave difficulties unresolved. We have discovered that knowledge cannot be identical with perception, true opinion, or true opinion plus a means of justifying that opinion. There is also a subtext. An important way in which knowledge differs from true opinion is that, as with the testimony of those who witness a crime, it is at firsthand. Of course, knowledge of Forms is also firsthand, and it therefore makes sense to say that those who deny Forms must do so in part because they have not “seen” them—a result of the inadequate preparation of their souls. But whereas from the Republic we might suppose—perhaps deluded in supposing Plato to use a rigid technical terminology—that firsthand knowledge is of Forms alone, the Theaetetus repeats the lesson of the Meno: that there is another kind of knowledge, namely of particular things or events, which resembles the knowledge of Forms in that it is direct and firsthand, but differs in that it is of changing, not unchanging realities. Put otherwise, it is difference in its objects that distinguishes knowledge of Forms from true opinion of particulars, but there is also knowledge of particulars (readily   184 

From Parmenides to Philebus perceived in that they are members of classes). Inasmuch as it cannot be explained by reasoning, this type of knowledge cannot be the subject of philosophical discussion, but is obtained by direct perception, though not all direct perception is infallible, and therefore not all generates knowledge. Aristotle in the Metaphysics (Z.1036a5) expressed it that there is no logos of particulars—that accords with the negative conclusions of Theaetetus, Act 3—but that these are recognized by perception or intuition. It looks as though the Plato of the Theaetetus, following the Plato of the Meno, is moving in that direction, and without prejudice to the existence and intelligibility of Forms. The same result, as already noted, can be expressed in a different way. Knowledge of Forms gives us the special sort of knowledge that is understanding; but particulars (the road to Larissa, the events to which we bear witness in a courtroom)—though familiar to us through firsthand experience—cannot be understood, since Plato does not recognize Forms of individuals (let alone of individual events), only of kinds, sharing a common nature. That has epistemological and ontological repercussions that he seems, in his own examples, to grasp, but not—perhaps for pedagogical purposes—to have clearly explicated. Of course, to say that the firsthand experience of the witness to a crime (as of my direct experience of the road to Larissa) is knowledge is far from allowing those other possible accounts of knowledge canvassed in the Theaetetus, namely that all knowledge is perception or that it can be identified with true opinion. Indeed the knowledge of the eyewitness is precisely distinguished from true opinion; its origins can be explained. The Theaetetus ends with those taking part in the debate saying they will meet again next day, as they do in the Sophist. When we read the final lines of the dialogue, we expect that Plato will continue the debate—though not necessarily immediately—but we shall not be surprised, in view of his ultimate failure in the Theaetetus, when next time the wise man is not to be Socrates. But before we consider what happens next, we must look at innovations in yet an  185 

From Parmenides to Philebus other basic Platonic thesis, in a dialogue that for stylistic and other reasons must predate the Sophist. That dialogue is the Phaedrus.   •  The Phaedrus is a multifaceted dialogue—so much so that modern interpreters have complained of its lack of unity. Though the theme of rhetoric is never far away, much of the first part is concerned with love, the soul, and the Forms; it is largely metaphysical. The second part is concerned with the nature of a properly “dialectical” rhetoric, so largely methodological. The overarching theme of the dialogue is persuasion: who should persuade whom, by what means, and for what ends. For Plato such an inquiry must involve thinking about the soul, the Forms, and eros as the link between them, as well as about those means of persuasion that are both honest—and therefore philosophically justifiable—and effective. There are only two speakers, Socrates and Phaedrus, but the figure of Lysias, who has composed a speech on love that has won Phaedrus’ admiration, is in the background; Lysias is a successful orator and brother of Polemarchus (see Republic 1), whose death at the hands of the Thirty he set out to avenge. The reappearance of Phaedrus, the initial and rather shallow speaker in the Symposium, leads us to expect not only that love will be important in the new discussion, but that some of the assumptions of the Symposium will be challenged. The setting of the dialogue is unusual: it takes place in beautiful countryside outside the city walls, where Socrates rarely goes. Trees won’t teach me what I want to know, people will, and people are in the city (230d), he says. What he wants to know, in the spirit of the inscription at Delphi, is (again) himself (229e). Lysias (or rather Plato, parodying Lysias) has composed a speech on love that Phaedrus says will naturally interest Socrates, who is deeply in love with debate (228c). It will urge the characteristically sophistic and “transgressive” thesis that it will be in the best interests of a handsome boy to grant sexual favors, not to a lover, but to a non-lover. Phaedrus reads the speech, and Socrates not only claims to be astounded, but is induced to produce something of his   186 

From Parmenides to Philebus own in the same vein (234d ff.). (Recall his “sophistic” tour de force in the Hippias.) But then, under pressure from his divine voice, his daimonion, he recants and denounces both his own speech and that of Lysias as simpleminded and even blasphemous (242d): he must make amends lest he be struck blind like the poet Stesichorus for sinning against the gods—in a manner he had denounced in the Republic—that is, by accepting that Eros, “who is a god or something divine,” is evil. For although love may be a kind of madness, “the greatest goods come to us through madness,” which can indeed be a gift of the gods (244c): we recognize it in prophecy and in literary inspiration, though to understand that this is so, we need to know more about the nature and capacities of the human soul. So we are returned to the soul’s natural immortality—the theme of the Phaedo and the last book of the Republic. However, the Phaedrus will offer a proof of a different character from these (245c), depending on the idea that all souls are self-movers, that a self-moving, ungenerated, and immortal soul is the origin and first principle of motion, and that it must therefore precede—at least logically—the physical universe that it moves. Thus Plato returns to a theme that he assured us in the Phaedo he had abandoned in favor of the Theory of Forms. Anaxagoras, he told us then, had tried and failed to show that mind organizes the universe for the best. On finding Anaxagoras wanting, Socrates had turned away from explaining the goodness of the universe in terms of efficient and purposive causes, and concentrated on the formal cause—which eventually led to the proposal that the existence of the Form of the Good is a necessary (albeit perhaps insufficient) part of the explanation of the nature of the universe as we find it. Now with the Phaedrus we find that souls are the efficient cause of the movement of the changing objects of the physical world, and that they must therefore be immortal. Such souls will resemble the Forms in that they are immortal, though differing in that they are active principles, hence in their role in the universe as a whole. Plato now wants to emphasize unambiguously that neither the Forms of   187 

From Parmenides to Philebus “Socrates” nor even an improved version of the Mind of Anaxagoras (or any other kind of “soul”) can by itself provide a complete explanation of the contents and events of the universe. In the Timaeus we shall see how the respective roles of Mind and Form can be identified in the physical world, not least in its origins; in the Laws we shall find the argument for the immortality of the soul as the selfmoving origin of motion worked out in much greater detail. Having established the immortality of the soul, Plato turns to its nature, developing the account of “tripartition” that he proposed in the Republic, and therefore—since the immediate aim of his project is to talk about love—needing to modify the account of eros that Diotima drew up in the Symposium. There follows the famous comparison of the human soul to a charioteer with a white and a black horse: the charioteer represents reason, the white horse the spirited element, and the black horse the material and physical desires. But an important distinction is to be drawn between human and divine souls. All souls are “tripartite,” but whereas the “elements” of divine souls are entirely good and virtuous (246a), those of humans are mixed; hence we have a black horse as well as a white. All souls are originally winged, to ascend to view the place above the heavens where dwell the unchanging forms—Beauty, Wisdom, and Goodness (246e)—all without color and shape, intangible examples of the “real being” that true and eternal knowledge can grasp (247cd). For the gods the ascent is easy, and it is by knowledge of the Forms that the gods are divine (249c). The case is very different for humans: the black and unruly passion horse drags them back, and although there is no envy among the gods to stand in their way (247a)—Socrates here implicitly denies the “blasphemies” of Lysias and of his own first speech—it may prevent them joining the “divine chorus.” As in the Republic, Plato presents in the Phaedrus a large range of value Forms, not merely Beauty as in the Symposium; the context of the dialogue perhaps precludes mention of a more varied selection, but their existence is not ruled out. All souls are longing to attain that higher world, but human “tripartition” prevents many   188 

From Parmenides to Philebus from achieving it; we have irrational as well as rational desires, and it is clear (as it was not in the Republic, where in book ten the best possible nature of the soul was left in ambiguity) that, though the passions can with difficulty be controlled, they can neither be eliminated nor wholly purified, at least in this present life. When examining the decline of the ideal state in the Republic, I noted that it is perhaps primarily for literary purposes that Plato allowed the guardians to fail in their duties; for in the Republic that possibility of failure seems not to be taken very seriously. But if the psychology of the Phaedrus were applied to the project of the Republic, the consequences would be very serious indeed. For the distinction between human and divine souls is to be read as implying that no educational scheme can guarantee the permanence of virtue in our incarnate life, hence is one reason Plato talks about attaining likeness to god only “as far as possible”—and why infallible guardians disappear from the later Statesman and Laws. The implications of all that must be left to the next chapter, for in terms purely of the dramatic progress of the Phaedrus, what Plato wants to show is that the madness of love provides an essential part of the “mechanism”—not merely the suasion—for an ascent to the Forms, through the recovery of the wings of the soul. In our enthousiasmos, our inspiration, and by the madness that is eros for the beautiful, we become lovers. In earthly likenesses of Justice and Restraint there is no “light,” but discerning them dimly through the senses we may recognize their originals—of which Beauty is the most easily recognizable through sight, the sharpest of our physical senses (250d). And Beauty, object of the best (and most accurately named) love, is, as both the Symposium and the Republic have already shown us, the best introduction to the Forms in general (whose namesakes—again—are here, 250e), which are approached only by a well-directed eros. Yet the physical bearers of those names are essential, too, for it is they that inspire us to “recall” their originals (249c), as also to inspire those able to respond to love and to reflect it with a   189 

From Parmenides to Philebus counter-love. That anteros displayed, according to the Symposium, in the behavior of Alcestis is now given a name (255d); yet erotic reciprocity, alas, also gives the passion horses their chance to accomplish “dreadful and lawless deeds” (254b, 256c). For though they can be subdued, they cannot be reformed, and can only be controlled by fear (254e). Sometimes, in collaboration with his counterpart in the soul of the beloved, the lover’s passion horse will secure his desire, but the result is a division in the soul, since the charioteer and the more honorable horse disapprove (256c). And so, after sketching the details of the soul’s fate after death, Socrates brings his recantation to a close. Phaedrus is delighted and allows that Lysias’ oration is feeble in comparison, while Socrates, thinking about the various speeches we have heard, turns directly to distinguishing good speaking and writing from bad (259e). Having heard examples of both kinds, we can now consider the theory on which they are based, Socrates insisting first of all that a good speech must be truthful against Phaedrus’ claim that orators do not need to know what is just—and similarly, we assume, in the case of Lysias, what is beautiful and ugly—but only what so seems. We are back in the world of the Gorgias, and Socrates argues that if an orator, ignorant of what is good and what is evil, persuades the public to accomplish evil deeds, he will reap a bitter harvest. The requisite is to learn the truth, then to speak it—and here we recognize echoes of the Cratylus. If we proceed otherwise, we shall find ourselves calling the same behavior on different occasions both just and unjust—as Zeno, the ingenious “Eleatic Palamedes” (261d), was able to show that the same things are like and unlike, one and many, at rest and in motion. Now we are hearing echoes of the Parmenides, and can conclude that the followers of Parmenides need to be tested, since they too offer an opening to those who want to distort the truth or bury it in paradoxes. Socrates and Phaedrus then take up Lysias’ opening lines, Socrates drawing a distinction between things on the nature of which we all agree, such as iron or stone, and those that are more   190 

From Parmenides to Philebus controversial, such as the just and the good (263a): precisely, in fact, the division that has been missing earlier when Forms were under debate, for both “iron” and “just” might seem to require a Form— on the one-over-many principle—but as Socrates observes, we all agree on iron, but not on justice; we may doubt therefore that a Form (or at least the same kind of Form) of iron should be posited. Moreover, it is over the doubtful items that deception is practiced by orators; it is easier to deceive with value terms, and Socrates soon secures agreement that love falls into the class over which deception is easier. Lysias’ discourse is ill-organized, Socrates continues, but more importantly, when talking about love he failed to define it because he lacked what Socrates calls dialectic. This is now defined—for the first time in the dialogues—as a concern to identify the contents of the universe and divide them into their appropriate classes (265e). What the orator must avoid is grouping them without reference to their natural distinctions, in this like an incompetent cook; then he will be able to do what Socrates has already laid stress on (249b): grasp correctly what can be said universally. For he will know what are proper and what improper classes—and even if we wonder what status we should allot to improper classes, we should realize that, whatever it be, construction of such “classes” can be very misleading. This point will be emphasized again in the Statesman (262d), where dividing mankind into “Greeks and barbarians” is ruled out, because there is no common mark by which to identify all barbarians. “Barbarian” simply means “non-Greek,” identifying no common feature, but all proper classes require a common positive characteristic; it is not enough to identify them by a common name. That should finally ensure the eradication of logically “negative” Forms: given that a, b, and c are non-Greeks, there can be no such Form as Non-Greek (or Barbarian). As for Lysias and his like, they are not dialecticians, but rhetoricians, and their profession should also be defined. Certainly it must instantiate the various techniques listed in the handbooks of The  191 

From Parmenides to Philebus odorus of Byzantium or Evenus of Paros, or of Gorgias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, and the rest. But just as a man who has picked up a few medical techniques is not a doctor, nor he who can string various speeches together a dramatist if he does not know how to appropriate those speeches to one another and to the play as a whole, so the non-dialectician cannot formulate definitions, not even that of rhetoric itself. Unless he is also practiced in dialectic, the rhetorician cannot understand the true nature and goal of his own activity, which requires natural talent, plus knowledge and practice (269d). Take the case of Pericles, our greatest orator—though in light of the Gorgias, where Socrates associates Pericles’ performance with windy chatter, there surely is a degree of irony here. Nevertheless, Pericles looked in the right direction: he had gained an understanding of the role of the mind and its absence from the philosopher (and would-be dialectician) Anaxagoras, who regularly discussed such themes. For the best sort of rhetoric—not that which can be reduced to a mere knack—will prescribe discourses and practices to persuade the soul to virtue. To achieve that result its practitioners require knowledge of the soul; in particular they need to know whether it is a unity or, like the body, multiform—and Socrates himself has already displayed the soul’s immortal nature. Without such knowledge handbooks of rhetorical techniques are vain. Unfortunately those who compose them are tricksters who prevaricate about the nature of the soul, pandering in the courts to people who, they assume, have no concern for the truth (271c, 272e). Socrates has a final trick up his sleeve, and it has too much bothered his readers. He relates the Egyptian story of Theuth, who invented letters and told his king that the use of these letters would improve the memory of the Egyptians and make them wiser. But the king disagreed: far from making them wiser, the use of writing would make them forgetful, for they would have no incentive to develop their memory. Writing will encourage not memory, but the need to be reminded, thus offering an appearance of wisdom, but not real wisdom. As Heraclitus might have put it, it will encourage   192 

From Parmenides to Philebus people to know much and understand little (275b). The problem with writing is that it cannot talk; it cannot carry on the debate (275d). In interpreting written texts the ignorant are liable to misrepresent the author’s intention; his books cannot defend themselves. Far better the living and breathing word in the mind of the knower, of which the written text is just an image that can be dispensed with as the wise man will judge appropriate. And is not he who knows about the just, the beautiful, and the good such a wise man? He will write for amusement, to remind himself when he is old and forgetful, and to help others advance toward wisdom. Serious philosophy must be carried on in dialectical debate, of the kind the Phaedrus itself has outlined, applying the method of collection and division that (in more or less adequate versions) Plato is going to write about—note the irony—in subsequent dialogues. Unusually in a Platonic dialogue, Phaedrus asks for a summary of what has been discovered thus far (277b). Socrates points to collection and division and to understanding the soul so that we can say what is appropriate to each individual, concluding again that the written document is a mere echo of the quality of a thinker’s ideas. They are what matter, and the written version need not be taken very seriously—a theme repeated in the Seventh Letter (344c)—but Plato often dismisses important matters ironically or as mere play! Justice and beauty and goodness are best spoken of and discussed philosophically. A man should derive his reputation not from what he writes, but from what he thinks (278d). Even such a man, however, cannot be called “wise,” for that term (as the Symposium also observed) is to be applied to God alone; the man is a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. And the up-and-coming rhetorician Isocrates (of Plato’s own time and not that of the historical Socrates) should know this. He is still young; he will become a great teacher of rhetoric, but that will not satisfy him, for he has the capacity for philosophy (279a). Lastly, Socrates offers a prayer to Pan and the other deities of the place “to be made beautiful within” and so that his outer life and his attitude to wealth be consonant with what is within: the   193 

From Parmenides to Philebus latter part of the prayer probably being more appropriate to the aristocratic and wealthy Plato than to the historical Socrates. In the last pages of the Phaedrus we thus learn something specific from Plato himself about why he wrote dialogues. They are the nearest written form to the philosophical debate for which they are no substitute. It would not be an honor, Plato is saying, to be told (as I once was told of a famous colleague): “He do (sic) not think, he write.” Writing can encourage learning rather than wisdom. Of course, smart talk is no better, but philosophical discussion certainly is. It is easy to see that one clear purpose of the Platonic dialogues is to encourage the reader to think—though it is equally clear that Plato gives him important leads about what it is profitable to think about. At the end of the Phaedrus it is not difficult to recognize that the dialogue is a unity that also sums up much of Plato’s progress thus far. Despite the Parmenides—perhaps rather because of the Parmenides—the Forms are eminently in view, at least the “moral” Forms. And their emotional impact is stressed in the joys of the lover of wisdom. The overarching theme of the Phaedrus is the need for the right kind of persuasive discourse on important topics such as eros, which are particularly apt to be manipulated by the unscrupulous to gull the public. But within that overarching theme Plato weaves many details, not least that love of the beautiful and of the other Forms is only half the philosophical story, albeit the more exciting half. We need to know the truth not only about the Forms, but about ourselves—that is, about our souls. Without the right combination of affect and cognition the moral truth will elude us. Plato says nothing direct in the Phaedrus about the relation between true knowledge and the higher eros, but in repeating the theory of “tripartition” from the Republic (albeit with more pessimistic modifications indicating that he now believes that a “surd factor,” the sheer desire for evil, cannot be eliminated from human nature on this earth, but only more or less suppressed), we conclude that here, as in the Republic, knowledge of the Forms and desire and   194 

From Parmenides to Philebus love for them cannot be distinguished (except, of course, conceptually). Persuasion to the truth, the theme of the Phaedrus, requires a unique combination of love and knowledge—and the reformed treatment of love must take into account the soul’s “tripartition,” thus appearing as a theory far more sophisticated than the simple and unified version of the soul that dominates the Symposium (as also the Phaedo): inadequate to account for the variegated loves of embodied human beings. However, that the revised version of the Phaedrus might seem to have shifted the balance too far, tending to lose sight of the soul’s ultimate unity, we shall see in the Timaeus. After the careful revisiting of the theory of Forms in the Parmenides, the more sophisticated discussion of knowledge in the Theaetetus by a revised version of the ever-self-critical Socrates and the further development of the original theory of Eros in the Phaedrus, Plato can advance further in defending the metaphysical defense of ethics he has laid out in the Republic. But there is still unfinished business—even if we defer discussion of the gods. More needs to be said about pleasure, which has lurked behind the debates on happiness from the very beginnings of Socratic inquiry, and Platonic metaphysics is still threatened by logical problems of largely Eleatic origin. From the Parmenides itself, from the deferring of discussion of Eleatic views in the Theaetetus and from the backhanded compliment to Zeno, the “Eleatic Palamedes,” in the Phaedrus, we might expect that further difficulties caused by the work of Parmenides will take center stage in the continuing discussion. Since his reformulation of the distinction between absolute nonbeing and perfect being in the Republic, Plato has shown continuing interest in Eleatic ideas. Parmenides has to be corrected, but also taken seriously. We can therefore expect that following the new Socrates of the Theaetetus we shall soon be introduced to the new Parmenides. We meet him in Plato’s next dialogue, the Sophist, the central theme of which is “not-being”: this too is unsurprising; we have constantly noted how much trouble “not being” has caused, whether for the comprehensibility of false statements and false beliefs or for the possible   195 

From Parmenides to Philebus positing of “negative” Forms such as not-just (unjust), not-good (bad), not-beautiful (ugly), and countless similar not-desirables.   •  Like the Republic, though much less elaborately, the Sophist is constructed on a Russian-doll principle. Formally it is a continuation of the Theaetetus, though it is impossible to know how much later it was composed. In accordance with the last lines of the Theaetetus the participants Theaetetus and Theodorus resume their discussion with Socrates the next day, but this time they have brought with them a “very philosophical stranger from Elea,” who seems to be presented not quite as Plato himself—for he deploys the method of collection and division too simplistically, and it is far from unPlatonic for a dialogue to show its readers some part of the road they must take and invite them then to move further on their own, at least in the first instance—but as a radically reformed (that is, Platonized) follower of Parmenides. The Stranger’s oversimplified “dialectic” lends itself to some characteristically Platonic caricature, even self-caricature, but the best argument in favor of reading him as more or less Platonic in spirit is that both the subject matter of the Sophist and the philosophical advances it proposes are wholly in line with what we might anticipate from our reading of immediately preceding dialogues. Socrates starts ironically: perhaps this visitor is (not Plato) but a god of refutation come to help us out, but Theodorus reassures him. The Stranger is more reasonable than those who merely dispute; he is not a god, though he is divine in the sense that the word can be applied to all genuine philosophers. Socrates needs further reassurance: there are so many charlatans about that it is as difficult to recognize a philosopher as a god. Sometimes philosophers look like statesmen and sometimes like Sophists. Can the Stranger distinguish between these three? Apparently he can, and he sets out so to do, using a crude version of the method of collection and division advocated in the Phaedrus. For his divisions, being dichotomous, are more rigid than the Phaedrus had demanded, yet in so being   196 

From Parmenides to Philebus they enable Plato to arrive at conclusions that apparently satisfied him, while at the same time suggesting satirical (even ludicrous) parallels to sophistic behavior. In the Philebus, as we shall see, Plato will provide a version of division both more sophisticated and more strictly in accord with what the Phaedrus seemed to require. It is difficult to identify a Sophist, so let us start, the Stranger proposes, with something easier: say an angler (218e). That will indicate how the dichotomous version of division works—and it is easy to see why angling offers a helpful (and mocking) practice ground; it is a kind of hunting, and Sophists hunt, as we shall soon realize (221d). At the end of the first application of the method, sophistry is defined as follows (223b): a type of hunting that is appropriative and coercive; its targets are young, rich, and distinguished human beings (humans being a species of tame animal); these are pursued in their private capacities for cash in return for an apparent education. A number of other possibilities are offered later, and six are summarized (231d ff.). It is confusing and disturbing that sophistry can be represented in so many different ways; therefore, says the Stranger, adroitly setting up the main theme of the dialogue, let us concentrate on one particular point that has arisen: that the Sophist is disputatious (232b). He is able to make people think that he is wise on any subject, to be possessed of a universal knowledge. But of course such knowledge is impossible, so at best the Sophist must possess some sort of opinion (233c), while his truer skill is in making verbal images that give the impression of true representations (234c). He is a juggler with words (235a), projecting deceptive images like an impressionist painter. And that idea returns us to a problem that Plato has discussed in earlier dialogues, and that turns out to be the core of the Sophist: how can it be intelligible that someone can say or think what is false? The initial problem is that what the disputants have agreed thus far entails that “not-being” exists, and that, says the Stranger, is what “the great Parmenides” always denied (237a). In classical Greek, “to be” always means (inter alia) to be something (cf. 237d), but obvi  197 

From Parmenides to Philebus ously there is no thing that not-being could be; in other words we can refer to not-being but cannot point to it, since it has no positive characteristics. Thus far Parmenides is right; the problem is how we talk sensibly about what does not exist; and if we do, what are we doing? Apart from general difficulties of this sort (to which Plato will return in the Timaeus when he says, as we have already noted, that we refer to empty space or place by a “bastard rationality,” without the aid of sense perception [52b]), Plato has now apparently come to believe that the notion of not-being, when inspected, generates a particular set of logical and ontological difficulties in the theory of Forms. Not-being has been listed in both the Parmenides and the Theaetetus as one of “the greatest kinds,” and by the one-over-many argument such “kinds” must be Forms: if a, b, c, are not-beings there should be a Form of Not-being itself—perhaps. Yet it seems impossible to speak descriptively or even to conceive of what does not exist. If Forms are existents, how could absolute not-being exist? For, as we have noted, Plato has often indicated from the Cratylus on (359d) that the “full name” of a Form, say of beauty, is “existent Beauty” (auto ho esti kalon); so how, or in what sense, are we to have an “existent non-existence”? For this reason alone we have to conclude that although the “greatest kinds” are recognized by the mind, at least one of them cannot be a Form. Perhaps that should be less surprising than it appears; Plato is beginning to realize more generally that many things can be thought about that do not exist, or that, like mud or dirt, apparently have no corresponding Form. But if one of the greatest kinds is not a Form, what is it? Indeed, returning to the Sophist itself, we find that things are getting even more complicated in that Plato is becoming concerned about being as well as not-being: there is no being, the Stranger argues, apart from beings of a particular kind (237d). So if there is no Form of not-being, perhaps there will be no Form of being either. Perhaps, as phrases like auto ho esti kalon might seem to indicate, we should think not of a Form of Being plus a Form of Beauty, but more strictly designate the Form as “Existent Beauty.” Yet we refer   198 

From Parmenides to Philebus both to “being” and “not-being,” so if these are not Forms, what is the ontological status of the “greatest kinds” in general? The Stranger makes no attempt to conceal the difficulties the disputants are up against (239b)—as is unsurprising, since in the twentieth century Heidegger was still hopelessly immersed in them. He urges Theaetetus to persist, to try to say something about not-being, without attributing to it either existence or unity or plurality. Theaetetus is baffled, and the Stranger notes that if we can progress no further into the world of “not-being,” it will be impossible to locate the Sophist who lurks there (239c). Perhaps then we should investigate the images he produces: they are not absolute non-existents; they exist “somehow” (240b) as likenesses, however deceptive, of what is true. Yet that deception tempts us to credit what is not the case (240d), for we know that falsehood does exist in opinions and in speech. (241a). Sophists, for their part, confuse us about what in some as yet unidentified sense does not exist, not by “dreaming” with the aid, we are to understand, of “bastard reasoning,” but by outright logical trickery. The Stranger now makes his decisive move. Please do not assume that I am a sort of parricide (241d), he says, for feeling obliged to test the theory of my father Parmenides and to argue that there is indeed a sense in which we can say that not-being exists. There is no alternative but that Parmenides’ stark dichotomy between being and not-being is simplistic—as the Republic has already implied, though without producing the necessary explanation. Thus the Stranger is now carrying on the work of Socrates in the earlier dialogue: a clear indication that his views are more or less platonic in spirit, albeit the methodology with which he began, and to which he will revert when the harder work of the dialogue has been completed, is a useful and amusing travesty. For if the Eleatic dichotomy (either being or not-being) is to be discarded, the status of false opinion, as is presumed in the Republic, is confirmed. It seems that Parmenides and everyone else who has attempted it have discussed what there is in too easy-going a fashion (242c), and have not con  199 

From Parmenides to Philebus cerned themselves with objections that ordinary folk like us might raise (243a). Go back to “not-being,” says the Stranger; I thought I understood the phrase, but now it puzzles me. And similarly with “being”; it is hard to see how Parmenides understands it, for he says that only One exists and in that very saying implies that more than one thing exists, for “being” and “one” are two names. Indeed countless problems arise both for Parmenides and for others who talk about whether being is one or many; whether they are materialists or whether they think that “real existence consists of certain intelligible and bodiless Forms” (246b): the battle between materialist reductionists (246d) and non-materialists is a battle between giants and gods. One problem in dealing with the materialists, however, is that they are embarrassed to follow out their own logic and assert that justice and wisdom are material, though that is what they more or less believe (247c). The Stranger now offers his own account of being, or rather of a being—a being is anything with the capacity to act or be acted upon (247e)—and with that he leaves the materialists and moves to the other group, which he now designates “the Friends of the Forms” (248a), a group that might include careless advocates of the position of “Socrates” in the Phaedo (who is certainly targeted in the Parmenides). The Friends of the Forms, says the Stranger, distinguish between being and generation (that is, between eternal, unchanging Forms and changing particulars), and hold that we are involved in change through the senses and with “real being” through thought that occurs in the soul. However, they have ignored the definition of being that the Stranger has just proposed; otherwise they could not deny that motion and life and soul are “present with” absolute being, but suppose that such being is holy and awe-inspiring, but always fixed and unmoving, with no intelligence. In effect, they have accepted “Socrates’” Forms, while paying too little attention to what Socrates holds as certain about active souls. Unsurprisingly, the Stranger’s words have baffled interpreters. Should one give them a “maximalist” (neo-Platonic) reading and   200 

From Parmenides to Philebus say that the Stranger believes the Forms must themselves be alive and intelligent, or is a “minimalist” reading more likely, and closer to the position Plato has adopted in the Phaedo: namely that among what truly is, there must exist, and apart from the Forms, some kind of divine intelligence? The evidence of other late dialogues, notably the Timaeus and Philebus, strongly supports the minimalist reading, though even so, Plato leaves the relationship, within the realm of “real being,” between its two components unclear. Yet it is hard to see how two such different entities as a moving intelligence and a Form—the transcendent and changeless object of thought by which that intelligence may be characterized—can be ranked as equal in any ontological hierarchy. This will be examined further in the next chapter. Previously, as in the Phaedo, Plato has said that soul is “most like” the Forms, not though of similar stature; at least, however, it is similarly “immortal.” Be that as it may, the Stranger’s critique indicates a Plato uneasy about at least the characterization of the higher reaches of his ontology, and although a minimalist reading of the situation seems appropriate for this dialogue, the Stranger certainly seems to be inviting further reflection. Perhaps the final results of such reflection can only be found outside the dialogues, but with a possibly defensible metaphysics of morals in mind, we may legitimately wonder about the relationship between the Form of the Good and a god (or God) and ask whether there is evidence in the dialogues themselves that Plato was now prepared to go further toward clarifying that relationship than he had gone in the Phaedrus, where Socrates said that it is by virtue of knowing the Forms that the gods are divine (249c). Assuredly the gods must know the Forms (it may be some Forms in one way, some in another), but could Plato ever have come to ask whether in knowing the Forms they are (or God is) knowing themselves? Such puzzles, potential or actual, must be postponed till the next chapter; they are not the Stranger’s immediate concern in the Sophist. The universe as a whole, the Stranger continues, can neither be entirely at rest nor entirely in motion (249c). But these notions too   201 

From Parmenides to Philebus are confusing, for both exist, but not in the same way. And if they both exist, being must differ from each of them, so that our previous perplexity about not-being re-echoes again in new problems about being. Indeed, because of the difficulty of explaining why being is both at rest and in motion, certain self-important “late-learners”— perhaps once again Plato targets his fellow-Socratic Antisthenes— deny the possibility of any kind of predication. All we say logically, in their view, must be tautologous: as “good is good” and “man is man.” To defeat this sort of thing we need to explain how predication can be possible; that is, how such basic terms as “being,” “not-being,” “rest,” and “motion”—these are again identified as “classes” (253b)— can be intelligibly combined with one another. For they are like the letters of the alphabet: some can be combined, others cannot (253a). The person who can combine them properly is arguably the philosopher—whom we have stumbled on while searching for the Sophist (253c)—for, as in the Phaedrus, the proper division by classes is a part of dialectic. It is the philosopher who is able to understand how one form (idea) can be present in many individuals and how smaller forms can be recognized as sub-classes. The activity of the Sophist is very different; he runs away into the obscurity of “not-being,” where it is hard to track him down. We must pursue him through investigating how forms or classes (the words seem here to be interchangeable) can (or cannot) blend with one another, in particular “the greatest ones.” That last phrase tells us what we might have expected, and the investigation turns immediately to not-being, being, rest, and motion, then sameness and otherness—and we are again required to pay particular attention to whether not-being really exists. We can see that not-being is somehow different from, for example, motion, and that being itself is different from all other things. The whole difficulty is erased, however, if “not-being F” should be interpreted as “being other than F” or “being different from F” (257bc). That would enable us to say that both “the beautiful” and “the not-beautiful” are parts of what is, since to say that F is not beautiful does not entail that F does not exist (257e). Yet in com  202 

From Parmenides to Philebus menting on correct divisions in the Phaedrus (265e), Socrates has already implied that, since they have no common identifying feature, no proper class will embrace all the not-beautifuls—hence there can be no Form of not-beautiful. And, as we noted in discussing the Phaedrus, that point is to be repeated in the Sophist’s sister dialogue, the Statesman (262d): it is mistaken to divide the human race into Greeks and barbarians. In sum, the Parmenidean dichotomy between what is and what is not is to be abandoned (258c): absolute being may be just being, and not-being just not-being, while various beings are both what they are and not what they are not. As for those, including perhaps Antisthenes, who believe that everything must be separated from everything else, they are philosophically illiterate philistines (259e), to follow whose path—we met something similar in the Parmenides about those who reject Forms altogether—would mean the end of all discussion (259e). If not-being mingles with all beings, it follows it must mingle with speech and opinion (260b), which is why it makes sense to talk of false opinion and false statements. It makes sense, though it is false, to say, “Theaetetus is flying.” Hence deceit is possible; someone might be deluded into believing that Theaetetus really is flying. The Sophist may now try to defend himself further, but we need not follow the Stranger in his inquiry into true and false statement and opinion, nor on into the last act of the Sophist, where, now that the metaphysical difficulties about referring to not-being have been overcome, a final (and grotesque) definition of the Sophist is easily reached by reverting to the dichotomous divisions with which the dialogue began. He is a special type of hunter of rich young men who trades on an all-too-human propensity to construct fantasies and pass them off as philosophical reality. The most far-reaching question arising from the discussion in the Sophist—apart, that is, from the adequacy of Plato’s analysis of not-being and the consequent discussion of true and false opinions and judgments—is the status of the “greatest kinds.” The Stranger seems willing to refer to them variously as kinds (gene) or forms   203 

From Parmenides to Philebus (eide or ideai). There are only two possible interpretations of this; either they are Forms in the classical Platonic sense—for in light of the Parmenides and Phaedrus there is no reason to suppose that these have disappeared from the stage—or they are some other variety of intelligible item. They have now appeared for the third time in a Platonic text, so there can be no denying that Plato is especially interested in them. As indeed he should be, at least with being and not-being. For although, as we have noted, these can be discovered by one-over-many arguments, we have found good reasons to believe that they cannot be counted among Forms. What could any perfect not-being be? Not-being is clearly a possible concept, but not a possible reality, but Forms carry ontological baggage. It is legitimate to wonder whether, by remaining highly obscure in the Sophist about the status of the “greatest kinds” recognizable by the mind, Plato is indicating that he is seriously concerned about the problem. That problem, as we have seen, involves not only not-being, but also being itself, for which—though all the Forms are existent beings—there seems no conceptual space. The most plausible solution to all our difficulties that has thus far been proposed is that in the Sophist the “greatest kinds” (now properly inspected) have been recognized by Plato as something like formal concepts; that is, they are recognizable by the mind, but lack separate ontological status. In that case, the scope of the world of Forms has been further diminished, and the coherence of that world philosophically improved. Plato’s willingness to vary terms he uses for the “greatest kinds” supports that interpretation—not least his introduction of the word “classes” (gene), which appeared in the Parmenides, but not in the “classical” version of the theory of Forms. Before turning to the Philebus and to the overall relevance of the five dialogues discussed in this chapter to the thesis of the present book, we should notice two further questions touched on in the Sophist. The first concerns two varieties of “malady” in the soul: wickedness and ignorance (227e), which are not “socratically” identified. Plato is not going to backtrack on the view outlined in the Re  204 

From Parmenides to Philebus public and developed in the Phaedrus that, apart from ignorance of the Forms, humankind is bedeviled by love for what is not good as well as for what is good. He will have more to say on that score in the Timaeus, adding there a physiological dimension to his analysis (88b ff.). The second question, to which I shall again return in the next chapter, occurs near the end of the Sophist, when Theaetetus prefers to allow that physical substances are no “automatic” product of nature, but indicate the activity of divine intelligence (265cd)— a theme that is to appear slightly differently in the Philebus, where the universe is said to be governed not by random and erratic forces, but by mind and wisdom (28d). That too is a matter on which the Timaeus will have much more to offer.   •  The Philebus was almost certainly composed after the Timaeus, and may indeed lack final polishing, but it is appropriate to discuss it at this point because we can recognize Plato proceeding in a manner similar to what we have seen so far in other “late” dialogues. While the Parmenides reexamines the Forms, the Theaetetus the problem of knowledge, the Phaedrus the interrelated themes of love and persuasion, the Sophist a number of key “logical” problems affecting philosophy as a whole and the theory of Forms in particular, the primary topic of the Philebus is pleasure: a prominent theme in Platonic dialogues from the beginning. Plato never denied the relevance of pleasure to happiness, and as early as the Protagoras argued that even if pleasure is the good, knowledge is important if we are to find out which particular pleasures are good for us. The relationship between pleasure and the good is again raised, but quickly dismissed, in Republic book 6. Now in the Philebus it is to be allotted a fulllength examination, not immediately relevant to the theme of the present study, but its early pages also advance our understanding of the dialectical tool of collection and division, while simultaneously introducing a number of new developments in Plato’s metaphysics. These will be discussed again in the next chapter, primarily in the context of the Timaeus and the Laws.   205 

From Parmenides to Philebus Socrates reappears in the Philebus for the last time as the major speaker, appropriately enough in view of the ethical subject matter and the return to the role of pleasure in the good life that had only been examined in passing in the Republic. In general, though by no means entirely, the Philebus avoids the “Eleatic” concerns of the Parmenides and the Sophist and the wider problem of Plato’s attitude to the followers of Parmenides: themes more obviously Platonic rather than Socratic. It was not inappropriate for the revised Socrates of the Theaetetus to discuss the materialists (the “giants”), because, as the Phaedo had told us, an earlier Socrates had already found mechanistic and materialist accounts of the universe disappointing and inadequate. It would have been much less appropriate for him to have led the discussion of the “gods” and the “friends of the Forms” in the Sophist, not least because he had been set up as a learner in the Parmenides—and what he had had to learn was that his original presentation of the Theory of Forms itself needed reformation. Despite this “earlier” theme of the Philebus, or perhaps because of it—it is the only dialogue after the Republic where we find specific comment on the Form of the Good (64e–65a)—the reconstructed Socrates, who is now far from professing only ignorance, quickly proposes radically new ideas, both to develop the dialectic of the Phaedrus, Sophist, and Statesman and to allow the possibility of a better (and more metaphysically grounded) account of both pleasure and knowledge: indeed by extension of many other matters as well. Hardly has the discussion between Socrates and Protarchus begun—the latter having succeeded as Socrates’ antagonist the more intransigent and dogmatic hedonist Philebus after whom the dialogue is named—than Socrates brings up an old argument, going back to the Gorgias and Protagoras, about the necessity to distinguish between reflective and unreflective pleasures, but now he points the debate in a more technical direction, thus indicating significant development in Plato’s account of first principles. That should not surprise us; the name of Socrates’ presumed fictitious opponent is Protarchus, which may be translated as “man of first principles.” Quite unlike the earlier   206 

From Parmenides to Philebus “Socratic” dialogues, the Philebus is laced with truth claims about disputed metaphysical questions. Socrates has little difficulty in getting Protarchus to agree that, although all pleasures are one in that they are all pleasures, they differ in that there are different kinds of pleasures. That brings back the wider problem of the relationship between the one and the many; readers of earlier Platonic writings will find this unsurprising. Socrates is also able to secure Protarchus’ agreement that such eristic puzzles as are generated by saying that Protarchus is one, because he is one person, and many, because he is both great and small, need not detain us. Real difficulties arise, however, when we think about “Man is one,” or “Ox is one,” or “Beauty is one” (15a). Such items (presumably Forms, though nothing in the argument necessarily hinges on that) raise three questions: Do such unities (monadas) really exist? How can such unities, which neither come to be nor pass away, be always the same unity? How can such unities be at the same time in one and many things? All this reminds us of the Parmenides, where Socrates tells Zeno that the problem of one and many in particulars does not arise in the case of Forms, for he would be very surprised if these could be anything other than (the unity) that they are. Now, however, he suggests a new approach that he says is easy to see, but very difficult to follow (16c). For when we speak of each thing being many, we need a clear idea of how many; we should not immediately invoke an indefinite and limitless number (apeiron, 16d). We should not apply the “idea of the unlimited” to plurality until we know how many kinds there are. The current generation of wise men, continues Socrates ironically, passes too quickly from one to an indefinite number. It is not clear who these wise men are—though one may suspect that, like the Friends of the Forms, they include earlier “ultraPlatonists,” perhaps people who (like the Eleatic Stranger) see division only or chiefly as dichotomous. In any case, we need to know just how many pleasures and kinds of knowledge there are; dichotomy, even if sometimes effective, will not always suffice. As is the   207 

From Parmenides to Philebus case with musical notes—where it is of no use to know simply that there are a lot of them—so with everything else; if we know not just that there are lots of notes, but how many, then and only then can we make harmonies. Even Philebus sees the point of what Socrates is saying, but wonders what it has to do with the particular discussion of the claims of knowledge and pleasure to be the good for man (18a, 18d). At this point there is a certain to-ing-and-fro-ing between Socrates’ interlocutors, of the kind that in Plato often acts as prelude to a major innovation. And so it is here: Socrates says that some god has put the next move into his mind, whether in a dream or in his waking life he is uncertain (20b). The new move is to suggest that there may be a third claimant to goodness; perhaps both parties to the dispute need to be corrected; perhaps again an either-or is not good enough. Be that as it may, Socrates starts with some preliminary observations. The good must be perfect and “sufficient”; that is, it must be something like the “first dear” of the Lysis, the “something adequate” of the Phaedo and the unhypothetical first principle of the Republic: perhaps in some way a combination of all three. In any case there can be no question of anything beyond, no infinite regress to obscure the principles of the good life. We must inquire whether our candidate goods meet these and other conditions. Socrates proceeds further: if a man had no kind of memory, he could neither identify pleasures as pleasures nor remember whether he enjoyed them (21bc). Similarly if we had minds, but no means of satisfaction, would that seem desirable? No, it would not—and that, Philebus asserts, knocks “your mind” on the head too—to which Socrates replies, “My mind, certainly, but not the real and divine mind.” We may leave that mysterious remark for the time being, noting only that Socrates speaks of mind, not soul (22c), and that he distinguishes a human and a divine mind in a way that might challenge certain parts of the Phaedrus. Further banter follows until Socrates says that the difficulty of the road ahead means that we must make a fresh start, with new   208 

From Parmenides to Philebus weapons; he then introduces a division of the contents of the universe—that is, apparently, of all that is (22d)—which we have met in no earlier Platonic writing. Everything there is can be subsumed under four heads: limit, the unlimited, limit mixed with the unlimited, and cause of the “mixture.” All of these heads are kinds of “being,” mixtures being no longer mere “becomings,” but examples of “becoming-into-being” (26d). Protarchus thinks a fifth head should be added: a power of separation (23d). Empedocles would have agreed, and Plato is probably thinking of his two active powers of love and strife. But Socrates declines the suggestion; for the time being let us try to do without it. In light of a myth that had appeared in the earlier Statesman, that was to be expected, for in the Statesman the Stranger imagined a world kept in existence by God, its generator and craftsman, for a period of time, and then wondered what would happen if God’s attention were withdrawn (269c ff.). The result would be chaotic, with the world “going backwards”: the old get younger, plants disappear into the ground. So if we recognize that without God the universe as we know it would end, we realize why in the Philebus Socrates declines Protarchus’ suggestion. As for Forms, so for motion, negative forces are not called for, and the presence or absence of a single cause of the “mixture” will suffice. That, however, is not Plato’s final word on the topic; it will come up again in the Laws. Forms are now classified under limit and changing particulars under the mixture, but our immediate concern is with the cause of the “mixture.” That cause, which is mind, looks like the “moving cause” of the Sophist and the god of the Statesman; it recurs in the Timaeus and the Laws. In the Philebus it is sharply distinguished from the Forms—and doubtless especially from the Good—which are all listed under “limit.” That means that there are three “principles” of all that is: Form, an indeterminate principle in virtue of which individuals within classes (perhaps individual Forms as well as individual particulars) can be recognized as a differentiated plurality, and an efficient cause or divine mind. That leaves the relation  209 

From Parmenides to Philebus ship between limit and efficient cause still in limbo, as also a more elaborate discussion of the nature of the unlimited. The Timaeus, as we shall see, has taken this further, though the language of limit and unlimited is not introduced there. In the case of the Philebus it only remains to notice that while the ethical part of the discussion still speaks of the Good, the general classification of the universe suggests that goodness is somehow to be understood as associated with limit, or in the case of all but the Good itself, of being limited (though, of course, in different ways). Of the Good itself we read that if we cannot track it down with one Form, we can do so with three: Beauty, Proportion, and Truth are its moral-aesthetic, mathematical, and epistemological aspects respectively. In the “mixture” these three, viewed as one, are seen as the “cause” of whatever goodness we recognize (65a). Thus, the proportion of each good thing is its limit. Each Form, called a “unity” in the Philebus, is, as we should expect, exactly what it is, though in its special way it could also be described with reference to formal concepts (i.e., the “greatest kinds”). Thus courage is not self-restraint, to use the example discussed in the final pages of the Statesman. In the Philebus what might seem a purely “ethical” discussion, with an appropriate metaphysic of morals (more or less as in the Republic), has now been set unambiguously within the context of a general metaphysical account of the principles of the universe in toto.   •  Looking back over the five dialogues treated in this chapter, we can see how the metaphysics of morals advanced in the Republic has fared during Plato’s prolonged reconsideration of much of his earlier work. In the Parmenides the theory of Forms has been broadly defended, though weak spots in theme and presentation have been ruthlessly exposed, and we have reason to recognize where Plato will go next in revising them. Participation has been clarified and the world of Forms reduced in size: mass words, like mud, no longer indicate Forms, and substance Forms now seem uncertain. Thus, it is becoming clearer that—even if we leave aside “negatives”—while   210 

From Parmenides to Philebus Forms will always be one-over-many, not all one-over-many arguments point to a Form—though they do point to some sort of intelligible concept. As a reconstructed “midwife,” Socrates in the Theaetetus reassumes the principal role that he had forfeited in the Parmenides, but the characteristic Socratic question “What is knowledge?” is now examined against a wider and more philosophical background, albeit with conclusions that, though formally negative—Socratically enough—point toward a wider account of knowledge than the Republic seemed to allow. In the spirit of the earlier Meno, it is now emphasized as a particular feature of any kind of knowledge, as distinct from true opinion, that it must be firsthand. In the Republic the guardians’ knowledge of the Forms was certainly firsthand, but any impression that all firsthand knowledge is of Forms is finally corrected in the Theaetetus. Forms are known and understood, while particulars can certainly be known. Turning to the Phaedrus we find that Diotima’s account of love has been adapted to the new tripartite psychology, and with more attention to mutuality in the relationship between the lover and the beloved—that is, roughly, between teacher and pupil. And value Forms occupy center stage, no others being discussed. At the same time, a new tool for the dialectician is introduced in the form of collection and division: a key that in the Sophist will reveal a further limitation in the number of transcendent Forms (as distinct from formal concepts). In its sophisticated central section, the Sophist explains how Sophists trade on the unclarity of “not-being” to generate their false statements and judgments, while at the same time these latter are legitimized as philosophically intelligible notions. And its analysis of not-being and then of being—as well of the other “greatest kinds”—points toward a better estimate of what is to count as no mere concept, but a Form in the strict and ontologically superior sense. The size of the now-restricted list of Forms is still uncertain, but it seems that there remain only Forms of positive moral, math  211 

From Parmenides to Philebus ematical, and aesthetic qualities, as of specifiable physical objects, both natural and artificial. Indeed, the exact status even of these last kinds—which are certainly not mere concepts—may still also be open to question. Perhaps when we turn to a direct discussion of the developing relationship between gods and Forms in the Timaeus, further revised answers to questions about the number of Forms will become clearer. For the moment, I emphasize again the novelties of the Philebus relevant to my main theme. The universe can be catalogued in a new way, and the Forms described as limited unities, their “mathematical” aspects being thus again displayed. Justice, like Man, is what it is and not another thing. And the cosmic role of God—also emphasized in the Statesman—as the organizer or “mixer” whose effects are always positive—has been confirmed. The Good too has finally reappeared—in its moral-aesthetic, mathematical, and epistemological aspects—though it can still only be grasped indirectly.

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 8  Gods, God, and Goodness

According to Aristotle’s pupil and successor Theophrastus, Plato proposed two causes of the physical universe: an all-receiving substrate and a moving cause that he “clothes with the power of God and the Good” (fr. 9, in Diels, Doxographi Graeci). Or is it of God, i.e., the Good? Aristotle himself, in the Metaphysics, also attributes two first principles to Plato, the One and the Dyad (A. 988a9ff.), but these sound to be metaphysical, rather than physical, and remind us of the limit and unlimited of the Philebus. Aristotle’s account seems radically different from that of Theophrastus, who clearly identifies a moving (or efficient) cause. Aristotle appears not to do so, and even to imply—against the evidence of all Plato’s later dialogues, many of which he knew well and cited regularly—that Plato had nothing to say about efficient causes, or perhaps that he somehow subsumed efficient causes under formal causes. Thus Aristotle’s version of Platonic metaphysic seems to leap from the Socrates of the Phaedo to what he calls the “unwritten doctrines,” in which theories about the One and the indefinite Dyad are expounded. I will argue that all this is relevant to the final relationship in Plato between God (or gods) and the Good and the Forms, but in order to make sense of it, we must return to the religion of Socrates, then to the more philosophical “theology” of Plato.   213 

Gods, God, and Goodness Socrates, we noted, was a religious man, claiming to obey a certain divine admonition if he was at risk of going off the moral rails. His pursuit of wisdom in Athens was, he insisted, to test and understand the response of Delphic Apollo—that he was the wisest of the Greeks. He would obey the commands of God rather than the laws of Athens if the laws commanded him to do what he judged impious. He believed that he had been providentially sent to arouse his countrymen out of their intellectual and moral slumbers. His piety, however, was unconventional; he held, contrary to much traditional belief, that the gods were the source only of good. In the Theaetetus Plato’s “reconstructed” Socrates urges that it is morally and intellectually disreputable to accept from Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. And although the refutation of Protagoras takes the form of a rejection of the individualist interpretation of Protagorean ideas, according to which each individual determines what is right for him- or herself, Plato would surely have had little time for the more “respectable” version whereby morality is conventionally constructed by different societies or by humanity as a whole. He holds, in fact, both that morality is objective—in the sense that we recognize it with our minds rather than with our feelings—and that that objectivity inheres in moral and religious laws that none of us, high or low, few or many, can invent. For Socrates, to pursue such objective morality, with the aim of making our souls better, is the most important goal in life, overriding all other goals. As presented by Plato—and much of the picture is corroborated from other sources—Socrates held both that revenge is impious, in that it involves the ungodly activity of returning evil for evil, and that the gift of philosophical wisdom enables us to eliminate the moral mistakes we constantly make. His claim that no man sins willingly depends on the belief that we are all born with the single moral capacity to seek what is good and true. Our problems arise through some kind of miscalculation as to what really is good for us, and also, therefore, about what is good and fine (kalon) in itself. It is likely that much of this portrait is historical; many such Socratic   214 

Gods, God, and Goodness views reappear, though sometimes transformed, at every stage of Plato’s career. However, there remains a gap between what the historical Socrates—and/or the Socrates of the earlier dialogues—thought and Plato’s mature views about religion. Socrates had progressed as far as he had without benefit of the Theory of Forms; Plato was convinced that much of the moral edifice—even perhaps of the religious edifice—that Socrates had established would collapse if that theory were to be defeated. If the Platonic Socrates lives in hope, Plato himself wants to insert a strictly philosophical underpinning. The fact that Socrates’ religion is wholly independent of the mature Platonic metaphysic points to a basic fact about that metaphysic: namely that Plato’s remarks about the gods on the one hand and about Forms on the other derive from disparate sources. Comments on God or gods, such as the insistence in the Republic that they must be moral, relate both to traditional stories and to earlier philosophical criticisms of those stories, going back at least to Xenophanes— not to speak of the views of Socrates himself. It might be supposed that at least among intellectuals, disputes about the necessary morality of the gods would have been settled long before the efforts of Socrates and Plato, but that is not the case. On the one hand, for example, we have the bleak and pitiless divinities of Sophocles (regarded by Aristotle—it may be partly for these portrayals—as the greatest of the tragedians); on the other we have the hostile criticism of Euripides, who sometimes seems to reduce the gods to psychological powers within men and elsewhere to condemn them for cynical immorality, making his readers wonder whether he is in effect advocating atheism. Indeed Sophocles too can look like an atheist—not in terms of traditional religion, but in the second sense of the word presented by Plato in the Laws—since his gods are far from unambiguously providential. Yet for Socrates the gods, or at least “the god at Delphi,” are indeed providential; he himself is proof of it. But if a god is providential he is a good planner, so it is hardly surprising that a certain philosophical tradition, again going back   215 

Gods, God, and Goodness to Xenophanes and reiterated by Socrates, urges that God is to be identified with mind. Since the word “god” seems in Greek to be originally less noun than predicative adjective (as in “Love is God” or “Power is God”), it may not matter to a Greek whether he speaks of God in the singular or in the plural. Thus we could say that the divine “stuff,” whatever it is, and whatever form it takes, comes to be identified as mind. Plato tells us in the Phaedo (97b ff.) that when Socrates discovered the book of Anaxagoras, he hoped that he would learn how mind had ordered all things for the best, and that he had been disappointed when he realized that after a good start Anaxagoras relied only on mechanistic and material principles. In the Apology Socrates seems to be agnostic about survival after death, but it is not clear how far this should be pressed. Certainly Platonic language (first appearing in the tenth book of the Republic and repeated three more times in later writings) about the goal of life being to attain to a likeness to God as far as is humanly possible (613b, cf. Theaetetus 176ab; Timaeus 90a ff.; Laws 716b) is absent from the earlier dialogues and can hardly be attributed to the historical Socrates. In the myth of the Gorgias, the first of Plato’s great eschatological stories, the afterlife is portrayed in traditional terms, with punishments meted out to the unjust by traditional judges, and even in the Symposium Plato is still much concerned with a lowlevel way of achieving “immortality,” by procreation, or—rather better—by leaving behind a literary or political legacy like that of Solon or Lycurgus. Many scholars believe that there is no clear indication of a belief in personal immortality in the Symposium, and some—wrongly, in my view—hold that there are clear indications to the contrary. That latter view has the obvious disadvantage of implying that Plato originally accepted (as in the Gorgias) that personal survival is assured (unfortunately for evil-doers!), then dropped the idea, only to retrieve it again in the Phaedo. Indeed, since it is likely that the Symposium and the Phaedo are comparable in date—I have suggested that they be regarded as a diptych—the notion of an agnos  216 

Gods, God, and Goodness tic period for Plato seems even less likely. The probable truth is that Socrates was agnostic—as befits a man who “knows” only his own ignorance—in that he did not think he could prove the immortality of the soul (or of the human being), but accepted something of traditional pictures of the afterlife, while Plato, after a period when he held similar views that immortality should be understood conventionally, decided first that the Pythagorean stories (probably first represented in the Gorgias) were a plausible “myth” (that is, a truth that could not be demonstrated or even presented in any very precise and “scientific” form), then that he could prove them to be essentially true—as he tries to do in the Phaedo and again in the Republic, Phaedrus, and Laws. But some of the proofs in the Phaedo will depend on the now available support of the Theory of Forms. There is no reason to believe that Socrates (or for that matter, the younger Plato) saw man as some kind of “fallen” or lesser god, an idea that presumably developed in Plato’s mind only when he had come to think that immortality could be demonstrated. For if one is demonstrably immortal, it might seem natural to argue that we should try to “attain” likeness to the gods as far as is humanly possible—indeed, if we are immortal, what else is there worth aiming at? And we have already seen in the Republic what such likeness would entail: we should strive to be just, and generally good, thus resembling the gods not merely in their immortality. But to achieve such goodness would again seem to require a recognition of Forms, since in the myth of the Phaedrus Socrates claims that it is in virtue of their knowledge of the Forms that the gods are divine. If we were to ask Plato what is the essential difference between a soul and a god, he might find it difficult to reply—except to say (as he does) that while the gods are in heaven (or in the place above the heavens), man is in some sense “fallen” and needs moral training. We share the gods’ immortality, but not yet their perfection, though that is a possibility at least for some of us. So the question arises, how do we know that we are fallen? Obviously in part because we are not “happy,” or not invariably happy.   217 

Gods, God, and Goodness And there is no doubt that Plato associates that unhappiness with our being in a body. In the Gorgias the body is the tomb of the soul (soma-sema), while in the Phaedo, as we have seen, Plato offers an account of vice whereby deliverance from evil comes from separating the soul from the body and from bodily concerns as far as possible. Clearly in the present life we cannot separate “ourselves” from the body altogether—and in this connection it is important to remember that Socrates condemns suicide as a kind of desertion of our allotted guard post. But after the Phaedo Plato’s account of the nature and origin of vice is modified. In the Republic it is disharmony between the various “kinds” of soul that causes the trouble, a position reinforced in the Phaedrus, where the passion horse’s nature cannot be changed, only forcibly restrained. Yet also in the Phaedrus the souls of the gods are presented as tripartite, and wholly admirable, which might suggest that it is not tripartition that is the problem, but again the association of the soul with the body. The “real” gods, of course, have no body; though in the myth of the Phaedrus they appear to be embodied as they were traditionally portrayed— which may account for why there at least their souls do emerge as tripartite. To be tripartite would be simply the state of a soul when it has bodily associations. So again it would seem that, if becoming like God is to be adduced, we should think in terms not only of trying to behave like the gods—that is, perfectly and providentially—but should pay only the minimal attention to bodily affairs. That in turn will be rewarded by escape from the cycle of births and deaths, to which Plato, as a good Pythagorean, believes we shall otherwise be condemned. Nevertheless, in the Phaedrus the human embodied soul, like the souls of the gods, is still tripartite. As we shall see, in a further development in the Timaeus that apparent anomaly will be clarified. In a key section of what is often referred to as a “digression” in the Theaetetus (176ab), Socrates—that is, Plato’s reconditioned Socrates—for the second time and in a passage most frequently cited, lays it down that our aim should be to obtain likeness to God as far   218 

Gods, God, and Goodness as possible. There are two patterns in the world, the divine—that is, the godlike and most happy—and the godless—that is, the most wretched (176e). Those who follow the former will be redeemed, and those who do not will remain wanderers within “mortal nature and this [present] place.” Here, then, we have our goal: likeness to God’s goodness will bring us to likeness to God’s detachment from the pettiness and resultant moral squalor of the present form of social and political life. Of course, there is nothing here to invite us to disown Plato’s claim about the need for the philosopher-king of the Republic to return to the Cave. Plato is merely contrasting two kinds of life in an ordinary Greek city. In such cities philosophers are regarded as unworldly: they may watch the stars like Thales and be mocked by slave-girls for falling down wells as a result. They are out of touch with the world (just as they are in the Republic), while the men of the politicized courts become tense and bitter, small-souled flatterers and deceivers, given over to returning wrong for wrong, stunted individuals who delude themselves that they have become smart and clever (173b). The philosopher, on the other hand—to use Theophrastus’ phrase with which this chapter began—is “clothed with the power of God and the Good.” Yet there is little about Forms in the Theaetetus: in the “digression” Socrates is still doing as much as he can to explain morality—and its cosmic and divine infrastructure—without reference to them.   •  If the Platonic gods derive from traditional theology, as modified by Socrates and Plato himself, and exist in and above the cosmos ordered by a constructive and providential mind, Plato’s Forms, appearing first in the Cratylus, Symposium, and Phaedo, derive from speculation that is purely metaphysical or more usually metaethical. They are introduced to solve two questions, which, as we have seen, tend to be collapsed into one: firstly, how we are to understand the natures of things that come to be and pass away and are identifiable by a common name—the reference of which is in fact primarily to their Form (such as shuttles, couches, tables, men,   219 

Gods, God, and Goodness oxen); secondly, how we are to understand that moral and aesthetic terms have a fixed sense recognizable by the trained mind, and thus to have good grounds to reject any form of conventionalism, as well as the nihilism into which conventionalism, when challenged, will ultimately collapse. In Plato’s estimation when he first formulated the new theory, it was not only intelligible discourse about morality that was threatened, but intelligible discourse as a whole, of which that about morality is the most important. The one-over-many argument was supposed to solve all these kinds of difficulties, among which—there is no doubt—was Plato’s initial concern, inherited from Socrates, with value terms. Yet, as we have seen, the one-overmany argument was found to generate too many “Forms,” thus showing itself necessary, but not sufficient as an indicator of the “content” of the real and intelligible world. Even after introducing and gradually refining the Theory of Forms, Plato argues not that we should try to become like the Form, but always like God. That has to be because the Forms are inactive and unchanging, whereas we, as souls, are self-moving and changing. As for the gods in themselves, they are unchanging, but actively so, thus in respect of their activity beings like ourselves. So there seems to be a real difference, not only in their origins, but in their natures between these two “parts” of the intelligible world of real being (to use the language of the Sophist). What Plato has said up to that point is that by their knowledge of the Forms the gods are divine, and we are to assume that this knowledge is of “extra-mental” and passive realities. We noticed in the Republic, however, that Plato seems uncertain about the sense in which the Good is the cause of all things (especially and directly of the remaining Forms). Perhaps the Timaeus, in conjunction with the comments of Aristotle and Theophrastus, can shed further light on whether the ultimate elements of Plato’s cosmos are two: a formal cause of all that is, and a “material” or apparently material cause. Or are they an efficient and a material cause? Or are there—apparently in contradiction of both Aristotle and Theophrastus—three causes: one formal, one ef  220 

Gods, God, and Goodness ficient, and one something like matter? Before embarking on a further dangerous voyage of discovery, we need to revert to the Symposium and the Philebus. Modern readers of the Symposium worry about a difficulty that never troubled the ancients. In the ascent of the soul to the Form of Beauty, two strange things seem to happen. First the lover’s original inspiration, namely the human beloved, seems to disappear. That is to some extent corrected in the Phaedrus, though the “correction” has long been instantiated in every description of the behavior of Socrates himself, who always appears concerned for the well-being of his interlocutors. In the Phaedrus (here misinterpreted by Plotinus) Plato emphasizes that the lover works on the improvement of his beloved as a sculptor works on perfecting his statue. The second concern the Symposium raises is more serious, though related to the first. Diotima seems to have no difficulty in moving from a love of individual persons (first bodies, then souls), to love of souls in general, then to the love of impersonal goals, such as the generating of splendid laws and institutions. From there she advances to the impersonal Form of Beauty Itself. This confirms the dichotomy between the two elements of Plato’s “real being” (as he later identifies it): mind or soul (which in some sense is personal for human beings and higher minds—if any—in the cosmos) and Forms. They not only come from different realms of discourse (that is, from traditional religion and reflection on traditional religion in the one case and from philosophical speculation on the other), but they are distinguished as personal and impersonal. In the “middle dialogues” Plato certainly seems to place the impersonal higher than the personal; indeed in the case of the personal gods, and of ourselves as their imitators, they are divine precisely because they “know” the impersonal Forms. The erotic relationship, as we have seen, is ultimately nonreciprocal. This may seem an implausible, if intelligible, position, not least in that a divine mind recognizes a kind of value higher than itself. That will be discussed in my final chapter; my present concern is whether Plato always upheld the the  221 

Gods, God, and Goodness sis about the relationship between gods and Forms proposed in the Phaedrus. If he did, we may wonder whether the explanation is to be found in his identification of “person” with soul, and soul with the organization of changing “beings.” But in the later dialogues, especially the Timaeus—perhaps also the Philebus (22c)—there seems to be a new factor in the story: the apparent distinction of mind from soul. Be that as it may—and we shall consider it further—Plato normally retains the superiority of the impersonal in the Philebus, where limit is connected with Form, and the “cause of the mixture” (apparently distinct) is an organizing and constructing mind, whether divine or human. And when he reflects on the good for embodied man (as distinct from the Good itself), Socrates disallows the idea that mind is the sole good, since by itself it is insufficient to satisfy us in our bodily state (67a). Yet elsewhere in the same dialogue he seems to affirm mind’s possible equality to, if not identity with, its objects: either mind, which is not necessarily impersonal, is identical with truth—that is, with intelligible reality—or—the “older” view, as in the Phaedo—it is most like it (65d). When trying to clarify this, we should recall our uncertainty about whether already in the Republic Plato wants to say that the Form of the Good really is the sole cause of all—which would at least imply that it is active, efficient, and in some sense mental—or rather only a necessary condition, as light is the necessary condition for vision. Perhaps Plato himself is still uncertain in the Philebus. Perhaps what he needed was an adequate distinction between quality and substance, which might lead him to deny that qualities (like goodness) can exist apart from substances (gods) in the intelligible world. Perhaps he needed to recognize that to account for the existence of the universe he needed to posit (in addition to “matter”) only the right kind of essentially qualified efficient cause, and that such a recognition would make not only the notion of Form, but also that of matter more intelligible. Perhaps the Timaeus will help to advance us further.   •    222 

Gods, God, and Goodness The Timaeus opens in extraordinary fashion. Three of those supposed to have participated in the debate recorded as the Republic (another is said to be absent) meet again the next day—though minus Thrasymachus and Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. Now the role of those latter three in the Republic was to challenge Socrates on fundamental and difficult issues and eventually push him into justifying the possibility of ethics by setting it within a metaphysical and psychological framework: the Theory of Forms and the “tripartition” of the soul. As we move from book four to book five of the Republic, we learn that if we would deal with the problem of justice, we cannot limit ourselves to political science. Yet the Socrates of the Timaeus, in the absence of the three key antagonists of the Republic, gives an account of what was discussed in the earlier dialogue without the slightest reference to metaphysics. The contents of the Republic’s three central books are omitted entirely—albeit the special distinction between knowledge and opinion is later reproduced by Timaeus as part of his own metaphysical proposals (48c, 51d ff.). Socrates in effect summarizes the Republic as a piece of theoretical political science with no transcendental dimension. To compound such presumption, he insists that he has outlined the whole of the Republic; nothing essential has been left out (19a). The other speakers in the Timaeus are: Critias, Plato’s tyrannical uncle, in an unexpected and still sanitized reappearance replacing Plato’s brothers to expatiate on the past glories of his (and their) family and city; Hermocrates, the Syracusan general who led the resistance to that city’s imperial expedition to Sicily, and thus directly—and happily for Critias—contributed to the weakening of its radical democracy—or dictatorship of the majority, as Plato had come to view it after the judicial murder of Socrates; finally Timaeus, apparently a Pythagorean astronomer from the southern Italian town of Locri, of whom we know nothing apart from the dialogue itself. It is Timaeus who does most of the talking, and scholars have been inclined to think that, since he recapitulates certain aspects   223 

Gods, God, and Goodness of the Theory of Forms, as well as a version of Plato’s tripartite psychology, the Timaeus is intended to replace the metaphysical books of the Republic as well as to attempt a project that the Socrates of the Phaedo had been unwilling to undertake in view of Anaxagoras’ failure to explain how mind orders all things for the best in the world of nature. But if Plato is now intending to modify or develop the metaphysical core of the Republic, one cannot help asking what has happened to the most important novelty of that most challenging of the dialogues, the Form of the Good itself. If Timaeus is to replace Socrates as the protagonist, is the doctrine of Timaeus to replace (or reposition) the Socratic Form of the Good, as well as, perhaps, develop other aspects of “Socrates’” views on Forms? Is it that in starting from a teleological natural philosophy Plato has concluded that he can advance beyond what he has achieved thus far in developing a justification primarily of ethics? Certainly we know from the Sophist (and Statesman), as from the Philebus, that in discussing “physics” we cannot avoid discussing God, the good and providential planner, as well as the metaphysical principles antecedent to physics. Even in book six of the Republic itself we recall that the Good is unambiguously intended also to justify mathematical Forms, and that Plato already regarded mathematics as somehow the basis of physics. Timaeus offers an account of the construction of the universe under two heads: the works of reason—that is, of the Demiurge— and the works of necessity (47e). This might suggest that in the Timaeus only two causes are proposed, as Aristotle said, but they seem not to be Aristotle’s two. For in the Metaphysics, as we have seen, Aristotle speaks of the “essential” (or formal) cause and of “matter.” Plato in the Timaeus offers mind (identified as a craftsman or demiurge) and “necessity” (which latter seemed to Aristotle to be a failed attempt to indicate a material cause). The discrepancy between Aristotle and Timaeus here seems to be twofold: there is a certain disagreement about the nature of the “material” cause or “necessity” and an apparently complete disagreement on its partner, Timaeus treating mind as an efficient cause, Aristotle finding a formal cause.   224 

Gods, God, and Goodness Perhaps that disagreement is to be explained by supposing that Aristotle has the Phaedo in mind as much as the Timaeus, for the Phaedo indeed posits no efficient cause, and Socrates has tried to substitute a discussion of Forms, of which he is capable, for reflection on the ordering activities of mind to which he has been unequal. That explanation cannot be complete, for Aristotle is very familiar with the Timaeus, cites it regularly, and criticizes it at length. And yet he seems to ignore the role of Plato’s efficient cause in his account of Plato’s metaphysical principles. Is it perhaps that he thinks that Plato deploys such a cause only in physics, and that it has no metaphysical—transcendental—relevance? If so, one might expect Plato to have made some suggestion as to how the efficient cause—not being primary—comes into existence at all, and not least because Aristotle (rightly in my view) thinks that he intends the “creation story” in the Timaeus to be taken literally—though that was contrary to the opinion of other prominent members of the Academy. But perhaps Aristotle does afford further clues as to the efficient cause. “As for the first principles of things,” he says (Metaphysics A 987b21ff.), “they have the One [equivalent to the Good] as ‘substance’ and as matter they have the ‘great and small.’” Perhaps Aristotle thinks that the “generating” One (which is a Form) is to be taken as parallel to the generating Demiurge—and his complaint against Plato is that he has failed to distinguish a formal (and necessary, but not sufficient) cause from an efficient cause. As we have seen, that sort of concern might arise from trying to interpret the sixth book of the Republic. To help unravel this we might revert to the remark of Theophrastus that Plato’s moving cause is “clothed with the power of God and the Good.” Unfortunately, that can be interpreted either as a statement about what Plato intended or else as an attempt by Theophrastus to make sense of what Plato intended. “Clothed” is a metaphor that leaves the relationship between the Good in itself and the moving cause uncertain. The moving cause clearly is God,   225 

Gods, God, and Goodness but is it also so clearly the Good? If held to be so deliberately, then Plato has indeed rewritten the metaphysics of the Republic—which would account for his leaving that metaphysics out of the resumé of the Republic that Socrates offers in the Timaeus. It is beyond our present remit to tackle the problems of Aristotle’s account of the “works of necessity.” Suffice it to say that Aristotle did not understand that Plato’s model is not “physical,” but biological. The works of “necessity” (that is, of the matrix of becoming, of “space” (50d), or of the receptacle—as it were the nurse—of becoming [49a], as Timaeus puts it) are analogous, as the sixthcentury Aristotelian commentator Philoponus realized, to the then supposed works of a female in the process of conception, where the Demiurge, the efficient cause, is the father. As Philoponus says (In Phys, 516, 16–19): “He (Plato) compares the separate and transcendent Form to a father [who ‘sows’ his seed (cf. Timaeus 28c, 37c, 41a, 41c)], the matter to a mother (cf. Timaeus 50d), and the creative reasons [the qualities deriving from the appropriate Form] to a seed. These reasons empty out into the matter. And he compares to a fetus the developing natural kinds that arise in matter as a result of the activity of the creative reasons.” Let us return to the efficient cause, the Demiurge itself, the God who constructs the universe out of a primordial and incoherently moving chaos. This is not creation from nothing, but an organizing of the disorder of unformed eternal “matter.” After accepting Socrates’ suggestion that he should start with a prayer, Timaeus begins, in the spirit of the Republic, by distinguishing between what is eternal and unchanging (scilicet the world of Forms) and what comes to be and passes away (28a). Indeed he increases the ontological distance between the two worlds in that he apparently sees the world of Forms as existing outside time, while the physical world is a “moving image of eternity”—that is, in time (37d): a distinction first mooted in the Parmenides (140e ff.). Timaeus then observes that everything that comes to be must have a cause—by which he means an efficient cause—and, if that efficient cause uses what is   226 

Gods, God, and Goodness eternal as a model, the result will be beautiful. All this must refer particularly to the physical universe itself, which must have a “maker and father” (28c): an indication either of continuous generation (which Plato does not accept) or a more or less literal first beginning of the universe, with a “semi-personal” organizer, when time too (evidently not a dimension of the life of the Demiurge as such) comes into being. The generation language is also to be found in the Statesman (270a, 273b). Since the “Demiurge” is the maker of the cosmos, his model will have to be the eternal and unchanging. Plato refers to the relationship of Form and particular as that of model and copy, rather than of participation, since before the existence of the copy it plainly could participate in nothing at all, and thus in speaking of the origins of the universe, pattern-copy language is necessary. After that it would matter less; however, Plato uses no participation language in the Timaeus, and we can see why he avoids it if we attend to the ontological difference between copy and original, for, as we already noted, if a copy is destroyed or passes away, the original is unaffected, and in this case remains eternal and unchanging, but without the original no copy could come into existence, and if (per impossibile) the eternal original did pass away, the copy would have nothing in which to participate. All one could imagine in that circumstance is a return to an incoherent material state. That might be adequate comment for physical objects, including the universe as a whole, but “values” (as distinct from valued objects) differ from physical objects, being incapable of coming to be and passing away, as also of changing. If no one, even God, had thought of a chair, would there be the Form of a chair? Certainly for the Socrates of the Phaedrus, if no one, even a god, had thought of justice, there would still be justice. Timaeus invokes the Republic again (neglecting the refinements of the Theaetetus, which are irrelevant to the present case) in his remarks about the distinction between the metaphysical targets (as distinct from this-worldly objects) of knowledge and belief. As being is to becoming, so is truth (which gives an exact account) to be  227 

Gods, God, and Goodness lief. That is how he justifies his remark that what he will offer about the origins of the universe is no scientific account (in the ancient sense)—not knowledge, that is, but a likely “myth”: a hypothesis that cannot be demonstrated to be “true,” but that is the best available in the current state of the evidence (29cd). And after that preliminary methodological comment he moves to the character and behavior of the Demiurge himself: “He is good and in him who is good there is no grudging of goodness; he wanted everything to be as like himself (i.e., as good) as possible.” Accordingly, when he took over the inchoate material with which he had to work, he made order out of disorder. This was all done “because of the providence of God.” In the Timaeus, as in the Phaedrus, there is no grudging envy among the gods, and we recall that in the Meno, if we assume that Themistocles was a good man, he would not have grudged virtue to his son. Here, then, is Plato’s basic understanding of God’s nature: he is good, and his will is good, which means he is unstinting in his bestowal of goodness. In such a description there are several ideas we have noted as genuinely Socratic and that contradict much traditional Greek religion. The traditional gods are frequently envious of human success; they seem to fear that humans will—to use the traditional language—pile Pelion on Ossa and try to scale the heights of Olympus, thus dethroning its inhabitants, or steal fire, as Prometheus. Plato’s god, however, is providential, and therefore cannot be arbitrary in his behavior: goodness is an enduring quality; it cannot change; hence God’s good and providential will cannot change. As a result, whatever is less than good is the result, not of God’s will, but of the randomness and intractability of the material with which he has to work, of a given disorderliness he cannot entirely overcome. What he produces is a living universe, with a rational soul and body. That living universe, however, is within the realm of becoming, not of being, so we should expect the World-Soul (like the souls of the gods in the mythological version of the Phaedrus) to be tripartite. And so it is, at least in essentials, for in the realm of becoming, “reason” always goes within soul as a whole (31a).   228 

Gods, God, and Goodness The last pages of the Timaeus offer some surprising developments in Platonic psychology—and in clarifying his theory of human”tripartition” Plato may also shed further light on the problem of the relationship between God and the Good. In speaking of the World-Soul, Timaeus comments, at least indirectly, on the “tripartite” nature of all souls in the world of “becoming,” including those of any gods so located. But he has also much to say directly, both about human souls, in their various conditions, and about the “soul”—that is not in fact the right word, as we shall see—of the Demiurge, the fundamental efficient cause of “becoming.” In the Timaeus, Plato repeats his normal practice in the Republic of treating not of parts of the human soul, but of kinds (e.g., 69d, 89e), each kind, however, now being given a physical location: the reasoning kind in the head, the other two in the thorax and abdomen. The two lower kinds are specifically bracketed as mortal, while reason is said to be immortal. Here, then, we have a clear resolution of the dilemma about the unity and simplicity of the soul in the tenth book of the Republic, with the abandonment of two of the three apparently immortal “parts” of the Phaedrus where the souls of both gods and men are of three kinds, the only difference being that in the case of gods (mythologically construed, as we noted, as embodied), the “passion horse,” the “desiring” faculty, is always obedient to its betters. But now in the Timaeus, if only one kind of soul, namely reason, is immortal even for human beings, the same principle must also apply in the case of all souls, as we seem to see in the case of the Soul of the World. However, in the case of the Demiurge, we should speak, as does Timaeus, not of soul at all, but of mind, for the Demiurge is not embodied. Plato follows a similar practice in the “myth” of the Statesman (where we read of the “greatest spirit” or daimon [272e]), and also, as we shall see, in the Laws (897d). In the Timaeus too the word daimon is further applied to our own reasoning mind (90a)—viewed as that kind of “soul” which is immortal and leads us to live justly; and being immortal it is “constructed” by the Demiurge himself, who leaves the construction of the mortal parts to lesser divinities he has himself formed (41c).   229 

Gods, God, and Goodness Plato wants to say that while we are embodied, our mind is to be seen not only as a “kind” of soul, but as a “part” of the “tripartite” soul—our souls thus being comparable to the World-Soul— but when disembodied we are mind alone, like the Demiurge. The World-Soul and our individual souls are indeed of similar construction, hence in different degrees sharing the capacity to recognize the “greatest kinds” of the Sophist—certainly of Being, Sameness, and Otherness (35a)—that is, to think logically (and morally). Yet there is an important difference between our souls and the Soul of the World: unless the Demiurge undoes his handiwork (41a), the World-Soul will never be disembodied; if it were, the world would come to an end, as “we” (if seen as our soul-body combination, as human beings, as the Meno puts it) come to an end at death. Why is Plato in the Timaeus concerned to allot to each kind of human soul a physical location in the body? In a sense it is the obvious thing to do if, as he believes, we reason with the brain in our heads and react sexually with our genitals. In the latter case, however, he may also be thinking metaphorically of the power of erotic desire to make us “think.” That would make good sense: witness an actress well-known in the sixties of the last century who claimed that there were occasions when she thought from between her legs. And such physical locating of kinds of soul makes it a little easier to understand how in an immortal life without a body we would exist without tripartition (though, as the Republic has taught us, especially in book nine, not without affect). All that is required for an unembodied soul or god is the necessary capacity to resume tripartition if, by chance, it ever takes on (another) body. The real and immortal “I,” it seems, is to be assigned to mind, but that mind is treated as soul when accompanied by mortal kinds of “soul”: that is, mortal and changeable kinds of motion-causers, such “souls” always living and working through a body. The Demiurge, God, has no body, being incapable of essential change. Thus the assertion in the Phaedrus that divine souls are “tripartite” is explained; if and only if the gods are in a body, whether in fact or in mythology, they must become tripartite.   230 

Gods, God, and Goodness Timaeus, however, has not finished; he has a further surprise, also associated with the notion that the essential “I,” the “kind” of soul that is “my” daimon (90a), is properly, like the gods, wholly immaterial: a revised version of the Socratic tenet that no one does wrong willingly (86d). Whereas in the Sophist Plato had distinguished human error as either wickedness or ignorance (228d), he now substitutes madness for wickedness. That madness, he emphasizes, may have largely bodily causes, rather as we may speak of a sexual offender as “testosterone-fueled.” His bodily excess then affects his soul and can produce a madness that induces wicked acts. But in conditions of temptation the well-trained and tempered mind is (or could and should be) unaffected. Thus, no one would sin willingly—though there is also the other cause of sin, namely ignorance. So Plato manages to save the Socratic dictum that no one sins willingly, but explains it differently. For Socrates we had only one basic desire—that is, for the good. Plato’s concerns about weakness of will render that view impossible; in our mortal and physical life we have other basic desires than for the good, but that is not true of our real self, the real “I” that is our reason or nous and that is now allotted its correct name, that of spirit or daimon. Our real self, but not our embodied self, still never sins willingly. But there is still more to be said (or recalled) about the divine mind. Plato thinks that “tripartition” is only a feature of bodily life, and since, mythology aside, there is no bodily life for the traditional gods—though there is for star gods—their souls could not be tripartite. But if the Demiurge is pure Mind—that is, a purely immortal and immaterial substance—he is by that closer to being identified with what is all along and undoubtedly purely immaterial—namely, the Good itself. Nevertheless, we should not make a tempting but false further inference about Plato’s final account of the divine mind (or of our minds). Even if not tripartite, minds are not merely rational calculators; the love of the Good and of Beauty, so strongly defended in the ninth book of the Republic, is still within them. Plato is not a Cartesian; for the Demiurge of the Timaeus, as   231 

Gods, God, and Goodness for the divinities of earlier dialogues, the distinction between reason and “will” or “love” is only conceptual. And the same will apply to our own real “I.” To know the Good and to love and will the Good comprise a single and simple act of the mind, whether human or divine. It is now clearer still why already in the Republic Plato speaks of the logistikon as a kind of soul, not a mere part.   •  Let us now turn to the model on which the Demiurge relies to complete his work for the best: that extraordinary model, which Timaeus calls the “Ideal Living Creature” (auto to zoon) and which certainly cannot be identified with the Good. The Ideal Living Creature “contains” all other Forms needed to explain the physical structure of the cosmos, just as already in the Phaedo the Form of Oddness “contains” the Form of Three. Now we have seen in earlier dialogues that the Forms are self-predicating, and from the Parmenides have derived some idea of how Plato intended that to be understood. Nothing is strictly beautiful but Beauty itself; if Beauty were not beautiful, it could not be what it is, namely the highest inspiration for the soul. Similarly the Ideal Living Creature must be alive. Yet since the Ideal Living Creature contains all other (“physical”) Forms (50e), they too (as the neo-Platonists believed) should also somehow be alive. If Plato had been able clearly to distinguish the differing natures of specific groups of apparent “Forms” (not to speak of formal concepts), there would have been no possibility of the immaterial “Form” of a table seeming to be a table (as Beauty is beautiful); it might be only the notion or concept of a table. However, this latter possibility could only be actualized in a genuinely Platonic (as distinct from neo-Platonic) world if the Good, as some sort of necessary cause of the existence of other Forms (as of other concepts), were itself alive: that is, identical not, of course, with the Ideal Living Creature (let alone with the World Soul), but with the Demiurge. But if the Good were to be identified with the Demiurge, what would become of the other Forms that, as the Republic maintained,   232 

Gods, God, and Goodness depend on the Good for their existence, and that, according to the “unwritten doctrines,” derive from the One and the “dyad,” or principle of plurality? Clearly they would have to be subsumed under the Ideal Living Creature and presumably, as in Middle Platonic writers, they would in effect become God’s thoughts (or better, in the case of the moral Forms, his attributes). Perhaps Plato was moving in that direction, at least as far as the Good and the Demiurge are concerned, though it must be admitted that his thinking is not perspicuous. That may be either because his own thoughts were far from clear even to himself, or because such a move is still revolutionary, and “Timaeus” does not as yet want to commit himself too far. In any case we should ask whether there is any other evidence— outside as well as inside the Timaeus—that points to his moving in that direction. I shall argue that there certainly is. The Demiurge’s model is eternal and unchanging; it exists outside time, for, as we have seen, the temporal everlastingness, which the physical universe possesses, is its moving image (37d). How does Plato understand “outside time”? He seems to think of the eternity of the Forms as primarily characterized by an absence of change. So the apparent distinction between the Forms, above all the Form of the Good—which are the models for the Demiurge— and the Demiurge himself is between an unchangeable and static character and a being able, though unchanging, to promote change in other things as an efficient cause. The Demiurge is perfectly and unchangeably good, and by direct action produces good beyond himself. Yet that looks remarkably like Theophrastus’ account of the second Platonic “first principle”: an efficient cause clothed in the power of God and the Good. Since Theophrastus is plainly aware of the other Platonic “cause,” namely what Plato in the Timaeus calls “space” (or “the receptacle of becoming”), what we should like to ask him is this: Are the two causes you attribute to Plato the sum of his first principles, or are they what you think should have been the sum of his first principles? For in effect what Theophrastus attributes to Plato—and he clearly has the Timaeus in mind—is a thesis   233 

Gods, God, and Goodness whereby when Plato has his Demiurge look toward the best possible model, he is looking not outside himself to a “third” principle—for Theophrastus names no third principle, no Form of the Good—but to himself as the equivalent of that third principle: in other words, that the Demiurge makes any further third principle otiose. For, although in itself the nature of the Demiurge does not change, in his acts he causes other things to change. He performs, that is, both the role of a traditional (and traditionally “philosophical”) god as mover and that of the peculiarly Platonic notion of a perfect model (or Form, or above all the Form of the Good) in accordance with which the best movement is possible. But is Theophrastus, speaking of Plato’s cause as clothed with the power of God and the Good (Or is it “as” the Good)—and perhaps in this Aristotle, too, inasmuch as he also attributes to Plato only the two “principles”—right after all about the Timaeus—or has Plato just left his final position ambiguous? Ambiguous? Or would Theophrastus view it as simply mistaken? The impression most modern readers take away from the Timaeus is that the “mistaken” view—that is, the view that God must be characterized by goodness (as the Phaedrus had it) rather than being identical with it—is the view of Plato himself. Certainly there is no evidence in the text that clearly contradicts that interpretation, though it is remarkable that, when Timaeus sums up his theories (52d, cf. 48c), he lists not mind, place, and becoming, but being, place, and becoming. Is being to be equated with mind (and its contents)? Of course, if we go beyond the Timaeus, we can point to Aristotle’s remarks about the One (that is, the Good) “generating” the Forms to draw the conclusion that, if Aristotle is reflecting genuinely Platonic language—and the “biological” word “generating” suggests he is—then it may be correct to infer that the first principle (analogously to the Demiurge of the Timaeus) is indeed an active cause—and not simply a necessary condition—of the existence of the physical universe. If that were the case, what might we conclude about the origin   234 

Gods, God, and Goodness of values; are their roots to be treated as on all fours with those of physical objects? They would be if Plato thinks that, like human values, physical objects are themselves the image of divine Forms. But that, as I implied earlier, might seem to run up against the problem of what happens when a new artifact is invented. Has it always existed, like goodness and justice in (or as) a divine mind? Or would it not be better to say that God knows physical objects as constructible, but that he knows values because they are what he is? For, though Plato’s Demiurge is good, he is not a chair or a table. Thus if Plato has now identified the Demiurge and the Good, he ought to say that the Forms of physical objects (that is, of substances) are God’s concepts, while the Forms of values are his nature. We recall that in the tenth book of the Republic Plato does claim that the Forms of couch and table are “made” by God. But then all such “conceptual” Forms, though still in the mind, would not be Forms in the original sense; the scope of the world of Forms would have (again) been pared down. And if Forms of substances are God’s concepts, what is the status of moral, aesthetic, and mathematical Forms? Is this the direction in which the Timaeus (not to speak of Theophrastus) ultimately points? There appears to be an allusion to Forms of artifacts in the Timaeus itself (28a), where Timaeus speaks of the way in which human craftsmen make use of unchanging “models.” In the Seventh Letter, too (342d), in a comprehensive list of intelligible items of many kinds (of shapes, colors, moral qualities, as well as natural substances) artificial items are included. Curiously, in both these texts specific words for Forms (eide, ideai, gene) are absent; Plato apparently only wants to refer to various kinds of intelligibles, without ontological comment.   •  Book one of the Laws apparently refers (638b) to a battle between the Syracusans and the Locrians in 356. We are told by ancient sources that the Laws was Plato’s last work, and that he left it unfinished. That would imply that the content of a reputedly unintelligi  235 

Gods, God, and Goodness ble lecture on the Good and of other “unwritten doctrines” to which Aristotle alludes regularly had already been formulated by the time Plato wrote the latter sections of his last “published” book. That makes it both intriguing and of great importance that the Theory of Forms only seems to appear in the last few pages of the Laws (965b ff., where we also find references to dialectic and “division”). The conclusion is sometimes drawn that Plato had abandoned the Forms, but since they appear, as we have noticed, in variously revised versions—and with hints of further possible revisions—elsewhere in Plato’s latest writings (not least in the Philebus, which, it is normally agreed, gives us material about limit and the unlimited closely related to what Aristotle and others tell us of the “unwritten doctrines”), such radical, even if “convenient,” claims must be rejected. For if my present thesis is broadly correct—that the metaphysical defense of ethical realism was an urgent reason for the original development of the Theory of Forms—a reason given particular expression in the Republic—we should be driven to conclude not only that Plato had given up the theory itself, but that with it he had abandoned the whole metaphysical structure of his reply to “naturalists” like Gorgias and nihilists like Thrasymachus. That, however, cannot be the case, since Plato reiterates his earlier ethical claims in a curious passage of the Laws itself, where the views of Callicles and Thrasymachus appear to be combined (4.714c ff.) in an allusion to people who think that the “natural definition of justice” is that it is the advantage of the stronger. In fact Thrasymachus in championing the advantage of the stronger conspicuously avoided the Calliclean word “natural”; it only appears in the revised Thrasymacheanism of Glaucon and Adeimantus. In any case Plato seems to offer no new metaphysical argument against all such views; doubtless he holds the earlier ones to be broadly correct. Nevertheless, the question posed by the very limited reference to Forms in the Laws has to be faced, and the answer seems to be not that Plato has abandoned them, but that they are to be found in a different guise, and a guise that provides more substance to the   236 

Gods, God, and Goodness claims of both Aristotle and Theophrastus that Plato proposed only two causes, one of which is matter. As we have seen, it is Plato’s eventual understanding of the other cause that is problematic. However, the “Thrasymachean” passage of book four of the Laws seems to point us in the right direction. Shortly after indicating the antisocial views of his opponents, Plato invites us to attend once more to the idea that not man, but God is the measure of all things (716c)—a back reference to the ethical relativism associated with Protagoras’ putative metaphysics that the reconstructed Socrates examined in the Theaetetus (152a). Thus in one respect the reply to Thrasymachus now appears to be different from that offered in the Republic: not the Good, but God is the answer to Plato’s opponents. What we need to know is whether and to what extent this means Plato is now traveling down a reconstructed road. What at least is certain is that he is convinced—as in the Theaetetus and in his slightly different formulation of the same situation in the Republic itself—that there are two alternative routes for mankind: in one moral laws are fixed and known to God; in the other they are pliable and constructed at will or whim by human beings or groups of human beings. Perhaps it is no accident that in the succeeding book of the Laws—and uniquely there—Plato makes the remarkably Augustinian suggestion that an excessive self-love (philautia) is a basic cause of moral evil (5.731d). There is no doubt that in the Laws as a whole religion is center stage, as is appropriate in that the three discussants are talking about founding a Greek city to embody largely Greek traditions. Hence it is full of invocations and prayers to the gods, confirming Plato’s identification of himself as a religious as well as a philosophical disciple of Socrates. The idea that the goal of human life is to attain to likeness to God was first outlined in the Republic, repeated in the Theaetetus and the Timaeus, and now reappears in Plato’s last work (716b) in the very passage where the condemnation of Callicles, Thrasymachus, and their ilk is reaffirmed and “Protagorean” relativism denied. We noted that, as in the Theaetetus, there are two models of life: that of following God or “the gods” (Plato has no   237 

Gods, God, and Goodness wish in “popular” passages to expand on the proper nature of the “divine stuff” that, as in the Phaedrus, is shown to be immortal) and that of what he now identifies as some form of “atheism.” And he proceeds to use what he sees as the challenge of atheism to an orderly community to develop the discussion of the Phaedrus on the nature of soul as the origin of motion. According to Plato, contemporary “wise men” (10.886d, 890a) are likely to belong to one of three types of atheist: they either deny the existence of gods altogether (though that group is small), or they deny providence, supposing that the gods have no concern for human beings, or they hold that gods exist and are liable to reward those who reward them: that is, in effect, bribe them. Those who teach these ideas, the Athenian speaker adds, are not, as might be popularly supposed, merely looking for an excuse for libertine behavior (896a); nay, they are practicing physicists. Their normal account of the gods is that they exist “not by nature but by human convention” (889e). They divide the contents of the universe into what is natural and what is conventional, assigning moral values like justice to the conventional, and hence variable, set. If justice is not natural, then the strong man will look to the natural right (as does Callicles) by which the strong should dominate their slavish fellows (890a). All this indicates that Plato now believes he has to discuss the nature of the soul in a much wider context than he had done in the Phaedrus, where Socrates (appropriately) was concerned solely with a vision of moral and aesthetic values. Now in the Laws, as the comments on justice indicate, those concerns remain to be treated, but as part of cosmology and the nature of the universe itself that the Phaedo had declined to discuss, but that—with the Theaetetus (and the Sophist) leading the way—the Timaeus has already faced head on. The problem of justice is to be tied to the origin of the world, and problems about the origin of the world and its maker, as the Timaeus has explained, relate to how the divine mind, the Demiurge, because he is good, has willed to organize “matter”—the “contents” of the receptacle of becoming—as well as possible. Such   238 

Gods, God, and Goodness is the background of the renewed analysis of the soul as the origin of motion in the Laws. Although now Plato uses the term “soul” rather than “mind”—having preferred “mind” in the Timaeus—the context makes it clear that it is the same theme under discussion. The first point to be established is the priority of soul to body (892c), as in the Phaedrus; then that soul is the origin of motion; then that the first-moving soul must be self-moved; then that there must be at least two souls in the universe: soul the benefactor and “soul capable of producing opposite effects” (896e). That last phrase misled many of Plato’s ancient readers, Plutarch being well known to have been among the deceived. These thought that Plato was now presenting himself as a metaphysical dualist: with two ultimate souls, one good and one bad. But that is neither what Plato says nor what “capable” means. Clearly Plato intended to explain why not all is for the best, and that “evil” movement must ultimately have a moving cause. He presumably has humans in mind, but other evil forces in the universe are also a possibility—though they form no kind of ultimate and evil principle to rival the soul that is beneficent. Nevertheless, Plato’s position here differs (at least in appearance) from that of the Timaeus, where it seems to be assumed that all evil derives from the “works of necessity”—the sheer recalcitrance of “matter.” Yet it is unlikely that Plato would ever have subscribed to the view that moral evil is to be explained entirely in “physical” terms, even though, as we have seen in the Timaeus, he is prepared to think of certain kinds of vicious behavior as being—I gave this example—“testosterone-fueled,” precipitated or exacerbated by purely physical causes. Even in the Timaeus, however, vice is by no means entirely so to be explained, and in the Laws, although Plato is still prepared to offer a certain defense (though not now the Socratic one) of the Socratic dictum that “no one sins against his will” (9.860d), he reemphasizes that the basic problem of morality is that there are souls capable of evil behavior for which a beneficent god cannot be held responsible (cf.4.713d). Doubtless he would include all human souls, having given up the optimism of the Repub  239 

Gods, God, and Goodness lic, where a proper education will produce vice-free rulers (4.713c, cf. Statesman 271a). On the basis of a particular passage in book two (644d, modified in book seven, 803c), it is often claimed that in the Laws we meet an old and sclerotic Plato running out of steam, and sometimes that is used to explain—in patronizing mode—the generally religious nature of the book. The offending text says that human beings are puppets of the gods, and Plato’s correction is to add that compared with the divine, what is merely human is rather trivial. But the Laws, though certainly of relatively little literary merit by Plato’s former standards, and lacking final polish, is far from indicating failure of his mental powers. We have already noticed how he summarizes themes (such as the views of Callicles and Thrasymachus) that have always been important for him, and how, with the argument that soul, being prior to body, is to be defined as a self-moved mover, he offers in the Laws a far more significant and wide-ranging treatment of its nature—now to be seen against the background of the Timaeus and of his new-found confidence there in his powers as a “physicist.” And if we return to the text where he defends the Socratic dictum that no one sins willingly (9.860d), we find a new and sophisticated account of voluntary and involuntary wrongdoing that is compatible with the original Socratic dictum, but still again leaves room for the theses, first developed in the Republic, that we have other and conflicting basic desires too, at least when we are “in the body.” Plato (as in the Timaeus) continues to believe that everyone “deep down” longs to pursue the good, and that the impact of these other desires can never eradicate that longing. That is in effect a restatement of the argument for the immortality of the soul in Republic 10, where Socrates insists that if vice cannot—as indeed it cannot—kill the soul, then the soul must be immortal. There are further provocative novelties, too, such as the condemnation of “excessive self-love” (philautia) we have already noticed (5.731de), or the more elaborate rebuttal of the advocates of anal intercourse—already convicted in the Phaedrus (cf. 1.633e;   240 

Gods, God, and Goodness 8.836e–841d). Nevertheless, it is the argument for the soul as selfmoved mover that offers a glimpse of the most tantalizing puzzle of all: the relationship between “God,” the main vehicle of transcendence in the Laws, and the Good and Forms in general that, we noticed, seem to have almost, though not quite, disappeared. I argued earlier that the omission of the core books of the Republic from the resumé of that dialogue at the start of the Timaeus might signal that taking shape in Plato’s mind had been not an abandonment (impossible for the Timaeus as a whole), but at least a clear revision of the Theory of Forms: a revision that in identifying the Good with the Demiurge would make the differing comments of Aristotle and Theophrastus on Plato’s mature metaphysic intelligible. Now, in the tenth book of the Laws (897d), and tucked into the discussion of soul as immortal self-moved mover, we come across a signpost pointing in the same direction. Plato starts to look at the movement of mind—and note that he has now switched from “soul” to “mind,” which term is used throughout most of the discussion. When we look at mind with mortal eyes, he says, let us not bring on night at midday by gazing at it directly, as though we could know it adequately. That is the language and metaphor of the Republic and the Sun, but here that original at which we should not look is not, as in the Republic, the Form of the Good, but the Divine Mind. Or are they one and the same, as Aristotle and Theophrastus may have supposed, for whom it seems Plato’s formal or final cause is (or acts as) efficient cause as well?

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 9  Ethics and Metaphysics Then and Now

My intention in this book has been to show how Plato developed a moral theory, underpinned by metaphysics, that in his view offered the only possible defense against the ethical conventionalism, relativism, and nihilism of his day. I have organized the preceding chapters in a tentative chronological sequence that reveals Plato working himself through to his final position—which is still incomplete. Philosophically, as I noted in the introduction, it does not matter whether Plato generated that final position over the long span of his life or whether he had much of it clear in his mind early in his philosophical career. Hence even if I am mistaken about his chronological development—or parts of it—the main philosophical lines of his unfolding response to relativism and nihilism remain on the table for us to inspect. Nevertheless, being aware, preferably at a chronological level, but any rate conceptually, of how Plato reached the positions he eventually laid out, is of more than trivial interest. It enables us to understand a fact I noted in my introduction: namely that later “Platonists”—not least the neo-Platonists of antiquity—accepted many of Plato’s most basic philosophical conclusions without grasping how he had come to reach them and by what philosophical premises. In some respects this brings them curiously close, ceteris pa  242 

Then and Now ribus, to the contemporary advocates of intrinsic human rights— philosophers and ideologists, not to speak of politicians—who want Locke’s conclusion that there are natural, universal, and intrinsic human rights, and that these are the basis for any non-arbitrary construction of legal rights, but reject or fail to understand the premises on which Locke’s claims depend. For Locke’s premises included the belief that natural rights are distributed by God: a belief that, again ceteris paribus, most Platonists today—while rejecting the “voluntarism” at the heart of Locke’s account of morality—would accept. As for the neo-Platonists, their unwillingness to take the context and literary form of Plato’s writings seriously enough—combined with the more general lack of concern in antiquity for, or even interest in, a philosopher’s intellectual growth—led them to know what in many cases seemed the “right” answer, without understanding why Plato himself would have judged that answer right—nor, for that matter, the kind of response Plato himself would have given to relativist, conventionalist, and nihilist rivals. Such neo-Platonic self-assurance—many would now call it arrogance—is quite properly unacceptable in the contemporary philosophical marketplace. Three tasks therefore remain: first to summarize the final position Plato reached in his defense of the very possibility of moral objectivism; then to indicate, however briefly, the most common contemporary attempts to evade the challenges Platonic views pose and to propose a sketch of how Plato, or rather a revised Plato, might suggest a reply to them—a project I developed at far greater length in Real Ethics; finally to look—again briefly—at the sort of improvements needed to develop what seems to be Plato’s final position into a thesis that can still be adequately defended. But let me also reassert what I stressed in my introduction. The intention of the present volume is not to defend moral realism, but to argue that in Plato’s view (as in my own), if moral realism of a Platonic sort fails, then Thrasymachus or his modern equivalent wins. My account of Plato’s developing views has emphasized two themes: most importantly the theory of the Forms and of the Good;   243 

Then and Now then a steadily improving account of the soul and a growing and related emphasis on a divine Mind. The parallel development of these two themes left him with the question of how, if at all, to reconcile what we might broadly call his philosophical account of Forms with his account of God as efficient cause of the universe. I shall therefore summarize the gradually expanding account that Plato gives us, first in terms of metaphysics, then of psychology, finally of theology— though all the time bearing in mind that throughout their lives both Plato and his master Socrates were deeply religious, believing not only that the gods (or God) exist, but that they are good and providential. Socrates seems to have remained agnostic as to how such beliefs are to be worked out; Plato gradually developed his elaborate if still incomplete vision of their philosophical implications. The story began with a widespread concern in Greek, and especially Athenian, society, as to whether moral terms are other than conventional. That problem went hand in hand with the interest of such widely different writers as the historian Herodotus, the playwright Euripides, and the “Sophist” Protagoras in distinguishing what is natural from what is conventional; for reflection on differing codes of law and morality encouraged them to ask whether what is natural should indeed trump what is merely conventional. Hence a perceived erosion of traditional morality, of traditional concepts of the virtues and of the common good, and the growth of the assumption that what is natural is the “right” of the stronger to force the weaker to do his will. Plato, in his character Thrasymachus, offered what might have seemed the logically complete version of such an outlook—for all Thrasymachus’ inability to defend his views adequately—in the form of the thesis that morality is an invention of the strong to keep the naïve and the weak under control, but to which the strong own no allegiance. Similarly, according to Plato’s uncle Critias, some wise tyrant had invented the gods to control the thoughts as well as the actions of his naïve and superstitious subjects. If God’s views are held to correspond with those of the ruler, he can appeal not merely to political, but to religious sanctions and scruples to enforce his will.   244 

Then and Now Socrates differed from his Ionian philosophical predecessors inasmuch as he devoted his active philosophical life solely to problems of ethics. At least as presented by Plato, he wanted to understand the nature of the traditional virtues of justice, courage, wisdom, and self-control, and to know the nature of moral knowledge: after all, people always say they “know” the difference between right and wrong. But if there is moral knowledge, there should also be moral teachers: are they the Sophists, the poets, or the general public, upholders, at least in a democratic state such as Athens, of “decent” ordinary values? The effect of Socrates’ inquisitions was to show that those who talked about morality quite literally did not know what they were talking about. Yet since Socrates himself—at least according to Plato—held that virtue is concerned with knowing what is just and unjust, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, and that vice is caused by a lack of knowledge of these characteristics, he seemed to have reached an impasse. If, as he believed, we all want what is good for us, vice and crime must be caused by ignorance. But knowing as it is ordinarily understand—that is, as a purely cognitive activity—seems to lack the motivating power to enable us to act rightly. What are we to do with weakness of will, with knowing the better and doing the worse? In what sense can such difficulties be explained by the doctrine that virtue is knowledge? Socrates’ ideas about the connection between virtue and knowledge and his conviction that vice is a lack of the relevant knowledge—one might almost say the relevant know-how—reveal him as a moral optimist. Looking after our soul—to use Socrates’ own language—is possible for all of us. Yet that optimism seems to be based on an inadequate—or rather perhaps incomplete—account of human psychology. Hence the development of a defense for morality entailing a revised version, as the Platonic “Socrates” sees it, of traditional morality. For this to be able to defend itself against “sophistic” attack will demand the development of a fuller account of the human being. Socrates held that our care should be for the wellbeing of our soul: is that equivalent to the well-being of our soul  245 

Then and Now body partnership, or is the soul the enemy of the body? Are the “Orphics” right, as the Gorgias suggests, that the body is the tomb from which the soul is only released at death? Before returning to Plato’s unfolding account of knowledge and its moral objects, we need to summarize the development of his view of the soul—and of its relation to what we should call the whole person. Only in the probably spurious dialogue Alcibiades does Socrates identify us unambiguously with our souls, but in the dialogues up to and including the Phaedo and its twin, the Symposium, he makes a clear distinction between our soul, identified as immortal in the Meno and Phaedo, and our mortal body. Wrongdoing is explained, especially in the Phaedo, as the victory of bodily desires over the desires of the soul—and Plato concludes that if we can be persuaded that our souls (our real selves) are immortal, that the soul-body composite is only a temporary if recurring phenomenon, then we shall better understand, not least from fear of post-mortem punishments, that “our” best interest is the best interest of our enduring as distinct from our ephemeral existence. If our bodily life is a mere temporary way-station for the soul, then the Symposium’s teaching that we should always prefer love of the soul to love of the body becomes entirely intelligible. The ambiguous status of the soul itself in the Symposium also enables us to understand why in the ascent of love human concerns seem to be largely left behind as the soul approaches the impersonal Form of Beauty. Even at a lower level of the ascent we recognize that the desire to immortalize ourselves through procreation—a theme appearing again in the Laws—is inferior to immortalization through our achievements, as, say, poets or lawgivers. It is a problem for Plato both in the Phaedo and particularly in the Symposium to know whether our “personality” is simply the result of our bodily associations, so that once in a perfect state (as well as on our way to that state?) we shall be happy to have outgrown it. By then Plato had not come very close to settling this problem: not till the Republic does he argue that our goal is likeness to God as far as is possible for a human being. But then are we sure   246 

Then and Now what God is like, apart from—for Socrates—good and providential? Is individuality—and with it concern for individuals—something to outgrow? Certainly not, if God is providential in the sense in which Socrates seems to have understood providence. With the introduction of the “tripartite” soul in the Republic things become more complicated, for Plato now wants us to be educated in such a way that the three kinds of soul that we are work together in a perfect harmony with the dictates of the “reasoning” (albeit not emotionless) kind. Furthermore, it is in the Republic that it is first announced that our goal is to attain to a likeness to God. Thus to be immortal is not enough: the soul is valued not simply because it is immortal, but only insofar as it also lives the right kind of life. The immortal soul needs to be perfected and come to live a life like that of the gods. Hence it matters exactly how the divine nature is to be understood, since to live like the gods will require an understanding of the activities, not least the providential activities, of those gods. It is beginning to look as though Socrates’ view that a reformed popular religion will satisfy our needs is inadequate; without more general philosophical reflection on the activities of the gods, it will provide no satisfactory grounding for moral theory. Yet for a while Plato seems to suggest that the problem has been solved. In the myth of the Phaedrus he appears to suggest that the souls of the gods, like human souls, are “tripartite”; indeed that they provide perfect models for what we are striving to become. Yet a paradox remains: human tripartite souls cannot rid themselves of their inherent weakness: the passion horse is controlled, not converted, and it would seem that perfection can come only with a separation of the two lower possibilities from the “real” soul. Then perhaps only during the process of growth toward human perfection will souls be tripartite; eventually there will be only the simplicity of the knowing-desiring element, the object of whose knowledge and desire is ultimately the Good. But if the human soul must ultimately cease to be tripartite, what is to happen to the “tripartition” of the gods? The Timaeus and   247 

Then and Now the Laws confront that question by telling us that when we think of the divine soul—and by implication of the kind of soul we shall become when perfected—we should drop the term “soul” (with its burden of tripartition) and think only of the Divine Mind, who is the Demiurge of the Timaeus and the cause of the mixture in the Philebus: think, that is, of God as the ultimate and philanthropic moving cause of the cosmos as constituted out of chaos. In the Timaeus the individual kinds of soul are given a spatial location; thus the real “I,” the reasoning part located in the head during mortal life, will survive outside that life without its spatial location. Apparently there is no way this is an option for the two “lower” kinds of possible soul. We, in this almost like the gods, are ultimately mind—a daimon; but if we are daimones, they will be something more. Plato’s account of the possibility of morality depends on our ability to grasp the Forms, “by knowledge of which,” according to the Phaedrus, “the gods themselves are divine.” In the Sophist he argues that to omit mind as a moving cause from a list of “what truly is,” as many philosophers—apparently including some of his own more enthusiastic followers—have done, is a mistake. Mind is in the first instance God, and whatever we think of Plato’s psychology—which, for all its perceptiveness, depends on an inadequate explanation of the soul-body relationship—we are offered an account of the divine Mind as, in the words of Theophrastus, “clothed in the Good”: that is, perfectly good. But let us now look away for a moment from Plato’s theology to summarize the development of the Theory of Forms itself—in Plato’s view the only possible basis for a viable account of non-conventional, non-arbitrary, non-relativist moral behavior.   •  “Socrates” equated the moral virtues with that very knowledge by which our virtual identification with the gods is possible. In linguistic terms this meant finding an invariable meaning for such terms as “good,” “just,” “courageous,” and their opposites. And he wanted to identify the kind of knowing that, once it had grasped that unchanging meaning, would be unable to lose it. This knowledge, he   248 

Then and Now eventually came to believe, could not be mere opinion; it would have to be based on a special kind of cognitive and personal experience that the soul could not forget. It comes to be seen, for Plato, as an experience of extra-temporal reality—though it will have something in common with our knowledge of temporal realities in that it is firsthand, like that of the man who has traveled from Athens to Larissa, or who is giving evidence about a crime he has seen with his own eyes The objects of that knowledge are first viewed as they are present in particulars; thus we can see justice in just men insofar as they are just. From recognition of that justice we have to ask ourselves what is the ontological status of the Justice Itself that is invariable, never fully instantiated in any particular person or event. A particular act or agent may be now just, now unjust; it is the idea of Justice that invariably indicates what is just or unjust. From that Plato draws two conclusions: first that an unchanging justice cannot be grasped in changing particulars; there must be some sort of external measure; secondly—and an inference from the above—that if we say we can identify the Idea of Justice by extrapolating from individual just acts or people, how does it come about that we can formulate and objectify an idea of perfect justice—justice and nothing else—from those imperfect instances? Indeed how are we even able to identify them as “just”? Hence the conclusion that individual just acts or agents partake in Justice Itself, which Justice comes, as the theory develops, to be seen as necessarily independent of them. Justice, that is, would still exist even if there were no just individuals, as I still exist even if my image in a mirror disappears. In this way we have the so-called “one-overmany” argument for the existence of Forms. But if the argument works for justice, beauty, and other moral and aesthetic values, why does it not work for other sets of items? If there is a Form of Justice, why not a Form of injustice? If a Form of Beauty, why not a Form of man or chair, or mud? At times “Socrates” at least spoke as though “negative” Forms like injustice must exist, and he certainly committed himself at times to Forms of man, shuttle, and table.   249 

Then and Now My principal interest in this essay has been with those moral and aesthetic Forms, those with which Plato, having inherited the ethical investigations of Socrates, was himself chiefly concerned. But, as we have seen, the one-over-many argument can yield Forms over which he hesitated or that he came to deny (such as mud, hair, dirt in the Parmenides). Thus he arrived at the conclusion that oneover-many arguments supply a necessary but not a sufficient condition for Forms. Aristotle tells us that the Academy rejected Forms of house and ring (that is, of artifacts, Met.1 990b15; 13, 1079a10) and this squares with other contemporary comment (cf. De Ideis 79.22–80.7). Xenocrates, third head of the Academy, claimed that Plato believed in Forms corresponding to natural objects (Proclus, In Parm. 691 Stallbaum). But that leaves Forms of inanimate natural objects such as mountains, as well as those of animate beings such as man and ox. It seems Plato eventually also decided that just as there is no need for a cause of separation to account for loss of motion, but only the absence of a cause, there will similarly be no need for Forms of injustice, evil, or ugliness: indeed it is hard to see how there could be perfect models of these (unless in some parasitic sense of perfect, as when we speak of a “perfect crime”). And the Sophist should probably be interpreted as also denying separate ontological status to the so-called greatest kinds (which we might think of rather as formal concepts), especially to being and not-being. For it makes no sense to say that not-being exists, while a Form of Being is otiose, since the Forms themselves are envisioned as existent entities, the “full name” of justice being “the existent justice itself” (auto ho esti dikaion). Thus by the end of his life—the “mass words” of the Parmenides, like mud, never being allowed formal status—Plato might appear to be left with two sets of Forms: those of moral, aesthetic, and mathematical values (which as qualities are our present primary concern) and those of specific natural (and just possibly artificial) substances. These Forms of substances would seem to us to be divisible into two distinct categories, but Plato would not see the distinction so clearly. In the Timaeus the Form of the world is said to exist as   250 

Then and Now the “Ideal Living Creature”—which suggests that the universe as a whole is alive, as Plato certainly believed of the sun, moon, and stars. Hence our modern distinction between animate and inanimate is irrelevant: all substance-Forms are included within the Form of Life. A further distinction we could make at this point— provided we accepted the existence of a transcendent God—would be between Forms that signify divine attributes and those that signify created substances. Hence I have raised the question of whether Plato advanced in that direction. At least it would appear he should have done so and began to do so. Before further considering this, we have still the problem of the Good itself. When the theory of Forms is introduced, there is an emphasis on moral Forms, but no indication of any hierarchy within the group. That changes in the Republic, where the Good “beyond finite existence and specific nature” is the cause of both the existence and the knowability of the other Forms. It seems, however, that Plato is less than sure at this stage, either about the role of the Good— whether it is a sufficient cause as well as a necessary condition for the existence of the remaining Forms and hence of the universe as a whole—or about how it is known, or at least how we can give an account of it. He seems to suppose that such an account would be similar to that possible for other Forms, but that is impossible, for to understand each one of the Forms we shall need to refer to the Good. The Forms are unified in goodness as goods; indeed the early Socratic dialogues are regularly concerned with whether the virtues are wholly identical or whether they are modes of excellence that, though not identical, imply one another in their instantiations, so that the perfectly just man will also be perfectly self-controlled. Plato’s contemporaries were unanimous that he eventually saw goodness as some sort of unity, and we have seen evidence in the dialogues that points in that direction. Many later Platonists also thought that he identified the Good with God, the formal cause being thus united with the efficient cause to make up the first of the two causes identified as Platonic by Theophrastus, the other,   251 

Then and Now the Platonic “receptacle,” passing for “matter.” But if Plato at least moves toward such an identification, what happens to the rest of the Forms? For this we have no adequate evidence. Logically, as I have indicated, Plato should have seen the moral and aesthetic Forms as divine attributes and the Forms of natural objects as ideas of possibles in the divine mind. Though there are indications that his thought was beginning to move in that direction, there is no compelling evidence that he took what seems to be that surely necessary final step. We examined an apparent corollary of Plato’s oneover-many argument (and perhaps of other arguments, as well), namely that the Forms will remain even if there are no minds to think them. Neo-Platonists such as Plotinus held that an object of thought without a thinker is unintelligible, and that Plato would— and therefore did—recognize that. Whether he did or not we do not know (though we may have our well-grounded suspicions), but if he eventually identified the Divine Mind with the Form of the Good, then the problem would indeed disappear: there would be no “time” when God was not thinking the goodness that is himself. As for the “moral” Forms—which Plato had come to regard as the necessary metaphysical buttresses of his reply to relativism, conventionalism, and nihilism—they remain on the table even if the “population” of the world of Forms is substantially diminished after the Republic. Whether they survive as divine attributes or as freestanding beings “by knowledge of which the gods are divine,” they remain a metaphysical necessity if a Platonizing defense of morality is to be maintained. Of that at least Plato never had the shadow of a doubt.   •  An essential part of morality is the recognition of moral obligations, and these obligations need to be justified philosophically—at least to the extent of showing that they are not unreasonable. Morality gives commands, and if these commands are to be reasonable they must conform to an idea of what is good both for ourselves and for others. To satisfy that requirement we need an idea of what human beings are for: if they are for nothing at all, then morality is irrel  252 

Then and Now evant, and all that is needed is to find what is convenient for our survival, comfort, and whims, all more demanding projects being fantasies. If we are for something, the human world is governed by overarching final causes, which will take the form of some variety of providence. Plato’s original aim in ethics was to fix the meaning of moral language, to offer an account of moral knowledge that would be valid universally—and the problem as to whether this is possible remains with us today. Increasingly in the West it is assumed, rather than argued (though arguments still occur from time to time), that Plato’s project is doomed: that there is no possibility of establishing any kind of metaphysical foundation for morality, and either that one of the alternatives Plato rejected must be accepted or some new way of evading Plato’s conclusions will be found. A typical contemporary move is simply to ignore the question of foundations and assume that whatever one’s chosen ideology requires can be accepted as a set of first principles. There is much pressure among liberal democratic élites to go down this route, in effect turning moral philosophy into social engineering. Part of the explanation of that remaking of the discipline is that Plato’s solutions persist in appearing ultimately to require the existence of God, and of the identification of God and Goodness (whether or not Plato himself recognized that), and that is assumed, for other reasons and especially in its historically dominant Christian form, to be an impossible condition. For those who reject Plato’s program, or a developed version of the principles of that program, there are at least eight possible routes on offer, some of which may or may not involve a mere ignoring of the difficulties. There is first conventionalism (with the assumption that “we” know what the best form of convention is); then speciously benign versions of naturalism that share many of the weaknesses of conventionalism; then nihilism in its postmodern guise, whereby morality is dismissed by an “unmasking” of the motives of the moralists, depicted as manipulators of the gullible to establish their own supremacy. The fourth alternative has been important in phi  253 

Then and Now losophy at least since Sidgwick at the end of the nineteenth century, but is popular among ideologists far beyond the utilitarian camp, despite its oddly Thrasymachean ring: namely a socially necessary deception of the gullible with some form of what I would style an “as if ” morality: this is again sometimes defended by the claim that there “is no truth.” A fifth and more properly philosophical approach is to claim that moral values, rather like Locke’s secondary qualities, just happen to arise in nature; we just happen to react to particular circumstances in apparently “moralizing” ways. Hume (also important for the conventionalists) is one of the forefathers of this approach with his theory of benevolence; another source may be Rousseau’s assertion that pitié is a natural and basic human characteristic, and that may in our own day be reinforced by subDarwinian claims about how such attitudes came to “evolve.” The sixth route (in some respects akin to the fifth) is to make undefended metaphysical claims (as about inalienable rights) without admitting that they are merely bad metaphysics, or even not metaphysics at all. In seventh place there is Kantianism, whether in its original or its more recent “constructivist” versions. This is nowadays a popular option that combines some of the weaknesses of routes two and six. Then, eighth, there is some variety of Aristotelian virtue ethics, which in Plato’s mind would either depend, as in Aristotle himself, on hidden and inexplicable Platonic premises, or turn out to be yet another (if more high-minded) form of conventionalism. A ninth option is utilitarianism in its various forms; I shall say nothing further of this. Plato’s basic objection to it—more radical even than to its failure to identify and rationally prioritize the goods to be maximized, would be that utilitarianism (indeed all forms of unadulterated consequentialism) is “agent neutral”—that is, it determines morality not by how individuals behave, but by how (and by whomever) goods are maximized. That flies in the face of Plato’s Socratic first principle: that our task in life is to look after the well-being of our souls. Leaving utilitarianism aside, therefore, I shall briefly review the remaining eight essentially anti-Platonic recourses.   254 

Then and Now Con v entionalism

Plato recognized that conventionalism, depending on tradition, might include religious tradition, and in that form might be worth defending against “sophistic” challenges. Some such conventions might be morally sound, but in a more sophisticated age, they require philosophical defense, and this must point toward Platonist metaphysics. If, on the other hand, social conventions are not of this “primitive” but unexamined sort, then those who propose them are in effect disciples of Protagoras, upholders of his dictum “Man is the measure of all things,” which Plato normally interprets in an individualist sense: each man is responsible for his own world, including his own moral world, but is free to make deals with other people to reach some set of conventions more or less acceptable to all parties. Plato notes, however, that the Calliclean “strong and free man” will find no reason to accept such conventions: he may claim to be appealing against them to a higher law of nature, or he may merely say that his reading of the moral world is different from that of his neighbors and that only force or the threat of force can “convince” him or anyone to obey the official rules. Plato has less to say about a less individualist reading of Protagoras: that man in general, humanity as a collective, must (or should) determine what is right and wrong; however, his objection to that alternative reading would be on similar lines. As a young man he learned from Socrates that no number of false judgments adds up to a true judgment, so he has no more reason to accept the humanityas-a-whole reading of Protagoras than the individualist version. Indeed, the fact that Plato pays so little attention to the humanity- (or city-) as-a-whole version is probably that he believes it must collapse into its individualist alternative. Nevertheless, he will not hesitate to say in the Laws that the only (non-nihilist) alternative to Protagoras’ “man is the measure” is the claim that God is the measure. All attempts to avoid that conclusion are, in his view, fudges. The correct implication to be drawn from any of them could only be that   255 

Then and Now we in fact live (as Thrasymachus supposed) in a value-free universe, even though we may believe, or want to believe, the contrary. Plato despises conventionalism as unphilosophical, as a way of life and social order that—even where conventions are “true opinion”—is infantile; hence those capable of more adult behavior should transcend it. In the Phaedo he comments that decent folk who, being lucky enough to live in well-ordered societies, merely follow true opinion, will be reincarnated as social insects like bees or ants. His objections to conventionalism are both pragmatic and theoretical: first, that those living in such blissful ignorance will not continue in their respectable ways if they are put under political (or social) pressure, but will cave in and “go along”; second, that, as Socrates puts it in the Apology, the unexamined life is not properly human; we are meant to think about how to make our souls as good as possible. In sum the most basic objection to conventionalism, in Plato’s eyes, is that it affords no justification for any strictly moral obligation. Obligations could only be “justified” by convenience, comfort, fear, or deception, thus resembling the dictates of positive law. Whatever is made by man can be unmade by man, and Plato will ask why it should not be. Naturalism

The fundamental weaknesses of naturalism—which must be distinguished from classical and theistic natural law theories that demand transcendence—are obvious enough. Since all forms of naturalism depend on the dubious assumption that we have the ability to make adequately rational judgments and that this natural ability can be harnessed as the power to legislate wisely, they all boil down to a confusing of judgment of fact with judgment of value. They therefore fall foul of Hume’s law if they derive a moral “ought” from statements of what I (or others) judge to be beneficial to some persons or persons; or if they make no attempt to invoke a moral “ought,” they will be no more than pragmatic appeals to what is in my or our interest or supposed interest. Thus “what was wrong with the Holocaust”   256 

Then and Now is that it was against various people’s best interest—as clearly it was, of course, but to say that is hardly to say that it ought not to have happened, but rather tantamount to denying that it was “wrong.” Hence, as we shall see, the various forms of Kantianism are an attempt to improve on naturalism by building a moral “ought” into a proposed principle that persons ought to be treated as ends and never as means. Earlier modern theories of naturalism are in part revivals of the Stoic notion that within the cosmos we are rational fragments of a pantheistic God. That was never plausible, and is even less so in our demythologized scientifically explained universe. Plato has every right to insist that moral rules and the obligations that accompany them cannot find any foundation (other than human invention) within the spatio-temporal cosmos. Moral N ihilism

For Plato the moral nihilism that Thrasymachus tries to defend is the only logical alternative to a Form-based account of morality. I take it therefore that he would agree with many contemporary postmodernists of Nietzschean stripe that, even if alternative moralities (utilitarianism, Kantianism, etc.) cannot be unmasked as mere power plays by their advocates, their pretensions cannot be upheld philosophically. While some may be power players, the majority are merely confused, and in that sense Plato would be sympathetic to the postmodern critique of ethics, but, of course, would have no sympathy with their more positive claims, primarily built on a denial of the possibility of truth. Such nihilists invariably move from arguments that complete truth has not been and cannot be established to claim that therefore it has to be (and has been) “invented.” When they make the latter move they look rather like the “as if ” or “virtual” moralists who will be discussed below. In any case, the argument (if formulated) that truth does not exist is flawed for at least two reasons, and Plato would certainly advance one of them: truth seems invisible when those seeking it lack or decline the necessary data, hence do not know what to look for. Plato would sup  257 

Then and Now pose that such data would include the recognition of Forms, so advancing an argument as to the incompleteness of his opponents’ metaphysics—and later on various Patristic Christians would argue more theologically that their opponents lacked data only available through Revelation, such as the fall of the angels. The second argument against the nihilists focuses not on lack of data, but on lack of capacity; there is nothing logically offensive in the belief that there are truths beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. I can leave aside the more obvious weakness of the claim—frequently made or implied by postmodernists—that because we cannot grasp the whole truth, or because our grasp of truth is only partial, truth itself does not exist, since the false conclusion that we can infer ontological propositions (here that truth does not exist) from epistemological claims (here that truth cannot be entirely or wholly grasped) may be ignored. Such obvious difficulties, however, are often recognized only when problems of “fact” are in question. Though I cannot account for the molecular structure of iron, I can still recognize a piece of iron. Many “facts” only require knowledge sufficient for the context to which they belong. Yet it is often supposed that, although nihilism fails so conspicuously when it is a question of “facts,” things are quite different when we think about “values.” Certainly the distinction between facts and values is important, even though Plato himself found it hard to recognize that arguments for the possibility of our knowledge of values are significantly different from apparently similar arguments for the existence of facts. In the context of the current discussion, of course, values are what matter, and Plato would appear to be right that, if other defenses of “morality” cannot be adequately invoked, then the nihilist wins unless some version of “Platonism” about values, i.e., an original or revised Theory of Forms, is upheld. Virtual or “A s If” Morality

At the end of the nineteenth century the Utilitarian Henry Sidgwick came to the reluctant conclusion that after a lifetime of work   258 

Then and Now he could not demonstrate the compatibility of duty and happiness. He grew frightened, not so much about his specifically philosophical failure, but about the possibility that this failure might become publicly acknowledged and thereby seriously damage the social fabric, so knowledge of it should be suppressed or reserved for the élite. In one respect this move itself is strictly utilitarian. Lying is always available to utilitarians if it can be justified as somehow benefiting the greatest number, though what Sidgwick is suggesting is no ordinary lie. Philosophy itself having failed to justify his own utilitarianism, that utilitarianism must in effect be re-presented as an ideology. Philosophical truth must be suppressed simply because it is dangerous to the social order. It must be kept under wraps, unwrapping being only for the cognoscenti. This attitude has been dubbed by Bernard Williams “Government House Consequentialism.” Plato might have been more sympathetic. In the second book of the Laws (663d) he tells us that if it cannot be demonstrated— though in fact it can, as he offers an argument to show—that the just life is more pleasant than the unjust, then the lawgiver must falsely claim that it is—again in the interest of preserving the social fabric. For Plato, however, Sidgwick’s advice is acceptable, not if utilitarian theory becomes intellectually inadequate, but if and only if Platonism fails. For then there would be no alternative defense of “morality,” and there could be only pragmatic objections to any kind of lying. As a result of the rejection of Platonism and all other “foundationalist” theories about morality, Sidgwick’s cynical conclusion has become widespread; indeed in many quarters far from utilitarianism it has become established wisdom. Those confronted with an inability to defend any kind of moral theory philosophically have resorted to choosing their own ideology as the source of social security and engineering. At the moment the pervasive choice in the West is liberalism and liberal democracy, but there is no theoretical reason that any other ideology should not be selected instead. Many aspects of what was once traditional Western morality—sometimes   259 

Then and Now bracketed together, as by Alan Donagan, as our “common morality”—are proposed as the best cement for liberal democratic régimes. Since foundations cannot be found, or rather the traditional ones, be they Platonizing or Christian, are cast aside, it is asserted (rather than demonstrated) that foundations are unnecessary philosophically as well as ideologically, but that important traditional virtues can be reinstated: we can all respect justice, a degree of selfcontrol, even wisdom. Piety, of course, will normally be omitted or consigned to the private sphere, as to be tolerated so long as it makes no public demands. Thus arises our “as if ” or virtual morality. We can live as if we can show that Thrasymachus is wrong in claiming that justice is but the advantage of the stronger, though we can demonstrate no such thing. Plato could admit that this attitude might have to be accepted with regret for the general public in an “ordinary” city, but for philosophers he would think it a shameful dereliction of duty. “Lockean” Secondary Qualities

A number of contemporary philosophers have tried to explain ethical and aesthetic value terms as resembling Lockean secondary qualities—that is, those qualities that are recognized not as mere characteristics or events of matter in motion and that can thus be described in the equations of a mathematician, but those that, like heat or like color, “arise” because of the contact between the eye (or other sense organ) and the object seen (or sensed). Such qualities are objective in that they regularly appear when similar physical circumstances arise. Just so, runs the argument, ideas about what is “just” or “beautiful” arise in our minds (but not in the external world) when we are confronted with certain “moral” situations, as for example if we see an innocent man being killed. Then a sense of injustice may arise, but what is this “sense”? At one level it may be emotional, as when we are upset by the sight of blood or of a battered body; we say that we do not like to see that kind of thing. But if that is all there is to value judgments, then the “Lockean” theory makes   260 

Then and Now them merely emotivist: morality ultimately is approving things we happen to like (or feel like) and disapproving what we happen not to like (or feel like)—and invoking “moral” significance to supplement our approval or disapproval. We may dress this up by saying that there is an appeal to a “moral sense,” but though we may have such a “sense,” what it identifies as moral is largely, if not wholly, dictated by preferences and conventions with which we are familiar. But our “Lockean” qualities can be seen to be more than producers of emotional reactions, since they come accompanied by judgments. We judge certain kind of effects of human behavior as fair or unfair, and perhaps think we are “hard-wired” to make such judgments (though that begs the question of the origin of the wiring). Hume’s challenge to the “Lockean” account of morality of which he is part ancestor ought to be (again) that it falls foul of his insistence that we cannot infer statements of value from statements of fact. Thus if I see someone being “discriminated” against, I can say that as a matter of fact his treatment is “different,” but I need to do more than that; I need to reply to the objector who says “Different yes, ‘unfair,’ yes, if you like—so what!” Thus our Lockean-qualities theory boils down to the claim that I (or we) make judgments—but on what basis?—about what I feel to be the moral iniquity of treating people unfairly, though these judgments provide no significant pressure on anyone else but me to accept their supposed moral force—apart from those who choose or have been conventionally taught so to do. Thus the Lockean theory is either merely emotivist or turns out to be yet another form of conventionalism, without access to a reasoned defense of moral obligation. It is generated by the assumption that in the “world,” as distinct from in the human mind, there are no responsible actions, only describable events. M etaphysics by A ny Other Name

A number of contemporary thinkers, especially those working in the philosophy of law, hold that morality depends on rights: that they override all other considerations. Since the seventeenth cen  261 

Then and Now tury, with the growth of individualism, possessive or other, rights have grown exponentially in importance. There is little discussion of them by philosophers in ancient or medieval times, though the medieval canonists, involved in constant dispute resolution, could hardly avoid them. Modern attempts to read specific rights theories into classical philosophers are anachronistic, though it would be reasonable to expand the views of such by adding an account of rights to their well-developed theories of the responsibilities of moral agents. In early modern times—largely for political reasons—rights moved to center stage, but as we have noted, they were set in a theistic context. Social inequalities were unjust because God has created all men equal and therefore with equal rights: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” But the abandonment of God entailed the collapse of foundationalism, thus generating the possibility that there are no natural rights after all. Clearly rights can be “positive” or legally established: that is merely Protagorean; what law can establish, later law can remove. Hence a desire to have “Lockean” natural rights without bothering about their justification, whether Lockean or otherwise. Indeed with Locke’s theism in disrepute, it is hard to see what else (apart from some form of Platonism) could take its place. Hence normally resort is again had to pretense: what are mere legal rights are treated as though they are natural rights by those at least sympathetic to the rights in question. Or again a “foundationalist” basis for rights may be asserted even by anti-foundationalists, as in Dworkin’s “Rights are trumps.” Of those who talk in that way we can legitimately ask, “Exactly what is a right?” For the claim that there are intrinsic and natural rights is a piece of metaphysics, and since metaphysics is to be abandoned, we are faced here with a metaphysical proposition pulled out of the air. Such rights assertions, that is, are metaphysical, but the metaphysics is a void.

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Then and Now Varieties of K antianism

Apart from conventionalism, utilitarianism, and nihilism, the principal (and perhaps in philosophical circles most popular) alternative to some form of the Platonism of my account is a version of the philosophy of Kant. Kant himself is a foundationalist, in that although he had little time for traditional metaphysics he believed that a metaphysics of morals could be derived from the commands of “practical reason” itself. Kant’s own version of practical reasoning is objective—that is, he believes that the deliverances of practical reason are universally valid and the “categorical imperative” bids us apply the dictates of reason to all agents, including ourselves. He also believes that he can establish via the categorical imperative that human beings must always be treated as ends and never merely as means; however, this claim, in its Kantian version, is highly implausible, being the perfect example of the use by anti-metaphysicians of a metaphysic to which they have no logical entitlement. Kant’s doctrine of the respect due to the human person is a survival of Christian metaphysics and theology rather than a principle he has established by reason. Kant’s concern for the human person has a certain resemblance to the position of those who may be designated “rights theorists,” but it differs in that Kant attempts to argue not only for the virtually “sacred” status of the person, but for his belief that what is due to the person can be derived, not from human law or convention, but from the nature and power of reason itself. Naturally most contemporary Kantians cannot accept the latter claim as originally proposed, wishing to deprive it of its roots in Kant’s “noumenal” world while recognizing that this deprivation turns the original theory into a mere formalism. Hence they may try to “construct” the specific demands of practical reason circularly from a set of assumptions about what is the proper behavior for human beings in ideal, hence unrealistic, circumstances. Such more radically “constructivist” versions of Kantianism reduce his objectivism to a shadow while maintain  263 

Then and Now ing his unsubstantiated “personalist” premises, but they enable many “nice” moderns to find in Kantianism a means whereby they can preserve certain basic features of Christian ethics while abandoning both Christian theology and any parallel metaphysic that might better uphold their views. They are thus shown to be classic examples of wishful thinking, indeed yet more variations (albeit less cynical ones) on the “as if ” morality. A ristotelian-T ype Virtue Ethics

Plato would of course be sympathetic to Aristotle’s view that the good life involves an active pursuit of the virtues, as to the view put forward in book ten of the Nicomachean Ethics that we should immortalize ourselves as much as possible. But he would worry that Aristotle seems to fall between two stools: on the one hand he thinks that the good man sees the goals that constitute the good life with the “eye” of the soul, yet what he sees appears to be merely an idealized version of what Aristotle himself finds attractive in Greek culture. That might look like a confusion of intuitionism and conventionalism. And the same objection would apply if such a virtue ethics were given expression in a different cultural setting. Furthermore, though Plato would approve of Aristotle’s view that moral actions are to be undertaken “for the sake of the fine” (kalon), he would find that “fine” inexplicable in Aristotelian terms, requiring (and probably getting in Aristotle himself) support from hidden and unacknowledged Platonic premises. So the objection to Aristotle would be in some ways similar to the objection to Kant. Where Kant’s position depends on hidden Christian premises, Aristotle’s depends on a hidden Platonism. And just as Kant specifically declines to defend his position with reference to the Christian metaphysics (while retaining much of the Christian ethic), so Aristotle relies on a hidden account of the “fine,” behind which would seem to lurk the theory of Forms that he very specifically rejects, showing in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics itself a particular hostility to the idea of the Form of the Good. In brief, virtue eth  264 

Then and Now ics in an Aristotelian manner (if read generously) gets much right, but cannot explain why what is right is right. Plato would certainly think that Aquinas, with his Platonic underpinnings supporting Aristotelian virtue ethics, is more successful than his master.   •  I have offered only a very sketchy account of what alternatives to a Platonizing metaphysics of morals hope to deliver. I have treated some of these possibilities in more detail in my Real Ethics, and it is not appropriate to rehearse them here. Suffice it to say that I argued in that book that the only philosophically respectable alternative to some form of revised Platonism is the nihilism (or an improved version of the nihilism) that Plato attributes to Thrasymachus in the Republic. What remains to be sketched, in an essay that has attempted to show how Plato established his defense of the possibility of a seriously non-arbitrary morality, is how to pick up where Plato left off, and how to tie together some of the loose ends he left hanging. In outlining that further task I reiterate that this is no neo-Platonic project in the traditional sense, even though some of the positions my extended Plato would advocate would surely have been welcomed by neo-Platonists. I have indicated two incomplete features of Plato’s defense of an objectively based morality: the ambiguity (to say the least) in which he left the relationship between God (whether Demiurge or divine mind) and the Good; the uncertainties as to the scope of the “world” of forms and the related problems of the presumed difference between value Forms and substance Forms (whether of natural or artificial objects). But in thinking about the contemporary viability of some sort of Platonist metaphysics of morals I must also mention, though in a necessarily very inadequate manner (for to do justice to the theme would require another book) what sort of completion of Plato’s project would be required if we are to justify not merely the existence of objective moral truths, but our obligation to act in accordance with them. For of the non-Platonic alternative “moralities” I have sketched, none can afford a justification of moral obliga  265 

Then and Now tion that is neither mere conventionalism nor some sort of wishful thinking about ourselves as potential or actual agents capable of a pure rationality. Plato himself is certainly aware of the problem of moral obligation, but his treatment of it reveals several substantial weaknesses, some of which he himself came to recognize but could not resolve. Plato’s problem of the plurality of first principles was solved to their own satisfaction in the third century A.D. by Plotinus and his neo-Platonic successors. They had learned from Aristotle that where there is an object of thought there must be a thinker, and hence inferred that the Divine Mind and the Forms are identical. They went further in this right and necessary direction by arguing that such a principle could not be the first principle—not least because it failed to take account of that superiority of the Good to the other Forms toward which Plato was already advancing in the Republic. The coherent solution to this difficulty—very partially recognized by Plotinus—would be that of identifying God with the Form of the Good, and maintaining the subsidiarity—or at least the limited scope—of other moral Forms by viewing them as divine attributes. Thus justice would be a divine attribute, but divine justice must also imply divine wisdom. That would hardly be alien to the Platonic spirit; from early on Plato was concerned to argue, if not that all value Forms are one, being merely different names for the same “substance,” at least that they are coexistent. If a man is truly just, he is also truly wise. Plotinus is concerned to emphasize the simplicity of the divine nature. That is why he wants to separate the Mind-Forms as a “second hypostasis” from the One or Good, which is “beyond thinking and finite existence,” since thinking entails a duality of thinker and thought; but he cannot entirely deny a certain cognition or intellectual being to the First Principle. Our new Plato needs to be even less unambiguous, since his God-Good has to be a providential and deliberately planning first cause. Plotinus seems to have partly grasped this requirement when he argues that an emphasis on the will of the   266 

Then and Now One is essential, but the uncertainty in the tradition he created was partly responsible for problems in medieval times—foreseen in the Parmenides—about whether God could “know” particulars. If his providence is to be more than automatic—and Plato clearly required something more than that—it will have to have knowledge of the particular beneficiaries of its beneficent actions. Thus had the god at Delphi sent Socrates specifically as the agent of providence to various individual Athenians as well as to the city as a whole. In the final analysis our neo-Plato would need more awareness of the difference between judgments of fact and judgments of value, in that he must recognize that although one-over-many arguments may seem to generate Forms of both types, these types cannot be “in God” on the same terms. Whereas Forms of “substances” (man, ox, table) might be eternal thoughts in God’s mind—that is, dependent for existence on a creative God who may or may not allow them to be instantiated—value Forms must be part of his essence as divine attributes. Substance Forms tell us the nature of what is made, whether by God or by man; value Forms tell us how, and in what respect, what is made is or becomes good or bad. I have argued that Plato was moving toward an assimilation of God and the Good, and that it would have been philosophically proper, ceteris paribus, for him to have proceeded further in that direction. In recent times, due to the West’s widespread distaste for God, attempts have sometimes been made by Platonists—perhaps the most famous of them was Iris Murdoch—to stay with the Plato of the Republic in offering the Good as the unambiguous first principle and to forget about (or subordinate) Mind. That solution will not suffice, as Plato himself had half-realized even in the Republic, where, as I have argued, there is a manifest lack of clarity as to whether the Good is a sufficient cause or only a necessary condition for the moral and physical universe. That shows a certain awareness that a formal cause, though essential, will not account for moral actions (or indeed for anything else). A final and efficient cause is essential; God—as well as the human mind—cannot be omitted. The   267 

Then and Now relationship between a Divine Mind and the Good needed clarification; the position Murdoch tried to retrieve is necessarily incomplete. That brings us to the third reason Plato’s metaphysics of morals needs to be developed further. A fundamental weakness of all the alternative moral schemes I have sketched in this chapter is that (Kant, who begs the question, aside) they fail to give any reason— except by reference to convention, convenience, or some other nonmoral motivation, that we should accept strictly moral obligations—that we should regard the moral “ought” as binding. Plato goes some way to showing why we will find it so (even if we cannot live in the way we know we ought). For he holds that we have a natural desire for the Good, and that entails that we can recognize that it is in our best interest to pursue the Good to the best of our abilities. In the Republic he thought that, given the right education, the guardians at least would always do as they ought, motivated as they are by their knowledge and love of the Good. But by the time of the Phaedrus, as we have seen, that dream has faded. The black horse of the passions can never turn white; it can be restrained, but it is always liable to break out. That psychological fact, as Plato came to regard it, explains why in the Laws there is no space for the guardians of the Republic. For Plato’s morality to work, therefore, man needs help, and that help can only come (pace Murdoch and Plotinus) from God. And an expansion of Plato’s account of God will give him two further advantages. If wrongdoing is a sin against a creator as well as a crime, its seriousness is the better understood, inasmuch as it offends not only against the Good (as God), but against his commands: not, of course, that these commands will be arbitrary—the Euthyphro has already in effect rejected that sort of voluntarism— but rather that they will be expressions of the divine nature. Moral obligation will thus be reinforced for those who would develop Platonism in that direction, while those who would reject Platonism lock, stock, and barrel should reject any such justification of obligation at the same time.   268 

Then and Now There is a further (and much neglected) reason that personalizing the Platonic Good would add substantially to its moral import. Metaphysics is impersonal; as we have seen, the goal of human ascent in the Symposium is impersonal, and that has often seemed strange and implausible. But a personal Goodness would allow us to talk not in generalities as we justify the moral life, but to recognize that that moral life is no function of our mere humanity, but of our uniqueness as members of the human race. Platonism offers the only route to a defense of moral truth and moral obligation, but in the end it must become more theistic, as indeed both Plato and most Platonists realized. What they did not (and could not) always realize is the sort of religion it must become. And finally I must repeat what I have reiterated throughout this book. What I have tried to argue is not that moral realism can be defended, but that Plato believed—and I agree with him—that only some version of the transcendental moral realism he developed over time offers any possibility of an honest defense against moral nihilism, whether explicit or logically implicit, whether that of Athens in the fourth century B.C. (which he specifically tried to defuse) or of twenty-first-century Cambridge, Boston, or Mecca.

  269 

A ppen di x A

Republic Book Five Some Background to Eugenic Theory

I have bracketed out Plato’s discussion of the marriages of the guardians and his associated arguments for eugenic breeding (458d–61e) because a major principle on which this argument depends is confused, not only in this section, but in the Republic as a whole. Indeed, although omitting eugenics from the Republic would apparently leave the guardians with further difficulties in maintaining their ideal constitution, it would still preserve Plato’s admission of a number of qualified women into his governing élite, while at the same time making the dialogue as a whole more coherent. So about which principles is it that Plato is confused or negligent in this section? And what underlying weaknesses of his position have induced him to appear confused? The immediate problem concerns lying and other forms of deception. Plato observes on a number of occasions that deliberate lying is wholly alien to the character of the good man (485c, 490b, 535e) and that the liar is a moral cripple. But there are exceptions where lying is acceptable: lying to enemies is permissible and so, more problematically, is lying to friends to prevent them doing wrong out of madness or ignorance (382c). In the ideal state the guardians are given a good deal of discretion in the matter; they may lie for the benefit of the city in reaction to the behavior of both enemies and citizens. But it is hard not to see circumstances in which such discretion might be “crippling” to their characters, especially if they are deceiving themselves as well as other members of their own   271 

Appendix A caste. And then there is the “noble lie” (perhaps better, “full-blooded and noble piece of fiction,” noble in that it will promote a noble mentality in the guardians), offered by Socrates as desirably believed by all, even the guardians themselves, a “Phoenician story” to be instilled especially into guardian cadets. All are to believe that they have only dreamed of being educated as outlined in the early part of the Republic. In “reality,” this education has taken place underground and at the hands of Mother Earth herself; hence all citizens are brothers (though the “metallic” worth of their souls is different—in the manner of a myth of Hesiod—some being golden, others silver, others iron or bronze). When Socrates asks Glaucon whether he can see any way of inducing people to accept such an outlandish story—which makes one hesitate about taking it seriously rather than treating it simply as an allegory—Glaucon says no, but adds that it might perhaps be possible after the first generation. Socrates quickly passes on to other matters, but even the suggestion that it would be good if, per impossibile, the guardians might be beneficially tricked in this way encourages us to suspect that Plato has inadequately considered the implications of his treatment of lying and falsehood. For what he offers with the “noble lie”—as on occasions when guardians lie for the benefit of their friends—is a surprisingly “consequentialist” piece of morality that sounds odd in the mouth of a Socrates who is normally the absolute agent-relativist; that is, he holds that not consequences, but the effects on the agent should be the determining factors of action. We recall, of course, that it is Socrates, probably “playfully,” not the guardians themselves, who proposes the “Phoenician” story. In treating of female guardians, Socrates has not unreasonably appealed to our attitude to animals. When we bring up hunting dogs, we do not assume that because they bear young the females are incapable of hunting. They do indeed have that capacity. But although there is nothing objectionable about proceeding from that to ask whether certain female human beings have the same capacity to rule as a similarly small number of males, the analogy carries the risk that, in other respects too, we may treat animals and humans identically, without looking closely at what each example requires and implies. Thus, when it comes to reproduction it can be assumed that the eugenic practices widely used in   272 

Appendix A breeding hunting dogs should be applied to humans in order to generate the best new specimens. That implies that there is no special dignity to be attached to the particular human being qua individual, but that, as with animals, we are to regard humans as a species. In matters of reproduction this attitude is reinforced by the notion, normal in antiquity and emphasized by Plato, that children are born and raised “for the city” (460e, 461a). All this may seem strange in view of Plato’s belief, emphasized in the Republic itself and elsewhere, that we should aim for likeness to God as much as possible, since the soul is somehow immortal and divine. Yet the divine statue of the soul has apparently no bearing on Socrates’ advocacy of both abortion (461c) and infanticide (459e, 460c, cf. Timaeus 19a). The immediate explanation of this apparent anomaly is that, despite the soul’s immortality, human value and “dignity” are not given by right of birth (let alone of conception), but are to be earned. Such lack of concern for the value of the individual is further demonstrated when Socrates says that guardians captured in war should be abandoned to their fate (468b). Presumably they should not have allowed themselves to be taken prisoner in the first place—probably an allusion to the Spartans captured by Athens on the island of Sphacteria in 425, whose imprisonment proved an immense embarrassment to Sparta and a political feather in the cap for Athens. In this eugenics section of the Republic the amount of discretionary lying, at the expense of members of the guardian class but for the good of the city, is pointedly large, as Socrates readily admits: “It is probable that our rulers will have to use a good deal of falsehood and deception for the benefit of those they are ruling” (459cd). Thus those among the guardians denied the option of reproduction are to be induced to blame chance rather than the rulers when, as the result of a rigged lottery, they are excluded from official “marriages” (460b). It is hard for us to see how such jiggery-pokery will not corrupt the group of guardians managing the system—in line with Plato’s more normal principle that deliberate lying cripples the soul. Perhaps it is no accident that in book eight we see Plato point to a failure of reproductive arrangements as likely cause of the decline of a state from ideal society to “timocracy.” If he had placed clearer value on the individual as such, the strategy of lying to one’s fel  273 

Appendix A low guardians, or to future guardians—and perhaps thus corrupting the whole caste—would less readily have presented itself. The discussion of eugenics does more than highlight Plato’s difficulties over lying and deceiving—which are understandable inasmuch as it is a problem that has worried numbers of able philosophers since. More fundamentally it is more revealing of his attitude to human beings as such than is immediately clear on the surface of this section of the Republic. As we have seen, despite the immortality of the soul, Plato thinks that human “dignity” has to be earned. Bad souls, though immortal, have no “dignity.” At conception or birth there is as yet no dignity either; but why would there be, since in metaphysical or theological terms it is not the body-soul composite that counts? The end of the composite of soul and body—the separation called death—does no necessary harm to the soul—indeed may be in the soul’s best interest: thus an execution may help the individual to realize where the good of his soul really lies, or in the case of abortion or infanticide, the soul may have a better chance of acquiring likeness to God in its next incarnation. Thus in addition to his problems about lying, Plato’s eugenic theory is deeply affected by his view that not the individual human being, but the immortal soul is what matters. There are, of course, many passages in Plato where a more “humane” attitude to the individual comes to the surface, and that point to the need for a better theory of what we “really are.” Theological claims about the soul’s nature and its series of incarnations make his cavalier attitude to eugenics more understandable, if no more plausible or palatable. Plato’s ideas about the true nature of the soul and its relationship to the soul-body complex probably also account for the strong impression left by the Symposium that the lover, in his ascent to Beauty Itself, largely leaves his human beloved behind and forgotten—an impression only partially corrected in the Phaedrus. The beloved, it appears, is a this-worldly phenomenon. Both lover and beloved have a higher destiny where their mutual love—certainly of body, but perhaps also of soul—once beneficial, will be outgrown as they pass from interpersonal relationships to the nonreciprocal love of Beauty itself. Of course, if God and the Good are eventually to be identified, there would be good reason to moderate this “anti-personalism.”   274 

A ppen di x b

Literature and Platonic Transcendentalism

In Appendix A I argued that Plato’s problematic theories of eugenics rely in part on his inadequate account of the soul-body relationship. Surprisingly, perhaps, the same difficulty affects his account of the role of literature and other imitative arts in the ideal society. Plato’s treatment of that theme is widely misunderstood, making it necessary to separate uninformed criticism from basic problems in his position. Although he knows he must establish—beyond an objective status for moral facts— an account of the moral agent such that he is able to comprehend those facts and their significance in his earthly life and beyond, Plato’s final view of what we are—expressed in the theory of the ultimately simple nature of the “tripartite”soul—is inadequate to the demands laid upon it. Broadly speaking, we can divide philosophical accounts of the human being into two groups: those that emphasize man as a moral agent and those that are more concerned with identifying the proper relationship between the soul (or the “I,” or the mind, however understood) and the body. Though both accounts are important to Plato, he concentrates on the first at the expense of the second. For him, as we have seen, we are in the last resort to be identified with our rationally erotic soul and must work to make that identification a present reality. Our soul only becomes tripartite when linked to a body that ultimately is irrelevant. The only emotions that finally matter are those of the erotic and rational self, directed toward the Good. That established, we can turn to Plato’s account   275 

Appendix b of the nature and role of literature as proposed in the Republic, in light also of his belief in that dialogue that the perfection of human nature is possible for the few in this present life, and that whatever stands in the way of that perfection must be excluded from the ideal society. In books two and three Plato’s attack on the poets and on the arts more generally is on moral grounds, and in evaluating it we must take due account of the religious content of ancient drama and its “source” in the poems of Homer. (An ancient writer described the dramas of Aeschylus as slices from Homer’s banquet.) This literature is religious, and Plato’s hostility to the presentation of gods and heroes as liars, murderers, rapists, and adulterers is religious and cultural. Ancient religion is very different from modern monotheistic assumptions, but it is not irrelevant to ask whether Christians do not rightly take offense if Jesus is dramatically represented (as he has been by atheists out to offend) as lying about his calling, having an affair with Mary Magdalene, or indulging in homosexual rites. For Plato is not only accusing the poets of telling blasphemous lies about the divine nature and about respected human heroes, but of encouraging the youth to think of such behavior as to be imitated. Thus do the poets encourage murder, adultery, rape, and cowardice, and such encouragement, more especially in a religious setting, leads to the idolizing of pernicious role models. Similarly with music: Plato is as well aware as any modern critic of, say, “heavy metal,” that it can easily encourage, and is often intended to encourage, violent and promiscuous behavior among the young. A serious objection to his attitude to the arts in these books should not be to dismiss these charges as philistinism—it is hard to see how such a consummate artist in words can be so easily dismissed—but to draw attention to benefits deriving from his literary targets that might be seen to counterbalance their disadvantages: not least if his account of human nature is seriously incomplete. We should remember, too, that Plato intended philosophical writing such as his to replace traditional poetry as the foundation on which future Greek education should be constructed. As we have seen, by the time Plato moves from book three of the Republic to the renewed analysis of the imitative arts—now with special emphasis on painting and sculpture—in book ten, he has at his disposal what he regards as the fully developed Theory of Forms. That means that   276 

Appendix b he can investigate the nature and impact of the arts, not only in relation to normal Greek society and traditional Greek education, but against a background of the Ideal state and the advanced and metaphysical education of the guardians. Certainly in book ten the moral and religious problems posed by traditional poetry are not neglected; Plato adds that, unlike Pythagoras, Solon, Lycurgus, and others (599d ff.), Homer has contributed nothing to the construction of recognizable forms of noble society. Yet his analysis of the imitative arts now reveals a metaphysical explanation of their ill effects and suggests a significant extension of the damage they cause. Such further analysis will not disallow the objection that Plato has neglected possible merits of the imitative arts, but it will strengthen the riposte that such possible merits are too limited to override the demerits. Already in the Divided Line section of book six (510a), we have learned that in the world recognizable through the senses we find both physical objects and “imitations” of such objects such as shadows, images, or reflections in water. Now in book ten Plato argues that artistic representations are similarly shadowy and delusory. What the painter and the poet are producing are images—imitations—of physical objects that are themselves only instantiations of the Forms. What exactly is wrong with an imitation of an imitation? Plato’s objections may be along the following lines: Lovers of mere reflections will have more to do if they are to have any chance of seeing the Forms. That will be especially the case if they come to lose all ability to distinguish the fictitious world from the world of physical objects, so becoming liable to further moral errors. Here Plato seems prescient: one can have the impression that (for example) actors—not to speak of “celebs”— have lost sight of the difference between their various character roles on the set and their activities in daily life; it is well documented—as from accounts of Peter Sellars—that they may find it difficult to live an ordinary life, being reduced to taking on one role after the other. If such loss of a sense of reality is part of what Plato has in mind, he can be understood as saying that those who live in a shadow world are not incapable of the good life—and in that resemble those who know particulars, but not Forms—but that while this latter group is at least aware that there is a difference between good and bad, right and wrong, even if they can  277 

Appendix b not understand the basis for such distinctions, the reflection lovers live in a world in which these terms are mere counters to be juggled at will: a world where there must also be no true and false, but only endless appearances—and in their speech endless discourse to which the categories of true and false are irrelevant. We might say that the reflection lover degenerates into the spin doctor. These are serious charges, and we need well-based objections if, while recognizing that Plato’s challenge is substantial, we still insist that there is more to be said. However, our objections can be based on Plato’s failure to solve the soul-body problem. If he were right in holding that “we” are ultimately our souls and that tripartition disappears with the ultimately irrelevant body, then appeal to the concerns of our tripartite nature would be misguided, being merely pandering to our potential lower selves when we should always be trying to live in direct communion with the Forms. Yet even in the Republic itself the guardians are not allowed to indulge such communion; they have to return to the Cave. If Plato is mistaken about our most basic nature, then approaches to virtue other than a direct appeal to our love of truth could also be beneficial, even especially so. Certainly for all incapable of guardian-like perfection—and we bear in mind that after the Republic the guardians become a beautiful dream—learning and understanding of the world may require a “mythologizing” as well as a philosophical approach. And that is where the arts will return; they appeal to us through our senses and can thus inspire us to look toward the good indirectly. Watching a Shakespearian tragedy, listening to a Beethoven Symphony, or admiring Michelangelo’s Last Judgment may not point us directly to the Form of the Good, but in elevating the mind they can certainly orient us in a direction of which Plato could not disapprove. If we are not souls, but a soul-body unity, indirect as well as direct approaches to the Good will be essential.

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Selected Bibliography

The following bibliography is very limited and largely contemporary. Although most of the works listed are more professional and more technical—and less sympathetic to much of Plato’s metaphysics—than mine, a few of them shed light on my fundamental concerns, and occasionally lend support.

Category A I begin (Category A) with books that offer a broad conspectus of the primary interests of most English-language commentators on Plato. Several of them (especially Fine’s Plato) provide extensive bibliographies of both editions and secondary studies. They also offer the further advantage of enabling graduate students and scholars to write sophisticated comments on Plato without rereading his text. Annas, Julia, and Christopher J. Rowe, eds. New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Benson, Hugh H., ed. A Companion to Plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Fine, Gail, ed. Plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. The Oxford Handbook of Plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Gill, Christopher, and Mary Margaret McCabe, eds. Form and Argument in Late Plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Klagge, James C., and Nicholas D. Smith, eds. Methods of Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Supplementary volume, 1992. Kraut, Richard. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Category B In Category B I have listed a few more books and essays that have particularly influenced my own understanding of Plato’s meta-ethics, whether positively or negatively. Baltes, Matthias. “Is the Idea of the Good in Plato’s Republic Beyond Being?” In Studies in Plato and the Platonic Tradition, edited by Mark Joyal, 1–23. London: Ashgate, 1997.   279 

Selected Bibliography Brandwood, Leonard. The Chronology of Plato’s Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Burnyeat, Myles. “Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London 24 (1977): 7–16. Burnyeat, Myles. Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999. Dancy, R. M. Plato’s Introduction of Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Fine, Gail. On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Theory of Forms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Frede, Michael. “Being and Becoming in Plato.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, supplementary volume (1988): 37–52. Gerson, Lloyd. Ancient Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Halperin, David M. “Why Is Diotima a Woman? Platonic Eros and the Figuration of Gender.” In Before Sexuality, edited by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, 257–308. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1990. Irwin, Terence. Plato’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Kahn, Charles H. “Plato’s Theory of Desire.” Review of Metaphysics 41 (1987): 77–103. ———. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Meinwald, Constance. Plato’s Parmenides. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. McPherran, Mark L. The Religion of Socrates. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Moline, Jon. Plato’s Theory of Understanding. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. Owen, G. E. L. Logic, Science and Dialectic: Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Peck, Arthur L. “Plato versus Parmenides.” Philosophical Review 71 (1962): 159–84. Penner, Terry. The Ascent from Nominalism. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987. Peterson, Sandra. “A Reasonable Self-Predication Premise for the Third Man.” Philosophical Review 82 (1973): 451–70. Price, A. W. Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Ross, Sir David. Plato’s Theory of Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951. Rowe, Christopher. Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Scott, Dominic. Recollection and Experience: Plato’s Theory of Learning and Its Successors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Santas, Gerasimos. “Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Form of the Good: Ethics without Metaphysics.” Philosophical Papers 18 (1989): 137–60.   280 

Selected Bibliography Sokolowski, Robert. Phenomenology of the Human Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Szlezàk, Thomas A. Reading Plato. London: Routledge, 1999. Vander Waerdt, Paul A., ed. The Socratic Movement. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. Vlastos, Gregory. “The Individual as Object of Love in Plato.” In Platonic Studies, 3–34. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. ———. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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Index

Academy of Plato, 61, 165, 178, 179, 225, 250 acrasia. See weakness of will Adeimantus, 52 Ad hominem arguments, 4, 24, 41, 46, 101 Aeschines of Sphettus, 19, 67 Agathon, 73–77, 80–81, 89 Alcibiades, 19, 88, 103 Anaxagoras, 99, 187–88, 192, 216 anteros, 86, 190 Antigone, 18, 20, 43 anti-logic. See eristic Antiphon, 113 Antisthenes, 37, 202 Anytus, 49–50, 55–59 Aquinas, Thomas, 3 Aristides, 57 Aristippus, 51 Aristophanes, 15, 16, 17, 18, 75, 77–80, 84, 89, 124, 135 Aristotle, 3, 6, 16, 21, 34, 35, 36, 61, 62, 63, 70, 126, 136, 144, 146, 161, 165, 167, 178, 185, 213, 215, 220, 224–26, 234, 237, 241, 250, 254, 264–65 art/arts, 159–60, 276–78 atheism, 16, 238 Beauty, 61–62, 73, 75–76, 80–81, 86–89, 93, 138, 188, 189, 198, 246 belief, 26, 32, 33, 50, 58–59, 126, 134, 140 Callicles, 11, 24, 37, 41, 49, 52, 56, 81, 108, 113, 114, 117, 238, 240 Cave (in Republic), 105, 149–50, 152, 219 Chaerephon, 19, 25

Charmides, 25–29 chronology of dialogues, 7 “city of pigs,” 121 city of rich and city of poor, 126, 128 civil war (stasis), 130, 133, 155 contemporary social scene, 1–5 conventionalism, 17, 43, 96, 135, 153, 220, 243, 252–56, 268 courage, 29, 31, 33, 35–36, 39, 107, 210 Critias, 17, 25–29, 37, 113, 223, 244 daimon, 83, 229, 231, 248. See also mind death, 68, 90, 94, 101–5, 108, 140 definition, 35–36, 51 Delphi/Delphic Oracle, 19, 23, 25–27, 29, 49, 82, 89, 129, 186, 214, 215 Demiurge, 224, 226–35, 238, 265 democracy/democratic man, 2, 15, 117, 155–57 desire, 41, 66, 69–74, 131–32, 157. See also eros; pleasure dialectic, 20, 26, 52, 60, 151–52, 191 dialogue form, 11–12, 25, 43, 50, 73, 166, 177, 179, 194, 196 dialogues of definition, 26, 42, 107 Diotima, 52, 74, 79–87, 120, 137, 179, 188, 211, 221 divided line (in Republic), 146, 148, 277 divided self, 8, 128, 151 division, 191, 193, 196–97, 202, 207–8 dramatic techniques, 25–26, 74, 103, 110 Dworkin, R., 262 Dyad (indefinite), 213, 233

  283 

index Hume, David, 41, 115–16, 134, 256, 261 hypothesis, 52–53, 55, 100–101

egalitarian politics, 2, 56, 155 Empedocles, 77, 209 eristic, 26, 52–53, 55, 60, 68, 98, 101 eros, 66–89, 138, 150, 165, 186–96, 205, 221, 232, 274, 275 eugenics, 72, 135, 154, 163, 271–74 Euripides, 17, 18, 34, 244 Euthyphro, 25, 29, 35, 43–48 Evenus of Paros, 192 false statements, 7, 59–60 family (in Ideal State), 133, 134–36 Forms: of Good, 93, 142–45, 148–49, 151–52, 164, 166, 201, 206, 209–10, 213, 219, 222, 224, 231, 232, 234, 243, 251, 278; of moral, mathematical, and aesthetic items, 60–61, 95, 138, 161, 176, 211, 220, 235, 249; of negatives, 138, 164, 169, 191, 196, 210, 249–50; of physical objects, 60–61, 160–62, 164, 165, 169, 172–73, 211, 235, 250. See also Beauty friendship, 68, 70–71 friends of the Forms, 200, 206, 207 God(s), 19–20, 47, 102, 120–21, 124–25, 160–61, 164, 201, 212, 213–41, 243–44, 251, 255, 257 Gorgias, 29, 36, 37, 50, 52, 55, 57, 80–81, 192, 236 greatest kinds, 177, 199, 202–4, 230 guardians, 82, 123–28, 137, 179, 272–73, 278 Gyges’ ring, 120 happiness, 2, 75, 110, 217 Heidegger, 199 Heraclitus, 61, 63, 64, 77, 95, 112, 124, 180, 184, 192, 193 Herodotus, 17, 244 Hesiod, 17, 123–24, 182 Hippias, 23, 37, 73 Hobbes, Thomas, 24, 115–16 holiness. See piety Homer/Homeric poems, 17, 32, 57, 78, 85, 95, 109, 123–24, 276 homosexuals/homosexuality, 41, 69–89, 125, 186–87

ignorance, 20, 23,–24, 26, 28, 29–30, 32–33, 35–36, 49, 80, 204, 231 imitation, 125, 159–160, 277–78 Immortality, 70, 86, 105, 121, 187, 201, 216, 246–47, 274; arguments for, 91–102, 162, 240 infinite regress arguments, 160 justice, 51, 93, 107–19, 129, 132, 148, 249 Kahn, C. H., 13 Kant/Kantians, 3, 254, 263–64, 268 Kerensky, 156 knowledge, 28, 30, 33, 37, 39–42, 53–54, 57–58, 69, 96, 100, 102, 129, 138, 140, 143, 146, 178–86, 211, 248–49 Lenin, 156 likeness to god, 70, 135, 189, 216–20, 246 Locke, John, 243, 260–61, 262 love. See eros luxury, 122, 125, 155 Lycurgus, 85, 216 lying, 124–25, 258–59, 271–74 Lysias, 186–91 madness: as characterizing the philosopher, 70, 86 man as measure, 17, 20, 24, 59, 62–63, 70, 94, 119, 206, 214, 255 mathematics, 51–55, 58, 94, 146–48, 150–51, 177, 212, 224 Meinwald, C., 13 Meletus, 44, 48 Meno’s Paradox, 50, 53, 58 mind (divine, and as cause of mixture), 188, 208, 209, 216, 222, 231, 238, 241, 248, 252 Mirabeau, 156 Moline, J., 13 Murdoch, I., 267–268 myths, 71, 102–4, 107, 119, 123, 159, 216, 218, 228, 229

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index naturalism, 17, 256–57 neo-Platonism/-Platonists, 3, 9, 13, 48, 87, 91, 144, 166, 175, 200, 221, 232, 242 Nicias, 33, 36 nihilism, 5, 18, 106–9, 117, 152, 159, 220, 236, 242, 243, 252–53, 257–58 not-being, 195, 197–200, 202–4, 211 obligation, 65, 252, 256–57, 265–66 Oedipus, 34 oligarchy, 15, 27, 28, 154–56 one-over-many arguments, 164, 168, 211, 249 opinion. See belief Parmenides, 139, 166–77, 180, 196, 197, 199–200, 206 participation, 100, 102, 170–72, 174, 210 Pericles, 18, 37, 38, 57, 192 Phaedo (as author), 67, 90 Phaedrus, 76, 80, 186–96 Philoponus, John, 226 philosopher-kings, 10, 137, 158 piety, 31,36, 37, 38, 43–48 Pindar, 79 Plato: Alcibiades (probably spurious), 91, 246 Plato: Apology, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 36, 44, 71, 79, 216 Plato: Charmides, 31, 37, 48, 66, 67, 69, 70, 110 Plato: Cratylus, 6, 55, 59–65, 79, 83, 90, 92, 112, 160, 161, 162, 169, 175, 176, 190, 198, 219 Plato: Crito, 20, 23, 37, 44 Plato: Euthydemus, 55, 60, 68, 98 Plato: Euthyphro, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 43– 48, 51, 53, 54, 100, 119, 162, 172, 175, 268 Plato: Gorgias, 11, 18, 23, 24, 27, 29, 31, 32, 34, 37, 40, 42, 44, 49, 50, 51, 53, 56, 57, 58, 62, 66, 70, 71, 88, 90, 108, 113, 115–16, 141, 179, 190, 206, 216, 217, 218, 236, 246 Plato: Hippias Minor, 23, 36, 37–38, 187 Plato: Ion, 32 37 Plato: Laches, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 42, 44, 48, 107, 119 Plato: Laws, 20, 135, 136, 144, 189, 205, 209, 215, 216, 217, 229, 235–41, 246, 247, 255, 259

Plato: Letters: second, 7; seventh, 11, 26, 141, 193, 235 Plato: Lysis, 67–73, 74, 83, 208 Plato: Meno, 32, 40, 49, 51–59, 60, 62, 66, 68, 71, 94, 95, 97, 134, 138, 140, 146, 148, 184, 185, 211, 228, 230, 246 Plato: Parmenides, 60, 61, 69, 160, 165–77, 178, 181, 190, 194, 198, 200, 203, 204, 206, 210, 211, 226, 250, 267 Plato: Phaedo, 53, 60, 63, 68, 70, 71, 75, 88, 89, 90–105, 114, 121, 125, 129, 132, 134, 137, 140, 144, 145, 148, 159, 162, 163, 167, 168, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 187, 195, 200, 201, 208, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219, 224, 225, 232, 238, 246, 256 Plato: Phaedrus, 11, 48, 68, 72, 86, 92, 101, 126, 150, 161, 163, 177, 186–96, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 211, 217, 227, 228, 230, 234, 238, 239, 240, 247, 274 Plato: Philebus, 37, 146, 197, 201, 204, 205– 10, 222, 224, 236, 248 Plato: Protagoras, 17, 20, 21, 24, 27, 31, 34, 36, 37–42, 44, 46, 49, 59, 60, 62–63, 66, 70, 94, 119, 206, 214, 255 Plato: Republic, 10, 13, 27, 35, 41, 42, 43, 52, 55, 63, 69, 70, 72, 82, 89, 91, 92, 95, 98, 101, 105, 106–64, 166, 169, 173, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 195, 199, 205, 206, 208, 210, 211, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 232, 236, 237, 246, 247, 251, 252, 267, 268, 271–78 Plato: Sophist, 62, 88, 167, 177, 181, 185, 186, 195, 196–205, 206, 211, 220, 224, 230, 231, 238, 250 Plato: Statesman, 6, 125, 189, 191, 203, 206, 209, 212, 224, 227, 229 Plato: Symposium, 41, 52, 60, 63, 68, 73–89, 100, 103, 120, 125, 129, 136, 137, 141, 142, 144, 150, 162, 163, 165, 169, 175, 188, 189, 190, 193, 195, 216, 219, 221, 246, 269, 274 Plato: Theaetetus, 1, 59, 63, 105, 135, 138, 177–86, 195, 198, 205, 206, 211, 214, 216, 218, 219, 237, 238 Plato: Timaeus, 91, 135, 139, 144, 148, 163, 181, 183, 195, 198, 201, 205, 209, 212, 216, 220, 222–35, 237, 239, 241, 246, 248, 250, 273

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Index Stranger from Elea, 196–205, 207 suicide, 93, 218

pleasure, 31, 37, 40, 41, 42, 66, 94, 110, 140, 143, 155, 205–7; natural, necessary and unnecessary, 155–58 Plotinus, 252, 266–67, 268 Plutarch (as dualist reader of Laws), 239 poets/poetry, 32, 42 Polemarchus, 108–10, 115, 186 Polus, 24, 51 postmodern readings, 11 private property, 126–27 Prodicus, 27, 60, 73, 192 Protagoras, 17, 21, 38–39, 56, 59, 62, 73, 179, 180, 184, 244, 255 purification, 91 recollection, 50, 57–58, 94, 96, 100 rhetoric, 36–37, 104, 109, 186, 191–96 rights, 243, 261–62 ring-composition, 106–7, 118, 136, 158 Robespierre, 156 Rousseau, J.-J., 254 self-control. See sophrosune self-love, 237, 240 self-predication, 47, 64, 89, 171 separate Forms, 5, 43–65, 92, 144, 162, 168, 171 Sidgwick, H., 254, 258–59 Simonides, 39 skills, 27, 29–31, 37, 39, 109, 116 Socrates 2, 9, 150, 211, 213–15, 245; divine sign of, 19, 44, 141, 179; on not doing wrong willingly, 34–35, 239–40; Platonic Socrates, 16, 98, 215, 245; religion of, 15–22, 44–48, 179, 213, 215, 247 Sokolowski, R., 1 Solon, 85, 216 Sophron (writer of mimes), 134 soul, 53, 90–105; as harmony, 97; as origin of motion, 187. See also daimon; mind sophists, 16, 17, 18, 19, 30, 36, 37, 39, 42, 56–57, 73, 97, 141, 196 Sophocles, 18, 20, 34–35, 215 sophrosune, 25–29, 31, 36, 130 space (chora), 226, 233, 252 Speusippus, 178

Thales, 219 Theaetetus, 151, 177, 196 Themistocles, 57, 59 Theodorus of Byzantium, 192 Theophrastus, 213, 219–20, 225, 233–34, 237, 241, 248, 251 “Third Man” arguments, 165, 171–72, 174–75 Thrasyllus (editor of Plato), 11 Thrasymachus/Thrasymacheanism, 81, 106–19, 129, 133, 134, 141, 152, 153, 158, 184, 192, 236, 240, 243, 244, 260 Thucydides, 118; Melian dialogue in, 18, 63, 113–14, 117, 130 Thucydides (politician), 57 timocracy, 154, 273 tragedy/tragedians, 123 tripartite soul, 115, 130–32, 150, 157–58, 162–63, 165, 188–90, 194, 211, 218, 223–24, 228, 229, 230, 231, 247, 275 truth-telling, 30 tyranny/tyrannical man, 117, 153, 157–58 “unitarian” interpretation, 9, 13 universals, 46, 54, 62, 172 unwritten doctrines, 144, 213, 236 utilitarianism, 41, 254 virtue, 30, 32, 36, 38, 39, 42–51, 54–55, 61, 254 weakness of will, 8, 35, 132, 150 Williams, B., 259 women, 76–77, 81–85, 134–36, 272–73. See also eros World-Soul, 228–32 writing, 11–12, 192–94 Xenocrates, 178, 250 Xenophanes of Elea, 17, 124, 215, 216 Xenophon, 16, 19, 50, 67 Zeno of Elea, 166–68, 190, 195, 207

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