Plato's Dialogues One By One : A

title:
Dialogical Interpretation
author: Tejera, V.
publisher: University Press of America
isbn10 | asin: 0761809937
print isbn13: 9780761809937
ebook isbn13: 9780585162324
language: English
subject Plato.--Dialogues.
publication date: 1999
lcc: B395.T36 1999eb
ddc: 184
subject: Plato.--Dialogues.
 Page i

Plato's Dialogues One By One

A Dialogical Interpretation
Victorino Tejera

University Press of America,® Inc.

Lanham · New York · Oxford
 Page ii
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Tejera, V. (Victorino)
Plato's dialogues one by one / Victorino Tejera.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: v. l. A Dialogical interpretation. 1. Plato, Dialogues. I.
Title.
B395T36 1997 184dc21 97-4571932256 CIP
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 Page iii

Contents
Foreword: On Reading Plato's Dialogues Dialogically vii
1 The Apology and the Phaedo: Plato's Tragic Humor 1
Why the Apology is not a Judicial Defense 1
Sokrates' No-Lose Alternative and the Anytus Episode
7
in the Meno
Sokrates' Conversational Style, His Dominance, and His
10
Wit
A Myth and Sokrates' "Idea" of the Earth 19
Plato's Socratism 21
2. Plato's Parmenides: On the Structurarion of Its Ironies 27
Getting into the Dialogism and Architectonics of the
27
Parmenides
How Are We to Take Parmenides' Rehearsal of the
31
Difficulties in the Theory of Ideas?
Discussion of the Best Training Method for the Pursuit
33
of Knowledge
The Pedagogical Demonstration as also a Satire on
34
Sophistic Deductivism
 Page iv
3. Irony and Allegory in the Phaedrus: Aristotle's Note on
41
Irony in the Phaedrus
The Initial Interaction 41
Normal Madness and Formless Essence 43
Sokrates' Critique of Speaking and Writing 46
Dialectic and Rhetoric, Philosophy and Writing 50
4. History and Rhetoric in the Meno: On the Difficulties of
57
Communicating Human Excellence
The Situational Irony 58
Interrogation and Hypothesis, Narrative and
63
Recollection in Meno
Knowledge is Sacred, but So Is Right Opinion When,
71
Like Inspiration, It Produces Goodness
5. The Gorgias: On the Use of Rhetoric and the Good of
77
Politics
Speechmaking and Dialectic 77
Refutations and Reversals 78
Getting Sophistic Rhetoric into Proportion 80
Wrongdoing and Rhetoric 82
Kallicles, Rhetoric, and the Desire for More 84
Sarcasm and Sophistry, Argument and Allegory 85
6. Irony, Dialogue, and Dialectic: An Interdialogical
Interlude 93

On the Use of the Term "Irony" in the Dialogues 93

Dialogue and Dialectic, Analytical and Logical 100
Eleatic Method 101
The Protagoras as a Dissòs Lógos, or Protagoras
102
Protagorized
Is Plato's Parmenides an Eleaticized Protagoras or
103
Parmenides Zenonized?
The Underlying Design of the Dialogues 106
Aristotle Again 108
7. The Protagoras: A Dialogical Reading of the
109
Personified Antilogy
Architectonics and Dynamics of the Dialogue-Form 110
The Personified Antilogy 111
Relevance of the Prelude and the Satirico-Dramatic By-
112
Play
 Page v
Sokrates Questions the Unity Attributed to the
115
Excellences by Protagoras
Sokrates' Amusing Anti-Lecture on Simonides' Poem 118
The Eristics about Aretê 119
What is the Point of the Last Debate about Pleasure and
121
Pain, Good and Evil?
8. The Charmides: Self-Knowledge and the Knowledge of
125
Knowledge
To Have an Excellence and to Define It 125
Wherein a Snob and a Sophist Is Satirized 130
The Debate about Knowledge of Knowledge and
132
Knowledge of Oneself
9. The Theaetetus and the Birth of Epistemology 143
Maieutic Art and Hypothetical Method 143
"Antilogies" about "Knowledge Itself" 155
"Antilogies" about Wrong Judgment 170
A Dream Account of Logical Accounts, and the
173
Acceptance of the False Pregnancy
10. Plato's Eleatic Sophist: Looking at a Sophist from Elea 181
"A Really Philosophical Person" 181
What a Clever Dog Does When He Has a Bad Name 185
The Sophistical "Refutation" of Parmenides 191
 The Views and Performance of the Elean Sophist 196
The Relation of the 'Sophist' to the Impending Trial 205
11. The Politics of a Sophistic Rhetorician: A Sophistic
209
De Monarchia
Plato's Dialogism and the Subject-Matter of the
209
'Politicus'
The Political Art as a Pythagorist 'Science' 213
Isolating and 'Purifying' the Kingship 216
Constitutional Government versus Sophistic 'Science' 220
The Sophist's Kingly Craft as 'Methoria' 224
Pythagorism and the Idea of Monarchy in the Fourth
226
Century B.C.
 Page vi
12. Plato's Counter-Utopia: The Republic 233
Section I: A Remedial Constitution 233
A Monumental Dramatic Sketch 233
The Point of View and the Dramatic Date 234
The Human Setting and the Political Context 237
The Intellectual Background of the Transmission of
241
the Dialogues
Section II: A Structural Critique 249
Why People Think Socrates Is Plato's Spokesman 249
Architectonic Irony of the Republic 252
Tone and Texture of Socrates' Narrative
259
Construction
The Problem of Implementation and the Role of the
264
'Philosopher' in the State
The Machinery of the Divided Line, and the
268
Conception of Justice
Section III: The Mathematical Humor in Books VIII
275
and IX
Structural and Allusional Ironies of the 'Nuptial
275
Number'
Some Textural Ironies 278
Modelling for Fun, and the Feasibility of the
280
 Discursive Polity
"It's Easier to Model in Words than in Wax" 283
Appendix 286
13. Excursus: The Question of Form and the Problem of
291
the Laws
The External Evidence from the Aristotelian Politics 291
What Constitutes Internal Evidence? 292
External Evidence from D. Laertius and Aulus Gellius 295
Mimetic Structure and Socio-Intellectual Allusiveness
297
of the Dialogues
Plato's Philosophic Awareness and Formal Mastery 299
Can a Designer Forget How to Design? 301
Oral-Aural Community of the Polis, Visual-Graphic
304
Anomie of Conquered Easternized Greece
14. A Garland of "Yesterdays" 309
A Narrative Wreath to Celebrate the Festival of an
309
Unnamed Goddess
What Kind of Tale Is the Atlantic-Story? 315
 Page vii
15. A Poetic Cosmography: The Timaeus 323
Problematic Connections of the Timaeus 323
What Kind of Likely Account is the Timaeus? 327
16. The Equivocity of Beauty: Plato's Sokrates and
335
Hippias the Sophist
That the Spartans Axe Law-Breakers 335
Sokrates Presses Hippias about the Beautiful 338
The Comic Elenchus Continues 341
The Refutation of Hippias's Aestheticism 344
Sokrates' Eristic Irony 346
17. Problems of Morality, Inspiration, and Practice 353
The Hippias Minor 353
The Ion 357
18. Disputation, Education, and Dialectic: The
367
Euthydemus and the Euthyphro
The Epilogue on the Would-be Knowledge-Seeker and
367
the Would-be Statesman
Protreptics vs. Logomachy, Ethical vs. Refutative
372
Dialectic
The Euthyphro and the Dialectic 374
Sokrates Takes Over the Inquiry 379
19. The Intellectual Pleasures and the Moral Excellences: 387
The Philebos and the Laches
The Philebos as a Socratic Dialogue 387
With What Is the Philebos Designed to Be Concerned? 388
The Cause of Pleasure, and Reason the Combiner 390
The Laches 394
20. The Kratylos: Sokrates the Name-Maker 405
The New Alphabet and the Technique of Literary
405
Name-Giving
The Dimension of Self-Irony in the Kratylos 418
In the Exchange with Kratylos Sokrates Becomes
424
Refutative and Admonitory
 Page viii
21. The Symposium: Sokrates, Eros, and Aristophanes 433
About the Setting 433
That Sokrates' Speech Is Mainly a Response to
435
Aristophanes'
Aristophanes' Account of Human Longing 437
Eros and Intellect in Sokrates' Tale of the Prophetess 441
Alcibiades' Encomium of Sokrates 451
Bibliography 457
 Page ix

Foreword
On Reading Plato Dialogically
In the following I have tried to assume nothing about Plato of
which we are not certain. Plato's dialogues are read independently
of any assumptions about the chronology of their composition.
There is no attempt to impose any system of doctrine upon the
dialogues from the outside. The only assumption made about
Plato's dialogues is that they all have their own integrity and that
this integrity must be respected. Operationally, this entails a
determined non-violation of their literary or dramatic form as we
read each dialogue for its own sake, in its well-constituted entirety.
This, again, has meant that no part of a dailogue may be given
more emphasis than is warranted by its position in relation to the
structure of just that dialogue in which it occurs, and no part of a
dialogueincluding the ordinarily isolated and downgraded
mythsmay be neglected because it is of no doctrinal or
"epistemological" interest. It has also required attention to the tone
of the conversations at all points in their development and attention
to the personal interaction between the characters, hitherto
dismissed as byplay by many readers.
The reader is invited to serve Plato, the intellectual son of the
historical Sokrates, like a more perceptive Krito. Only the reader
can release that dangerous (because open-minded) Socratic, Plato,
from the jail that was quickly constructed for him by
Academicians, pythagorizers, and Pythagoreans that has been
zealously guarded ever since by Neoplatonists and traditionalists.
Will that ugly duckling, the doctrinally-interpreted dialogues, ever
emerge as the splendid, free-flying swan that in the myth became
the home of the soul of the released master?
 Page x
Accordingly, the reader must not expect to find here an
introduction to the Neoplatonist literature about Plato, of whatever
century, nor to the Idealist literature of Plato interpretation, of
whatever nation. Still less is this an introduction to the
''development" of Plato's "doctrines," though reference is made (in
a later stage of the work) to the paralogical methods of what is
called stylometrics in its application to the dialogues. All that this
book seeks is to lead readers into a way of responding to Plato's
works, which makes it possible, as they themselves read the works,
to keep within the universe of discourse of the dialogues as the
locus of their intelligibility, and which makes unnecessary the
invocation of esoteric concerns and questionable chronologies as a
condition of understanding the dialogues. I have tried to apply and
share the logical and formal insight that, without a first move that
respects the individual integrity and design of each dialogue as a
whole, there cannot be a responsiveness adequate to Plato's creative
or philosophical effort. A second move, which relates elements in
these carefully constructed works to the history of Plato's times,
will then be seen to be required by their brimming allusiveness and
playfulness: we cannot understand the wit, the satire, and the
allusions in the dialogues (or the dialogues themselves) without
some knowledge of what it was in Plato's culture that they were
celebrating, satirizing or alluding to.
I have not wished to dissuade anyone from an interest in the
systems of Neoplatonism or Idealism, which as philosophies are
worthwhile in their own right, and entirely different sorts of
constructions from Plato's. But these philosophies, it should not
have been necessary to say, are better studied in the systems of
such of their proper exponents as Plotinus and Hegel, respectively.
Nor do I wish to inhibit philosophic discussion of any question that
Sokrates happens to raise, or appears to "answer," in the ironic
contexts of the dialogues, as long as the questions or answers are
discussed in the situational contexts provided by Plato and in
relation to the overarching questions and exhibitive judgments that
the action of the dialogue as a whole dramatizes or enacts. What is
meant by "exhibitive" will emerge as we proceed.
It is surely a positive thing to discuss, on their merits or in
isolation, ethical or epistemological, metaphysical or aesthetic
questions that are similar to those discussed by characters in the
dialogues. If, however, a reader of Plato's imaginary conversations
chooses to raise or answer such questions in abstraction from the
communicative interaction that they constitute, and in terms purged
of their situational and interlocutory pregnancy, then before he can
assign the "answers" to Plato as Plato's own doctrines, he will have
to prove (independently of unproved assumptions about the
dialogues) that the speaker from whom he got the answers is (i)
speaking for Plato and (ii) that Plato meant
 Page xi
them literally, or in the same sense as himself. He would have to
prove that a speaker in another dialogue from whom an opposable
answer can be derived is (iii) not speaking for Plato. Such a reader
would also have to accept that (iv) this speaker also meant the
abstracted words literallyotherwise the doctrinal reader can't trust
his proof that the first speaker was speaking literally. Such a reader
would have to show why these abstracted words should not
supersede the previous thesis, especially when the second set of
abstracted words is derived from a speaker with the same name as
in the first case. If such a reader wishes to use the second set of
abstracted words to qualify the first, he would have to justify his
assumption that the second set was (mediately) responding to a
question derived from another dialogue and that it is the same
question. If a different doctrinal reader should claim that the
differing abstracted questions or answers he derives from the same
dialogical utterance are the real question or answer intended by
Plato, then the first reader would have to make explicit the rules of
derivation by means of which he claims to have abstracted the real
or intended question or answer, and defend them in addition.
Not only will such literalist readers have committed the
intentionalist fallacy in doing or failing to do all or some of this,
but they will also have committed serious interpretive violence to
the dialogical texts before them. Great unanswered question will
have been left outstanding. Why did Plato go to all the trouble of
creating so many concretely different situations and intellectual
interactions among so many distinctly characterized speakers
without giving any clue, in the dialogues themselves, as to which
speaker speaks for him, Plato? Why does Plato go to the trouble of
using the Greek language with such allusive and poetic virtuosity,
if he meant us to abstract from the allusions and to reduce the
expressive language of his constructions to nonexpressive
propositional terms? Thus, if a Platonist interpreter persists in
abstracting nondialogical propositions from the conversations
before him and decides that some of them are Plato's own
doctrines, not only is the burden of proof upon him, but he must
make explicit the decision-procedure he has used to reach his
conclusion.
This book has tried to avoid polemics wherever it could, though it
has not been everywhere possible. As an exercise in how to read
Plato's dialogues dialogically, the book is based on a number of
operating hypotheses, which, in the end, only the success of the
readings can justify. The dialogues are so different, or individual,
in their designs that it would-not be apt to give theoretical,
methodological or detailed directives before the reader has
undertaken a given dialogue with my reading in hand. He will do
this either to enrich his own reading of a dialogue, or to test mine.
The test of any reading will be the
 Page xii
text of each dialogue as a whole, taken in its integrity and deprived
of none of its constituent dimensions. The reader of translations
will soon perceive that the translations do indeed subtract from the
liveliness of the conversational exchanges, i.e., from the
pointedness and wittiness of the communicative interaction, from
the tone of the speakers, and from the linguistic and formative
virtuosity of the medium in which the speakers speak to each other,
as Plato gives them their being in that medium.
The feedback over centuries from anti-expressive ways of
translating the dialogues has served only to reinforce the
plausibility of the tradition of "Plato interpretation" that
engendered, in the first place, the tolerance of the colorless prose
from which doctrines are extracted and recombined. This
exegetical tradition is properly called Academic because it was
initiated by Plato's miscalled "successors," in the Academy. The
birth of ''Plato exegisis" was the death of the dialogues as
dialogues, because what the exegetes took and offered as the
subject of their exposition was not the intellectual exchanges that
Plato had carefllly constructed, but the isolatable kernels of
doctrine that the interlocutors appear to be advancing, using, or
dealing with. The criteria according to which sentences were freed
from their context in interlocutory utterance were, originally, a
function of the Academic interest in developing a sytem of
assertions that cohered with the doctrines and other assumptions of
given Academicians. In this way, the authority of Plato could be
claimed for the belief systems of his "succesors" whether they were
Pythagorizers, like Speusippos (IV c. B.C ) and Thrasyllus the
astrologer (I c. A.D.), or Neoplatonists like the prolific Proclus (V
c.A.D.).
Precisely because Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism were so
interesting to post-Classical audiences, it was not noticed that
Plato's dialogues as dialogues had been put beyond the range of
discussion by this sort of exegesis. As enthusiastic "Platonists"
themselves, the Renaissance scholars who completed the recovery
and Latin translations of Plato's texts simply perpetuated the
working assumption that Plato may be interpreted only on platonist
premisses or with Neopythagorean or Neoplatonist interests or
presuppositions. In more recent times this tradition has nurtured the
practice of expounding the works as if they were modern treatises
dealing with conventional philosophic subjects.
The exegete now feels free to make a collection of "fragments,"
like an ancient doxographer, and to collate passages taken as
referring to the "same" ethical, logical, physical, political, aesthetic
issues from widely separate dialogues. By widely separate, I mean
very differently designed, dialogues. The name of the speaker from
whose utterance the passage is taken is omitted, and the passages
are turned into sets of propositions to which the original
communicative situation is irrelevant, and to which the rest of the
dialogue in
 Page xiii
which they belonged is also not relevant. Thus, the overall
dialogical, rhetorical, poetic, satiric, or critical effectiveness, and
the conceptional architectonic of every dialogue is silently
jettisoned and made irrecoverable.
Accordingly, I have tried in this book to uncover the observable
design of each of the works addressed, in order to restore them to
their condition as dialogues. Read as the dramatization of an
extended conversation about intellectual, cultural or political
matters, each dialogue soon recovers its allusiveness to the
circumstances of Greek life and to the climate of opinion in Plato's
Athens.The works nature as a reflection which puts on exhibit some
aspect of the human condition again becomes clear, and a
responsiveness adequate to the overall design of a dialogue is
facilitated. I hope to have shown the reader that, as intellectual
constructions that are works of art articulating tensions, themes and
dilemmas of great human significance, the dialogues have values to
offer besides those pursued by the doxographical or propositional
approach. The practice followed in this book of giving primary
importance to each dialogue as a whole in its well-constituted
integrity has had the interesting result of revealing Plato, the author
responsible, to be a synoptic and implicitly critical Socratic
working, unlike Sokrates himself, in a literary medium instead of
on his feet. To our astonishment Plato emerges, in the end, as the
last great Socraticas a second Sokrates evenrather than as the first
of a long line of Academic and other Platonists.
When one of Plato's dialogues is explicitly related to another by
means of a speaker's phrases, then the chapters in this book that
address those dialogues are also explicitly related to each other.
Otherwise, only as much continuity or discontinuity among the
chapters is sought as is proportionate to the continuity or
discontinuity among the dialogues themselves. The reader should
know that those chapters that have already appeared in journals
(with or without modifications) were part of the book before they
were published. The generative conception of this book has been
that students of Plato should have available a guide to an
alternative way of reading his worksa guide that, like Plato's
Sokrates, practices what it preaches. The book is, thus, the
articulation of a way of reading Plato that reads his dialogues
dialogically and one by one.
Because most readers are not familiar with ancient Greek, I have
remembered at every turn that I am writing for readers of
translators who have not created works-of-art, and who do not
know that what they are translating is a series of works-of-art. I
have attended to this primary need to communicate with all readers
at the risk of some repetition or overemphasis. The reader can have
faith that if he takes Plato's dialogues one by one, with the
corresponding chapter in hand, there will be no dialogue of Plato's
that is boring or that has boring passages or irrelevant digressions
in it. If the reader does find any such
 Page xiv
passages or "digressions," it will rather be that something is wrong
with his reading. Put in another way, the reader's efforts to restore
to life the communicative interactions that Plato's dialogues have
staged for him will never go unrewarded by Plato. I repeat, the test
of my understanding of the dialogues is the success or failure of the
readings it has led to, and can lead to. That is why this book is,
more than anything else, the record of a reading of the dialogues.
To have taken the space needed to show that the evidence is quite
insufficient and the reasoning faulty that purport to establish a
chronological order for the dialogues would have only led the
reader away from the dialogues. What we most need is to find our
way back to responding to them in their integrity as perceptive
communicative interactions, which have literary closure but are
intellectualy open-ended.
Where the traditions of transmission and interpretation have both
ignored or side-stepped the fact that the Parmenides is the dialogue
which comes first in the dramatic order of recitation (because, in it,
Sokrates is at his youngest), I have responded to this important clue
about the nature of Plato's dialogue-series by addressing it at the
earliest opportunity. This could not be before the figure of Plato's
Sokrates was established in the reader's world as the consistent,
living character that he is shown to be in the Apology-Krito-Phaedo
triad which dramatizesso intelligently and so poignantlyhis last
days. My account of the Parmenides therefore occupies chapter
two.
The device of keeping track of important Greek words by adjoining
them in transliteration allows the reader to monitor for himself
conceptually important textural and structural developments. The
Greek of some pivotal passages cited is also recorded in
transliteration. Some alternative translations are occasionally given.
To have added the bibliography pertinent to particular dialogues at
the end of each chapter would have been disruptive; so,
alphabetically ordered bibliographies are provided at the end. It
would not be proper to recommend any one translation over others;
the reader is advised, rather, always to use more than one
translation for every dialogue he or she is interested in.
 Page 1

Chapter 1
Plato's Tragic Humor:
The Apology and the Phaedo
Why the 'Apology' is not a Judicial Defense
The first impression of Sokrates that new readers of the dialogues
getthat he is dominant, always in center stage, and sometimes
funnyis not entirely incorrect. Phaedo, Krito, and Apology all have
funny openings and, given the grim circumstances, project
considerable good humor on Sokrates' part. In the Krito Sokrates is
just a little grumpy at being awakened so early even though, or just
because, it is almost the eve of his appointed death (43a-d). He was
sleeping so well. But he doesn't snap at his unphilosophically
anxious friend. Within the space of one page, and in spite of the
bad news that Krito brings, he is wakefully back at his usual
business of thinking, questioning, and teaching. In the Phaedo
Sokrates opens the narrated dialogue by quizzically rubbing the leg
that had been lettered and asking for a definition of pleasure. While
pleasurably scratching, he cannot resist telling a fable about it (60a-
c). In the Apology, it is quietly amusing to hear him open his
defense by saying that his slanderers have almost made him forget
who he isso persuasive have they been (17a). The mild joke also
gives the reader a first hint that Sokrates knows he has to deal with
a prejudiced jury.
As the Apology opens, the accusers Meletus and Anytus are
assumed to have just finished their speechees to the dikasts. It is
now Sokrates' turn. The reader does not yet know whether the
classic gambit of the politicians, that of blaming their major
troubles on their major critics, will succeed. Plato's Sokrates
 Page 2
was not an explicitly political critic; but by his sixty-ninth year his
ethical questions about people's pursuits and presuppositions are
assumed (in the dialogues) to loom large over the convalescing city
of Athens. In a divided society, the universal discomfort that his
questions arouse make him a unifying object of negative emotions.
Anytus has seized the moment to blame Sokrates for everything
because it is a moment in Athens' political history when everybody
is pledged, by the oaths of amnesty, to refrain from accusing
anybody else of political misdeeds.
In the Apology Sokrates is subtly humorous from the first, and
friendly. He addresses the jury throughout as his fellow Athenians
(ô andres Athênaioi) rather than as his juror-judges (ô andres
dikastai 40a), a term that he uses only after they have condemned
him to death. It is when they have betrayed justice that Sokrates
ironically honors them with the title of justicers (dikastai). That he
did not call them dikasts before also means that he was doubtful
whether he could get justice from them. But the general form of
address "men of Athens" shows it is his city, the city of Athena that
he is speaking to, and that he will address the human, not the legal,
issues in the case. He has come to the court of the Archon Basileus
as routinely as other Athenians to their daily business in the Agora,
and without any of the concern for self-preservation that would
have made others flee the city.
The result of this kind of tragic humor in Plato's dramatization of
Sokrates' interrogative activity is that a level of mythic interest in
his career is achieved that would not have been reachable by
polemic or discourses about him. Xenophon's humorles
presentation, through didactic speeches purportedly by Sokrates,
yields an implausibly edifying pedagogue who is less than
memorable. In the Clouds, Aristophanes' farcical dramatization of a
meteorosophistic knowledge-vendor is one-dimensional, and sets
up "Sokrates" as a scapegoat that the Athenians would be able to
get rid of without residues of remorse. But Plato with his humorous
presentation of a Tragic figure achieves a lovableness for him, a
humanity and reality that memorialize his tragedy as both a
Tragicomedy of the dominance of intellect, and a tragedy for the
sovereign comnmunity of Athens.
The pure humorist, as Guthke says, "is securely settled witin a
comic horizon that provides the comfort of reassurance" to himself
and his audience. 1 But the buried side of his humor registers a
disturbing perception that this horizon of theirs has been challenged
and will have to be either expanded or destroyed. Plato, the tragic
humorist of Sokrates the challenger, makes the perception explicit
that Aristophanes in the Clouds could not. Plato puts his Sokrates
into action in the concrete context of the unsettling fears that
Athenian society now had about itself and its future. These fears
were a result of
 Page 3
the losses and troubles it had suffered around the turn of the fifth to
fourth century B.C.
It has often been noted that the dramatic reality of Sokrates'
interlocutors depends upon the touches of humor or comic realism
with which Plato paints their pretentiousness or contentiousness, or
passivity. Similarly, the almost full-bodied reality of his Sokrates is
a function of the comic realism with which Plato dramatizes this
unabashed pursuer of knowledge as someone who is as much
dominated by his intellectuality as he (ethically) dominates with it.
But there is also a perceivable backdrop to the conversational
action, which consists of the mixed feelings that had become a part
of public opinion in Athens after the defeats of the Peloponnesian
War and the traumas of the Tyranny of the Thirty. This backdrop
subtly tempers the comic quality of the dialectical interactions.
Plato could assume that these mixed feelings were present to his
auditors and readership.
It was an anachronism to project such uneasiness back into those of
the conversational encounters that are purported to have occurred
before collecive shock had permanently damaged the sense of
community of the Athenian polity. But it was just this
accumulation of feelings and resentments, suspicions and rivalries,
that had made it clear to Plato that Sokrates' intellectual mission to
enlighten public opinion was tragically vulnerable to
misrepresentation and political attack. The thematization of this
vulnerability is a dynamic part of his total dramatization of
Sokrates as the ironically puzzled questioner.
Another pervasive tension in the dialogues occurs between
Sokrates the searcher after truth, the "intellectually honest" man as
we would say, and Sokrates the intellectually "dominant" man, as
he is tempted to be. Readers have not found the conflict obtrusive
because it is a contradiction with which we have lived as Western
intellectuals for a long time. It is a matter here of a basic problem
in Western modes of thought and Western individuality. Once
alerted, however, we will find that the tension is a deliberate
element built by Plato into the interactions between his Sokrates
and the interlocutors. It is an element that Plato, himself an honest
observer, could not have left unrecorded or unstudied. We have to
suspect, in fact, that Plato, as pre-eminent in his own circle, could
not have been very dominating over it however impressive he may
have been in individual interaction, and as brilliantly masterly as he
is over his medium, the dialogue-form.
Given the quick displacement after Plato's death of the dialogical or
non-dogmatic approach to philosophy by the pythagorizing systems
of his immediate successors, the inference is almost unavoidable.
However it may have been with Plato himself, there is no doubt
that Plato's Sokrates is the strongest
 Page 4
speaker in the dialoguesoutside, naturally, of the nonce
performances of the antilogistical old Parmenides, the father of
philosophy, and the doughty myth-maker Aristophanes in the
Symposium.
Zeno had amusingly described the young Sokrates in Parmenides
as "following people's arguments with a scent as keen as a
Laconian hound's" (128c). We may use words enthusiastically
applied by Sokrates' ironic politeness and hopefulness to the Eleatic
visitor in the Sophist to describe what Sokrates had become by the
end of his dramatic and historical life: "a great one sent, it would
seem, to track down and refute us who are sordid reasonersa kind
of cross-examining god" 216b).* By his dramatic life I mean
Sokrates' life in Plato's works. Now, and not so surprisingly, the
great cross-examiner who had become a legend in his lifetime has
been brought to trial in the Apology by prosecutors who are bad
reasoners, and before a jury that must include many bad reasoners.
That two of the prosecutors were bad reasoners is quickly shown in
this dialogue (24d-27e) and in the Meno (89e-95a). That the jury
included a majority of bad reasoners is shown by the outcome of
the dramatized trial: it condemned an innocent citizen, even after
he had patiently clarified the nature of the charges against him and
sarcastically exposed their emptiness and origin.
There is implicit irony in the dilemma that the great practitioner of
irony finds himself in; he knows it and makes the most of it, as we
shall see. We may observe, however, that the Apology is not so
extremely or "existentially" ironic as to be "absurdist" in the
modern sense. It does show that the Athenians no longer possessed
a stable or shared system of values to guide their difficult
decisions, by making it clear that the sentence reached by the jury
is going to be the product of previous manipulation by Anytus, not
of the justice of the charges or the nature of the defense (30b,d and
36a,b). Because Apology is almost wholly taken up with Sokrates'
words to the jurors, we have to go to other dialogues like Gorgias,
Philebus, Krito or the first two books of Republic to observe
Athenians caught by Sokrates' questions in the act of being most
confused about their most basic priorities. But though they are
confused about the meaning of important words and key ideas, they
do not seem to suffer from loss of reality; rather they are quite at
home with expedience, ambition, luxury, and the use of force and
bribery. If they are alienated from themselves, they do not know it.
It is only in the view of Plato's Sokrates, and the reader's, that they
are separated from their own humanity by a lack of wisdom or
good reasoning. Thus, the extreme of irony dramatized in the
Apology is can qualify as historical because it is not absurdist. It
does highlight, besides, the shallow irrationality to which public
opinion and public communication could sometimes sink in the
early fourth century.
 Page 5
In exposing the unreliability of the judicial process in Sokrates'
case, the Apology was also calling attention to a more general
abuse of the judicial process in all other trials. However, I don't
mean to deny that there must have been in fact some Athenian
fathers who felt vindicated by the condemnation of Sokrates on the
charge of "corrupting" the young, as these fathers understood the
charge. There is a sickening anecdote in Xenophon's Cyropaedia
(Bk.II, ch.1.38-41) that documents the strength of the prejudice
against even good teachers. We have to understand that the ground
for the intense fear and hatred aroused by Sophists and other
teachers was not so much what they taught but the fact that they
were thought to alienate youngsters from their parents and their
plans for them. In an act that Xenophon does not condemn, the
wholly admirable teacher of Tigranes is killed by the father not
because he has turned the boy's head, but because, like a lover
caught conversing with a married woman, he has alienated the
pupil's affections from his father and has made himself, the teacher,
the object of admiration.
That Anytus is an Athenian father who has taken personal offense
at Sokrates' philosophical activity is established by the episode in
the Meno (89e-95a) in which Anytus is greatly angered by the
reasoned inference, reached in easy, careful steps, that human
excellence mightlike other subjectsbest be taught by experts. We
also feel that Anytus could well have planned the threat of a death
sentence as a means of silencing or banishing Sokrates (Apology
28a, 29c, and 34d). It is made explicit at 36a to 36b that, without
Anytus' previous efforts, Meletus would have fallen short of the
legal fifth of the votes required to avoid imposition of the
cautionary fine of one thousand drachmas. But problems remain
about Anytus's role in this highly crafted and carefully considered
work of Plato's.
If it is true that Anytus had to accuse Sokrates of "impiety" (rather
than of something political) because of the oaths of amnesty, and if
it is true that Anytus had to use Meletus as a front (this is made
explicit by Sokrate at 25c) because Anytus had been an ardent
champion of the amnesty, then two questions arise that we should
be able to answer if we have fully understood the Apology. First of
all, why doesn't Sokrates appeal to the law or spirit of the amnesty,
and to Anytus's support of it, to save himself? Sokrates does not
present himself as a member of either the party of the Piraeus or the
oligarchal party in the city; rather he presents himself as apolitical.
But he was in Athens at the time of the swearing of the oaths (since
he presents himself as never having left Athens except on military
service).
For Socrates to have invoked the law, or psephism, of Archinos
against the unfair prosecution of persons who were bound by it,
would have been an evasion of what he saw as the real issue, and
the issue that he wanted to face.
 Page 6
Our reading of the Apology will suggest that it is because Sokrates
is presented by Plato as enjoying his chance for a fair and
unforgotten fame that he is not very interested in saving the small
remainder of his life.
Secondly, why does Sokrates, after merely alluding to the political
power of Anytus, "exonerate" both him and Meletus and go on to
blame "the slander and ill-will of many" (28a) as the real causes of
the danger he is in? Again on our reading, it is because he is
making use of the unexpected opportunity to get Athens-as-a-
whole to approve and sanction formally his lifelong pursuit of the
kind of knowledge that, through identification with him, came to be
called philosophy. The representative character of the large jury
that was trying Socrates would have been understood by a Greek
reader of the dialogue.
Within the dramatized trial itself Sokrates is not at all concerned
with defending himself in any judicial sense, though he does
illustrate the method of interrogation to the jury when he cross-
examines Meletus (24d-27a) on the charges brought. To defend
himself rhetorically would have been, as Sokrates says (3b, 3d ff.),
to abandon the post assigned to him by the Gods and his
conscience: just the kind of implicit impiety that he cannot and has
never committed. Sokrates' discourse makes it clear that his God-
given mission to enlighten, while not the legal issue before the
court, is in fact the real issue. So, he stops at the specific
indictments (of corrupting the young and not believing in the Gods
of the city) only long enough to refute Meletus and point to his
sponsor or manipulator Anytus. It is Sokrates' philosophical
vocation to interrogate that has provoked what he assumes to be a
personal maneuver by Anytus and Meletus. They wish to make him
desist from the reflective practice that has earned for his art, the art
of inductive cross-examination, a dangerous respect among the
young of the city. So it is that Sokrates makes this question, much
more than the indictments, the subject-matter of his discourse.
Plato represents his Sokrates as mainly concerned to have his
audience understand his intellectual life-work; Sokrates is,
characteristically, not trying to persuade in the usual sense, though
he is factual when it suits him to be. If it could understand, the jury
would not need to be persuaded. But Sokrates, in the circumstances
of the court, is not able to use his best method for bringing
understanding to birth, namely, the method of question and answer.
Now, honest speechmaking, even when done with knowledge, will
not produce understanding in more than a small part of the
multitude, as politicians know. Like lecturing, it is less than fully
effective; and the jurors numbered over five hundred! On the other
hand, speechmaking to persuade can, if skillful enough, carry the
crowd with it, though it produces little understanding. Thus, though
we know and can believe from the Phaedrus that the dramatic
Sokrates has the
 Page 7
requisite rhetorical skill, we also perceive that he is incapable of
using it merely to persuade.
Finally, we see that to raise the question of whether Sokrates did or
did not, in historical fact, abstain from making any kind of speech
in his own defense cannot advance our understanding of the
Apology. In the absence of historical evidence we can neither settle
the question in itself nor tell to what degree the dialogue may be
reflecting the historical past. The question has no other source than
the failure to take the dialogues dramatically, as they were designed
to he taken, by their critical and philosophic author. It seems to
have been suggested by taking out of context the passage in
Gorgias 86a-b in which Kallikles tells Sokrates that he would have
nothing persuasive to say were he ever unjustly dragged before a
politicized court in the agitated circumstances of postwar life in
Athens. The fictional Sokrates himself agrees with this view of the
disabilities of the non-contentious or inquiring knowldege-seeker in
Theaetetus 172c, 175d and Republic 517a,d. The agreement is quite
compatible with Socrates' attitude here in the Apology; he has
nothing to say of a legal nature in his own defense. He does not, as
we have noticed, appeal to the decree of amnesty that was still in
effect and that would have helped protect him from personal
prosecution. He does take care to make the dikasts see that what he
has been caught in is, essentially, the political process.
Sokrates' No-Lose Alternative and the Anytus Episode in the Meno
In 409 B.C. Anytus had been entrusted by the Athenians with the
relief of Pylos, which the Spartans were pressing to recapture. His
ample squadron of thirty ships never came near it; Anytus claimed
that his fleet had been dispersed by a storm while rounding Cape
Malea. Accused of treachery for the loss of Pylos, the rich man
avoided conviction by a systematic use of bribery (Athenian
Constitution, ch.27; and Diodoms Siculus 13,6.6). His support in
404 B.C. of Theramenes the constitutionalist may have given him
some countenance as a moderate. By joining Thrasyboulos, leader
against the Thirty Tyrants, he came to prominence as an active
democrat (Xenophon, Hellenica 11.3.42,44; Lysias, Against
Agoratus XIII.78). We see from Isokrates' Against Callimachus
(VIII.23) that he was influential again from 403 on. In 400 B.C. he
was powerful enough to get the unpopular Andocides acquitted,
involved as the latter appeared to his contemporaries in the affair of
the profanation of the Mysteries, and unprotected as Andocides
was by Archinos' Amnesty since he had not been in Athens at the
swearing of the oaths of forgiveness.
According to Plutarch's life of Alcibiades, Anytus had been an
admirer of
 Page 8
Alcibiades. Sokrates of course could hardly have had any contact
with Alcibiades for 16 years. It is ridiculous of some commentators
to invoke Sokrates' dramatic contacts with Alcibiades as
contributing to his prosecution, when his main accuser was also
well known for his historical contacts with Alcibiades. In any case,
by 399 B.C. Alcibiades had been dead for five years. The
association of Alcibiddes with Sokrates in the public mind is a
fourth-century media phenomenon and owes its persistence
precisely to the unforgettable dramatization of their fictionalized
relationship in Plato's Symposium. Alcibiades had, besides, been an
opportunistic leader on the democratic side, thus also offseting any
taint that might have fallen on Sokrates from Kritias' once having
been his auditor.
It is equally anti-historical to forget that Meletus, a mediocre writer
of Tragedies, had also and more recently been the object of ridicule
by the comedians. 2 If we ask why, then, Meletus's bad public
image didn't cancel out Sokrates' bad public image, so far as they
were both derived from the comedians, the answer must again be:
because of Anytus's personal intervention. Consider that Sokrates
is portraying himself in the Apology as having offended all
factions. It is possible that when he says he resisted the motion to
try the Arginusae generals en bloc, he is also reminding his
audience that he had angered Theramenes (and therefore, already,
his supporter Anytus) as well as the numerous outraged relatives of
the drowned rowers and marines.3 This would mean that the
apolitical Sokrates of the dialogues had succeeded in causing
resentment against himself in the so-called moderate party as well
as in the popular party and the oligarchal faction. The non-political
nature of Sokrates' activity, as he understood it, is made explicit at
31d-32a.
It would seem that Plato wants the reder to feel that there could be
no splitting of the jurors' vote along political lines that could favor
Sokrates automatically or get him automatically condemned. When
we add to his ubiquitous profile the properties of general
unpopularity and critical intellectualismattributes of which he
reminds his audience at 22a-d and 23c it becomes apparent that he
made an ideal scapegoat upon whom a political leader could vent
pent-up public frustraions that might otherwise be turned against
himself. It was a time, in part because of the amnesty agreement,
when real but powerful offenders, as ever, could not be safely made
to pay the penalty for past offenses or present difficulties.
Thus, the history of Anytus, whose doings as a successful briber
were remembered well into Aristotle's times, gives us the
generative or structural reason for the explicit allusions that
Sokrates makes to Anytus's effect upon the jury (29c, 31a, 36a). He
and Lycon have arranged for it to bring in a sentence of death, or
else to impose the penalty that will silence forever Sokrates' shame-
 Page 9
producing questions. We are meant to understand by the designer
of the dialogue that the magnificent old gadfly (myôps) has really
been presented with a no-lose alternative. Sokrates must either be
condemned to die with a marmorealied reputation for courage,
consistency and human excellence; or he must be acquitted, and
thus sanctioned in his pursuit of enlightenment and the exposure of
sordid reasoners (phaulos . . . ontas en tois logois). Coolly and
discursively, the experienced dialectician of sixty-nine years seizes
the opportunity that the unknowing Anytus has provided.
It is not right to see in Sokrates' attitude and discourse a suicidal
''affront to the court," as Grote does in his great History of Greece.
From Sokrates' point of view, jurors who had been tampered with
by Anytus needed admonition, needed to be shamed back into
whatever perspective and humanity Sokrates, with good reasoning,
could help them to. He could only have begged his life from them
at the price of future silence and by being inconsistent. It was
Sokrates' position that a good man who fell into pitiful begging
before a court should be condemned by it for degrading himself,
because such pleading made him appear guilty of what he hadn't
done and afraid of the death that one must sometimes risk to do his
duty (4c,d).
Since Sokrates sensed he had been condemned in advance by the
manipulation of his public image, he could only gain by addressing
the jury in quite the opposite tone, namely, in his usual tone of
reflective admonition and obstetric mediation. As it was, his
forthrightness fell only 30 votes short of de-conditioning a biased
jury of over five hundred (36a). According to another reading of
the manuscripts, he fell only 3 votes short! If, as is probable, there
were 501 dikasts, the figures would have been either 280 against
221, or 253 against 248! No wonder that Sokrates could consider
nothing less than the recognized honor of publicly provided meals
in the Prytaneum as equivalent compensation for giving up his
chance to be sentenced to certain immortality. Under the
alternative-penalty option allowed to defendants found guilty in
capital cases, this was not a proposal concocted by Sokrates to
insult the jury. On the contrary, it was the only solution that would
not be an insult to Sokrates' sense of justice and would also be an
exemplification of it (36d-37b): namely, local recognition of the
civic usefulness of his interrogative mission for the short remainder
of his life in exchange for the universal fame after death that was
sure to embarrass the Athenians if they did not acquit him.
We can now see what was the dramatic purpose of the carefully
designed encounter with Anytus in the Meno (89E-95A), as it bears
upon the Apology. It was designed (i) to show concretely how
angry a conventional opportunist could get with all who taught the
public how to question authority, and (ii) to let us see why Anytus
cannot distinguish between Sokrates' honest refutativeness
 Page 10
and the professionalist hustling of the Sophists. Both were real
threats to Anytus's kind of political career. The Sophists were a
threat because their skepticism and their defense of teachable
expertise in every field delegitimated his claims to leadership and
generalship, based as they were on nothing but his wealth. Sokrates
was a threat because his kind of ethical consistency, if generally
adopted, would have made politics as practiced by Anytus
impossible. The ethical consistency I have in mind is highlighted
by Sokrates' account in the Apology (32b-e) of his resistance both
to the unjust demand of a hysterical multitude to execute the
generals after the disaster at Arginusae, and to the unjust order of
the Tyrants to arrest Leon of Salamis. The contrast with Anytus's
opportunistic switching from support of Theramenes' oligarchism
to support of the democrats could not be greater. It is cleverly
brought back to public consciousness by Sokrates' modest
rehearsal, at this point in the trial, of his own response to the
contradictory and arbitrary orders of oligarchs and democrats. In
connection with the Apology it is only some commentators, not the
jury in the fiction, who can't seem to remember who Anytus was,
and how sordid was the verbal and the real coinage with which he
successfully got the jury to go against Socrates.
Socrates' Conversational Style, His Dominance, and His Wit
Plato's Krito makes the point, among other things, that the friends
of his Sokrates found it difficult to believe that he actually
welcomed the kind of death that was being offered him in the
dramatized trial of the Apology. In the universe of discourse of the
dialogues these friends are portrayed as only human, and often as
not understanding the motivations and discourses of their
extraordinary fellow-citizen. So, in the Krito Sokrates has to state
as part of his response to the invitation to escape that, "It was open
to [me] at the trial to accept banishment had [I] wished, and thus do
with the city's good will what [I] would now have to do against it"
(52c). Sokrates need not have gone to court in the first place; Krito
realizes this at 45e. But Krito doesn't understand that, because it
would have meant leaving Athens, Sokrates couldn't avoid going to
court. Neither has Krito understood Sokrates' very good reasons for
not leaving Athens. They are the same as the reasons for which he
has made the pursuit of knowledge, through his method of
philosophic interrogation, the work of his whole life.
Sokrates is coolly heroic in these dialogues: his attitude is
accompanied by no obtrusive flourishes. At Apology 29c he quotes
Anytus as having told the jury that either he ought never to have
come before the court at all or, now
 Page 11
that he has come, he must certainly be put to death in order to save
their sons from his totally corrupting influencelet us not miss the
irony of the phrasing here. 4 It does indeed follow from the
situation and the second member of the logical alternative that if
Sokrates is acquitted, his influence and practice will have been
legitimated by the state. And this was one of the two results that
Sokrates could hope to precipitate: a result not less honorable than
being condemned for consistency, courage and human excellence.
He couldn't quite predict which alternative he could push the jury
to accept, though he was ready for the worst. But in Apology he has
certainly gotten enough control over the situation so that, either
way, he cannot be robbed of his integrity or of the pursuit of
knowledge in his own way. And we, at this point, are led to realize
that Sokrates' conduct in the dialogues is such that, here as
elsewhere, it is not possible to distinguish his intellectual and moral
integrity from his intellectual and moral activity. After
understanding the Apology, it can no longer be a matter of the
reader's indulgently allowing Sokrates his ironies for the sake of
some doctrines. It becomes rather a matter of understanding his
uses of irony, sarcasm, discourse, allegory, and interrogation within
the situations that arise around him, for the sake of his own clarity
and the good of his auditors and Plato's readers.
In the Phaedo Plato's Sokrates is no longer concerned with
convincing his companions that he cannot lose as a result of the
unjust prosecution by Anytus. The reader who has correctly
assessed the central situation in Apology and Krito may already
have acquired enough confidence in Plato's prose and Plato's
Sokrates to be sure that in the Phaedo he will conduct himself
adequately to the situationwith interestingness, perhaps even
surprisingness. The new situation in this dialogue is that his older
as well as younger friends have become so distraught, so ready to
burst into lamentation, by the onrushing imminence of his death
that Sokrates is compelled to gentle them with his wit and divert
them with his intellectuality, stories and arguments. Without
Sokrates' dominance over it, the situation would have gotten
intolerably out of hand.
As we see from the Krito, the companions of Plato's Sokrates fail
to perceive that he welcomed the no-lose alternative that he had
deliberately developed out of his prosecution on a capital charge.
Sokrates knows they haven't risen to the belief that death with fame
assured and at the right time is as good as official approval by
acquittal of his interrogative pursuit of knowledge. Consider
Phaedo 84e: "Bless me, Simmias, it would be difficult to persuade
others that I don't regard my present situation as a misfortune,
when I can't even get you to believe it. . . ." So it suits Sokrates in
Phaedo to let his companions believe that he welcomes this
consequence of the good disjunction he had existentially achieved;
namely, that he must die. It is this move that in the
 Page 12
sequel generates the structural ironies underlying the discussion of
the definition of death and the stories about, and "proofs" of,
immortality.
The dialogue is occasioned dramatically by the return voyage of
Phaedo to his native Elis after the death of Sokrates in Athens. As
he passes through Phlius, a local Pythagorean named Echecrates
questions Phaedo about the death of Sokrates. Thebes, the city of
Simmias and Kebes, and Phlius, the city of Echecrates, seem to
have been Pythagorean centers; Philolaus had lectured at Thebes,
and it is his doctrine about suicide (61e5-7) that is discussed by the
companions in the narrated dialogue. Death and the question of
rewards and punishments after death were subjects of discussion
among Pythagoreans; so too the doctrine of purification rehearsed
at 67c and 69b,c. Plato has made the frame-dialogue compatible
with the narrated dialogue inside it. Both Echecrates, auditor of the
story, and Simmias and Kebes, principal interlocutors within the
narration, are Pythagoreans (Aristoxenus, Fragm. 19, ed. Wehrli,
1945); and the subject matter of the narrated conversation consists
of topics of Pythagorean interest. What Plato has his Sokrates
discuss with the companions are topics recognizably familiar to
them. What Sokrates soothes them with, in their distress at his
impending fate, is the best arguments he can devise for the things
they want to believe (70a,b ff.).
There is no way of verifying historically what the detailed
circumstances of Sokrates' death actually were. What we can say is
that there is a dramatic reason for the number of Pythagoreans in
the foreground of the dialogue with which Plato commemorates
Sokrates' death. The reason there has to be a prolonged intellectual
discussion that he dominates is equally dramatic: it is the only way
Sokrates can handle the socially difficult situation and remain
himself. From the formal point of view, what Plato is celebrating
here is the virtuosity of Sokrates' argumentative or rationalizing
ability regardless of subject-matter, and the other-oriented integrity
of his composure in the most trying of possible circumstances.
There is not much question, on a dialogical reading of the
dialogues, that in the Phaedo Sokrates has been "attitude fitting"
again, as with Phaedrus in the Phaedrus: His Pythagorean
companions want to talk about philosophy and life and death, so
Sokrates obligesfor their own good, as he had with Phaedrus in the
other dialogueby talking to them in terms they can accept about
what they are interested in. It would not be good historiography,
therefore, to infer from the Phaedo that the historical Sokrates had
a less critical or more sympathetic relationship to Pythagorean
thinkers than he had to other kinds of thinkers. 5 If it is true that the
historical Sokrates was the self-appointed general cross-examiner
of the Greeks that came his way, then we cannot without apposite
historical evidence assume that he was less critical of one kind of
philosophy than of another.6
 Page 13
Plato's Sokrates, in the fiction that his creator sustains, is both
sympathetic to those who are good listeners and inventive on their
behalf. This is the case even though they may not be good learners,
like Protarchus in the Philebus, or Adeimantos and Glaucon in the
Republic. As for Plato himself, a dialogical reading of the Phaedo
does not permit us to attribute to him, as unshakeable beliefs of his
own, doctrines and arguments that one of his characters advances
ironically in response to the requirements of a social situation
constructed by Plato as a moving literary memorial to his
philosophic inspirer. In any case, it will not be before we have
learned to read the dialogues as dramatized conversations that we
shall be able to succeed in separating Plato's critical philosophic
activity from the pythagorizing dogmatism that overtook the
Academy and its systematizing Scholarchs in the middle of the
fourth century B.C.
That Sokrates is being gently ironic during the whole discussion of
immortality would be evident from the wording at 70b, if teachers
and translators did not assume that they know already what
Sokrates is up to here. Kebes has been saying: "But, for this,
perhaps a great deal of paramythias and pisteôs is required to hold
that the soul can exist when a man is dead and still have any power
and intelligence." "True," says Sokrates, "so what can we do then?
Do you want us to diamythologômen about whether it is likely or
not?" Paramythias means "reassurance," ''exhortation,"
"persuasion," "soothing," what the Nixon White House used to call
"stroking." Pisteôs means "belief," "trust," "confidence." If Plato
had wanted Kebes to be read as asking for "argument" and "proof"
at this point he would have used the corresponding forms of lógos
and tekmêrion or their equivalents. And if he had wanted Sokrates
to say he was going to try to "demonstrate or prove" whether such
immortality was likely or not, he would not have used the word
diamythologeô, which means "to tell-and-exchange stories about."
7 Well then, Sokrates continues with a joke that is also an
interdialogical allusion to the Apology, if even a comic poet were to
hear us now, he couldn't accuse me of chattering about
irrelevancies; let us, since he's almost here, discuss Death. Sokrates'
active wit is now poised to achieve in the discourses that follow,
the familiar fusion of seriousness with irony that allows him to
remain true to his own rationality and honesty while attending to
the needs of his auditors. Other examples of this fusion are to be
found in Phaedrus, Philebus, Gorgias and Republic, as well as in
the Apology and Krito.
Between 70c and 77c Sokrates uses an argument from "ancient
doctrine" (70c), an argument from opposites (70d,e), an analogy
(71c), an argument from "irreversible entropy" (72b-d), and the
argument from knowledge as recollection to "demonstrate" for his
friends the first half of the thesis (77c) that the soul exists in Hades
(71e) before birth. The point in all this is not so
 Page 14
much that these "arguments" are more speculative than they are
from experience, or that they include non-sequiturs, unexamined
additional assumptions and some equivocations. The point is rather
that Sokrates is allowing himself these paralogical luxuries both
because they refer to the future (a subject which to be discussed at
all necessitates speculation) and because with them he is giving
good form to an important but difficult occasion. It would
otherwise have been difficult to preserve the balance of emotion set
for the group by Sokrates at the beginnmg of the narrated
conversation.
Plato's Sokrates has already triumphed ethically in the Apology
with his development of the good, or no-lose, existential alternative
that he is now living out. For the few who are with him in the
Phaedo he can take a holiday from skepticism because the triumph
of his death will immortalize the interrogative method to which he
has heldin opposition to sordid, sophistical or political, reasoners.
Sokrates is therefore entitled to make a festivity out of the
occasion; but he must communicate his festiveness to his friends in
order that they may not falter from being with him in spirit as he
triumphs in death. The pedagogical or "psychagogical" overtones
in the discussion come from the leading part he must take in
generating a mood of cheer among the companions. As the
Indonesian proverb says, "Death among friends is but a festival". 8
Simmias and Kebes do their part by responding to his intellectual
lead with intelligence and a kind of cautious pleasedness. After all,
as Pythagoreans there are dogmas such as that of reincarnation to
which they must adhere, whether they can find rational grounds for
them or not. And it is this dogma that the fictional Sokrates has
chosen to improve upon in his own wayrejecting, for instance and
for good reasons, one of its supposed corollaries, the view that the
soul is a harmony. So, though somewhat surprised by that turn in
the discussion, Simmias and Kebes have no trouble going along
with Sokrates because they are flattered to be treated to discourses
on their favorite subjects by the most reputed thinker in Athens.
The joke at 77d ("you have the childhood fear that when it leaves
the body the wind will actually blow the soul away and scatter it,
especially if you should happen to die in bad weather with a high
wind blowing") is put there by Plato to promote the carefully
nurtured attitude of naturalness among the interlocutors. It also
reminds us of the basically ironic structure of the situation. Kebes,
continues Sokrates, you must sing healing charms to the child in
you to charm the fear away. But where, Sokrates, will we again
find so great a charmer as yourself now that you are leaving us?
The elegiac compliment is an exact categorization of what Sokrates
is doing in this dialogue, but not of the frequent refutativeness and
occasional sharpness in his discourses in other dialogues of Plato's
series.
 Page 15
After a brief rehearsal (78b,c) of the argument for the immortality
of the soul from the indestructibility of what is simple, Sokrates
goes on to develop, elegantly and discursively, an analogy between
the activity of the soul in "pure thinking" and the separation of the
soul from the body, i.e., of the soul in death, since death has been
defined as just that: the separation of soul from body. But though
Socrates has brought spiritual retribution and reincarnation into the
eloquent development of his equation between pure thought and
death, Simmias and Kebes have been left with doubts, as they state
at 84d.
They are not sure whether they have permission to air their doubts,
which might "displease [Sokrates] in [his] present misfortune." It is
at this point that Sokrates exclaims against the inability of even his
intellectual friends to understand that he is not suffering a
misfortune at all, but is like the swans whose joyous death song is
misinterpreted by men as sorrowful because of their own fear of
death (84eff.). He reasons that since no birds sing when suffering
and since swans belong to Apollo, it is their prophetic sense of
blessings to come that makes them sing so joyously all through
their last day. He is leaving life as gladly as the swans. And since
he too is devoted to Apollo, the doubts of Simmias and Kebes will
get similarly prophetic or aoidic answers.
Sokrates, says Simmias, if I am not to rely on some divine
revelation (85d), we must find the best possible arguments; but
Kebes and I both think we haven't succeeded in doing that. Their
trouble, it turns out, comes from believing the soul to be a harmony
of the tensions and a mixture of the elements of the body (86c).
How are we, Sokrates, to refute someone who claims that the soul
will not survive the decomposition of the body in death because it
depends upon it, like the harmony upon the tuned lyre?
Sokrates asks Kebes to say what he thinks first. Kebes disagrees
with Simmias about the soul's being weaker than the body. But he
goes on to discredit, with a convincing analogy, the belief that the
soul can survive the wear and tear of all its reincarnations without
perishing after some one of them. Kebes is so convincing at this
point that Phaedo has to interrupt his narrative to tell his Phlian
auditors that the other companions of Sokrates were dismayed by
the cogent refutation of the likelihood of indefinite survival after
death.
Plato has Echecrates respond to the interruption by admitting that
he himself had found Sokrates' reasoning powerfully convincing,
but now doesn't know what to believe (88d). With this admission of
Echecrates, Plato is showing his reader how other Pythagoreans
than Simmias and Kebes were already taking the arguments
reproduced in Phaedo's narrative with complete literal-ness, and
missing the irony and courtesy with which they were being
advanced in the dramatized prison scene.
Hoping to find in the sequel another argument that will convince
him of
 Page 16
the immortality of the soul, Echecrates urges Phaedo to resume his
narrative. The first point that Phaedo makes is that Sokrates was
aware of his companions' dismay, but still magnificent in his
command of the situation (89a-91c). We must not become haters of
reasoning (misologists), Sokrates kindly tells Phaedo, just because
one argument has betrayed us, any more than we should become
haters of men (misanthropists) because one man has done evil to
us. That would be to show ignorance of human nature and of the
nature of reasoning. This is the one thing, Phaedo, that I do become
contentious about: that reasoning is worthwhile and that we ought
always to pursue the truth. Just as you must, for the sake of your
future, put trust in reasoning, so for me to trust my own arguments
and reasoning can only be a good thing. For if there is truth in what
I say, fine; and if there is nothing in what I say, at least I will not
have burdened my friends with lamentation (91b)! So, Simmias and
Kebes, let us reason as hard as we can about this.
Sokates then points out to his Theban visitors that they may not
believe both (i) that the soul is a harmony and, therefore,
compound and (ii) that knowledge is recollection. This is because if
the doctrine of recollection is true, the soul must have existed
before the body; but if it is true that the soul is a harmony, it cannot
have come into existence till after the body upon which it depends.
As between the two doctrines, Simmias chooses the doctrine of
anamnesis (recollection). It is to be accepted, he says, because
agreed to through a "worthy" hypothesis, 9 while the doctrine of
attunement is based on merely probable analogy. Having already
agreed that the forms or essences of things preexist, Simmias does
not now want to deny that the soul preexists (92e). So the doctrine
of attunement is demolished by Sokrates with his "permission,"
between Stephanus pages 92e and 95a. And Sokrates is free to
come to grips with Kebes' heroic demand for a proof of the
indestructibility of the soul that will justify the knowledge-seeker's
confidence in his way of life and his fearlessness in the face of
death.
The main trouble, says Plato's Sokrates, is that the proof of the
indestructibility of the soul involves the whole question (the grand
question in early Classical times) of the causes of generation and
decay (95e-96a). Sokrates finds the approach that the natural
philosophers have taken to the question absurd. This includes
Anaxagoras, whose treatise purported to include mind (noûs)
among the causes and claimed to explain how some things were for
the best. Sokrates was most disappointed, in Plato's fiction about
his intellectual development, that like all the others Anaxagoras
had confused material agencies with formal and final causes. He
had confused such conditions of action as heat and cold, blood,
brains, muscle, earth, air, and water with the ends (telos) of action.
It is as if, says Sokrates, we were to claim that the causes of our
 Page 17
talking here today were voice and hearing, and not the decision of
the Athenians that it was best to condemn me or my decision to
sustain and support (hypechein) the sanctions and the justice (dikê)
of the city. It would be an extremely careless (makra rhaithymia)
and absurd (atopos) way of talking or reasoning to say that is is
because of such things that I am doing what I do, and that I act with
intelligence (nôi) but not from the choice of what is best (99a,b).
Sokrates wanted to know the nature and power of the cause that
holds things all together as they are. So I took, he says, another
route in quest of the nature of the good. I found that if I avoided
direct looking at, or sensing of, things but started instead from
(hypothemenos) that definition (logon) of each thing that I judged
fittest (errômenestaton), I was able to match (symphônein) and
examine (skopein) the truth of things (tôn ontôn tên alêheian) by
reference to the definitions. [Here, I am conflating the translation
of 100A, lines 3 and 4 with the translation of 99e, lines 4 and 5].]
Not only that, Kebes, but if you will grant me my starting points of
beauty-as-such, of goodness- and bigness-as-such, and so on, I can
hope to expound (epideiksein) the nature of cause to you and to
discover the deathlessness of the soul.
Sokrates wants to see how much can be inferred about cause and
soul from this theory of the mediation of ideas. It is not, he says,
the color or shape or bloom of a thing that makes it beautiful, but
its sharing (metechein: eite parousia eite koinônia) in the idea of
beauty that "causes" it to be beautiful. Paragraph 100d-e is
ironically emphatic in stating that this is the "safest" type of answer
that can be given to the question of what makes a thing ''beautiful"
or "big." At 105C this answer is also called a know-nothmg
(amathê) answer by Sokrates, a reminder that he is entertaining the
theory of ideas with suspended disbelief. It is, says Sokrates, a
simple, plain, good-natured (haplôs, atechnôs, euêthôs) answer.
But the ground for the "safest" answer turns out to be verbal rather
than logical in paragraph 101a. It is merely a witty confidence in a
given use of words that creates this ground. Would it not be
monstrous (teras), Sokrates says with mock horror, to say that one
thing is taller than another by something small (i.e., by a head) or
that one thing is short by virtue of the same thing that makes the
other tall? Kebes laughs, presumably at the wit and equivocation of
Sokrates' discourse. For we may doubt that fourth century Attic
speakers would have found anything wrong with saymg that a thing
can be greater than another by a little, or with reasoning that a thing
can become large as well as small little by identical little.
That Sokrates is in fact having fun with the doctrine of ideas and
the hypothesis of participation can be seen from the mock-
peremptory prescriptions to Kebes that follow: if you are afraid of
this, you will have to stop saymg (what
 Page 18
we have all been taught to say) that addition of one to one makes
two (101c, aitian einai: "yields" or "is the cause of")! You will
have to proclaim that the "cause" of the existence of two is the
participation of things in twoness, and the cause of things
becoming one is their participation in unity. You would have to
leave such complex operations as addition (!) and division to wiser
men to explain. Being afraid of your own shadow and inexperience
you would trust to the safe hypothesis. If challenged about the
hypothesis. you would postpone reply until all the consequences of
the challenge were examined for consistency; and if asked to
account for your starting point itself, you would pile hypothesis
high upon hypothesis until you came to one that appeared adequate.
You would not be mixing things up like those refutative people
(antilogikoi) who confuse hypotheses (hypotheseôs 101d) with
consequences when trying to discover what exists. Unlike them,
you care about the distinctions and methods of which I speak. Yes,
we care, say Simmias and Kebes simultaneously.
In this little sermon, and in the text as we have it, Sokrates seems to
pass from laughing at the doctrine of participation to over-praising
the method of hypothesis and deduction. Sokrates' approval of the
method of hypothesis allows him to soften his harshness about
"participation" into seeming agreement with his interlocutors.
Sokrates is plainly hinting here at the infinite regressiveness of
deduction and the difficulty of finding a "safe" starting point for
demonstration.
But Phaedo, reporter of the dialogue, and Echecrates, the auditor,
do not notice this. The latter finds what Sokrates has just said
marvellously clear (!). It would be clear, he says, even to a man of
limited intelligence (102a). The irony as to who is of limited
intelligence, in Plato's presentation, will not escape the alert reader.
Phaedo resumes his narrative of the conversation with the
development by Sokrates in a solemn manner of some
consequences of assuming the doctrine of ideas. Just as he is
getting into this, Sokrates laughingly interrupts himself to say that
he sounds to himself as if he were a book talking! But I'm talking
like this, Simmias, because I want you to agree with me (102B). He
wants Simmias to agree to the point that ideas of opposites are, as
such, mutually exclusive: that one of two opposite ideas cannot
take upon itself the nature of the other. But Sokrates is interrupted
again by one of the companions, who expostulates that this
contradicts their earlier assertion (70d-e) that opposites are always
generated from their opposites. Sokrates is pleased (103a) that a
companion has had the courage to speak up: it means that his
friends are not afraid any more, either of themselves breaking down
or for him as he approaches the end of the discussion and of his
life.
 Page 19
Sokrates explains that earlier they had been talking about concrete
things developing opposite characteristics, in different respects or
at different times. The consequence that he now wants his audience
to accept, as a corollary of the independent existence of ideas in
themselves, is that some ideas are necessarily excluded from
existing in, or together with, others because the latter already
embody, or participate in, ideas that contradict the former. Thus,
for example, though a given triad is not the opposite of "even," it
cannot become even without being destroyed. This is because it
participates in oddness, which is the contradictory of evenness.
Similarly, says Sokrates, is it not the case that fire can have no part
in coldness? Necessarily, Kebes agrees (106a).
Well then, must we not speak in the same way about something
that is deathless (athanatos)? If deathlessness comports
indestructibility, that which participates in deathlessness will also
participate in indestructibility. So soul, which is deathless, must
also be indestructible (anôlethros) because it participates in
indestructibility. For this reason soul, even when the body is
destroyed, cannot admit destruction, because it participates in the
contrary of destructibility. It follows that after death the soul will in
truth continue to exist in Hades (107a). Kebes agrees completely.
But now we notice that at the end of this "demonstration" of the
indestructibility of soul, Simmias still has his doubts about this
great matter. In fact, his awareness of human weakness makes it
necessary for him still to disbelieve (apistían eti echein).
Significantly, Sokrates not only approves of Simmias's doubts
about the argument, but tells him he should examine its first
premisses with more clarity (saphesteron) and in their farthest
consequences (107b). Kebes, however, has already expressed
complete belief in the conclusion. This could well be an
overreaction to having upset the company so much at 88a-b with
his refutation of the argument for indefinite survival of soul after
death. In any case, Plato's dramatization shows that at least some of
the companions took the argument literally and did not wish to
doubt the deathlessness of soul in the circumstances in which they
found themselves. But Sokrates' knowing encouragement of
Simmias's doubt preserves for the careful reader the image of
Sokrates' intellectual honesty.
A Myth, and Sokrates' "Idea" of the Earth
The reader's first impression of the myth in the Phaedo is that it is
not to be taken literally. Doctrinal interpreters of the dialogues
agree with this; and it is confirmed by the tone in which Plato's
Sokrates has been talking. There is also a dramatic reason for this
switch-over into outright story-telling. Sokrates has completed the
reasonings based on the premisses that Simmias and Kebes
 Page 20
accept. He has convinced everybody except Simmias; and it is clear
from his encouragement of Simmias's doubts (107b) that Sokrates
is not going to invent new "arguments" to eliminate them. Sokrates,
however, has not used up all his time. And he must preserve the
mood that he has at last succeeded in creating among the
companions. So he tells them a suitable story about the after-life of
the soul: an after-myth growing out of the reasonings or
diamythologizing (70b) invented by Sokrates, as we can see from
some of its features.
The story purports to be just an "idea" of the earth (idean tês gês),
among the many extant opinions about it, of which Sokrates has
been persuaded by someone else (hypo tinos). I can tell it you, but
to prove it convincingly, Sokrates allusively tells Simmias, would
be too difficult for even the proverbial Glaucus and would take me,
could I do it, more than my lifetime (108c)! That will satisfy, says
Simmias, who has decided to accept completely everything in the
story, as we see from 109a9 and 110b4.
There is surely much that is Orphic as well as much that is invented
in the fable. It wouldn't do, says Sokrates, for a man of sense
forcefully to assert (diischyrisasthai) that these things are so. But it
seems to me that to believe this or something like it is very
appropriate (prepein) and worth (aksion) suggesting. It is meant to
charm people (114d), Sokrates says harking back to 77e, like a
spell. That is why I have been so long in the telling of my story, so
we may be of good cheer; for we must all, Simmias and Kebes and
everybody, go on to Hades when the time comes. And I, like a man
in a Tragedy "called by fate," am now ready to goto my bath . . . to
save the women the trouble of having to wash the corpse. The
anticlimax, followed by anticlimax, of Sokrates' words here
achieves a fullness of ironic modesty difficult to match in Western
history and literature.
Sokrates chats with Krito, who wants to know what he can do for
him, and laughs gently at his anxiety about some details. See, says
Sokrates, I can't persuade Krito that it is not the me who has been
talking and carefully attending to the order of everything he said
who will be in the corpse. That me will be among the blessed, dear
Krito, and suffering nothing (115c-116a). So be of good courage
and let no evil into your souls.
Phaedo interrupts himself again to tell his Phlian auditors that the
companions felt that a great misfortune had befallen them, for they
would now be like intellectual orphans without a father (116a).
Clearly, Plato wants us to notice that Phaedo has not been
persuaded by Sokrates that what has happened is not a misfortune.
The servant of the Eleven who brings the hemlock knows that
Sokrates is the best man he has ever served and will have, and give,
no trouble in taking
 Page 21
the poison; but he cannot keep from weeping as he leaves. Krito,
however, still only loves Sokrates as a friend and has not
appreciated his ethical greatness. Krito tells Sokrates not to hurry,
the sun hasn't set, many others drink the poison long after they are
supposed to, after a good dinner, a lot of drinking and even
intercourse with their lovers. Without knowing it, but under Plato's
management, Krito has here suddenly put all of Socrates' previous
reasonings and invention to the test: were Sokrates to do as these
others, he would have refuted his recent words with his own
conduct! Those who do that, Sokrates responds to Krito, do so
because they think they gain something by it. I do not. I should
only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I acted like that.
There is nothing to be gained by clinging to life any more.
Sokrates wants to know whether he may, or not, pour a drop in
libation to a god. But there is only just enough in the cup for the
hemlock to take its effect. So he offers a simple (and dramatically
apposite) prayer to the Gods "that my migration from here to there
may be a fortunate one" (tên metoikêsin tên enthende ekeise
eutuchê genesthai). He cheerfully and quietly drains the cup.
Whereupon Krito, Phaedo, Apollodorus and all the others break
down weeping, some of them wailing aloud. Sokrates is astonished:
Hoia poieite, "what are you doing?" expresses surprise and anger. I
sent the women away to prevent just such discordance
(plêmmeloien): I had supposed it was best to die in silence. 10
We were ashamed, Phaedo narrates, and held back our tears.
Sokrates lay down. When the chill of the effect of the poison had
worked its way up from the feet as far as the groin, Sokrates
uncovered his face and said, Krito we owe a cock to Asklepios:
don't forget to make the offering. Those were his last words, says
Phaedo; and the reader realizes that as a fragment of life-asserting
imagery breaking through at the moment of death, they are a last
Socratic, picaresque flash dared by Plato against the encroaching
gloom of life without Sokrates. After a little, the attendant raised
the cover and closed the eyes and mouth. Such, Echecrates,
concludes Phaedo, was the end of our friend, the best man in his
time, and of all the most perceptive and the most just (118b).
Plato's Socratism
The tribute that Plato has paid to Sokrates by appropriating the
living memory of the master to his own critical and philosophic
ends, in this and other dialogues, is a complex and monumental
achievement. It is not fully intelligible or enjoyable except as the
product of a set of abilities and attitudes that its creator applied to
the purpose.
 Page 22
The first of these abilities is Plato's complete and easy mastery of
the intellectual and conceptual matters about which the characters
in his dialogues are made to converse. To judge from the dialogues,
Plato had a wide-ranging and detailed knowledge of the intellectual
currents and controversies of his time. The dialogues are
masterpieces that give verbalized form to some problems of
conduct, while holding up for inspection both the conduct and the
verbalization. For instance, the Gorgias and the Republic give us a
sense of Plato's concern with social and political issues, the former
because of its critique of the abuses of rhetoric and the ethical
futility of politics, the latter because of its extended critique by
satire of three basic strains in Athenian public life: Spartanizing
militarism, the tension between oligarchism and demagoguery, and
pythagorizing intellectualism. On the reading of the dialogues that
is here undertaken, and from which he emerges as a first-rate
critical thinker, Plato is like the historical Socrates in his
detachment from merely doctrinal issues and in his care to avoid
the imposition of doctrine upon his reader. The one big thing that a
historical interlocutor could get from Sokrates, if he paid enough
attention, was the art of asking philosophic questions. Plato allows
us to observe how philosophic questions get to be asked in
themselves, at the same time that he implicitly raises some
additional questions of his own about the relation of thought to
action and of question to context, in a massive and exhibitive way.
It is because Plato in his own way also teaches an art of philosophic
interrogation that he is in fact a Socratic, and can properly be called
a Socratic. But the difference between Plato's Socratism and the
practice of the historical Sokrates is just this: in the former the
scruple to avoid imposition of doctrine is coupled with a very great
literary ability. Sokrates practiced his art of interrogation on his
feet, in the live medium of personal contact and conversation. But
Plato practiced the Socratic art in writing, with the modifications
necessitated by the change of medium. It was, indeed, the
combination of his mastery over the medium with the
determination to emulate his "model"his model in the oral-aural
culturethat led Plato to develop the dialogue-form in just the way
he did. Since we have little information and no certainty about the
actual historical details of Sokrates' lifelong series of ethical
encounters, our conception of Sokrates as a critical knowledge-
seeker must remain abstract, and we can discuss only some
differences in quality between his historical practice and Plato's
Socratism.
Plato himself shows forthputs on exhibitin the Phaedrus one
difference in quality between the two sorts of Socratism. Since
Plato nowhere speaks in his own voice in the dialogues, he must do
what he is doing exhibitively. Plato's Sokrates has just finished
instructing Phaedrus on the subject of speak-
 Page 23
ing as an art and as less than art (274b); and, in undertaking to
discuss what writing is good for, Plato's Sokrates launches without
pausing for breath into a solemn fable about Theuth the inventor
and Thamus the sacred king of Egypt. But Phaedrus, who is
catching on to Sokrates' ways, takes him up for being so quick to
"make up stories about anything he likes." With the interruption,
Plato tips off the reader to the ever-ready inventiveness of his
Sokrates in action. Sokrates pursues his attack on the belief that
any real art or clarity or certainty can be achieved by a piece of
writing. He winds up his defense of the spoken word of the man of
knowledge in a dialectical exchange, by adding that such a man
must understand about people's souls and the kinds of speaking to
which they will respond (177b-e). What we are being given to see
in the Phaedrus is that for Plato's Sokrates, the material upon
which art is to take effect is the whole human being. Sokrates is
giving the status of art only to what has an enduring effect for the
good upon the listener. Effective art for this Sokrates is something
that takes root in a person by the agency of a personal capacity for
rational intercourse.
But Plato, the creator of this Sokrates, also has his effect upon the
reader with his dialogues. The difference is that it is less direct, and
that the material upon which the writer's art works is, in the first
instance, graphic and discursive: it then must be put into the
reader's hands. It is true that Plato's human perceptiveness, his
social consciousness, and skill in characterization are indispensable
to bringing off the designs of his dialogues. But the love of
knowledge, namely, the critical power or activity called philosophy
that both Plato and Sokrates practiced, takes its effect more
indirectly upon Plato's reader than upon Sokrates' auditor. It is
because Sokrates sees himself relating so immediately to his hearer
with questions, words and reasonings that he criticizes writing in
the Phaedrus; for writing cannot be effective in this dialectical
way. Yet, as we saw in Apology, Sokrates was not in fact fully
effective in his live discourse to the jurorsif we measure
effectiveness by the test of whether his speaking on that occasion
achieved the honorable kind of acquittal he could have lived with.
So, in outline, it may have been historically. And so would Plato's
dramatization have us believe it might have been.
But it remains true that the written word gets quickly out of the
control of its formulator. It is easily misunderstood and made into
something uncritical. The irony of it was just this, that no sooner
was Plato dead, than Speusipppos' Academy began to take his
works in the most uncritical way possible as a kind of masked
presentation of the dogmatic system of pythagorizing belief, which
came to be called Platonismbut which is really Academicism, and
begins with Speusippus. To the degree that Plato saw himself
already misunderstood in his lifetime, Sokrates' critique of writing
in the Phaedrus is a restrained and
 Page 24
prophetic piece of self-irony on Plato's part. It is also a playful
rehearsal of what the historical Sokrates might have told his young
admirer Plato, on perceiving his incurable addiction to writing.
Sokrates need not have worried so much. Plato emerges from his
written works a dialogical Socratic, in not unfavorable contrast to
his conversational master. If dialectic is restrictively defined as
inquiry by the cooperative method of question and short answer,
then it may be that the criticism of Sokrates that we are supposed,
by Plato, to draw from the dialogues is that the original Sokrates
was, perhaps, too dialectical and should have allowed himself more
discursivenessin some such way as Plato allows it to his Sokrates.
Plato's ability to preserve and project the larger human context of
disputation and inquiry permits him to keep his Sokrates quite
consistent from the ethical, though not from the doctrinal, point of
view. But it is just the Tragicomic realism of the characterization
that allows him to show us his Sokrates getting carried away, here
and there, by a claim or an argument, even though Sokrates might
have initially broached the claim or the argument out of sheer
eristic ingeniousness or wit. What we come to feel in the end, as we
read and meditate upon the dialogues, is that both Plato and his
Sokrates (like other creative humans) are doing what they are doing
for its own sake and for the sake of doing it well, as well as for the
sake of their long-range intellectual and ethical purposes. It is
noteworthy that the permanence that Plato sought to add to the
original effectiveness of Sokrates the ethical inquirer, by
constructing the dialogues around him, has come to stand as a
monument to Sokrates' intellectual greatness rather than to his own;
and that the literary brilliance of the monument has gone mostly
unnoticed. This is a profound if unintended compliment to Plato's
art, as well as to his other-directedness. For, it is only the very
greatest art that can achieve such nearly absolute transparency as to
go so long unnoticed, and only the greatest selflessness that could
have allowed one man to make another the overwhelming
beneficiary of his own talent and the center of the attention and
affection that his own work is arousing.
Ironically, the selfless art that gives the dialogues their vitality has
also been a stumbling block in the study of Plato's works. It is one
main cause of the still unconquered difficulty that commentators
have had in distinguishing Plato's Sokrates from the historical
Sokrates. Not only is the fictional Sokrates often still confused with
the historical, he is also contradictorily identified with Plato
himself, or else with such others of his characters as the Eleatic
visitor in Sophist and Politicus or the fictional Parmenides in
Parmenideseven though Sokrates himself is also present in these
dialogues. It is these confusions that we are trying to unravel in a
reading of the dialogues that takes them to be the work of a
thoroughly learned and skillful thinker, who knew what he was
 Page 25
doing at every stage of his critical constructions. The reader must
be left to judge whether a dialogical reading of the dialogues does
more or less justice than other approaches to Plato's greatness, and
to the integrity of his particular works.
Notes
1. K. Guthke, Modern Tragicomedy (New York: Random House,
1966).
2. According to the scholium on Apology 18b (Scholia Platonica,
ed. W.C. Greene, Haveford: Amer. Philol. Assoc. 1938). There is
even an outside possibility that this Meletus or his father was an
accomplice of the Thirty Tyrants. Cf. also K. Kock, Comicorum
Atticorum Fragmenta I, fr.149, 150; and Aristophanes Frogs, line
1302). Frogs was first staged in 405 B.C.
3. See E. Derenne Les Procès d'Impiété (Paris: Champion 1930).
This author (who relies on the work of P.Cloché, La restauracion
démocratique à Athènes, Paris: Lerot, 1915) infers that juries were
required at this time to number half their members from the old list
of the so-called Three Thousand enfranchised by the Thirty
Tyrants. But I have not been able to verify this claim in the primary
sources. If true, it only reinforces the view that it was not out of
faction that Sokrats was condemned but over the question of his
right to cross-examine people at large about their beliefs, the
question that he too has imported into the proceedings. If haIf a
jury inclined towards oligarchism and the other half towards
democracy, strictly political prejudices would tend to cancel
themselves out.
4. ". . . Anytus . . . who said that either I ought not to have been
brought to trial at all, or since I was brought to trial, I must
certainly be put to death, adding that if I were acquitted your sons
would all be utterly ruined by practicing what I teach . . ." (29c2-6).
5. But, as Holger Thesleff has pointed out, this doesn't entail that
Plato (as distinct from his Sokrates) was as sarcastic as his Sokrates
about the Pythagoreans. The mild, even constructive sarcasm of
Plato's Sokrates elsewhere in the dialogues is perhaps a residue of
the scorn felt by the fifth century for the Pythagoreanswho,
however, were becoming poised to succeed in capturing the
Athenian climate of opinion in the later fourth century.
6. It is historiographically astonishing to find Guthrie (History of
Greek Philosophy III, p.333-4), in his discussion of Xenophon as a
source, silently assuming the Phaedo to be a historical account. In
a chapter that is supposed to be a critique of the sources of
information about Sokrates, these naturally uncritical sources have
become, with Arisophanes and Aristotle, two of our "four main
authorities" (p.329). By page 371 they have become usable as
"evidence." On page 343 Xenophon's claim to have been
 Page 26
present at his own Symposium "must be taken as a transparent
dramatic device." But on p.330 Plato's similar claim to have
been present at Sokrates' trial is taken as historical. In note 1,
p.349, Guthrie says that the Apology as contains "a large amount
of historical truth;" but he doesn't state by what means he has
established this.
7. "But for this, perhaps, a great deal of exhortation and faith is
required . . . so what can we do then? Do you want us to exchange
stories about whether it is in that way likely or not?" . . . Jowett and
Fowler, both, mistranslate with "argument" and "proof."
8. Quoted by the seaman Jorgensen in J. Conrad's The Rescue.
9. Here, Jowett translates aksías as "trustworthy [hypothesis],"
while Fowler has "a sound course [of argument]."
10. Olympiodorus claimed that this was a Pythagorean maxim (In
Platonis Phaedonem Commentaria, ed. Norvin). But it is just as
likely that the Pythagoreans got it from the Phaedo, given the
many uses to which, in their history, they are known to have put
Plato's works and their habit of attributing all good opinions to
previous Pythagoreans.
 Page 27

Chapter 2
Plato's Parmenides:
On the Structuration of Its Ironies
Getting into the Dialogism and Architectonics of the Parmenides 1
About the extended antinomies with which Plato's Parmenides
ends, George Grote commented,
''if these same demonstrations, constructed with care . . . for the purpose
of of proving that the same premisses will conduct to double and
contradictory conclusions, had come down to us . . . under the name of
the Megaric Eucleides, or Protagoras or Gorgiasmany . . . critics would
probably have said . . . that they were poor productions worthy of such
Sophists, who . . . made a trade of perverting truth. Certainly the
conclusions of the demonstrations are specimens of that "Both and
Neither," which Plato (in the Euthydemus, 300cff.) puts in the mouth of
Dionysodorus as . . . [sophistic] defiance.2
Grote is quite right about the sophistic nature of the antinomies,
when they are taken out of the context of the conversational
exchange of which they are a part, and out of the suspension in the
dialogue-medium within which they arise. As such the antinomies,
in fact, make up a full-scale four-part antilogy of the kind
developed by the Sophists Protagoras and Antiphon. The catch of
course is, that the antinomies, or their conclusions, are not being
proposed or asserted by Plato, the creator of the dialogical
Parmenides, as an example of his own way of pursuing the truth.
Plato's way of getting at the
 Page 28
truth is, in fact, the very dialogue-form which he can be seen to
have developed into the high conceptual art which gives us not
only so much to think about, but so much to enjoy intellectually
when it is responded to as art should be responded to, namely, with
sensibility and for its wit.
If, moreover, we read the dialogue dialogicallyas this essay willthe
dialogue emerges as effectively satirizing late fifth- and early
fourth-century deductivist sophistry. We will find that Plato is
putting some verbal behaviors of the Sophsits on exhibit for our
observation and reflection. His Parmenides is, of course, in clear
respects the main speaker in the dialogue called after him; but in
other respects the young Socrateshe is at his youngest, here, in the
world of the dialoguesmust be granted his weight as the recipient of
a lesson in "philosophy" and method. For one thing, we see in the
fiction of the dialogue that, at this early age, he is going to be fully
(if politely) exposed to insurmountable difficulties in the theory of
ideas, a theory which "he" appears to have just discovered. He is
presented as eager to apply it; and he does so in his refutation of
the refutationist Zeno.
The lesson to be given in the body of the dialogue has two parts:
the first is in the so-far-unrefuted objections to the theory of ideas,
while the second is on the limits of deductivism and the need to
monitor the initial minor or auxiliary premisses of any chain of
inference. I say "so far unrefuted" objections because, that is how
within the dialogue Parmenides characterizes them in the interest
(i) of good pedagogy and (ii) of continuing the conversation into
his second lesson to young Socrates about the best way to get
competence in the search for knowledge or philosophizing.
In terms of Plato's oeuvre as a whole, and of the particular
communicative interactions which Plato has dramatized here (as an
interesting episode at the beginning of Socrates'p) intellectual life),
my suggestion is that the strategic motivation for raising Socrates'p
consciousness of the impasses in the theory of ideas, is to clue the
reader into the fact that a dramatically "older" Socrates in
dramatically "later" dialogues cannot be asserting the doctrine
literally, but is rather playing with it, being virtuoso about it as he
diagrams it or alludes to it on both likely and unlikely occasions. I
speak here only of Plato's Socrates (Socp) in the dialogues, not of
the historical Socrates (SocH). 3
That there are (at least) two principals in thisor anydialogical
interaction, refutes the assumption of some doctrinal readers of the
dialogues that, when the conversation is not between "equals," the
dialogue can safely be treated as monological.4 But no
conversation ever was between interlocutors who are equal in all
respects; an exchange between equals in all respects would be
reflexive communication, since self and other would be
indistinguishable. And as reflexive communication it would still be
dialogical.5 And were most
 Page 29
conversations, in fact, between equals in all respects there would be
much less talking in the world. When conversations are between
equals in some respects, the fact that one speaker may emerge as
dominant does not turn the dialogue into a monologue.
Nor, in despite of our dominance-oriented culture, do we have to
assume that some speaker must, or wants to, be dominant. When a
dominance-oriented speaker does appear in a dialogue of Plato's, it
seems entirely appropriate that Plato's Socrates should tame him or
match him, as he does respectively with Kallicles in the Gorgias or
Protagoras in the Protagoras. Nor are the Sophist and Politicus any
the less dialogical because Plato lets the sophistic rhetorician from
Elea advance the best cases he can for rhetorical sophistry and one-
man rule, and confute or confirm himself in his own words. For, in
these dialogues the reader is supposed to see and hear him with the
eyes and ears of Socratesp, the skeptical gadfly, the conscience of
his democratic city. When however Plato's Socrates is catechical,
as with Protarchus in the Philebus, he is still not necessarily being
dominant, but rather kindly and pedagogical. Kindly and
pedagogically, indeed, is how, in turn, (and as we shall see) Plato's
Parmenides behaves towards young Socrates in our eponymous
dialogue.
Taken as a whole, the Parmenides divides quite easily into four
interlocutory episodes of different extension. First is young
Socrates' supererogatory appeal to a theory about ideas which he
seems to have just latched on to (127d-130a), and which he invokes
in his refutation of Zeno. Next comes Parmenides' rehearsal of the
difficulties he finds in the theory of ideas (130a7-135c3). This is
followed by a brief discussion of the antilogistic method of training
for knowledge-seekers (135c-137b5). Fourthly, comes Parmenides'
demonstration of an actual example of the antilogistic form and
method; but he ironically turns the illustration, as he conducts it,
into a satire of sophistic deductivism (137b-166c).
In the first episode, young Socrates takes up "the first thesis of the
first discourse" of Zeno as follows (129e2-5):
if what there is (ta onta) is plural (pollà), it/they must (deî) be both like
and unlike, but this is impossible; for neither can the unlike be like nor
the like unlike.
Zeno agrees that this is what he means, and that "the purpose of
[his] arguments" (ho boúlontaí sou hoi lógoi, 127e9) is to maintain,
against all arguments, that "they/it are not many (hôs ou pollá esti).
The alert reader notices, however, that the first compound proposal
is true only if we are speaking of what is absolutely "like" and
absolutely ''unlike." Remembering that neuter
 Page 30
plural subjects take the verb in the singular, we may also not allow
the ambiguity in the subject of esti to go unnoticed.
It is just the subject of esti, and how to characterize "it," that the
Goddess's discourse is about in the poem of the original
Parmenides. Briefly, the Goddess's concern in the poem is to
distinguish between the two references this unstated subject can
have: namely, what-there-is in the sense of "the All" (tò pân), and
what-there-is that we unguardedly refer to when discussing
"nature'' or the cosmographic universe as a whole. A point she
wants her young auditor to take is that to talk about the All at all
we must speak with strict consistency. Talk about cosmographic
nature, on the other hand, will inevitably be "of two minds"
(díkranoi), "backward-turning" (palíntropos), and incomplete; for,
nature, as the process which it is, is ever completing itself and
hasas the sixth century believedno beginning.
To return to our dialogue: young Socrates does notice that Zeno has
appealed to "likeness" unqualifiedly, i.e., in the absolute sense. But
he doesn't dissolve the paradox by pointing to the equivocation
upon which it hinges. Full as he newly is of the theory of ideas, he
instead capitalizes on the implication that Zeno has thereby granted
that there is such a thing as "an idea of likeness in itself" (aurò kath
autò eídos ti homoiòtêtos), and such a thing as an abstract separate
idea of unlikeness (128e9-129a1), as required by the theory of
ideas.
And don't you think, young Socrates adds, that both you and I and
the things we say are many, partake (metalambánein) of these two
ideas. Here we already find our Socrates doing what he is going to
be doing in many another dialogue: He puts words in the mouth of
his interlocutor which lead the conversation into the subjects which
he, Socratesp, wants to discuss. The subject in this case, is the
theory of ideas. And this of course implies that the author who is
managing the conversational exchange also wants that theory to be
the subject of discussion.
The two older interlocutors exchange a smile and Parmenides asks
Socratesp, did you invent this distinction which separates the idea
itself from the things of which it is the idea, and does it seem to
you that there is a likeness-itself apart from given likenesses, and
also a separate oneness-itself and a separate idea of many? But
then, says Parmenides broaching a first difficulty with the theory of
ideas, won't you have to grant that there are separate ideas of such
things as hair, or mud, or filth (130c7)? But young Socratesp is
reluctant to admit that there are ideas of such things as filth (130d2-
10); he thinks such ordinary, ugly things are as they appear, and
only wants to think about such separable ideas as that of beauty or
the one or the many. And Plato then lets young Socrates get away
with this evasion of the questionon implicit grounds, no doubt, of
polite good taste.
 Page 31
Young Socrates then dissolves Zeno's paradox by explaining how
things "participate" in (the idea of) "oneness" or "manyness,'' so
that there is no contradiction in a given thing's being a unity in one
respect and a plurality in another respect. As he concludes Socrates
says, "I should be . . . more amazed if anyone could show in the
ideas themselves (en autoîs toîs eídesi), which are extrapolated
concepts (en toîs logismôi), this same multifariousness and
perplexing entanglement which you described in visible objects"
(130a). Fowler's rendering of logismoi as plain "intellectual
conceptions" blurs the point that the separate ideas are abstractive,
or calculative, constructions.
The purpose of this essay, however, is not to discuss the logic of
the theory of ideas, but to highlight the dramatic uses to which
Plato puts it, as well as what he does with it and to it in the course
of our dialogue. Keep in mind that if the dialogues are ordered
dramatically, as the protrayal which they are of some encounters in
the idealized life-cycle of a dramatic character who is a great
seeker, then the Parmenides is the first dialogue in that order. And
the significance of this for Plato's dialogues as a series is that we
may not take Socratesp, in dramatically subsequent dialogues, to be
innocent of the "refutation" of the theory by Parmenidesp and, so,
as merely expounding it (in the Republic) or as bringing it up
merely for the sake of explaining something (as in the Phaedo, the
last of the dialogues in the dramatic order).
The fact that young Socrates is found by Zeno to be as keen in
running down (metatheîs) and sniffing out (ichnôúeis) the
weaknesses in what people say (128c2), establishes this ability as a
life-long attribute of Plato's Socrates. It also tells Plato's dialogical
readers that there are ethical and rhetorical motives for the
paralogic in Socrates'p responses, and that they are not due to
naïvete or lack of logic. We do not forget that sometimes the
appearance of illogicality is due to the grounds and context of what
is said in the semi-literate culture of oral-aural communication.
That Zeno, twice in one paragraph, (128b9-c9) tells Socrates his
perception of what is written (tà grámmata) is defective, reminds us
that the historical Socrates (SocH) did indeed grow up in an oral-
aural culture that was beginning to be semi-literate.
How are We Take Parmenides' Rehearsal of the Difficulties in the
Theory of Ideas?
On the understanding that Parmenides is not proposing his
antinomies literally or asserting their results categorically, but
engaging in exhibitive satire, it is clear that Plato his creator is not
himself engaging in first-order inquiry or debate when he makes
his Parmenides unfold for young Socrates major difficulties in the
theory of ideas. So, in order to capture the tone and purpose of
 Page 32
the exchange (130a7-135c3) in which Parmenides takes Socratesp
through the difficulties in the theory of ideas, we attend to the way
in which that discussion closes at 134e10-135c5.
"Yet these difficulties and many more attach necessarily
(anankaîon) to the ideas," says Parmenides, "if there are ideas
themselves of what exists and each idea, as such, is a separate one"
(ei eisìn haûtai hai idéai tôn óntôn kaì horieîaí tis autó ti hékaston
eîdos). Listeners to these claims," he continues, "make difficulties
and argue that neither do such ideas exist nor could they, by any
possibility, be known to human nature did they exist. . . . And it'll
be someone greatly gifted who can ascertain that for each thing
there is a genus and a beingness-in-itself (ousía autê kath' hautên),
and only a most wonderful man (thaumatotéron) will discover
(heurêsontos) and be able to teach another all these things and
judge-them-sufficiently-and-felicitously (dieukrinêsámenon)."
Young Socrates agrees. "But on the other hand," concludes
Parmenides,
if anyone, looking back at (apoblépsas) at all these and other such
difficulties, also does not permit ideas of what there is (tôn óntôn) to
exist and does not distinguish an idea of each individual thing, such a
one will have no place to which to turn his thought because he has not
allowed that the idea of each existing thing is always the same, and in
this way he altogether destroys our ability to converse (dialégesthai)
with each other.
If these words are about both what the practice of verbal
communication cannot help assuming and the difficulties with
those assumptions, then Parmenides' juxtaposition of the two sides
of the question can be seen as a conversationally balanced outcome
which allows the interaction to continue as it must, given what
Parmenides has still in store to teach the young Socratesp.
From the logical point of view, however, the unacceptable
consequences educed by Parmenides from the theory of ideasnot to
mention the "many more difficulties" (panu pollá, 135a1) he
alludes tohave refuted it. But, on the other hand, Parmenides has
insisted that it is an inevitable assumption of intelligible discourse:
"What, then, will become of the pursuit of knowledge
(philosophía)," if you cannot know the ideas?" he goes on to say.
Young Socrates confesses that, for the present, he cannot tell. And
he cannot, because the possibility of discourse has been grounded
in a theory with unacceptable consequences to which there seems
to be no alternative, given the mind-set of the fictional young
Socrates. We have seen that, at this stage, he is not just elenctic; he
had been eager to share with Zeno the efficacy of "his" theory of
ideas.
 Page 33

Discussion of the Best Training-Method for the Pursuit of

Knowledge (135c-137b)
The youngster's pet theory in a shambles, Parmenidesp gracefully
lets him off the hook by praising his "drive to ratiocinate" (hormê .
. . epì tous lógous, 135d3) which, he assures him, is noble and
inspired; but which, while he is still young, must be exercised and
trained beyond mere verbal facility if he wishes not to miss the
truth. Socrates rises to the bait: "what then, Parmenides, is the
manner of this training?" Well, the thing that pleased me in your
exchange with Zeno, answers Parmenides, was your move to
discuss his difficulty in the light of the ideas, as they may be called,
of what is especially conceivable by reason.
Going from there, it is still necessary to do something more. "You
must consider not only what happens if a given hypothesis is true,
but also what happens if it is not true. . . . And, briefly: about that
which you might ever hypothesize, supposing that it exists or that it
does not exist and whatever else it undergoes, you must examine
what happens in relation to itself and in relation both to whatever
particular things you anticipate, as well as in relation to other
things and to all of them as a whole . . . if you plan to train yourself
rightly to see into the truth (diópsesthai) completely" (136b8-c6).
We note, in passing, the quasi-formulaic phrasing of Parmenides'
words here; it is a formulism whichuntil its meaning is
graspedsounds like pseudo-authoritative mumbo-jumbo.
To this Zeno interposes that most people "don't know that, without
such a wide-ranging (planês) circuit (dieksódou) through
everything, it is not possible for the mind (noûn) to come to the
truth" (136e1-3). Young Socrates had just asked Parmenides to take
up one such hypothesis and work through it, as an illustration for
him to learn from, and Parmenides had at first refused what he calls
an unmanageable affair (amêchanon . . . pragmateían).
But at the insistence of Zeno, Antisthenes and the others (as
Pythodorus told him, according to Antiphon the narrator of the
dialogue) Parmenides agreeswith an entertaining show of
trepidation at having to launch into "an ocean of words," a show
which itself takes all of ninety words and that compares him to the
horse past its racing prime in Ibycus's poem about the shock of
falling in love in old age, and in which he also calls what he is
about to do an "ostentatious, gimmicky game" (pragmateiôde
paidiàn) which he has "to play through" (paizein). 6 "Shall I begin
by taking my own hypothesis about the one itself and discuss what
must happen (ti chrê symbaínein) if we hypothesize either that the
one exists (éstin) or that it does not?"
 Page 34

The Pedagogical Demonstration as also a Satire on Sophistic

Deductivism
As Parmenides begins the exercise, it is necessary to note that the
tone in which he has said it is "his own hypothesis" is,
appropriately, one of smiling irony. The words tês emautoú
hypothéseôs occur at the end of paragraph 136e9-137b4, in which
Parmenides' toneas reported by Pythodorus to Antiphon is entirely
light, self-ironic, and appropriately preliminary to the virtuoso
display he has consented to. Observe, further, that the exhibitive
antilogistic performance, follows upon the rehearsal we have just
reviewed of the difficulties (hósê estin hê aporía, 133b1, 133a6) in
young Socrates' theory of ideas.
After rubbing in these difficulties some more (at 135a): "the ideas
necessarily have these difficulties and many more besides. . ."),
Parmenides then adds, antinomously, that if, however, one does not
allow being to the ideas, one will find his ability to converse quite
destroyed, because things will have lost their identities. To this
antinomy Parmenides added, as we saw, the ironic qualification
that "only a man of the greatest natural gifts will understand that
for each thing there is a genus and an essence or being-in-itself
(ousía autê kath'hautên); and only a still more wonderful man will
find [them] out and be able to teach another how to judge them
sufficiently and felicitously"such a man, needless to say (?), as
might be found only among Pythagoreans or Academicians. This
sequence is telling us, is it not, that it is just the problem of
participation that Parmenides has shown to be unsolved and
insolubleexcept of course by the "wonder-man of very great natural
gifts" required to keep young Socrates in countenance, and the
conversation from ending.
We can now see that it is easy to be misled by the kindly tone in
which Parmenides has consoled the young Socratesp for the knock-
down counters administered to his theory, and by the politeness
which covers the irony of Parmenides' saying that an Übermensch
might some day solve the problem in the same breath that promises
young Socratesp that there is a great future for him in the pursuit of
knowledge, if he can understand the ramifications of the
antilogistic method which he is about to illustrate. But, irony of
ironies in the reception-history of Plato's dialogues, misled
literalistic readers always take Parmenides's ironic, detached
politeness here to mean that the theory of ideas can be salvaged.
That it has not been salvaged in more than two thousand years goes
a long way toward showing that it cannot be salvaged.
There is yet another lesson which the dialogical reader will not fail
to draw from the situation of intellectual tension into which Plato
has manouvered his characters. Parmenides goes on to apply Zeno's
refutational method to clauses which, when taken out of the context
of "his" own poem, re-appear as
 Page 35
both the assertion and denial of a doctrinal question "whether the
one is or is not one" (eite hen estin eite mê hen, 13765). 7 Is it not
paradoxical that, on one hand, Zeno's method literally applied
destroys all asserting, including his master's (should asserting be
what he was doing)? On the other hand, if the admonitions of
Parmenides' Goddess are taken literally, rather than poetically, as
categorical propositions, not only are some of them easily
falsifiable by the auditor but also Zeno's method must be wrong.
It follows, if we are reading the dialogue literalistically, that
Parmenides and his disciple Zeno cannot both be right; either
something is wrong with Zeno's eristic method or else Parmenides,
if he was being dogmatic, is wrong. Only by taking the dialogue
dialogically can master and disciple be in agreement. And the
dialogical reader notes, firstly, that the apparent categorical
question is in reality a propositional precipitate abstracted from an
utterance held in the suspension of Parmenides' poetic medium, a
suspension in which the utterance is not assertive but exhibitive,
and, secondly, that the dialogue-medium itself which we are
reading holds all assertions made by speakers in it in a similar state
of exhibitive suspension. Wrong as it is to take the poem of the
original Parmenides as a series of assertions, it is equally a
misreading to take Plato's dialogue to be a construction in the
assertive mode, from which given propositions may be abstracted
and claimed as assertions of Plato's, without specification of a
decision-procedure justifying the claim.
As we read on, we find that we are not sure of the reference of "the
one" to be antilogized. Is it the original Parmenides' "All:" the
"All" in the sense of whatever-is-was-and-will-be which excludes
nothing and which, in being conceptualized, has to be thought of as
One? Or, in the light of what the conversation has so far been
about, is it just the idea of one, or oneness? Or is it, thirdly and as
some suggest, the separate oneness of any idea that is being
antilogized?8 What we must, therefore, do is to let the development
and context of the antilogistic demonstration determine for us what
the reference or references of "the one" might be in the rest of the
dialogue. But this new turn which our inquiry must take may not be
allowed to leave out of artistic or organic relation to the rest of the
dialogue, either Parmenides' new rhetoristic9 tone or his ironically
elaborate antilogizing, if it is trueas I am suggesting that the
Parmenides is a carefully constructed work-of-art.
Doing this, we need to point out what too many readers have
missed, that this last part of the dialogue is at the same time an
exhibitive critique by satire of the phenomenon of secondary
elaboration, and of the excesses of deductivism, the engine that
drives secondary elaborations in philosophy and the practice upon
which Zeno's refutationism depends.
In Plato's brilliant hands, Parmenides can be said to have tempered
the
 Page 36
negative impact of his disciple's refutationism by being endlessly
and deductively refutative himself: the point is driven home that,
with enough deduction, any and every claim is refutable. But
Parmenides' parody of Zeno's methodic deductivism also shows
that you can prove or disprove anything you like by being sheerly
deductive, including contradictory propositions about the same
thing, if you don't know which starting points should or should not
be accepted.
This realization will come as no surprise to readers who concur in
the finding that Plato is a quietly skilfull satirizer, in the exhibitive
mode, of the phenomena of intellectual life and the intricacies of
communicative interaction among disputants. 10 G. Grote's
comment, quoted at the outset, on the antinomies in this part of the
dialogue comes to mind again here. The realization also brings this
part of the dialogue into continuity with the satirical tension in a
central situation of the dialogue according to whichif what
Parmenides and Zeno are saying is taken literalisticallythey cannot,
though they are master and disciple, be in agreement. Nor can we
possibly omit noticing, given the above, that Parmenides never
loses his virtuoso detachment as he tacks and scuds his way over
the sea of words on which he is launched.11
The reader can now understand the reason why, though the exercise
is for the benefit of young Socrates, he cannot be the respondent in
this parody of deductivist argumentation. As Zeno said earlier on,
young Socrates follows arguments, "chasing after" them and
"sniffing [them] out" as closely as a Laconian hound (hôsper ge hai
Lákainai skûlakes eu metatheîs te kai ineúeis ta lechthénta, 128c1-
2). This ability would, obviously, spoil the fun and make the
exhibition impossible. That young Socrates tacitly agrees to remain
silent: does it also mean that he has finally caught on to the fact
that what Parmenides has undertaken is an anti-Sophistical parody
of extant sophistries about what there is? At the time, would not
Gorgias's famous discourse on Not-Being have been in the back of
any Athenian intellectual's mind?
In collateral reinforcement of this we find, going back to
Parmenides' anticipative rehearsal of what this method will be
(starting at 136a4 with young Socrates' "what do you mean", and
going one to 136c9, "What an impossible . . . affair, I don't
understand very well" (amêchanon . . . pragmateían kai ou sphódra
manthanô), (i) that Parmenides' tone has become incantatory and
echolalic in a manner that competes with the style of Gorgias's
recital on Not-Being, (ii) that the description of the hypothetical
method is so generalized as to be nearly incomprehensible without
exemplification at the same time that it sounds authoritative, and,
very significantly, (iii) that it does outline a pre-set, if complex,
schema for the development of antilogies about anything.12
Such pre-set schemas according to which to argue were,
historically, the
 Page 37
common device and characteristic resource of all the Sophists. So
not only is Plato's Parmenides out-sophisticizing the Sophists at
their formulaic games, he is also bringing out the limitations
inherent in the deductive process for the benefit of the
mathematicians as well. But the lessons which are to benefit young
Socrates in the fiction of the dialogue, are also of general
intellectual benefit.
They include a renewed sense of the limitations of both
refutationism and deductivism. Not only do we expect young
Socrates'P keeness in spotting paralogisms to be tempered by an
awareness of the limitations of deductive logic, but the
antilogizings of the Sophists at large are put into perspective. Their
practice of refutation and antilogism had forced the climate of
opinion to accept the fact that any proposition was refutable or
relativizable; so, young SocratesP is made by Parmenides to see
that claims must be advanced hypothetically. The reader-auditor of
the dialogue, in turn, is invited to see for himself that when
hypotheticals are advanced in argument, the speaker's associated
premisses must be monitored from the very beginning, objected to
or qualified, if the deduction of consequences from the hypothesis
is not to go astray.
Nor will a reading of the dialogue that takes it as a set of artfully
constructed communicative interactions that is both high
intellectual satire and pedagogical, take the concluding antilogistic
exercise to be a treatise in systematic metaphysicsas the
Neoplatonist tradition insists on taking it. There is, however, much
to be gained by joining in Parmenides' deductive fun-and-games
for those who undertake to think about unity and plurality or about
what-there-is or the "All," as metaphysical problems. The
demonstration of this, like the inquiry into the reference of 'the
One,' must be left to another occasion, but one example will suffice
to show that it is worthwhile.
Does not the point made by the first hypothesis that if 'the One' is a
whole, it cannot have partscounter-intuitive as this isimplicitly raise
a question about how ideas if they are unitary, can be the ideas of
things with parts? Equally a problem for those who might have on
their minds the oneness of the "All" in Parmenides's poem, is that
this Onewhich is all there is and, therefore, the only thing there
iswould have to be a complex to be existential; for, things are only
simple in some respect and no simples exist, save in the order of
discourse; simples are all implicitly postulational.
The seeming paradox is that "It," this "One" or "All," which has no
parts is neither simple nor only discursive (i.e., non-existential or
non-material) because it is the "All" which is "everything-that-
ever-was-is-or-will-be.'' Its existence must, therefore, be
conceptual: the essence perhapsin Santayanian termsof a
potentiality: "the being" of all "becoming." It is a real possibility
 Page 38
that is not exemplified because never fully exemplified, but
nonetheless exemplifiable because there is what-there-is and there
will be what-will-be; and there will never be nothing, on
Parmenides' non-creationist assumptions. That "it" can be thought
of, however, entails in terms of Parmenides' poem, that it is; for,
there, "if it can be thought, it is" (tò gar autò noeîn estin te kai
eînai, fragm. 4). 13
The Parmenides shows, in other words, that in composing his
dialogues Plato designed them to be not only challenging and
amusing, but also in order to teach the need, by dramatizing it, of
achieving perspective and observing proportion in matters
intellectual as well as political. We may like or dislike the claims
and arguments, the parables and stories, which Plato has put under
observation for us by staging them to be advanced by interacting
speakers who are succintly characterized by their words and
according to the needs of the intellectual, satirical or comical
design of the dialogue. But like or dislike them, claims, arguments,
and forms of argumentation have now been put under observation.
From a "Socrato-centric" point of view, and as a series, what the
dialogues do (among other things) is to exonerate Socrates from the
spoliation of his image by the Spartanizing, oligarchist propaganda
of Xenophon14, and from the historical charges of impiety and
corruption of the young, while augmenting that dimension of his
character in which he was an ethical seeker after the truth and an
honest interrogator of himself and others. This, of course, is said
from within the literary-intellectual frame-work of a non-doctrinal,
dialogical approach to the dialogues as the works-of-art which they
are when they are Plato's.
Notes
1. This essay is a much-revised version, in a different presentation,
of "On the Dialogical Composition of Plato's Parmenides," in
F.González ed. Plato's Dialogues: the Third Way (Rowman,
Littlefield 1996). Its focus is on the relation between the structure
of the dialogue's interactional episodes, and its over-all irony.
2. Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates 1881, 4 vol. (repr.
Burt Franklin 1973); iii.82f.
3. Nor do I assume anything about the "development" of Plato
himself or the chronology of his dialogues. The dialogical
approach makes no claim that SocratesP or any other character is
speaking for Plato at given points. I limit myself to what happens
within the fictional intellectual world created by the dialogues.
SocP = Plato's Socrates in the dialogues that are by Plato; SocH =
the historical Socrates.
 Page 39
4. By "doctrinal" readers I mean "counter-dialogical:" namely,
readings that abstract from the interlocutory situation and
background of the speakers: the situation which conditions the
meaning and weight of their responses.
5. Logicist and formalist approaches to language will remain
incomplete as long as they overlook the showing, by Bakhtin and
others, that discourse is basically dialogical. C.S. Peirce, G.H.
Mead, M. Bakhtin, Martin Buber, Justus Buchler are not claiming
that "language" in the formalist theoretical sense of a grammarian's
construct, is dialogical. The system which, following Saussure, is
now called "language" cannot be either monological or dialogical,
for it addresses no one. It is we who construct and address
ourselves to it, as linguists, and who theoretically seem to
presuppose it as speakers and writers. See, respectively, Collected
Papers of C.S. Peirce (Harvard U.P. 1938-1951); Mind, Self, and
Society (Chicago U.P. 1934); Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics
(Minnesota U.P. 1984), The Dialogic Imagination (Texas U.P.
1981); Das Dialogische Prinzip (Heidelberg: Schneider, ed. of
1962); and Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment
(Columbia U.P. 1955). As Peirce said (4.551), "it is not merely a
fact of human psychology, but a necessity of logic, that every
logical evolution of thought should be dialogic.'' We must
remember that logic as semiotic includes, for Peirce, speculative
grammar and speculative rhetoric (or methodeutic), as well as
"critic" or logic in the modern formalist senseand that logic as
semiotic is itself subsumable under ethics and aesthetics.
6. The best translation I can think of for pragmateiôde is the
Spanish "aparatoso." Affairs pragmata aren't necessarily
"laborious" (as some humorless translations have it), they are rather
"complex."
7. The ambiguity of these words requires attention: alternative
possible translations are, "either it is one or it is not one;" "either
there is one or there is not one." The former is a logical alternative,
whether the reference is to the original Parmenides' "All" or to
unity as such; the latter is an ontological alternative. Fowler
translates ontologically that "that the one exists or that it does not
exist"but wouldn't this require the Greek to have been eite hen estin
eite mê, without the repetition of hen? Grote translates "unum est"
and "unum non est" (vol.iii, p. 18f.). Brumbaugh's translation of the
first hypothesis (137c4) as "if one is, it certainly will not be many,"
takes the alternative to be about unity; and, as in other neoplatonist
interpretations, he takes Parmenides' discourse from here on to be
metaphysical.
8. As in, e.g., H.L. Sinaiko Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in
Plato Dialogue and Dialectic in Phaedrus, Republic, Parmenides
(Chicago U.P. 1965); 238f.
9. Actually an anti-rhetoristic imitation meant to show up the
echolalic rhetoricism of such Sophists as Gorgias.
10. As is shown to be the case, for example and for twenty-two
dialogues, in such studies as V.Tejera's Plato's Dialogues One By
One (N.Y. Irvington 1984), or J.Arieti's Interpreting Plato The
Dialogues as Drama (Rowman and Littlefield 1991).
 Page 40
11. The inquiry into the identity or reference of "It" or "the One,"
as well as other points about this satire on antilogistics and
deductionism must be left to another occasion.
12. R. Brumbaugh draws attention to these proof-schemas in his
Plato on the One: The Hypotheses in the Parmenides (Yale U.P.
1961).
13. Here is the paradox that makes the concept of the "All" appear
so "real": There is not nothing, as there would have to not-be if "it''
were not exemplifiable. But "it" is not fully exemplifiable, because
it is unending (ateleston) as well as ungenerated. Yet it is not
without closure; it is ouk ateleutaton because "it" is
conceptualizable. It would seem, then, that Buchler's definition of
"the world," in his Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, captures the
idea in question: for him, "the world" (in the sense of the "All") is
"innumerable complexes, distributively exhaustive, with no
collective integrity."
14. (In his oligarchist "Socratic" discourses).
15. This is not a bibliography of works referred to, but a list
covering a number of the many alternative ways of reading the
Parmenides, as well as some of the background necessary to
appreciate the dialogue.
 Page 41

Chapter 3
Irony and Allegory in the Phaedrus:
Aristotle's Note on Irony in the Phaedrus
Aristotle's discussion of stylistic propriety in Book III, chapter vii,
of the Rhetoric notices that in seeking to be proportionate and
adequate to his subject-matter, an exalted or enthusiastic speaker
may use exaggeration. But he may have to admit his excess or his
inspiration in order to preserve his effect. The inspired style, says
Aristotle, is especially effective in poetry or when the audience is
sympathetic. But it can also be used, he concludes, "with irony, as .
. . in the speeches in the Phaedrus." In the person of the young
Phaedrus, Sokrates certainly has a sympathetic audience in that
dialogue. But it has not been accepted as equally certain that
Sokrates is as ironic as he is inspired in the two speeches that he
invents for Phaedrus in the dialogue.
The Initial Interaction
The first thing that happens in the Phaedrus is that Sokrates sees
through the affectation and harmless pretenses of a young man
enjoying the symptoms of that expectant state known as being in
love with love. It appears that Lysias the speechwriter
(logographos 27c) is in love with him. The only speech that Lysias
ever spoke was the one in his own defense Against Eratosthenes. A
victim of the Thirty Tyrants and a metic, Lysias had to resort to the
art of composing speeches for others in order to make a living in
the ensuing democracy. He is thus more properly called a
speechwriter than an orator. We note that at the time of the
 Page 42
"dramatic date" of the conversation, he was still just a man of
affairs. Plato, the author, has the perspective of a turn-of-the-
century observer, not that of a contemporary of the historical
Sokrates. In his critique of writing, therefore, Plato's Sokrates has
at least as much reference to Lysias the writer as to Lysias the
orator. We will consider later the element of self-irony included by
Plato, the author, in this critique.
As an apprentice intellectual who has been discussing the art of
speech with Lysias, Phaedrus is very pleased to meet Sokrates, and
takes him on a walk outside the walls of Athens. Fitting his mood
to that of the youngster, Sokrates accommodatingly professes to be
love-sick from his own passion for language-and-argument (227b-
c). Sokrates is not simply a "lover of discourse," as the translators
have it here (228C). A logos was both a reasoning and a discourse.
If misologos means "one who hates speeches and arguments"
(Phaedo 89c,d; Republic 411 d), then a lover of logôn was a lover
of speeches and reasonings. Phaedrus now has a friend with whom
to share the love-speech he got from Lysias; but he is coy about
trying to repeat it verbatim to Sokrates.
Sokrates insists on hearing it. As they walk towards the shady spot
where Phaedrus wants to sit and read it, he asks Sokrates whether
he believes that the myth that Boreas abducted Oreithyia from the
riverbank nearby is true. When I am not yet able to know myself as
the oracle enjoins, Phaedrus, how can you expect me to worry
about other inquiries? Oh, Sokrates, says Phaedrus, you are such a
stranger to the countryside. Only dangle a discourse in a book
before me, Sokrates answers, and I would follow anywhere.
Phaedrus reads the speech. Don't you think it's superb, Sokrates?
Listening to you was quite divine, Sokrates answers, I caught your
beautiful enthusiasm. Please be serious, Sokrates, don't you think
it's the best speech by any Greek on this subject? No, I found it
repetitious and self-conscious about its own skill. I am somehow
sure that better things to say exist somewhere, different and
quotableif only I could remember who said them (235c). You mean
you could make a better and quite different speech on the same
subject, Sokrates? I'll dedicate a statue at Delphi if you do. Yes,
Phaedrus, but no speech on this subject can be entirely original.
Good enough, but if you don't make it, I swear I will never read or
speak to you again. As a lover of language-and-reasoning then,
says Sokrates with tongue in cheek, I will have to do as you say.
But Sokrates finds that to be able to make his speech he has to hide
his head from embarrassment or shame (hyp'aischynês 237a). Why
is this? What is going on here that has made Sokrates ashamed of
himself?. The behavioral clue that Plato gives shows that Sokrates
is physically resisting a tendency to sexism in his response to the
beautiful young Phaedrus. So would an ancient Greek
 Page 43
contemporary, it seems to me, have understood the gesture, and so
would he have appreciated the reality of Sokrates' restraint
(sôphrosynê). But Sokrates cannot, or does not, hold back from
giving some intellectual expression to the erotic arousal he has felt.
Hence the failure as philosophy of his first discourse. It is a
pleading not different in kind from Lysias's attempt to win the
favors of the admired beloved. It is only better done up to a point.
It is more honest only in the sense that while Sokrates' invented
suitor also pretends he is not in love, the speech as a whole is less
directly an erotic plea in that it is encased in a narrative about a
suitor and his suit, one that recognizes that the suitor is really a
lover and not a nonlover. Still, the fact that Sokrates lapses into
dithyrambics from the stimulus he is under makes it all the more
manifest that Dionysan desire rather than intelligence is governing
his speech. While the lover and the Sokrates behind him seems
slightly less self-interested than Lysias and his clever suitor,
Sokrates' speech nonetheless outdoes Lysias in Lysias's own terms.
And not only are these not philosophical terms in the best sense,
but they also turn out to be, in Sokrates' considered judgment, an
offense to the God of love.
That the speech is not philosophical but sophistical can be seen
from the deceitfulness of the suitor's claim that the lover keeps his
beloved away from the enlightenment of philosophy and, for it,
substitutes his own authority (239b). It is deceitful because the
suitor is himself really just another lover and, in so far, will do the
same passion-guided things that he is pretending to warn his
beloved against. But why is the speech an offense against the God?
Sokrates recognizes the speech to have been impious because, just
like Lysias, he has said that the love of the lover is a bad thing. But
if love is something sacred (theion) as Sokrates and Phaedrus
believe it is, then it is false that love is bad. And Sokrates must
atone for, and cleanse himself of, his blasphemy.
Normal Madness and Formless Essence
Sokrates will purify himself with a palinode, or avertive
recantation, under the inspiration of the poet Stesichorus.
Stesichorus too had once offended against Love in verses about
Helen of Troy, but succeeded in rectifying both the ill he had
spoken and the harm he had suffered. Sokrates will make himself
the outlet for a repetition of the well-spoken precedent of
Stesichorus, and thus neutralize his blasphemy against love before
any harm comes to him.
Sokrates starts the palinode off in a spirit of great good humor and
with an outbreak of punning. The reader becomes conscious of the
connotations of the name Stesichorus, or "choral leader," and of the
beautiful meaning of the
 Page 44
name of the beautiful youngster, the "shining one." He is the son of
the "fame seeker" (Pythocles) from "Wreatheville'' (Myrrhinous),
while the repentant poet is the son of "Mr. Finespeak" (Euphêmos)
from "Longington" (Himera). The lie is given at once to the
proposition that the nonlover should be favored over the lover
because the latter is mad. In fact, says Sokrates, there are four kinds
of madness, all of which are regularly accounted superior to
ordinary sanity, and true love is one of them. The lover is,
therefore, superior to the nonlover (243e244b).
Sokrates expatiates, with wit but not without reverence. In calling
the art that foretells the future the mantic art, do we not recognize,
he says, that the mania or madness on which it is based is
honorable? The prophet is certainly more honored than the bird-
watching augurer whose pretensions are legitimated, Sokrates slyly
implies, by a more far-fetched and forced etymology. The tortuous
etymology in question is obligingly supplied by Sokrates himself as
he merrily pursues his point. And the madness that sometimes
overtook the subjects of great plagues or tragedies, has it not
eventuated in exemplary rituals of release for themselves and their
tribal successors? To this day whoever is truly touched in his
troubles by the expiatory madness finds deliverance from affliction.
Then there is the inspired madness of the Muse-possessed poet,
who surpasses by far his sane and uninspired counterpart, the mere
master of poetic technique. I will prove, Sokrates continues, that it
is a madness much like these that the Gods have given to man for
the benefit of all true lovers (244b-245c).
Sokrates now undertakes a lovingly elaborate and ironic allegory
(245c257b) that will, when completed, constitute an apt account of
a general human phenomenon, the mad love of sensed beautythe
passion against which he in particular has been wrestling for the
good of the youngster who has inspired it, and for the sake of his
own, almost betrayed integrity. As a piece of detailed
intellectualization, it will also on completion have relieved him of,
and tamed, the erotic stirrings unwittingly awakened by Phaedrus's
radiant beauty. The dramatic, or motivating, tension of the dialogue
is to be found in just this fact: that the disciplined older knowledge-
seeker has been truly surprisedindeed, erotically assaultedby the
poetry of the circumstances and the beauty of the youngster. So
what does Sokrates do about it, once he has pulled himself together
in the wake of his misguided first discourse? Characteristically,
what he does is methodically inspired and overwhelmingly
intellectual.
In the second discourse he takes a mixed bag of conceptual
materialsranging from nature-philosophy and Pythagorean
doctrine, through the heuristic use of visualized Olympian myth
and Orphic allusion, to the folklore of passion and the aesthetic-
ascetic basis of idealityand transforms them into
 Page 45
a story about the genesis of reflectiveness, or intellectuality, in the
discipline of true love. Because his myth does honor to the Gods
and the men who can imitate them as well as to mind and those
who honor it, he can offer his invention to the God of love in the
spirit of a suppliant seeking purification and protection.
But the enthusiastic invention must nonetheless be called ironic
because it keeps Phaedrus, to whom it is addressed, from noticing
what has really been troubling Sokrates, that it is he Phaedrus who
"caused" the trouble, not the weaknesses of Lysias's speech.
Sokrates is being quite accurate when he tells Phaedrus that he is
the cause of the first discourse, but he is also being ironical because
it remains hidden from Phaedrus that he was the erotic, as
distinguished from the studious, generator of the discursive
response. The case is similar with Sokrates' second, vastly superior
effort. Here he has competed with, or been inspired by the example
of, Stesichorus, where before he had unfortunately stooped to
beating Lysias at his own rhetorical game of disguised lustfulness.
But he still "blames" Phaedrus in the second discourse for the
poetical expressions he has been ''compelled" to employ (257a).
Sokrates, that is, has poetically adapted his words to the situation
and preserved the student-teacher relationship between himself and
Phaedrus; but he is characteristically unwilling to be identified with
his mock enemies the poets.
In a richly ambiguous conclusion, which needs examining,
Sokrates prays the God of love not to take from him (pêrôsêis) that
art of love (tên erôtikên technên) and that capacity for love that the
God has given him. He also prays not to be less honored than
before by those who are beautiful (257aA-b)! He prays to the God
to turn Lysias towards philosophy rather than rhetoric, and to free
Phaedrus from his present clinging to two diverse things
(empamphoterizêi), so that he may undividedly (haplôs) devote
himself to love (Erôta) in a rational, philosophical way (meta
philosophôn logôn, "devote himself to love with philosophical
reason"). Here we should not translate (as Jowett, Fowler, and
Cooper do) "devote himself to love and (or, "along with")
philosophical discourses;" this is to miss the point and the irony.
Use of the conjunction "and" does not remove Phaedrus from doing
two still distinct things. Sokrates is hoping that the young Phaedrus
will become a philosophical lover (as Sokrates has just shown
himself to be); it would not be right for him to want Phaedrus at
this stage to be anything else or more. Phaedrus is destined to be
loved and to be a lover; Sokrates can only require him to become
philosophical. To let him be concerned with love and
speechmaking is to pray for him to become like the Lysias they
have criticized and left behind because he was neither a
philosophic speaker nor a philosophic lover, but only a rhetorical
speaker and an insincere lover.
 Page 46
Thus, the "proof" promised by Sokrates of the fact that love is a
God-given madness turns out to be a beautiful myth about the
development and basis of intelligence (sôphrosynê) in the most
intimate relationship of which humans are capable. What I am
calling the discipline of true love turns out to be, in Santayana's
phrase, a kind of "normal madness." To take Sokrates' discourses in
this dialogue as dressed-up logical argumentation, and to ask how
what he says in them can be made to fit the doctrinal system of
Platonism is to have missed the overall structure of the dialogue
and the nature of the personal interaction between Sokrates and
young Phaedrus. It is, precisely, to have been made a victim of
Sokrates' irony by failing to see it. Our loveless appetite for
disputation and our nonphilosophic ways of loving have kept
readers from overcoming the same schizoid plight for which Lysias
was condemned. For, the positive point of Sokrates' many ironies
thus far is the mythopoetic or dramatic validation by Plato of the
indivisibility of appetite or want (pothos 253e), and intellect and
responsiveness or spirit (thumos) as the precondition of human
happiness. In the case of the Sokrates of the Phaedrus, Plato has
him come very close in practice to identifying good philosophizing
with true love.
And while it is true that Sokrates mentions (249c) the ability to
unify impressions into rational classes, as if invoking the theory of
ideas, what he has been talking about is the soul-nourishing vision
that the processioning Gods in his story love to enjoy and that
upward-toiling humans strive to glimpse. But this vision is in fact
described as an aschêmatistos . . . ousía (247c), a completely
formless essence(!). Thus, it cannot be a question here of the theory
of forms.
Sokrates' Critique of Speaking and Writing
Phaedrus feels that Sokrates' second discourse is much more
beautiful than his first and that Lysias will not be able to equal it.
An abusive politician, he says, recently called Lysias a
speechwriter; so perhaps Lysias will want to refrain from writing,
out of injured pride or for the sake of his reputation. This is
somewhat disloyal of Phaedrus, but it signals that he has now
become a disciple of Sokrates. There is also a kind of vague return
to historicity in the remark, since it implies that Lysias was still a
gentleman and not yet a logographos, as was the actual fact at the
time of this fictional conversational encounter. You underestimate
your friend's tough-mindedness, Sokrates answers, the disgrace
consists in writing and speaking badly not in writing or speaking
themselves (258d).
Sokrates then asks, what is the method (ho tropos) of good writing?
Sokrates has, in the preceding, given us an example of good
speechmaking. It is fair to
 Page 47
assume that his second discourse has met his own standard of
human and philosophic validity; otherwise he would not feel
purified by it, nor would he have offered it to the God. The fact that
it also succeeds in converting Phaedrus from Lysias to Sokrates
may perhaps be taken to indicate that it is also a good example of
technê, or informed art and knowledgeable practice. Whether or
how far it is so can in any case be verified by reference to the
explicit discussion that now follows about the nature of good and
bad speaking and writing. Sokrates himself suggests that the speech
be examined in this way, at 262c. But we are not told, within the
limits of the dialogue, whether the speech can be credited with
more than setting Phaedrus on the road to philosophic loving and
philosophic rhetoric.
Phaedrus reaffirms that for himself the study of discourse is the
greatest and purest of pleasures. In undertaking this study, says
Sokrates, the noon-day locusts will surely notice our devotion to
the Muse of philosophy and that we have not succumbed like tired
peasants to the charm of their Siren voices; they will perhaps hand
on to us the gift they got from the Muses they serve of never
needing food or drink to support their lives of song. So let us
examine (skepsasthaí) the rationale (ton logon) of good and bad
speaking and writing.
In working through the conception of rhetoric that Sokrates now
puts forward, we will get most from our dialogue if, in
juxtaposition with this conception, we keep in mind the
metaphorical, narrative, and "dialectical" techniques actually used
by Sokrates in his second and successful discourse. If we feel
impelled to make explicit to ourselves the conception of truth and
philosophy implicit in what is a great philosophical discourse, it is
because the dialogue is having its effect on us and already
structuring our response.
The claims that Sokrates makes on behalf of the art of speaking
(tên tôn logôn technên) are that knowlege of the truth does not
guarantee its persuasiveness (260d), and that for a speech to be
good the speaker must know the truth about the matters of which
he is to speak (259e). In other words, Sokrates has so far said that
knowledge of the truth is a necessary but not a sufficient condition
of good speechmaking. Conversely, it follows that if a speech is to
be good, it will at least have to be based on knowledge of the truth.
But much as we can agree to this, a difficulty arises when we
remember that in many of the dialogues Sokrates claims not to
know, or to be sure of, what the truth is. Nor is the difficulty
alleviated by the fact that the philosophical discourse Sokrates has
just regaled us with is itself so allegorical and so poetical. As
Phaedrus says farther on (275b), Sokrates very easily makes up
stories (logoi) about anything he likes. A tendency that should be
remarked about Plato's Sokrates throughout, if we are to get an
accurate sense of the philosophic and critical uses to which his
creator puts him in the dialogues. These uses are
 Page 48
varied and diverse. The answer that emerges, for this particular
dialogue, seems to be that as long as one's basic distinctions are
well drawn or dialectically and ontologically apt, one is proceeding
convincingly and philosophically and not away from the direction
of truth.
To understand what happens in the rest of our dialogue, we must
notice that the discussion that now ensues (259e-278b) is definitely
not a consideration of style in literature in general, as some
commentators have thought. The discussion is in the end addressed
to the more specific question of the difficulties associated with an
art of oratory that had come, as a matter of history, to be based on
writing or logography. This emerges from pages 274b on, in which
the harmful effect of writing upon memory is elaborated by
Sokrates in a myth and in which the superior effectiveness of the
spoken word in dialectical exchanges is emphasized for purposes of
good teaching. We must hew to the central line of dramatic
development, the internal dynamic, of the dialogue as a whole if we
are to avoid being distracted by the many other interesting points
that arise in the instructive conversation with Phaedrus.
Sokrates starts out in this last part of the dialogue wanting Phaedrus
to respond to some arguments that will persuade him that "only by
philosophizing properly (ean mê ikanôs philosophêsêi) will he ever
be able to speak about anything adequately." Sokrates is
broadening the conception of rhetoric in a way unheard of by
Phaedrus (261b8), but which Isocrates was to make familiar to the
Athenians with the programmatic statement in his speech Against
the Sophists published in connection with the opening of his
school, seven years after the death of Sokrates. Sokrates asks
Phaedrus, hasn't he heard of the clever Eleatic's practice of the art
of refutation and antilogism, outside of the law courts in public and
intellectual life?The Eleatic referred to is probably Zeno, but
possibly Parmenides; it is Plato's Parmenides who is dramatized as
constructing a full-scale antilogy, whereas all we know of Zeno are
his paradoxes and his refutative practice of the method of reductio
ad absurdum.
But to be able to mislead others and escape deception himself, a
speaker will have to be able to distinguish (dieidenai) similarities
and differences with sureness. Therefore, a speaker who has no
knowledge of the way things are and who appeals to mere opinions
cannot be said to be in possession of an art, or science, of rhetoric
(262b-c). Thus are refuted the people quoted by Phaedrus (260b),
who say that an art of persuasion has to be based on what seems to
be true and not on the truth: it would be laughable to call that a
science which is not based on knowledge, and whose
manipulations and deceptions are not based on knowledge. So let
us look, says Sokrates, at Lysias's love-speech and at mine for
examples of unscientific (atechnon) and scientific (entechnon)
practice.
 Page 49
When Sokrates now goes on to say (using the dual number) that the
discourses just spoken (262d) are an example of how one who
knows the truth may lead his audience on by flatteringly playing
with words (prospaizôn), it has not been clear to readers and
translators which two of the three speeches Sokrates has in mind.
Of the three speeches, the one by Lysias and the first by Sokrates
cannot both be examples composed by "one who knows the
truth"unless we turn Lysias into a man-of-knowledge. But the
development of the dialogue does not allow this, as can be seen
from 257b where he is censured as unfriendly to true love and as
unphilosophic. Sokrates' second discourse cannot be paired with
Lysias's either, for the additional reason that although it "leads on"
to philosophy, it does not "mislead" like Lysias's. This leaves the
two by Sokrates, which meet the conditions required except for an
apparent difficulty. They are both by "one who knows'' and they
are both "playful"unlike Lysias's, which was intended to seduce,
where Sokrates' first speech only played at being seductive. We
have to become more precise and observe that the latter speech was
repudiated only because it praised the nonlover and falsely
separated, in idea, the lover and the philosopher, who should be
united in the same person. Sokrates' first speech is not really
"misleading": it was launched as a story about a nonlover's speech;
and it did start off correctly with a definition. It was only wrong in
identifying "the lover" as one in whom passion forcefully overrides
right opinion (238a-c). But it was right in showing the bad
consequences of consorting with such a lover; the man who was
called the nonlover does not keep the beloved from philosophy and
wisdom. Finally, that the two discourses in question are the two by
Sokrates is confirmed by the fact that both were spoken
(errhêthêtên 262d1) and only spoken (dramatically speaking), in
contrast to Lysias's, which was first written out and then read
(anagignôskein 228e,230e).
Not only should a good speech begin with a clear idea, or
definition, of the subject of discourse, rhetoric must also teach, as a
matter of method, how to distinguish clearly all equivocal or
essentially controversial concepts (263b). "Love" is such a concept;
Lysias was not clear about it and did not get to it until the end of
his discourse. Pan and the Nymphs who inspired Sokrates were
more methodical than that. Again, there was no ordering principle
at work in Lysias's speech organically determining the sequence of
its parts. It was like the four-verse epitaph of Midas the Phrygian,
in which the lines can be put in any order without changing the
meaning. Phaedrus objects that Sokrates is jeering (skôpteis) at the
speech, showing incidentally that Phaedrus has not succeeded in
making a clean break with it (264e).
 Page 50

Dialectic and Rhetoric, Philosophy and Writing

Sokrates turns next to his own speeches, which defined love as a
kind of good madness. The second of them, he says, began with
some clear distinctions "and somehow succeeded in projecting a
likeness (apeikazontes) of the occurrence of love which might lead
us up to the truth or away from it; and having mixed a not
unpotable account (apithanon logon) we had fun, in a measured
and well-spoken (metriôs te kai euphêmôs) way, with a rather
mythical (mythikon tina) hymn to Love, my lord and yours,
Phaedrus, and the guardian of beautiful children" (265b-c). In other
words, in the account that Sokrates has given of love, love could be
a starting point for the search after truth. And the account, for all
the effort and seriousness that went into it, is characterized as an
enjoyable virtuoso entertainment honoring love under the aspect in
which it can lead the young towards truth.
Sokrates' words here make explicit both the serious philosophical
intent of his speech and the playful and aesthetic means by which
he pursues his purpose. It is in the tension between the aesthetic
design of the speech and its ethical purpose that its irony resides.
Yet given the character of Sokrates' interlocutor and his interest in
the study of discourse, the means is beautifully suited to the end.
This is Plato's Sokrates at his ironic best, achieving in the second
speech an intelligent fusion of what he does with what he ought to
do and enjoying the moral and artistic effort that this kind of
integrity demands. It is no wonder that Aristotle could take this
dialogue so seriously for purposes of his treatise on rhetoric, yet
recognize that the speeches in it were ironic. Out of his own
abundant talents, Plato has skillfully endowed his Sokrates with
what the Renaissance Italians called "sprezzatura," the ability to
achieve the difficult with the easy grace that makes it beautiful.
Thus, when Sokrates describes his performance as wit or
playfulness (paidia 265d), we see that it is just an instance of the
self-deprecation that he sometimes practices That he is not
deprecating his speech but only himself is shown by the fact that he
now proceeds to draw technical principles from it.
Sokrates abstracts as a first precondition of good speechmaking the
power of accurate conceptualization. This is the ability to gather
under one relevant heading, or general notion, a number of
scattered particulars. It is the power to provide clear definitions
early in the composition. The other prerequisite is skill in making
distinctions. The good distinction maker, like the good carver, will
divide things up along the lines of the natural jointings in the
subject-matter (265e). Sokrates admiringly calls the masters of this
twofold skill "dialecticians," and suggests that it comprises almost
the whole art of rhetoric (266d). But Phaedrus wants to talk about
other things as well, things that the
 Page 51
rhetoric books cover. These other things are now all listed in quick
succession, and in conjunction with the particular rhetorician who
most or first insisted on them, under the heading of "niceties of the
art" between pages 266e and 268. In point of their effectiveness,
Sokrates finds that all these niceties or devices constitute no more
than the preliminaries of the art and not the art itself (269a). They
do not suffice to define rhetoric.
In fact, rhetoric will never be rightly defined by those ignorant of
the dialectical process just described. It is just the things least
taught to learners, namely, the apt application of the artifices and
the organizing of the speech into an integral whole, that are the
core and dynamism of the art for Sokrates. So how and from
whom, says Phaedrus, can I get the rhetorical art of persuasion?
Not from Lysias and Thrasymachus, Sokrates answers, for their
methods fail to constitute an art. You must be gifted to begin with,
you must care and practice, and you must acquire the science
(epistêmê) of it. The most accomplished of orators is perhaps
Pericles (269e), if you must have an example.
We are now obliged to notice that what Sokrates says about
Pericles here appears to contradict what is said about him on pages
503 to 504 of the Gorgias; just as what Sokrates has said about
tragedy at 268c-e appears to contradict what was said about it on
page 502 of that dialogue. But it is Pericles as a politician, not as a
speechmaker, that is being criticized in the Gorgias, as we shall see
below. And it is in the context of the point that the politician is
inevitably in the same unhappy relation to his public as the Sophist
is to his ungrateful pupils. The political leader who gives the public
much of what it wants must neglect the true business of the
statesman, which, according to Sokrates, is to promote justice in
and among the people. In so far as giving the public what it thinks
it wants is flattery and ignores justice, the rhetoric of the political
leader cannot be serving the true science of politics; it serves only
Sophistic politics. It cannot look beyond the order or techniques of
speechmaking to the order that would bring men to justness.
Thus, what Plato's Sokrates makes Pericles illustrate in the Gorgias
is that the successful politician cannot, in the nature of the case,
practice the true science of rhetoric because his rhetoric does not
serve the true art-and-science of statesmanship. Like the Sophists,
he is limited to practicing rhetoric as an empeiria, or mere set of
skills. Of course, this need not prevent him from being a virtuoso
speechmaker. It is just that from the standpoint of the true science
of statesmanship, to give primacy to virtuoso speechmaking is a
mistake. So, in the Phaedrus, it is strictly in the context of
greatness in the techniques of composition that Pericles' name is
invoked. Just as in the Gorgias Sokrates does not say that Pericles'
rhetoric led the people towards justice, so in the Phaedrus he does
not say that his rhetoric leads the hearer towards
 Page 52
ideality or truth. Taking the Gorgias and the Phaedrus together,
while scrupulously respecting their contexts, Plato's Sokrates can
be seen to be insisting that in the true art-and-science of rhetoric
the techniques of organizing a speech into a beautiful and effective
whole must be informed by the purpose of promoting either
justness or truthfulness in the hearer, and this whether the initial
motive was political or erotic. Without this, rhetoric remains a
mere skill; and the only questions that can arise about it are
questions of technique.
The important technical question that is being discussed when the
subject of Tragedy comes up at 268c-e is: how to produce speeches
that are well-ordered wholes. This is especially interesting because
one of the important questions that the Phaedrus as a whole leaves
outstanding in the reader's mind is whether a speech can have a
good dialectical basis (as Sokrates has just described the dialectic)
and remain unphilosophical, i.e., not directed towards justness and
truth. Can what Sokrates calls the dialectical distinctions upon
which a discourse is based, and which are constitutive of its
integrity, be good ones if they do not tally with those that would
follow from knowledge of the nature of human excellence? We get
no explicit general answer in the dialogue, and it would not be wise
to want one. Rather, only those will be on their way to wisdom in
this respect who can accept from Plato the gift of the question as a
questionas one, that is, that will now become an operating part of
their psychês, causing them to hold all discourse henceforth
accountable to the search for the conditions that will make men
good.
As for what Sokrates actually says in the Phaedrus about Tragedy,
the contrast with the Gorgias is marked. He implies with his
question at 268c that a Tragedy cannot be reduced to the aggregate
of mimetic speeches in it. And he accepts from Phaedrus that the
art of Sophocles and Euripides requires in addition a power of
synthesis and apt harmonization. Sokrates adds, however, that no
master of any art would want to discourage a beginner because he
only knew the preliminaries of his art; the master would surely put
him on the road to acquiring the other more difficult and
constitutive things required by the art. So it is with rhetoric: the
learner must add to his knowledge of what is in the textbooks, a
dialectical power of putting it all together on the basis of apt
distinctions and good generalizations. Pericles' rhetorical ability,
Sokrates adds half humorously, was probably connected to the
philosophic largeness of mind he developed in converse with his
friend Anaxagoras.
But the best way to develop your rhetorical skill (empeiria) into a
real art-and-science (technê) is to make the psychê the object of
your concern (270b). However, we cannot understand the nature of
the psychê without first learning about the whole nature of man.
We must be inductive and methodical
 Page 53
about the matter, like Hippocrates the physician. If the function of
rhetoric is to produce conviction in the psychê (271a), then the
scientific teacher of rhetoric will have to discuss the nature and
constitution of the psychê. He will also have to understand what it
responds to and toward what it is directed. Thirdly, he will have to
use his knowledge of these causes (aitiai) to show how to correlate
(diataxamenos) a given kind of speaking with a given kind of
psychê so as to produce the desired effect. This knowledge of
psychê, however, is not to be found in the current treatises on
rhetoric even though rhetoric cannot be a science (technê) without
it. Furthermore, a man must also learn that there is a time when it is
best to be silent, and that there is a best time at which to speak. He
must know when to be brief, when compassionate, when clever or
impressive, and so on, if he is to be completely artful and scientific.
It's a long and arduous task, Phaedrus, says Sokrates, unless you
know of a short cut; perhaps Lysias showed you one? No, he didn't.
Well, says Sokrates, some people claim that it is not necessary to
be so solemn about it, nor to go so far in pursuit of first principles
(272d). They say that all that's needed is to attend to "likelihoods"
and to stick to what is accepted as most probable in each case. But
this advice is reduced to absurdity, Phaedrus, when a speaker is
forced to avoid the defensible truth of a case and required to defend
the false alternatives only because they seem more likely. The fact
of the matter is that the man who can understand probabilities and
invent plausibilities best, is just the man who is a good observer of
psychês and has incisive dialectical ability (273a). It is a long
course to take, Phaedrus, for the sake of great ends; it is not the
way you thought it was. Here, H.N. Fowler contradicts himself and
mistranslates when he writes (274a) "this path . . . must be trodden
for great ends, not for those you have in mind. Yet your ends also,
as our argument says, will best be gained in this way, if one so
desires." Phaedrus's end is to become a good rhetorician: it does not
differ from the end of the course (periodos) described by Sokrates,
as Fowler's translation implies. Enough said, then, of speaking as
an art and as less than an art; we still have to discuss what writing
is good for.
Do you know, Phaedrus, what is the best way to please God in the
conduct of reasonings (logôn, 274b)? Since I'm not sure myself, let
me tell you something the Ancients said about it. When the divine
Thamus was king of Egypt under the god Ammon, Theuth the
inventor came to him with many mathematical inventions. Thamus
praised some of them and blamed others. But he especially
condemned the invention of a script, or writing, on the grounds that
it would weaken men's memories and make them forgetful. There
you go again, Sokrates, making up stories about anything you like.
Perhaps, Phaedrus, I am prophesying; please learn to consider only
whether what is
 Page 54
said is true or false (275c-d). You are right to rebuke me, Sokrates,
and what Thamus said is true.
Whoever believes he can perpetuate some real art (technê) in a
piece of writing, or that he can be clear and certain about anything
in writing, is wrong. Written words are like portraits: if you put a
question to them, they cannot answer or defend themselves; and
you never know into what insensitive hands they may fall. But the
spoken word of the man of knowledge, planted in a receptive mind
under suitable conditions in a conversational exchange, will not
only be able to defend itself but will also bear further fruit. Writing
cannot be so serious; it can stand only as a reminder of our best
thoughts and for the beguilement of our later years. Yet to be able
to speak or write well, a man must know the truth about his subject
and be able to distinguish things clearly as they are in themselves.
And he must understand about psychês and the kinds of discourse
to which they will respond (277b-e).
We see again that for Plato's Sokrates the material upon which art
is to take effect is the attentive human being, and nothing less than
the whole human being. Sokrates does not allow the status of
science or art to anything that won't have an enduring effect for the
good upon the auditor. Now Plato, the creator of this Sokrates, can
also be felt by the reader to be having his effect upon him with his
dialogues (as noted earlier, in connection with the Phaedo). But the
difference between Plato and his Sokrates in this respect is that the
proximate material that Plato's prose-art must give shape to is
graphic as well as conceptional. It is true that his art of
characterization and his general perceptiveness are indispensable to
the achievement of the design of the dialogues. But the love of
knowledge, i.e., the critical activity called philosophy that both
Plato and Sokrates practiced, takes its effect more indirectly on
Plato's reader (in our time) than it would have upon the historical
Sokrates' live auditor. It is because Plato's Sokrates sees himself
relating so immediately to his hearer with questions, words, and
reasonings that he condemns writing; for writing cannot be
effective in this praxical or active way. But it is because of Plato's
"reconstruction" or literary augmentation of "him" that we think of
the historical Sokrates as being thus orally effective.
As already noted, the written word is too prone to be turned into
something it did not intend. The historical irony that overtook
Plato, the prose artist and critical philosopher, was just this: no
sooner did he die than Speusippus's Academy began to take his
words in the most uncritical way as a kind of masked presentation
of the dogmatic system of pythagorizing belief that came to be
called "Platonism." To the degree that Plato saw himself not
understood in his lifetime, Sokrates' critique of writing in the
Phaedrus is a restrained and prophetic piece of self-irony on Plato's
part. But it is also a
 Page 55
playful rehearsal of what the historical Sokrates might have said to
his young auditor Plato, on perceiving his incurable addiction to
writing.
It is possible that Plato was also alluding to the historical case of
his contemporary, Isocrates, the speechwriter and statesmanly
educator who, precisely because he wrote out his speeches, was
never able to be a dialectical orator of the kind Sokrates is here
portrayed to be. His graphic method did not allow him to confront
an audience "on his feet," to insist on the right questions and invent
the distinctions and explanations most appropriate to the situation,
while not forgetting the basic human values to which we must hew
if we are to become or remain good men. The written word has a
harder time becoming a part of its audience than the spoken (278a).
Plato's Sokrates, however, is not being as negative about Isocrates
as he was about Lysias. Tell the poets, the lawmakers, and the
speechwriters, Phaedrus, that the Muses have this day taught us
that they are not wise unless they can support what they have
written dialectically, orally and ethically. Tell this to Lysias. But
what will you, Sokrates, tell your friend, the fair Isocrates? I
prophesy that, because of his nobler character and better nature, he
will want to go beyond the technical study of rhetoric into the
pursuit of knowledge; there is already something philosophic about
his mind.
We conclude that in telling Phaedrus to take this message to
Isocrates, Sokrates is in fact suggesting that the latter will be a
better model for the student of discourse than the older,
unphilosophic Lysias. Of course, while this is confirmed up to a
point by the extant speeches of the two writers, Isocrates, as a
matter of historical fact, never did develop into the fully dialectical
and philosophic speaker that the dramatic Sokrates has been
depicting and exemplifying. There is no evidence that Plato himself
achieved this norm either. But the fact of the dialogues themselves
leaves no doubt that Plato achieved, in the medium of writing, a
dialectical mastery and philosophic criticality that refutes his
master's pessimism about the effectiveness of writing.
Unfortunately, the regressive dogmatic activities of Plato's earliest
Academic successors also completely justify the prophetic
pessimism of Plato's Sokrates.
 Page 57

Chapter 4
History and Rhetoric in the Meno:
On the Difficulties of Communicating Human
Excellence
It has too often been the case that the historical gap between Plato
and ourselves has been filled not by a knowledge of the social
background that would restore their allusiveness to the dialogues,
but by the interposition of a system of ideas external to the
dialogues, which inhibits reading them for themselves and for the
individual, intellectual enjoyment that each one has to give. The
reader is seldom in a position even to try the latter approach, given
that he must initially give his trust not to a composition whose
integrity is guaranteed by its author's established power to
construct, but to a translation over which the reader has no control.
Paradoxically, it is because Plato's power to construct well has not
been admitted that most readers must rely so much on the
translations and commentaries. That we do not trust the overall
structure of a given dialogue to bring us through it successfully is,
in fact, a sign that we do not believe it has one.
We do sometimes think we have captured this structure when we
have succeeded in keeping track of the turns and stages of the
arguments in a dialoguethereby assuming that the abstracted
arguments are all that matter. We forget, or else are not reminded
by those whose responsibility it is, that the truth-claims and the
argumentation have arisen from interactions among some very live
(in a literary sense) characters, and that one of Plato's main
characters, Sokrates, repeatedly avoids making categorical truth-
claims. How many readers have paused to notice that Plato's
Sokrates or Plato's Parmenides deal, from the logical point of view,
mainly in hypotheticals; or that when Sokrates
 Page 58
appears to make an assertion it is most often either a matter of
faith, of irony, or of satire? Worse, we have habituated ourselves to
jumping uncritically from something one of Plato's characters says
in interaction with some other character to what we believe Plato
believed about the matter, as if the point of the dialogical
construction were to tell us what Plato himself believed rather than
to make it irrecoverable. We do not seem to notice that Plato
nowhere speaks in his own voice. And it has become an entrenched
article of methodological faith that there is nothing wrong in
purging anything said in a communicative interaction of its
interlocutory pregnancy or interactional sense, and treating it like
an abstract proposition looking for its location in a system external
to the dialogues as such. This is the method that has led to that
understanding of the dialogues according to which they represent
an earnest, humorless striving after a system of doctrine on Plato's
part.
It is not only the pervasiveness of Plato's wit that the translations
systematically neglect or the commentaries minimize, but the
whole dimension of social or historical, allusiveness in them. I do
not just mean that there are specific historical allusions in the
dialogues; these are, in fact, not all that numerous. By their
sociohistorical allusiveness I mean that whole dimension of Plato's
compositions in which the state of public opinion or an extant
doctrine, a political event or situation, a cultural tendency or habit
of the Athenians are either presupposed or alluded to in a pointed
but non-specific way. It is sometimes necessary, as well, to become
aware of the historical or intellectual characteristics of the
characters in a dialogue independently of the dialogue, before we
can understand the way in which Plato is characterizing them
himself for purposes of the dialogue. This is the case with the
Meno, a gem of dialogical organization and clean prose: if enough
attention is not paid to the historical background of the two
gentlemen who are Sokrates' interlocutors, the emphases in our
reading of it will not be demonstrably just.
The Situational Irony
According to what we can gather from the primary sources,
Xenophon and Ktesias, the historical individual Meno was a
thoroughly unscrupulous Thessalian of the oligarchal class. l Meno
appears to have been eager for wealth, ready to get the advantage
of others, treacherous and self-confident. He is the family- and
guest-friend (patrikon hetairon 92d; xenos 90b) of the opportunist
politican Anytus, and is himself attended by hangers-on
(akolouthoi 82a7). He is thus not one of the "companions" of
Sokrates (though he is sometimes numbered among them) but a
friend of Sokrates' greatest enemy. Plato's Sokrates
 Page 59
shows that he knows with whom he is dealing. "How overbearing
(hybristês ge) you are Meno," Sokrates says at 76A; "you order an
old man to answer, but you do not yourself try to remember and tell
what it is that Gorgias says about excellence." At 80b Meno,
benumbed by Sokrates' refutations, revealingly reasserts his good
opinion of himself by reminding his hearers that he has given
countless speeches about excellence in the past, and that they were
all very good ones! At 86d Sokrates good-humoredly upbraids him
for not even trying to rule himself, and for being so unbridled while
trying, and "succeeding" in the attempt, to rule over Sokrates.
The reader now understands the rude abruptness of the words with
which Meno had opened his conversational exchange with
Sokrates; and we can appreciate the unperturbedness with which
Sokrates succeeds in blunting Meno's aggressiveness. He does this
with some knowing compliments about Meno and his countrymen
and a tactful, yet strategic, admission that so far is he from
knowing (eidenai) whether excellence is teachable (didakron) that
he does not even know what excellence itself is. We note that,
characteristically, Sokrates ends up responding to Meno's questions
with a question of his own: Does Meno think it possible for
someone to know (eidenai) whether Meno is handsome, rich and
high class, if that someone has no acquaintance (gignoskei) with
Meno himself (71b)?
It is, then, a notoriously unscrupulous man who has raised the
question of how human excellence, or goodness (aretê), is
acquired. This situational irony and the way it pervades the
dialogue will be missed by readers who have no acquaintance with
Menoor who, though they "know" of him, fail to see the relevance
of his willfulness because of the established practice of abstracting
from the personal interactions in, and social allusiveness of, Plato's
dialogues as if they were not dialogues. The generative tension
between the speakers, namely, the dialogical irony that structures
the whole composition, comes from the fact that though Meno has
made many speeches to many people about aretê (as we just
learned from 80a), it soon emerges that Meno has been discoursing
about something he cannot define, and that is perhaps unlearnable
from others. In addition to not being a good man, Meno turns out
not to know what human goodness is. In contrast, Plato's Sokrates
may not know how to define it but is a good man. More, he shows
in the famous geometrical interlude with the slave boy (82b-85b)
that he "knows" what successful teaching is.
Thus, Plato's Sokrates in the Meno both possesses human
excellence and "knows" in practice what good teaching is, but
believes he does not "know" what human excellence is because he
cannot find an explicit definition for it. This can only be called a
Platonic irony. Though Meno is the opposite of an excellent human
being, he believes he knows quite well what excellence is
 Page 60
(71e). He just wants to know how it is acquiredwhether it can be
taught, for instance. He has no idea what excellence is and no idea
what teaching is (other than discoursing): yet he wants to know
whether excellence is teachable. Thus, Meno's opening
conversational gambit is revealed to have been not merely a bit of
tactical aggressiveness, but also an ignorant and strategically, or
systematically, misleading question.
That the Anytus in the dialogue is the same as the historical accuser
of Sokrates and his principal prosecutor in Apology is made certain
by the threat Anytus makes at 94e against Sokrates, and by
Sokrates' chiding reference to the wise, industrious, and courteous
Anthemion as the father of Anytus at 90a,b. 2 The multiple
sarcasms in Sokrates' words, as he brings Anytus formally into the
well-advanced conversational search, are so buried under and
covered over by the compliments to his father and himself that,
dramatically speaking, an immediate reaction to them is
impossible. Anytus has come, it appears, only to pick up his guest
and wait for the exchange in progress to come to an end. His
reluctance to participate in the debate is easily overcome by
Sokrates; it is signalled by Anytus's first four one-word answers.
Inside himself Anytus is perhaps so disturbed at the offensive put-
down that he is unable to analyze it out of Sokrates' ironic little
speech (90a-b).
Anthemion, the father, was not arrogant (hyperêphanos), says
Sokrates looking at Anytus; nor was he an inflated (ogkôdês)
person or an oppressive nuisance (epachthês). ''He also raised and
schooled this one (touton) well, or so the majority of the Athenians
consider, who select him for the highest offices." The allusion must
be, first, to Anytus's own failure (apparently well publicized) to
school his son or keep him from evil ways. There is an account of
the matter in Xenophon's Apology, 29ff. Secondly, though there is
a hint, in Sokrates' words, at the bad choice the people have made
in Anytus, the same words (majority, plêthos; consider, dokei,
select, hairountai; the highest offices, tas megistas archas) veil the
barb with the status of accomplished political fact and terminology.
The point of the previous reference to money and to Ismenias the
Theban politician can now take effect. For Ismenias was a man
with a pattem of doing political services for money, whether
Persian or Athenian (Xenophon, Hellenica III.1; and Hellenica
Oxyrhynchia XII,1). The point is that just as it was only Anytus's
wealth that earned him the generalship that he discharged so badly
in 409 B.C. and just as it was only his bribery of the whole jury that
got him exonerated,3 so it was probably still only his wealth that
got him the highest offices. In fact, it is possible that some of the
money that went to Ismenias for helping the exiled party of
Thrasyboulos (the democrat) was supplied by Anytus.
The situational irony in the case of Anytus is even more
pronounced than
 Page 61
it was with Meno. From the point of view of Sokrates and the
reader, Anytus exemplifies the son who failed to learn goodness
from a good father. Yet Anytus believes that any Athenian
gentleman (kalos k'agathos 92d) can teach human excellence,
having learned it in turn from his elders (para tôn proterôn). This is
probably because Anytus equates "goodness" with his own kind of
"gentlemanliness," the main ingredient of which appears to be
political success. Sokrates seems to acknowledge his political skill
at 93a5-6. But public opinion, so far as it has left a record, did not
take him to be a good man. True, Anytus identifies (as just seen,
and as at 95a5) with the kaloi k'agathoi, in the sense of the
successful class; yet he is a lesser man than his father, as Sokrates
does not let him forget.
But the irony does not depend on any peripatetic, or historical,
deflation of Anytus's character and achievements. Inflated as he is
with his own "greatness," the case is only made worse if we take
Anytus at his own valuation: as a father he has not been able to
teach excellence to his son. In fact, the more we "rehabilitate"
Anytus (as a few commentators tend to) the sharper the irony
becomes.
Not only has he failed to learn goodness as a son and failed to teach
it as a father, he blindly rejects the possible escape (allowed by
Sokrates' argument) of being classed, as one failed father among
the best of failed fathers, with Themistocles, Aristeides, Pericles,
and Thucydides. These four great Athenians are the inductive
examples from which Sokcrates wants Anytus to conclude that
human excellence is perhaps not teachable (94b). Instead, Anytus
withdraws at this point, insulted and menacing, claiming that
Sokrates has been "speaking ill" (kakôs legein) of peoplethough
that is not what Sokrates has been doing. What has actually
happened is that Anytus has caught up with Sokrates' earlier but
entirely implicit, severe criticisms of himself (at 90a-b), as we saw,
but also at 92c and 93a). He is so offended that he threatens, again
implicitly, to use the political processes of postwar Athens to
punish (kakôs poiein) Sokrates for it.
Anytus cannot know how bad Sokrates has made him look to
Meno's crowd of followersthough his action shows he feels
itbecause he was not there earlier when the kind of serious mistake
he makes at 92b was exposed at 71b. This is the mistake of
confidently passing judgment on a matterthe didactic conduct of
the Sophistsof which he is totally without experience (pantapasin
apeiros). His only resort, when Sokrates' series of easy and careful
refutations reaches its conclusion, is to reinflate his punctured
image with the threat that reinserts himself and Sokrates into the
political context within which Anytus is at present riding high. The
dramatic date at which the conversation is presented as taking place
is about 402 B.C., as we infer from the
 Page 62
phrase "just recently" at 90a and the evidence about Meno's age
and doings in Xenophon.
Perhaps one of the several things we are to gather from the Anytus
episode is whence, other than Gorgias, Meno gets his own
"gentlemanly" tendencies and presumptions about goodness and
everything else. What men seem to "learn" from one anotherin this
case the younger Meno from the older Anytusis not human
excellence but how to get the advantage over others in practice.
The fact known to all was that Meno proved in his subsequent
career to have learned nothing about being good or about goodness
itself from Sokratesif he did actually have conversations with him.
Not that he ''learned" anything about being good from Gorgias
either, as our dialogue is built to show.
This is why we can refer to the clarity of this dialogue as
disturbing: not only does it show that Meno has failed to learn
anything about goodness or being good from the discourses of
Gorgias, it shows that the theoretical, inductive, and interrogatory
Sokratesa good man himself was also unable to teach Meno
anything. Human excellence is proved to be not teachable by any
sort of verbal instruction in the dialogue as a whole, i.e., in both its
argumentative and exhibitive dimensions. By its exhibitive
dimension is meant the effectiveness of the dialogue as a whole in
so far as it enacts, rather than states, a judgment. When a dialogue
is also a work-of-art it, like other art, cannot help addressing the
human condition in a non-paraphrasable way. It is precisely what
cannot be paraphrased with the effectiveness of the original that
constitutes the exhibitive aspect of the work-of-art as a human
judgment. Thus, in its exhibitive or dramatic dimension the Meno
is constructed to imply that undoubtedly good men, like Sokrates
and Anthemion, are also unable to transmit goodness in any other
way. There could be doubts about the goodness of all four of the
great politicians mentioned.
As far, then, as the interactions in it are concerned and the
discursive development that the confrontational situations receive,
there can be little doubt that the Meno is designed to be negative or
refutative in its effectcontrary to the unreliable Hellenistic subtitle
of peirastikos, "testing," that it is sometimes made to carry: it
would seem that Hellenistic grammarians could not stand to be
shown that goodness cannot be taughtfrom fear perhaps that it
wouldn't be learned at all.
This sense of the refutative design of the Meno is reinforced by the
uncircumventable array of four examples, of four great Athenians
who failed to teach excellence (aretê) to their sons, which Sokrates
deliberately invokes (93c-94e). A second look at the apparently
inductive review of the cases of Themistocles, Aristeides, Pericles,
and Thucydides will show the reader how rhetorically organized
their presentation to Anytus also is. It is so much so
 Page 63
that at the elenchtic pauses Sokrates appears not really to need
Anytus's assent. In the transition from the case of Aristeides to that
of Pericles, Sokrates does not even wait for the assent, but skips it
entirely. Yet when Anytus does verbalize his assent at the key
points, it is emphatic (93e8, 94a3, 9463, 94c6), signalizing the
success with which Sokrates is bringing off his tour de force of
special pleading. Another sign that Sokrates is on the whole being
more rhetorical than inductive is the fact that he allows himself
rather than his interlocutor to draw the crushingly negative
conclusion that his performance calls for. But it is just this turn that
allows Anytus angrily to dissociate himself from the conclusion
that he could not have brought himself to verbalize, but which the
rules of dialectical debate would otherwise have obliged him to
verbalize had the exchange been more dialectical and less
rhetorical. The striking thing about the examples, taken
disjunctively, is that they anticipate all likely objections to the
exemplifications of excellence sure to arise from partisan
democratic or oligarchal quarters. Plato has made sure that his
Sokrates instances the kind of excellence favored by moderates and
traditionalists (Aristeides), by expediency-guided innovators
(Themistocles, Pericles), by democratizing aristocrats or
intellectuals (Pericles), and by uncompromising, conservative
aristocrats (Thucydides). These are no mean (phaulos 94d3, 94b8)
Athenians with which Sokrates makes his point. From the point of
view of righteousness, well-connectedness, and concern for his
family, Thucydides, the strictest case of all, must ironically be
accounted the greatest failure. It is interesting to reflect that in
historical retrospect Thucydides seems to have been the least
popular of the four statesmen.
Interrogation and Hypothesis, Narrative and Recollection in Meno
Right after his refutative benumbing by the interrogative Sokrates,
whom he likens to the paralyzing torpedo fish, Meno introduces at
80d, or fishes up (katageis, Sokrates' word), the contentious
argument or dilemma: how is it possible even to look for something
you know nothing about; and, supposing you do chance (entychois)
upon it, how will you know (eisêi) it is the thing you did not know
(eidestha)? The twofold response that this Sophistic (eristikon)
maneuver elicits from Sokrates is central to understanding our
well-knit dialogue. One of the responses, the solemn yet irony-
tinged appeal to a myth, is compositionally generative of the rest of
the conversational exchange as far as Meno and his boy are
concerned. The other response is a passionate, self-characterizing
declaration of faith in, and dedication to, the search for knowledge
by Plato's Sokrates (86a,b). We should not leave unnoticed that the
latter is the consequent of a conditional obtained by turning a myth
into a proposi-
 Page 64
tion that is the logical antecedent of the declaration. If the
declaration is believed, as it might be, by the interlocutor or reader,
it is still the case that the myth about anamnesis and the
immortality of the "soul" 4 is being certified by means of a
fallacious affirmation of the consequent, and that it is Plato's
pointed presentation of the case that has allowed us to see this.
The appeal to a myth is brought in by Plato's Sokrates as a myth. It
is not disguised as anything else; it is something, Sokrates says, "I
have heard from men and women wise in godly matters (81a5)."
This, of course, is a solemn invention of the fictional Sokrates; or,
externally viewed, a playful utilization by Plato his stage-manager
of something that had become a standard article of Pythagorean
belief. The Pythagoreans were not merely number philosophers,
they were religious thinkers for whom knowledge was a "godly
matter," and for whom the transmigration of the soul was a
fundamental dogma. This doctrine, with his use of Pythagorean
terminology, is transformed by Plato's Sokrates in this dialogue
into the hypothesis of anamnesis (recollection) as a basis for a
theory of knowledge. Ironically, as a consequence of this, it can
become explicit thatin platonism no less than in
Pythagoreanismmyth is the foundation for, as well as the
sanctification of, knowledge.
Now Sokrates' solemnity here, is a solemnity in which there is also
much irony. The fact that Sokrates the original master of rational
induction, the very inventor of the skeptical search for adequate
definitions, is here dealing in myth and dogma is, surely, a
development that require explanation if we are to claim that we
have understood the Meno.
Except for the citation from Pindar whose verses (81b-c) reinforce
the thought, Sokrates is deliberately vague about the sources of the
story he is going to tell. But he does emphasize that whoever they
might have been, they were poets and hierophants concerned with
things "godly." There is that word again (theios), the signal that
Sokrates is dealing with matters Pythagorean. We begin to realize
in the light of Plato's life-work as a whole and the historical and
intellectual situation within which he was working that at least two
things are going on here, continuous with what "Sokrates" is being
used for by Plato in other dialogical places. "Sokrates" is
improving upon and reformulating, with the touch of irony that
expresses his knowingness or skepticism, an extant doctrine of an
identifiable sect. And he is relating it to the tribal, poetically
transmitted lore of the Greeks that these sects were challenging and
replacing. It looks, indeed, as if Plato were constructing his
Sokrates and involving him in a new movement to place morality
on a foundation that could give an account (logon . . . didonai
81a9) more rational and satisfactory than that of the tribal poets,
like Homer and Hesiod, whom the traditionary culture had pressed
into this service.
 Page 65
If it was the case that the Pythagoreans were concemed (memelêke)
to give a reasoned account of their practices (peri hôn
metacheirizontai), then it follows that the poets and priests in
Sokrates' story are an allegorization of these Pythagoreans. It
would also be true that in being so concerned, they were doing
something that is characteristic of Plato's Sokrates himself, and
something that he characteristically calls upon all others to try to
do. But it could also be that the duty of giving a reasoned account
of their beliefs and practices was both something he wanted them
to do better than they had been doing so far (as in the Phaedo). It
could be, however, that Plato's Sokrates is simply calling for a
rational account of their beliefs and practices from this sect, just as
he calls for such an account of their practices from politicans,
rhetoricians (as in the Gorgias), and Academic philosophers (as in
the Theaetetus).
We have already seen in the Phaedo the dramatic and lifelike
circumstances in which Plato's Sokrates does this. While the tone
of his discourse in Phaedo was one of tolerance and tragic humor,
Sokrates' tone in the Gorgias will be seen to be one of rational
criticism of the deficiencies of political rhetoric. The case of the
Republic is yet again different; while Sokrates' dialectic has turned
to fabulation in Book II, the fabulation is sardonic in tone and
sustainedly critical as we shall see in a later chapter. For present
purposes we will simply note the tone of the reference to the
Pythagoreans at Republic 530a7-531a1: "as we were just saying
about astronomy," says Sokrates to Glaucon, "don't you know that
they also apply such treatment to harmony as well, for . . .
[skipping to 531c1-5] the numbers they seek are those found in
heard concords, but they do not ascend to examining the
outstanding [theoretical] difficulties (problêmata) of which ratios
(arithmoi) are [inherently] harmonious and why, and which are not
and why." Plato's Sokrates is cheerfully pressing, perhaps teasing,
the Pythagoreans for not being mathematicist or apriorist enough in
their devotion to number in astronomy and harmonics. It is of
historical significance that the Pythagoreans appear subsequently to
have taken this bit of ironic intellectualism as their literal scientific
program. This development could be said to be an example of the
sense in which Plato's Sokrates made intellectual history by being
misinterpreted positively, just as the historical Sokrates made
political history by being misinterpreted negatively, by those who
prosecuted and condemned him.
And we can, on this interpretation, make something operational out
of Whitehead's word about the Western philosophic tradition as
mostly a series of footnotes to Plato, as follows: the demand that
Plato presents his Sokrates as making on other thinkers, in a
dialogical reading of the dialogues, is not a demand for system in
the Pythagorean or Neoplatonist sense, but rather an insistence
upon a "Sokratic" or philosophic responsiveness. The terms in
which
 Page 66
we explicate this responsiveness will tend to oscillate between
those that we find to categorize Plato's activity as the composer of
his philosophical dialogues, and those that categorize the activities
of the more exemplary and autonomous-seeming characters in the
dialogues, such as Parmenides, Aristophanes, and Sokrates. In
terms taken from the Parmenides, we could say that
philosophically interrogative activity is a demand for or
commitment to open-minded scrutiny (of antilogical
consequences), thorough search (for counter-instances) and
synoptic and conceptual criticality (135d-136e). Now, if we add to
this description the composer's (Plato's) surpassingly intelligent
constructive activity, we will have to integrate the above
description of philosophy with persuasive or refutative ability,
exhibitive power, mimetic, compositional or expressive skill, and
human concern or social awareness.
Thus, it would be bad intellectual history if we failed to notice how
oxy-moronic or forcible is Sokrates' juxtaposition in the Meno
(81a-d) of mythology with epistemology, of (what we call) science
with storytelling. Perhaps only the construction of an author who
loved and knew narrative as equally well as he knew "science" and
"philosophy" could have spoken like this. But if science is as
different from story-telling as logicalist philosophers say it is, the
transition from myth to science could only have been an abrupt
one. It is not that Meno or Sokrates' auditors have any trouble
accepting the epistemic fabulation or fabulous epistemology.
Meno, as we shall note, just wants anamnesis explained in more
detail (81e). It is we who must interrupt the conversational action
to notice as historians the part of the story at 81 d that was to
become the basis of Western deductivism:
 For, since all of nature is kin (syggenous) and the soul has learned
everything, nothing prevents us, having remembered one thing . . . from
discovering all other things if we are brave and do not falter in the
search; for, to search and to learn is entirely a process of recollection.
In a nondeductive and social universe, the crux about science vis-a-
vis narrative is to know when to use which. Plato's Sokrates has
here had to use them simultaneously.
Though most often not conceptualizing itself as recollection, the
deductivist ideal of knowledge can be found recurring in thinkers
as far apart as Clement of Alexandria and unity-of-science
positivists (Stromateis Bk. VII; Encyclopaedia of Unified Science
Vol. I, No. 1). Clement expressed himself in terms of the
connotational relations among the ideas of things, and Neurath in
terms of "encyclopedism" rather than (axiomatic-deductive)
system. But such qualifications succeed only in making our best
accumulations of the
 Page 67
most carefully tested and formulated knowledge merely imperfect
realizations of the ideal implicit in deductivism. As a process-word,
anamnesis should be translated "process of recollecting."
Meno wants Sokrates to teach him this new doctrine that what we
call learning is really recollecting. You are too clever, Meno; you
now ask me if I can teach you something when I have just said
there is no teaching, only recollecting. Sorry, Sokrates, I didn't
mean it like that. But if you can in some way prove what you say,
please prove it. Lend me one of your many attendants Meno, and I
will demonstrate.
Sokrates now succeeds in two stages, through a process of
questioning, in getting his unknowing subject to solve correctly,
through answers that are the subject's own, a problem in geometry.
The problem is: given any square, to construct another square that
will be exactly twice the size of the original (82d6). There are two
stages in the process to be demonstrated. In the first the reality of
the boy's ignorance is brought home to his consciousness at the
same time that his desire to overcome it has been set in motion.
Sokrates has asked Meno before beginning to observe closely
whether the boy was "recollecting" or "learning from me." He now
(84bc) pauses at the end of the first stage to quote back to Meno
Meno's own conceited words from 80bMeno's facile supposition
that he could speak well about goodness to so many people on so
many occasions in the time before Sokrates refutatively showed
him that he did not know what goodness is.
So, too, the progress that Sokrates claims the boy has so far made is
progress in knowing that he does not know. But unlike Meno the
interlocutor, the detached observer sees that in this first series of
questions (82b-83e) the boy commits two different sorts of
mistake: the first (at 82e2,3) out of a hasty, unreflecting guess, the
second (at 83e2) as a result of some questions that, while appearing
to lead in the right direction, are insufficient to educe the right
answer, given the emptiness of the boy's mind in these matters.
Given the lack of prerequisite knowledge, only a very strong power
of visualization and invention could have succeeded in reaching the
answer under the guidance of Sokrates' still too indeterminate
questions. But because he has been brought closer to the right
solution than by his first incorrect answer, the second incorrect
attempt leaves the boy with a feeling of constructive ignorance.
The boy has in fact become teachable. And Socrates can get Meno
to agree that the benumbing (narkêsas 84c6) refutation will be
beneficial: Sokrates tells Meno to watch the boy now reaching a
conclusion only as a result of "questioning by me" (ouden all' ê
erôtôntos emou). But Sokrates protests too muchPlato would have
us understand when for the second or third time he adds insistently,
"and without any teaching" (kai ou didaskontos).
 Page 68
More: an expert in the interrogative art can see what Meno did not;
namely, that the indeterminateness in the series of questions that
led to the boy's second mistake is deliberate on Sokrates' part.
Alternatively, the least a question-programming teacher would
have to say is that the question at 81e1 is premature: to ask the boy,
at this point, to try (peirô) to say how long the side of the required
square should be is to ask him to guess. That the boy guesses
incorrectly is just about what could be expected here, and that he
suggests that the length of the side is three shows that he is not
trying to visualize undrawn squares on the sides available for them.
The next series of questions is the second stage in Sokrates'
"demonstration." It is calculated to bring out the correct answer and
it does. Sokrates begins the series at 84d34 with a new diagram. It's
plain sailing until the question at 85a3; we note that a more
thorough questioning would have had to demonstrate what the
question assumesthat the four lines drawn "from corner to corner"
are, indeed, equal. In response to the very next question about the
area enclosed by these four lines, the boy says he does not
understand. Sokrates has gone too fast; but he gets the correct
answers out of the boy from 85a5 to 85b1,2. Sokrates restates the
conclusion in proper geometric terms at 85d6-8, and again all
Meno's boy has to do is agree. And he is presented as having
understood his part in the exchange. The effective answer at 85b2,
pointing to the diagonalthe name of which he does not knowwas
his.
Let us see whether we've understood what Sokrates has been trying
to do for Meno with this demonstration. From the discussion
between Meno and Sokrates from 85b9 down to 85e8, we gather
(from Sokrates) that what Meno is supposed to have observed is
that the affirmations or denials forthcoming from the boy did
indeed come only from the boy himself. Now, the careful reader
can see that it is only an interpretation of what happened that
Sokrates is getting Meno to accept. The reader can also see that
Meno has not observed what happened as closely as he was told to.
Meno is again failing to raise questions that emerge directly from
the exchange in the dialogue. And if we can see this, it is because
of the way in which Plato, the author of the exchange, has
presented the interchange so that we do perceive Meno's failure.
So, when Sokrates' interlocutorsthose who should dispute him and
ask more or better questionsdo not do so, but turn out instead to be
feeble intellects like Meno and his boy here, the reader's
responsibility will be to try to grasp Plato's design and to make sure
that he, the reader, is responding with his questions to Plato's
design and no other. He should specifically avoid raising questions
generated by concerns external to the interactions in the dialogue.
We can agree that the yes's and no's forthcoming from Meno's boy
came
 Page 69
only from himself. But we must observe (with other commentators)
what Meno does not and what is there to seethat what the boy is
responding to comes from Sokrates. This means that it is not wrong
to say that Sokrates misled the boy with the indeterminateness in
the series of questions that produced the wrong answer "three."
This also means that Plato expects his reader to see that Meno's
responses to Sokrates, down to 85e8, are unreflective and
insufficient from the point of view of pure search. Meno has failed
to challenge Sokrates' equivocation, at 85d7-85e between "having"
(echein) an idea or bit of knowledge (epistêmê) and "always (aei)
having" it, as well as his equivocation between these two and
"being always in a state of knowledge" (aei kai ên ên epistêmôn).
What Meno lets Sokrates get away with from 85e to 86b3 is not
only more speculative than the previous equation, it is obviously
so. But to the reader this hardly seems to matter: Meno is no longer
a foil for, or contributing to, Sokrates' philosophical activity in its
interrogative phase. Plato's Sokrates has moved on to something
else than refutation. He is continuing with what he began back at
81 a and 82b, namely, with narrative (as we saw) and with
hypothesis (as in the geometric demonstration). The speculative
and inferential narrative reaches a hopeful hypothetical about the
immortality of the "soul" at 86b that is the basis of an exhortation
always to search and try to recollect (epicheirein zêtein kai
anamimnêskesthai). "What you are saying sounds good to me,
Sokrates, I don't know how." We begin to see what Sokrates is
trying to do for this young man who is neither good nor
intellectual, but who has been shocked into respectfulness by
Sokrates' refutations and impressed by his success with the
attendant.
Sokrates is not claiming or trying to teach him anything explicit
since, at this point in the interaction, it appears that there is no
teachingthough learning is possible, as Meno's boy has shown. It
would seem to follow for Meno and for the spectator of the
dialogue that to learn about goodness one would have to try to
recollect what it is or search for it by remembering. But the point is
not developed as the interaction continues. At 87b9 Sokrates even
says, let us not differ about whether the word for it is "teachable" or
"recollectable." What the reader does see, at 86b6-10, is Sokrates
explicitly exhorting Meno in ringing terms (b8-10) to the duty of
inquiring about what we don't know, even though Sokrates also
says (b6,7) he is not sure enough of the argument to assert it with
confidence. It would seem, then, that Sokrates is trying to re-orient
Meno towards goodness and reflectiveness by rhetorical means, but
also in the hope that the previous refutations of Meno's superficial
discursiveness together with the convincing (to Meno) "geometric"
performance will have made him responsive. More, at this stage,
Sokrates could not
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hope to accomplish for a self-indulgent and willful young man with
a taste for the semblance of knowledge as "taught" by Gorgias. We
should also take note in all of this of the way in which Sokrates
takes care to preserve his intellectual honesty while remaining
intellectually in charge. But it is taken for granted in the progress of
the dialogue that Sokrates can only be "good for" the young Meno.
Even now Meno is not entirely amenable. Though respectful and
nominally agreeing about the duty of cooperative inquiry, he still
would like best of all to examine the jumbled second-hand question
of whether goodness can be taught, achieved by nature, or acquired
in some other way (86c8-10). Sokrates' apt response to Meno's
obduracy is an explicit appeal to the form of the method of
hypothesis that geometricians use. Jacob Klein suggests that the
example Plato's Sokrates gives here (86e5-87b1) of a problem
awaiting solution is a bit of a hoax. No more is needed for purposes
of the dialogue than a reference to the kind of thing geometers were
doing in trying to solve a problem. Sokrates says he, too, is going
to make use of a hypothesis to try to solve Meno's problem.
The hypothesis is advanced interrogatively: what sort of
psychological thing (peri tên psychên) would goodness have to be
for us to be able to ask whether it is teachable or not (87b2-5)? If it
is something like (hoion) knowledge, will it be teachable or non-
teachable; and if it is not like (alloion) knowledge, will it be
teachable or not teachable? I suppose it is clear to all, says
Sokrates, that the only thing men are taught is knowledge (87c2)?
Divested of its limiting interlocutory scope, this passage in an ad
hoc argument has, we note, been inflated into a foundation-stone of
Western cognitivism. The method of hypothesis allows the
geometricians to investigate the properties of something, a
construction for example, before they know the thing itself that is
the solution their problem awaits. The irony must be allowed to
sink in. Sokrates invokes the practices of geometry to give himself
permission to do what he forbade Meno and Anytus to do, namely,
to discuss the properties of a thing before we know what it is that is
being discussed! Dialogically, Sokrates is responding to Meno's
insistence; he is showing Meno how it's done in geometry. But if
we say, correctly, that the method is in fact permissible in
geometry, we must by the same token agree that it is easy for the
reader to see that Sokrates simply assumes the method will work
equally well in a different kind of inquiry when he proceeds to
apply it to the problem of goodness.
We also see as we read on that for the procedure to work, Socrates
must also assume that all knowledge is teachable and that
knowledge is (as suggested at 87c2-3) the only thing that can be
taught. Otherwise he will not have disposed (apêllagmetha 87c6)
of the question by the method of hypothesis. For only if they are so
related will goodness have been proved teachable when
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found to be a kind of knowledge. Sokrates also has to assert (at
87d7) that if we find there is nothing that is good that is not
included in knowledge, our suspecting (hypopteuontes) that
goodness is some kind of knowledge would be a correct suspecting
(hypopteuoimen). 5 Meno agrees, and they proceed to check
whether there is something good that is separate and different from
knowledge. But what this bit of search produces is an argument and
a conclusion that goodness (aretê) is either wholly or partly a
matter of being wise (phronêsis), so that it can at least be
concluded that goodness is not something that men get by nature
(89a7,8). Sokrates also agrees, in a questioning way at 89c1-5, that
it would seem to follow from this that the good become good by
education (mathêsei). But he adds that it might turn out to be the
fact that goodness does not get taught because no teachers of it
exist. This would justify the doubt (at 89d2) that goodness is
knowledge. We note that Plato's Sokrates is not taking back his
hypothetical "if it is knowledge then it is teachable." He is just
having misgivings (eikotôs apistein) about the antecedent of the
hypothetical ("if it is knowledge") because he has never in fact
found any teachers of goodness.
Knowledge is Sacred, but so is Right Opinion When, Like
Inspiration, It Produces Goodness
Let us notice an almost thrown-away but strategic joke in the
episode with Anytus. In ironically defending Protagoras at 91dff.,
Sokrates had incidentally made the point that with his Sophistic
knowledge (apo tautês tês sophias) this particular "teacher" had
amassed a great fortune and a great reputation: just the two
ingredients that for Anytus consitute excellence (aretê), as in the
social climber's understanding of it! In other words, it is sophistry,
the counterfeit of knowledge prevailing among the Sophists whom
Anytus hates, that leads to the counterfeit of goodness that prevails
among the "men of distinction" (kaloi k'agathoi) like Anytus.
After the exchange with Anytus, already referred to and which is
an inductive confirmation of the fact that so far there have been no
effective teachers of goodness, Sokrates asks Meno how things
stand in this respect in his country, where there are so many fine
men (95a7). Meno answers that some of their great men say
goodness is teachable whereas others of them say it is not. The two
discussants conclude that these fine people (kaloi k'agathoi) cannot
be called teachers of goodness if they cannot even agree about its
teachability. That is a point, Sokrates, which I admire about my
man of knowledge Gorgias, says Meno; he does not promise to
teach human excellence, only clever-
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ness in speaking (deinous poiein); he ridicules the Sophists who
claim to teach goodness (aretê). Still, like everybody else (hoi
polloi), I sometimes think they do teach it and sometimes that they
don't. Well, Meno, you are like the politicians and the poet
Theognis who says, in one place, that you will learn good things
(esthla) from the good (esthlôn) and, in another, that not by
teaching can the bad man be made good.
With Sokrates leading, he and Meno have no difficulty in
concluding (96a5-96dl) that since it's a matter (pragma) of which
there are neither teachers nor learners, it follows that goodness can't
be taught. This final rebuttal astonishes Meno into wondering
whether it isn't the case that there are in fact no good men: But if
there are any good men, Sokrates, in what way then do they come
into existence?
Notice how this remark confirms Meno's lack of goodness. Were
he a good man himself, Meno wouldn't have said this. Supposing,
on the other hand, he had already achieved the influence of an
Anytus; even though he would know that in Sokrates' sense he
wasn't a good man, he would might have ''known" how men
become 'great' in an unexamined political sense. Had he begun to
achieve goodness in the human sense, he would also have known
something about how it is acquired and wouldn't have made the
remark. The point dramatized without being stated is the rather
ironic one that it takes a Socratic scrutiny to show a bad man how
difficult it is to be a good one: Since the bad must count on the
goodness of others for his own success, shouldn't he "know" it's
difficult to be good? Usually, the bad man has no doubt that he will
be called "good" in Anytus's sense if he achieves great political
influence.
Ah Meno, answers Sokrates taking a new turn, I now see that we
have ridiculously (katagelastôs) failed to observe that it is not only
from knowledge that men conduct their affairs rightly and well.
Good (agathos) men are of help (ôphelimos) if they lead us rightly
in practice (97a3,4). For a man who has a correct opinion and who
does not know the truth but only guesses itsuch a man will not be a
worse guide than one who does know it. But Sokrates, if there is no
difference between knowledge and right opinion in this respect, in
what, then, do they differ, and why is knowledge prized more?
By way of an answer Sokrates now tells a story (97d-98a9) about
the fabled mechanical statues of Daedalus that invariably ran away
from their owners. Such a piece of work is worth its great price
only when safely fastened. Right opinions are just like that,
valuable and effective guides while we have them, but they do not
tarry in the soul. Their nature is to escape it unless made fast by
reasoning about causes (logismôi aitias). And this process, Meno,
is recollecting as we agreed previously. When shackled, however,
these opinions become both knowledge and stationary: knowledge
(epistêmê) differs from right opinion (orthês doksês) by its
fastenings!
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Meno's agreement is too admiring. So Sokrates says, of course I
speak as one who does not know; I am only conjecturing. Yet it is
no guess with me, he adds, that there is a difference between
knowing and guessing; this is one of the very few things which I
assert that I know.
Now, Meno, since neither knowlege nor true opinion (98d1-5) are
natural to men but have to be acquired, good men are not products
of nature. But we did think that if goodness were good thinking
(phronêsis), it would be teachable, and that if it is teachable, it must
be good thinking. 6 However, we also found that excellence is not
taught and that it is not phronêsis (good thinking). But we insist
that it is a good.
Again, continues Sokrates, only two thingstrue opinion and
knowledgeare good guides for men. But since we have rejected
knowledge, as between these two good and useful things,
knowledge cannot be the guide in political practice. So, Meno, it
was not by wisdom (sophia) that men like Themistocles guided
their cities. And you can now see that it is because what they had
was not wisdom that they could not teach others to be like
themselves. It was not by knowledge (epistêmê) that they were the
men they were.
Meno wavers (99b9), but Sokrates presses on, rather rapidly, to the
end. He has explained the puzzle about the great men of Athens
who, while providing excellent leadership for their city, were
unable to communicate excellence to their offspring. Now he must
lay it down that in analyzing the nature of this leadership he was
not being impious. That Anytus's threat is not out of Sokrates' mind
is shown by his repeated references to Anytus at 99b2, 99b6,
100b9. In line with this, some form of theios or theos (divine,
divinity) occurs seven times in half a Stephanus page. Sokrates
wants to persuade (his word, used three times in two lines) Meno of
what Meno should persuade Anytus, both for his good and for that
of the Athenians: that it is futile to ask how excellence comes to
men before we have searched out what excellence itself is, that
there is something sacred about a good man, and that though a
good opinion is not knowledge, it, too, is sacred if it leads to good
and great words and deeds. Of course, were there a statesman who
could make a statesman out of another man, such a statesman
would rate among the living as highly as Teiresias among the dead.
Sokrates cannot resist the pun: as Homer says, "he alone among the
scurrying shades has the breath of knowledge (pepnutai), so he
lives while they are dead." The excellence of such a statesman
would be more than a semblance.
On our reading of the Meno, then, we can say that it is a refutative
dialogue as far as the unsorted questions are concerned that its
eponym raises. We have also been enabled on this reading to see
that it is a rhetorical dialogue in two senses. One is the sense in
which Plato's Sokrates, in order to salvage something "hopeful"
from his interrogative and inductive refutation of both the
 Page 74
Gorgian and the gentlemanly approaches to excellence, rhetorically
develops a new construal of the history of his city, according to
which it has been blessed by the god in having had great men to
lead it. These great men, Sokrates concludes, though unable to
communicate their excellence to others, are yet to be honored for
the inspired quality of their leadership and right opinions. I say
"hopeful" in a modulated way because the piety of this positive
formulation does not conceal what Sokrates' honesty and the state
of Plato's Athens would not allow Plato to conceal, namely, a
potentially tragic sense of the precariousness of Athens history.
For, on this view, only the blessing of the gods stands between
right action or survival and failure or destruction.
The other sense in which the Meno is rhetorical is also substantive.
This is not just the sense in which all of Plato's dialogues are
implicitly rhetorical, but the sense in which they are deliberate
constructions aiming to produce a massive intellectual and deeply
engaging effect upon an audience of Plato's peers and fellow
citizens. The transparency of the Meno's organization, the vibrant
texture of its uncomplicated prose, its use of hypothetical
demonstration and historical induction, the manner in which Plato
lets us perceive that his Sokrates is using these techniques to
produce negative as well as positive conviction, its use of myth and
exhortation both to advance the inquiry and to conclude it, must
surely be called rhetorical. But in case there should be any
misgivings about a term that has received so much abuse, we hope
also to have shown something of how the Meno (short of
commenting on itself) brings into the foreground of awareness the
sense in which a composition of Plato's can simultaneously be as
worthily rhetorical as the great drama of which he was the
Athenian heir, and as creatively interrogative as the critical
philosophies of a later day.
We can also conclude in answer to the question: But in what sense
then is Plato's Sokrates a good teacher, (i) that in the case of Menoa
young notable with a reputation for devious cunning, who was not
about to change his natureSokrates could not have done better than
set before him the examples of Themistocles, Aristeides, Pericles,
and Thucydides as men of judgment (phronêsis); (ii) that in the
case of the attendant boy, Sokrates was able to bring him to the
condition of being able to learn, and learning something, when
rightly guided; (iii) as for us, and the onlookers at the
conversational exchange, Sokrates has made it dramatically visible
that neither of his gentleman-interlocutors (kaloi k'agathoi) knows
or is able learn what aretê human excellence really is.
Plato's power to coordinate his dramatizations of the way in which
people make truth-claims with argumentation about these truth-
claims, in works that at the same time show the alert reader that
most such argumentation is
 Page 75
paralogical, is a power of criticism as well as of construction. It is
the implicit, or more precisely, the exhibitive criticality of this
power that works to produce the skeptical and stimulating effect of
the Meno as a whole, and that makes Plato's art the kind of
philosophical technê and praxis that it is. But I would not wish to
say that works of Plato, in which this criticality ramifies into
dialogical exploration or exposê, and that are either slighter and
more obviously witty (Euthyphro, Euthydemus), or less graspable
as wholes and less obviously witty because of the monumentality
or doctrinal entanglement (Republic, Theaetetus)I would not want
to say that such other dialogues are not less rhetorical or inventive
in their construction because the kind of glimpse into "how Plato
does it" that we have extracted from the Meno is not so easily
extractible from all of them. The difficulty for a modern reader
comes partly from deadening translations and the historical gap
between himself and Plato. But it also comes from the strange fact
that though he has repeatedly heard that Plato is a great author and
brilliant thinker, it does not occur to the reader to demand of the
text before him (translated or original) that it be at least as alive as
the best conversational exchanges he has himself been witness to or
involved in. Indeed, taking our cue from Sokrates earlier, we may
be forgiven for saying that it can only be the scurrying shadow of a
reading that abstracts from the interactional life of a dialogue of
Plato's.
Notes
1. Xenophon Anabasis II. vi. 21-28; Ktesias, in Photius's summary,
Persica 58 ff. Plutarch's Life of Artaxerxes 18, and Diodorus
Siculus xiv. 27 follow Ktesias. Putting together Herodotus's
allusion to the Aleudae (VII. 6) as friends of Xerxes with
Demosthenes' (Aristocrates 23) and Thucydides' (II. 22) references
to a Pharsalian Meno (probably of different generations), it appears
that Meno's family had rendered political and military services to
both Persians and Greeks. In any case, the Thessalians of Plato's
generation did for the Spartans what their ancestors had done for
the Persians by allowing them to march through their territory
against Olynthus (382 B.C.), the leading Greek foundation in
Chalkidike. Under Jason of Pherae (in the 370's), Thessaly almost
became, as Macedon actually did later, a threat to Greece itself.
2. The scholium on Apology 18b confirms the point. See W.C.
Green, Scholia Platonica 1938).
3. Athenian Constitution xxvii]; note that ch.xxxiv identifies
Anytus as siding in 405 B.C. with Theramenes, who called for an
"ancestral" rather than a tyrannical oligarchal constitution.
4. I say "soul" here, rather than psychethe transliterated term that
best captures
 Page 76
what pre-Pythagorean Greek culture meant by "itfor the reason
that psychê, in pythagorean usage meant a principle that was
detachable from the organismas is the case with Christian "soul."
Before this bit of orientalization, psychê had meant only "the
internal principle of motion" of both "animate" and "inanimate''
objects, their "form" in the sense of the shape of their life-cycle.
In passages where psychê (in the Greek) might connote both or
either 'soul' or 'psyche', I will print it as "soul."
5. Sokrates' logic sems to go like this here (87c1-87d9): "All T are
K," and "Only K is T." But, since it does not follow that "All K is
T," the reader has to ask himself, is Plato's Sokrates aware of this?
That he is becomes established at 89d when he airs his doubts
about "it is knowledge," the antecedent of the hypothetical "if it is
knowledge, then it is teachable." This hypothetical is the equivalent
of the universal "All K is T." Amusingly, a rhetorical analysis of
the reasoning here reveals the further irony that Sokrates has
implicitly brought the discussion back to the previous question
about the nature of goodness. It also illustrates the point about
Sokrates' social competence in intellectual matters.
6. Does this revoke Sokrates' earlier "logic"? Not if we consider
that it has been found, since then and as a matter of fact, that the
proposition "it is teachable" must be denied whether as an
antecedent or as a consequent. I am referring of course to the
progress of the conversation within the dialogue.
 Page 77

Chapter 5
The Gorgias:
On the Use of Rhetoric and the Good of Politics
Speechmaking and Dialectic
Plato's Sokrates doesn't want to meet Gorgias, the older Sophist,
just to witness one of his famous rhetorical displays, but in order to
have a discussion with him (447c). By a discussion Sokrates means
a question-and-short-answer session, or dialectical exchange. So it
will be well to recollect that originally, dialectic as practiced by
Zeno was always refutative; that is, it was always destructive of
any categorical assertion that one might wish to deny. Protagoras
then gave an antilogistic turn to the dialectic, so that it no longer
had to be always negativesince half of any twofold argument
(dissòs lógos) consisted of a defense of the proposition refuted in
the other half. Where Zeno had refuted all categorical assertions,
the effect of Protagoras's antilogisms was to relativize them. Plato's
practice in the dialogues goes far beyond the Zenonian practice of
sheer refutation and the Protagorean mode of antilogizing
everything. And Plato's Sokrates, within the dialogues, is very
often not contentious (philonikos, eristikos). As we will show in
later chapters, it was to limit the destructive effect on philosophic
activity of the Eleatic-Sophistic development of dialectic that Plato
developed the dialogue-form.
The dialogues contain, in both senses of contain, not only
refutations and antilogisms but also formal disputations with
apparently categorical conclusions (by some of the speakers), as
well as short or long series of related assertions that remain
undisputed within the drama of the particular dialogue in
 Page 78
which they occur. Myths advanced within the dialogues may or
may not be accepted, or understood, by their hearers. But it must be
remembered that connected "assertions" in the longer discussions
always take off from the dialectical, or hypothetical, basis of
premisses agreed upon by the other interlocutor, even when the
intention of one of them is to refute the other. We shall also be
noting throughout our study of the dialogues that many of the
longer discourses in which Sokrates makes a series of "assertions"
are satirically or ironically advanced by him.
Now, the initial business with which the several questions raised in
the Gorgias are concerned is the exposure of the intellectual
inadequacy and political or human irresponsibility of the practice
of the Sophistic rhetoric that Gorgias represents. It is from this
concern that the other basic issues ramify, and that the dialogue
gets its structural articulation. This is confirmed and effected by
(among other things) the nature of the central peripeteia, or
reversal, upon which the dialogue hinges and to which we will
return later.
Refutations and Reversals
So, by means of question and answer and with an innocent
empiricism that is not at first perceivable as refutative or ironic,
Sokrates elicits from Gorgias the preliminary response that each
and every art (technê) "is about that kind of speech which deals
with the subject-matter of which it is the art." But Gorgias balks at
therefore calling all the arts and sciences rhetorical. His reason is
that "the whole practice of rhetoric and the mastery (kyrôsis) which
it gives, comes from speech (dia logôn esti)," and from speech
only. Its effectiveness Gorgias says, does not come from additional
or manual operations as in medicine, craftsmanship, and
navigation: these could be and are practiced silently.
Sokrates counters by reminding Gorgias that, still, there are many
other arts that require speech more than anything else for their
practice. And he gets Gorgias to agree that as a practice rhetoric is
after all only one among many speech-dependent skills. This
allows Sokrates to call on Gorgias formally to specify just what the
distinctive subject matter is that separates the speech-dependent art
of rhetoric from other speech-dependent arts and sciences?
Put upon his mettle, Gorgias answers with some portentousness:
"the greatest of human affairs and the worthiest" (451d)! But since
that too is ambiguous (amphisbêtêsimon), Gorgias is finally
brought to specify that the subject-matter of rhetoric is the
persuading, to one's own purposes and through speech, of those
who have either political power or special skills, as well as the
persuading of the multitude that peoples the city. Sokrates is not
impressed; Gorgias
 Page 79
has not been distinctive enough since other activitiessuch as
teaching and calculatingare also persuasive. Sokrates insists, what
sort of persuasion is rhetoric and what sort of thing is it persuasive
about (454a-b)? What Gorgias had in mind finally emerges
between pages 454b and 458e: he meant "persuasion to belief," in
contrast to "persuasion by instruction;" he meant persuasion in the
Assembly and law-courts, not anywhere else; and he meant
persuasion of the many (to plêthos) and the crowd (ho ochlos)
rather than of experts in the subject-matter.
But this answer has a paradoxical consequence that is deeply
disturbing to Sokrates (459d), namely, that the rhetorician invents
persuasive devices with which to handle given subjects, so as to
appearto those who are as ignorant as he isto know more about
these subjects than those who in fact know them. So, under
pressure from Sokrates, Gorgias assents that the student who wants
to become a rhetorician "must know what is just and unjust either
already or else must learn justice later from Gorgias" (46a). This
does not yet satisfy, for they also agree that if the rhetorician must
be just, then the rhetorician is one who will never wish to do
wrong. And this contradicts what Gorgias asserted earlier (456c-
457a)that the orator can, with dangerous consequences, use rhetoric
unjustly.
That successful speakers in the Assembly and courts could come to
have the power of life and death over others was a commonplace of
public life in classical Athens. The abuse of rhetorical power was a
reality to be feared. Thus, Gorgias's account of the orator as
incapable by definition of injustice is, in its silence about a
notorious fact, a grim bit of social satire on Plato's part, as well as a
dialectical refutation by Plato's Sokrates of Gorgias's conception of
rhetoric. What is happening logically and dramatically within the
dialogue is directed by the author to what was happening in Athens
during his lifetime. If here Plato's younger or later readers are led to
think that it would indeed be nice if, in accordance with the
idealist's fantasy, pleaders and publicists could be trained to avoid
the perpetration of injustice in their addresses to the people, then
they have only enlarged the explicit irony of the contradiction. In
theory, anyway, Gorgias would not have wanted to admit that the
rhetorical training he offered could be unjust (adikos). Polos
implies just this of him at 461c, and Kallicles confirms it later.
At this point young Polos rudely interrupts to defend Gorgias from
Sokrates' well-known refutativeness (461b,c), and agrees, under
teasing challenge by Sokrates, to do dialectic on behalf of Gorgias
and to take on the part of questioner (462b). Polos at once asks,
what do you, Sokrates, think rhetoric is? Sokrates does not answer
immediately, but takes a turn with which Plato lets us see that he is
being playful. Sokrates quotes Polo's own treatise back to
 Page 80
Polos by way of answer: it is "a basis for art-or-science (technê)."
He responds further: it is an ability or practice (empeiria) which
produces gratification.
But Polos, in his dialectical role of questioner, now makes a
mistake and presses the question: "Then, do you take rhetoric to be
something fine (since it pleases people)?" Polos has lapsed again
into a search for the properties of a thing before he knows what that
thing is. This gives Sokrates the chance to halt him and to
innocently suggest a question more on the right track: "what art
does Sokrates take cookery to be?" So Polos asks the suggested
question and Sokrates replies, "it is the ability to produce
gratification." Upon which Polos is sharp: "so cookery and rhetoric
are the same thing?'' "Not so," Sokrates corrects him, "only parts of
the same practice." What practice, then?
Sokrates does not answer without first deferring to Gorgias and
protesting to the old speechmaker not to take the answer he will
give as a satire (diakômôidein) of Gorgias's own profession; for
what Sokrates calls rhetoric is not a fine business at all! But since
Gorgias insists, he gives the keen young man the answer he has set
him up for: "rhetoric is the counterfeit (eidôlon) of a part of
politics" (463d). But Gorgias, who is not so young and keen,
doesn't understand. So Sokrates develops an account according to
which the good of the psyche, or the quality of life (epi têi psyche .
. . kalô), is the concern of politics, in contrast to gymnastics and
medicine, which are mainly concerned with the body. But politics
as the art of life has two parts as well, namely, legislation and
administration (i.e., the implementation of justice, dikaiosynê), that
correspond respectively to the distinction between training and
treatment in the arts-or-sciences of the body.
Getting Sophistic Rhetoric Into Proportion
When Sokrates has resumed the role of questioner and Gorgias that
of answerer, it is structurally revealing to observe that Sokrates has
done so only after pre-advising Gorgias for the second time that he
is not being contentious or refutative (462e) but only trying to
advance the inquiry. The first time was in a discourse (457c-458d)
that recognized how difficult it often is just to define what is being
argued about, and that claimed that Sokrates was himself as glad to
be refuted as to be the refuter: for, to be the former is to be
liberated from the evil of having a false opinion. That Sokrates has
become the questioner again, is structurally interesting because,
while the little metadiscourse on how to inquire rather than debate
is sincerely delivered to avoid giving offense to Gorgias, it is at the
same time a part of the satirical development that Sokrates is
leading his contenders through, and that will eventuate in the
 Page 81
destructive definition of Sophistic rhetoric as a pseudo-science.
Like cookery and cosmetics, the Sophistic practice of rhetoric
comes out as a form of flattery that is not able to give a rational
account of itself, as a true science should (according to Sokrates).
Moreover, where Sokrates has not allowed either Gorgias or Polos
to make any speeches, he himself undertakes a longish explanatory
discourse, the conclusion of which is the following brilliant and
amusing proportionality: just as tailoring is to gymnastics (the true
training of the body) as Sophistry is to legislation (the true
regulation of life), so also is rhetoric to administration (the fair
implementation of justice) as cookery is to medicine (the true
science of health, 465c). Sokrates, with seeming scruple, is careful
to add that he has made a long speech only because he was not
understood and was asked to explain. Thus, if he too should fail to
understand his interlocutors' short questions and answers, they in
turn will be allowed to make speeches as well! But in his long
explanation Sokrates has not fairly explained that the practice he is
ironically and destructively categorizing is rhetoric divorced from
justice, not rhetoric as it might be when associated with justice.
Plato has to make Sokrates save this point for the dialectical sequel,
because it is the point upon which the dramatic peripeteia
(reversal) of the dialogue-as-a-whole turns.
The historical controversy that Plato is skirting or playing with in
all of this is whether excellences such as aretê, sophía, and
dikaiosynê (justness) can be taught. The first is the subject of
discussion in the Protagoras and Meno; the second in the
Euthydemus. In the Gorgias justness and knowledge of justice are
simply assumed by Plato's Sokrates to be a precondition for the
practice of the true science of politics. How justice might be
defined is formally disputed at the beginning of Republic. But that
it is not enough to produce justness through habituation alone is
high-lighted by the myth of Er at the end of the dialogue.
Furthermore, just as it was the form of the antilogism made famous
by Protagoras that Plato dramatizes in the Protagoras, so in the
Gorgias it is the recent conflict between Sophistic defenders of set
speech-making and Sophistic defenders of dialectical interrogation
that is personified and comically distributed over and among the
interlocutors. Echoes of this conflict between "macrologists" and
"brachylogists" are noticeable in fourth-century orators like
Isocrates, on one side, and semi-Socratics like Antisthenes on the
other. It is again clear that the structuring of the dialogue originates
in the use Plato has made of the intellectual and social
controversies of his time for the purpose of practicing philosophy
as a basic kind of critique.
We must not fail to notice that in having Sokrates defend the need
for long speech, after having been so insistent about allowing only
short speech between himself and Gorgias, Plato has not exempted
the Sokrates who is his
 Page 82
own creation from the touch of his observant irony. But the humor
with which Plato makes Polos, the professional speechmaker,
sputteringly fail to complete his sentences grammatically (at 461b-
c) is explicit and more obvious. Polos is not just the butt of Plato's
wit, but also the victim of Sokrates' cool irony. Finally, the reader
should know that the double proportionality constructed by the
fictional Sokrates flatly contradicts the claim in the Encomium on
Helen, attributed to Gorgias, that rhetoric is to the mind as
medicine is to the body. The elaborate intellectual humorousness
here of Plato's Sokrates may also be contrasted with Isocrates'
analogy in the Antidosis (180-5) between the philosophical training
of the orator and the gymnastic training of the athlete. But
Isocrates' analogy can be called an "answer" to Sokrates' (as E.R.
Dodds calls it) only if it is assumed that Isocrates was overlooking
the humor in Plato's dialogue. More simply, these were ideas that
each thinker made use of in his own way.
Wrongdoing and Rhetoric
The argument at the end of which Polos is silenced in his turn is
ultimately aimed (by Sokrates) at showing that rhetoric is no use at
all in the defense of injustice (480a,c). Polos wants to assert that it
is better to do wrong than to suffer it and that it is better to escape
just punishment for wrongdoing than to suffer justice. Polos,
according to the fashion of speechmakers in the courts, tries to
bring a cloud of witnesses to the support of his position. But
Sokrates insists on bringing to the dialectical test of assent from his
respondent the apparently paradoxical propositions that (470e) the
good person (kalon k'agathon) 1 is happy (eudaimôn) while the
man who labors at wrongdoing (adikon kai poneron) suffers
wretchedness (athlion einai), and that the wrongdoer who escapes
just punishment is more wretched than the wrongdoer who pays the
just penalty (472e). In spite of Polos' scornful laughter, Sokrates
maintains as an instance that the tyrant who gets away with
tyrannizing is more wretched (athliôteros) than the one who is
justly prevented from it. This, he insists, will follow from the
statement that he and Polos must now put to the test (474b): that to
do wrong is worse (kakion, more evil) than to suffer it, and that to
escape the just punishment for wrongdoing is worse (more evil)
than to suffer it.
Polos agrees with Sokrates that to do wrong (adikein) is more
shameful than to suffer it, although to suffer wrong (adikeisthai) is
of course worse. Polos next must agree that if something is
aischion (more despicable), it is aischron (despicable), the opposite
of kalon (good, fine); that is, it is either foul or painful. So that, if
adikein (wrongdoing) is aischion (fouler), it must be
 Page 83
so by exceeding either in painfulness or in evil. But since, or when,
wrongdoing is not painful, it cannot be more painful and must
therefore be more evil. And since, if he were brought to the choice,
Polos would (like everybody else) always choose the less evil
thing, it follows that he would choose to suffer wrong rather than to
do it; for it is less evil to suffer it than to do it. Sokrates' reasoning
here will be more convincing if we recollect that, for a Greek, to be
good was little different from being thought good by his
community. If a Greek did wrong with what he thought was profit
to himself, he could not share his deed with friends: half the usual
satisfaction in achievement would be missing. And not to be
honored for something was close to being dishonored for it. To say,
in Classical times, that there was no honor (recognition) in
something was to say that it wasn't worth doing.
Sokrates next gets Polos's dialectical assent to the proposition that
if it's a good thing to administer just punishment, then it must be a
good thing to suffer it. For as Polos agrees (477a), a man "who
pays the penalty justly suffers what is good;" he is relieved of the
greatest of evils, badness of psyche. And just as it is money-making
that relieves poverty, and medicine from disease; so it is justice that
relieves from evil of psyche. It does so even though it's unpleasant
because, like unpleasant therapy, it is beneficial (ôphelimon). Thus,
the wrongdoer who has been justly punished is better off than the
wrongdoer who hasn't been; and more than wrongdoing alone, the
worse thing is not to suffer justly for it. Conversely and finally,
though it is better to pay the just penalty for wrongdoing, best of all
is never to have done wrongjust as best of all is never to have
needed medicine.
At this point not only has Polos been tamed; he is also finally ready
to agree to the elenchos; the conclusion that refutes his initial claim
about the power of rhetoric. For, if the most wretched man is the
one who escapes the just punishment for wrongdoing, then a
rhetoric that deprives a man of the benefit of justice for himself
would not be doing what he really wished, since no one wishes the
greater evil for himself. The perverse power of such a rhetoric is
only to increase the sum of the wrongdoer's wretchedness in
helping him achieve merely what he thought was best, not what
was really good for him. As nobody willingly does harm to
himself, so anybody who harms himself has not done so willingly:
he has been powerless to do what he would have wanted (467aff.).
All along Sokrates' implication has been that a powerful rhetoric
would be one that helped you clarify what you really wanted,
namely, what was good for you, and that helped you achieve it. But
the explicit irony that he rubs in heavily, at the end of his refutation
of Polos, consists in the fact that rhetoric as practiced by the
Sophists is of no use whatsoever to the man who has no intention
of doing wrong (481a,b).
 Page 84

Kallicles, Rhetoric, and the Desire for More

Sokrates' final bit of sarcasm here is not supererogatory. It has a
structural purpose; it has been allowed by Plato (one sees) just so
as to provoke the impatience of Kallicles, the popular
Assemblyman. Accordingly, Kallicles abruptly intervenes,
accusing Sokcrates of trifling and of turning life upside down by
asking men to do the opposite of what they must (ha dei) by nature
do. Sokrates, he says, has caught both Polos and Gorgias in the
same trap by equivocating between the meanings of "degrading by
nature" and "degrading by convention" (438a). By nature it is not
degrading to do wrong; the natural law, illustrated by political
history, is rather that the naturally stronger and abler party will take
what he pleases from the weaker (484aA, b). And he will do this no
matter what any man-made law might say about it; for such laws
are merely confusing conventions devised by the weaker to protect
their own interest (483c). Only impractical philosophers like
Sokrates, who are no good at public affairs, seriously support such
laws. Indeed, to persist in the pursuit of philosophy until maturity
and middle age, as Sokrates has done, is the mark of a childish and
ridiculous man (484d-486d).
The reader must stand aside a moment to note that Kallicles, who
has pointed to the twofold meaning of "degrading" assumed by
Sokrates, has himself equivocated at 483d by extending the
meaning of "law" (nomos) from that of something agreed to, to that
of a rule in nature needing no sanction (nomos ge on tês physeôs).
Sokrates responds head-on to Kallicles' charges, but with quiet
irony and a clever invitation to be put to the test of Kallicles'
knowledge, wisdom and friendliness. So what do Pindar and you,
Kallicles, hold natural justice to be, Sokrates asks: that the superior
(kreittô) should take by force from the inferior (hêttonôn), that the
better (beltiô) should rule the worse (cheironôn), and that the
nobler (ameinô) should have more than the baser (phauloterous)?
By "superior" or "better" does Kallicles mean "stronger"? And
must the weaker follow the stronger? Can't some states be better
than others, yet weaker; or superior, yet more wicked? Does
"superior" or "better'' mean "stronger" (ischyroteron)?
Kallicles answers that yes, they all mean the same thing (488d).
But, says Sokrates, are not the assembled many superior by nature
over the individual? Yes. So the ordinances of the assembled many
are the ordinances of the better and, therefore, "fair" by nature
(kata physin kala)? Yes. But the opinion of the many is that it is
more degrading, or fouler, to do wrong than to suffer it; hence, it is
more degrading to do wrong than to suffer it by nature as well as
by convention! And Kallicles has been refuted once.
Stop catching at words, Sokrates, counters Kallicles, and
capitalizing on the slips people make. I don't mean superior in the
sense that a pack of slaves
 Page 85
is physically stronger than a single free man, but superior in the
sense of having sagacity and courage in public affairs (491d). So,
Sokrates leads him on, would justice be that the superior in this
sense should have more than those they rule? Yes. But, says
Sokrates, can they have more than themselves? On the assumption
that every man needs to rule himself, this is the absurdity that
followsthat the superior man should have more than he himself
has! But Kallicles does not grant the assumption. Kallicles and
Sokrates only appear to agree that the wise or the happy man must
be a free man.
In fact, their disagreement is radical; for in Kallicles' view the free
man does not have full control of himself. But in Sokrates'
understanding, a man isn't free if he can't regulate himself with his
own moderation (sôphrosynê). They have opposed interpretations
of the man without a master. Kallicles seems to be basing his on
"natural law": it is nobler by nature (he says) and just, for a man to
let his desires be great. To be able to satisfy great desires is courage
and competence (andreia kai phronêsis). For those who are strong
or privileged, to accept regulation is to accept as "law" and
"justice" the despotic censure of the incapable and cowardly
multitude. Happinesshuman excellenceis an unhindered
luxuriousness pursued in safety (492c). The sweetness of life is to
be ever filling up as much as possible (494b).
So then, asks Sokrates, for the inflow to be great must not the
outflow be great, too? Kallicles agrees: satisfaction is to eat when
hungry, to drink when thirsty, and to scratch when itching. The
pleasant life is the happy one. But it would follow from this,
Sokrates points out with embarrassment, that the happiest life is the
shameful life of the extreme and unnatural voluptuary or catamite.
Now Kallicles cannot convincingly object to this embarrassing
conclusion as long as he fails to distinguish between good
pleasures and bad ones (495a), and as long as he insists that
pleasure is altogether the same as good. Nonetheless, he stubbornly
refuses to accept the shameful consequences drawn by Sokrates. So
Sokrates takes up a different dialectical line. But it won't escape the
reader's notice that Kallicles has been refuted a second time, even if
Sokrates is being very mild about it. Sokrates is quite ready to
refute him again in the next series of questions and answers; but
both Gorgias (at 497a) and Kallicles himself (at 497a and 500d)
admit the refutation. It is thus that Kallicles becomes a tacitly
defeated, reluctant, and finally perfunctory respondent in the
development of Sokrates' next arguments.
Sarcasm and Sophistry, Argument and Allegory
The structural description of our dialogue is also helped if we stop
to note that Kallicles, when he was refuted the first time, had
accused Sokrates of
 Page 86
being sarcastic (eirôneuêi) at 489e. Actually, Sokrates retorted (at
485aff.), it is Kallicles who has been sarcastic about grown men
who persist in taking seriously the infantile interrogations of
philosophy. Sokrates uses the same verb, eirôneuomai, as Kallicles.
Jumping forward to when Sokrates has just finished refuting
Kallicles for the third time (at 497a), we notice that this time
Kallicles accuses him of being sophistical (sophizêi) and pretends
not to understand the distinctions that have refuted him.
But the distinctions and equivalences being argued were being
argued seriously by Kallicles (hôs sou spoudáizontos 495c), as he
has had to admit, even if with heavy irony in his voice (panu ge
sphodra). The clarified position that Kallicles claims he has held all
along is "that pleasant and good are the same, but that courage and
knowledge are both different from each other and from the good."
This is made explicit with the mock formality of Assembly-style
address by Sokrates. However, that Kallicles is not secure in the
position can be inferred from the quick and sarcastic use he makes
of the pun "from the foxes" (Alôpekêthen) that Socrates' deme-
identification inevitably suggests. It's quite appropriate, but it is the
sarcasm of a sore loser.
Sokrates' foxiness in this dialectical series consists in getting
Kallicles to agree that it would be irrational or contradictory
(alogon) to assert that you can get rich and poor, or well and ill, or
strong and weak at the same time (496c). So that if there is
something from which a man can suffer and of which he can be rid
at the same time, it is not anything good or bad. Things good and
bad, in a given respect, must be had in succession (496c). Kallicles
completely agrees.
Now, because thirst and hunger are painful and drinking and eating
pleasurable, when we drink while thirsty and when we eat while
hungry, we are getting pleasure while in pain. So pain and pleasure
are things it's possible to get and be rid of at the same time. But
we've just agreed that things that are good and things that are bad
are not things you can get and be rid of at the same time. It follows
that pain and pleasure aren't things in themselves good or bad.
Kallicles is refuted a third time; so he claims he can't follow
Sokrates' sophistry any more. But pressed by Gorgias to continue
to answer, Kallicles says it's the pettiness of Sokrates' questions
that refutes (ekselégchei). But he accedes to the pressure and
continues to give the shortest possible answers.
Sokrates is still bothered that though he has dialectically proved
that good things are not the same as the pleasant and that bad things
are not the same as the painful, Kallicles will not consent. So he
takes another approach. He first gets Kallicles to agree that
whoever is good is good because of something good in him, and
that whoever is bad is bad because of something bad in him. Next
he gets Kalicles to agree that those who have more of something
good (more
 Page 87
pleasure, in Kalicles' terms) are more good than those who have
less of it, while those who have something equally good are equally
good. Kallicles also agrees that the intelligent and the foolish, the
timid and the brave feel pain and pleasure about equally, with the
timid probably feeling these things more intensely than the brave.
But Kallicles agrees that the intelligent and brave man is good, and
that the fool and coward is bad; and he holds that the good and the
bad suffer and enjoy about the same, with the bad probably feeling
these things rather more intensely. From this and his previous
assertions, Sokrates now points out, it follows that the bad man is
made bad or good in exactly the same way as the good man. But
this is contrary to fact, since the coward has more pleasure in the
withdrawal of the enemy than the brave, and the greater pleasure
does not make him a good man. Nor is the good or brave man made
worse by feeling less pain at the withdrawal of the enemy.
Kallicles quickly tries to avoid a fourth elenchus by saying this
time that surely Sokrates will grant that he and everybody else
"regards some pleasures as better and some as worse" (499c).
Sokrates immediately starts a new series of questions, the first of
which causes Kallicles to concede the slightly different proposition
that some pleasures are good and some are bad. He further agrees
that good pleasures are those that have good consequences, and that
bad ones are those that have bad consequences. Sokrates now
reminds Kallicles that this is just what he and Polos had come to
earlier (at 468c): that the good is the end of all our actions. So, can
Kallicles agree that it is for the sake of the good that we should do
everything, including what is pleasant? Kallicles agrees. And is not
real skill necessary, for picking out which pleasant things are good
and which bad? Yes.
Sokrates next reminds Kallicles that Polos and Gorgias have
granted his distinction (464-465) between occupations that seek
only to give pleasure (like cookery) and those that want to know
what's good and what's bad (like medicine). And he begs Kallicles
not to trifle (paizein), for they are discussing the most serious of all
topicshow best to live one's life and, in particular whether
Sokcrates should practice rhetoric and go into politics or go on with
his very different sort of life in the pursuit of knowledge. But
Kallicles doesn't get the bearing of this; so Sokrates carefully
explains again the distinctions underlying his earlier
proportionality, and asks him whether he doesn't agree that any
skill or practice that causes pleasure without considering whether it
is good or bad is a form of flattery (501a-c). Kallicles emphatically
does not agree, but responds in order to please Gorgias and help the
argument to its conclusion.
But it is a shame that Kallicles has become perfunctory at just this
point and no longer answers Sokrates' questions seriously. For
when Sokrates asked
 Page 88
"do flute- and harp-playing, choral odes and dithyrambs aim only
at our pleasure?" a serious answerer might have said "no, some
may be also trying to make us better." We soon see, however, that
Plato has deliberately let Kallicles go perfunctory here, precisely so
that Sokrates may indulge without interruption in a diatribe against
the poets. Plato not only has Sokrates invoke two presumably bad,
now quite lost, audience-pleasers, he also lets Sokrates make the
contrary-to-fact assertion that the great Tragic poetry of Athens has
for its sole purpose the pleasure and gratification of the spectators.
Though Kallicles easily agrees with the assertion, it is contrary to
fact. The Tragic poetry of Sokrates' time included plenty of
anguish-causing verses and painful situations. Nor should we fail to
notice that Plato is here letting the reader see through his Sokrates,
by putting just those words into his mouth (502b) that will prod the
reader to remember that not all the verses nor all the scenes in
Tragedy are pleasure-causing. But Kallicles agrees that Tragic
poetry is flattery (!).
He also agrees that what is left when Tragic poetry is stripped of
meter, melody and rhythm is just speeches. What is poetry when
you have taken the poetry out of it? Kallicles mechanically agrees
to the next mistake, that poetry is a kind of public speaking because
the speeches that Tragedy becomes when you have taken the poetry
out of it are spoken to a great crowd. Actually, the speeches in
Tragedy are spoken as between the actors themselves and these and
the choruses. Sokrates is waxing outrageously sophistical in
pressing the preconception. So, he says, if poetry is public
speaking, then it must be rhetorical and poets must use rhetoric?
Yes. But must it not also be the worse kind of rhetoric, Sokrates
clearly implies, since the public at the theatre includes women,
children and slavesunlike the Assembly where only free men need
to be flattered (502d)! It is as if Plato had interrupted Sokrates'
dialectical deflation of Sophistic rhetoric to let his beloved creation
take a characteristically comic pseudo-swipe at his competition, the
tribal poets.
But the fact that Sokrates is presented as thinking Tragic poetry to
be even baser than Sophistic rhetoric shows that Plato in allowing
his character his premiss has also wanted the reader to see it as the
exaggeration that it is. [It is worth noting that on this occasion
Sokrates condemns both music and poetry. The fact that in the
Republic he decides to ban only poetry, ironically claiming that
some music can make the guardians good and keep them from
taking over the state, shows that Sokrates' dramatic attitudes to
music and poetry must be taken with a pinch of salt. It is not
impossible (though historically unverifiable) that part of the joke in
Sokrates' condemnation of poetry in the name of ethics was the
contrast Sokrates' attitude made to Plato's own love of poetry, a
love known to his contemporaries but suppressed by his successors.
It is a wonder how Aristotle's well-documented love of the Tragic
poetry
 Page 89
of Athens could have survived twenty formative years of
association with a poetry-hating Plato. One also wonders how the
attitude, towards the extant varieties of dramatic form, of the
inventor of the dialogue-form which he derived from them, could
be as entirely negative as Plato's anti-dialoglcal interpreters have
claimed. At Phaedrus 268c-e, Sokrates explicitly denies the view
that Tragedy reduces to a mere aggregate of speeches!]
When Sokrates asks the parallel question (502e) whether the
orators, like the poets, are merely concerned with pleasing the
Assemblies of the city-states, Kallicles alertly objects that some
orators care about the citizens. But in any case, Sokrates persists,
you do allow that some oratory is flattery and shameful
demagoguery? So name me an orator, he continues, who has been
concerned to make the lives, or souls, of the citizens good.
Kallicles can only name the dead speakers Pericles, Miltiades,
Kimon and Themistocles. But did even they, Socrates asks,
promote only those desires whose satisfaction was good for the
citizens? And did they possess a special art-and-science that looks
beyond the order of craftsmanship to the justice and wisdom of the
conditions under which men will be good (503d-504e)? Sokrates is
speaking of a political art-and-science that will generate justness
and intelligent civility (sôphrosynê) in men; and, at first, Kallicles
agrees that there should be such an art. But as soon as it emerges
that this art-and-science will impose restraints upon desire and
corrections upon men, Kallicles again tries to break away from the
argument. Gorgias, however, wants it concluded; so Sokrates
proceeds with it on the understanding that Kallicles will interrupt
him if he says anything Kallicles cannot agree with.
What is pending that needs concluding is a convincing discussion
of the relation between rhetoric and the political art. Sokrates'
conception of this relation is obscure to Gorgias because as a
foreigner he doesn't practice the latter; he only teaches the former.
And Kallicles is willing to at least hear what Sokrates has to say
about it: he is still at the beginning of his political career (515a),
and Sokrates has both challenged the superiority of that career over
the life of inquiry and put rhetoric, the instrument of politics, into
the same box as cookery and cosmetics. Sokrates himself, we soon
discover, wants to call attention to the basic wrongness in the
politician's idea of his relation to the people, because it is the same
kind of basic wrongness committed by Sophistic teachers of
excellence who complain about the cheapness of their pupils
(520b). So the discussion continues. But by this time the point that
Sokrates has been wanting to make, namely, that the true art
(technê) of rhetoric is not distinguishable from inquiry after the
truth in the pursuit of human goods, has yielded the foreground to
the refutation of Kallicles' insistence that the political life is the
best, and that rhetoric (as Kallicles conceives it) is essential to the
preservation of life and property.
 Page 90
After all, Sokrates objects, doctors and lawyers, swimming, and
ships' pilots also preserve the lives and property of those they
serve. But they do not immodestly claim superiority over all other
professions, as the politicians so defensively do. The complete
(teleios) man, as Sokrates has shown, is the intelligently moderate
(sôphron) man (507C). In doing whatever he does well, he will be
happy; and, in his justness, he is not easily made unhappy even if
he should suffer wrong (!). The politicians are really useless if they
do nothing for the people they claim to serve. And to Sokrates it
does not seem that they do the public any good. For they don't
make men's lives better or their souls good. This was just the
trouble with the supposedly great statesmen named by Kallicles:
that they were too much forced to give to the public what it thought
it desired rather than what was good for it.
Didn't Pericles in fact corrupt the Dêmos, Sokrates leads again at
515e, by paying it for what was only its political duty and making
it idle and talkative, cowardly and money-loving? Not only is
Sokrates here, as usual, indulging in political irony; he is telling
Kallicles that even if he achieves the reputed greatness (in his own
career) of Athens's outstanding statesmen, he will not have
achieved anything really good. According to the Aristotelian
Athenian Constitution, the historical fact was that Aristeides the
Just had first encouraged the people into Empire by offering them
careers paid out of the tribute from the Allies. In introducing pay
for the court service of the dikasts, Pericles was only offsetting the
influence of Kimon's wealth upon the people. But in neutralizing
the political power of oligarchal wealth, Pericles had also
introduced the possibility of corruption into democratic politics.
The clever exaggeration shows that Sokrates is being sarcastic, not
just historical, in his reporting.
In fact, continues Sokrates, enlightening and amusing us with the
paradoxes of politics: the kind of service that politicians give the
public precludes their being good for it. It is merely rhetorical; it is
flattery, not the justice-seeking ministration that would have made
men better in the conduct of their lives. So that if the people are
ungrateful to their statesmen in the end, it is because their lives, or
souls, have not been improved. And the politicians are not entitled
to complain about the harsh treatment they get in return, for
whatever else they may have accomplished for the public, they
have not promoted justness in it. If they had promoted justness in
the people, they would not now be suffering "injustice" at their
hands. In this respect, the rhetoric of the politicians is quite like the
sophistry of the Sophistic teachers of excellence who complain that
they have been defrauded by their pupils. The latter may have
learned some Sophistic skills, but like gourmet eaters, they are not
benefited by what they have taken in. Not made good by their
teachers, they can do no good to them. Thus, if the rhetoric within
which the politician relates to
 Page 91
the people does not look to the conditions under which the people
can be good, then the politician can in turn expect no good from the
people. A true teacher of excellence will not ask for payment.
Having made his pupils good, he can securely expect only good
from them.
Still, says Kallicles, you cannot claim that the men of today have
achieved anything as great as the men of old (517b-c). You think
that, Sokrates answers because they provided fortifications and
arsenals and fleets for the city. But they were not better in bringing
the city to what was good for it. You keep retracting truths,
Kallicles, that you had previously granted; let us not circle
endlessly around the same point. You have admitted, so you must
stick to it, that there are two modes in which the affairs of body and
life may be managed: the way in which medicine and gymnastics
help them, and the way in which Sophistic politics-and-rhetoric
claim to serve the life of the citizens, in contrast to the way in
which the legislative art and the administration of justice actually
facilitate their lives in the polis. And you will see in your new
career, Kallicles, that you are blamed for failures in present affairs
that are caused by errors in the laws and administration of the
famous statesmen you were praising (519a). So, Kallicles, to which
of these two ways of managing (therapeuô) the city are you
inviting me (521a)? Am I to fight for its health like a doctor, or to
serve (diakoneô) it like a caterer and always humor the people?
Like a caterer, Kallicles cynically answers.
At this point we see that Plato has laid open his dialogue to the
existential irony of the contrast between what happened to the
historical Sokrates and what Sokrates is here desiderating. At the
moment when Plato's Sokrates has just turned the tables on the
Sophistic politicians and rhetoricians, the reader is reminded by
what Plato makes him say in reply to Kallicles' cynicism that
Sokrates, who spent his life freely trying (with true but painful
science, 521d, 522a) to make the Athenians better, was nonetheless
condemned to death by a majority vote of an Athenian jury. The
success of the intellectual peripeteia resulting from Sokrates'
inquiry is shadowed by the impending tragedy of his arraignment
by political cosmeticians and demagogic caterers. Moreover, the
"prospective analogy" or "retrospective prophecy" about his own
death that Plato makes Sokrates utter here, succeeds also in
conveying an imperturbable strength in Sokrates and a clear-
headed self-irony. As the words of a dramatic character they are
suitably astonishing in their modesty and far-sightedness. As a
pregnant allusion by Plato to the historical fate of the once and
future Sokrates, they are also a Tragic (i.e., dramatic)
memorialization of the political cutting-edge of Sokrates'
intellectual activity. The Tragic emotion is kept well in hand,
however, by Plato's skill in projecting the beauty and comedy, not
so much of the human as of the intellectual condition.
 Page 92
You can be sure Kallicles, Sokrates concludes, that as long as he
has avoided injustice, even though not avoiding unjust
condemnation, a man will cut a noble figure in his city and not be
helpless (522d). It is not death that a man should fear but doing
wrong. For death (Haidês), which all must face, is not fearful to the
man unburdened with wrongdoing as he confronts it. And now
finally, and as long as Kallicles has encouraged me to be as
conclusive as he has, I will add a true story or account (mython,
logon) to his conclusions, says Socrates, in pointed but ironic
response to Kallicles' disbelief. This story is the myth with which
Sokrates rejects Kallicles' invitation to the political life and its self-
importance, perjuries, betrayals and injustices. The myth is an
account designed by Sokrates to convey to Kallicles a counter-
invitation to the pseudo-art of politics, offering instead the pursuit
of the practice of human excellence that alone will not befoul his
soul. And it is an invitation to put his trust in the rewards of
justness. For, Sokrates implies, however these rewards are
mythologized, neither Kallicles nor Polos nor Gorgias have
succeeded in proving that any other life than a just life of human
excellence is worth living.
Note
1. This would seem to be one use of the syntagm kalos k'agathos
that is not ironical. It was probably precipitated by the contrast with
adikon kai poneron. The historian of belief would like to know
how much "rassentiment" there was behind the non-literary use of
the term in Athenian culture at large.
 Page 93

Chapter 6
Irony, Dialogue, and Dialectic:
An Interdialogical Interlude
"Philosophies may die of too much method. But doxography is a killer of
philosophy itself."

On the Use of the Term "Irony" in the Dialogues

Most readers of Plato have at some point paid lip service to his skill
as a prose writer. But this acknowledgement has not helped us to
understand in what way Plato's mastery of the peculiar medium he
chose to work in has contributed to making him the great
philosopher he is. One of the obstacles to this understanding has
been our unsuspecting failure to perceive, through the unrelenting
fog of platonist commentary and in the distorting medium of
translation, that Plato was a great master of irony. Another main
obstacle has been a longstanding lack of clarity as to the nature of
irony, perhaps due to our tendency to repress the perception of
something that is usually a matter of mixed emotions. It is like the
pleasure we get from a Tragedy; the balance in irony of pleasure
over pain seems rather small; it is only the glinting tip of the
iceberg and the seething submarine temperatures within it.
In its more massive manifestations, either as an elaborated literary
product or as an emergent complexity and felt tension in the course
of affairs, irony is something that requires both a perception of
structure and the
 Page 94
acknowledgement of an intensity of feeling. Though more often
following from comic rather than tragic complications, irony is as
often sobering as it is exhilarating in its effect. Conversely, one of
the peculiarities in the perception of irony is that we sometimes
laugh at what is not on reflection funny; though not all cases in
which we laugh at what is not funny are necessarily cases of irony.
It is not that irony is indefinable; irony is definable as well as
indefinable in a sense analogous to that in which art isin a way
definable, but in another way not. It is rather that a perceived irony
can in every case be rejected as an instance of ironyby the choice of
a point of view from which the irony can no longer be seen. In
other words, that irony has occured is always disputable.
The problem of irony is like the problem of beauty because irony is
a species of art. One distinctive trait of this species of art is its
inevitable moral reference or allusiveness, both when this reference
is only implicit and when it is allegorical. Another distinguishing
characteristic of irony is its intellectual nature. It is not disputable
that the perception of this kind of art requires a dianoetic or
intellectual, combinatory, contrastive, analytic, or synthetic act on
the part of the perceiver. The differential trait connected with its
precarious recognizability as irony, and with the balance of
pleasure in it, consists in the fact that there is a superadded (but not
superficial) pleasure in the very effort and triumph of intelligence
over chaos and inertia that it takes to establish the irony. Here, the
perception of irony can often be seen to involve a rebellious, or a
resigned, reaffirmation of humanity. Irony is, thus, a species of
criticism as well as a species of art.
Consider on the other hand the smaller ironies of everyday life that
we all experience, and either tolerate or don't. They first of all
differentiate themselves from the situations that we don't take to be
ironic. Next we find that, if we have abstained from verbalizing
them as they occurred to our perception, we still silently registered
them as implicit or incomplete moral judgments. If we verbalized
the irony in such a way as not to have to do anything more about it,
it was because we were involved with it mainly as an aesthetic
phenomenon. In verbalizing the irony we made something like an
artistic judgment about the ironic occurrence, and did something
towards abreacting (working off) the painful ingredient in the
situation. When we acted, however, to terminate or change the
ironic situation, we did so as the result of a moral judgment, or
were in fact executing an active judgment or judgmental act.
Perhaps the two extreme sorts of irony between which other kinds
can be seen to fall are (i) ironies discovered to be founded upon
failures of human intelligence, and (ii) ironies ascribed to accident
or existential contingency. I think that in both cases the deeper
meaning of irony declares itself to consist
 Page 95
in not just a reaffirmation of humanity after chaos or failure, but
also in the affirmation of a will to live more intelligently. The
ironist as I see him is not likely to be a suicide, since it requires
strength of mind to affirm an irony. The ironist who, like Sokrates,
does choose death can be found to have done so as an affirmation
in the human arithmetic of his own integrity. He has judged that the
balance of pain over pleasure in his existence is no longer, and will
never be again, intelligently supportable.
Thus, the nonpathological and noncompulsive acceptance of death
succeeds in reversing, for consciousness or for posterity, a situation
that was destroying or negating an individual's integrity. Very
generally, irony exhibited or expressed can be categorized as the
liberating or preservative reversal of a disturbing negation of what
is believed to be the human interest. A merely perceived irony
would be the allegorical, or paradoxical, imposition of a human
interest or structured tension upon a given sitation. If the liberating
act is inhibited or the preservative gesture repressed, pain if not
neurosis is likely to ensue. The attempts at irony of someone
already neurotic are secondary elaborations that, like his other
symptoms, express the neurosis without curing it, that is, they do
not usually express the deep ''double bind," the existentially
conflicted life-structure, in which the neurotic as neurotic is
trapped. "Paradoxical" (para to ethos) is used by Plato's Sokrates to
mean "contrary to custom" (42a). At Republic 472a Sokrates
himself draws attention to the counter-cultural nature of his ironic
proposals by applying the term paradoxical (paradoxon) to them.
We are reminded that true irony; like art, can sometimes have a
healing effect. Petty irony, on the other hand, can often be an
expression of neurotic tendency.
Just as it is in the enlargement or renewal of perceptivity that we
find the crux at which art occurs; so it is ever in human
reversalssituational or discursive, temporal or structural, active or
accidentalthat we will find irony. And it is just at this business of
accomplishing reversals in discourse or perception that we mainly
find Plato's Sokrates in the dialogues. Accordingly, rather than
illustrate these generalizations from anywhere else, we will now
take a more deliberate look at Sokrates' ironic activity in the
dialogues. We need not repeat what we have seen so far, nor do I
wish to anticipate what is inductively discovered in the rest of this
book; but a brief examination of Sokrates' use of the word "irony"
will help our inquiry into some of the ways by which Plato
achieves the discursive and dramatic ironies that are the
constitutive core of his philosophic activity and acuteness.
"Irony," as we all know and as Pape says in his Handwörterbuch,
"was the weapon with which Sokrates fought the Sophists." This
lexicographer intriguingly defines eirôneia as "covered up speech"
(Verstellung in Reden) and rou-
 Page 96
tinely cites the occurrence of the word at Republic 337a. But it
seems to me that the important point hidden in this reference has
never been made explicit enough. This point is that Thrasymachos,
the Sophist, is quite right in charging Plato's Sokrates with a
systematic evasion of part of the duty of a participant in a formal
dialectical exchange of questions and answers. The duty that Plato's
Sokrates evades is that of taking his turn at answering, when he is
himself put to the question. All readers of Plato will recognize that
his Sokrates is the greatest of questioners. But there is a problem
about the nature of the answers that Sokrates gives, when he does
answer. For they are seldom straightforward answers, or given
according to the rules of eristic dialectical contests, and this is the
case even though Sokrates, as in the Gorgias, is himself quite strict
in forcing an eminent but reluctant respondent to answer properly.
In what follows we will seek to clarify the nature of some of
Sokrates' answers to his dialectical respondents, and the sense in
which they are ironic.
I am not complaining that Plato's Sokrates does not give positive
answers to new or recognized philosophic questions; though,
whether he does or not in fact give such answers is an important
problem in the interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The reader is
simply asked to note that Plato never represents his Sokrates as an
interlocutor who, in submitting to a series of dialectical questions,
feels obliged to give the short straight answers that Sokrates
extracts from his respondents. Notice, for instance, how quicklyin
submitting to the questions of Polos in the GorgiasSokrates ceases
to be a simple respondent and becomes the explicit prompter and
formulator of the very questions that Polos must put to him,
Sokrates.
The Greeks thought of the ironist (ho eirôn) as someone "who says
something other than what he thinks; who says he cannot do what
he can do." We, in our time, rather think of the ironist as someone
who draws attention to something troublesome but relevant, that
has not been noticed for the very reason that it is troublesome.
Most often there is an element of surprise in the reminder. But this
element may have been less important in the Greek response to
irony than the element of reversal nourished by Tragedy and
Comedy. In Aristotle's Ethics IV. 13 the ironist is the opposite of
the boaster (alazôn), who claims to be more than he is. According
to Plato's Sokrates at Apology 38a, to ironize (eirôneuomai] means
"to speak in jest," not so much in the sense of joking as in the sense
of saying something that won't be believed, or of saying it
insincerely. So, respectively, does Fowler translate the word, and
Adam comment upon it, when they come to this passage. Pape
translates eirôneuomai as "pretending not to know what one does
know" (sich unwissend stellen in dem, was man weiss). But does
this fit the passage (38a) in question?
Sokrates is saying towards the end of Apology that if he tells his
juror-judges
 Page 97
he's only acting in obedience to God, then they'll think he's
"ironizing." This seems to mean (i) that they won't believe him, and
(ii) that Sokrates perceives his audience will take him not to believe
the oracle upon which he he claims to be acting. So (iii) Sokrates
won't press the God's mandate as an excuse for his behavior.
But this doesn't mean that Sokrates is only pretending to believe or
follow the mandate. Nor, since the oracle was actually issued (in
the fiction of the drama), does it entail that he's insincere; he is
represented by Plato as busily following his interpretation of the
oracle. It just means he knows he won't at first be believed, i.e., that
he'll be taken to be ironizing. The question arises, is it then a
necessary condition of irony that the ironic speaker knows he's
saying something his audience finds it hard to believe? The
inductive answer would seem to be, rather, that it is only a frequent
accompaniment of irony.
Since Sokrates' practice in the dialogues varies in this respect, we
cannot give an affirmative answer to the question. Sometimes he
knows he won't be believed, as in the Apology; sometimes he
means to be believed and his hearer wants to believe, as in the
Krito. But sometimes he is believed as in the so-called "proofs" of
immortality in the Phaedo, when the reader (along with Simmias
and Kebes) can see that he does not himself take literally what he is
saying. Lastly, and as we shall see in the development of the
satirical allegory of the luxurious state in the Republic, Sokrates
knows and the reader knows that the spirit in which he is advancing
his construction is not necessarily the spirit in which his
interlocutors will take it. I hope to show how this comes about in
the chapters on "the remedial constitution"; but it will then be the
case that speakers who might take Sokrates literally (as
Adeimantos and Glaucon seem to do) will not have benefited from
Sokrates' irony. More seriously, it will be the case that readers of
the Republic who miss the satirical spirit in which Plato's Sokrates
is working from the middle of Book II on, or who take him to be
speaking prescriptively, will also fail to benefit from the irony.
According to Theophrastos's Characters I.1, irony is "pretending to
be not so good in acting and speaking (prospoiêsis epi cheiron
prakseôn kai logôn . . .). Here the question that arises is,
"pretending to be worse" than what, than himself or than another?
And this helps with the leading question that a reader of the
dialogues must ask: "is this what we find Plato's Sokrates actually
doing? Does he feign an inferiority to himself, that we are shown
he doesn't suffer from? Does he use his repeated claim to be
ignorant of the subject under inquiry as a feint with which to lead
on his interlocutor, or is there also not a sense in which his
ignorance is real?"
It's certainly true that the doubts Sokrates is made to express, when
a Thrasymachos offers his definition of justice or a Gorgias his
definition of
 Page 98
rhetoric, are genuine. For as we will see, Sokrates does not in the
Republic give a definition of justice in the usual sense of definition,
despite the claims of idealist commentators. And in the Gorgias, he
must refute the Gorgianic definitions of rhetoric as an art (technê)
because he is there presented as believing that Sophistic rhetoric
isn't an art but only a practice (empeiria) that gives no rational
account of itself. Thus, the expression of his doubts in the form of
dialectical questions does lead to the refutation of the theses of
Thrasymachos and Gorgias. The refutations create the openings
that allow Sokrates in the two dialogues, respectively, to advance
his allegory about the difficulties of instituting justice in the state,
and his ethical critique of the Sophistic practice of rhetoric.
Notice further that what Sokrates maintains at Gorgias 480c to
480d as a logical consequence of his ethical critique of the
Sophistic practice of rhetoric is precisely what Euthyphro is made
to act out in the dialogue that bears his name. Euthyphro is bringing
to light, and to justice, the wrongdoing of a relativehis fatherin the
righteous conviction that it is good to do so. The wonderful thing
about Plato is that in this other dialogue, he brings out (through his
Sokrates) the difficulties of putting into practice a dialectically
supported conclusion of the Sokrates in the Gorgias. We have
already had a look in the Gorgias at some of the paradoxical
consequences of Sokrates' critique of the Sophists.
Another paradoxical consequence that is made explicit by Sokrates
(at 480e-81c) is that evil that goes unpunished is its own worst
punishment; and that, therefore, if we want our wrongdoing
enemies really to suffer the worst, we should let them go
unpunished. Now this will perhaps be not so paradoxical to those
who believe that human excellence (aretê) is its own reward. For if
human excellence is its own best reward, could it not also be the
case that anti-human evil is its own greatest punishment? It is thus
structurally right, and dramatically beautiful timing, that at just this
point (481b) the young Sophist Kallicles finds it impossible to
believe that Sokrates means what he says, and that the Socratic
disciple Chaerephon asserts that he is eminently serious. "Tell me,
Chaerephon, is Sokrates serious about this, or is he kidding?" "It
seems to me, Kallicles, that he is eminently serious" (481b). 1
Kallicles then undertakes a serious, or formal, dialectical
discussion with Sokrates in which he tries to maintain that it is only
by convention that doing wrong is more degrading (aischion) than
suffering it; and that by nature it is just (dikaion) for the man who
is more able or superior (ameinô, dynatoteron) to take more for
himself than the man who is inferior and less able (cheiron,
adynatoteron 483d). But as soon as Kallicles finds himself refuted,
he repeats the charge that Sokrates is still drivelling (houtosì anêr
ou pausetai phluarôn, 489e1) rather than recognize that he is being
dialectical and ironic.
 Page 99
Kallicles thus seems to mean by "being ironic" that one is either
"trifling" or that one is "playing" or ''pretending" (paizôn). Being
ironic, for Kallicles, would seem to be the opposite of being serious
(spoudazôn). However, Kallicles' accusation is immediately
countered by Sokrates' rejoinder that it is rather Kallicles who has
been making Sokrates the target of his irony or disapproving
sarcasm (489e3). For Kallicles has just been ridiculing persons
who persist into middle age in the pursuit of philosophy. And
Kallicles has implied that Sokrates, because he is such a man,
would not know how to conduct himself in either the law courts or
the public Assembly. The reader nonetheless perceives that in spite
of these mutual charges, both men are quite serious about the views
that they are each defending. Plato's Sokrates is ironic in this
dialogue mainly in the sense that he has been quietly selective in
what he was saying about rhetoric in the early exchange with
Gorgias. He was brilliant, and he remained empirical; but by
holding back till the end the good things that could be said about
rhetoric, he was able to systematically deprecate the practice of
rhetoric not based on knowledge of the subject-matter and on
knowledge of the good.
In calling it a branch of the technique of flattery and a false
claimant to being a branch of political science, 2 Sokrates did
appear to be serious in his definition of what at this stage was being
called rhetoric by his interlocutors. But it turns out he was being
eristically serious about the skillful but irresponsible practices of
the rhetoricians of his day, practices that fell short of being the art-
and-science (technê) that rhetoric can be when it is based on
knowledge of (i) the special subject under consideration and of (ii)
the political ends and human goods involved. Once the reader has
appreciated this reversal, he is in a position to see how ironic
Sokrates was being with his earlier definition. In it he gave the
appearance of being inductive and descriptive, when actually he
was being powerfully derogatory. Strictly speaking there is no
"joke" here, only dialectical effectiveness. The earlier derogatory
definition gives added seriousness to the later normative definition,
and the normative definition gives added point to the critical
description masquerading as a definition. We are again reminded
that just as the beautiful is not only what is pretty, so too does the
ironic consist not only of what is amusing. There was, nonetheless,
humor as well as truth in the homely analogy that Sokrates drew
between gourmet cookery and Sophistic rhetoric.
This is the sort of dialogical development we must keep track of if
we are to understand the ends that Plato was pursuing with the
creation of his Sokrates and the dialogue-form that he inhabits.
Whether there is "Socratic" irony in a given dialogue or not, and of
what sort; whether the larger ironies that some of the dialogues
crystallize ought rather to be spoken of as Plato's; and whether or
not it is in the dramatic structuring of these ironies that we can
most clearly
 Page 100
see that Plato's presentational mode obviates the need for "doctrinal
system" or extra-dialogical assertion, are questions that I hope this
inquiry will help the reader to answer.
We may round out this sketch with an expansion upon Ast's
Lexicon Platonicum, and with the scholium to eirôneuomenos,
ironizer, at Symposium 216e. The scholiast reinforces our sense of
the ambiguities and range of the term "eirôneuomenos" with the
two synonyms he offers. These are chleuazôn and hypokrinomenos:
the former means "joking" or "jesting"; but one of the meanings of
the latter is very close to "answerer" or ''answering"
(apokrinomenos). In fact, hypokrinomenos also means
"interpreting" (as of an oracle) or "role-playing," as well as
"simulating" or "dissimulating." To these connotations Ast's
lexicon tellingly adds the meaning for eirôneuomai of "cavillor,"
i.e., tease, vex, or change one's tone. And all of these are things
Plato's Sokrates can be found to be doing in the central dialogues
that must be the point of departure for an inquiry such as ours. He
teases Glaucon in the Republic, he vexes Kallicles in the Gorgias,
and in Republic Book II Sokrates radically changes his tone, as we
shall see below. Also among the connotations of eirôneuomai in its
equation with cavillor are: to be evasive, to find fault, to doubt, to
be sharp or subtle, to engage in "subterfuge,"again, all of them
things that we find either Plato or his Sokrates doing or being
throughout the dialogues, and all of them things it could take
volumes to illustrate.
In any case, a part of the secret lies in the explanation of why
Sokrates' kind of irony can look like subterfuge to the observer of
his victims. Plato's Sokrates does not usually reveal his dialectical
strategy to his interlocutors until they have been trapped into
contradiction. His questions look innocent, or are such that the
interlocutor doesn't know how to take them. If he takes them
seriously, he is soon made to look foolish; if he takes them as a
joke or as trifling, he is soon seriously embarrassed or silenced. In
the end, the process is an artful tribute by Plato to the dialectical
resourcefulness of his Sokrates. For Plato has taken care to make
the process as amusing to his readers as it is painful to Sokrates'
fictional victims and to the targets in the culture that they mask.
Ironically, just as some of Plato's historical subjects would not have
understood his witty criticism of what they stood for, so to this day
is Plato still not understood as the satirizer that he was of many a
favorite doctrine, mode of argument, or institution.
Dialogue and Dialectic, Analytical and Logical
The Aristotelian Topics can be called "dialectical" because it is a
work about reasoning, persuasion, and the producing of conviction.
But it is still inno-
 Page 101
cent of the deductive principle of the syllogism; the Topics was
written before the Analytics. The principle of the syllogism,
discovered and displayed in the Analytics constitutes Aristotle's
conception of deductive reasoning. The Prior Analytics are what
logicalists would call his strictly logical work. Thus, in the first
place, we seem to have a contrast in Aristotle between "dialectics"
and "analytics," in which dialectics (the art of persuasive reasoning
to produce conviction) is not limited to, but is wider than, strictly
logical or syllogistic demonstration.
But we also find, in the second place, that there is some contrast in
Aristotle between logikos and analytikos. In Posterior Analytics
1.22.84a8, for instance, logikos is used as synonymous with
reasoning in general, but analytikos is restricted to purely
syllogistic (deductive) reasoning. So here we have "logical" and
"dialectical" on one side, distinguished from "analytical" on the
other. This will remind us that it is only since the last half century,
out of twenty-five hundred years, that "logical" has meant "purely
logical'' or strictly deductive (formalist). But neither are notions of
deductivity themselves unchanging and eternally fixed. However,
our problem is not with "logical" but with "dialectical."
In Aristotle, then, the difference between syllogistic reasoning and
dialectical reasoning (see Topics Bk.I) is that the first is apodeictic,
because it proceeds from premisses that are "true and primary,"
whereas the second reasons from premisses that are only "generally
accepted" (endoksa). This makes dialectical reasoning what we
would call hypothetical or "iffy" reasoning. In any case, finally,
dialectic is here only a part of the "organon" or instrumentation of
the search for knowledge, not knowledge itself.
Eleatic Method
Now, Aristotle called Zeno of Eleawho flourished around 460
B.C.the founder of dialectic, 3 because in the paradoxes that made
Zeno famous, he did not claim to be arguing from premisses he
knew to be true but from premisses admitted by his adversaries.
Between the lifetimes of Parmenides and Aristotle, then, it was
clear to all concerned (from Eleatics and Sophists to Sokrates, from
Protagoras to Plato) that dialectical reasoning was hypothetical, not
apodeictic.
It is also ultimately to Zeno that the Greek founders of geometry
owed the method of disproof known as "reduction to absurdity."
Thus, the geometric mode of reasoning was in its origins deeply
involved with the dialectical or hypothetical method of reasoning.
Because this has been obscured by Scholastic logic and Cartesian
mathematicism, we need to recover and emphasize
 Page 102
as a fact in Plato's background that if Plato was as much influenced
by geometry as historians like to state (from, for example,
Hermann and Stallbaum to J. H. Randall), then the geometers'
reductios or dialectical habits must have been as present to his
mind, and as operative in his dialogues, as their demonstrative
endeavors. Of course, the kinds of problem that Zeno and the
geometers were solving didn't so easily allow of practicing the
dialectical method by means of oral questioning and answering.
They must have worked graphically, and been among the first
theorists to do so.
Plato's Protagoras as a Dissòs Lógos, or Protagoras Protagorized
So, if we look for a dialectician among the practitioners of the art
of oral disputation, we find the outstanding one to be the Sophist
Protagoras. Protagoras (as we all know) was famous for his
antilogies, or dissoì lógoi, which were sets of arguments first on
one side of a given claim and then on the other. Protagoras'
procedure seems to have consisted in taking a pair of contradictory
assertions and then giving arguments in favor of boththus
constructing what we call an antimony. Because Zeno had
repeatedly (or systematically) deduced contradictory conclusions
from his adversaries' assertions (thus rendering them not only
hypothetical but untrue, too), it seems that Protagoras inferred that
it is always possible to construct an antimony on any question.
In any case, we see that the doctrinal relativism imputed to
Protagoras by the speakers in the Theaetetus has a methodological
counterpart in Protagoras's manual on the art of eristic disputation,
or agonistics. It is safe to assume, then, that Plato's methodological
sophistication took fuller cognizance of this fact than we who are
noticing it now. We may conclude that inasmuch as Zeno's concern
to refute Parmenides' dogmatic opponents minimized the assertive
side of Eleaticism while maximizing its methodology, Plato's
consciousness of "Eleaticism" must certainly have featured its
famous methodology quite as much as or more than its disputedor,
rather, imputeddoctrines. Sokrates' words in the Phaedrus (261d)
make explicit the connection, in Plato's reflection, between
Eleaticism and method: "Do we not know that the Eleatic
Palamedes (i.e., Zeno) has such an art of speaking that the same
things appear to his hearers alike and unlike, one and many,
stationary and in motion?"
Correspondingly, we can also conclude in relation to Protagoras
that Plato was at least as aware of his skillful and methodic
technique as he was of his doctrineif, that is, he held dogmatically
(rather than antilogistically) to any. It is indeed not his doctrines
that are discussed in the dialogue that Plato honors with his name.
It would seem rather that the Protagoras is an extended
 Page 103
tribute to, or dramatic application of, the method of the Dissòi
Lógoi in which we find both of the master-disputants each taking,
in turn, both sides of the same question, namely, reversing
themselves on it! The Protagoras, we can say, was Plato's twofold
argument to end all twofold arguments. Indeed, on the question
itself, whether human excellence can be taught only if there is an
idea of it, we notice also that the different possible positions all get
the support, in successive anastrophes, of both Sokrates and
Protagoras. As far as Plato, the author, is concerned, this is neither
skepticism nor eclecticism, but rather the dramatic dialogue as
critical inquiry into alterntive solutions of a given problem.
Is Plato's Parmenides an Eleaticized Protagoras or Parmenides
Zenonized?
In the Parmenides Plato's youthful Sokrates complacently clears
up, to his own naive satisfaction, a paradox of Zeno's by invoking
the theory of ideas. Sokrates is then confronted by the fictional
Parmenides with a series of real difficulties in his theory, and he
cannot solve them. Parmenides' intent, however, was not refutative
or elenchtic, but kindly and educational, as we see from Stephanus
pages 135-136. He tells the youthful Sokrates that his impulse
towards reasoning (epì toûs lógous) is beautiful and sacred, but that
he needs more training (gymnasía). "What, then, is the method of
training?" the youth asks. "That which you heard Zeno practicing,"
Parmenides answers. The older man then commends Sokrates for
dealing with his problem in terms of what is grasp-able by reason
rather than by anything else (i.e., for dealing with it in what we
would call mainly conceptual terms), and goes on to urge that he
acquire practice in the elaboration of antilogies. "You must do
something more than that," i.e., than think mainly in conceptual
terms; ''you must consider not only what happens if a given
hypothesis is true, but also what happens if it is not true." Asked by
Sokrates to frame a hypothesis and illustrate the method, so as to
help Sokrates understand it, Zeno declines the request, but adds
that "without a far-ranging (planês) circuit (dieksodon) of the mind
through all things, it cannot attain the truth." To recapitulate, the
training that is being recommended to the young Sokrates has here
been said to have the following characteristics: (i) it is training in
handling what is especially graspable by reason; (ii) it is training in
the construction of antilogies; (iii) it is training in looking at the
consequences of asserting and of denying hypotheses; and (iv) it is
systematic or, at least, a very thorough search for instances and
counterinstances.
 Page 104
It is the old philosopher, our father Parmenides himself, who
consents to illustrate the training method and conduct a full-scale
dialectical exercise. The hypothesis he takes up is "whether the one
is or is not" (eite hen estin eite mê hen): and he is made to say by
the author of the dialogue that it is his own hypothesis. Without
taking up the question of whether in fact this was the exact starting
point of the philosophy of the historical Parmenides, we can agree
that the exercise that Parmenides conducts appears to meet all the
conditions specified earlier for the dialectical training method. It
follows that any discussion of detail that is not to violate the
integrity of this work of Plato's must be based on an effective
recognition of its dialectic (or antilogistical) structure, both as it
arises within, and is generative of the last and longest part of the
architectonic of the dialogue.
Any reader who has thought about the influence of the historical
Zeno or the significance of the historical Protagoras, willwhen he
comes to Plato's Parmenidesbe both pleased and challenged by the
pervasive mixture of Zenonian and Protagorean traits in the logical
behavior of the father of philosophy in the dialogue that honors him
with its name. Zeno had applied his dialectical method to
Parmenides' dogmatic opponents: Plato now applies Zeno's method
to (what is said to be) Parmenides' own doctrine. This is one irony.
It is another irony that the whole performance (in part two of the
dialogue) looks, as to form, like a monumental Protagorean dissòs
lógos. Antinomies I to IV (137c-160b) rehearse the paradoxical
consequences of the hypothesis that the one is, while antinomies V
to Vll (160b-166c) elaborate the paradoxes that arise if this
hypothesis is denied. There can be no doubt that Plato is a past-
master of the dialectic method (in the antilogistic sense of dialectic)
of argumentation, both as it had been practiced down to his time
and as it came to be characterized by Aristotle.
But doesn't an emphasis on Plato's use of, and fun with, "Eleatic"
method lead us to conclude that he was much less interested in
Eleatic doctrine as it came to be perceived? The sense in which he
was interested in the doctrine is the sense in which he found
himself obliged to criticize it, if taken categorically. And he chose
to criticize it by turning Eleatic method against what was thought to
be Eleatic doctrine. However, his destructive and exhibitive
criticism works both ways in the Parmenides: if you take the
method seriously you must reject the doctrine, but if you take the
doctrine as belief you must reject the method. Here is a third irony
in the dialogue, and it is one that tells us something without
inferential straining. It tells us that we cannot consistently agree
with both Parmenides and Zeno if Parmenides is taken to have laid
down doctrine. Plato is showing that we are not to take either
member of the "Eleatic school" literally. On one hand, Zeno's
method literally applied de-
 Page 105
stroys all assertion, including his master's. On the other hand,
Parmenides' words, taken out of the context of his poem and
asserted as categorical truth-claims, would be refutable by Zeno's
method, and first of all (in Plato's dialogical fiction) by Parmenides
himself But this is still not the whole of the philosophic joke, or the
end of the structural ironies in the dialogue. For by dramatizing in
the first part of the dialogue the serious difficulties in the theory of
ideas, Plato is (i) forcing us to be non-literal about doctrines being
discussed in the bosom of the Academy and has (ii) exhibited as
operative a pragmatistic view of "theory" according to which that
theory is best that has fewest paradoxical consequences.
Now these are not strange things for Plato to be doing or implying.
On the contrary, we must understand that the whole of Plato's
philosophic activity, as constituted by the dialogues, was non-
dogmatic (like his model Sokrates'), and that the dialogue-form is
itself designed to avoid that mode of philosophizing that argues
about doctrines literally asserted and inescapably falls into
doctrinal assertion itself. The system-seeking and doxographical
kinds of reading that Plato's dialogues have mostly been subjected
to in their history are also the kinds of reading that have done most
violence to the creative integrity of the philosophic dialogue-form
that Plato developed. One of the great unnoticed things that Plato
did for philosophy was to show the wrong-headedness of
philosophical doxography just as the doxographers were getting
started on their systematically misleading, dogma-listing labors.
We have witnessed the ironic manner in which Plato, the author,
uses the antilogy as part of the dialogue structure of the
Parmenides and as constitutive of the Protagoras. We have also
emphasized the "hypothetical" nature of the dialectical technique.
In connection with "the dialectic" we must again 4 face the
question that arises when we find Sokrates, the ubiquitous
character in Plato's dramatic constructions, claiming that there is "a
portion of the intelligible . . . which reasoning itself grasps by the
power of dialectics, treating its hypotheses . . . as springboards to
enable it to rise to that which requires no assumption and is the
starting point of all'' (511bff.). A dialogical reading of this whole
passage, that attends to what it is alluding to, will realize that it isn't
innocent group-discussion as such that is being referred to by "the
power of dialectics." Sokrates' allusion is, rather, to the way in
which the starting-points of reasoning were reached by discussion
and group-induced acceptance of the Academy's most basic
assumptions or, else, of the initial assumptions of the Pythagorean
sect.
Sokrates ironic suggestion here (and farther on in Republic
VII.532a) is that there is a knowledge that transcends the
conditional nature of the hypotheses of the special sciences,
achievable by means of pure reasoning (dia
 Page 106
tou logou . . . aneu pasôn tôn aisthêseôn) by the well-trained man
with synoptic (synoptikos) power, and whichprovides 5 both a
secure anchoring for knowledge and a terminal for the knowledge-
seeker, is an exhibitive summarya making explicit ofthe procedure
by which the Academy reached its results and claimed certainty for
them. This is the goal of intelligence (ep'autôi gignetai tôi tou
noêtou telei), Sokrates continues, and the completion, or end, of
"the dialectic." This is not a claim of the fictional Sokrates about
how to achieve a knowledge (noêsis, dianoia) that is not
hypothetical (anypotheton), but a rehearsal of the pythagorizing
methodology by means of which the Academy indoctrinated the
students who were to become its members. Dialectic (as in the
Aristotelian Topics) is after all a persuasive process for producing
conviction.
We may not overlook the fact that the idea of an absolute Good as
the unconditional starting-point for knowledge desiderated by the
theory of ideas, is reached by extrapolation from the top of the
Divided Line, in steps that are themselves conditional Secondly,
there is irony in the very situation from which the notion arises.
If I have rightly sensed the spirit in which it is desiderated, the
corresponding verbalization or metadescription of that spirit would,
quite simply, run like this: If there is to be a resting place from
questioning for purposes of achieving the comprehensive system
sought for by the Academic idealists, and if there is to be a surcease
from the refutativeness of the Sophists and antilogistics, then there
must beor we must come toa kind of understanding that is not
conditional, namely something that is both noetic and
unquestioned. But note that this is all itself conditional. Andgiven
that Sokrates' is in the middle of his extended (and detailed) satire
of pythagorizing intellectualityit is also ironic, even as it comes
loaded with a Socratic or skeptical kind of wistfulness for a good
idea which is not, however, to be trusted. Notice that, in the very
discussion of the special or hypothetical sciences which leads up to
the notion, Sokrates categorizes all these sciences as conditional
(510b-511e).
The Underlying Design of the Dialogues
Non-fallibilists, and others who would like to take as categorical
Sokrates' postulation of unconditional knowledge cannot avoid the
fact that his "postulation" is inextricably embedded and advanced
within the framework of a conceptual experiment in constitution-
making and within a socially critical and satirical literary
construction. By conceptual experiment I mean, in Plato's case, a
variable but visible format that underlies all the dialoguesdifferent
as they are in their individual designsthat frees the author from the
kind of
 Page 107
doctrinal consistency which is expected from system-builders but
not from intellectual play-wrights or novelists of ideas.
Coming from the mouths of likely speakers other than Plato
himself, all claims voiced by speakers are in a state of dramatic or
conversational suspension. Plato's dialogue-form is a format that
exempts attempted solutions to philosophic problems from
sounding or claiming to be definitive in themselves. This is because
it is a design that allows the "solutions" to be both explicitly
criticized at the discursive level, and implicitly related to the world
and tests of actioneven while these "solutions" are being
elaborated, as in the dialogues so far considered. The dialogue-
form makes all system-seeking paraphrases of the dialogues as
illegitimate as the paraphrasing of good poetry and puts the burden
of proof upon those who decide to neglect the form. When a
metadescription is given, as above, of something that has happened
in a dialogue, what is being given is not a paraphrase of anything
that is a claim of Plato's, but a verbalization of the structure of the
reader's response.
The determinacy, the openness, and the direction in our responses
to the dialogues are, of course, the product of Plato's art, and they
bear on both the need for action and the need for thought. The
dialogues don't provide knowledge in a theoretical sense; they are,
rather, openings towards knowledge in the sense that knowledge is
something we can act on or something that clarifies human action.
In this respect, what the dialogues give us is very much like what
we get from Greek drama, namely, a clarification of the condition
of manthe talkative, political animalfrom a perspective of
humanity. What we get from the characters in the dialogues are
presumptions, mistakes, clever moves, assertions and evasionsvery
much as in Tragedy and comedy. From Plato's Sokrates we also get
some deliberative ethical conduct. But what we get from his author
is great art, and the cognitive gain that comes with it.
While Aristotle says in the Rhetoric (I.i) that demonstrative proof is
the most convincing, he adds that it isn't always effective with a
given audience nor is it always allowed by the subject-matter.
Hence the need for dialectic and rhetoricand, we would addfor
poetics. Thus, in the sense that Plato's dialogues produce (i)
dramatic clarification of the knowledge process and (ii) a stimulus
to more thoughtful or deliberate action, we find in them a synthesis
of, on one side, the rhetorical conception of dialectic and the
Zenonian or refutative conception with, on the other side, what we
now call (because of Plato's dialogues) the Socratic conception of
consistency in thought and conduct and between thought and
conduct. It is a novel synthesis that both enriched and exhausted,
for philosophy and for its time, the creative possibilities in the
"Socratic" critique and view of the dialectic, as dramatized for
posterity by Plato.
 Page 108

Aristotle Again
Having said the above about Plato's dialogism, we can't help
recollecting that the texts we have of Aristotle were only his so-
called (and unguarded) "lecture notes" for use in the live situation
of "classroom" discussion. It may be that we go too far in taking
them as the parts of a categorical system of philosophic doctrine
rather than as parts of an encyclopedic collection of inquiries. I am
not claiming that Aristotle was not systematic in his teaching, only
that we should distinguish more than we do between his talent for
system and the system of his Peripatetic, platonizing editors. In any
case, for Aristotle himself, the noteshis sharing and developing of
themwere a means to the humanly full and good life, as well a
result of it. It is no accident that Aristotle's published works were
dialogues. In a pure speculation, we might say the following: in his
art of dialectical inquiry, the living, historical Sokrates avoided the
categorical assertion or imposition of doctrine; and he felt no need
to write. If Plato was to be his disciple, he too had to avoid
assertion; but Plato, as we can tell from his roughly two dozen
dialogues, liked to write. The dialogue-form solves the problem of
practicing philosophy in writing, while avoiding indoctrination of
the reader; it achieves something positive but non-dogmatic. So, if
Aristotle is to be thought of as a disciple of Plato's in the way Plato
was a disciple of Sokrates, then Aristotle's categorical writings (as
distinguished from his lost dialogues) could not have been intended
doctrinally or for use outside of the context of cooperative
dialectical inquiry, i.e., of inquiry mediated by reflective discussion
or conversation (hê tou dialegesthai, Rep.533a7). A true disciple of
Plato, if I am right about the nature of Plato's philosophical activity,
could have published only dialogues. 6
Notes
1. Eipé moi oh Chairephôn, spoudázei taûta Sôkrátês ê paízei?
Emoì men dokeî, oh Kallíkleis, hyperphúôs spoudázein.
2. "Rhetoric, by my account (katà ton emôn lógon), is a counterfeit
of a part of politics" (politikês moriou eidôlon).
3. According to Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers
viii.2.57 (3), and Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians 1.6-7.
4. I say "again" because the following repeats the analysis of this
locus to be found in in my The Return of the King, Chapter 1.
5. Since it relates all the ideas of the arts-and-sciences (technai) to
the idea of the good as their first principle . . .
6. Some consequences of this idea are explored in The Return of
the King The Intellectual Warfare over Democratic Athens
(Rowman, Little field: 1997).
 Page 109

Chapter 7
The Protagoras:
A Dialogical Reading of the Personified Antilogy
The following is a purely dialogical account of Plato's
dramatization of the communicative encounter between Sokrates
and the famous interlocutors whose mannerisms and idiolects are
so neatly captured by Plato's mimetic genius. Dialogical accounts
of the intellectual interactions in the dialogues, rare as they have
been, seek to respond to the perceptible literary indicators built into
their texture and structure, rather than to an interest in some
externally generated system of doctrine. There is of course much
moreintellectualy and in the way of entertainmentto a dialogue that
is by Plato, than any single dialogical reading can capture in an
essay reporting such a reading. James Coulter (for instance) points
to the description, at Protagoras 315b-d, of the group of Sophists
assembled in the house of Kallias, "as an intentional 'transposition'
of elements of Aristophanes' representation of the phrontistêrion in
Clouds," and to the "incorporation of some verses from the Nekuia
of Odyssey XI" as ''shed[ding] an infernal light over the den of
Sophists . . . betoken[ing] an epistemology mired in the shadowy
realm of doksa" (CP Summer 1995; pp.281-85). Such insights into
the structuration of the work move us, however, into another, valid
kind of criticism of the dialogues that is no longer purely
dialogical. And the point of the present exercise is to permit its
reader to make some judgment of the aptness and validity of an
undefended example of the practice of reading the dialogues
dialogically.
 Page 110
In other words, the question the reader must ask of the following is,
is it true (as it brings it out) to the dialogical nature of the work,
and, does not this kind of reading obviate the need to invoke, as
necessary for the appreciation of the dialogue, an externally
generated system of doctrine? As an intellectual historian, I of
course emphasize the need to know something about the climate of
philosophic opinion in Plato's time, for purposes of understanding
the views and counter-views of the characters whose interactions
are being dramatized.
Architectonics and Dynamics of the Dialogue-Form
Some orientation-statements are, however, unavoidable and will be
helpful to the reader. Plato's mastery of the medium in which he
chose to do his thinking, the prose dialogue-form, is not only
textural. He is not only a wizard of polysemy (the types of
ambiguity, as Empson called them) and an orchestrator of internal
resonances and imagistic echoes, he also always turns out to be a
master of structure, of overall architectonic form. The Parmenides
and the Protagoras, when looked at in their artistic coherence as
wholes, give the best perception of this because of the use made in
them by Plato of antilogistic devices. Dialogically read, these
dialogues allow us to see, besides, that Plato's irony and satirical
spirit are equally constitutive of his well-designed products.
Without the satire, absent the ironies, the dialogues would be plain
dialectical or argumentative exercises, like Antiphon's tetralogies
or Protagoras's twofold arguments.
This, by the way, is how Arkesílaos took them, when he was
Scholarch of the skeptical Academy. It is also how those take them
who miss the irony or satire in either Sokrates's sardonic discourses
or in the paradoxical shapes Plato often gives to the interactions he
has staged. Of course Plato's speakers (within the dialogues) are
also deductive or inductive, sometimes even abductivenamely, they
come up with antecedent stories or hypotheses of how, if these
were accepted, a given conclusion can be seen to be true. But to
study the dialogues only for the arguments in them is implicitly to
recategorize them as what we are showing they are not,
argumentative doctrinal treatises or merely dialectical exercises.
The dialogues, as I have amply shown elsewhere, do not deal in
categorical assertion, persuasion, or the argumentative taking of
positions, but in the dramatization of assertion, argumentation, and
the forms of persuasion. By putting them in the mouths of
appropriate speakers interacting with each other, the dialogues put
on exhibit a variety of forms of reasoning and persuasion for
observation by the reader.
 Page 111

The Personified Antilogy

Knowing that the historical Protagoras was the antilogizer who
composed some famous 'twofold arguments,' or dissoì lógoi, the
first thing we notice about the dialogue is that Protagoras does not
formally perform an antilogy within it, such as Parmenides did in
the last part of the Parmenides. But, just as Sokrates also does, he
ends up arguing for a thesis the opposite of which he started out by
defending.
Sokrates had started out saying that, considering the facts of the
case he has just made, "I . . . believe that human excellence is not
teachable" (ouk hêgoumai didakton eînai aretên, 32065). 1 He said
this in response to the claim that what he Protagoras teaches is
good judgment in one's affairs, how best to administer one's business,
and in city-state matters how to have the most effect upon them in
speech and action (318e-319a).
Sokrates' counter-reasoning at this stage was that human excellence
is not teachable because firstly, for city-state purposes of self-
government by democratic Assembly, the Athenians assume that
everyone is capable of political competence and because, secondly,
he observes that those who are visibly excellent people all fail to
teach excellence to their offspring.
But Sokrates, by the end of the dialogue, has found "a way of
making aretê appear to be teachable" (361b3f.). Protagoras "on the
other hand . . . now seems eager to declare the opposite, that
excellence has been found to be almost anything but knowledge
(epistêmên), which would make it quite unteachable" (361c2,
Lamb's transl.). And this position is the antithesis of that which
Protagoras had tried to make believable with the story he
developed between 320c and 324c. Plato leaves it to the
readerunder the prompting of the self-focusing device in which
Sokrates is made to let the discussion-as-a-whole describe itselfto
see that the two protagonists have reversed themselves and have
each both refuted and defended the initial position. Plato, namely,
has constructed what is visibly a personified antilogy. The self-
focusing device is the nearest any dialogue of Plato's comes to
giving a stage-directionor, rather, it is a stage-direction but not
extradialogical, not one that violates the compostional integrity of
the dialogue as such.
Sokrates, on the penultimate page of the dialogue, does call what
has happened between them "a fearfully upsetting confusion"
(tarattomena deinôs, 361c). These words seem more like a polite
gloss calculated to soften, for the auditors within the dialogue, the
failure of the reputed master-disputants to
 Page 112
stay in control of their reasonings or solve the problem. But they
have the side-effect of hiding from later readers, less skilled than
the fourth century in rhetorical perceptiveness, the precise form
that the argumentation took. But it cannot be denied that what they
have acted out between them, even if unknowingly, has the form of
an antilogy.
"This present outcome of our reasonings" (hê arti eksodos tôn
logôn, 361aff.), says Sokrates, speaking in the name and voice of
their discussion, deserves "to be indicted and laughed at . . . how
strange you are, oh Sokrates and Protagoras," the discourse would
say:
You [Sokrates] on one hand, after having said at first that aretê cannot
be taught, are pressing the opposite, striving to prove that all affairs are
knowledgejustness, moderation, and courageas the best way of making
aretê look teachable; for, if excellence were other than knowledge . . . it
wouldn't be . . . Protagoras on the other hand, though at first he claimed
that aretê was teachable, now seems eager for the opposite, suggesting
it to be anything else rather than knowledgethus making it less than
teachable.
We interrupt here to object to two standard mistranslations of key
ideas in the dialogue: that which renders aretê, ambiguously and
anachronistically, as "virtue": ambiguously because it is not
specified whether Judaeo-Christian virtue is meant, Roman virtù,
Renaissance virtu, or virtue in the sense of the "essence" or ''strong
point of." Secondly, in this particular dialogue, the popular Loeb
Library translation wrongly takes mathêma to mean "doctrines"
instead of "lessons" or "that which is learned." This is particularly
misleading in the case of Protagoras, who would appear not to have
formally expounded doctrines (in the dogmatic sense), given that
the treatises he is reported to have composed must have aimed to
teach the antilogistic arts of reasoning for and against given claims.
His treatise On Truth, in all probability, had the form of an
antilogy.
Relevance of the Prelude and the Satirico-Dramatic By-Play
As Sokrates tells it to the friend who has come to see him, he
Sokrates has just returned from an encounter with Alcibiades in
which something more beautiful than the latter quite made him
forget the handsome youth who is teasingly alleged to be an object
of his admiration. This something is a "most knowing"
(sophôteron) and therefore "most beautiful" (kallion) man. The
encounter was in the house of Kallias, to which he had repaired in
company
 Page 113
with Hippocrates, a young man who is eager to take lessons from
the visiting Protagoras. Many well-born or well-known people
were at Kallias's house in order to visit with the famous Sophist
who is Kallias's guest.
Other Sophists of repute (with their entourages) Prodicus, Hippias,
Kritias, are also the rich man's guests. Sokrates reports this, we see,
as a way of dismissing the teasing references to Alcibiades with
which the friend had greeted him. The historical fact about public
opinion that this social banter reflects is the acceptability in
discourse of homosocial preferences or attachments. Its dramatic
point is to absolve Sokrates from his friends' frivolities. But doesn't
Sokrates' dismissal, even if ironical, imply that he would like the
Athenians to admire the beauty of sophía (knowledge, sagacity)
more than beauty of physique?
The Protagoras reflects the Athenians' admiration of Protagoras in
more than one way; less as well as more informed admiration can
be found among the many auditors in the dialogue. But all,
including Protagoras's peer and counterpart Sokrates, show the
greatest respect for him (310e9-10). Sokrates' expressions of
respect however are all so solicitously courteous that, in the end
and for the reader, the politeness fails to mask the irony.
Exception that Sokrates is to the fashionable "sophistomania" of
the day, the spirit in which Sokrates approaches the Sophists can, in
this dialogue, best be seen from his words at 312d7-11, and at
313c5-7: "Perhaps we would be speaking the truth, though not all
of it," if we said that he [Protagoras] knows how to make one into a
clever speaker; except that this leaves unanswered the question,
what is the subject on which he makes one a clever speaker? And:
"Then can it be . . . that the Sophist is a sort of merchant or retailer
of commodities that nourish the psyche?'' Towards Protagoras in
particular, Sokrates emerges in this dialogue as skeptical, then
interrogative, and finallyafter each of them has refuted the
othersocially conciliatory, in words that try to do justice to both
their dialectical failure and to the difficulties in the subject they
have dicussed.
Plato the author, moreover, has worded Protagoras's description of
his profession and his vaunted frankness about being a Sophist, so
that we can see them to be the covered-up sales-pitch which they
are. But Protagoras puts himself in a line that makes him an
intellectual descendant of Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides (316d),
and claims that, as a Sophist, "he educates men" (317b6).He tells
his prospect Hippias that every day he spends with himself will
make the youth a better man (318a9-b10). When Sokrates asks him
in just what matters will Hippias's daily improvement be,
Protagoras reminds them what an exception he is in not teaching
the standard disciplines (technas 318d2), 2 but rather giving
 Page 114
lessons (mathêma) in having good judgment about one's business (tôn
oikeôn), in how best to administer one's own estate, and how to be most
effective (dynatôtatos) in city state affairs in speech and action (318e6-
319e2).
It was indeed good Sophistic practice to be advancing a cause
while appearing to be only describing it. Finally, Protagoras's claim
to non-descriptive frankness (316e-317d) is itself a good Sophistic
example of the fallacy of "I-can't-be-doing-it-myself-if-I-repudiate-
the-professionals-who-all-do-it."
The fable which Protagoras tells (320c8-323a5) in order to justify
his claim that aretê is teachable can be called "abductive" because
this is the semiotic term for hypotheses that propose antecedents
from which, if they were the case, the conclusion would follow.
But is it not a tacit criticism of his persuasiveness that, having
finished his story, he must give "still another proof" (tekmêrion)
and of a different kind for his thesis? This turn in the dialogue
again makes visible the attitude of Plato the author towards the
Sophist he is characterizing.
Having moved into the argumentative mode (ouketi mython soi erô,
alla logon, 324d9), Protagoras promises to explain why notably
excellent men don't succeed in teaching excellence to their
offspring. But what his discourse does in covering the issues from
324d to 328cwhere he concludes that he has "shown both by myth
and by argument that aretê is teachable"is to lay down as answers
the very questions that are outstanding.
Since, also, many of the things he claims in these pages cannot be
agreed to by Sokrates, it is to Protagoras's initial slurring of the
issues that the final reversals and "table-turning confusions"
(361c4) of the debate can be traced. Where Sokrates had meant by
"not teachable" that "there are no observable teachers of it,"
Protagoras countered that (among other things) if people did not
develop some sense of justice and were not reinforced in it, there
would be no city-states, and that the sense of goodness is like one's
sense for her native language, learned from everybody else.
Note that from a premiss similar to this one, namely, that the
Assembly assumes all citizens come to it with a sense of justice,
Sokrates had concluded that this sense is not teachable. The two
debaters have started with an almost identical major premiss but a
contradictory minor premiss. It also emerges from 326e on that
Protagoras is involved in an over-all equivocation, namely, that
civic excellence is both a "common" skill like speech and yet also
like "any" skill (such as musicianship) that is difficult to teach to
any but the gifted. In other words, aretê is both common and
exceptional! But isn't this a complicated way of saying that human
excellence is possessed in all the different degrees by humans?
 Page 115
As Protagoras completes his stories and arguments (328b-c), the
professional who lives from his fees surfaces, with his self-
flattering reminder that his clients are only required to pay whaton
a temple-witnessed oaththey believe his lessons were worth. Here,
at 328c, he again equivocates between the non-transmission of
aretê by fathers and the failure of great artists (like Polycleitus) to
transmit equally great artistry to their sons.
So, when Sokrates, the reporter of the conversational exchange,
here calls Protagoras's spell-binding (kekêlêmenos) display
(epidaiksamenos) "such a" and "what a" performance (tosauta kai
toiauta), the irony is not lost on the dialogical reader. Sokrates'
irony is probably not perceived by the auditors present within the
dialogue because its polite surface-form shares in just that
admiration that Athenian opinion is giving the Sophist. To
undestand the conversational and debating modes habitual to the
Athenians we must also take notice of the behavior in which
Protagoras the dialectician easily and permissibly switches from
reasoning-or-argument (logon) to story-telling or fabulating
(mythos). This behavior is also practiced by the rhetorical Sophist
from Elea in the Politicus, and by Sokrates in the Republic and
other suitable occasions.
Sokrates Questions the Unity Attributed to the Excellences by
Protagoras
All right Protagoras, Sokrates says at 329b7ff., picking up on a left-
over problem, you say that goodness can be taught. But you also
several times said that justness, holiness, intelligent self-restraint,
(dikaiosynê, hosiotês, sôphrosynê) and all such qualities were one
thing, aretê or human excellence (329c5f.). Protagoras reasserts
that aretê is a single thing and that the qualities mentioned are parts
of it. Having peviously made sure that Protagoras will stick to the
method of short question-and-answer, Sokrates soon refutes the
assertion about aretê.
About the ease with which Sokrates refutes Protagoras here, Grote
thought that it
seems intended to illustrate the indifference of Protagoras for
dialectical forms and strict accuracy of discussion. The akribologia was
. . . distasteful to rhetorical and practical men. Protagoras is made to
exhibit himself as thinking the distinctions drawn by Sokrates . . . not
worth attending to. Many contemporaries . . . shared this opinion. One
purpose of our dialogue is to bring such antitheses into view
(II.iii.276n., 1888).
But given that the historical Protagoras was a principal in the
development of antilogistics, and given what else we know and can
infer about him, this is
 Page 116
not an apt suggestion. And, as regards the dialogical character,
would a dialectician who was so indifferent to "dialectical forms"
have been held (in Plato's handling of him) in the great respect that
the dialogue reflects? Was Protagoras, then, only a disorderly
antilogizer, like the post-modern Derrida?
No, what the episode shows is, rather, that the formalizer (if not the
founder) of antilogistics was not as good a debater in practice as
reputed, or else more interestingly, that since everybody (including
such master-disputants as Sokrates and Protagoras in this one) 3
can come out badly in a debate, debating must not be the only way
in which to seek knowledge. The passage could also be showing
what happens to thinkers who, having become celebrities because
they were sharp when young, are happy to live off their reputations.
As part of the intellectual plot of the dramatized encounter, these
points are substantive enough to permit characterization of the
Sophist to be subordinated to the dianoetic points enacted by the
drama, according to Greek dramatic practice as reported in
Aristotle's Poetics, 1450a21-22. But while this also explains why
Protagoras is allowed to go into longish discourses, it aggravates
the historiographic problem about the exact nature of Protagoras's
rhetorical practices. Certainly, the historical Protagoras could not
always have spoken in antilogistic form; and, as we've just seen, it
was no problem for speakers to switch from one mode of address to
another. And that Plato allows his Sokrates also to discourse at
length, shows that people never do stick, in debate, to the rules of
debate, even when they have laid them down themselves.
The way in which Sokrates refutes Protagoras from 329c to 333e
(sticking to the method of question and short answer) is both
cleverly sophistical, and involves an illicit appeal to the theory of
ideas (!).
Just as it isn't true that the idea of beauty is itself beautiful, except
in an extended, very weak senseso, the idea of holiness is not itself
holy. When Protagoras agrees that "holiness" is not "just" he has
fallen for a trick question. Holiness is not an agent capable of
justness, and holiness is only "just" in the sense of "aptly applied"
in some context that has to be specified. The dramatic point seems
to be twofold. The plot of the dialogue requires that Protagoras be
refuted about the particular point in question; and this is what
happens in the heat of argumentation: even an ethical dialectician
(as Sokrates is portrayed to be) will get carried away. Also because
the reifying sleight-of-hand is visible with which Sokrates out-
argues Protagoras, the reader can conclude that he is supposed to
take note of the sophistic subtlety as the kind of thing about which
the theory of ideas creates confusion. The point is tacit because it is
a criticism of the theory in the exhibitive mode.
In an aside to his narration Sokrates tells his friend (cf. 310a6) that
he was next led to ask a gentle (êrema êrómên) question because,
by now, Protagoras
 Page 117
had become disturbingly tense and ready to quit (333e). The
question was, can then good things be not profitable? Protagoras
takes advantage of it and comes up with a thirty-line discourse
(334a4-c9), which is enthusiastically applauded by those present.
Feigning weakness of memory, Sokrates then requests the favor of
keeping to the "method of brevity" (brachyology) in the debate.
When Protagoras is not willing, Sokrates starts to withdraw from
the scene (335b-c). But Kallias, Alcibiades, Kritias, Prodicus, and
Hippiaswho are enjoying the discussionall intervene to have it
continue. The procedure they settle on is that (i) if Protagoras
doesn't wish to answer, then he Sokrates will answer, and will try
to show how the answerer (in his view) ought to answer. (ii) When
Sokrates has answered all Protagoras's questions, then Protagoras
will similarly answer to Sokrates. And if Protagoras becomes
unwilling, then he will be urged (just as Sokrates was just now
urged not to desist) to continue the discussion (338c-e).
This dramatic interlude is famous because in it Plato's mimetic
magic opens windows upon the style of speaking of each of the
three famous speakers Kritias, Prodicus, and Hippias who plead for
the continuance of the discussion. Young Alcibiades is given his
little pun too, at 336b6, "You don't speak fairly (kalos) Mr.
Fairleigh (Kallias). Kritias snubs both Kallias who is his host, and
Alcibiades Pericles' ward, in the same terse breath that he polarizes
them (336d5-e). Prodicus rationalizes his suggestion in imitation of
the historical Prodicus's way of tackling words (337a1-c7).
Hippias's words satirize, while echoing, his grand conciliatory
manner of holding forth (337c7-33862).
Protagoras reluctantly agrees to continue on the agreed conditions.
He gets first turn at asking. He chooses to ask Sokrates about a
poetic composition of Simonides, whether the poet (whom Sokrates
here approves) has not contradicted himself. Cleverly posed, the
alleged contradiction moves Sokrates to involve Prodicus in his
answer, a move which will also avoid an in-his-face refutation of
Protagoras. Simonides has not contradicted himself, Sokrates
points out, because what Pittacus said was that it was hard to
become good. 4 Protagoras does not accept this, nor does he accept
Sokrates' playful equivocation with the Keian dialect-meaning of
"chalepon" which equates "hard" with "bad," as explaining
Simonides' reproach of Pittacus. We interrupt to notice that
Sokrates puts words in Prodicus's mouth (341c), and then blames
Prodicus for joking with those words.
Sokrates now offers his own extended interpretation of Simonides.
Whereas Protagoras had asked short questions about the poem,
Sokrates is about to give a long speech as a way, so he says, of
letting Protagoras test him. But, he adds (even more coyly), if you
prefer I would rather listen to you (342a2). It's as you please,
Protagoras says, so Prodicus and Hippias urge Sokrates to do his
part.
 Page 118

Sokrates' Amusing Anti-Lecture on Simonides' Poem

This he does, from 342a8 to 347a3, with a vengeance and counter-
brachyological relish 5 that is longer than Protagoras's speech in
praise of sophistry from 316d to 319a, though not as long as the
Sophist's defense of the teachability of aretê from 320c6 to 328c.
Sokrates' interpretation of what Simonides had in mind
(dianooumenos) in composing (pepoiêkenai 347a5) his ode,
accomplishes several things.
It opens with an ironic, boldly contrary-to-fact account according
to which Sparta's success is due to the ancient love of knowledge
(philosophia) which it has pursued in secret while allowing others
to think that Spartan predominance is due to their fighting spirit.
Sokrates laughs at the spartanizers who imitate Laconian
muscularity and mannerisms, including shortness of speech (342c),
adding that in Sparta, as in Crete, the women share in this best of
educations in knowledge-seeking and reasoning (pros philosophia
kai logous). This, of course, is a back-handed swipe at the total
failure of the Greek city-states to provide formally for the
education of women. The pointedness and brevity of Spartan
speech are due to the completeness of their education (343al)! The
Seven Sages were all students of Spartan education; and to this we
owe their maxims, such as "know thyself," and "nothing in excess."
Pittacus's saying "it's hard to be good" was handed down just like
this by individuals. But Simonides, says Sokrates, saw that he
could become famous by overthrowing the statement, and
composed his poem accordingly (343c).
To "confirm" this novel claim Sokrates launches into some wordy
quibbling and overly-extended similes about what words the poem
is emphasising (343d-344d). He quotes another poet on how "the
good man is at one time bad, but at another good," whereas (he
says) the bad man, because he has no capacity for becoming (!)
must ever be (!) what he is. He quotes Simonides again to show
that becoming good is indeed hard but to be good is impossible
(344e), and goes on to propose that in the professions and crafts the
good practitioner becomes on occasion bad. At 345c he takes this
part of the poem to conclude that, for the good man, "it is
impossible for [him] . . . to continue to be (diatelounta) good, but
possible to become (genesthati) good, and bad too indeed and in
person (kakon ge ton auton touton)."
Taking Pittacus to mean that while we may not hope ever to find "a
wholly blameless man," we must yet praise those "who willingly
commit no baseness" (mêden aischron), Sokrates says leadingly
that Simonides could not have been implying that people did evil
willingly. I say "leadingly" because this is a claim that we identify
with Plato's Sokrates because he repeats it and defends it in other
dialogues. For, he continues, none of the Sages believed that people
commit wrong willingly; "they well know that all who do evil,
shameful deeds
 Page 119
do them unwillingly (akôn 346e)." Simonides, Sokrates says, was
telling Pittacus that while he praises those who avoid evil, there are
some whom he praises and befriends unwillingly. So, Simonides
could never blame Pittacus "as long as you Pittacus speak
moderately and speak the truth" (kai ei mesôs eleges epieikê kai
alêthê, 346e5); "but now, since you are lying (peudomenos) with an
air of truthfulness about great matters, it is about this that I
reproach you" (347a1).
Hippias is the first to applaud Sokrates' mock-interpretation
because he too, it turns out, has composed an essay on the poem
which he is eager to display. But readers of the Hippias Major will
remember that Hippias is there featured as quite missing Sokrates'
many ironies in it, even as they are politely practiced on himself.
Alcibiades quickly puts him off, reminding him that according to
the conditions agreed upon, Sokrates must now answer any
questions put by Protagoras, unless Protagoras prefers to take the
role of answerer himself. But not just Hippias is oblivious to the
systematically ironic nature of Sokrates' satire (in his mimetic
parody) of the hyponoiacs, namely, the pursuers of recondite
meanings in the poetic compositions upon which they discoursed:
the point is to this day not noticed by many a learned commentator,
and quite missed by literalist readers.
The Eristics about Aretê
Just as Sokrates for good reasons has parodied the hyponoiacs who
specialize in finding hidden meanings in poetry, so when he calls
Protagoras back to their more serious (347d, 347e9-348a2)
discussion of aretê, he is still being satirical with a purpose. He had
already insisted (at 348d-e) that his desire to converse with
Protagoras was motivated only by the need to examine particular
difficulties into which his own thinking had run (348c7-9). For, as
Homer knew, two are better equipped than one (Iliad X.224). And
he knows no one better than Protagoras with whom to investigate
whatever needs examining by a serious person, especially the
nature of aretê. You who are good and can make others good but
make no secret of your art-and-science (technê), how could I not
call on you the self-proclaimed man-of-knowledge (sophistes)
apointed by himself to be the teacher to the Greeks of their culture
and aretê, and the first to be thought worthy of pay for this? I need
you to remind me of some questions and to get help on others
(349b1).
The question was, I believe, are
sagacity (sophîa), moderateness (sôphrosynê), courage (andreia),
justness (dikaiosynê) and respect for the sacred (hosiotês), five names
for one subject (pragma), or is there underlying each name an
individual process or thing (ousía kai pragma)
 Page 120
having its own effect (dynamin) separately, each one being different
from the others (34962-8)?
Do you still hold that each of the names applies to a different thing,
all being non-homogenous parts of aretê? If however you have a
new view, I don't object; but please define it, perhaps you were
only testing me before. Protagoras replies that all are parts of aretê.
Four of them are quite close and akin (epieikôs paraplêsia) to each
other, with courage an entirely (panu polu) different matter. Many
people are most unjust, impious, dissolute and ignorant but out-
standingly brave (349d2-9).
But Protagoras, Sokrates interrupts, don't you call brave men bold?
Yes, and headlong where others hang back. And don't you say that
aretê is a good thing, and that you can teach it? It is the best of
things. Then, Sokrates presses, is one part of aretê good and
another part bad (aischron)? The whole of it is as good as can be.
Don't divers dive boldly, Sokrates rejoins, because they know how
to dive, and horsemen charge because they know how to ride? And
who are the dashing targeteers? Those who know how to dodge and
target, says Protagoras; if that is what you're after, yes, those who
are knowledgeable are bolder than those without knowledge. But
you've seen people be bold in these matters without science, have
you not? Are these bold people courageous?
Protagoras answers: No, that would make courage cheap; such
people are just senseless (mainoumenoi). Such bold men, then, are
not courageous, Sokrates asks, but mad? And in the instances first
mentioned the most knowledgeable are the boldest, and so the most
courageous? Sokrates concludes: on this reasoning, it is knowledge
that makes up courage.
Here Protagoras, who doesn't want to agree to this, quibbles: I
admitted that courageous men are bold, but you didn't ask me
whether bold men are courageous. If you had asked me, I would
have answered No. When I admitted that courageous men are bold,
you didn't object to that. Then you show that individuals with
knowledge are bolder than those who lack it, and conclude that
courage and knowledge are the same. By such reasoning you could
make strength appear to be knowledge. You'd ask are the strong
powerful; and I would say Yes. Next, you'd ask whether those with
knowledge of wrestling are more powerful because of their
knowledge. And when I agreed, you would conclude that, by the
same token, knowledge is strength. But I only admitted that the
strong are powerful, not that the powerful are strong, because I
don't believe that power and strength are the same. I believe that
power comes from either knowledge or madness or rage, while
strength comes from either nature or good nurture. Just so, courage
comes from nature and good psychological nurture, whereas
boldness comes either from skill (technê) or from madness or rage.
 Page 121
It would seem that this response has diffused Sokrates's refutation,
and saved face for Protagoras before those present. But didn't
Sokrates' refutation employ an undistributed middle term in order
to make its point? Since it did, then Sokrates has been countered by
Protagoras as successfully as the latter was by him. That this is so
would seem to be confirmed by the fact that Sokrates abruptly
changes the subject at the end of Protagoras's response. So we are
not just getting, in this dialogue, an exhibitive critique of Sophistry
and Protagoras, we are also being treated to an exhibitive critique
of Eristic as such and anybody, including Sokrates, who engages in
it. 6!
What Is the Point of the Last Debate about Pleasure and Pain, Good
and Evil?
At the start of the next and last part of the dialogue, from 351 b to
the end, the reader has to be surprised by (what appears to be)
Sokrates' defense of the majority (hoi polloi 351c3) view that
equates pleasure with the good and pain with evil. Is not this a
thesis that Sokrates objects to, or severely qualifies, elsewhere in
the dialogues? It is certainly not a belief that we could attribute to
Plato the author either, even if it were legitimate which it is notto
attribute to him as his own, beliefs of the characters he is stage-
managing.
Protagoras is reluctant to accept the view unqualified (haplôs); he
says, let us examine (skopômetha 351e4) this formulation. Sokrates
must lead the discussion, since he began it. Sokrates proceeds, in
this train of questions, from the premiss which Protagoras shares
with him that "sagacity and knowledge" (sophia kai epistêmê) are
the greatest of human things, and that men should be ruled by
them. Both are also one in acknowledging that the public does not
think that knowledge is what rules over human affairs, and that
persons with knowledge are often ruled rather by passion, pleasure,
pain, or love (352c). So Sokrates invites Protagoras to help him
explain what is meant by "being overcome by pleasure" (353al).
The reader's puzzlement fades when she begins to see that Sokrates
has taken this road in order to be able to concludeas he will at
357d5-8that even if good = pleasure, and pain = evil, the choice
among pleasure and pains is still a matter of knowledge, and
consequently also of measurement. They also find that "to be
overcome by pleasure" means "to act in the greatest ignorance"
(amathia hê megistê 357e3) or from lack of knowledge (epistêmês
endeiai 357d6). For if we say a man does evil because he is
overcome by pleasure and pleasure is the good, then what we have
said is that a man does evil because he is overcome by good
(354e7-10). So, it must be by ignorance, not by pleasure, that he is
overcome by ignorance of the greater pleasure in the good.
 Page 122
The right kind of knowledge for purposes of choice turns out to be
knowledge of measurement. Now this too is somewhat
surprisinguntil we realize that this turn in Sokrates' discourse is
also satirical, and most probably aimed at the "mathematizers" of
knowledge. If intelligence or good judgment is a matter of
measuring the amount by which one pleasure outweighs another, or
of the amount of pain by which one evil is less than another, then it
is the art-or-science of measuring that is the basis for the best and
most secure life (!). Hê metrikê technê becomes the art which is the
salvation of life (356d4, 356e4f., 357a8f.). The intellectual
historian will catch here an ironic echo of Pythagorean claims
about the relation of mathematics to salvation and the right kind of
life.
Sokrates, now taking it as granted that he and Protagoras have
together proved that "being overcome by pleasure" is an act of
ignorace, addresses the public, in order to add that if it is supposed
that "being overcome by pleasure" is anything other than
ignorance, the consequence would be that no one will go to the
Sophists for instruction because aretê would not be teachable, and
all would be badly off both in private and in public (357e5ff.).
Sokrates next says that he wants to ask a quesion of Hippias,
Prodicus, and Protagoras jointly (358a4). But, by 359a-c, we see
that he is really out to pick up on Protagoras's counter-refutation in
the argument that appealed to the nature of courage as Protagoras
saw it, and that Sokrates is bringing the other two into it so
Protagoras will not quit answering.
Sokrates succeeds in bringing Protagoras to where he cannot deny
that cowardice is a matter of ignorance (amathia), and courage one
of knowledge or sagacity (sophía 360d). Although Protagoras
wants to stop answering at this point, Sokrates finally gets him to
agree that, after all, persons most ignorant cannot be most
courageous (360e3). Sokrates, we see, has in the end had the last
word on this matter. But he softens his minor victory by
immediately saying that he asks his questions only in order to reach
an understanding of aretê in its implications and in itself (360e9).
What he says in the next paragraph shows that he doesn't after all
think that they've cleared up the question of whether goodness can
be taught 361a).
It is right after this that The Discussion, speaking through Sokrates,
describes itself as having gone through the strange reversals that
allow the reader to see it as a personified antilogy. We must
beware, says Sokrates, the Epimetheus of Protgoras's fable lest he
trip our investigation into another terrible tangle. I myself prefer
Prometheus, and try to be Promethean in my thinking. I should
really like, with your help, Protagoras, to pursue with you the
matter of what aretê is and whether it is teachable (361c).
Protagoras responds by praisingmost courteously in his
turnSokrates' eagerness
 Page 123
(prothumian) and way of arguing, adding that he Protagoras is not
an envious sort, and has often told others of his admiration for
Sokrates. ''And I say that it will be no surprise should you Sokrates
become famous for your sagacity" (361e6-7). But as for our
subject, we will pursue it, whenever you wish, on some other
occasion.
Stand-off that it has become, the exchange ends, for the two
master-disputants, on a note of mutual respect and competitive
awareness of each other.
It is a measure of Plato's artistry, finally, that our impression of the
extended interactionin all its intellectual detailis formed upon the
basis of Sokrates' narration of it to the eager young Hippocrates. If
the latter benefitted as much from Sokrates' portrayal of the
interaction between himself and the Eristic as much as the reader
benefits from Plato's dialogue in its unfolding, then Hippocrates
was well served by his impulse to talk first with Sokrates about
becoming a better speaker and citizen.
Notes
1. It's worth noting for intellectual-historical purposes that at 319a4
Sokrates, because he is addressing a Sophist, speaks of human
excellence in political terms, as "polis knowledge" (tên politikên
technên), as that which makes men good citizens (agathous
politas).
2. The disciplines which he lists (318e2-3) are arithmetic,
astronomy, geometry, and music. If we consider that these make up
that part of the Pythagorean curriculum which doesn't deal with the
art of words (grammar, rhetoric, and poetics), we see that the
Sophists must have had to compete for students with the
Pythagoreans, or else, that the Sophists were perhaps sought out by
the young with no mathematical interest. If the list is not an ancient
editor's interpolated after-thought, does it mean that by the time of
writing of Protagoras higher education was, by then, already so
formalized and (as it were) "pythagorized," and that one attraction
of the Sophists was their non-mathematicism and claim to teach
matters of practice.
3. Consider that, if Sokrates is regarded as the victor in his
exchange with Protagoras, then the price he has paid is to have
contradicted or antilogized himself.
4. Sokrates appositely strengthens his defense of Simonides by
quoting Hesiod's Works and Days (289ff.) as saying the same thing
as Simonides.
5. Cf. his ironic use of brachy at 342e4, brachyologia at 34366,
and rhêmata brachea at 343a10.
6. Attending to the form of the eristic argumentation we get: All C
are B; and all C are K; but, Some B are not K. Of course, Some C
are B; namely, some B are C. And it
 Page 124
is the absence of quantification that allows Protagoras his come-
back. In effect, his response is a reminder that Sokrates has
suppressed the fact that not all C are K, namely, that some B are
indeed C, and that these B people who are Courageous show that
K is not a necessary condition of C. Protagoras has escaped the
refutation by showing in a roundabout way that not all C are K.
 Page 125

Chapter 8
The Charmides:
Self-Knowledge and the Knowledge of Knowledge
To Have an Excellence and To Define It
The youth Charmides in the dialogue Charmides is not altogether
unlike the young Meno in the Meno. Though the conversations in
the two works are differently structured and differently initiated,
the relation of each of the young interlocutors to Plato's Sokrates
isfrom Sokrates' point of viewnot that different: Meno engages
Sokrates rather aggressively, primed with a tangle of questions he
has formulated under the influence of Gorgias the rhetorician,
whereas the decorous Charmides is presented to Sokrates by his
teacher in decorum, the aristocratic Kritias who was known to be a
follower of the Sophists. Meno had wanted to know, from Sokrates,
how human excellence (aretê) is aquired or transmitted. But
Sokrates wants to know, of Charmides, whether he has that
excellence (sôphrosynê) of character that he is reputed to have by
his companions and his guardian. Both young men are of the ruling
class and handsome, the latter superlatively so. The later history of
both men was well known to Plato's public. For Sokrates, however,
they could, dramatically speaking, only be potentially good men or
potentially bad men.
Thus, the personal aspect of Sokrates' reasons for engaging in
serious conversation with each of them is largely the same:
Sokrates is presented as wanting to help each of them uncover for
himself how he stands in relation to knowledge (epistêmê) and to
excellence (aretê, sôhrosynê): or, otherwise stated, what the
capability of each might be in respect to knowlege and goodness
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which, along with justice, are the most usual of Sokrates'
intellectual concerns in the world of the dialogues. A tacit irony
about goodness common to both of the dialogues is that Sokrates'
young interlocutors were known to have turned into bad citizens; 1
while Sokrates' older interlocutors, Anytus in the Meno and Kritias
in the Charmides, are also already known to be the kind of
politician they were. Kritias, known to history and Plato's public as
an extreme oligarchist and Spartanizer, is presented here at his best
as an aristocrat who thinks like a Sophist, where Anytus, a
supporter first of the intermediate oligarchy of Theramenes in
411/10 B.C. and later an opportune supporter of Thrasyboulos's
democrats, is presented at his unknowing worst in the Meno.
Kritias consents to Sokrates' cross-examining his ward, at 154d-e,
to see if his soul is as well formed (eu pephukôs) as his
astonishingly well-formed body. The chances are it will be, says
Sokrates politely and ironically to Kritias, since he is of your
kindred. The reader realizes that this also makes Charmides kin to
Plato, the author of the dialogue. Charmides, who affected his
contemporaries in the same way that a great beauty would affect
the sexists among us today, shows his prudence and training by
choosing to sit between Sokrates and Kritias (155c). His nearness
nonetheless gives Sokrates an erotic shock that he must overcome
(155c4-e3). Charmides has already been described by Kritias as
believing himself to be a philosopher (philosophos) and very
poetical (panu poiêtikos, 155al). Thus, in spite of his prudent action
here and his careful words later, he cannot be pronounced by the
reader to be entirely without self-conceit. But Sokrates himself has,
as in the Phaedrus, demonstrated intelligent self-restraint
(sôhrosynê)the very quality to be discussed in the Charmides. At
the beginning of the dialogue Plato has presented him as being in
possession of this quality, in Sokrates' modest responses to the
inquiries about the battle of Potidea from which he has just
returned, in the fiction of the dialogue. We learn from Alcibiades'
account in the Symposium (219e ff.) that Sokrates acted with great
courage during this battle.
Under the playful pretext of providing him with a cure for his
headache, Sokrates tells Charmides quite a story. It is no doubt one
of his frequent, brilliant but ad hoc inventions. The story is about
how the good physicians know that you can't cure any part of the
body without treating the whole as well, and how a Thracian doctor
quoted Zalmoxis his king and god to him, laying it down that just
as you can't cure the eyes without treating the head, so you cannot
treat the body separately from the soul (156e-157b). You must use
certain chants (epôidais) whose charm consists in noble words and
reasons (logous kalous); for everything in a man springs from his
soul, the life-principle (psychê). And, Charmides, if soundness
(sôhrosynê) is generated in the soul, it will be easy to treat the head
and the rest of the body. This is what the
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Thracian enjoined, no matter how wealthy or handsome the patient
might be. So, Charmides, if you are willing to submit your soul to
the discursive charms first, then we will go on to cure your
headache.
Well, let me tell you SokratesKritias interruptsCharmides'
headache will turn out to be lucky if his thinking (dianoian) is
going to be improved by you on account of it. But he not only
excels over his contemporaries in bodily build, he also stands out
among them for the sound intelligence that your charm is supposed
to produce. And so he should, says Sokrates (paying a compliment,
with ironic relish, to the family connections of Plato his creator),
given the two most noble houses that united to produce him! I say
ironic because Plato and his readers well know that his family
connections have not of late been good for Athens, but have
resisted its liberation from Spartan occupation and cruelly
tyrannized over its citizens during their period in power.
However, Charmides, says Sokrates, this is how the case really
stands: if you are as adequately of sound intelligence as Kritias
declares you to be, you really have no need of any Zalmoxean or
Hyperborean spells, and I can give you your remedy right now. So
tell me yourself, Charmides, whether you feel you are adequately
supplied with sound intelligence (sôphrosynê 158c)? Charmides
answers decorously and intelligently that he can neither agree nor
disagree. For if he says he is not temperate (sôphron), it would both
be a strange thing to say about oneself and would belie what Kritias
has said; but if he, Charmides, says he is "temperate," he would be
praising himself and that would seem insufferable (158d). The
reader sees that Charmides already knows how to formulate a
logical dilemma. "Charmides you speak, it seems to me, plausibly"
(eikota).
Then we must examine together, continues Sokrates in response to
this show of logical competence, whether you do or do not possess
what I am asking after: so that you will not be forced to say
anything you don't want to and so that I can avoid doling out
medicme without due examination (askeptôs). Will this be
agreeable to you, Charmides? Nothing could be more so, Sokrates;
proceed to inquire any way you think best.
"Well it is clear (dêglon)," says Sokrates as we come to Stephanus
page 159, "that if sound intelligence and temperance (sôphrosynê)
belong to you (soi paresti), then you are capable of (echeis) a
judgment (doksazein) about it." The reader's feeling that Sokrates is
making a big assumption here is confirmed by his next words.
They seek to give, partly by the method of repetition, not so much a
reason for what he began by saying was ''clear," but to give the
reassurance of adding some detail that makes the presumptively
necessary process less vague and more concrete. "For, if it is really
(eiper) inside you (enestin), it
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is somehow necessary that it provide you with some sense
(aisthêsis) of itself, by means of which you can make some
judgment about it: what "temperance" is and what sort of thing;
don't you think so, Charmides?
About this part of the exchange between Sokrates and Charmides,
Tuckey (p. 19) says without explanation, "it is thoroughly in line
with Socrates' habitual method" And R. Sprague claims: "In
Socrates' view, those who possess a virtue (sic) should be able to
define it. It is for this reason, presumably, that in the Laches it is a
pair of generals who are asked to say what courage is." But this
could be misleading if we don't spell out the sense in which this
part of the exchange is "Socratic": it is simply that in which
(according to Sokrates' account in Apology and elsewhere) it was
his practice to interrogate various sorts of skilled professionals,
politicans and artisans both about what they were excellent in as
specialists (the various technês) and about human goodness (aretê)
in general. These interrogations always looked ironic to observing
third parties, just because the presumptively knowing (technikos)
experts inevitably turned out not to be able to define the subjects of
even their own expertise; for example, holiness, rhapsody, beauty,
rhetoric. Much less were they able to define the excellences of a
human sort, the practice of which would make a man just (dikaios)
or good (sôphrôn). Charmides is, thus, not to be exempted from the
irony of a similar sort of confrontation with Sokrates. He is asked
about sôphrosynê by Plato's Sokrates just because he is reputed to
have it in a precocious measure. With his response, at 159a5, of "I
do think so'' to Sokrates' leading question about whether he could
define "temperance" because he has it, he puts himself unwittingly
in the same position as other presumptive knowers.
Charmides' answer is in character, but it is anticlimactic (15963-6).
Sôphro-synê, he says, is a sort of quietness (hesychiotes); sound
intelligence consists in doing things in a quiet and orderly way. The
reader notes how much Charmides' "definition" is that of a well
brought-up young person of good family, and how well Kritias has
schooled him in propriety.
But Sokrates is not going to allow that responsive intelligence
(sôphrosynê) consists only of quiet propriety. He refutes the
proposal with an inductive interrogation of Charmides, and on the
assumption that sôphrosynê is honorable (kalê). The refutation, or
elenchus, comes at 160b6-d3 as the cumulative result of the
examples of conduct in which being quick and vigorous (rather
than quietly decorous) was the condition of the action's
honorability. "Well, look into yourself again Charmides; only more
closely this time," says Sokrates gently taunting, "and tell me
bravely and truly what sort of thing sôhrosynê seems to you to be,
after reflecting on its presence in you and putting that together with
what it can achieve" (160d9). The reader must also
 Page 129
register the fact that in his report of the conversational exchange,
Sokrates does not neglect to record how manful (andreiôs)
Charmides looked during his new self-examination. Transferred to
our own time and culture, the heterosexual homologue of this
observation would be to note, for instance, that "she looked very
womanly while thinking this through." If today we find this
statement somewhat risible, romantic or sexist, then we need to be
given reasons why Plato's contemporary readers would not also
have found the statement of his Sokrates equally risible, romantic
or sexist. Anybody who "looks into himself very manfully" would
seem to be the object of the speaker's admiration, ironic or sincere
depending on whether he is or is not posing.
The result of Charmides' manful self-reflection does, in the event,
add up to some improvement over his first attempt. "It seems to
me," he says, "that sôphrosynê makes a man ashamed of himself
(aischynesthai) and feel like a social fool (aischyntelon), so
sôphrosynê is really the same as responsive restraint (aidôs) or
modesty" (160e2-4). It is an improvement because any Greek
reader or hearer of Homer would know that this equation comes out
of the Homeric tradition. But Plato's Sokrates, who knows this only
too well, is not going to allow that it is an improvement.
Well now, Charmides, didn't you agree that sôphrosynê is a noble
(kalon) thing, and that good men are sôphrôn? Yes. Can that be
good (agathon) which does not produce good men? No.
Sôphrosynê, therefore, says Sokrates with a forced logic that
Charmides does not notice, is not only honorable but also good. 2
And don't you believe that Homer is right, Charmides, when he
says it is not good for a man in need to be aidôs (Odyssey
XVII.347), that is, modest or restrained? I do believe him. Then,
Charmides, restraint (aidôs) can be both a good thing and a bad
thing. And sôphrosynê, responsive restraint, cannot be only aidôs
or restraint because the former is always good but the latter is not
always good.
That seems to have been correctly stated, Sokrates, says
Charmides. But please examine the view, which I have just
remembered hearing from someone, that perhaps sôhrosynê is to be
pursuing what is of concern to oneself (to ta heautou prattein 161
b5, 6). Was the speaker right, who said this, Sokrates? You wicked
boy, says Sokrates, you got that from Kritias here or from some
other man-of-knowledge (sophon). Kritias quickly inserts himself
between Sokrates and Charmides and denies the suggestion: he
must have got it from somebody else. But the reader soon learns
that Kritias must be lying, since Charmides' sly words and way of
looking at Kritias at 162b and Kritias's behavior from 162c-d
convince Sokrates that Charmides has indeed gotten the dictum
about sôphrosynê from Kritias.
Sokrates had taken it as a sort of riddle or enigma, as put by
Charmides,
 Page 130
and has shown how unintelligible it must be, if it leads to the
consequence that every individual in a city must take care of all his
own needs, from weaving his clothes and doing his own washing to
healing his body and making his own shoes and oil flaskmaking
(ergazesthai) and doing (prattein) nothing for any other citizen,
whose affairs, on this principle, he simply must not touch. But,
Sokrates, the person who said that sôhrosynê is the pursuit of one's
own concerns didn't mean that. Far from being foolish, he seemed
to know all about it (panu . . . sophos einai). But if you don't know
what he meant, Charmides, and I don't either: that makes me
certain he meant it as a riddle. Charmides now joins Sokrates in
teasing Kritias into a response by saying, as he looks at Kritias with
a suppressed laugh: "well, it is not impossible that the one who said
it didn't know what he meant either."
Charmides, says Kritias sternly, like a poet whose poem has been
ruined by the reciter: are you saying that because you fail to
understand the author of the statement that sôhrosynê is the pursuit
of what concerns oneself, the author himself doesn't know what he
means? Sokrates interposes: don't expect our friend to understand
at his age; but you are quite likely to know, given your maturity
and studies (helikias kai epimeleias 162el). So, if you agree with
the statement and would take it over, I would much prefer to
inquire together with you into the truth of the matter or its falsity.
Wherein a Snob and a Sophist Is Satirized
Do you also agree, Kritias, that craftsmen (demiourgous) make
(poiein) things for others as well as for themselves? Yes. So,
Kritias, they can be temperate (sôphronousin) while making not
just their own things. Yes, Sokrates, what reason could there be
against it? The reason, Kritias, that if you say sôphrosynê is doing
(prattein) your own thing, you cannot also say that those who do
things for others are sôphron. I did not say, Sokrates, that they did
(prattein) anything for others; I simply agreed that they made
(poiein) them for others. So, Kritias, making and doing are not the
same for you?
Kritias now launches into some argumentative distinction-making
(163b-c), based on a text of Hesiod's (Works and Days 309), by
means of which Plato lets the reader see how great a snob and how
much of a Sophist Kritias is. I have learned from Hesiod, he says,
that "no work is disgraceful." But do you think that by "workings"
and "doings'' Hesiod meant such things as selling pickled fish, or
shoe-making, or lying in a house of ill-repute (ep'oikêmatos
kathêmenoi)? "Making" is different from doing or working. Even a
thing made (poiêma) is disgraceful when not well or fairly made.
But "work" is never a
 Page 131
disgrace, according to Hesiod, because by "works" he meant things
worked out in a fair (kalôs) and useful (ôphelimôs) way. It
necessarily appeared to him that only such proper (oikeia) things
should be of concem to us, while all harmful things should be alien
(allotria) to us. Thus, we must believe, Kritias winds up, that
Hesiod and anybody with any insight (hostis phronimos) would call
him of sound intelligence (sôphron) who is occupied with his
proper concerns.
You are welcome, Kritias, to as many distinctions as you want to
makelike Prodicus. But you must be clear about what you are
applymg your names to. Start again and define (horisai) more
plainly. You say, Kritias, this doing (praksis) or making (poiêsis)
of good things is sôphrosynê; so that he who does (prattôn) good
and not evil is exercising sound intelligence (sôphronei)? Yes,
Sokrates, for he who does (poiounta) evil cannot be said to be
exercising sound intelligence (sôphronein). The doing of good
things (praksis) is right responsiveness (sôphrosynê); that,
Sokrates, is my plain definition.
I wonder now, Kritias, do you figure (hêgêi) that those who
respond rightly know they are responding rightly? They do,
Sokrates. And did you, Kritias, not say earlier that craftsmen are
not prevented from responding rightly (sôphronein) in making
(poiountas) things for others? What of it, Sokrates? Well, a
physician who makes someone healthy is doing something helpful
to both himself and the other? Yes. And in doing this, Kritias, he is
doing what ought to be done (ta deonta)? Yes. Is not he who does
what he should do, Kritias, responding rightly (sôphronei)? Yes.
But does every doctor, or every craftsman always know when his
medicine will help or when his work will benefit him? Probably
not, Sokrates. So, Kritias, sometimes someone may have done
something helpful without knowing the effect of his action; yet he
was responding rightly (sôphronôs epraksen) in doing what was
helpful; did you not say that? I did. Then, Kritias, it is possible to
respond rightly and to be ignorant of one's intelligent
responsiveness.
But that cannot be, Sokrates, says Kritiasresponding, like the
reader, to the paradox that it is possible to have acted intelligently
but not know it.
I would rather withdraw whatever I have to withdraw, continues
Kritias distressed, than ever admit that a man who does not know
himself (agnoounta auton heauton) can be intelligently responsive
(sôphronein). Kritias now gets rather carried away by his own
eloquence, from 164d3-165b5, on the subject of knowing oneself
(to gignoskein heauton): "know thyself" is the greeting of God to
mankind. As men enter the temple he is saying to them "respond
rightly" (sôphronein) which is the true and original meaning of the
oracle, contrary to later interpreters. I say all this, Sokrates, to
account for my definition, unless of course you already agree that
sôhrosynê is knowing oneself.
 Page 132
But, Kritias, you mustn't treat me as if I claimed to know the
answers to my questions. The fact is, I join you in the scrutiny of
every proposal because I myself do not know. You must let me
examine this. Sokrates had been asking, back at 164b, about the
extent to which doers of good things know that they are doing good
things.
"I am looking (skopô) at this," he now says; "if right
responsiveness (sôphrosynê) is indeed to know something
(gignôskein ge ti), it is clear that sôphrosynê is knowledge of some
kind (epistêmê tis) and knowledge of some thing (tinos), is it not?"
This is suitably cautious, even if intellectualist in tendency. But
Kritias incautiously interjects, "yes it is, and of self" (heautou ge).
Medicine, Sokrates pushes on, is a knowledge of health? Yes. And
what is achieved (apergazetai) by it is useful and beneficial, since
it produces (apergazetai) health, which is a fine thing (kalon).
Similarly, the result of the builder's art and other arts would be
other fine things. So now, Kritias, it is for you to tell me about
sôphrosynê, since you say it is a knowledge of oneself (auten
heautou epistêmên): what fine work (kalon ergon) does it do
(apergazetai) for us? Please tell me.
Kritias does not tell him (165e). This could lead the reader to
suppose that Kritias fears any inductive analysis of his general
statement by Sokrates, given the class bias built into it. Instead
Kritias accuses Sokrates of the fallacy of question-framing. You do
not inquire, Sokrates, in the right way; for this knowledge is by its
nature not like the other knowledges (epistêmais), any more than
the other knowledges are like each other. The technês, Sokrates, of
calculation or geometry do not produce a result or product similar
to that of the arts of building or weaving. True, agrees Sokrates, but
calculation does have a subject matter proper to itself, like each of
the other knowledges, and different from itself. So tell me, Kritias,
what is sôphrosynê the knowledge of, which is different from itself
(166b)?
The Debate about Knowledge of Knowledge and Knowledge of
Oneself
"That's just it, Sokrates, you go so far as to ask in what way
sôphrosynê differs from all the knowledges. But then you search
(zêteis) for resemblances between it and the other knowledges."
Kritias has made a good logical point. But now he goes too far,
showing that he is not in control of his subject-matter. There is no
such resemblance, he says, between sôphrosynê and the other
knowledges; for all the others are knowledges of something else,
not themselves. But sôphrosynê, alone, is both a knowledge of
other knowledges and of itself (kai auté heautes). 3
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I say Kritias has exceeded himself for at least two reasons. To
gignôskein heauton (164d6, 165b4), "understanding oneself"
(Kritias's words), or epistêmê heautou (165d), "knowledge of
oneself" (Sokrates' wordswith which he presses Kritias), are not the
same as epistêmê autê heautês, "a knowledge of itself" (166c3,4).
But Kritias seems to be equating the two processes. Secondly, it is
assuming too much to say that different knowledges cannot in
some respects also be alike. After all, the conclusion of a
geometrical theorem or calculation, a house, and a woolen cloak
are all human products, though of different sorts.
The reader who is keeping track of the discussion sees, at any rate,
that there are at least three notions in question here: the
knowledges, or arts-and-sciences, in the usual fourth century sense;
secondly, knowing oneself or understanding oneself (which may be
two somewhat different things rather than one); and thirdly,
knowledge of the special knowledges insofar as they are
knowledges, i.e, knowledge of "knowledge." In modern
terminology the first two are "transitive" kinds of knowledge, the
third is an intransitive or "self-reflective" kind of knowledge.
Kritias's words, repeated twice (once at 166c3-4 and again at
166e6-8) within a short space, are also such that a philosophic
reader cannot help noticing that they could very well serve as a
precise definition of what is now sometimes called "pure
philosophy."
However it may be with his character Kritias, Plato the authorlike
all great authorswas aware of what he was doing. This means that
the discussion of sôphrosynê as a kind of knowing, which takes us
to the end of the dialogue, is also a disguised discussion for Plato
and his philosophic reader of the definition or possibility of pure
philosophy. The reader is reinforced in this hypothesis by the fact
that Plato's Sokrates is quick to point out the difficulties, or
paradoxes, that arise from Kritias' definition of "sôhrosynê" (read
"pure philosophy") as the "science" both of itself and of the other
"sciences." ("Science'' is the Latinate and theoreticist word with
which most English translators have preferred to render the Greek
epistêmê.) In other words, we seem to have a case here of Platonic
irony, played by Plato upon his knowing philosophic reader,
through the allegorical device of having his Sokrates appear to be
engaged in uncovering, with Kritias, some Sophistic confusions
about sôphrosynê.
That philosophers or men-of-knowledge (sophoi, philosophoi)
should not only know knowledge, but in knowing it also know
themselves automatically, emerges not as the inexplicable
nonsequitur and equivocation that some have thought it to be, but
as a piece of typical Sophistic arrogance that deserves the satire
that it receives in this dialogue.
The first overweening paradox appears immediately at 167a: that
only
 Page 134
(monos) such a knowing person can inspect (eksetasai) what he
happens to know and what not; and only he will have the power to
examine what other people know and think they knowwhen they
doand, also, what they think they know when they do not. And
others, Sokrates concludes, will be unable to do this. Is not that
what you mean, Kritias, by "being temperate" (sôphronein) and
knowing oneself.' knowing what one knows (to eidenai ha te
oide)which is a truismand what one does not know (kai ha mê
oiden)which sounds impossible? Kritias agrees emphatically
(egôge). The irony may also hide some wistfuness about the fact,
surprising to Plato's Sokrates, that the men who make knowledge
their profession tended (then as now) to know themselves less than
would be expected; such, at any rate, was and is the stereotype of
the philosopher and professor.
"Again then, Kritias, for the third time 'to the Savior': let us
examine, as if from the beginning, whether this is possible or not,
to know that one knows and does not know what one does know
and does not know; then, if this is quite possible, whether it is of
any benefit to those who know this?" Kritias accepts the offering
(167b5).
But please, Kritias, show that you can do better than I; for I am at
an impasse. May I tell it you Kritias? Of course, Sokrates. Well
Kritias, says Sokrates piling up more paradoxical words, if what
you say is true, wouldn't all this (sic) now be none other than a
single knowledge (epistêmê), which is not of anything but itself but
is also the knowledge of other knowledges, as well as being that of
the lack of knowledge (167b6-176c3)? Quite so, says Kritias,
impervious to the intellectual humor of "all this." What he said
about sôphrosynêif it is to be called a sciencehas indeed been
shown to combine such starkly contradictory properties that it can
at best be a Sophistic science, or pseudoscience. At worst, and as
defined by Kritias, it is not a possible science on Sokrates'
showing.
Because Kritias cannot see how strange (atopon) his statement is,
Sokrates tries to find an activity analogous to that of sôhrosynê as
defined by Kritias But he cannot. Take the senses (aisthêsis),
Kritias; is there any sense of the senses and of itself which is also
insensible of what the other senses sense? No. Can you think of a
desire (epithumia) which is the desire, not of any pleasure, but of
itself and the other desires? No. Sokrates points out that it is the
same with wishing (boulêsis) for what is good, with loving (erôta)
beauty, and with terror, which is in dread of itself and the other
fears, but does not fear a single thing! Is there, Kritias, an opinion
(doksan) or judgment which is an opinion or judgment of opinions
or judgments, and of itselfbut opines or judges nothing? By no
means, Sokrates. Thus, not only has Kritias's definition of
sophrosyne been restated by Sokrates so that the reader can see that
it is self-
 Page 135
contradictory, but no analogy 4 can be found for it among other
human processes.
Still, strange as it would be if it really existed, Sokrates does not
yet want to assert in a dogmatic way (pô diischyrizômetha) that
such a thing does not exist (168a). "This knowledge," he continues,
"is it a knowledge of something, and does it have a power such that
it can be of something; or not, Kritias? It is so, Sokrates. Sokrates
now appears as wanting to try another kind of analogy, to see
perhaps whether knowledge is a kind of relation (168b4 ff.).
Do we not say, Kritias, that "the greater" is such in virtue of
something that makes it "greater than" something else, namely,
something smaller? Now, says Sokrates, if we were to find
something that has the relation "greater than" and that is greater
than other greater things, as well as greater than itself, but that is
not in the relation of "greater than'' with regard to that which the
other greater things are themselves greater, then we would have
found something that, in having the relation "greater than" to itself,
is also less than itself.5 Sokrates, it seems, wants to have some
mathematical or logical fun at the expense of Kritias. If, he
proceeds, the relation of "double of" were like Kritias' definition of
sôphrosynê as knowledge, it would be both the double of itself and
the half of itself, as well as not the double of those halves that are
the halves of the doubles of which it is the double. Thus (168e),
says Sokrates, it is impossible for sôhrosynê-knowledge as defined
by Kritias to be like quantitative relations. And it is very
improbable and disputable, Kritias, that it is like sensory activities
or the processes of motion and combustion that seem to have
objects and materials other than themselves,
It would take some great man (169a) to distinguish whether there is
any process in existence that by nature can sometimes apply its
activity or power to itself rather than to other things. I do not
believe I am adequate to solving this problem of whether there is a
knowledge of knowledge. But even if there were such a thing, I
would not accept (says Sokrates) that it is sôphrosynê until you had
shown that it is also beneficial (ophelimon) and good (agathon
169b). For, I claim and prophesy (manteuomai), says Sokrates with
a twinkle, that sôphrosynê is beneficial and good. I say with a
twinkle in his eyes, because Sokrates has also said, a few lines
above, that he mistrusts his own adequacy in speaking about these
things.
So, son of Kallaischros, if you can first clarify (endeiksai) thissince
the thesis that sôphrosynê is a knowledge of knowledge as well as
of ignorance is your thesisif you can clarify that it is possible at all
and, next, that this possibility or power is also beneficial or useful,
you will have convinced me that you are speaking correctly about
sôhrosynê (169b-c). Kritias answers so vaguely to hide the
difficulties he is having (169dl), that Sokrates, as narrator
 Page 136
of the conversation, has to explain his behavior. Just as seeing
someone yawn, claims Sokrates, makes oneself want to yawn, so
Kritiasconfronted with Sokrates' string of difficultiesseemed
compelled by sympathy to fall into an impasse (aporia) himself.
But the reader should not think that Sokrates, as participant in the
conversation, is having difficulties in the same sense as Kritias.
Sokrates' "difficulties" are with Kritias's thesis; there can be no
doubt for the alert reader that Sokrates is so masterfully, wittily,
and perceptively in charge of the conversation itself, that he can be
having difficulties only in the sense of objections to the
consequences of the thesis. A proof of this is the number of
concessions he has been willing to make at key points, to keep the
conversation going, and the fact that he now helps Kritias out of the
very impasse he has brought him to. He does this with a concession
that allows Kritias to save face before his audience. "Another time"
(authis) we shall examine whether it is a fact or not; but let us
concede and suppose for now, Kritias, that a knowledge of
knowledge is possible.
How, Kritias, does this make it any more possible to know what
one knows and what one does not know? For this is what we said
(at 167a) was the meaning of knowing oneself (to gignôskein
hauton) and "being temperate" (sôphronein), did we not? Because,
Sokrates, if a person has a knowledge which knows itself (epistêmê
hê autê hautên gignôskei), he will be the same sort of person as the
sort of knowledge he has For instance, Socrates, when someone has
speed he is speedy, when he has beauty he is beautiful, and when
he has knowledge (gnôsin) he is knowing (gignôskôn) or a knower.
Thus, when he has knowledge which is of itself (gnôsin autên
hautês), then he will surely be a knower of himself (gignôskon
autos heauton). This is clever of Kritias, but Sophistical, because
(among other things) it equivocates between being a knower of the
knowledge of knowledge and a knower of oneself.
Sokrates, however, takes Kritias up on another non-sequitur. How,
Kritias, will a person who has that-which-knows-itself (to hauto
gignôskon) or who knows himself (autos hauton gignôskei) be
bound (anagkê) to know (eidenai) what he knows and what he does
not know? Because, Sokrates, the two are the same thing (170al).
I'm afraid, Kritias, I still don't understand how knowmg what one
knows and does not know is the same as knowledge of oneself. The
reader will note that Sokrates is not admitting Kritias's equation
between sôphrosynê as a knowledge of knowledge and as a
knowledge of oneself. If, Kritias, there be such a thing as
knowledge of knowledge, will it be anything more than the
distinguishing (diairein) of something that is knowledge and
something that is not knowledge? It will be just that, Sokrates.
Sokrates now goes on to demonstrate by question and answer
between 170b
 Page 137
and 171c that as Kritias defines it sôphrosynê is supererogatory:
namely, it adds nothing to knowledge. For, Kritias, what a person
knows of health, of music, or of building construction he knows
from medicme, harmonics, and architecturenot from sôphrosynê
defined either as knowledge of knowledge or as knowledge of self.
At the same time Sokrates shows Kritias that even as knowledge of
knowledge, sôphrosynê does not help the expert or professional.
This is because the latter, like the craftsmen (dêmiourgoi), can tell
what a physician, musician or architect does or does not know only
by means of his knowledge of medicine, harmonics, or
architecturenot by means of sôphrosynê as epistemology. And in
the case of sôphrosynê as self-knowledge (170c-d), he has shown
that all it can do is tell a person that he or she knows or does not
know something; it cannot tell a person what he or she does or does
not know. The reader must wait until Stephanus page 172b for
Plato's Sokrates to bring out what is interesting in this proposition.
"Then what benefit Kritias," Sokrates concludes (171d1ff.), "can
we expect from sôphrosynê if that is the sort of thing it is?" For the
philosophic student who is allegorically reading "pure philosophy''
for sôphrosynê, the amusingness of this can only be enhanced by
the perception that sôphrosynê as defined by Kritias is
indistinguishable from "pure philosophy" as some philosophers
now define it, and as some must have thought to define it then.
It is a pity, Kritias, that the sôphron person cannot do what your
definition hoped he could, Sokrates continues, indulging ironically
in just such dreams as technocracy is made of: to have sôphrosynê
would really be good for us. For those of us who are sophron
would live free from error and be able to rule over the others
without mistakes. We would never undertake things we had no
knowledge of, but we would put the matter in the hands of those
who know, and those whom we rule would be permitted to do only
what they are going to be able to do rightly because they have
knowledge of it (171e6). So a house or city-state, and all that was
governed by sôphrosynê, would be beautifully administered (kalôs
oikeisthai). Error would be abolished, and under such conditions
(houto diakeimenous), everybody would do well and be happyif
only sôphrosynê was knowing what one does know and what one
does not know (172a). You see what a pity it is, Kritias, that no
such science exists anywhere. "I see," says a disappointed and
attentive Kritias.
But there is this good thing, Kritias, says Sokrates to cheer him up,
that we can say about sôphrosynê as the knowledge of what one
knows and does not know. Will not whoever has it, learn
(manthanei) everything else more easily, and see things more
clearly, and be very aware of his special study as knowledge
(172b5-6)? And he will better analyze (eksetasai) both what he and
others have learned. But, Kritias, adds Sokrates suddenly, are we
over-valuing
 Page 138
(apolausometha) it and making it out to be something bigger than it
actually is? Perhaps we are, Sokrates.
And perhaps, says Sokrates, our whole inquiry has been useless. I
am inferring (tekmairomai) that some very strange things appear
about sôphrosynê, if it is knowledge of knowledge. Can we be so
sure, Kritias, that it would be a good thing for mankind if each of
us were to turn over to those who know all the things about which
we don't know? We may not be looking at the matter in the right
way. Let it be ever so true, Kritias, that sôphrosynê is what you say
it is, it is not at all clear to me that it accomplishes anything good
for us (171al). I hope I'm not wandering, Kritias, but if I am to be
serious, I must face the notion that has occurred to me. Well said
Sokrates, says Kritias encouragingly.
Listen then to my dream (to emon onar), whether it is of the sort
that comes true or misleads. However portentous this may at first
sound, Sokrates immediately proceeds (173a8-173d6) with good
logic to a massive set of examples that constitutes a denial of the
consequent. If sôhrosynê, such as it has been defined, were really
ruling our activities, would they not all be carried out according to
the knowledges (kata tas epistêmas)? Neither pilots nor physicians
nor generals would deceive us into believing they knew what they
do not know. Nor would they go undetected. And wouldn't we be
safer at sea and in battle, and have better health? Wouldn't all our
utensils, clothes and other things for use be skillfully (technikôs)
and knowledgeably contrived, because made by true (alêthinois)
craftsmen? We might even agree that false soothsayers would be
kept, by sôphrosynê, from practicing the art of prophecy defined as
knowledge of what will be. Thus prepared or guided by
sôphrosynô, the human race would, I grant you, live and act with
knowledge (epistêmonos). But that by acting according to
knowledge we should do well (eu) and be happy
(eudaimonoimen)that I cannot yet understand, Kritias.
"However, Sokrates," Kritias replies with apparent good sense,
"you will not easily come up to the aim of doing or livmg well if
you disregard (atimasêis) acting on knowledge (epistêmonos)."
Then tell me Kritias, says Sokrates with a hint of impatience:
acting on the knowledge of what? Of shoe-making? Good heavens
no, Sokrates! Of metal working, Kritias, or weaving or carving
perhaps? Of course not! Then, Kritias, it follows that we no longer
hold to the statement that he who lives according to knowledge is
happy. For you, Kritias, do not allow that those people who live by
knowledge are happy or fortunate (eudaimones). You seem to me
restrictively to define (aphorizestha) happy persons only as those
who live according to a knowledge of certain things rather than
other things. Are you perhaps referring to the person who knows all
about the future, the prophet, or to someone else, Kritias? Yes,
Sokrates, to
 Page 139
him and to someone else (174a). But, Kritias, granting that such a
person exists who is ignorant of nothing, you aren't going to tell
me, are you, that there is someone even more knowing than
hesomeone who, besides knowledge of everything past, present and
future, also has knowledge of knowledge? Indeed not, Sokrates.
The unfinished joke cut off by Kritias's negative here is also a
logical inference. Most readers will not fail to draw it. The
implication of Sokrates' question is as follows: that it might be
thought that as between a knower who knew everything and one
who also knew epistemology (i.e., knowledge of knowledge), the
latter would know moreeven though Kritias had said that
sôphrosyné (i.e., knowledge of knowledge) is knowledge of
nothing. There is another side to the paradox; namely, that the
person with knowledge of knowledge who knew everything, would
know that there was nothing he did not know, in arrogant contrast
to his non-sophron or non-epistemological counterpart. Was
Sokrates' question aimed at this hubristic connotation of Kritias's
definition of knowledge of knowledge? Kritias's negative may be
telling the reader that snobbish as this oligarchist is, he has likewise
been "epistemologically arrogant" without knowing it.
I am still eager to know, Kritias, which of the knowledges it is that
makes a person happy; or is it all of them together or equally? No,
not all of them equally, Sokrates; it is the knowledge of good and
of evil which makes a man happy (174b10). You wretch, Kritias,
leading me around and 'round while hiding from us that it is not
living according to knowledgeor all the knowledges, eventhat
makes us do well and be happy, but only this single knowledge of
good and evil. Will the other knowledges still be effective without
this one knowledge, Kritias? Oh yes, Sokrates, as effective as ever.
But, Kritias, the other knowledges will not do what they do, well
and beneficially, if not guided by the knowledge of good and evil
(174c10-b2)? True, Sokrates. And this knowledge is not
sôphrosynê as the knowledge of knowledge and lack of it, but a
knowledge whose job (ergon) is to benefit us. So, Kritias, as a
knowledge of good and evil, it cannot be both the same as
sôphrosynê, the way you defined it, and of benefit to us (174d4-8).
But why should sôphrosynê, says Kritias, resisting and committing
the epistemological mistake all over again, not itself be beneficial
as a knowledge of knowledge which rules the other knowledges
including the knowledge of good and evil? Because, Kritias, it has
been thoroughly testified to already that sôphrosynê is only
knowledge of knowledge and the lack of it, and nothing else: it will
not take care of our health or other needs, for these are the work
(ergon) of the other arts-and-sciences (technai). So, Kritias, how
can sôphrosynê be of benefit when it is the
 Page 140
creator (dêmiourgos) of no benefits? It seems it cannot be,
concludes Kritias at last (175a6).
Having made his point, Plato's Sokrates now proceeds to let
Kritias, and the friends of sôphrosynê as pure philosophy, off the
hook by being ironic about himself. You see, Kritias, how right I
was to doubt my ability to investigate sôphrosynê, given that I saw
nothing useful in what is agreed to be the finest of all things (!). We
have been unable to discover what has been set down as, and said
to be, sôphrosynê. We failed even though we made concessions
and tried out assumptions denied by the argument, such as that
there was a knowledge of knowledge that could know the products
(erga) of the other knowledges. And we tried to make out that the
sophron person had a knowledge of what he knew and did not
know, so that he could know that he knew the former and that he
did not know the latter. But nothing can be more illogical than this,
Kritias; for we left out of consideration the impossibility that one
can in any way know things he does not know at all.
Complacent and flexible as we were in our inquiry, however
(175d), it remained unable to discover the truth but seems to have
laughed at sôphrosynê by showing that as we defined it, it was
useless. Now Charmides, says Sokrates, turning to the young man,
it is not so much on my account that I am vexed as on yours. For, if
in spite of your fair form (idean) and most temperate disposition
(psychên sôphronestatos), this sôphrosynê is to be of no help to
you, I have to be very upset.
The reader should not leave unremarked that this is an implicit
attack on Kritias; for, decorous as Charmides has so far been
trained to be, the notion of sôphrosynê that Kritias is imparting to
him has proved to be useless for the conduct of life. The authorial
irony in this is that the reader knows that Charmides turned out to
be only less evil than Kritias himself in his moments of power in
later life.
I'm also very upset, Charmides, at taking all this trouble over the
Thracian doctor's incantation, when it has proved to be worthless. I
find this so difficult to accept, says Sokrates tongue-in-cheek, that I
would rather believe that I'm bad at inquiring (phaulon einai
zêtêtên). For I really hold sôphrosynê to be a great good, and would
think you blessed if you actually have it. So look and see,
Charmides, if you have it, and don't need the incantation and can
regard me as a charlatan who does not know how to inquire
logically into anything (adynaton logoi hotioun zêtein 176a).
My goodness, Sokrates, I don't know whether I have it or not. How
could I, when it has not been possible for you and Kritias to
discover (ekseurein) what it is. I feel that I do need the charm,
Sokrates, and for my part I would
 Page 141
like to be charmed by you every day of my life until you say I have
had enough. If you were to do that, Charmides, interposes Kritias, I
would be convinced that you are temperate (sôphroneis). So follow
Sokrates, and leave him not for anything great or small. I will obey
my guardian, says Charmides, and not forsake Sokrates starting
from today.
Now just what, says Sokrates with assumed social innocence, are
you two plotting? Are you going to use force without fair and
previous warning? You may expect force since I am under orders,
says Charmides. Humorously said as this is, it is also a faint
prefiguration of Charmides' political future. Well then, says
Sokrates, it is useless to oppose you; for when you do anything by
force you cannot be resisted.
Notes
1. Charmides is mentiond by Alcibiades, at Symposium 222a-b, as
confused about Sokrates. He did not keep his promise to follow
Sokrates, since he is identified at Protagoras 315a as a follower of
that Sophist. Charmides became one of th Thirty Tyrants of Athens
under th Spartan occupation.
2. I say with forced logic because: if (S is H) and (S produces G), it
follows that (S is H and produces G). It does not follow that (S is H
and G). Similarly: (GM impliesG), the assumption behind the
conclusion that S is G, can be statd as (G implis GM). Thus, to
assert that there are GM is either a fallacious affirmation of the
consequent or a denial of the antecedent. Sokrates has not proved
that S is also G, i.e., that sôphrosynê is also good; but only asserted
it with a circularity hidden by an appearance of logicality.
3. R, Sprague suggests that the reason for Kritias's saying this
might be that he could be expected to be thinking that without
knowledge of one's self as "temperate," one would not know what
sophrosyne was. But if Kritias thinks this, he has fallen into the
same trap as his ward Charmides and all the presumptive
"knowers" ever questioned by Plato's Sokrates in the world of the
dialogues.
4. R. Sprague (p.81, note 56) thinks the analogies are not to the
point because Sokcrates' examples are all first-order activities, as
she calls them. Does she mean that sophrosyne is not a first-order
activity, and that it is a second-order activity? Or has she, in
assuming that Plato's Sokrates is talking about what she calls a
second-order activity, unnoticedly accepted that the discussion of
sophrosyne here is an allegory for the discussion of what we call
"epistemology" or "pure philosophy"? The two latter, in some
contemporary definitions, are indeed second-order activities.
 Page 142
5. It may help to schematize what Sokrates has just said as follows:
1. aRb, and aRc (where R = df.'greater than').
2. bRx, bRy, and cRy (by definition). Also,
3. aRa, (by definition). But,
4. a - Rx, or a - Ry (by definition). So, since
5. x - Rb, and x - Rc, etc. Therefore,
6. a - Rb, and a - Rc (substituting a for x, given that a is not
greater than x).
7. Step 6 and step 1 are contradictories!
 Page 143

Chapter 9
The Theaetetus and the Birth of Epistemology
Maieutic Art and Hypothetical Method
Bypassing the frame dialogue for the moment, let us begin our
discussion of the Theaetetus at Stephanus page 145d. We note that
in this case the reported dialogical exchange is initiated not by the
rather reluctant youth, but by Sokrates, who asks, of all things, a
loaded question. Is learning (manthanein) growing wiser
(sophôteron) about that which one learns (145d)? Theaetetus's
agreement to the obvious is followed, astonishingly, by an
equivocation or fallacious confusion on Sokrates' part of a "final"
with an "efficient" cause: ". . . the wise . . . are made wise by
wisdom." With deliberate tendentiousness he then presses
Theaetetus as to whether knowledge (epistêmê) and wisdom
(sophia) are not the same thing, given that people are wise in that
of which they have knowledge? When Theaetetus does agree,
Sokrates at last allows his longstanding doubt (aporô) about this to
emerge, and asks what he "wants but cannot fully grasp (labein)
unaided,'' namely, what can knowledge really be (epistêmê ho ti
pote tugchanei on).
Because he is well mannered, Theaetetus knows he must try to
answer, but he is also sure that Sokrates will correct him if he
makes a mistake. As we shall see, he does make a mistake, and
Sokrates does not correct him: we must try to understand why.
Theaetetus answers by citing the crafts of shoe-making and
carpentry as examples of knowledge (epistêmê), as well as
Theodorus's subjects, geometry for example.
 Page 144
But the question, Theaetetus, was not what is knowledge of, or how
many kinds of knowledge there are, but to know (gnônai) what
knowledge itself is actually (epistêmê auto ho ti pot'estin 146e).
Sokrates reinforces the point with an analogy, and asks the tricky
question, does anyone understand (syniêsin) the name of anything
when he does not know (oiden) what the thing is? "No," agrees
Theaetetus a little too easily.
Sokrates uses Theaetetus's assent to make two generalizations (1):
"then he doesn't understand (syniêsin) the science (epistêmê) of
shoes, if he doesn't know (eidôs) science, and (2): "then he who is
ignorant (agnoêi) of science does not understand shoemaking, or
any other art-or-science (technê)?"
I say that Theaetetus's agreement at 14762 is a mistake because the
general consequences Sokrates has drawn from it appear to Plato's
reader to be contrary to fact: that to know the theory or science
(epistêmê) of shoes, you have to know what theory or science is.
This is either a tautology ("if you don't know the science of shoes,
then you don't know the science of shoes") or it is false: to know
shoes, you don't have to know theory or "science." Secondly, if I
understand physics or any art-or-science, then I am not ignorant of
art-or-science: I know the science-or-art of physics or the science-
or-art of whatever. "Knowing'' what theory or science or art is in
abstraction from all subject-matter, if it can be called "knowing," is
what we call epistemology. But you can know physics without
getting into the self-reflection about aspects of method that would
be the epistemology of physicsthese would be the aspects of
method common to several natural sciences. In the same way, one
can also create worthwhile art without being able to verbalize the
aesthetics of it.
So if we believe that knowlege is always knowledge of something,
it follows that Sokrates' reasoning at 14767-147cl is also a mistake;
for if it is knowledge of nothing, it is not knowledge, and if it is
knowledge of knowledge, it is only epistemology. In any case, in
wanting to know what knowledge would be in abstraction from any
subject-matter, Sokrates is being shown by Plato his creator as
giving birth to the notion of epistemology. Plato is going to leave it
to his reader to decide for him- or herself whether Sokrates has
given birth to a wind egg (151e6) or not.
Sokrates' young interlocutor becomes very hesitant from 147c2 on.
To illustrate his difficulty, he gives an example from his work
under Theodorus in mathematics in which he and another student
(Sokrates the younger) were able to distinguish two kinds of linear
"roots" and give them distinct names while trying to understand the
whole class of quantities. Theaetetus says he is unable to do for
Sokrates in regard to knowledge what he was there able to do in
regard to the class of quantities: he would like to apply the same
method to the problem of knowledge as set by Sokrates, but he is
unable to do so.
 Page 145
Sokrates, however, won't let him be discouraged about the inquiry
into the nature of knowledge, saying that this inquiry is, after all, a
matter for older and more practiced thinkers (148d). Sokrates' faith
in Theaetetus is not arbitrary, dialogically speaking. Plato's reader
has just been prepared for it by the brilliant way in which Plato has
made his Theaetetus summarize his distinctions among "square
numbers" (tetragônos arithmos, 4, 9, 16 . . . n2), "oblong numbers"
(promêkê arithmon, all others except 1), "lengths" (mêkoi, all
whole numbers after 1) that form squares, and irrational "roots"
(dynameis, , , , etc.) that are incommensurable with the unit (in
feet, podiaia) but can be sides of figures commensurable in area
with squares.
Theaetetus is no ordinary young learner, then, and Sokrates'
characterization of him as "not empty but big with" (egkymôn
148e) possible outputs about the problem of knowledge is not
unearned within the dialogue. Again within the dialogue, Plato's
Theaetetus shows himself aware (148e2) of the direction that the
interests of Plato's Sokrates take. Unlike Meno in his dialogue with
Sokrates, Theaetetus is presented at the beginning of the exchange
as already at that peak state that constitutes teachability and that
both the discussion and the practical demonstlation in the Meno
establish as a precondition of learning. This is the state in which the
learner both experiences his ignorance and, in beginning really to
understand that he does not know, also begins to get a sense of
what he wants to understand. But, again in contrast to the Meno, it
is Theaetetus who tells Sokrates that having heard reports of
Sokrates' questions and having tried without success to work them
out for himself, neither can he find anyone else who answers in the
way called for by Sokrates (out'allou akousai legontos houtôs hôs
su diakeleuei, cf. Meno 71c3,4). Yet he continues to be concerned
about it. It is at this point that Sokrates tells him that his pangs must
be birth pangs because he is not empty but pregnant (!). We see
that Theaetetus comes close to being the ideal student.
When the far from ideal subjects of Sokrates' questions were the
conventional young aristocrat Meno and his untutored attendant,
Plato made his Sokrates compare "his" hypothetical method of
interrogation with that of the geometers and insist (tongue in
cheek) that the process by which the attendant had worked out the
theorem posed, was wholly a process of recollection. The
pedagogical "demonstration" was supposed, in the ironic fiction of
that dialogue, to prove that knowledge in the sense of epistêmê and
sophia was perhaps achievable by a process of recollection. At the
same time, the exhibitive judgment that the dialogue as a whole
seemed to be enacting (so far as it is verbalized) is that while there
is such a thing as learning, human excellence is almost impossible
to communicate. But within the universe of that particular dialogue,
Plato's Sokrates enunciated the proposition that Greek
 Page 146
mankind had yet to find a single teacher of goodness (aretê). He
also took care to neutralize any impiety that this claim might have
implied towards the city's founders and saviors, by asserting that
what these great men had helped Athens with wasby the blessing of
the Godright opinion, or right judgment. But right opinion,
according to the Sokrates of the Meno, had already been
categorized as fugacious and therefore unteachable, unlike
knowledge or wisdom, which this Sokrates had claimed earlier are
the only thing teachable.
So, since "what then can knowledge be?" is the very question that
Plato's Sokrates asks Theaetetus to try to answer, Plato's reader will
want to ask at least two questions of the dialogue Theaetetus: do
the principals in it learn or teach each other anything about the
subject of inquiry as the questioning proceeds; and, does the
dialogical exchange as a whole and as such enact anything about
knowledge itself or the process of inquiring into knowledge? In
other words, we will want to see whether Sokrates' characterization
of his methods (while respecting their different dialogical contexts)
as "maieutic" in the Theaetetus and as "anamnesic" in the Meno
throw any light on each other. Or, do the two methods together
throw any light on the problems of knowledge, and teaching and
learning? In what respects do the exhibitive judgments enacted by
the two dialogues as wholes qualify or reinforce each other? For
instance, is the Theaetetus going to show that something can, after
all, be taughtnot just somehow learned?
Consider Sokrates' story about the childless Artemis being the
patron of childbirth because midwives meet the two conditions of
being like Artemis in that they are unable to give birth any longer
themselves, but are not without experience of childbearing. Plato's
Sokrates tells the story in order to defend himself from the
widespread charge of being a skeptical, or destructive, eccentric.
But the story has one negative implication for all of its positive
intent: at this late stage in his dramatized life, Plato's Sokrates
implicitly accepts the fact that while he may and does bring others
to knowledge, he himself is not able to give out knowledge. Are
we, therefore, to take him as a great teacher with nothing to
teachexcept intellectual care and honesty in the pursuit of
knowledge? Or is he teaching by example the maieutic art of how
to direct or conduct an inquiry? He does speak of himself in the
dialogue as possessing and practicing this maieutic art-or-science
(technê). But by the same token that he is teaching what we call
intellectual honesty by example, he is also by example teaching
what may have to be called intellectual leadership in nearly all the
dialogues. In any case, is the transmission of an art-or-science by
example not an instance of the communication of an excellence or
a kind of knowledge?
Two other consequences emerge. We note that at 210b Theaetetus
says that Sokrates is bringing out more than was in him. Put
together with what Sokrates
 Page 147
has said very early in the conversation, to the effect that this was a
problem he could not solve alone, Theaetetus's statement suggests
that we should perhaps be observing something about inquiry as
cooperation. Secondly, it must finally occur to the dialogical reader
of the dialogues that Plato's Sokrates is, on the record so to speak,
quite a conversationalist for conversations sake; though he is,
outstandingly, a philosophic conversationalist. It follows that while
there will be parts of dialogues that are conversation for
conversations sake, the exchanges will also be pointed by Sokrates
in the direction of subjects that he is interested in and wants to
interest others in. Theaetetus knows this (148e2), and Plato's reader
knows it, but many of Sokrates' interlocutors fail to perceive it in
their interactions with him.
The analogy with midwifery turns out to have an "epistemological"
point, as we would call it. At 149c Plato's Sokrates insists that
"human nature (hê anthropinê physis) is too weak to obtain an art
(technê) of dealing with that of which it has no experience" (hôh an
ê apeiros). Now, the basically identical point is made twice by the
Sokrates of the Meno that it is foolhardy to claim knowledge about
that of which we have no experience or acquaintance. Sokrates had
made the point early in that conversation with Meno (71b), and he
makes it again late in the dialogue, while exposing Anytus, in the
exchange with the latter on the subject of the Sophists (92b).
Reflecting on the Meno as we read the Theaetetus, we feel the
weight of the questions that are both acted upon or acted out and
that are either made explicit or effectively left to germinate with
Plato's reader: How is it possible to understand, or talk about, or
relevantly pursue, something we have not defined? Is to understand
something really to be able to define it? Have we really failed to
understand what we are otherwise doing well enough, if we don't
have a definition of what we are doing?
Structural Significance of the Frame Dialogue
When a young subject turns out to be unresponsive to the maieutic
art of Sokrates, Sokrates sometimes tries to match him up with a
teacher more suitable to his temperament and abilities. He does
this, he says, without any pandering and quite like the good
midwives who know best what matches will produce the finest
offspring. Sometimes a student who has rejected Sokrates'
methods, but finds himself unable to learn or be rationally
delivered of his potential output, tries to come back to Sokrates
because he has realized what he is missing away from Sokrates.
Such a one, of many, was Aristeides, son of Lysimachos (151a).
The reason for this digression and circumstantial explicitness is
more nostalgic than methodological: Plato is reminding his
Athenian
 Page 148
readers of how much they should be missing the Sokrates they
allowed to die, and of how much they have been deprived by his
death.
Plato's Sokrates returns to his main subject by noting that his
thinking students, like women ready to deliver, are also restless and
in pain. His art, he says, can both bring on that pain and bring it to
an end (151bl). But before we ourselves return to the main thread
of the narrated dialogue, it will be useful to consider the structural
reasons for its being set by Plato inside the frame-dialogue between
Terpsion and Eucleides that he has devised for it.
We remember that these two Megarians are mentioned in the
Phaedo as present at the conversation held by Sokrates with his
Theban visitors and other companions on the last afternoon of his
life. In the fiction provided by the frame-dialogue of the
Theaetetus, Eucleides has put into writing Sokrates' report to him
of the conversational exchange Sokrates once had with the
mathematician Theodorus and the young student Theaetetus.
Eucleides says he wrote down as much as he could remember of
what Sokrates told him as soon as he got home to Megara; and
whenever he went to Athens he would ask Sokrates about whatever
he couldn't recollect, until he got the whole conversational
exchange corrected and written down (143a). 1 But since the
conversation ends with Sokrates' remark, at 210d, that he must go
to the Stoa of the basileus to answer the suit Meletus has brought
against him, Grote raises the question: how could Eucleides have
found the time to meet with Sokrates, given the imminence of his
trial and execution?
The dramatic fiction turns out to be sound, however, given
thataccording to Xenophon's Memorabilia IV viiia period of ritual
purity had begun for the city the day before Sokrates went on trial.
The "delia" was a festival commemorating the liberation of Athens,
by Theseus, from the tribute in human sacrifice it had once had to
pay yearly to Minos. This period lasted as long as the sacred ship
and its priestly envoy took to go and come from the shrine of
Apollo at Delos, which on this occasion was thirty days.
Meanwhile Crito "had given security to the dikasts that [Sokrates]
would abide" their verdict (Phaedo 115d). This would have given
to Eucleides not only more than a month to visit Sokrates, but also
the sense of urgency with which to take the thirty-mile round-trip
often enough to complete his record of the Socratic conversation as
required by Plato's literary convention. The point is worth making,
because it confirms the claim, neglected by so many, that Plato was
a master of the dialogue-form ever in virtuoso control of it for
critical and philosophic purposes.
According to surviving testimonies so insufficient as to allow only
guesses, Eucleides seems to have been a contemporary of Plato's
and, like him, a conscious Socratic. In any case, in the dramatic
fiction of this dialogue, Eucleides
 Page 149
is an attentive auditor of Sokrates. According to some unreliable
and very interpretive traditions, Eucleides is supposed to have been
"influenced" by the Eleatics Parmenides and Zeno. But, as I have
shown in previous chapters, so was Plato (in ways not fully
clarified). And it turned out that Plato's understanding of
Parmenides, as this understanding operates in the Timaeus and the
Parmenides, is not the same as that of "the tradition" after
Theophrastus. Unlike the rest of "the tradition" Theophrastus
correctly testifies that Parmenides did not distinguish between
"thinking' (phronein) and "perceiving'' (aisthanesthai, De Sensibus
1.4). Likewise, how we take Eucleides, if we allow ourselves to
talk about him at all as a historica figure, will depend on what is
meant by his being "influenced by" the Eleatics. And we cannot
decide this, as Zeller and others have noted, on the basis of what
any later Megarians are fragmentarily recorded as believing. Since
all we have of Eucleides' words or doctrines are some fifteen
unreliable mentions, 2 it is not impossible that Eucleides was
claimed as a founder by, or for, "the School of Megara" because of
the association with Sokrates celebrated in the two dialogues by
Plato.
Again, Eucleides, like Plato, is usually opposed by "the tradition"
to Protagoras; yet as we have seen, Plato rather celebrates the form
of the Protagorean antilogism by personifying it in the Protagoras
and adapting it to the dialogue-form of the Parmenides. At the
same time, Eucleides is reported to have been quite an eristic
andconsistently or inconsistently with thisto have written
dialogues, six according to Laertius, more according to Suidas. But
if Plato was able to encompass and control the form of the eristic
antilogy by means of the dialogue-form, perhaps Eucleides was
able to do so too. Finally, if Eucleides did write dialogues and any
of the surviving fragments are from them, how do we know that
they are Eucleides' doctrines rather than some dialogical
disputant's? Even the notice in Laertius which says that after the
death of Sokrates, Plato and some other philosophers withdrew to
the house of Eucleides in Megara is suspect. And it is suspect
because the reason Laertius gives (which he says he got from
Hermodorus) is that they feared the cruelty of the Thiry Tyrants
(II.106). But at the time of Sokrates' death not only were the Thirty
no longer in power, but the amnesty of Archinos was still in force!
Now Protagoras is believed to have written a treatise, not a
dialogue, on Truth (Alêtheia); it is referred to in our dialogue at
161c5 and 162a, but has not survived. It would certainly
complicate matters if said treatise was itself developed by
Protagoras in the form of an antilogy! It is plausible to suggest, as a
matter of intellectual history, that to Plato and his contemporaries,
the most original formulations of the opposition between
epistemological relativism and rationally-based right belief (doksa)
were those to be found, respectively, in the treatise of Protagoras
and the poem of Parmenides. We will have
 Page 150
to see whether such a hypothesis helps us better to understand the
complex conceptual allusiveness of the dialogue Theaetetus.
Antiquity also opposes Eucleides the Megarian to Aristippus of
Cyrene, a sort of deviant Socratic and hedonist who got along with
everybody, from the dynasts Dionysius and Dion (of Syracuse) to
the philosophers Diogenes and Aeschines. How significant is it that
in the Theaetetus the youngster's mathematics teacher is a
Theodorus from Cyrene? Theodorus was the name, by coincidence,
of an important next-generation disciple of Aristippus. Are we to
understand that one of the reasons Sokrates wants to talk with
Theaetetus is to make sure he will not fall into some Aristippean
errors about knowledge and the good? And since both Protagoras
and Herakleitos are claimed by "the tradition" as intellectual
ancestors of or influences upon Aristippus, must we not wonder
whether this is one reason why Plato's Sokrates conflates the views
of the first two in criticizing the third? Does it not appear, in other
words, that Plato's Sokrates is seeking to attack Aristippus (if he is
attacking Aristippus) in a fundamental way by going to the
originals? Will we be justified in retaining the suspicion that "the
tradition" only claims Protagoras and Herakleitos as influences
upon Aristippus because of what happens in the dialogue; or can
we safely not heed it? In any case, if Plato's Sokrates is attacking
Aristippus implicitly and in a fundamental way, should we not stop
calling him a Socratic, even though he may have imitated Sokrates
in some respects, and number Aristippus among the Sophists?
The case would appear to be the same for Antisthenes, in this one
regard, if it is true that the second half of the Theaetetus is a
polemic against the Antisthenian position that it is impossible to
answer any question incorrectly (183a6). 3 This position is
associated with, then based on, a Herakleitean ontology by Plato's
Sokrates (179eff.). On the basis of the Theaetetus, Antisthenes
ought to be called a Sophist rather than a Socratic, no matter how
much he admired Sokrates, because he seems to have done some
dogmatizing of his own in competition with other Sophists; and,
like other supposed founders of Socratic schools, he stands in a
derivative and perverse relation to the great Presophistic natural
philosophers of an earlier day. It is not Socratic to dogmatize, or to
"speak for the gallery," as Sokrates says of Protagoras at 161e4. I
say, "like Aristippus and the Protagoreans," and I say, ''derivative
and perverse," just on the evidence of the Theaetetus.
In any case, since the historical Sokrates seems to have asserted as
such no doctrines of his own, and was certainly the first great
antidogmatic, it must have been on the grounds of similarly
interrogative methods that the public and "the tradition" saw
Eucleides, Aristippus, and Antisthenes as "Socratics." But it is
wrong to turn around and then see the historical Sokrates reflected
in
 Page 151
their image, as some commentators and textbooks do, or as
maintaining dogmas of his own. Plato 's Sokrates is another matter,
and a great part of the subject of this book. In this and other
dialogues he is in possession of all the methods and devices of the
Eleatics and the Sophists (both Gorgian and Protagorean), and he is
quite masterfully in control of their and others' doctrines: these he
is made to use, improve upon, play with or challenge, according to
the design of the particular dialogue Plato has put him in. Perhaps
the out-loud reading of the Theaetetus by the Megarian's boy is
designed to imply that the dialogue was "appropriate entertainment
for eristics"except that it is also a challenging, if disguised, series
of antilogies that Plato has not only put over on the Megarians, but
has also advanced as a warning against the ingrained tendency to
epistemologize of "pure philosophy."
What Plato's Sokrates is not detached from, but forever seeking, is
the knowledge that can be obtained from others and secured as
valid by his own rational criteria. This Sokrates deals mainly, as we
have seen, in hypothetical and critical reasoning, though he is
normative as regards the above-mentioned pursuit. When he does
resort to argumentative or fabulating devices of his own, Plato his
creator allows us to see that it is either for the good of his
interlocutor or that it is in the heat of competition with a peer such
as Protagoras himself, or Zeno or Aristophanes. It is a tragedy of
the life of reason, as dramatized by Plato and personified by his
Sokrates, that there is so little knowledge to be found among
humanscomic as they sometimes are in their pretensions and
vicious as they are in their actions against the man who challenges
them and shows that they do not really know what they profess to
know.
The fiction maintained by the dialogue is that what we are getting
from Eucleides is a faithfully recorded and carefully corrected
version of Sokrates' conversation about the nature of knowledge.
The fiction is required by the intricacy of the argumentation and by
the method Sokrates adopts in order to enlighten Theaetetus and
clarify, if Sokrates can, his subject matter. What Plato gives us in
the Theaetetus is (very generally) a large-scale application by his
Sokrates of the "hypothetical method" to some theses about
knowledge. Thus, in the first part of the dialogue, as we shall now
see, what Sokrates undertakes in response to Theaetetus's first
answer to his question is an examination of the other assumptions
that are needed to make consistent the view that "knowledge is
nothing other than perceiving or observing" (ouk allo ti estin
epistêmê ê aisthêsis 151e4). It will only be after we have worked
through the dialogue that the architectonic claim will have been
inductively justified that the dialogue is designed to stand as a
warning against the tendency of philosophy to become pure
philosophy, and as an exhibition of the impossibility of providing a
purely theoretical ground for "theory" in the sense of knowl-
 Page 152
edge abstracted from its many subject-matters and the practices and
problems that give rise to it. In modern language, what is exhibited
by the Theaetetus as a whole is that epistemology is a second-order
inquiry involved in the paradoxes that arise when discourse about
knowledge is undertaken in separation from the activity or practice
that knowing is.
Observing or Perceiving; Knowledge or Science?
"It seems to me," Theaetetus has just said (151e1), "that he who
knows something observes that which he knows and just as it
appears at the moment" (dokei oun moi ho epistamenos ti
aisthanesthai touto ho epistatai kai hôs ge nuni phainetai).
Theaetetus's words are carefully chosen; if it is not anxiety that
they reflect, it is at least a concern to be exact in response to
Sokrates' encouragement and questioning` But this first, carefully
limited, definition of knowledge by Theaetetus has not been given
the care by the translators that it deserves. It is not only a matter
here of the striking, and therefore distracting, equation at the end of
the passage between knowledge (epistêmê) and perceiving or
observing (aisthêsis); Theaetetus has prepared for the equation by
saying what all the translators 4 miss except perhaps Fowler whose
punctuation is ambiguousthat what is known, is known only as it
appears to observation at the moment.
"Very good," says Sokrates, "and well derived (gennaiôs). For so is
it necessary to be delivered (apophainomenon, like gennaiôs,
carries an echo of the obstetric pun) in speaking." But while
Sokrates, too, seems to seize upon the equation at the end of
Theaetetus's "not bad description" of epistêmê, it is clear that
Sokrates has done so to make it easier to compare Theaetetus's
statement with the (he says) identical claim implicit in Protagoras's
famous statement, that man is ''the measure of all things, of the
existence of the things that are and nonexistence of those that are
not" (152a1-5).
Protagoras's implication is made explicit by Sokrates as the claim
that "each thing is such as it appears to me, and is such for you as
it, in turn, appears to you" (152a7-9); and that, "as each person
perceives things, such must they be to each person" (152c2-3). But
the second paraphrase comes as part of the proposal, by Sokrates to
Theaetetus, of an equivalency or equivocation between
"appearings" or "seemings" (phainetai, phantasia) and "perceiving"
or "observing" (aisthanesthai, aisthêsis). Keeping in mind that the
thesis that "science" is just "observing" or that "knowledge" is
nothing else than "perceiving" is the thesis that is going to be first
defended or clarified and then refuted, we are again challenged to
wonder (as we were by the Parmenides and Timaeus)
 Page 153
what the understanding of Parmenides' poem might be that is
operative (but not explicit) in the Theaetetus. Sokrates, we note, is
immediately made to jump by Plato from the proposed equivalence
between the seemings and the perceivings to two conclusions that
are, in one sense, Parmenidean and in another sense not.
The Parmenidean sense of the first conclusion that aisthêsis is
always of something that is or exists (estin) is that perceiving
cannot be of Nothing; Nothing cannot even be talked about, and
Being is nowhere penetrated by Not-being. What this first
conclusion fails to assert is that Being, in Parmenides' sense of
everything-that-was-is-and-will-be, cannot be perceived but has to
be thought, and thought of as one (hen). It must be thought of,
according to the Goddess in Parmenides' poem, as entire, uncreated
and imperishable (oulon, agenêton, anôlethron), as unique,
immovable, complete and without end (mounomeles or
mounogenes, atremes or akineton, [a]teleston and ateleutêton); it
must be thought of as, ontologically speaking, continuous, now-all-
together, and indivisible (syneches, nun . .. homou pan and oude
diaireton); and it could never have not been (oude pot'ên
oud'estai). This All (or Being) which must be thought, is not to be
confused with the, so to speak, observable astronomical universe,
though the latter belongs to it while being less than it. The point to
be borne in mind, which most of the tradition gets wrong, is that
the seemings don't belong with Not-being; for then they would be
neither perceivable nor discussablethey would not be.
The second conclusion to which Plato's Sokrates jumps is that if
perception is always of something that is, then it cannot be false
(apseudes) because it is knowledge (152c5,6). Here the antecedent
is Parmenidean, as explained above, but the consequent is not. For
in Parmenides' poem, consistent discourse can only have Being as
its subject; when discourse has less than Being as its subject, it is
inevitably inconsistent. Thus, according to the Goddess, though
becoming things can be said to be what they appear to be, there is
no necessary or compelling logic in the case of discourse about
becoming, as there is in the case of Being. Discourse about
becoming, cosmography for example, is guided by criteria of
acceptability (dokimôs, to use the Goddess's word) not by logical
necessity. To think otherwise, according to Parmenides' Goddess,
is to confuse becoming with Being. And this is just what Sokrates
implicitly understands Protagoras to have done at 152c8.
At Theaetetus's request Sokrates explains further, in paragraphs d
and e, that there is no unity to becoming things and that since every
thing is always becoming (gignetai), no thing ever is (esti . . . oude
pot'ouden). And he says that all the learned men (hoi sophoi)
except Parmenides, from Herakleitos and Empedocles to
Protagoras, as well as the chief comic and Tragic poets, have
 Page 154
denied that any thing is one (hôs mêdenos ontos henos) and have
followed Homer in believing "that all things are the offspring of
movement and flux."
Though he is ironic about the overwhelming nature of this
consensus, Sokrates is going to go along with it for a while. But he
has explicitly left Parmenides out of consideration, although what
Sokrates says at 180d-e does not seem to separate Parmenides from
his "disciple" Melissus. It is important to note that what is
presented by Sokrates here and at 181a, as a discussable alternative
to Herakleiteanism, is Melissus's doctrine and not Parmenides'.
This is established by the fact that what is said to be "everything"
(panta) or "the whole" (tou holou), at 183e, is ''the universe" (to
pan). But in Parmenides' poem, esti has no explicit subject; the
subject of esti is certainly not the astronomical or observable
universe. What we may best translate as "Being" (the "All") is just
that which fits the carefully thought-out set of predicates rehearsed
above and not the cosmographical universe that is plausibly and
elegantly rehearsed by the Goddess in the second part of the poem.
But Melissus and his opponents, as well as "the tradition" ever
after, have tended to confuse Parmenides' metaphysical or
completively-thought subject of consistent discourse with the
incompletely observable universe of the nature philosophers. The
relevant difference between Parmenides and later thinkers for our
dialogue is found in the fact that while the Goddess in the poem
knows that consistency about what is incompletely observable
cannot be guaranteed, the nature philosophers have persisted in
trying to achieve consistent discourse or knowledge about it. The
Sokrates of the Theaetetus does in fact say at 184a1-2, "I am afraid
we may not understand [Parmenides'] statement and have much
failed to follow what it was thinking through (phoboumai ou mê
oute ta legomena syniomen, ti te dianooumenos eipe polu pleon
leipometha).
In the Parmenides, Parmenides refutes or antilogizes himself when
he is taken out of context and thought of as asserting that "the one
is." The Timaeus turns into a prose poem celebrating an equally
elegant but merely "probable" cosmography, outdoing the
cosmographical verses in second part of Parmenides' poem. Now,
the Theaetetus treats of both Parmenides' "disciples," who do not
understand him, and of his opponents, who also do not understand
him. In other words, it would appear that the Theaetetus as a whole
and as argumentation "antilogizes" both the Herakleitean
opponents of Parmenides and the Melissusian followers with only a
mention of the revered Parmenides himself, who is explicitly and
respectfully excluded from the discussion. Structurally speaking,
this would seem to be one key to a dialogue consisting of
hypothetical clarifications, refutations and counter-refutations.
The mention by the fictional Sokrates (183e) of a meeting with the
aged Parmenides when Sokrates was very young would seem to
show that at the
 Page 155
time of writing the Theaetetus, Plato had in mind his dialogue
Parmenides, whether he had completed it or not. In any case, it is
from the internal references to Parmenides in the dialogues, and
from the structure of those just mentioned, that we establish Plato's
great respect for the man his Sokrates calls "the father of
philosophy," and that we find Plato to have had an operating and
architectonic understanding of Parmenides that differs from that of
"the tradition."
"Antilogies" about "Knowledge Itself"
The Initial Statement or "Defense" of Protagoras's Position
Sokrates had been saying that things are not unitary and invariable
because everything is in motion, as the majority contend. But at
154b10 Theaetetus says he doesn't understand Sokrates'
applications of the doctrine to sight, size, and touch, and that he
wants to answer both "yes" and "no" to Sokrates' supposedly
clarifying question "can anything become greater or more in any
other way than by augmentation?" Sokrates cajoles him into
''agreeing" in the spirit of Euripides' Hippolytus (612), that is, with
unconvinced mind. But while promisingwittily and perhaps
soothingly not to be Sophistical, Sokrates requests that Theaetetus
consider as a private citizen and man of leisure the question of the
nature of these appearances (phasmata) within us. He gets
Theaetetus to agree that (i) "nothing can ever become more or less
in size or number, as long as it remains equal to itself"; that (ii)
"anything to which nothing is added and from which nothing is
taken away is neither increased nor diminished but always equal,"
and that (iii) "what was not previously could not afterwards be,
without becoming and having become." We notice how non-
Parmenidean proposition (iii) is, since it assumes that something
that is not (or was not) can afterwards be by having come into
existence. But as we know, according to Parmenides, Not-being
cannot become Being: what is nothing cannot become something.
Nor, again, can Being become Not-being: what is something cannot
become nothing, it can only become something else. However, it is
possible for Sokrates to advance it as a believable proposition
because the grammatical subjects of mê . . . ên "was not" and einai
"be" are not, respectively, Nothing and Being as the totality-of-
everything-that-ever-was-is-and-will-be.
Nevertheless, for the young Theaetetus, it turns out to be a trap
along with the two other enunciations agreed to; for Sokrates
immediately refutes them with counter-examples convincing to
Theaetetusso much so that the latter
 Page 156
is overwhelmed with wonder and overcome by dizziness (155c9-
11). Well Theaetetus, says Sokrates punning, wonder is the source
of philosophy and the father of messages from heaven. So, have
you begun to appreciate why it follows from the doctrine attributed
to Protagoras that these things are so? No, not yet Sokrates. All
right, Theaetetus, I'll explain. The beginning from which these
sophisticated claims follow is that all things are in motion and the
product of the two opposite kinds of motion; so that no thing can be
itself or one, but is always an interaction or becoming in relation to
some other things. By denying being to everything and allowing
only becomings, these views deprive every thing of its identity.
Come, Theaetetus, do you share the taste of the clever (sophôn
157b4) people who enjoy these views?
"I don't know, Sokrates, and I can't tell about you either, whether
you believe what you're saying or are testing me." "You forget, my
friend, I know nothing about these things and can neither adopt nor
give birth to any of them. I am merely delivering you: which is why
I recite and set before you samplings of each of the wise men until
I can help bring to light your own opinion." Only then can we test
it, says Sokrates, concluding the irony. So, tell me again, do you
approve the claim that "nothing is, but is always becominggood,
and beautiful, and all the qualities already mentioned?'' As put by
you, Sokrates, I accept it. Fine, Theaetetus, but there is a problem
which this view must meet, namely that dreams, illusions and
delusions seem to show that some appearances really are contrary
to the thesis that everything is to each man what it appears to him
(158a). That is a problem, Sokrates, for those who dream or are
insane do have false opinions (158b), and it is hard to prove what
the difference is between sleeping thoughts and waking thoughts
(158c).
The answer to this, Theaetetus, by those who say that things are as
they appear to each of us, is: that dream things are as they appear to
dreamers, and sour things as they appear to me when my health has
been soured. For, what is perceived (aisthanomenon) or sensed
must be sensed by someone. I cannot be or become what I am
except in relation to what I am sensing or acting upon, just as what
I sense or make of things is or becomes what it is in relation to me,
and me alone (160c4-5), since necessity ties the being of both to
each other (16066-7) and not to anything else. Different perceivers
perceive different things, and different things are perceived
differently.
"So, when something is said to be or, else, to become, it must be
said to be so to or for something, or of something, or in relation to
something. We must not speak of a thing as either being or
becoming by itself or allow others to do so" (160b10 ff.). This is
what the account we have gone through signifies, Theaetetus. Now,
because what acts on me affects me and not someone else, I
 Page 157
also and no other am the only one to perceive it. And my
perceiving is for me true, because it is ever constitutive of my
being (tês gar emês ousias aei estin). And I am the judge, as
Protagoras says, of the things that come into my ken (ton te ontôn
emoi) that they exist, and of the things that do not that they do not
exist. Theaetetus agrees, and Sokrates proceeds to the conclusion.
So, if my mind can never fail and I can never be falsified
(apseudês) about the things that are or become, how could I fail to
be the knower of that which is perceived?
So you were entirely right, Theaetetus, and in agreement with
Homer, Herakleitus and their followers that all things move and
flow; and you are in agreement, too, with the exceedingly wise
Protagoras who says that man is the measure of all things, when
you claimed that knowledge is only perceiving or, better yet, says
Sokrates punning, that perceiving "becomes" knowledge. Can we
say then, Theaetetus, that this is your newly begotten offspring and
the result of my midwifery? Yes, we have to say that, Sokrates
(160e5).
The "Refutation" or Modulation of Protagoras's Position
Theaetetus's statement of the view that knowledge is only
perceiving has now been given an ontological basis by Sokrates,
who has also defended it against some extant objections and
clarified it. But Sokrates has been so clever and so 'leading' that the
reader feels he has rather pulled a white rabbit out of a black hat
than that he has brought Theaetetus's brainchild to birth. Not only
has Sokrates been playfully Sophistical (154el), he has not been
inductive or empirical in the sense of examining cases of
knowledge: he has not been the genuinely interrogative Sokrates of
some of the other dialogues. Instead, he has been, to the reader's
observation, quietly and ironically epistemological; namely, he has,
unnoticed by his interlocutors, stipulated how to characterize the
activity of the perceiving individual in such a way as to make
Theaetetus's Protagorean thesis come out as true.
But will it upset you, Theaetetus, if we examine your offspring
very closely to see if it is worth keeping and rearing? At this point
Theodorus butts in to vouch for Theaetetus's equanimity, but
succeeds only in attracting Sokrates' sarcasm to himself by voicing
the fear that Sokrates is now going to show that they have really
been all wrong. "How mightily addicted to argument you are,
Theodorus and mighty kind to think of me as some kind of a wine-
skin full of ready-to-pour arguments and refutations. You don't
catch what's going on: that it is not from me that any argument
comes but from my fellow speaker; I myself know nothing except
just enough to get the case from another who knows, and entertain
it fairly." As we shall see, Theodorus is presented by
 Page 158
Plato as not all that bright, even with respect to his own field of
mathematics. Sokrates, accordingly, promises to try to get the case
from Theaetetus "without saying a word himself" (161b).
Instead he discourses loquaciously for a whole Stephanus page, to
Theodorus, about what is wrong with the book of Theodorus's
friend Protagoras, thus beginning the demolition of the very thesis
he has just finished defending in company with Theaetetus.
While Sokrates is tickled (moi panu hêdeôs) by the doctrine that
what seems to anyone also exists, he is astonished at the initial
presumption with which Protagoras elevates man, and himself
among men, over all other perceiving creaturesfrom boars and
baboons to wiggling tadpoles (gyrinou). Without this presumption,
Sokrates says, he could easily have laughed at us all for
worshipping his wisdomwhen nothing that has sensation is better,
in point of knowing (eis phronêsin), than anything else that has
sensation. For that is his position; and another consequence of it is
that no one else can falsify the sensation-generated judgment of
another, since it is constitutive of him alone and true or false to him
alone. So that it makes no sense to try to learn from another and
pay him for it! Protagoras must be playing up to the populace
(êdemoumenon legein): for if his Truth is true, it makes a mockery
not just of my maieutic techniques but of the entire serious business
of debatingunless it is a jest and not an oracle, which resounds from
the sanctuary of Protagoras's book.
Theodorus, who may have seen the refutation coming, unsportingly
withdraws again from the discussion (162a6-164e9); but an
observer of the dialogical action can note that he is not without a
Protagorean ground for doing so, since according to his friend's
doctrine it is pointless to dispute the opinions of another. But
Theaetetus has already been persuaded by Sokrates' elenchustoo
facilely for his own good, in Sokrates' judgment. So Sokrates
brings to his attention several more grounds for granting that there
is a difference between knowing and perceiving; namely, that if
knowing is seeing, then not seeing is not knowing; but since
remembering is, in the nature of the case, not seeing what you are
remembering, it follows that to remember something is not to know
it: an absurd result of equating knowing with perceiving.
Sokrates now draws Theodorus back into the conversation by
saying that they have been unfair to his friend Protagoras.
Theaetetus remains the respondent while Sokrates holds forth, as
far as 168c7. As a matter of intellectual scruple, Sokrates now says:
we have not really won the argument, we have only been
verbalistic (anomologêsamenoi) and eristic (antilogikôs). We got
away with it only because Protagoras himself wasn't here to defend
his intellectual heritage. Were he here (165e9), he would say that
only a timid and inexperi-
 Page 159
enced debater would forget that remembering something is a very
different experience from that of actually perceiving something. He
would deny that it's the same perceiving, and deny that it is the
same unchanged person who knows and then does not know a
thing. Protagoras, in fact, would not admit that as long as it is
change that is admitted to prevail, no person is ever the same, or
one, but always also changing.
What you have to prove is that our perceivings are not individual to
ourselves, and that they don't appear differently to different people
(166d). "It does not at all apear that" [or, "I am far from saying
that," depending on whether we take phanai as a first aorist
infinitive of phainô, or whether we take phanai as the present
infinitive of phêmi]: "there are no men of knowledge. . . . Food
appears and is sour to the sick but appears and is the opposite to
those in health. We should not make out that either of these knows
more . . . nor categorize the sick man as ignorant and the healthy
man as knowing because of the difference in opinion. A change is
required from one to the other, for the other condition (hexis) is
better (ameinôn). . . . So those, who in bad psychological condition
make bad judgments, must make suitable judgments when in a
different condition; for, it is not possible to think what is not nor to
experience other than what one does (oute gar ta mê onta dynaton
doksai, oute alla par'ha an paschei); that is the case. . . . But there
are people who, through inexperience, call the appearances 'true'
whereas I call some of them 'better' than others, not 'truer.' Those
who know, friend Sokrates, cannot be said to be frogs, but if they
deal with the body I call them physicians, and if with plants,
cultivators. . . . And it is precisely those who know and are good
orators who make their cities judge what is good, instead of what is
bad, to be just. . . . According to the same argument, the teacher (ho
sophistês) who in this way is able to train his students also knows
and is worth much pay to those he has trained. Thus it is that some
men know more than others although no one can think falsely; and
you, whether you like it or not, must accept being a measure.''
Now, you can dispute these positions from principle (ex archês)
continues Sokrates acting as the voice of Protagoras, or you can
dispute them by the method of asking questions. But you must be
fair (mê adikei) in your questioning. We must observe the
distinction between trying to win an argument (agônizomenos) and
advancing a dialogical inquiry (en de tôi dialegesthai spoudazêi):
the latter method of asking questions leads to clarity and a love of
philosophy, but the devices of the debaters produce in the end only
scorn for philosophy. So, Sokrates, if you will join with me and
candidly examine the relation of the question, whether knowing
and perceiving are the same or not, to our two declarations that all
things are in motion and that whatever seems
 Page 160
to an individual or community also is, then perhaps we can avoid
the perplexities and equivocations of unmonitored popular usage.
There, says Sokrates to the astonished Theodorus, I have tried to
help your friend; you must now do your part for Protagoras.
Do you not yourself consider, Theodorus, that you are an arbiter of
diagrammatic representations and superior in astronomy; but that
most men are not? I am compelled by my passion (erês deinos) for
this kind of exercise, explains Sokrates with either irony or
rhetorical urgency, so do not refuse me an answer, Theodorus. It
will be good for you, and we will be careful to avoid inadvertent
unseriousness.
Protagoras granted, did he not, that some people differed when it
came to matters of better and worse, and that these were the people
who had knowledge? And Protagoras's actual words also were,
"that which appears to each person exists for him to whom it
appears"? Yes. And I must be allowed to say to Protagoras that
"men themselves believe that wisdom and ignorance exist among
them," must I not? And men think that knowledge (sophía) is true
thinking and ignorance (amathia) false opinion, do they not? Well
then, Protagoras, says Sokrates, if we say with you that the
opinions of men are always true, it will follow from what they say
that opinions are sometimes false and sometimes true. And it also
follows from what men say, as above, that opinions can be either
true or false.
So, says Sokrates addressing Theodorus, can you or any follower
of Protagoras really contend that no one ever thinks that another
does not know or is maintaining a false opinion? No, says
Theodorus (170c8), that would not be believable. Yet, says
Sokrates, this is where the doctrine that man is the measure of all
things leads. How so? Have not myriads of men, Theodorus,
opposed you on occasion and maintained that your judgment was
false? By Zeus, yes they have! And shall we not have to say, in
such cases, that you judged truly for yourself but falsely for the
others?
So, if neither Protagoras himself nor people in general think that
man is the measure of all things, then the Truth he wrote about can
be true to no one. But if, in contrast to everybody else, Protagoras
thought his claim was true, then it is more the case or not the case
only by as many more or less as do or do not think so. Secondly,
since Protagoras grants the opinions of all men to be true, he grants
the truth of those who say his own claim is false, thus conceding
that his claim is indeed false. His opponents, on the other hand, do
not concede themselves to be in error; and, according to his
writings, Protagoras must grant that too. Thus, Protagoras will have
to agree with us that it is not the case that any incidental man is the
measure of what he has not studied.
 Page 161
And must we not say with everybody else that some men know
more, and others are more ignorant, than others?
Would we not be helping the [relativist] position (logon) of
Protagoras once he has had to concede that some men surpass
(aliapherein) others in some thingsif he were willing to say that not
everyone knows what is best for himself or itself (171d-e)? In
social matters we can accept that sovereign states establish what is
best for themselves internally, and are no different in this respect
from each other. But wouldn't Protagoras also have to admit, here
if anywhere, that one advisor's judgment surpasses another's with
respect to what will benefit (sympheronta) the state, and that the
opinion of some cities surpasses that of others with respect to truth
(pros alêtheian)? Naturally, however, he would not care to assert
(ouk an panu tolmêsei phêsai) that whatever a city thinks is best for
it will be best for it. But others who also support Protagoras up to a
point will confidently assert with respect to those things like justice
or piety which I talk about (ekei hou legô) that they do not have in
nature any substance of their own (hôs ouk esti physei autôn ouden
ousian heautou echon) and that the common opinion (koinei
doksan) about them becomes true when, and for as long as, it
seems so (172b).
The Point of the Digression
But as far as our argument has gone, Theodorus, it is arrested
(katalambanei) by a larger one growing out of a smaller. Well, we
have the leisure to follow, says Theodorus. How is it, then, that
those who have spent so much time in the pursuit of knowledge (en
tais philosophiais) seem such laughable speakers when they get
into the law courts? Like us, they have the leisure and the habit of
taking up arguments for as long as they promise to lead to the truth.
But they do not speak to the judicial issue or make effective use of
their limited time, as those do who have rattled about the courts
since they were young. Because the contest is often for life itself,
the latter have become learned (epistamenoi) in the flattery of their
judicial masters but have been turned from freedom, directness, and
development by their punitive and pleading slavishness; they then,
Theodorus, call themselves clever (deinoi, 173b).
But would you prefer me to talk about our own sort (tou hemeterou
chorou) of seeker, or should I rather stick to the argumentas this
sort of seeker is supposed to, Theodorus? Give us the description,
says the uncomprehending Theodorus; for we who belong to this
band are not bound in service to the argumentthus exhibiting the
peculiar misconception that because he is neither pleading before
the dikasts nor trying to please a dramatic audience, he
 Page 162
needs to take up only those arguments that please him and in the
order that suits his convenince. Clearly, Theodorus has been made
by Plato to exclude himself, with his leisure-class attitude, from the
group of thinkers that Sokrates has in mind here.
In the next couple of Stephanus pages Sokrates is made to show
himself familiar with the stereotype of the unworldly philosopher,
so given over to cosmic and universal issues in abstraction from all
else, that he knows nothing about human nature or what is proper
to it (174b). The reader must understand that Sokrates is being, at
first, critical of the type. For, contrary to the stereotype, Plato's
Sokrates himself not only "knows the way to the agora" and
understands the political processes of his city (173c10-d5), but he
knows the practical details of Theaetetus's genealogy and estate; it
was only the young man's name that he didn't remember (144c).
We must understand, however, that Sokrates is also using the
stereotype to bring into notice the sharpness of the city-dweller, the
exploitativeness of the tyrant, and the pretensions of the wealthy or
well-born (17469-175c).
Sokrates concludes this part of his digression by noting that the
public ridicule of the type is not entirely unjustified; for such men
do give an appearance of arrogance and do tend to be ignorant of
ordinary things. But from here to the end of the digression at 177c,
Sokrates is positive about the possibilities of the type. He is so on
two grounds: first, because this sort of seeker may have fitted
himself to ask an important and relevant kind of general question;
and secondly, because he is godlike in his knowledge that the true
cleverness of a man (hê hôs alêthôs deinotês andros 176c5; cf.
173b) consists in his justness and moral courage. If we now bear in
mind that the dramatic date of the reported conversational
exchange is some short time before Sokrates' trial, it emerges that
Plato's Sokrates has been discoursing about something that
Meletus's suit against him has brought back into public
consciousness as a subject for discussion. This subject is the
relation of the knowledge-seeker to the state, and the images of him
generated by members of the less "successful" sects, such as the
nature-philosophers and exiled Pythagoreans, in contrast to the
popular Sophists and rhetoricians of the day (the late fifth century).
We see that the figure with which Aristophanes had made laughter
in the Clouds, two decades before, was already a stereotype and
one that did not fit either Plato's, or the historical, Sokrates. We can
guess that Aristophanes gave the name "Sokrates" to his composite
caricature because it was the name of the most public "unrewarded"
knowledge-seeker of the time. Perhaps Plato has included in this
dialogue the otherwise functionless young philosopher, also named
"Sokrates,'' in order to help loosen the association in the public's
mind between the type and the older Sokrates. Another guess: if the
"Aristophanes"
 Page 163
who is made a friendly, convivial companion of Sokrates in the
Symposium is a just and proportionate response by Plato the author
to Aristophanes' caricature, then in the degree to which it was not
historically true that Aristophanes literally "was totally concerned
with Dionysos and Aphrodite" (Aristophanês, hoi peri Dionyson
kai Aphroditê pasa hê diatribe, Symp. 177d), we have an
approximate or corresponding measure of the discrepancy between
the Sokrates Plato knew and the "meteorosophistical" inhabitant of
Aristophanes' catchy think-tank (phrontisterion) in
Cloudcuckooland (Nephelokokkugia).
Sokrates is so persuasive that he has to remind Theodorus at 176a
that evil cannot be persuaded away. For evil will always oppose
goodness with the "cleverness" (deinotês, panourgia) that is unjust
and capable of anything. But because good and evil have a place
only where mortal men dwell (not among the Gods, 176a), the
price that clever wrongdoers pay for their injustice is precisely the
loss of their likeness to God, the paradigm of eudaimonia, of
human happiness or blessedness (176e).
And have you noticed, Theodorus, that if ever you can get one of
these clever men into the give-and-take of a person-to-person
argument about their counter-claims (hotan idiai logon deêi dounai
te kai deksasthai peri hôn psegousi), they always end up silent and
displeased with themselves and their rhetoric? (The reader thinks of
Kallicles, in the Gorgias). 5 But, says Sokrates, we must stop
digressing and return to our argument from the starting point (ex
arches logon).
Return to the Discussion "From the Principle"
Sokrates now points out that while many are willing to maintain, in
regard to what is just (ta dikaia), that whatever a state sets up as
such or practices and believes to be just is just; in regard to what is
good (t'agathou), no one is bold enough to hold that whatever a
state enacts, believing it to be in its own interest (ha . . . ophelima),
actually also is in its own interest (unless you trivially and
truistically define "in its own interest" as "whatever a state declares
'it' to be"). Theodorus emphatically agrees that states are often
wrong about what is to their own advantage.
But does not "the advantageous," or what is good for you, belong
to the classas a classof future things or things that will be (to
mellon)? Sokrates then shows, by a series of examples relating to
the verification of judgments about future conditions in various
domains, that it is the judgment of the expert in each domain that is
counted as better, and as valid or more valuable (beltion, kyria . . .
doksa, kyrotera). The culminating example is that of Protagoras
himself who was recognized by all to have been the most effective
user of the
 Page 164
best arguments in court: the opinion of such an expert about which
arguments will be most effective must surely be, and was in fact,
honored in practical ways (178e-179a).
It is fair (metrios) to say to your Master, then, that it is the man
who knows more (sophôteron) who must be the measure (metron
einai), not just anybody including myself whom his argument tried
earlier to press into a measure. Theodorus and Sokrates here reach
the conclusion that to the extent that expert judgment is an admitted
fact, to that extent must Protagoras's indiscriminate
anthropomorphic relativism about knowledge be modified. The
lightness of touch with which Sokrates' wording, in modifying the
doctrine of man the measure, amusedly and ironically verbalizes
his own measuredness is, of course, Plato's and deliberate.
Sokrates has not forgotten that another kind of Protagorean
relativism remains to be discussed (179c). That is the relativism
about the personal experience (pathos) from which individual
perceptions (aisthêseis) come, which generate (gignontai) people's
judgments or opinions. This is the point of strength in Theaetetus's
original proposal, and the argument so far has not really shaken it;
for the individual's present sensations are just what they distinctly
are to him (enargeis). So that those who say that it is these that are
knowledge may be stating what is the case (tacha an onta legoien);
they certainly are more elusive (chalepôteron helein). We must
therefore inspect these ongoing (pheromenôn) states of being
(ousian), as commanded by the argument in defense of Protagoras,
slowing them down (diakrounta) and sounding them out as states
of health.
We must indeed, says Theodorus, for the Herakleiteans are backing
this doctrine vigorously. As they maintain it, cautions Sokrates, and
from their starting point (kai ex archôs). But don't you know,
continues Theodorus excitedly, it is as impossible to have an
orderly discussion with them as with someone maddened by pain;
for they do not stop to listen or to give a response that does not
move off in unexpected directions. Well, I'm no friend of theirs
either, Theodorus; but don't they have any peaceful discussions
among themselves, says Sokrates, slyly alluding to Herakleitos's
doctrine that conflict is the father of all? No, not even for the sake
of having pupils. They develop their views out of their own
enthusiasms and think nobody else knows anything. It is left for us
to take the matter seriously as a problem awaiting its solution
(problôma episkopeisthai).
As to whether it is an unproved theorem (problêma), Sokrates
corrects him, isn't it, rather, an obscure and ancient tradition which
the democratic moderns have brought into the open, in order to be
honored for establishing that all is in motion and nothing is at rest
(180d)?
 Page 165
Refusal to Discuss Parmenides Himself
But I was almost forgetting, Theodorus, that there are others who
join in to claim the opposite of this, saying it (the One) is
immovable, in name and entirely the all. 6
This sounds like a quotation; but it is important not to mistake who
these others are that are being "quoted," if we are to get an
intelligent and acceptable reading of the dialogue as a whole. Is it
so easily to be assumed, as many commentators have done, that
these words are either Parmenides' own or that Plato is quoting him
inaccurately (but still quoting him), when there is no single verse in
Parmenides' poem, as we have it, whose words look or sound like
the grouping at Theaetetus 180e1? The ingenuity of Buttman's
conjecture is that it puts together two halves of two successive lines
of Fragment 8 of Parmenides (180d-e of our dialogue). This makes
good sense if Parmenides' poem is taken to be talking about the
concept of the all as everything-that-ever-was-is-and-will-be. If
telethein, as Cornford points out, cannot be Parmenides' word
because it is not used by the Presocratics in the sense of "to be,"
then neither can it be Plato's word in the sense that he himself
thought Parmenides' "Being" (as we translate it) was subject to a
generative process even of a completive kind. Again, in the context
of the conversation at this point, Plato's Sokrates is not putting
Parmenides into a personal confrontation with disciples of
Herakleitos belonging to the later generations of Melissus or
Theodorus. So, telethein ("to become fully," or to "finish becoming
something'') not only does not have to be from Parmenides'
poemthus making all the manuscripts "corrupted" herebut it does
not even have to sound like something in a verse of Parmenides, if
the poem is not being quoted. Nor is Plato, through his Sokrates,
misconceiving Parmenides' concept of Being by cosmologizing it.
Rather, Plato is deliberately making his Sokrates use the
cosmographical word telethei in quoting or resonatingly
paraphrasing the Melissusian disciples of Parmenides in order to
signal that they have not understood Parmenides' concept of Being
any more than the fashionable Herakleiteans with whom they are
arguing at the merely cosmological level.
Sokrates Evades the Examination of Eleaticism
Though Sokrates tells Theodorus he fears being caught and torn by
the tug-of-war between the proponents of universal flux and the
defenders of overall motionlessness, Plato lets the reader see that
his Sokrates really does not want to discuss the Eleatics. He evades
Theodorus's urgent request to discuss the Melissusians (181b6-7)
by developing a distinction with which to refute the
 Page 166
Herakleiteans. This is the distinction between two kinds of motion,
alteration and change of place, which the Herakleiteans must
permit everything to undergo in order to remain consistent and
allow nothing to be at rest. For if the Herakleiteans did not
maintain that everything is always undergoing both kinds of
change, then the qualities of things that are moving only in space
might remain unchanged (unmoved). But since they cannot allow
this, there is no way of speaking rightly (orthôs prosagoreuein)
about things. Impossible Sokrates, adds Theodorus, to name
anything like that at all, if even while we're speakingour reference
perpetually decamps by being in flux (eiper aei legontos
upekserchetai, hate dê rheon). Sokrates follows up the elenchus by
making it explicit that if there are no stable objects in nature, then
perceiving is of nothing, or else there is no such activity or
condition as perceiving (182e). So, we could not have been right or
relevant when we answered that knowledge is perceiving.
A pretty pickle we have gotten into, Theodorus, in trying to
strengthen the thesis that knowledge is perceiving by deriving it
from the premiss that everything is in motion (oti panta kineitai)! It
turns out "that if all things are in motion, then all answers to
anything about which a question is asked are equally correct." Note
that this also inevitably implies that it was not after all incorrect to
answer that "knowledge is only perceiving" or "science is nothing
but observing."
We may use only the word "becoming" (gignesthai), continues
Sokrates, about things; we may not use the expressions "thus" or
"not in this way" or the term "this.'' Only the expression "nohow"
(to oud'hopôs) is left to describe the happening of things to those
who hold this hypothesis, Theodorus. And, Theodorus, we are
divorced from your friend Protagoras. Only a man of insight
(phronimos) is the measure, and we don't have to agree that
knowledge as perceiving follows from the routine (methodon)
about universal motion. Unless Theaetetus here has something else
to say. Well said, Sokrates; and now that the argument about
Protagoras is settled, please divorce me from having to answer, and
address your questions to Theaetetus as originally agreed. All right,
Theodorus, says Theaetetus earnestly, but not until you and
Sokrates have also discussed those who say that the universe (to
pan) is at rest (estanai), as was just promised. But Sokrates refuses
to do so for a second time (183e2-18464).
"It seemed to me there was something deep and entirely noble
about him" (184a); Sokrates is talking about the time long ago
when, in Plato's dramatic fiction, he got a lesson in philosophical
method from the aged father of philosophy, as he calls Parmenides,
himself being but a youthmuch like Theaetetus in the reported
conversation. Their similarity, in fact, was given so
 Page 167
much emphasis earlier that the reader is disposed to grant that the
older Sokrates, in the Theaetetus, may be supposed to be doing for
the young student what the older Parmenides, in the other dialogue,
was doing for the twenty-year old Sokrates, who had also been
made to show his brilliance early on in that encounter.
"But I am most afraid we may not understand what he said, and
have been left far behind by what he had in mind when he said it"
(see previous page). As far as the history of philosophy is
concerned, these words of Plato's Sokrates are prophetic, and in
fact applicable to the way in which most later thinkers have failed
to understand Parmenides. In the fiction of the Theaetetus, Sokrates
is saying that he barely understood Parmenides then, and he is
unwilling to talk about him now because of the unrectifiable crowd
of misunderstandings that exist about him. Note that, in the
meantime, Plato's Sokrates has implicitly granted that people do
fail to understand (syniêmi) what other people say; and this, just as
the discussion is about to turn to the question of false judgments or
mistaken claims in the rest of the dialogue. To the philosophic
historian, in any case, all this must mean that Plato stood
practically alone in antiquity in understanding Parmenides
correctly. Lewis Campbell noted, about the passage quoted, how
remarkable was Plato's perception of the difference between the
literal or grammatical sense in which Parmenides had been taken
and the real drift of the author.
Nominal Renewal of the Maieutic
As Sokrates turns again to his questioning of Theaetetus to get on
with "the maieutic," the characterization of his procedure as
obstetric is now felt to be more metaphorical and more ironic by
Plato's reader. This time, at 187b, Theaetetus really is somewhat
tentative in offering his definition; it is that "perhaps true judgment
is knowledge" (kinduneuei de hê alêthês doksa epistêmê einai).
Under questioning, Theaetetus has just granted that there are things
that only the soul itself, or the responsive human as-a-whole (hê
psychê), can think about. He uses the term episkopein at 185el and
e6; but at 185d he uses aisthanomethai with "our soul," psychê, as
grammatical subject. There remain other things that are perceived
(aisthanomai) through, but not by, the sense organs. Examples of
the former class are: "what things can be said to have in common,"
"likeness" and ''unlikeness," "sameness" and "difference,"
"oneness" and "numerability," "oddness" and "evenness,"
"beautifulness" and "ugliness," "goodness" and "badness," "being"
and "not being." Sokrates says to estin, "the
 Page 168
is," or "is-ness," and to ouk esti, "the is not,'' or "is-notness," of
things at 185c. But like Theaetetus, he also uses to mê einai for
"not being" at 185c8.
At this point the reader wonders to what things exactly we may
legitimately apply the terms "is not" or "it is not" (ouk esti) or "not
being" (to mê einai)? ls Plato expecting the reader to notice that
Theaetetus and Sokrates are contradicting themselves here in
assuming that "is not" may be applied to a thing that "is"? For, if it
"is not," it is no thing, it is nothing: only Nothing "is not," and only
of Nothing may it be said that it "is not." Things, or whatever is,
are not Nothing; when a thing that is, is said "not to be," it is
always said "not to be this or that," or "not to be what it was
thought to be." A thing that is cannot be said "not to be" in the
sense of being, or becoming, Nothing. Things do not become
nothing, they become something else. We must read on to find out
whether Plato has expected his reader to notice how non-
Parmenidean the discussants, who are his creations, are being.
Theaetetus has had to grant (18664) that even in the case of
hardness and softness, which are perceived through touch, the
hardness and softness themselves"their being (ousian) and that they
exist (ho ti eston) and their opposition to one another, and the being
of this oppositioneven in this case it is the mind or organism itself
(hê psychê) which, by rehearsing (epaniousa) and comparing them,
tries to judge them for us" (186b5-9).
But while there are some things that are by nature affections
(pathêmata) of the organism as a whole (epi tên psychên teinei), in
the case of both men and animals, and which are at once perceived
by it through the body, says Sokrates, is it not also true that
comparisons or calculations (analogismata) about their existence
(ousian) and usability (ôpheleian) are acquired, if at all, through
much trying and education? Certainly so, says Theaetetus. Plato's
reader cannot help noticing here that Plato's Sokrates has just said
that the ideas which reflection has about things are not a priori,
since they are acquired (paragignetai) over time (enchroni) and
through taking care. Plato's Sokrates seems to be referring in this
passage to the difference between automatic responses of the
organism, reflex actions, and reflective thinking, deliberative action
or considered choice.
Plato's Sokrates then asks a question, or interrogatively makes a
claim (186c6), that is so elliptical as to be obscureuntil it is
clarified by the very next interrogative claim (186c8) that he
advances. "Is it possible, then, for him to hit upon truth, who
cannot get to existence?" Or, if we take Sokrates to be referring to
the pre-reflective sensations merely, as opposed to the judging
organism as a whole: "Is it possible, then, for that to hit upon the
truth, which cannot get to existence?" (Hoion te oun alêtheias
tychein hôi mêde ousiase, 186c6).
The next question, or claim, reads more clearly: "Will (or, may)
anyone
 Page 169
who misses some bit of truth (alêtheias tis) ever be a knower
(epistêmên) of it" (186c8)? Now, tugchano, "come upon," is one of
those verbs that take the genitive. Nonetheless, the genitives
alêtheias and ousias, if taken as standing alone and unattached in
the first question, call to be read as sheer abstractions and raise, as
such, Parmenidean puzzles in the reader's mind, as will be
remarked below. But if in the light of the question following, we
take tis (nominative, masculine or feminine of the indefinite
pronoun) to be understood (as the grammarians say) after alêtheias,
then we get something like the following sense out of the first
question: "Is it possible, then, for him to hit upon any bit of truth,
who cannot get to the existence of it?"; or else: "Is it possible, then,
for him to reach something of the truth who cannot get to
something in existence?"
If Plato's understanding of Parmenides is part of the operative
background of this dialogue, and Parmenides' poem was trying to
enforce that truth (or consistency in discourse) is possible only
about Being, then Plato's Sokrates would here be either punning or
equivocating between the subject of "is" esti in Parmenides' poem
and "being" ousia in the sense he and Theaetetus have been using
it. Plato would be making an allusion to the thesis that unless you
talk about the Being that is everything-that-ever-was-is-and-will-
be, you cannot attain truth. But it would remain to be verified that
Plato understood Parmenides in Parmenides' own terms; and this is
not possible independently of the understanding of Parmenides that
can be found operating in the dialogues Timaeus and Parmenides,
which are free of the epistemological focus of the Theaetetus. In
this matter, then, to invoke Plato's understanding of Parmenides in
terms of what happens or is implicit in the other two dialogues is to
provide only a kind of reinforcement of our understanding of the
Theaetetus.
Artist that he is, Plato the philosopher is probably having it both
ways: he is setting down a Parmenidean pun or allusion while also
making his Sokrates proceed with the dialogical interaction with
Theaetetus. Sokrates must now, in the metaphor of the dialogical
fiction, bring Theaetetus to a new and better birth.
The New Proposal: Judging Truly; an Argumentative But
Nominally Not "Antilogistic" Discussion
At just this point Theaetetus claims that there is no knowledge in
the affections (pathêmasin), but only in reasoning (syllogismôi)
about them, since one is able to get to what is there (ousias) and to
the truth with the latter but not the former (186d). Theaetetus (as
distinguished from Theodorus) now
 Page 170
accepts that perceptions, which consist of affections of the
organism, cannot be knowledge. He is also ready, at last, to look
for knowledge not in the process of aisthêsis but in "some
disposition of the living organism (ho ti . . . eche hê psychê) when
it is troubling (pragmateuêtai) detachedly (autê kath'hautê) and by
itself about what is there (peri ta onta)." But realizing that people
make mistakeshe has just been made to realize his ownTheaetetus
is drawn to the new proposal that "perhaps it is true judgment that
knowledge consists of" (kinduneuei de hê alêthês doksa epistêmê
einai 187c).
"Antilogies" about Wrong Judgment
Plato's Sokrates, however, is so uneasy about the experience we
have all had of making judgments that turned out to be not true that
he is unwilling to trust this definition of knowledge as judgment.
He will not proceed farther until he has accounted for this
experience (touto to pathos par'hêmin 187d3). But Plato's reader
notes that Sokrates is hereby made to anticipate and implicitly put
into practice the improvement of his student's new attempt at a
definition of knowledge; for what Sokrates is in effect worried
about is getting an account of true judgments that shows how they
have avoided error. And this is the same as requiring that true
judgments be supported by a rational demonstration of their truth.
Plato's Sokrates is also determined that if the subject of people's
opinions or judgments (peri doksês) is to be worth taking up again,
then we must examine it by some other method than that just used,
namely, the method (tropon) that put them in the context of flux
and sensation.
Sokrates now shows, first, that false judgment is not mistaking one
thing for another. This is because (on the assumption of the
exclusive alternative that either you know a thing or you don't
know it) it is impossible (a) to mistake something that you know
for something that you don't, or (b) to mistake something you don't
for something you do know; it is equally impossible (c) to mistake
two things that you know for each other, and (d) to mistake two
things you don't know for each other.
Secondly, false judgment is not a judgment of, or about, what is
not, or that something is not; for that would be a judgment of
nothing. And knowledge of nothing is not knowledge.
Again, judging falsely (ta pseudê doksazein) is not "allodoxy," nor
is it "heterodoxy" (190e2), "the dianoetic interchange of one
existing thing for another." Is not this because, Sokrates claims
(189e ff.), "judgment'' is "the argument (logon) which the human
organism (hê psychê) has with itself about what it is examin-
 Page 171
ing as it goes through the details (diekserchetai)?" "Don't think I'm
sure of what I'm saying here, but the picture I get (moi indalletai) is
that thinking (dianooumenê) is only an argument with oneself
(dialegesthai) and that when one has ceased to doubt (mê distazei)
and decided (horisasa), we call that our judgment" (190a). And if
there is no difference, in this respect, between arguing with oneself
and talking to another, "then it is not made clear that there is false
judgment in us either by this method or by the previous method"
(190e2-4).
By Stephanus page 190e Plato's reader has enough justification to
accept the feeling that Plato's Sokrates has gone to all this trouble
to account for false judgment because he must believe that we
won't be able to understand knowledge in terms of judgment unless
we know what false judgment is in order to escape it. But,
ironically, false judgment does escape both Sokrates and his
student Theaetetus. Socrates is in fact forced to admit at 200c-d
that they "were wrong to wander away from knowledge (epistêmê)
and to seek for false judgment" because it has turned out to be
"impossible to know what it [false judgment] is without first
grasping sufficiently what knowledge is" (to d'estin adunaton
gnônai, prin an tis epistêmên hikanos labêi ti pot'estin).
What then is the reason for the argumentation, the parables, and the
suggestions in the intervening Stephanus pages between 190e and
200d? If we cannot answer this question, we will not only be
failing of a good understanding of the design of the dialogue, we
will also fail to appreciate the reason for the "dream" with which
Sokrates introduces, at 201d-e, a new account of the matter under
discussion. This is an account in terms of postulated elements (ta . .
. prôta hoionperei stoicheia 201e1), and of parts and wholes (merê,
holon). We have to say "postulated elements" not only because of
the "as it were" (hoionperei) with which Sokrates qualifies
"elements,'' but because (i) he is reporting something "he thinks he
heard certain persons say," and because (ii) the examples
(paradeigmata) of elements used in the borrowed argument (202e-
203a) are the letters of the alphabet, taken as a metaphor for all
elements, in their representative capacity as components of words
and syllables.
Returning to Sokrates' exclamation at 190e that they have now
twice failed to account for the occurrence of false judgment, the
reader observes Sokrates telling Theaetetus that they will have to
agree to many absurdities (atopa) should they find that false
judgment does not exist. But Sokrates does not tell him what these
absurdities are: he would feel like a fool, he says, and ashamed, if
he admitted to these consequences before he has accounted for
false judgment; they would overwhelm him like a debilitating and
demeaning seasickness. In other words, there are still a couple of
standard accounts of false judgment that disgust Sokrates, that he
finds ridiculous, and that he wants to
 Page 172
discredit for Theaetetus's benefit. If in the rest of the dialogue "he
makes inquiry the vehicle of satire," as Campbell says of Plato
anent the Sophist, in the parables of the lump of wax and the
noisome aviary, Plato's Sokrates is making "satire the vehicle of
inquiry."
The model of the imprintable wax matrix, which Sokrates
rehearses, must have been in use to illustrate the way in which an
impression made upon the organism earlier (e.g., of Theodorus)
might be wrongly assigned to a present observation (e.g., of
Theaetetus, 193b-c ff.). But the wonderfulness (thaumasiôs hôs
legeis) with which Theaetetus says Sokrates has been discussing
opinion here (193d3) is called unpleasant garrulousness
(adoleschôs 195b9) by Sokrates himself. He refutes the metaphor
on the grounds that it does not explain such mistakes as thinking
that "seven plus five in the abstract which we are saying are
imprints upon the wax" makes eleven instead of twelve (196a ff.).
So "false judgment (196c5) must be something other than the
interchange of a thought for a perception." And the dilemma has
not been resolved that "either there is no false judgment or it is
possible for a man not to know what he knows." Theaetetus
implicitly insists there must be false judgment, at which point
Sokrates sarcastically (196d5) says they will have to undertake
something quite shameless (anaischyntein); namely, to continue
trying to make clear what sort of thing knowledge is
(apophainesthai to epistasthai hoion estin) or what knowledge is
like, when we don't know knowledge (mê eidotas epistêmên,
196d11-12).
But really, Theaetetus, our discussion for a long time has been full
of obstructions (palai esmen anapleôi tou mê katharos
dialegesthai, "infected with logical imperfection," L. Campbell ad
196e). Here we are, using uncritically the very words we are trying
to understand: gignoskômen and ou gignôskomen, "knowing," or
"being acquainted with," and not, as well as "epistametha'' and ouk
epistametha, "knowing scientifically," or "understanding," and "not
know scientifically" or "not understanding"!
Indeed, Theaetetus, were we in a strictly logical disputation (ei
mentoi en antilogikos, hoios anêr ei kai nun parch), I could not
continue to use these terms. But since I love discussion and we are
not on that high level, do you want me to risk a statement of what
knowledge is like (hoion esti to epistasthai)? The fashion is to say
it's a "disposition" (hexis) or mere "owning." But we'll change that
slightly and say it's a "using what you have" or "capability"
(ktêsin).
Perhaps then, says Sokrates with seeming informality, knowledge
is like a large bird-cage which fills up as we grow up. The birds in
their varieties must be taken to represent items or varieties of
knowledge (197e). Getting the pigeons into the cage, which was
empty in childhood, puts them to some extent in our power.
Suppose you are in search of something scientific about the
 Page 173
class of odd and even numbers. The man who has got something to
teach has it in his aviary, and handing over one of the creatures is
called teaching (didaskein); acquiring it for our aviary is called
learning (manthanein). But if knowing (epistasthai) is having it in
the cage, knowledge is only a capability, do you see? For,
recatching that bird may mean a lot of trouble, even after you've
recognized it; and you might just catch the wrong one. The latter
would constitute false judgment. Theaetetus, again too readily;
agrees.
But there are difficulties with this explanation, says Sokrates,
thinking it over. It implies that we learn from ourselves what we
already know. Plato's reader will not fail to note how cool this is,
given that in the Meno and other dialogues this objection is never
raised against the thesis that knowledge is recollection though it
applies with equal force to that thesis. And how serious, continues
Sokrates, is a distinction between the ktêsis, using what you own in
regard to knowledge and the hexis, the mere owning of it, if you
can be said not to be able to use or to mistake what you own?
Owning both 11 and 12, for example, how could you mistake 11
for 12 when hunting for the latter? If owning is to stand for
knowing, you couldn't have owned these notions. And one couldn't
have caught a non-cognition either, as you suggest Theaetetus,
because that would be like possessing a non-possession or
recognizing (gnônai) something unrecognizable (agnoein). So
again, knowledge cannot give rise to ignorance; and we have failed
to explain false judgment. We were wrong to try to do so before we
had a sufficient understanding of knowledge itself (200d1-2). But
Plato's reader will again reflect that if Sokrates is right in what he
has just said, i.e., that they "were wrong to try, . . ." then Sokrates is
practicing, or being made by Plato to exhibit, what false judgment
can be! By now, the reader will surely also have realized that the
discussants will keep getting into trouble as long as they cling to
their initial, assumed, exclusive alternative that either you know
something or you don't know it, and that you cannot both know and
not know something (unless the meaning of "know" is changed).
This exclusion, by the way, parallels the Zenonian and Megarian
denial of any third possibility between complete motionlessness
and absolute flux.
A Dream Account of Logical Accounts, and the Acceptance of the
False Pregnancy
Sokrates is willing to agree that good judgment is like knowledge
in being true. Thus, dikasts (jurors) who decide correctly reach true
conclusions or judgments (201a-d), even though they were not
observers of what the pleaders have convinced them of. That these
true judgments are not knowledge
 Page 174
seems to have been part of the climate of opinion. It is possible that
to a classical Athenian only seeing was believing, in the sense of
knowing with certainty. Thus, the trouble which Sokrates and
Theaetetus (who has, for some time now, been acting more like his
student than a man in intellectual travail) are in is also due to what
must have been an assumption of their time and culture. They are
so unwilling to give up certainty as an ingredient of knowledge that
they do not admit true conclusions reached by the mediation of
inference or third-party report as knowledge. In the meantime,
however, Plato's dramatization of this unwillingness shows the
reader that an Athenian jury functioned, among other things, as a
mechanism for acting in the absence of what the society equated
with certainty, namely epistêmêthe knowledge that we have come
to call science. But the fact that epistêmê was also an ingredient in
the technai (arts, crafts, practical or productive sciences), as these
words were used by Plato and his times, shows that it was the
reliability of the conclusions or product that was primordially in
focus. But in the shift towards theoreticism that occurs in pure
argumentation or "philosophy," this reliability of the conclusions or
end result comes to be categorized as certainty. And since "certain"
cannot idiomatically qualify a practice or a product, the productive
and practical sciences or knowledges begin to be sundered from the
theoretical knowledgesas, in fact, they were historically in the end,
and as they are in this dialogue.
At this point Theaetetus remembers that he had once heard it said
that knowledge is true judgment with an explanation (ephê de tên
men meta logou alêthê doksan epistêmên einai), but that without an
explanation it is far from knowledge. But if you cannot think it
through Theaetetus, says Sokrates waxing mantic, listen then to my
dream instead (onar anti oneiratos): I seemed to hear these people
saying that there is no account possible (logon ouk echoi 201e) of
the primary elements, as it were (hoionperei), of which we and all
else are composed. For, once isolated (auto gar kath'hauto
hekaston), you can only name them, you may not relate them to
anything else or qualify them, and you cannot say that they exist or
do not exist, since this would be adding something to that of which
you are speaking as alone by itself.
Now, just what it is that is dreamlike about this passage must be
explained, if we are claiming to understand the dialogue as a
whole. And dreamlike this passage is, though few or none have
been the commentators that have ever given a structural or textural
reason for it.
We seem to be pursuing a point, but as in a dream, the steps by
which we do so are self-contradictory and we do not know whether
what we're thinking about exists or not. As in a dream, we see
images of what we're after; they are objects of perception
(aisthêta), but they are irrational (aloga) and strangely
 Page 175
unintelligible (agnôsta). However, the combination, the tissue or
fabric (symplokên) of names, gives the account its existenceor, the
reader thinks, what must pass for its existence (ousían).
What Sokrates is rehearsing as if it were a dream is the account of
knowledge that the earnest Theaetetus couldn't quite remember,
according to which "he who cannot take hold (labei) of a rational
account of a thing cannot have knowledge of it." This does not
make it Sokrates' own account; but he is willing to consider it,
wondering, in his ironic and detached way, whether they could
have so suddenly solved so difficult a problem with Theaetetus's
new formula. In other words, Sokrates is "implicitly saying" that
those who appeal to simples in epistemology are ''dreaming."
It's just what seems attractively felicitous (kompsotata) in the
appeal that dissatisfies him most, namely, that the elements are
unknowable while the class 7 of complexes is knowable (gnôston).
Since Theaetetus doesn't perceive the difficulty, Sokrates illustrates
with reference to letters and syllables (taking advantage of the
usage according to which stoicheion and syllabê were also
originally the terms for element and compound). So, Theaetetus,
we have rightly admitted that the letter is not known (mê gnôston),
but only the syllable is. But the analogy with spelling works only
until you realize that you need to know "s" and "o" singly before
you can know the syllable "so-". And this contradicts the required
unknowability of the elements. Perhaps we should have said, says
Sokrates (203e), that the syllable is one event coming out of the
letters, a single idea with its own identity, differing from the
participating elements8 (chrên . . . isôs tên syllabên tithesthai mê ta
stoicheia all'ex ekeinnôn hen ti gegonos eidos, idean mian, auto
hautou echon, heteron de tôn stoicheiôn, 203e).
But if complexes are single forms arising out of the interadjustment
of the elements, says Sokrates, proceeding to test this "great" and
"impressive" account (megan te kai semnon logon), then a complex
must have no parts (204a4-5). The difficult question now arises
whether the [new] whole (to holon) and the all (to pan) out of
which it is made are the same or different. The answer that
Sokrates compels Theaetetus to admit is that there is no difference
between "the all" and "the whole," and that both terms, in a thing
that has parts, mean "all the parts." Sokrates then advances the
dilemmatic alternative, which Theaetetus grants: if the syllable is
not the letters, then they are not its parts; and if the syllable is the
same as the letters, then both must be known equally. But it was to
avoid this latter conclusion that the complex was taken to be
different from the elements!
What are the parts of syllables if letters are not? Theaetetus admits
that if syllables have parts, these must be the letters. In that case,
says Sokrates, ac-
 Page 176
cording to the doctrine assumed, a syllable must be a single form
without parts (205c). And in that case, he now "proves," it must be
elementary, and so undefinable and unknown. It is not true,
therefore and in conclusion, that the syllable can be defined and
known, unless the letters can be so likewise.
Sokrates also appeals to Theaetetus's memory of how he first
learned to read and write, scanning the letters one by one in order
to tell them apart and matching them up in the right order with the
sounds that went with them. When Theaetetus agrees to this
account, Plato's reader cannot help remembering that earlier, at
203a and b, both Sokrates and Theaetetus had described the process
of reading quite otherwise and oppositely, with Theaetetus
asserting that the consonants, like "s," were either mere hissings or
tongue movements or, like "b," quite soundless; and that only the
vowels were distinguishable sounds, though still unintelligibile by
themselves. It was the same in the lyre class (206a12-b3),
continues Sokrates antilogistically, learning completely was
nothing but being able to follow each note and say which sort of
string it goes with. As an appeal to experience, it will be noticed
that Plato's Sokrates has deliberately left out the experience of the
practiced reader (which Plato him-self must have been); and that,
as for music, he has limited his evidence to that of learning an
auxiliary instrument, with from 3 to 6 strings, used for
accompanying the voice.
Two comments here will help us towards understanding the
dialogue as a whole and as having its own completeness. G. Grote
(Vol. III, p.177, 2 ed.) is quite right in pointing out that Sokrates
throughout the Theaetetus "is . . . depicted as one in whom the
negative vein is spontaneous and abundant, even to a pitch of
discomfortas one complaining bitterly, that objections thrust
themselves upon him, unsought and unwelcome, against the
conclusions which he had himself just previously taken pains to
prove at length." Grote refers his reader to the emphatic passage at
195b-c, presumably because it is explicit as a self-characterization
by Plato's Sokrates of his own antilogistic fertility, not because it,
singly, proves what the dialogue as a whole is at pains to enact: that
Plato's Sokrates is constitutionally a questioner, and can be as
antilogistic as Protagoras himself. Add to this what I have already
hypothesized, that Plato's Sokrates is shown to be doing for the
young Theaetetus something like what Plato's Parmenides is shown
to be doing for the young Sokrates in that dialogue. He exercises
him in the practice of considering consequences, i.e., of
hypothesizing, and uncovering unnoticed contradictions. Plato's
Sokrates does the latter so systematically in the Theaetetus that he,
too, can be said to have been antilogistic, first about observation or
perceiving and secondly about false judgment.
The difference with the Parmenides in this respect is that Sokrates
does not
 Page 177
pre-announce to the student that he is going to be antilogisticas the
father of philosophy did, without embarassment, in the presence of
the eristic-loving Zenobecause Theodorus hates eristics in his
pretentious way, as we know from the interlude or digression
(172c-177c) about the non-contentious seekers of knowledge. The
digression, in fact, now stands revealed as having for one of its
purposes the nominal imposition upon Sokrates of the interdiction
against eristics or antilogistics.
The other comment to be made, before we return to the end of
Sokrates' dream account of logical accounts, bears on the fun that
Plato and his Sokrates are having with the epistemological
tendency in philosophy and the paradoxes it generates. The reader
is, surely, expected by Plato to benefit from Sokrates' attack upon
simples as ultimates. But it is also well within the ability of the
alert reader (whether Plato's contemporary or ours) to see that the
attack upon simples in theory of knowledge, which was perhaps a
well-received argument among anti-empiricists in the Academy, is
also easily transposed into an attack upon any version of the theory
of ideas that treats some of the ideas as simple.
In any case, at 206a7-10 Sokrates and Theaetetus have now
reached the exact antithesis of the thesis broached at 201d9 with
which they started namely, that the elements are unknowable and
the complexes better known. The antithesis is that in all sciences
the fictitious class of elements admits of clearer knowledge than
the class of complexes, and knowledge of the former class makes
for better science. The antilogism could not be more visible, yet it
has been, like the other antilogisms in this dialogue, seriously
neglected.
So, says Sokrates ironically, anyone who thinks that complexes are
by nature (pephukenai) knowable and elements not, must be
joking; and there are, I think, other proofs of this. But let us not, he
continues forget the main question: just what is meant, now, by
saying that the completest (teleotaten) knowledge consists of a
supporting account (logos) added to a true judgment (206c3-5)?
It is not enough to say that an explanation, or account, is the more
or less grammatical reflection of thought in the stream of sounded
words, because this is constitutive of any true judgment, and so
does not distinguish it from knowledge. Perhaps, however, the
author of this opinion meant to say that answering (apokrisin) a
question about something consists in responding in terms of the
basic features of that thing. For example, when speaking of a
wagon, we don't detail all the pieces of wood in it; but we do say
that it is a thing with a frame upon axles with wheels, rails and a
yoke. But is that your view, Theaetetus, that a thorough itemizing
of the elements of a thing (tên dia stoicheiou dieksodon peri
hekastou 207c7) is an account (logon) of it, but that a
 Page 178
listing of the complexes or larger parts of it leaves it unaccounted
for (tên de kata syllabas ê kai kata meizon eti alogian 207c9-d)? I
do accept that view. Very well, Theaetetus, but in learning to spell
correctly, didn't we use to sometimes write our syllables correctly
and sometimes incorrectly, thus showing that there was a condition
in which we could be right in our judgment without knowing? But,
Theaetetus, even when a man has learned to spell, i.e., to itemize
all the elements of a name in the right order and, therefore, has
what you call a correct view of it with an explanation, that still isn't
knowledge: he could misspell other words, or lack the full science
of grammar (20762). Thus, there can be correct judgment with an
account that fails to be knowledge.
So treasuring, as we were trying to, the truest possible account of
knowledge, we got but a dream (onar dê, hês eoiken 208b). Or,
shall we not say that yet? For, says Sokrates, most people would
say that an account brings out what is different about the thing,
from all other things. About the sun, for example, isn't it enough to
be told that it is the brightest thing that circles about the earth?
Listing what the sun has in common with things would not suffice,
right Theaetetus? Plato's Sokrates seems to be questioning, here,
those who held that "the ideas" represent what is common to
classes of things. Theaetetus agrees at 208d. So, continues
Sokrates, adding a comprehension of what makes it different from
all else to a true judgment about a thing turns the judgment into
knowledge of it (208e4-6)? That is indeed what we assert, says the
still unseasoned student.
But closing in on our statement, Theaetetus, is like coming right up
to a painting in perspective: I now see there is really nothing in it.
Look, if all I had of you before I got knowledge of you was the
things you have in common with all others, then I didn't have a
notion of you; so I couldn't have a judgment about you; and adding
differences to what is not a judgment about you won't give me
knowledge of you. I would have had to have judged what's
different about you in the first place, to get a true judgment of you.
So it's truistic, or circular, to claim that adding the already
perceived differences of a thing to its character gives us knowledge
of it. And we are simpletons (euêthes), says Sokrates with good-
natured sarcasm, to say that correct judgment with the addition of
anything at allbe it differences, elements, or speechesis knowledge.
Thus, neither observing (perceiving) nor correct judgment, nor an
explanation with correct judgment can get to be knowledge. I guess
not, says Theaetetus, but you sure brought out more than was in
me, Sokrates! But we are delivered (hê maieutikê hêmin) of all our
empty pregnancies (anemiaia), are we not, and find them not worth
developing, says Sokrates.
So good sense (sôphronôs, adverbial), when searching and
discussing, Theaetetus consists in not believing that you know what
you do not know (210c3-
 Page 179
5). The maieutic, for which I thank the God, tells me no more than
that. But let us meet again early tomorrow, Theodorus; for just now
I am to present myself at the Stoa of the basileus on account of an
indictment against me by Meletus. So, until tomorrow, says
Sokrates. But the Plato who with these words of his creation is
simultaneously taking leave of his hard-worked reader, has he not
designed his dialogue so that, as a whole and in the end, it provides
for that reader something like what Sokrates, within it, provided for
Theaetetus?
The reader of this dialogue, who is learning to believe that he does
not know all he thinks he knows, who takes stock of the antilogistic
phases of the discussion he has read through, and who can
appreciate the wit and criticality of Plato's Sokrates, will perhaps be
content to take as a new beginning for understanding the
Theaetetus the suggestion that has overtaken the present reading of
it. This suggestion is that just as Theaetetus's not uninteresting
ideas about knowledge have all been shown to be self-
contradictory, insufficient, or circular by Plato's Sokrates, so
Platothe architect of the dialogue has here made a quite special use
of his clever and beloved teacher. Sokrates appears to have been
used to exemplify, in company with Theaetetus, the process of hard
thinking when that thinking is on a false trail. Thinking caught up
in the pursuit of "epistemology" is exhibited as irremediably
paradoxical when the method is purely discursive and the premiss
that gives rise to it is not questioned. This premiss is that a
"transitive" activity, namely, knowing, can be understood in
abstraction from the objects, materials, or subject-matter of that
activity.
Notes
1. An interesting collateral question that could be asked here is
whether this indicates that the power of memory usual in the earlier
oral-aural culture is being, or has already been, lostand that the
compulsion to get it all down as correctly as possible is a residue or
symptom of how good that memory could be?
2. For a recent compilation, se K. Döring, Die Megariker,
Amsterdam: Gruener, 1972. There are six by Diogenes Laertius
(IIIc. A.D.), two by Pollux (IIc. A.D.), and one by Stobaeus (c. 500
A.D.), Censorinus (IIIc. A.D.), Hesychius (IVc. A.D.), Cicero (Ic.
B.C.), Lactantius (IVc. A.D.), Eusebius (IIIc. A.D.) and Seneca (Ic.
A.D.).
3. The position was already stated in a different way at 170c8, as
one that "contends that no person thinks that another is ignorant
and has false opinions." But at 157c8-9 the contradictory of this
position has been formulated as also in keeping with Protagorism,
and as also following from Herakleitean nature-philosophy;
namely, that "if anyone talks in such a way as to fix or make stand
something in discourse, then such a one is easily refuted"(!). Here,
the possibility that Protagoras's treatise was an
 Page 180
antilogy about Truth would simplify rather than complicate
matters. Antisthenes is the only Socratic listed as such by the
historian Theopompus. He is said to have been the teacher of
Diogenes, Krates, and Zeno the Stoic.
4. Those checked were Jowett and Cornford, the old Cambridge
translation by B.H. Kennedy (1894), the new Oxford Translation
by McDowell (1973), the French by A. Diès, and the reprint of
Schleiermacher's German by Staudmacher (1970). All of these
present Theaetetus as saying, in the clause that qualifies touto ho
epistatai, "that which he knows," something like: "as far as I can
see at present," or "in my present view," etc. But Theaetetus has
already said ''as it seems to me" at the beginning of this sentence. It
is a pity that the scholar L. Campbell has no comment on or
translation for the first part of this sentence in his edition. H.N.
Fowler translates, "I think, then, that he who knows anything
perceives that which he knows, and, as it appears at present,
knowledge is nothing else than perception." The unwarranted
ambiguity disappears if we remove the two commas around "and."
5. With reference to the stereotype of the eccentric knowledge-
seeker in ancient Athens, see A. Melero Bellido: Atehas y el
Pitagorismo. It was not a single-handed creation of Aristophanes,
any more than Sokrates was his only "model"; the type was already
a commonplace in the late fifth century.
6. L. Campbell prints here: Oin akinêton #telethel, toi panti#
onom'einai, from the Bodleian MS, obelizing the words that
appeared corrupt though found in all the MSS. F.M. Cornford opts
for the conjecture: oion akinêton te thelei tôi panti onom'einai,
supplying Anagkê (Necessity) as the subject of thelei (is willing
that the All should only be called one and immovable, p.94).
Simplicius quotes the verse (not Cornford's) in his Commentary on
Aristotle's Physics at 29,15 and 143.8. oion instead of hoion is
vouched for, for Campbell, by Simplicius's other phrase (f.7.a in
the edition used by Campbell): akinêton auto anumei kai monon
hôs pantôn eksêrêmenon. He does not disapprove of Buttman's
conjecture: T'emenai tôi pant' for the obelized words; but Campbell
then proceeds to give a cosmological content to Parmenides' purely
conceptual analysis. A. Diès goes further in approving the whole of
Buttman's suggestion: houlon akinêton t'emenai, tôi panti
onom'estai (entirely immobile is it, but the All is purely a name).
Kennedy and Fowler print hoion (such as), Warrington translates
as if the original read oion; but McDowell translates as if it read
hoion, There are several problems here deserving extended
treatment, but we will summarily report the way through them only
as it leads us back to the subject-matter of the Theaetetus at this
juncture. Hoion, "such as," of course, frees the words from having
to be an exact quotation from anybody.
7. Notice that Sokrates avoids asserting that there is a class of
elements, as there is of complexes.
8. Notice again that we have to say, "with an identity different from
that of the elements;" for, if the elements had an identity, there
could be an account of them, and they would be (self-
contradictorily) knowable.
 Page 181

Chapter 10
Plato's Eleatic Sophist:
Looking at a Sophist from Elea
"A Really Philosophical Person"
Since the visitor in Plato's Sophist is introduced by Theodorus to
Sokrates as a follower of Parmenides and Zeno, and is also from
Elea, he is usually called Plato's Eleatic Stranger. But speaking
strictly according to the text, he is Theodorus's guest-friend (xenon)
and a member (betairon) of the circle of Parmenides' and Zeno's
"successors" (216a). Coming from the Theaetetus where,
dramatically speaking, today's meeting was concerted between
Sokrates, Theodorus and Theaetetus, it is fresh in the reader's mind
that Theodorus is also a friend of Protagoras. Theodorus, then,
manages to have friends in both Eleatic and Protagorean, or
Sophistic, circles. However, the characterization of his guest-friend
as a follower of both Parmenides and Zeno immediately creates a
problem. For as we saw in a previous chapter, one of the points
enacted by the Parmenides was that you cannot consistently agree
with both Eleatics at the same time: you cannot both take a line in
Parmenides' poem as a categorical assertion and also take seriously
Zeno's dialectical method of universal refutation of any categorical
assertion. As a consequence of what happens in the Parmenides,
we are reminded that the poem must be taken not assertively but
exhibitively (I use Buchler's word deliberately); or else there must
be something wrong with a method of refutation that refutes, or
antilogizes, the very Master whom Zeno professed to follow and
defend. To this problem we will return later.
 Page 182
In the meantime, we may notice that Politicus 257a and 257b2
refer back, even if implicitly and ambiguously, to Plato's visitor
from Elea as a Sophist. The reference clarifies something not
usually noticed about Theodorus's guest-friend. This is that the
Eleatic is himself a member of the class of people that he's going to
discuss and define in the rest of the dialogue, namely, Sophists. But
Theodorus, who is known from the socalled digression in the
Theaetetus (172b,c) to hate Eristics, obfuscates this by explaining
to the others that his guest-friend is not a philosopher of the
"refutative" kind (tôn peri tas eridas espoudakotôn) but more
moderate (metrioterôs). Theodorus will not allow Sokrates' ironical
hope of refutative correction by the visitor (216b9), but he does
sanction Sokrates' ironical compliment to him of being godlike and
takes it literally; for Theodorus finds all philosophy to be divine.
Now, we have already referred to the stereotype of the non-
worldly, unsuccessful philosopher or knowledge-seeker as part of
the climate of opinion and as comically dramatized in
Aristophanes' Clouds two decades before the dramatic date of the
Sophist. Theodorus's reference to all philosophers as divine would
seem to reflect the new respect that eclectics were now giving not
only to the successful Sophists and rhetoricians of earlier decades,
but also to the new wave of pythagorizing, pre-Academic or
Academic knowledge-seekers. As part of the intellectual history of
Athens, we cannot tell whether Plato, the author, has reference to
the end of the fifth century (dramatic date of the dialogue) or to the
first half of the fourth century, which we guess to be the time of
writing of the Sophist. Theodorus's stated aversion from
disputatious Sophists would seem to reflect, on the other hand, the
stage to which popular disrespect for eristic Sophists had now
advanced.
Sokrates feels obliged to point out (216c), however, that godlike as
the philosophers may be, it's hard to tell, among those who make
the rounds of the cities (epistrôphôsi poleas), which ones are for
real (ontos) and which ones are only made up to look like such
(plastôs). Sometimes they appear as statesmen (politikoi),
sometimes as Sophists (sophistai) and sometimes as quite mad
(mantikos), or prophetic. "And I'd like to ask our guest here," says
Sokrates, about what his countrymen think of these matters. Which
matters? asks Theodorus with characteristic slowness. The
characterization or naming of the Sophist, the statesman, and the
philosopher, answers Sokrates (217a3).
Here it is relevant to note that Sokrates starts the Politicus off by
thanking Theodorus for having made him acquainted with
Theaetetus (his young mathematician friend) and his guest-friend
(the Sophist from Elea). "You will soon be three times more
thankful," says Theodorus in that dialogue, "when we will have
achieved the acquaintance of the statesman and the philosopher."
Theodorus, then, has not denied that Sokrates has made the
acquaintance of
 Page 183
a Sophist in the previous conversation, not just in some current
sense of the term but also in the same sense that Sokrates has
gotten to know Theaetetus; that is to say, personally. Theodorus's
statement might also imply that he thinks the Elean is equally a
statesman and a philosopher besides being a Sophist, as well as that
they are going to get his definitions of the statesman and the
philosopher.
But as far as Sokrates is concerned, it is wrong of Theodorus to say
that he Sokrates will be three times more grateful (Politicus 257a5-
8). Is he really ready with all his calculative and geometrical
knowledge, asks Sokrates sarcastically, to say that each of these
kinds of man is of equal value? Are they not more far apart (pleon
allêlôn aphestasin), Theodorus, in point of worth than any
proportion in your science can express? Theodorus pompously
acquiesces in Sokrates' invocation of a mathematical analogy
without seeming to understand that what Sokrates has implied is
that: just as adding a statesman and a philosopher, as values, to the
value of the Sophist gives you more than three times the smallest of
the three values, so adding knowledge of the statesman or politician
and knowledge of the philosopher to the knowledge the
interlocutors have just gotten of the Sophist, will give them
knowledge more than three times the value received in the previous
dialogue on the Sophist, if they can achieve it. 1
Theodorus accordingly, postpones "to some other time" (eis authis)
his technical response to Sokrates' correction of his bad arithmetic
(to peri tous logismous hartêma) and evasively asks his guest-
friend to begin at once the discussion of either the philosopher or
the statesman. Theodorus's failure to respond more intellectually to
Sokrates' correction reinforces Plato's presentation of Theodorus as
a mediocre mathematician and thinker. The eager and
mathematically talented Theaetetus of the dialogue Theaetetus
remains silent, as much out of a combination of respect for his
teacher and deference to the visitor as because he has understood
Sokrates' point. Could Theaetetus's silence in Politicus also be due
to the fact that he is the one who has paid to hear the Elean visitor?
We were explicitly told in the dramatic fiction of the Theaetetus
that Theaetetus is a sensible young man of good fortune, just such
as the Sophist-to-be-defined in the Sophist could be expected to
seek out, and who would curb his own eagernesshaving paid to
hear another. It is compatible with this that at Politicus 257c5 the
visitor feels obliged to ask, "But what should I do about Theaetetus
in the circumstances?" Both he and Sokrates seem to want to hear
from Theaetetus's companion, Sokrates the younger, but do not
proceed without first consulting Theaetetus's mentor Theodorus on
the possibility.
Back at the beginning of the Sophist, the Elean visitor has no
trouble keep-
 Page 184
ing the Sophist, the statesman, and the philosopher separate. The
troublesome previous question is: by what method will they discuss
(dieksienai) so as to define clearly (diorisasthai saphôs) the nature
of each? The visitor likes the method of dialogue through questions
(di'erôtêseôn) only when he has a respondent who gives no trouble
and is easily led; otherwise he prefers to be the only speaker
(kath'hauton)! He says this in response to Sokrates' suggestion that
he follow the method of questions that Sokrates had once, long ago,
witnessed Parmenides using to bring off and complete a splendid
discussion. Sokrates does, in this way, get the visitor to accept one
of the young men present as respondent, and vouches for the
tractability of Theaetetus.
Theaetetus himself is not sure this will please all those present,
including, it would seem, himself. The visitor does make it clear
that he will speak lengthily, even if in response to the young man's
attention; he does not, he tries to imply, want to appear to be
showing off (epideiksin poioumenon). He is sorry, he again says
(with relief no doubt), that the present subject doesn't allow him to
give brief responses to questions by Sokratesa proceeding that
Plato has shown to be dangerous in other dialogues. Submitting to
questions by Sokrates is recognized as dangerous by a number of
experienced speakers, such as Protagoras and Gorgias; the Elean
visitor is one of these (217d8-10). It appears, then, that what the
visitor is going to give his interlocutors (and the reader) is a
specimen of Sophistic discourse. That this is so, and in what sense,
will emerge as we read on. We will also be able to match his
performance with the explicit discussion of the nature of Sophistic
discourse and the nature of speech, when we get to Stephanus
pages 264b-268d of the dialogue.
Finally, if we believe that an important part of being Socratic is a
preference for the method of question and answer, then we may not
take the visitor as a Socratic, or as a kind of stand-in for Sokrates as
he is sometimes taken. In being a rhetorical rather than a dialectical
"man-of-knowledge," he is more like the Sophists Gorgias or
Hippias than he is like Plato's Sokrates. The latter is more
interested in what is good for his interlocutor and in the truth he
can elicit from or with him, than he is in discursive virtuosity;
though, as we also know, he is as capable in Plato's hands of such
virtuosity as any Sophist or rhetorician. Let us not forget, though,
that, over the whole range of the dialogues, Sokrates uses poetry,
fabulation and persuasion as much as logic and interrogation in his
dialectic, namely, in his art of conversational inquiry.
In short, the reader's doubts about Theodorus's advertisement for
the Elean visitor as a "really philosophical person" are intensified
by the visitor's dislike of the method of question and answer, which
is so natural to Sokrates. In any case, how Zenonian can the visitor
be if he practices questioning only with completely tractable
respondents? We can also see that the Sokrates who has
 Page 185
invoked the example of Parmenides at 217c will be (like ourselves)
in a position to compare the visitor's performance with that of the
father of philosophy in the Parmenides as that dialogue drew to its
end.
What a Clever Dog Does When He Has a Bad Name
Talk about the form that the discussion should take quickly
becomes, between Theaetetus and the visitor, a discussion of the
method to be followed in the difficult task of identifying the
variegated and elusive (dysthêreuton) species (phylon 218c5; genos
218d4) of Sophists. We notice that the visitor's style of discourse is
quite serious, even technical from 218b to 218e.
He suggests that were they to take some worthless thing (tinos tôn
phaulon) as the object they are trying to identify, a paradigm
(paradeigma) might emerge as to how to pursue their own great
object. Take the angler (aspalieutês), for instance; we shall know
about him, though he is hardly worth pinning down. Now it has
often been remarked that the method of the visitor here is the
opposite of the method that Plato's Sokrates says he is going to
follow in Republic. Sokrates there wants to see his subject in the
large first, like big letters on a wall (Rep.II.368d5-7). 2
The contrast causes the reader to become suspicious; he will want
to see whether the method of Plato's Elean Sophist is not some
strategic ploy by which, in beginning with something lowly, the
contrast with something of greater dignity confers greater dignity to
the money-making intellectual class of which the Sophist is a
member. Does the preliminary example not also work to draw upon
the angler, and away from the Sophist, both the amusement that
had been found to attach to the method of diairesis or division, and
the irony that might fall upon the Sophist when he, too, is found to
be a kind of angler?
The angler is not artless (atechnon). But his art, like the art of
acquiring knowledge, the visitor says with cunning, is not
productive (poiêtikên). For angling is an acquisitive (ktêtikês) art
too, though not one that acquires because of voluntary (hekontas)
exchanges, and not one that uses force openly (anaphandon), but
one that uses it concealedly (kryphaion), as does hunting. But it
does not hunt lifeless (apsychôn), or footed (pedzothôrikon), or
winged animals (ptênon). Thus, angling is the branch of water-
animal hunting (enhygrothêrikon) that excludes water fowl and
comes down to fishing (alieutikê). But it is not fishing by night-
light (pyreutikên) or by spearing (triodontia), but by pulling
upwards with something sharp. We cannot leave this chain of
divisions without noting, however, that the Sophist has had hastily
to dismiss
 Page 186
hunting by diving (kolymbêtikês) as unimportant, and that
Theaetetus has allowed it. But whether or not sponge-diving was an
activity of any economic significance in ancient Greece, it would
"falsify" the Elean's chain of divisions because it makes ambiguous
the definition to which the chain leads. This is because sponges are
also water animals but not swimmers (neustikon), and because
divers also use something sharp (angkistron) and an upward pull to
catch their prey. So sponge-diving fits equally well the final
definition of angling that has been carefully, but (it now appears)
arbitrarily reached. Given the verbal associations and the possible
puns, we are obliged to take a closer look at the difference between
anaspaô (tear upwards) and aspalieutikê; that is, between
anaspômenên, the form of anaspaô nearest to the mention of
aspalieutikê (angling) as a name, and the name itself. The Elean
Sophist explicitly tells us (221b-c) that "the name is in the likeness
of the act itself" (ap'autês tês praxeôs aphomoiêthen t'ounoma),
drawing attention to the pun and to the enjoyment he is be having
in the exercise of his virtuosity. That we can see all this is, of
course, due to Plato's virtuosity.
Anticipating that the above-mentioned associations will refer also
to what Sophists are or do, or are thought to be concerned with, we
quote a few possibilities from the lexicons: anaspasos, "dragged
from one's home" (as the young are lured by the Sophists);
spomenos or spoimên (2 aor. ptc. mid. and 2 aor. opt. mid. of
hepomai), "follow, pursue"; speio, which puns with spaô, is the
epic. aor. imv. mid. 2 s. of hepô, "be busy with.'' Given the
infinitive form anaspain, it is not farfetched to think of spanizô,
"be in want of." We think of the stem of lêïas, "captive," as having
consonance with the syllable -lieu-; or the synthetic lêïzikê ("art of
plundering," the real word for which is lêïstikê), with -lieutikê-. Is
paliôzis ("pursuing in turn") close enough, phonetically, to be part
of its subliminal connotations?
Only some of these associations are needed to be operative for the
angler or fish-hooker to become a metaphor for the hooker that the
Sophist himself is. Since this implication has been precipitated by
the Sophist deliberately, and since he makes sure it is not missed by
the auditor in making it explicit from 221d7 to 222a3, we are
forced to ask, what can he be seeking to accomplish by this initial
deprecation and satire of the Sophist, if he is one himself? He
would seem, in the first place, to be employing a strategy of "how-
can-I-be-accused-of-these-things-myself-when-l-am-the-first-to-
recognize-and-depre-cate- them?" We must read on to find out
what else is achieved by Plato's presentation of him as a typically
bold Sophist, apparently on the offensive, or perhaps after all, on
the defensive because of the presence of Sokrates. We also wonder
whether the Sophist from Elea is not being made by Plato to take
his turn at laughing at somethingthe method of diairesisthat was
being prac-
 Page 187
ticed to excess either within the Academy (if it was functioning at
the time of writing) or by the new wave of eclectics and
pythagorizers that the fourth century had brought with it to the
philosophical scene?
When Theaetetus agrees that man is a tame (hêmeron) and hunted
animal, the visitor wittily brings out that piracy, slave-making,
tyranny, and the arts of war are all classifiable as a kind of
manhunting by force. Theaetetus is pleased (kalôs, he says) and the
visitor is, so far, right. But when he then classifies the judicial art
of the law courts (dikanikê) and the political art of speaking in the
Assembly (dêmêgorikê) and the "art of intercourse" or conversation
(prosomilêtikê, the pun is deliberate) as, collectively an art of
persuasion, he is all at once revealed as a persuader rather than a
Socratic (in spite of his detached stance). For, as we know from the
Gorgias, Euthyphro, Phaedrus, Apology, Crito and Republic, the
political art, the judicial art, and the art of love are all, for Plato's
Sokrates, knowledge-seeking arts addressed to the achievement of
human goodness. They may use persuasion, but what distinguishes
them from opportunist or Sophistic persuasion is that according to
Sokrates they existlike the acquiring of knowledge in the Menofor
the sake of achieving the good for the individual and community.
As no more than arts of persuasion, sophistry and rhetoric are for
Sokrates the very counterfeits of justness or statesmanship in
relation to individuals and public.
Note that the visitor's remarks at 222d6 and 222d8 imply that
Theaetetus knows about paying a fee for the sake of discussion, but
has never thought of courtship as hunting by gift-giving. The
visitor now makes a big move. First, he classifies enjoyable
discussions that are paid for as a kind of art of pleasing (hêdyntikên
technên). But secondly, he makes out that paid discussions for the
sake of excellence (aretê) deserve to be called by another name
(223a6). Theaetetus agrees, and concludes for himself that the
Sophist is properly classified as someone who is paid to conduct
discussions for the sake of human excellence. This must be counted
as a triumph for the Elean Sophist. But our visitor rather covers it
over with a technical recapitulation of the virtuoso diairesis
(223b1-7) by which they came to the result. It must be said that the
recapitulation is both amusing and aptas long as aretê is allowed its
ambiguities. The watchful presence of Sokrates is having its effect.
It, perhaps, motivates, the Elean Sophist's next move.
From 223c-224d3 the visitor, who is invoking the many-sidedness
(poikilês) of the Sophist, establishes that the art of the Sophist is a
kind of intellectual retailing (psychemporikês) of arguments and
learning, as well as a trading in human excellence (aretês
pêlêtikon). This is not an expression of the contempt that an
original Eleatic would have had for a Sophist but, we now see, a
carefully calculated swipe at Sokrates by the Elean Sophist.
Sokrates' refusal to be
 Page 188
paid for his active participation in the search for knowledge and
excellence was an implicit, standing criticism of Sophistic fee-
taking. The Sophist is a paid transmitter (metablêtikon) of
knowledge and excellence. But, the visitor has now implicitly
asked: is a man like Sokrates, who also deals in goodness, but with
no visible means of support, not trading on the goodness of his
friends?
The visitor's third move seems calculated to promote the Sophist
into the ranks of the poets, dramatists, or historians; for they also
sell, transmit or exchange what they themselves produce
(autopôlikon, mathêmatopôlikon 224e1-4). Theaetetus allows this
because, he says, "it is necessary to follow where the argument
leads." He has fallen for the equivocation upon which this move
depends.
The Elean's next set of distinctions among kinds of controversy
(amphisbêtêtikon) continues the attack upon Sokrates: legal or
forensic argumentation (dikanikon) is public, lengthy pleading
about justice, one of Sokrates' favorite topics. In a witty little
description, Sokrates' personal method of question and answer is
dismissed as logic-chopping (antilogikon). And formal, rule-
governed argumentation between trained (entechnon) disputants on
abstract subjects such as "justice, injustice, and the rest" is called
disputation or eristics (eristikon), also a word with unfavorable
connotations. Since Plato's Sokrates excels at the last two, it is to
these that the Elean Sophist must and does give a bad name. We
can see that the maneuver was deliberate, since he proceeds to rub
salt into the wound by defining disputation for its own sake as
money-wasting garrulity (chrêmatophthorikon, adoleschikos 225d).
At the same time, he gets Theaetetus to give a fourth definition of
the Sophist as the man who, in favorable contrast, makes money
from individual disputations!
Having come dangerously close to provoking Sokrates into speech,
the Elean immediately provides some diversion. Do not home-
makers, he asks, speak of all kinds of separative activities, such as
slicing and filtering anal sorting and braiding, and do these not
imply a notion of division? As I see it, he cleverly continues, they
can all be grouped into one art, the art of discrimination
(diakritikên). And can you see that it divides into two kinds, first
that which separates worse from better, and, second, that which
separates like from like? And is not the first sort called purification
by everybody? Now, are there not two kinds of purification, one of
bodies: cosmetic, hygienic or medical when they are alive,
embalming when they are dead; and another of souls or minds?
Notice Theaetetus, continues the Sophist, how my method also
deflates the pretentiousness that accrues to some researches which
relate to the body merely because of subjec-matter: louse-catching
is as much a kind of hunting, and plundering as much a kind of
generalship as other kinds of hunting and war. Are we supposed to
notice from the Elean's use of the (underlined) adverb
 Page 189
"also" that he is competing with Sokrates for the mind or soul of
Theaetetus? Is the Elean Sophist competing with Sokrates as a
debunker, or is he satirizing (by sarcastic imitation) Sokrates' well-
known art of deflating the pretentious? It does seem that Plato
expects his readers to be alert to these tensions. He constructs with
observable care for detail: he has, for instance, made sure that
sponges were mentioned back at 220a.
There is a kind of leveling cynicism to this sally of the Elean
visitor. But it is covered over by his claim that what matters is to
separate out and distinguish all these material arts from the
purification of the psychic life (chôris tôn tês psychês katharseôn).
Purification of the life of the soul is the casting out (aphairesis) of
evil; and there are two kinds of mental evil, says the visitor. One is
vice (ponêrian), which is like a disease (noson) or internal conflict
(stasin), and the other is ignorance.
Now, is not this ignorance involuntary and only a missing of the
point (paraphrosynê) or a deviation from understanding
(syneseôs)? It follows, continues the visitor, that the foolish mind is
ugly and lacking in measure. But people do not so easily see
wickedness or vice as a disease of the mind, and they are unwilling
to call ignorance wicked (228d6-7). Theaetetus now agrees that
there are two kinds of evil (kakias) in mental life, one a kind of
disease and the other a kind of ugliness or malformation.
But for deformity, says the visitor, there is gymnastics, and for
disease, medicine. So, is there not an art of justice against
arrogance, crookedness and cowardice, and an art of teaching
(didaskalikên) against all kinds of ignorance? Notice the Sophistic
assumption that anything can be taught, an assumption with which
Plato's Sokrates has had great difficulty in the Meno and
Protagoras.
Ignorance, thinks the Sophist, can be divided into two. The most
grievous half of itwhich, he says, outweighs all the other kinds of
ignorance togetheris the ignorance that believes it knows
something when actually it does not. This is clearly a variation
upon the Sokratic thesis in the Apology, that to know that one does
not know anything must be a kind of wisdom, if the oracle's
response to Chaerephon is to be believed. The Eleatic seems, here,
to be playing up to Sokrates in some way. But when he says
(229c5-6), "he fears that it is from this kind of ignorance that all
our intellectual failures come," we feel that this is flattery made
ironic by exaggeration, or else a Sophistic use of the fallacy of
extension aiming to hurt the Socratic thesis. "Furthermore," says
the visitor, making it as harsh as he can, "to this kind of ignorance
alone is the name given of amathia, "the ignorant conceit of
knowledge.'' 3 This succeeds in making it look as if the truly
modest thesis of Sokrates in the Apology actually implies that
everybody who fails to perceive his own lack of knowledge is
stupid.
 Page 190
As opposed to instruction in the arts and practical sciences
(dêmiourgikê, didaskalikê), the kind of instruction that is calculated
to remove this sort of ignorance, agrees Theaetetus, is called
education (paideia). But instruction in arguments (logois
didaskalikês) divides into two kinds, counters the Sophist. The old
method, he says sharply, used admonition or suasion. But the new
kind thinks all ignorance is involuntary (another parody of, or
swipe at, Sokrates); thus, admonition is insufficient to cure
conceited ignorance. The new method cross-questions the
conceited subject, who thinks he knows what he's talking about
until he finds himself contradicting himself and gets angry at
himself and feels humiliated. With this ploy the Elean either brings
Sokrates into the class of Sophists, or arrogates to the Sophists a
Socratic ability, in abstraction from the ethical context of the
Socratic practice of that ability.
But the Sophist now shows that he has missed the essence of the
method of Plato's Sokrates. "For," he continues, "those who purify
the soul . . . think that . . . opinions which obstruct the teachings
offered" (tas tois mathêmasin empodious doksas ekselôn) must first
be removed, and the learner made modest by being made to see that
he knows only what he knows and no more. As if the point were to
replace old misconceptions with new doctrines, rather than with
new, Sokratic attitudes of scrutiny, consistency, induction, search
for counter-instances, clarity and open-mindedness! This goes
unnoticed by Theaetetus, and the youth and the visitor agree "that
the part of discrimination (diakritikês) . . . concerned with purifying
the soul is instruction (!) and part of education . . . and that the
refutation of the unfounded pretense to knowledge . . . is nothing
else than the well-born art of the Sophist'' (231b3-9). The Sophist
from Elea has cleverly vindicated his profession in the presence of
both Sokrates and the anti-eristic Theodorus, who are expected to
remain silent because of the initial agreement about the respondent
and the mode of discourse being followed.
Theaetetus and the visitor now rehearse the number of forms in
which the Sophist has appeared to them. According to Theaetetus,
he was first of all someone who tracked the young and wealthy for
pay. Secondly, he traded or dealt in amounts of knowledge for the
life of the mind. Thirdly, he retailed these things; and fourthly, he
himself "manufactured" some of the things he sold. But fifthly,
adds the visitor, he was a trained competitor (athlêtês) in the
contest (agônistikês) of words, who was devoted to the art of
disputation (tên eristikên technên). Sixthly and challengeably
(amphisbêtêsirnon), he was a purifier of the mind who removed the
opinions that obstruct learning (mathêmasi). Note, again, that he
does not say, "who removed opinions that obstruct 'intelligent
goodness' or 'intelligence'" (sôphrosynê, phronêsis), as in the
Socratic conception of dialectic.
 Page 191
But what do all these activities have in common, asks the visitor,
that will allow us to designate the Sophist most plainly? He seems
to be a disputer on all subjects, says the Sophist, from the cosmic to
the judicial, he also writes books on how to master the various arts
and skills and can communicate his art of disputation to others. But
the Elean does not want Theaetetus to think, so easily, that it is
possible to know all tbings. So, he adds, he wants to know for
himself (233a5-7) "how can someone who is himself ignorant"as
Sokrates professes to be, understood"say anything sound in reponse
to or defense against someone who knows?" This is, again, a swipe
at Socrates, the silent onlooker, although it professes to refer to the
modesty about knowledge that the Elean had earlier claimed for the
Sophist.
It is not that the Sophist claims to know all things, he continues.
The secret of the Sophist's art is its seemingly magical power of
wonder-working in words: he is a maker of the likeness, in words,
of all things. He is a word-artist; but his verbal image-making is of
real likenesses that are true to, or proportional with, the originals.
The art of the Sophist is not illusionary or phantasmagoric, says the
Elean Sophist (326a), arrogating to his class a poetic power
possessed only by the great poets, dramatists, historians, and Plato
himself. But, Theaetetus, continues the visitor, you must now
observe that our inquiry has involved us in such difficult matters as
"appearing (phainesthai), and seeming (dokein) but not being
(einai de mê), and of asserting things that are not the case" (to
legein men atta, alêthê de mê).
The Sophistical "Refutation" of Parmenides
Ontologically speaking, this is already to put matters trickily. But
the Elean Sophist continues disarmingly (236e4), "you see,
Theaetetus, it is extremely difficult to find an expression which
states that falsehoods may be spoken or which believes they really
exist, and which is not in the very utterance of it, accompanied by a
contradiction." "Why so," asks Theaetetus.
Because, says the Sophist wasting no time in his attack upon
Parmenides, "this statement has dared to hypothesize that not-being
exists; for, otherwise falsehood could not exist" (tetolmêken ho
logos houtos hypothesai to mê on einai: pseudos gar ouk an allôs
egigneto on). That not-being exists is just the statement that
Parmenides insistently forbade us to make in my youth, he tells
Theaetetus, whowe now rememberhad wanted to hear about
Parmenides from Sokrates in the Theaetetus. It is no doubt because
he is so eager to hear about the revered father of philosophy that
Theaetetus now tells the Elean to "just follow out the examination
of the argument as best he can" and to take him
 Page 192
[Theaetetus] with him and "assume [his] agreement with anything
he wishes" (23765-7). Thus, we observe regretfully, is the method
of short but real (if inexperienced) question and long answers
abandoned by the interlocutors. It would seem that the Sophist will
now speak on with even less challenge from Theaetetus than
before. In the intercourse that the Sophist has been holding with the
rich young man, it doesn't seem to make much difference in any
case.
The Sophist starts: How do we think one of Parmenides' students
would answer the following question, "in what way must this term
not-being be applied?" (237c2-3: poi chrê t'ounom' epipherein
touto to mê on). But in order to "refute" Parmenides, the Sophist
must answer in his own way, not as the text of Parmenides poem
answers: Since the term not-being cannot be applied to any being
(tôn ontôn ti), it cannot be applied to some thing (oud'epi to ti
pherôn orthôs an tis pheroi) either. But it is plain that when we say
"some thing," we are referring to some being. For, (he says
correctly) it is impossible to speak of something as totally isolated,
bare and disconnected from everything else that exists. And you
recognize, the Sophist continues (this time fallaciously), that to
speak of something is to speak of some one thing, and it would
seem that he who speaks of no thing (ton de dê mê ti legonta) must
necessarily be saying nothing (i.e., "no thing'' at all 237e5-6).
However, the Parmenidean Goddess's answer to the first question
would, of course, have been that "not-being" cannot be applied to
anything; it applies to Nothing, nor can anything be predicated of
"it," Nothing. The Sophist's fallacy consists in not distinguishing
between the mention of the term and its use. "Nothing" can be
mentioned as a term, and is only mentioned by Parmenides'
Goddess. She nowhere uses it in his poem, as later thinkers have
wanted to use it. Use of "nothing" involves an equivocation
between its "absolute" sense, in which it is the exclusive
contradictory of Being (understood as everything-that-is-was-and-
will-be) and its relative sense, in which something is not something
else, or becomes something else. This is the sense in which a
totally smoked cigarette has ceased to be, but has not become
nothing; it has just turned into ashes and smoke. There is also an
amphiboly, in the Sophist's approach, according to which "to be
speaking of nothing" appears self-contradictory or impossible only
because it sounds like saying we are not saying (anything). The
paradox disappears as soon as we note that we are only mentioning
"nothing."
The Elean Sophist raises another perplexity (aporia) in his
rehearsal for Theaetetus of the arguments that have sought to refute
Parmenides (238b ff.). Number is among the things that exist; so
since we must attribute either singularity or plurality to "nothing"
when speaking of "it," we are attributing a kind of existence to "it."
In fact, nothing of the sort is permitted by the God-
 Page 193
dess in Parmenides' poem. Nor does sheeither implicitly or
fallaciouslyattribute some kind of being to not-being by anywhere
speaking of "it" as irrational, inexpressible, or unsoundable
(alogon, arrêton, aphthegton). What she says (in paraphrase) is that
"nothing"while being mentionableis unthinkable.
Observe the tactic that the Elean Sophist now follows (239b ff.). It
remains to be proved, by him, that falsehood cannot exist unless
not-being also exists. But the quoted refutations of Parmenides
have not seemed truly effective to the Elean Sophist himself, just as
they have not to the Parmenidean reader and Plato the Parmenidean
writer. "Poor me," says the Elean Sophist, "I am always defeated in
the refutation of not-being." We must look to someone else for
correctness of statement (orthologian) about it; to Theaetetus here.
Note that the Elean Sophist is still assuming that not-being can be
talked about. He is now an Eleatic only in the sense that he comes
from Elea; for a Parmenidean who follows the Goddess may not
grant this and remain a Parmenidean in the philosophic sense.
Theaetetus replies that it is going to be very difficult to speak
correctly about not-being. He has not seen the trap. Then, says the
Sophist, on the assumption that it will be difficult or impossible to
prove that falsehood exists, the Sophist has cleverly disappeared
into an inexplorable topic (eis aporon . . . topon katadedyken;
notice the pun between "place" and "topic" or "commonplace" in
the Greek, 239c7).
Because he deals in images, says the Sophist, beginning his
categorization of false judgment, we will say that the Sophist is an
image-maker. But he will ask us what we mean by "image"; and he
will deduce from the words in your answer that there is a single
class of images and ask you to define it. Then, from your definition
of a likeness, he will make us conclude that something that does
not really exist, really does exist. A likeness, Theaetetus had said,
is really a likeness, though not the real thing. I agree, Theaetetus,
that not-being is absurd and that by a substitution (epallaxeôs) the
hydra-headed Sophist has forced us, against our will, to agree that
not-being exists in a way.
How then, asks the Sophist, are we to define the art of the Sophist
so as to avoid self-contradiction? How do you mean that, and what
are you afraid of, asks Theaetetus. Well, Theaetetus, when he
beguiles us with an image we say that he has an art of deception.
So we also have to say, don't we, that by his art our minds now
hold a false judgment? But false judgment believes the opposite of
what is the case, does it not? Thus, falsehood makes judgments
about what is not, concludes the Elean Sophist. Now, does false
judgment think that what is not (mê einai ta mê onta), or that what
is absolutely not, somehow is (pôs einai ta mêdamôs onta 240e 1-
2)?
 Page 194
Since this question may only be answered affirmatively, the Elean
Sophist must be said to have committed a fallacy with his question.
To overlook this is to proceed as if Plato was not very intelligent,
not in control of the carefully constructed conversational exchange
we are reading, and as if he did not know his Parmenides. "False
judgment," answers Theaetetus (as programmed by the leading
question), "must think that what is not the case is, in some sense, if
there is to be any false judgment at all, even the slightest." "Well,
but does it not also think that what is entirely the case is absolutely
not," pushes the Sophist; "so that a statement is false both when it
thinks that things which are, are not, and when it says that things
which are not, are?'' They agree that there is hardly any other way
in which statements could be false.
The Sophist's next move is at first surprising. "But neither the
Sophist nor any intelligent person (mêchanê . . . tina tôn eu
phronountôn) will say or agree to this"; for, he continues, we
agreed that the expressions just used were unsoundable,
inexpressible, irrational and unthinkable. Wasn't that the Sophist's
meaning, Theaetetus? The latter agrees. "Then the time has come to
decide what to do about the Sophist and whether he should not be
classed by our findings as an illusionist (pseudourgôn) and
technically a wizard (goêton technêi), given the ease with which he
raises so many objections and difficulties" (241b4-8). I'm afraid,
Theaetetus, that the kinds of objections he raises have no end. You
mean, says Theaetetus disturbed, we are not going to be able to
catch him? "Shall we stand aside then," counters the Elean, "given
our weak handling (malthakisthentes) of him?" No, no, not now,
says Theaetetus, if we can in any way get even a slight hold on
him. Theaetetus's anxiety at being left unsatisfied in the middle of
the discursive search (i) gives the Elean Sophist license to deny that
he himself is any sort of parricide of "his father" Parmenides just
because he will have to test Parmenides' reasoning forcibly, but in
self-defense (amynomenos), maintaining (biazesthai) that "not-
being in some way (kata ti) is" and that, again, "being" in some
way is not. With the maneuver he gets a stronger assent to his
contentions from Theaetetus. But (ii) he has had to pay the price
(under Plato's management) of letting the reader, or Socratic
observer, see that he has identified with the Sophist (241d6, "in
defending myself") rather than with Parmenides, even though he is
from Elea.
Speaking historiographically, I don't see how commentators get
something called "the Eleatic heritage" out of this Sophist's denial
of Parmenides' "Eleaticism," and a combination of the fragments of
Melissus (which take Parmenides' metaphysical and linguistic
analysis for a cosmography), together with the work of
Neoplatonist doxographers like Simplicius who (unlike
Parmenides's Goddess herself) take "appearances" as belonging
with not-being. It would be of great usefulness historically to know
whether Parmenides'
 Page 195
poem was still being read by anybody other than Plato at the time
of writing of the Sophist. What the dialogue reflects is that the
climate of opinion was anti-Parmenidean at this time.
Thirdly, Theaetetus, you must allow me to reverse my position and
not think that I am aberrant (manikos) because I do so. The Elean
Sophist pretends he has never before been tough enough
(apêirekôs) to attack (epitithesthai) and refute (elenchein) "our
father's reasoning (toi patrikôi logôi), and that it is just for
Theaetetus's sake (sên . . . dê charin) that he will try to do so now.
Theaetetus politely reassures the visiting Sophist that he doesn't
believe him to be doing anything unseemly (plêemmelein) in going
ahead with his attempt.
"It seems to me," proceeds the Elean Sophist, lumping Parmenides
together with other Presocratics and nature-philosophers, "that
Parmenides and all those who have made an issue of defining what
there is and how many and what sort of things exist have spoken
unguardedly to us" (Eukolôs moi dokei Parmenidês hêmin
dieilechthai kai pas hostis pôpote epi krisin hôrmêse tou ta onta
diorisasthai posa te kai poia estin 242c5-8). But the reader of
Parmenides' poem knows that this is exactly what his Goddess does
not do, and that the poem is very concerned with projecting and
observing a distinction between the strict, consistent discourse that
has Being for its subject and the inevitably inconsistent discourse
that men must use when they discuss cosmography, or less than
"the All.'' Parmenides is, in fact, "the father of philosophy"
precisely because he was the first to criticize systematically the
inconsistencies of the nature-philosophers.
Thus, it looks as if what we have before us in the Sophist is a
presentation, an exhibitive criticism of some of the ways in which
other philosophers were trying, or failing, to solve the problems
about "being" and "not-being" that arise when they are tackled on
some other basis than that provided by Parmenides' Goddess.
Plato's procedure is to show us in dialogical form what the thinking
and argumentative techniques of a Sophist from Elea might well
have been on a given subject in a given situation that he finds
himself. The (exhibitive, nonassertive) judgment of Plato himself
of the Elean Sophist's thinking and maneuvering is to be found in
the way in which this thinking and maneuvering are organized and
presented to the reader by Plato's artistry. This artistry is surely
evaluative; but it is evaluative in the same mode that arts like
poetry and drama are evaluative. If the Elean Sophist looks good or
bad or some of both to the reader, the latter can appreciate that this
is a matter of his response to, or interaction with, Plato's work.
It would be practically impossible, for instance, to express
accurately what Bernard Shaw himself thought of millionaires in
other than the dramatic mode of Major Barbara and The
Millionairess, if all we had were Shaw's plays. It's
 Page 196
only because we have the social criticism that constitutes Shaw's
prefaces to the plays and because we know so much about Shaw's
life and opinions that we can argue in assertive terms about his
theory of capital in distinction from Undershaft's beliefs or Major
Barbara's responses and actions. But all we have in Plato's case is
the Sophist and his other dialogues. Accordingly, our reading of
these works must begin by focusing on the discursive interactions
between the speakers, on the intellectual situations with which they
begin and end their exchanges, and on those pivotal situations that
stand out as such under Plato's dialogical and memorializing
management.
The Views and Performance of the Elean Sophist
A few pages back, at 241e5, the Elean startles the modern reader
by maintaining that it is necessarily self-contradictory to believe
that false judgments can be made in the sciences and the arts unless
Parmenides' doctrine (as he calls it) is first either accepted or
refuted. How he can unquestioningly feel that this is so could be
more easily solved, as a problem in intellectual history. But we do
not have the documentary evidence of the right kind to be able to
formulate the problem in this historical way. We must depend on
the rest of what Plato has the Sophist say to Theaetetus in the
dialogue. So it is of great help that the visitor is soon shown to
believe that there would be a problem about how to conceptualize
"being" in any case, whether their careless philosophic
predecessors had raised and confused the issue or not. He adds that
though it is easier to see that "not-being" causes difficulties, both
"it" and "being" are equally a problem (243c). But it is just this
parity, as G.E.L. Owen calls it, of being with not-being that
Parmenides' solution prohibits. There is no problem of not-being
for Parmenides because, as his Goddess stipulates in mentioning it,
it simply cannot be talked about or be in any sense at all. So far, it
would seem that the Elean Sophist's problem arises from a non-
Parmenidean conception of not-being according to which "it'' not
only can be mentioned but can and must be thought about and
talked about in order to explain the nature of existence.
The Elean Sophist's biases begin to show, in the systematic sense,
in the contemptuous "history" of his philosophic predecessors that
he gives from 242c8 to 243b1. Among them, the relevant one is his
claim that like the others, what "our own Eleatic people"
(par'bêmin Eleatikon ethnos) have given the public is only a
creation story. It is also clear to the reader of Parmenides that the
Sophist's critique of previous thinking, from 24263-11 and from
243d6 on, does not apply to the linguistic and metaphysical Part
One of the poem,
 Page 197
however much it may apply to other Presocratics. We have to infer
that by the time of writing of the Sophist, professionals other than
Plato had ceased to understand that the (for us) badly preserved
Part Two of Parmenides' poem was only a specimen cosmography,
ironically and deliberately designed to show how easy it is to
construct an elegant cosmography (as persuasive and liable to
inconsistency as any other) if only the designer chooses his
originative opposites cleverly enough.
It is evident that some fifth- and fourth-century "men of
knowledge" used Part Two of the poem to give a cosmographical
(and easier) interpretation to the startling and rigorous (but
difficult) Part One, as so many others down to our own time have
done. It is clear, in any case, that the Elean Sophist is bypassing
Parmenides' categorial analysis of the predicates applicable to
Being-as-excluding-nothing, what we would call the ontology of
this part of the poem. The Sophist is also ignoring Parmenides'
operating distinction between this kind of linguistic or
metaphysical analysis and the synthesis of incomplete facts and
observations that any cosmography is bound to be.
Having turned the question of Being into a question of nature-
philosophy, the Elean visitor proceeds from 243d7 on to give, in
his discursive behavior, a Sophistic imitation of Sokrates' mode of
proceeding in the Theaetetus. There Socrates had purported to
question the deceased Protagoras himself, as well as the absent
Protagoreans and their equally absent allies the Herakleiteans. But
in trying to speak for Protagoras, his followers, and their allies the
Herakleiteans Sokrates had remained, if not skeptical, at least
detached: "I can't tell about you, Sokrates, whether you believe
what you're saying or testing me," Theaetetus had noted at 157c5.
Unlike those of the Elean Sophist, who is pushing his own case, the
answers that Sokrates gives on behalf of these thinkers consist (we
can agree) of the strongest possible arguments that Sokrates can
think of in their defense.
The Elean in the Sophist, on the other hand, proceeds, with the easy
assent that Theaetetus had promised him, not to defend Parmenides
but to reaffirm the confusion between conceptual analysis and
cosmography and to conclude that "whoever asserts that being . . .
is"whatever its number"will be confronted by a myriad of problems
each involving unlimitable difficulties" (245d1O-e2). But
Parmenides did not use the formulation "being is" (to on . . . einai)
in his poem, tautologous and free of difficulties as it seems.
Parmenides' Goddess was consistently categorizing, for her young
auditor, the subject of "esti" (is) when nothing that-in-any-way-
was-is-or-will-be is left out. She was, we may say, trying to
conceptualize Being as all-inclusive, not asserting the tautology
"what exists, exists.'' Note that though the Elean claims at 245e6-7
to be rehearsing the precise doctrines of some precise thinkers, he
 Page 198
has actually scornfully equivocated between Parmenides and his
"followers," in a way that Sokrates did not confuse Protagoras with
his followers in the Theaetetus. The Elean is not himself precise in
quoting Parmenides, or about whom he is questioning and speaking
for. His phrase "those who treat accurately (diakribologoumenous)
of . . . not-being" is itself equivocal and inaccurate while appearing
not to be. It is, in short, sophistical. No wonder L. Campbell
admitted some doubt in his commentary about what the phrase
means; Campbell missed the sophistry being practiced by the Elean
sophist. But Campbell was right in noting that the phrase could
refer to the Atomists, since they too (i.e., besides Parmenides)
could be said to have spoken unequivocally about not-being,
having clearly defined "it" as the void besides which there is only
body in motion. Accordingly, why call the monstrous materialists
in the gigantomachia "the others" who, according to the Elean
Sophist, are so terrifyingly earthly in their argumentation against
the idealists from ''the world above"? We should not, in other
words, take the phrase about ontological exactness too seriously
when we see that its user is himself not being exact.
The Elean Sophist's sarcastic rehearsal for Theaetetus of the
Atomists' position brings him at 247e3-4 to a statement of his own
definition of that which exists (ta onta) as power (dynamis). On
behalf of the corporealists, Theaetetus gives provisional acceptance
to this suggestion. This "acceptance" is in no way dialectical.
Agreement reached like this would not have been agreement to
contemporary men-of-knowledge. The Elean's procedure, in
seeking to avoid eristic disputation, has paid too high a price in
unconvincingness.
And it teaches us something: we see that the dialectic as practiced
by Plato's Sokrates for the benefit of his interlocutors cannot avoid
a measure of eristic confrontation if it is to be effective. But we
must also observe that in rejecting the eristical aspects of Sophistry,
the Elean Sophist has by no means given up the rhetorical or
persuasive constituents of it. We find in fact (turning to Stephanus
pages 267f.) that he is claiming by implication to found his own
"non-eristic" and "real" art of discourse, upon its acceptance by
those of the others who are most knowing and whom he recognizes
as wise (sophon) because they have knowledge of what they
imitate. This is probably a reflection of the change in style and
preference among the Sophists, already presaged in Gorgias's
practice, according to which most of them had become rhetorical
rather than eristic Sophists by the first half of the fourth century. In
any case, the Elean Sophist has not earned or proved the definition
of being as power that he and Theaetetus will now rely on, as he
goes on to attack "the friends of the Forms."
He requests Theaetetus to answer for the latter. The Elean takes up
the distinction between being (ousian) and becoming (genesin) and
the idealist
 Page 199
thesis that the body participates (koinônein) through perception in
generation and change, just as the soul participates through thought
in the unchanging reality constituted by the Forms. He relies on the
idealists' claim to be in the condition of knowing being and on their
presumed "admission" that active and passive cannot share in each
other in order to refute them. For, he argues, if being is known, it is
moved and cannot therefore be in a state of rest as the idealists
assert. In any case, the Elean Sophist continues, being as a whole
(tôi pantelôs onti) cannot be immovable; for then it would be
without life or mind. But these exist, just as motion and that-which-
is-moved exist.
However, Theaetetus, we are also in danger of banishing mind
(logos) from the universe if we admit that all things are in flux and
motion. For it is hard to see how thought (nous) could exist without
sameness and there is no sameness in flux.
So the philosopher (philosophos), Theaetetus, cannot accept either
that the real universe (to pan) is at rest (whether as a unity or as
many Forms) or that all is in motion. The philosopher must grant
that being and the universe (to on te kai to pan) consist of both rest
and motion (249d5-7). Note, again, how the Elean visitor identifies
or fails to distinguish between Being, the all-inclusive concept, and
the so-to-speak astronomical universe. But now, Theaetetus, we are
really in trouble. For if motion and rest exclude each other and they
both are, they both participate in being, and being must be a third
thing different from either. But how can being be outside the two
classes, into which everything must fall, of things which move and
of things at rest?
Let us remember, Theaetetus, that we were greatly perplexed when
asked to what we should apply the term not-being. We can now say
that we are in complete perplexity about both being and not-being.
This means, Theaetetus, that if we can get a glimpse of either one,
we will have glimpsed the other. But if we miss both of them, we
can at least push our way (diôsometha) through both at once as best
we may (251a1-3). L. Campbell translates diosômetha here as
"steer clear of."
The Elean Sophist has made this last point about being as some
third thing through direct rhetorical interrogation of Theaetetus
himself, a procedure he reverted to at 250a5-6. But to deal with the
question of how unities come to be assigned multiplicities of
predicates, the visitor switches yet again to the method or fiction of
interrogating in person, as if they were present among the sects
previously addressed, the sect of the tautologistsas we may call
them. They claim that it is wrong to say, "a man is good," for then a
man would be other than a man. You may only say, if you wish to
avoid error, "a man is a man," or, "the good is good.'' The Elean
wants Theaetetus, in answering for these new people, to choose one
of three alternatives.
 Page 200
First, is it the case, as these people claim, that no thing has the
power to combine with, or share in, anything else (251e8-9)? The
Elean visitor answers this one for himself: all the schools make
conjoinings (prosaptousin) in being, whether they are advocates of
universal motion, or unity and rest, or of the unchanging
constituent Forms; so too the Sicilian school that first takes
everything apart and then puts it all back together again. But most
amusing are the tautologists who refute themselves every time they
say that something "is" (thus allowing it to share in being), and
every time they use disjunctive expressions (since you can only
separate what was once joined).
Second, is it the case that all things have the power to mingle with,
or share in, one another? Theaetetus, inexperienced as he is,
quickly disposes of this alternative by invoking its impossible
consequence: that rest would be able to participate in motion, and
motion in motionlessness. The Elean concludes for Theaetetus that
the third alternative must be the case, namely, that some things will
mingle with one another but that others won't. The reader notes that
this conclusion has been reached, not by a true or Socratic
elenchus, but by a kind of Sophistic maneuvering or persuasion.
So it is, Theaetetus, with the letters of the alphabet and the tones in
music. Some will not go together and some will, while still others,
like the vowels in speech, are pervasive and necessary. Now, we
have agreed that the genera (i.e., the classes into which all things
divide) do and do not commingle with one another, says the Elean,
preparing to make an important point. It follows, Theaetetus, that to
demonstrate which of the classes are compatible and which are not,
we will need a science (epistêmê) that proceeds rationally (dia tôn
logôn), just as we will if we are to show that there are some things
that are pervasive in holding all other things together and allowing
them to separate or combine. What name, says the Elean Sophist
pouncing, shall we give to this science? Or, by Zeus, have we
unexpectedly come upon the science, or knowledge, that is
characteristic of free men; and in looking for the Sophist, perhaps
discovered the philosopher? (Tin'oun au proseroumen, ô Theaitetê,
tautên; ê pros Dios elathomen eis tên tôn eleutherôn empesontes
epistêmên, kai kindyneuomen zêtountes to sophistên proteron
anêurêkenai ton philosophon 253c6-10).
Surprised, Theaetetus doesn't quite understand (pôs legeis). Shall
we not call this science dialectic, explains the Elean Sophist, coolly
appropriating for his own practice of distinction-making the term
that had hitherto applied to the art of disputation formally
developed by Zeno, Protagoras, and Sokrates: elenchtic or purely
refutative in the case of Zeno, antilogistic in Protagoras, and
inductive in Sokrates. Sophist though the Elean may be, he has
nevertheless just as coolly, and in the presence of Sokrates and
Theodorus, appropriated to himself the title of philosopher
(philosophos). In so calling himself, the
 Page 201
clever Elean is portrayed by Plato as now moving over to the other
side, for safety, seeking the support of the friends of the Forms.
In the next few lines he elevates the diairesic dialectic to the status
of a science (epistêmê), defines it as the study of the relations
between genera (genê), and uses "genus" and "form" (idea) as if
they were synonymous (253d1-e3). His suggestion that only those
philosophers may be called dialecticians who are just and purified
may be a peace-offering to the numerous pythagorizers among the
friends of the Forms. But he disguises his compliment to, or flattery
of, this kind of philosopher by saying that he is as difficult to see
clearly as the Sophist but from a different cause. This cause is the
dazzling glare generated by his constant reasoning about the idea of
being. The disguised compliment is one of the kinds of irony
(eirôneia) noted by Pape in his Handwörterbuch, as covered-up
speech ''Verstellung in Reden."
The Sophist, says the Elean, is hard to detect because he takes
cover in the dark recesses of what-is-not. However, we must not
give up till we have got an adequate sighting of him. We must
reason again about what is and what-is-not (to te on kai mêe on
254c) as fully as our method permits, and try to see whether we
may not, after all, say that what-is-not really is in being not.
Theaetetus docilely agrees that this is what they must do.
The Sophistic visitor's next moves are massively and Sophistically
equivocal. He takes "being," "motion," "rest," and "otherness" as
the greatest or most pervasive of the distinct or disjoint classes
(megista . . . tôn genôn). Then he stipulates, at 257b3-5, that not-
being must be taken to mean not the exclusive opposite of Being
(as Parmenides' Goddess had insisted), but only as something
different from being. He succeeds in getting Theaetetus to agree to
the equation of not-being with otherness. The Elean Sophist knows
full well that he has broken with Parmenides in this and
transgressed his metaphysical interdict. So at 258c8-9 he makes
sure that it is he himself who notes this explicitly, adding a bit
boastfully that he has shown the Master more than he allowed
could be seen (258c10-11).
The Elean Sophist goes further. Plato, presumably, wants to make
sure that the reader can perceive those concepts with which the
Sophist is juggling. "We have not only proved," he says, "that the
things-which-are-not are, we have also exhibited the characteristic
Form (eidos) of not-being." But it is clear to the reader by now that
the Elean has simply redefined "nothingness" as "otherness"; he
has, namely, equivocated between "not-being" and "not being the
same as." His mistake, Parmenides' Goddess would have told him,
is that "otherness" is included in Being. Nothing is excluded by
Being; and otherness is not nothing. At 259a the Elean Sophist
becomes a bit disputatious, advancing a dilemma as a sort of
challenge that George Grote rightly found unac-
 Page 202
ceptable. "As for our present definition of not-being," says the
visitor, "a person must either persuade us of its wrongness by
refutation, or until he can do so, he must speak as we do about
these matters. . . ." To which Grote responds:
The language of the Eleate here is altogether at variance with the spirit
of Plato in his negative or Searching Dialogues. To say as he does,
'Either accept the explanation which I give, or propose a better one of
your own' is a dilemma which the Sokrates of the Theaetetus, and other
dialogues, would have declined altogether. The complaint here made by
the Eleate, against disputants who did nothing but propound
difficultiesis the same as that which the hearers of Sokrates made
against him. . .
Grote, incidentally and independently, confirms the perception that
the Elean visitor is attacking Sokrates.
So it is, continues the Elean at 259b, that there are myriads of
things which being is not, just as all other things in many relations
are and in many relations are not. We begin to see that the Elean's
belief is that Parmenides' solution to the problem of not-being
prevents things from being rationally connected in discourse
(259d9-e6). This is because, in the Goddess's terms, he has allowed
being to be penetrated by not-being, contrary to her injunction.
Things could not be connected by predication if there were
absolutely nothing between them, thinks the Elean. Therefore, in
his belief, not-being cannot be absolutely nothing. "For," he tells
Theaetetus, "it is from the interweaving (symplokên) of the Forms
(tôn eidôn) with each other that speech comes to us."
My purpose, he proceeds, has been to establish speech as one of the
kinds (genôn) of things that exists. But why, asks Theaetetus, do
we need to define it? Because, answers the Sophist, not-being is
one of the classes that pervade all that is. And if it did not, all
statements connecting the things that are would be true; we would
not be able to say something that is not, or is not the case.
And if falsehood exists, then deception exists; and the world must
be full of images, imitations and illusoriness. Theaetetus agrees.
But this is just the place to which the Sophist has withdrawn in
denying the existence of falsehood. "For," says the Elean, now
trying to turn Parmenides himself into a Sophist, "he tells us that
not-being cannot be thought and cannot be talked about, for being
(ousias) can in no way participate in not-being (to mê on). So that,
by inquiring into speech, judgment and delusion and showing that
they participate in not-being and, thus, that falsehood exists, we
may be able to shackle the Sophist-as-such on the falsehood issue"
(260e-261a2). But if he escapes the charge, we must look for him
under some other classification (en allôi
 Page 203
genei) than the speaker of falsehoods who denies that there is such
a thing as falsehood (261a3-4, and paraphrasing so as to make the
point of these lines explicit). So be of good cheer, Theaetetus, we
have broken through his biggest defense, the line he drew at not-
being, and may yet and more easily capture his lesser earthworks.
About names, Theaetetus, we need to understand that they are
sometimes not conjoinable. The vocable that we call the verb refers
to actions, and we call nouns those that refer to the agent or doer of
the action. But it takes both a noun and a verb combined to make a
sentence, and sentences make discourse. Now, Theaetetus, the
noun and the verb must be such that they fit with each other; and
the former is called the subject. We wonder that Theaetetus, the
well-instructed student of mathematics, should need all these
explanations about language. So tell me, Theaetetus; if I say,
"Theaetetus sits," what is the subject? I am the subject, says
Theaetetus. And if I say, "Theaetetus with whom I am now talking
flies," what is the subject? Again, I am the subject, says the young
man. They agree that the first sentence is true, and that the second
has the value (poion) of being false. They also agree that the
second is false because it says something other (hetera) than what
is the case; thus is a sentence false if it says that things which are
not at all, are. It is such combinations of nouns and verbs,
concludes the Elean Sophist solemnly, that give rise really and
truly to false speech.
So it is clear at last, is it not Theaetetus, that thinking (dianoia) and
judgment (doksa) and imagination (phantasia) can occur in us with
both the value of true or the value of false? How? Well, thinking is
the same as speech, except that it is inward and silent; and thought
has judgment for its outcome. Note the error in the first part of this
claim: thinking, as internalized speech, is limited to words.
Thought requires terms, but these need not be words. And when
thought is mediated by perception (aisthêsis), then thought must be
called imagination or abstraction (264a). Thus, if thinking can be
true or false, then so can all the other kinds of thought be true or
false. And you see, Theaetetus, that we have found false speech
and false judgment to exist sooner than we thought.
We can now resume our task, Theaetetus, of locating the Sophist;
for we have established that imitations of what is can exist and that
an art of deception can be developed out of this possibility (264d6-
7). Now a while back, we established that the Sophist belongs to
one of these two classes of imitators. We had begun, Theaetetus,
with a division between productive and acquisitive art. But now
that it has emerged that his is an imitative art, we must go on to
divide productive art into two; for mimesis is a kind of making
(265b1) of images of things.
 Page 204
Let there be, the visitor now says, two parts to the productive art:
the divine and the human. This catches Theaetetus by surprise, so
the Elean reminds him that he had accepted earlier the suggestion
that productive activity is a power when it causes previously
nonexistent things to come into being (265b). We stop to note that
the Elean has (i) maintained that the Sophist is both mimetic and
productive. He has (ii) reasserted his belief that being is power.
And in distinguishing between human and divine productivity, the
visitor has (iii) asserted that the set of dynamisms that constitute
nature are God's handiwork, and that (iv) they came into existence
out of nothing. This is not only totally anti-Parmenidean, but
startlingly non-Athenian. For the ordinary Athenian had it as a
tribal and Hesiodic inheritance that in the beginning there was
chaos, but that chaos was not nothing. As far as the unexamined
beliefs of Greek society about things at large were concerned, there
had always been something in existence. To "the All," as such,
there had never been a beginning for the Archaic or Classical
Greek. It was only Greekness or Greek society that had had their
beginnings with the rise of the first generation of Gods and their
Titanic and Olympian successors. With this new doctrine of the
Italiote visitor, that creation can be out of nothing, we are at the
beginning of the end of the Classical period and can already see the
coming to Athens of the Hellenistic age.
Some images, reflections or silhouettes are natural and divinely
produced, continues the Elean. But in the case of man, we first
build a house according to the art of building-construction, and
then by the art of painting we produce a kind of man-made dream-
image of the house for viewing while awake. In general, Theaetetus
there is in the case of human creation the thing itself produced by
the appropriate art; and there is, secondly, the picture of it produced
by the art of picturing. Theaetetus agrees. But we must remember
that image-making, a real art, divided into the production of
likenesses and the production of the imaginary. Now let us divide
the art of the imaginary (to phantastikon): in one kind the artist
works with tools, in the other the imitator uses his own figure or
voice to reproduce, let us say, your appearance, manner and tone.
That kind of illusionism is called mimetic. Let us consider only this
mimetic art. It, too, divides into halves: for there are those who
imitate with knowledge (eidotes) of what they imitate and others
who imitate without this knowledge. And they are as different as
the great difference between knowledge and ignorance. The
example I just gave, Theaetetus, was of someone who knew what
he was imitating.
But what about the cases in which it is such forms (schêma) as that
of justice or of goodness (aretê) that are to be imitated? Are there
not many who strenuously imitate human excellences in speech and
behavior without knowing
 Page 205
what human excellence is? How many of these succeed in looking
excellent, Theaetetus? Only too many. But such unknowing
imitators are quite different from the imitator who knows? Yes. Let
us coin names for them: the first we will call a doksomimetic actor
or opinionated imposer, and the second we will call a scientific
(historikên) actor because he acts with knowledge. 4
But you know, Theaetetus, the Eleatic presses on, there are the
simple (haploun) imitators and the ironic (eirônikon) imitators.5
But, says the Elean, of the latter kind there are two classes. One
kind imposes (eirôneuesthai) in long speeches upon the many. This
one we shall call a public speaker (dêmologikon) rather than a
statesman (politikon). Then there is the kind, Theaetetus, who
ironizes or dissembles (eirôneuesthai), in private with short
arguments that force his interlocutor into contradictions with
himself. Shall we call him a wise man (sophon) or a Sophist
(sophistikon)? Since by hypothesis, answers Theaetetus, he does
not know, it is not possible to call him wise. But since he imitates
the man of wisdom his name will have to be a paronym
(parônymon) of "sophon." Now I see, says the young man as he
falls into the Elean's trap, this is the one whom we must actually
and unhesitatingly call the Sophist.
The visitor has gotten Theaetetus to accept a definition of the
Sophist that fits Sokrates' preferred procedure rather than his own!
And the reader is finally confirmed in what the Elean has been
doing all along: he has been trying to prove himself better than
Sokrates, and has been hiding the fact that he is defending a certain
kind of Sophist, namely, his own non-eristic but persuasive kind.
He has, moreover, quite succeeded in capturing or "hooking" the
rich, young Theaetetus for his own point of view, while
unnoticedly belittling Sokrates. The Elean also believes himself
totally unlike Sokrates in thisto have reached the complete truth
(t'alêthestata . . . erei) about the kind of eristic Sophist he and
Theodorus happen to dislike.
The Relation of the 'Sophist' to the Impending Trial
The Sophist is only one of a few dialogues which are fixed by some
locution of Plato's Sokrates as occurring just before his trial. But it
is most commonly the Euthyphro that is printed (or read) right
before the Apology, as if there were a compelling dramatic
connection between them. The motivation for this is, however,
external. It is the consideration that readers or students are best
introduced to Plato's dialogical rendering of the Impiety Trial of his
Socrates by a dialogue that shows how difficult it really is to define
piety, and that shows Euthyphro, a professed expert on the subject,
acting on an unexamined notion of piety and going forward with
his action even after Sokrates has shown
 Page 206
him that he, Euthyphro, does not know what it is. On a dialogical
reading, however, there is an internal dramatic connection between
the Sophist and the Apology. We know from its explicit connection
with the Theaetetus that the (dramatic) time at which the visitor in
the Sophist has spoken his piece about those whose behavior in
relation to justness (dikaiosynê) and goodness (aretê) is only
mimetic but nonetheless successful is the time just after Sokrates
has been indicted by Meletus and Anytus. We have seen that in
speaking this piece, the Elean Sophist is aiming to make his
audience believe, or start suspecting, that Sokrates is perhaps only
a good imitator of human excellence rather than a good man (and
that, perhaps, there can only be imitations of goodness, not
goodness itself). Since it is Plato the author who has put his
Sokrates into this position, it follows that Plato is secure in the
knowledge that he has already exhibited, or will be able in the
Apology to exhibit, his Sokrates as actually wise; even though this
Sokrates also possesses the techniques of argumentation that are
called Sophistical because Eristics also used them. This is in fact
how the Apology actually presents Plato's Sokrates. He refutes
Meletus with short, questioning arguments from 24c10 to 27a8 of
that dialogue, thus qualifying (according to the Elean's definition)
as an Eristic. That he also almost succeeds, but fails by a sprinkling
of votes, in persuading a jury of over five hundredpredisposed
against him by the notorious jury-briber Anytusmight or might not
qualify Plato's Sokrates as a public speaker (dêmologikon). If it
does, it is Sokrates who has been caught in the net of the Elean's
dichotomies; for he is then both a demologue and an Eristic
Sophist. But if it does not qualify him as a public speaker, he is at
least an Eristic. But since (as we saw in our early chapter) it is
Sokrates' wise discursive behavior in the Apology that generates a
good existential alternative, for himself and the jury, out of the
confrontation with Anytus; and since this behavior succeeds in
immortalizing him as a good, humanly excellent, personwe know,
or can anticipate, that the Sophist from Elea cannot really catch
Sokrates with either his barbed phrases or his dichotomous nets.
Notes
1. L. Campbell took Sokrates' reference in Politicus to a
mathematical analogy to imply that "the Statesman rises above the
Sophist in value" as "the Philosopher [rises] above the Statesman in
more than a geometrical ratio." This understanding of Sokrates'
correction says that the difference between a philosopher and a
statesman is greater, in terms of positive value, than the difference
between a statesman and a Sophist. But is this the point in Sokrates'
correction of Theodorus? The annotation rather suggests
 Page 207
that Campbell has failed to perceive that all we'll get from the
Eleatic is a Sophistic account of the Sophist, the philosopher,
and the statesman or politician.
2. L. Campbell, on the contrary, thinks that the two methods have
something in common in that "in each case the inquiry advances
from the less known to the more known" (p.15). But this cannot be
right, since the angler, with whom we are to start, has been
explicitly said to be known to all.
3. Or, "stupidity," as both Fowler and Campbell translate; Apelt
uses "Unverstand."
4. Here, A.E. Taylor's translation synonymizes "imitator" with
"impostor"; but this seems too strong. It is themselves that such
people impose upon others; their pretense, by definition, is
supposed to go unnoticed. They were said to be successful
imitators of the excellences.
5. Eirônikon: "dissembling," H.N. Fowler; "hollow, insincere,
designing," L. Campbell; ''verstellenden," 0. Apelt; "ironique," A.
Diès. A.E. Taylor translates "impostor," but explains that by an
"impostor-mimic" he means an ironical imitator.
 Page 209

Chapter 11
The Politics of a Sophistic Rhetorician:
A Sophistic De Monarchia
Plato's Dialogism and the Subject-Matter of the 'Politicus'
To understand Plato's Politicus and the rhetorical Sophist who
takes the leading role in it, we need to rehearse something of what
happened in the Theaeetus and the Sophist, the first two dialogues
in the trilogy of which the Politicus is the last. Plato's Sokrates in
the Theaetetus can be seen to have emulated the antilogistic
behavior which the patient Parmenides practiced in the Parmenides
for the benefit of his youthful self at twenty years of age. But while
the interlocutors and auditors of the Parmenides were forewarned
that the father of philosophy was going to be antilogistical,
Sokrates in the Theaetetus refrains from such a pre-announcement
because he knows that Theodorus hates eristics or antilogistics, and
would not allow that they can benefit his pupil Theaetetus. 1
Significantly, the guest-friend from Elea whom Theodorus brings
the next day to the meeting at which the nature of the Sophist is
discussed, also dislikes eristics. In the Sophist, we found that
insofar as the Visitor's characterization of the Sophist is a definition
it is a subtly derogatory one of the eristic Sophists with whom
today's speaker is in competition as a rhetorical Sophist himself.
We also noted that he tries to assimilate Sophistic disputatiousness
to Sokrate's ethical habit of unpaid discussion seemingly for its
own sake. Notable, too, is that the good things which were said by
the Eleate about the Sophist, were said in defense of the persuasive
or 'pedagogical' Sophistwho is paid, so he self-servingly says, to
make his interlocutor better. It turns out in this dialogue
 Page 210
that the visitor from Elea is himself such a rhetorical Sophist, and
of the party who would refute Parmenides' conceptualization of
Being as the exclusive contradictory of not-being. 2
The behavior of the visiting Sophist from Elea in the Politicus is
equally clever. He has some more fun with the method of diairesis,
or classification by series of subdivisions. And he is "dialectical" in
an amusing and fabulating, but non-Socratic, way. He can also be
seen to be striving for a virtuosity greater than that of the Sokrates
he has been competing with since the previous dialogue.
The point of these remarks is to assist the reader who hasn't yet
read the Theaetetus and the Sophist, or caught on to the antilogies
underlying the development of the former, or the way in which in
the latter the Eleate deprecates eristic sophistry while practicing as
a rhetorical Sophist. The points to be summarized that help
understand the Politicus are, first, that Plato's Sokrates has
emulated Plato's Parmenides in his own way in the Theaetetus by
antilogizing some Protagorean theses about knowledge. Secondly,
that the visitor in the Sophist is against disputation and thinks of
Sokrates as an unpaid eristic, while defending rhetorical sophistry
as 'philosophy.' This, thirdly, will permit the Eleate in the Politicus
to advance his pythagorizing, spartanizing, political views in a
amusingly pseudo-Sokratic and fabulating way. As we have said,
the Elean Sophist is trying to outdo Sokrates at his own game, and
thinking he has succeeded, just as in the Sophist he tried to get at
Sokrates with some dichotomous nets and barbed phrases without
succeeding. I say without succeeding because the reader
remembers that Plato's Apology negatesor (dramatically speaking)
will negatethe truth of attributing to Sokrates any self-serving
demology. "Demology" is the Sophists' term for playing to the
gallery in disputations. The Apology reaffirms indelibly for the
reader the ethical purposes that prompt Sokrates' interrogative
activity.
Emphasizing Plato's dialogism as we do, we naturally reject H.N.
Fowler's philistine judgment that "in this dialogue, as in the
Sophist, the dramatic form is hardly more than a convention."3 On
the contrary, any reading (not excluding 'philosophic' readings) of
the Politicus conducted with what is now called 'literary
competence' will grant that the dialogical or dramatic form which
Plato gave it is of supreme relevance. But if by a 'philosophic'
reading we mean one that seeks only for 'doctrine,' it follows that
the doctrines which such readings come up with will simply be
those of the Elean visitor in the fiction of the dialogue.
Alternatively, if by philosophic readings we mean those that apply
only a logical analysis to the reasonings of the visitor, we will have
neglected the rhetorical dimension of a discursive interaction in
which the copious main speaker is a rhetorician. And we see that to
call such readings
 Page 211
'philosophic' is a presumptuous impoverishment of the art-and-
science of responsive reflection, because it is less than fully
reflective and less than adequately responsive.
We also cannot hold back the suggestion that the non-ironic title of
M. Miller's interesting book 4 on our dialogue should have been
'The Sophist in Plato's Politicus'; rather than 'The Philosopher in
Plato's Statesman'. This is because to call the subject-matter of the
Eleatic visitor's discourse 'the statesman' is (i) to transpose 'the
political man' (ton politikon andra, 258b4) for whom the visitor
says he will seek in his discourse, into 'the man of real knowledge'
(tis . . . epistêmôn ontôs ôn, 301b5) whom he invokes as a standard
or ideal later in his speeches. And to do this is (ii) to beg the
question of the whole dialogue. For, if by statesman we mean the
visitor's one true, kingly man of knowledge who manages the state
with justice and benefaction, then it cannot be to the political man
in this sense that Sokrates junior applies the term politikous at
303c5-6, since the interlocutors agree that such a man of
knowledge is not to be found on earth (275c).
He also makes it explicit at 303c6-7 (following the lead of the
Eleate) that quote: "this term 'sophist' then comes round quite
rightly to fall upon the politikos." But neither is it to the latter man
that terms sophos kai agathos (296e5) are applied by the Eleate, as
we shall see; for these are applied in that passage to the 'kingly'
ruler whose 'science' obviates the need for laws. The sophistic
visitor's equivocation between 'the political man' and 'the kingly
man' is so subtly done, however, that it needs to be caught at its
very beginning. He has just said that having found out yesterday
(258a3) the nature of the Sophist, it is now necessary to search out
(diazêtein) that of the politician (ton politikon andra), thus
implying some sort of kinship between them.5 So politikos means
hereas it will mean in the course of the dialogueadministrator of
one of the six imitations of the true form of government.6
We notice at once that the Sophist's search for 'the political man'
has become, by 268b10, "our discourse about the king," and a
diagramming of "a sort of kingly shape" at 268c6. Already by 262c
the sophistic visitor has forgotten the political man and is talking
only about 'the kingly man' (ton basilikon) whose art (technê at
25965, epistêmê at 264a5) is kingly (basilikê) "if he is a true king."
We also observe that the phrase at 264a5 "the knowledge
(epistêmê) we are hunting (thereuomen) for,'' is forcing technê to
mean something more than the 'knowledgeable practice' which
politikê was in classical Athens. It is pushing what we would call
an 'art'the art of politics or of applied 'political science'to mean
something theoretical and more capable of certainty. And it is this
that justifies the translation of epistêmê as 'science'which is not a
Greek word.7 We ourselves, however, should not fall into the
Sophist's trap, by
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going on to privilege theoretical knowledge over the other kinds,
and make itas neopositivists and platonists dothe model or standard
for all other knowledges. For, that would just be scientism.
We see that the visitor (unnoticed by Sokrates junior) has switched
over from a search for 'the political man' to a search for 'those who
are really political and kingly' by 291c (tôn ontôs ontôn politikôn
kai basilikôn), when he says that the latter have to be separated
from the troop of charlatans and sophists who busy themselves
with the affairs of the state. But now we have to remember that at
259c1-4 he had said:
it seems that all these are the scope of one knowledge (mia epistêmê),
whether we call it kingship (basilikên) or politics (politikên) or
management (oikonomikên).
Of course, with his subsumption of "all these" under one 'science',
and in one breath, the sophistic visitor is reinforcing a fundamental
equivocation: management is a practical 'science', and political
theory is different from the practice of governance. But again, the
critical reader or auditorunlike young Sokratesdoesn't have to
accept it. Non-sophistic readers or auditors of the Politicus will, of
course, be in the position that Plato has put his Sokrates in the
dialogue, namely, in a position to decide for themselves about the
cogency of the Eleate's arguments. Such a reader will also catch the
points at which the latter is tacitly directing his quips against the
silent Sokrates. For this is what Plato the author has done for his
auditor with this dialogue: he has put on exhibit before us a
pythagorizing Sophist at his rhetorical best, in order that we may
judge him on 'his' own words without dialectical prompting from
Sokrates. It should not escape our notice that, so fair and virtuoso is
Plato about this, that we feel he is probably giving the visitor's
arguments sharper formulations than an original Sophist could have
have given them himself.
Let us pause to note that just as Gorgias's words in the Gorgias are
idiolectically Gorgian and Polus and Meno, in their turn, sound like
Gorgian disciples, so is the discourse of Plato's Eleate entirely in
character and brilliantly sophistic in Plato's presentation. The
contrast our dialogue makes with the Euthydemus confirms our
sense of Plato's fairness; for in that dialogue Plato puts on stage
before us two professional word-mongers at their sophistic worst.
But with his Sophist and Politicus Plato gives rhetorical, political
and pythagorizing Sophistic the fairest hearing his ingenuity is
capable of.
The reader who can agree to this will be ready to agree that the
right attitude to take to the speeches of the visitor in the Politicus is
that which Plato's Sokrates takes within it, namely, one of skeptical
detachment combined with a consciousness that, when a sophistic
rhetorician speaks, his listeners not the
 Page 213
truth are his targets. Also, since the Eleate feels himself to be on
display because of Sokrates' presence and the prideful manner in
which Theodorus introduced him, Plato's reader can take the
visitor's discourse to be a defense of his own profession and
assumptions. This artistic strategy of Plato's is what Bakhtin called
in the case of Dostoyovsky, his dialogism, namely, his ability to
honor his characters' subjectivity by having them speak out of their
own worlds and their own assumptions. Plato's characters, like
Dostoyevsky's, are not simply constructed from an observed point-
of-view but are experienced as the valid centers of their own lives
and concerns, whose voices are on a par with those of the reader
and author. Their voices are, thus, in dialogue both with other
characters and with the reader and author. 8 They are subjects not
objects; when they speak the world is seen as in their
consciousness. It is this authenticity and their talking in the first
person that confuses readers into taking them to speak for Plato,
instead of with or to him or us.
The Political Art as a Pythagorist 'Science'
We now return to the text of our dialogue by noting that, according
to the Elean visitor at 260c, what the kingly man has to have is "an
art of command" (epitaktikên technên). This art is quickly (and
fallaciously) distinguished by the rhetorical Sophist as a theoretical
skill as follows: at 259c10 it is "rather more" intellectual than
manual" (tês dê gnôstikês mallon ê tês cheirotechnikês). Then at
259d7 it is simply assumed to be plain "intellectual science'' (tên
gnôstikên, by 259e3 it has become "most certainly one of the
intellectual arts" gnôstikên ge . . . pantapasi technôn).
The visitor then assigns the kingly man to the art of commanding
which "judges as a ruler" (en têi kritikêi . . . despozonta . . . ge)
rather than "as a spectator" (kathaper tina theatên). Next the art of
the king (basilikên) is (260d-e) is separated from that of the
interpreter, the boatswain, the prophet, the herald and other such
craftsmen, because it is "the 'science' of giving orders of one's own
(tên autepitaktikên). We are reminded by the downgrading of
prophecy that just as the Sophists were in competition with the
wealthy on the ground of having an expertise which most such
eligibles lacked, so were they also advisors to the city-state in
competition with the oracles.9
Again the kingly man is nobler (gennaioteron) than the architect
(e.g. because "the power he holds is ever over living things" (261c)
rather than inanimate materials. And we note that gennaióteros has
a dynastic flavor to it that available synonyms such as esthlos or
agathos don't have. Next the kingly man is said to be analogous to
a herdsman or shepherd rather than a groom because
 Page 214
his art could be said to be "a kind of community management"
(koinotrophikên tina, 261e3). On Sokrates junior's agreeing to
"whatever name might go with it," the clever visitor takes a
moment to praise the youngster's indifference to names. With this
Plato is allowing the reader to see that the visitor is pleased the
youth is letting him give things the names that suit his rhetorical
purposes. However, when his tractable respondent proposes to
divide the art of herding into the care of men on one hand and that
of beasts on the other, the Sophist abruptly tells him he is in
erroreven though the reader can see that, for purposes of the
inquiry, it's an acceptable division given that it dichotomizes
according to a principle. 10 It becomes clear that the visitor wants
to divagate upon the subject of dichotomous division; his
objections bear more on "dividing through the middle"
(mesotomein)and being virtuoso about itthan on dividing according
to a principle.11
More, the great fuss he makes about how parts of a set aren't
always classes, how divisions must be apt and how they must
correspond to divisions in nature, serves to alert the reader that in
the dichotomizing to which the Sophist now proceeds he does not
follow his own admonitions, clever as some of his classifications
are. It is he who goes off track here, not young Sokrates whose
suggestion is perfectly apt that the art they are after is one that
applies to humans. It must be, we hypothesize, that the visitor
wishes to show off his mastery of the method of diairesis, and that
Plato is letting his reader see how easy it is to go wrong with it.
The Sophist is a master of the method in the sense that he can
satirize the Greeks (for ethnic chauvinism) while practicing it. At
the same time, his doctrinal tendentiousness persists with so light a
touch that just as it would have been unnoticeable to some
contemporaries, so it has remained for too many of Plato's readers.
By making sure, for instance, that young Sokrates agrees that the
kingly art holds sway over "tame" (thremmasin 264b) animals, the
Sophist is setting aside the need to discuss the right to rebellion
against tyranny. And he has to do this because the one-man rule
(monarchia) based on pythagorist 'science' which he favors and
which is above the laws is, from a non-monarchist point of view,
simply another form of tyranny.
That the visitor can make his virtuosity amusing is shown by his
pythagoreanstyle comparison of biped-herding (pezonomikên) to an
even number, and by his characterizing the objects of the king's
'science' as hornless bipeds that can't cross-breed. He protracts the
humorous note by suggesting that the division of the two species
they haven't covered is a matter of geometry requiring the help of
the young geometer Theaetetus. He means, he explains that they
must cut them
 Page 215
by the diameter, of course, and again by the diameter of the square of
the diameter (têi diametrôi . . . kai palin têi tês diametrou diametrôi,
266a).
The joke is twofold; first, the Eleate has found a 'geometrical' way
of disinguishing between biped (dipous) animals and "the other
remaining species" (quadrupeds) which is felicitous. The latter,
since it is their nature to have twice two feet, are divided off
from the point of view of their root (i.e. their 'power') [by] the diameter
of the square of our root (or 'power') kata dynamin au tês hêmeteras
dynameôs diametros, eiper duoin ge esti podoin dispephukuia).
Mathematically speaking, this is well-derived, (bien traído, as we
would say in Spanish) rather than far-fetched. For dipous means
two-footed as well as the two-foot square whose root is the
diameter. 12 But we cannot miss the compresent sexual innuendo if
we think of "power" as "potency" and remember not only that the
"root" also customarily means the organ of reproduction, but that
bulls are a symbol of sexual potency. There has just been a
reference to these in the distinction between "horny" and unhorned
animals.
However, both the reader and young Sokrates are distracted from
the Sophist's raciness here by his going on to say that there is a
well-reputed (eudokimêsantôn) and amusing corollary attached to
his mathematics. This is that the human race has ended up in the
same class as the race of placid porkers, because we share with it
the attribute of being eucherestatos! The pun on which this
depends is that eucherestatos means both most 'dexterous' or 'easy-
to-handle' and most 'licentious'. And just as pigs can be as
gennaiotatoi (well-bred, 266c4) as men because they are carefully
matched by their breeders, so men can be as licentious
(eucherestatos) as pigs because they are dexterous (eucherês) and
easy to handle.
That this also results in an equipairing of the life of a king with the
lax life of a swineherd, only proves to the Sophist that diairesis is a
"value-free" (in modern terms) method of classification which
"always leads to the perfect truth" (267d). Because of the
unseemliness of the comparison, however, the Sophist gives
himself permission to take "the shorter road" to the definition of the
king "without any asking" by his respondent. We ought at the
beginning, he now says, to have divided walking animals into
biped and quadruped and then the bipeds into feathered and
featherless so as to get quickly to human beings and the art of
herding them (tês anthrôponomikês technês). We note that they
could have gotten there more quickly by not rejecting young
Sokrates' dichotomy between the care of men and the care of
beasts, back at 262b-c.
 Page 216
And having reached the art of herding human beings, the Sophist
continues, "we should insert the kingly political man (ton politikon
kai basilikon) as a charioteer into the division and turn over to him
the reins of the city-state as befits the 'science' proper to him"
(266e). 13
To this young Sokrates responds that "this explanation has paid
[him] back in full, and with the digression as interest." These words
confirm how very tractable and tame (!) young Sokrates is, and
how charismatic and persuasive the sophistic visitor must be to
him. For, the digression was not logically more justified than
young Sokrates's dichotomy. Since it could at most only be
justified pedagogically, we see that it is as much a result of
authorial structuring of the interaction (which accomodates the
readily-displayed skills of the visiting Sophist) as it is plausible,
given the Eleate's dominance over the youngster.
Isolating and 'Purifying' the Kingship
On plaiting back together for purposes of a definition the several
strands they have separated, the visitor finds that, as a definition of
the political art, "the 'science' of giving one's own commands in the
tending of human herds" (anthrôpon koinotrophikên epistêmên) is
not in every way complete. For, would not merchants, farmers,
grain distributors, trainers, physicians and a myriad others dispute
the claim that the king is the only tenderer of the human herd? An
outline of the kingly shape won't be accurate, the Sophist now says,
until we have isolated and purified him14 from the crowd pressing
around him for a share of the herdsmanship. Let's make a new
beginning and take a different, amusing road on which it'll be our
duty to mix into our dichotomizing part of a grand story until we
get to the summit of our search.
The story the Sophist now tells "will be well suited to delineating
(the nature of) the king" (tên tou basileôs prepsei rhêthen, 269c).
The moral they draw from it is that
we see that our definition of the ruler is not only incomplete, but that
we erred in confusing the political man with the Divine Shepherd.
When we were asking ourselves about the king and the political man of
the present cyclic and generation (tês nun periphoras kai geneseôs) we
spoke of the shepherd of the human flock at the time of the reverse
movement (ek tês enantias periodou poimena) and he was a God not a
man. We also failed to describe the manner of his rule (275a).
More, they find (275d-276b) that they would be misnaming the
man of politics (politikon) if they included his art under that of the
herdsman
 Page 217
(agelaiotrophikên); nor would they have separated him from his
competitors. The political man doesn't feed the human herd, like
some of the latter. But he does have a care (epimeleia) for it, says
the Sophist, as we must agree all the others do. Also no matter how
much we believed that there's an art of raising (threptikên technên)
the human herd (agelês), "we ought not to have called it kingship-
and-statecraft (basilikên . . . kai politikên) so hastily (276c8). For,
there's a division (tmêsis) we have to apply between the Divine
Shepherd (ton theion . . . nomea) and the human herder
(anthrôpinon epimelêtên). The great story just told has given the
Sophist's auditors what they need to know about the Divine
Shepherd. Their second, lesser mistake in the discussion was that
they didn't specify in any detail the manner of ruling. 15 Next, the
caring (epimelêtikên) has to be divided into voluntary and
involuntary, because if it isn't we're putting the king together with
the tyrant: but their modes of ruling are quite different.
Now if we call the use of force 'tyrannical', and the care of willing
bipeds 'political' (politikon), it's the man who has this art of caring
who will appear to be really kingly-and-political (basilea kai
politikon), 276e11). "But still I think our figure of the king is not
yet complete;" like some statue-makers we used more of our
mythic material than is proportionate, "fancying that the use of
grand illustrations was proper in the case of the king" (277b). Our
outline (perigraphên), however, seems adequate; except that the
exposition of any great idea does require examples;
for, it seems that each of us knows all he knows as if in a dream, but
when awake we seem again unknowing.
There now," the visitor interrupts himself, "I seem to be falling into
the current, absurd discussion of the pathology of knowledge" (kai
mal' atopôs eoika ge en tôi paronti kinêsas to peri tês epistêmês
pathos en hêmin). 16
This is because, he explains to young Sokrates, my example itself
requires an exemplification. Please proceed with it, says the latter.
The example invoked is that of the art of weaving which, so the
Eleate says, involves the same sort of activities as the political art
(echôn tên autên politikêi pragmateian). Here the thing to notice is
the conclusion, and its cola, which the visitor reaches
dichotomizing weaving by reference to the materials it works on as
well as by reference to the way in which it works them: "just as we
called statecraft (politikên) or politics the art concerned with the
city-state, so weavingthe greatest part of which is concerned with
making clothesdiffers in name only from clothes-making" (280a).
He adds "just so, as in the other case, the kingly 'science'
(basilikên) differed [in name only] from the political art
 Page 218
(politikês). We see how difficult it's going to be for the Sophist's
auditors (or readers) to keep track of the continuing equivocation
between politikê and basilikê; he sometimes synonymizes and
sometimes distinguishes them.
After four more Stephanus-pages of dichotomizing fun and
wordplay 17 with the art of weaving, the Sophist says, "it is now
pretty clear to everybody" that we may call weaving "the art which
directs the process" of making woollen clothes." So why in the
world, he asks himself at 283b, "did we go around in circles
making futile distinctions?" To my mind, good visitor, nothing said
seemed futile. You may change your mind, the visitor replies. Let
me propose a principle to apply to cases of excess and deficiency,
says the visitor, as he plunges into still another round of
dichotomies about size and measure. It is by now abundantly clear
that the sophistic rhetorician from Elea is both as much a master at
the method of diairesis as anybody and that he is very conscious of
it. But it is visible to his reader, as it is not to young Sokrates, that
he is either abusing or satirizing the method. But if he is doing the
latter rather than the former, then his dichotomies are sometimes
shallow and not according to nature for reasons, and not from lack
of intelligence.
Like other talented Sophists, this one is deinos in the sense of
"formidable," just because he is intelligent and a special pleader,
not a sincere knowledge-seeker like Plato's Sokrates. To grasp this
is to see why there is no question left over of why he often comes
on as a sincere problem-solver (as at 286d-e);18 for, it is part of his
sophistic art. To be believed he must be indistinguishable from the
true knowledge-seeker. Had he not said at the end of the Sophist
that the eristic Sophist imitates the man of knowledge (sophos),
from whom he gets his name (sophistês) paronymously? And the
species of Sophist which he himself is (namely, rhetorical) does not
escape the stricture which the Eleate has applied to the genus, even
though it is eristic Sophists that he had in mind.
Now the purpose of his distinction-making here was to establish, or
get agreement to, the postulation of the mean and the reality of
excesses and deficits over or under it (283e). There are two ways of
doing this, the Sophist continues, one by taking them relatively to
each other (pros allêla), the other by reference to the standard of
the mean (pros to metrion). But you must never take the first way
without the second; for, not to relate too-much and too-little to the
standard of the mean would be to abolish the arts-and-sciences,
given that in practice all these solve their difficulties by referring to
what they consider proportionate. So, he now says, "just as in the
case of the Sophist we were forced to assert that not-being exists,"
aren't we now forced categorically to assert the reality of the
existence of the mean because without it "we could not say that
there is such a thing as a politician (politikon) or that there is
anyone with knowledge (epistêmona) of practical affairs," as there
would then
 Page 219
be no art of politics or of practice (284c). We notice that the visitor
makes no reference to basilikê here, and that practices are being
assimilated to the knowledges defined as epistêmai. And his
reasoning, that if excesses and deficits exist so must the mean
really exist in the same sense, has not been objected to. But, of
course, the mean exists only in the sense that categories exist:
excess and deficiency are things perceived, whereas categories are
things postulated and, therefore, hypothetical. Nor was the visitor
(in the Sophist) "forced" to assert the contradiction that non-
existence exists, except by his own sophistic need to differ from
Parmenides.
But then between 286d2 and 287a he switches to a functional and
situational view of brevity and prolixity while also asserting that
the first and most important thing by far is to exalt the method itself of
being able to divide according to classes (eidê).
He now pronounces the kingly art (basilikê)not that of the politikos
mentionedto have been distinguished from most of those relating to
herding; but adds that what's left are the arts relating to the city
itself and, among these. to distinguish between those that are
causative (aitiôn) and those that are auxiliary (xynaitiôn).
"Although without the latter," he says at 287d, "there would be no
city and no art of politics (politikê) we will not grant that any of
them are the job of the kingly art (basilikê)." The detached reader
has to ask, is this a lapse from the visitor's monarchist apologetics
in so far as it implicitly recognizes the art of the king (basilikê) to
be a species only of the political art (politikê). We must note,
moreover, that the distinction between instrumental, auxiliary arts
and causative arts forced them to abandon the method of division
down the middle in favor of division "by joints" (kata melê).
The reader now bumps into a series of seven (!) dichotomizations,
kata melêfrom 287e to 289aperformed in a riddling and punning
way, the ostensible purpose of which is to finish eliminating the
auxiliary arts from political art, but the real purpose of which, the
reader sees, is to distract from the failure of the previously exalted
method of division by the middle. That they are so amusing,
involving a triple pun and a bathroom joke, confirms the reader in
his suspicion that it is an exercise in tergiversation on the part of
the Sophist. The joke is that thakos means both 'throne' and 'privy';
the triple pun is between periblêmata, probolês and problêma. The
series also allows the Eleate to classify the delight-giving arts of
ornamentation, music and painting as non-serious amusement
(paidia, paignion pou). And this is yet another move chacteristic of
Pythagorean or pythagorizing thought 19 which clues us in to the
intellectual affiliations of our Eleatic rhetorician. And we notice
again that
 Page 220
it is the kingly 'science' (basilikês epistêmês) that is exempted from
responsibity for the auxiliary arts at 288e6-7, but that at 289a5 it is
the politica] (politikê) that is so exempted, while at 289a1A1 the
reference is to the practice (prakseôs) of both (te kai) king and
politician.
The Eleate points out next that there are going to be some among
slaves and servants who will mob (amphisbêtountas) the king over
the weaving itself. Bought servants are of course excluded from the
kingly art (basilikês technês, 289e1). But do those who serve for
pay have a claim to some sort of statecraft (politikês)? Shopkeepers
and laborers won't claim any share in basilikê (290a6). But what
about heralds and those skilled in writing or who serve in public
offices? These are servitors too, ventures young Sokrates, because
they are not rulers (archontas) in their city. Prophets or diviners
(mantikê) have a kind of ancillary 'science' (epistêmês diakonou);
for they interpret the Gods to men. And priests are knowing
(epistêmôn) about attending the Gods and have the art (technês) of
praying on our behalf. They are proud and well-esteemed because
of the majesty of their enterprise, are they not? And in Athens the
Archon who performs the most solemn and patriotic sacrifices, is
he not called a King (basileus)? These, and one more group that I'll
need to delineate, will have to be sorted out from the really political
and kingly men (apo tôn ontôs ontôn politikôn kai basilikôn) if we
are to see clearly what we seek. This troop is called by our
rhetorician "of all the men-of-knowlege or sophists (sophistôn) the
greatest magician (goêta) and the most experienced in his art"
(technê). It will not escape the non-snobbish reader that implicit in
the Eleate's last set of distinctions is the feeling that service is
incompatible with governance.
Constitutional Government Versus Sophistic 'Science'
We note next that the visitor from Elea has no name with which to
distinguish the consensual (hekousiôs, 292e1) or lawful form of
democracy from the demagogic, when they rehearse the six
recognized forms of government: monarchy and tyranny,
aristocracy and oligarchy, and the two forms of democracy. He
says here that there are only five (291d8), not bothering with the
distinction between the coerced and uncoerced forms that he makes
in the case of one-man rule and rule-by-the few; for, "no one ever
habitually changes the name [in this case]." Well, perhaps no one
did in the pythagorized climate of opinion of such Western Greek
cities as Elea; but the ordinary Athenian who had enjoyed
democracy since the reforms of Kleisthenes at the end of the sixth
century, would not have omitted the distinction and he would have
remembered that the two exceptions to their decades of
democracythe supposedly-moderate oligarchal revolution of
Antiphon and the Spartan-sponsored
 Page 221
tyranny of the Thirty at the end of the fifth centuryas disastrous
alternatives to the lawful and moderate democracy by which the
majority abided under the heading of the "ancestral constitution."
20
"We said that royal rule" (basilikên archên), the visitor reminds
young Sokrates, "was one of the 'sciences' (tên epistêmôn,
292b5)even though we haven't yet sufficiently defined 'science'.
And it's a matter of judging and commanding. But, the visitor now
announces, if we are to be consistent the forms-of-government just
reviewed ought to have been distinguished on the basis of some
'science' (tina epistêmên). So we must ask which of these forms
engenders the 'science' of ruling men, the greatest and hardest to
acquire. We must know this in order to see which men are to be
separated from the wise (phronimos) king, for many claim to be
political or statesmanly (politikoi) who are not. And since a city of
ten thousand could never produce 150 expert draughts players don't
expect it to produce even a lesser number of kings: I'm including,
the Sophist specifies, those who have 'science' (epistêmê) among
the kingly whether they rule or not.
So we have "to look for the right kind of rule wherever it occurs
among one or two or very few men" (293a). And these must be
supposed to rule according to some art (kata technên hêntinoun).
We notice here that Sophist is again operating with an equivocation
between epistêmê and technê. In the same way are physicians
called physicians whether they cut or burn, with or without written
rules, whether the patient is willing or not, whether they are rich or
poor. As long as they purify (kathairountes) us by art or 'science'
(epistatountes technêi) and do us good and make us better. Only in
this way can medicine be rightly identified or any other kind of
regimen whatever. The Eleate now reaches his grand conclusion
(293c6-d2):
It necessarily follows, it would seem, that among differing forms-of-
government (politeiôn) the one and only right polity is that in which the
rulers are found truly to have 'science' (epistêmonas) . . ., whether they
rule according to laws or without them, with or without consent,
whether they are rich or poor, these things being no way relevant to
account of the most right method.
He strengthens his medical comparison with the analogy of bee-
hive organization, "so long as they act in accordance with 'science'
(epistêmêi) and justice . . . that must be said to be the only right
form of government (monên orthên politeian). All other forms," he
continues,
must be said to be not legitimate (gnêsias) or real but to be imitaing this
form; and we call [cities] well-governed (eunomous) or more deformed
(aischiona) according to their success in imitating this form (293e3-6).
 Page 222
But young Sokrates finds it hard to accept that there should be
government without laws. The visitor's answer is that the art of
legislation is part of kingcraft (basilikês); "but the best is not for the
laws to be in power (ischuein), but for a kingly man of wisdom to
be" (294a). Why? Because the changefulness of human life and the
differences (anomoiotêtes) among men and cases prevent any art
(technê) from proclaiming anything unconditionally about
everything. 21 In this respect law is stubborn and unknowing. True,
says young Sokrates naïvely, the law treats each of us atechnôs,
with plain indistinction. If we note the punning antithesis between
atechnês and technê, we also have to note that it undermines the
claim that law-making is a part of kingcraft if kingcraft is an art
(technê) or 'science'. Or else, the antithesis implies that when the
king legislates he is being 'unscientific.'22 But the consequence of
this is that there can be no Pythgorean legislation, if
Pythagoreanism is a 'science.' In contrast the Sophist's explicit
reasoning is that if law is unconditional, then it cannot apply to
what is conditional, as are human affairs (294c6-7). There is an
appeal to individualism in this part of the Sophist's discourse; it
also associates the law with the herd of "the many," making it (he
hopes) distasteful to the élite few. He argues further that writing the
laws down makes them unchangeable, and (at 296a) that Greek
procedure makes it difficult to change a law.
But if like a physician with correct art (echôn . . . orthôs . . .
technên) you forced a cure or improvement upon a patient, would
that be called an "unscientific error" (para tên technên hamartêma,
296b9) and harmful? Is not unscientific error (para tên politikên
hamartêma) evil, injustice and shamefulness (to aischron)? And if
people are forced to do what is juster and nobler contrary to written
laws or tradition, it would be ridiculous to say that they've suffered
unjust or evil treatment. So, if a man by persuasion or force does
what's for the good, won't this be the truest form of right
administration (dioikêseôs) "with which the good, wise man will
administer the affairs of the ruled" (296e)? Just as the navigator
makes his science the law for the ship, so may men establish a right
polity (politeia) by making the strength of 'science' (technês)
greater than the laws.
And whatever the wise rulers do there can be no mistake, as long as
they defend this one thing: always to distribute (dianemontes) full
justice with intelligence and 'science' (meta nou kai technês) and both
safeguard the citizens and bring them the better out of the worse as far
as possible (297a-b).
Astonishingly, but in character, young Sokrates says to this: "there
is no refuting what you have just said." It's astonishing to the reader
because he has just approved of one-man rule or oligarchy
unlimited by law or by account-
 Page 223
ability, as long as the rulers can claim to possess true 'science'
(epistêmê) or a kind of professional expertise (technê). The
Sophist's proviso that such rule be administered ''with intelligence,"
is, of course, his escape-clause; for, won't any kind of
administration be a success that acts intelligently and with full
justice (dikaiotaton), and that knows how to maximize good and
minimize the worse (297a-b)? The fallacy in the Sophist's defense
of monarchy and oligarchy here is that it is also a defense of any
form of government. It would be non-refutable, i.e., tautological
but for its factual claim that large numbers of men cannot be
intelligent administrators. And as political philosophy it completely
overlooks Aristotle's point that, as with some productive arts and
practices, the judges of quality are the users of the product not the
makers of it. The Sophist's neglect of this point is a corollary of his
abolishment of the principle of the accountability of rulers.
The Eleate now proceeds to make good an omission, and clarify for
young Sokrates what he means by imitations of the form of a
polity. Granting that the polity just described is the only right form,
you see that other forms will have to employ written laws if they
are to surviveeven though, as I've said, obeying written laws is not
the best thing to do. It's only the second option, he says. But for us
readers, the latter is the 'existential' option. In contrast, we will call
the first the 'utopian' option because it is mythopoetic or
speculative and perfectionist. 23 We notice, further, that as the
Sophist evaluates kinds of polity his usage (from 298 on) is never
to mention the dêmos by itself, but alway in counterpoise with the
wealthy: he lacks the constitutional Athenian notion that the dêmos
includes all citizens (298c4, 298e7, 299a1-2, 300e8).
The Sophist now excludes all who take part in existential
governnments (which to him are unreal imitations) from being real
men of politics (ôs ouk ontas politikous). They are just partisans,
party-men (stasiastikous). They head up "the greatest counterfeits"
(eidôlôn megistôn) and are themselves the bigest illusionists
(goêtas) and supreme sophists (tên sophistôn sophistas, 303c1-4).
"This term [sophist] seems to have come round," agrees young
Sokrates, "rightly to apply to the so-called (legomenous) men of
politics." This seems to exclude all earthly politicians
(politikoi)whether they are good and knowledgeable or partisans
and pleaders (stasiastikoi)from being 'statesmen' (basilikoi) in the
Sophist's sense of 'kingly' and 'scientific' (epistemên). As he goes
on to say: "all that is other and counter and not akin to the 'science
of politics' (politiês epistêmês) has now been refined out" (303b8-
10).
This leaves for elimination only military science, jurisprudence,
"and the kind of oratory that shares in the kingly science because it
leads to justice and helps to steer the state." Since rhetoric serves
the political power (dynamis, 304d8) and military science is ruled
over by kingcraft (basilikê, 305a6), they
 Page 224
themselves cannot be the 'science' of politics (politikê, 305a8-9).
Nor, the Sophist continues, can jurisprudence be, since it takes the
existing laws from the king-lawgiver (nomothetou basileôs,
305b6): the power of judges is not kingly (ou basilikên, 305c6)
either. At 305c10-e6, finally, we get the Sophist's outright equation
of political 'science' (politikê) with kingcraft (basilikê). In a short
but interesting addition to the equation, he concludes that the
special knowledges are quite properly called 'special' because they
rule over neither one another nor themselves (305e). Moderns may
be allowed to read this as a reminder to positivists and physicalists
that no single special sciencenot sociology, not physics or
mathematicsis regulative over the rest of knowledge.
The Sophist's Kingly Craft as 'Methoria'
In the Eleate's sophistic style of pythagorized thinking, then,
basilikê is the 'science' which governs all other arts and practices.
As politics or political 'science', its responsibility is to weave the
web of the political community just as it is described as doing in
the last five Stephanus-pages of our dialogue (305e-311c). But as
reflection, we see how idealist (i.e., how pythagorist) it is, in
turning the art-and-science of reflective politicsand all the other art
sciencesinto ancillary or subservient technês (technai) rather than
true knowledges (epistêmai) because they cannot grasp the relation
between what they themselves do and the good of the political
community. The valid core of this is that the special sciences must,
indeed, be subsumed under the study of ethics-and-aestheticsas
thinkers from Aristotle to Peirce and Santayana have always
known. But it is Sophistic because the alternative it offers as the
inclusive, regulative 'science' has been validated as such by an
unfalsifiable story which invests its practitioner with
unchallengeable divinity. We will see that as only the 'professor' of
this theory rather than its implementor or practitioner, our
rhetorician is notcontrary to his own claim, but in his own termsa
kingly craftsman basilikê, but only a borderliner (methorios)
between philosophy and politics, in Sokrates' term at Euthydemus
305c. With all his methodic wiliness (methodeia) his craft is only
methoria.
But not within the limits of the Politicus itself either, is his craft
validated by the results it produces for the city-state: these the
Eleate deploys for young Sokrates as the consequence of basilikê
from 306a to the end. At 311b "the end of the web" of its practice is
declared to be the good weaving (or knowledgeable interbreeding)
together of hardy-courageous characters with prudent-decorous
characters (andreiôn kai sôphronôn anthrôpôn êthos)
simultaneously with the implantation of the friendship and concord
that will
 Page 225
produce the best-textured possible mantle with which to cover and
watch over all in the happy city whether slave or free. This is not
only promissory, theoretical and based on mere analogy, but its two
central kingly technês are the inexact 'sciences' of eugenics and
group indoctrination. Most ironically of all, in point of the
"happiness" with which the process mantles the city, the free
become indistinguishable from the slaves.
If we now go to Euthydemus 290a-d, we find Plato's Sokrates
leading Cleinias on, through a question about generalship to the
rejection of it (and calculation and geometry and astronomy) as the
master art that governs the special knowledges. Further, in that
dialogue's report to Crito of his exchanges with Cleinias and the
Sophistic word-mongers, Sokrates smilingly and explicitly includes
the art of monarchy (tên basilikên) among those they decided did
not produce happiness. Sokrates had just asked at 289c9f., perhaps
ironically, could it be, as the Gods are my witness, that if we learnt
the art-and-science of speechmaking this art would make us happy?
When Cleinias says no, speechwriters don't know how to use the
arguments they themselves make up, Sokrates confesses that when
with them they impress him as superwise (hypersophoi), out-of-
reach; their art seems a branch of the enchanter's, and they're able
to spellbind and sway mass juries, assemblies and other crowds. If
these words deliberately echo those of the Elean visitor about the
Sophist as a word-wizard in the Sophist, they are a clue to the
dramatic order in which the latter dialogue, the Politicus and the
Euthydemus should be read. And this would imply that the epilogue
of Euthydemus is not only an exchange about education with Crito,
but also one in which Plato gives his Sokrates "equal time" to
respond to the impressive pretensions of the would-be Elean man-
of-knowledge and statesman in his two dialogues. But if
Euthydemus is read before Sophistês and Politicus, its epilogue
serves to alert the reader to the pretensions of the brilliant visitor
from Elea.
The fact that Sokrates identifies the basilikê technê with politikê at
291c6 strengthens the hypothesis that he is alluding to the
identification of the two by the Eleatic in Politicus. That's why,
Sokrates had continued at 305c, Prodicus called them
"inbetweeners" on the borders (methoria) between knowledge and
politics. They think themselves the wisest, and believe they'd be
accounted so if it weren't for the philosophic menwhom they
therefore downgrade. But when they meet a refutationist like
Euthydemus, they are silenced. 24 It's natural for these
inbetweeners, continues Sokrates, to believe themselves wise, for
they have absorbed some philosophy and some political
knowledge. But since they take no risks (i.e., do not practice
politics) and avoid competition, they enjoy only the benefits of
their knowledge. Still, says Crito, you can't deny that there's some
propriety in their account of themselves. Here the reader will
 Page 226
remember the effort it took (without Sokrates' help) to see through
the impressive rhetoric of the Eleatic Sophist, and how well-
persuaded he kept his bright young respondents. Yes Crito, says
Sokrates it's a question of appearing seemly rather than of holding
to the truth (306a).
Pythagorism and the Idea of Monarchy in the Fourth Century B.C.
There is no doubt that the Politicus is somehow related to the
renewal of Pythagoreanism in the Fourth century, as well as to a
new interest in Athens in the idea of monarchy. The idea of
legitimating sovereignty by 'science' or knowledge probably did
exist among Pythagoreans (whatever the state of the school) and
others before Plato's time. But the passages which Stobaeus (5th
A.D.) has preserved of Pythagorean doctrine about monarchy are
all later than Plato's dialogue, and could have been influenced by it
or the Academic interpretation of it. 25 But what development it
might have received among presocratic Pythagoreans, or Sophists,
independently of Plato's dialogues and the Academy is
undocumentable.
In matters political, readers can be sure that tensions in the climate
of opinion will also be operating in any work before them. Given
that at 276d and 284c-285c the Eleate is treating the same topics as
Xenophon in his Hiero and at the end of the Oeconomicus, and
with the same obliviousness to the relevance of law to rulership,
the question becomes whether Xenophon is reformulating (in his
own unintellectual and understated) way views similar those of the
pythagorizing Sophist from Elea, or whether Plato is using the
Eleatic rhetorician to make explicit for purposes of critical
reflection the rationale behind these views. Whatever the
chronological priorities betwe Plato and Xenophon, it is the
conception of the ruling-class farmernot exclusive to Xenophon's
Ischomachosthat is being played with by the visitor. The initial tip-
off to this is the idea of the ruler as man-herd. But, while Xenophon
and the Eleate are both antidemocratic, it is clear that the latterwith
his pythagorizing claims to knowledgeis intellectualizing the
common oligarchal idea. Secondly, Xenophon held his views in the
context of a laid-back paternalist paideia, where the Eleate as a
paid professional must operate by results-getting (and covered-up)
persuasion.
A contemporary reader or auditor of the Politicus would have
noted (at 293d) the occurrence or re-occurrence of the image of the
King-bee which is also found in Xenophon's Cyropaedia V.i.24-26.
He would also have recognized the Eleate's mention, at 260e1, of
the boatswain as not a commander but only a transmitter of orders,
as more exact than the reference at Oeconomicus
 Page 227
XXI.2 to knowing versus unknowing boatswainsXenophon,
characteristically, is talking practice; the Eleatic persuader must
give the appearance of theorizing. I mean 'more exact' in his
pythagorizing parlance; but his dissociation of knowing from lowly
practices comes out as more oligarchal. If Plato expected his
readers to assume that the Eleate knew Xenophon's work, then we
can take this speaker's project in the dialogue as an attempt to
improve on Xenophon's views by intellectualizing them. But if
Xenophon's works are themselves indifferent to or indirect
responses to Plato's, then we have to see them as a
'depythagorization' or de-intellectualization of pythagorist or
Sophistic defenses of monarchy. We must remember that, as a real
oligarch and spartanizer, he would not have been predisposed to
favor either Sophists or Pythagoreans. It is also not implausible to
take our Eleatic rhetorician as speaking against the condemnation
of tyranny by Antisthenes the semi-Socratic, if Xenophon's use of
him to condemn predatory despots has a historical basis
(Symp.IV.36-37). In any case, one of the common beliefs that the
Eleate is combatting is that of the inevitable unhappiness of the
tyrant.
This brings us to the two or three significant conceptions that the
gentle-man-militarist and the rhetorician from Elea do share.
Xenophon's Sokrates, at Memorabilia II.3, makes the aretê of the
kingly general depend entirely on his ability to make his followers
happy. The condemnation at the end of the Oeconomicus of the
tyrant who rules over unwilling subjects, shows that this
consentingness is a matter of importance to Xenophon. And in the
Hiero, the difference between a tyrant and a monarch depends on
the willingness of his subjects to be ruled by him. This of course
blocks, as it did in the discourse of the Eleatic visitor, any
development of the place of law in reflective politics, whether in
Xenophon's praktikê or the Eleate's epistêmê. But as to the
happiness of the monarch the Eleate's Divine Shepherd, possessed
as he is of basilikê knowledge and a happy kingdom, he can be
presumed not to lack it. Nor is Xenophon's Hiero kept from
happiness as long as he knows how to also keep the consent of his
subjects.
Nonetheless we find Hiero's interlocutor Simonides agreeing
strongly to the need of the monarch for a mercenary guard which,
however, will be put to uses that are good for his subjects as well;
Hiero well knows that the despot is "forced to maintain an army, or
perish" (IV.xi). The implication, in Xenophon at least, is that the
consent of the subjects (given human nature) is not enough to
sustain a monarch who has only it, even if it seems to legitimate
him. For the Sophist, it is his 'science' or knowledge that
legitimates the one-man ruler; and the presumed success of the
latter's inclusive 'science' (which has included the supervision of
generals, judges, administrators and other city-state functionaries)
keeps the subject of the monopoly of force from arising in his dis-
 Page 228
course. But, of course, only a non-constitutional monarchist will
believe that the kingly man's intelligence and great store of
'scientific' ability is enough to legitimate his rule. And only a
paternalist like Xenophon, with a military model of state
administration, would rationalize a tacitly dominationist system as
something willingly consented to by those dominated.
Finally, should any of the Eleate's auditors find some allusiveness
in his words to the pan-Hellenic politics of Isocrates, we know that
the latter was interested in monarchy, not for the individual cities
of Hellas but for purpose only of a unifying foreign-policy and
defensive alliance or confederation. The normative conception by
means of which this orator and man of politics implicitly critized
the weaknesses of fourth-century democracy was constitional: "the
constitution is the soul of the city, the life of the state" (esti gar
psychê poleôs ouden heteron ê politeia), Areop.14, Panathenaicus
138). His repeated use of the phrase the "administration (dioikêsis)
of our city"instead of the standard "ancestral constitution"protected
his ability to mediate among all parties, and like the much-used
dioikeô, was well-chosen in its connotation of 'home-governance'
of the city's affairs. For, he knew that extremist oligarchs and the
more conservative were appealing away from the ''ancestral
constitution" to the new-fangled notion of the "ideal constitution"
which Plato extensively and elegantly satirizes in the Republic. But
the king Isocrates had in mind was a war-leader to be entrusted
with the supreme command over a Hellenic alliance, not with the
governance of any cities but his own. And the purpose of the
alliance was not only to prevent faction at home and avoid
hegemonic disputes among the allies, but also to actualize the
potential greatness of the Greeks vis-a-vis the rest of the world. It
does strike us, however, that had some contemporary wished to
provide a rationale for the taking of power by such a supreme
commander over all of Greece, regardless of home-constitutions,
he could hardly have done better than the sophistic rhetorician from
Elea does, in the virtuoso discourse that Plato invented for him and
for our response. And we remember that young Sokrates's only
noticeably loud objection, among his many easily-muted
difficulties, was to just this proposal to do away with constitutions
whether written or traditional.
Notes
1. In answer to the question of whether Theaetetus's conversation
with Sokrates is good for him, we have to note that he is indeed
stimulated into some strenuous thinking when his interlocutor is
Sokrates, but that he is "turned off" by the charisma of the Eleate in
the Sophist into passive docility. The same thing also happens to
the Eleate's young interlocutor in the Politicus.
 Page 229
2. He does this by equivocating between "not being" and "not
being the same as." The Eleatic Sophist identifies non-existence
with otherness and claims in the Sophist that, contrary to
Parmenides' Goddess in his poem, existence is everywhere mixed
with non-existence: that that-which-is-not is, in some sense and
that that-which-is is not, in some sense. But otherness, we have to
say, is after all something, as rehearsed in the previous chapger.
3. Politicus Philebus ed. & tr. H.N. Fowler (Harvard: Loeb Libr.
1952); p.2.
4. M.Miller The Philosopher in Plato's 'Statesman' (The Hague:
Nijhoff 1980).
5. Recollect that the characterization of the Sophist in that dialogue
is not only negative: he was there called a masterful counterfeiter
and a knowing imitator of what is true and what is excellent. Being
a rhetorical Sophist himself, it is the disputatious Sophists (with
whom he tacitly classes the elder Sokrates) that he derogates. The
visitor's severity against Sophists who "garrulously" dispute for "no
pay" at all, directs the allusion at Sokrates explicitly.
6. We will see that he is called sophos kai agathos (296e) by the
visitor as part of the equivocation between 'the political man' and
'the kingly man of knowledge' (who "is not to be found on this
earth") that the Eleatic is bringing off. The one, true form of
governance is the godlike rulership of the 'scientific' monarch. The
lawful imitations are constitutional monarchy, aristocracy;
democracy. The lawless imitations are tyranny, oligarchy, and
demagogic democracy. In English, 'statesman' has an honorific
connotation and 'politician' a derogatory one. But, just as those who
wish to translate ton politikon andra with 'statesman' claim there is
a neutral use of it in which it means 'man of politics', so those who
prefer to translate with 'politician' say that there is a non-
judgmental use of this term too. Since it's not possible to overcome
the favorable connotation of 'statesman', I use the latter to apply
only the man of politics who is supernally competent and above
'politics' (not just above 'party') in the sense that Solon was.
7. It also anticipates Aristotle's distinctions between the theoretical,
practical, and productive knowledges while un-Aristotelianly
elevating theoretical knowledge above the other two kinds of
knowledge.
8. M. Bakhtin Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics 1929, tr. C.
Emerson (Minnesota U.P. 1984); and The Dialogical Imagination
1975, tr. Emerson & Holquist (Minnesota U.P. 1981).
9. It's worth noting that, in contrast to the Sophists, we don't find
Plato's Sokrates downgrading prophecy or the oracle.
10. A principle that can be stated but which the youngster fails to
adduce, namely, that politics has to do, or should have to do, in the
first place with human beings (as Sokrates maintains it should in
the Gorgias).
11. As L. Campbell, taking the dialogue with total literalism, seems
to have believed: II.17ff. The Sophistes and Politicus of Plato
Rev.text w. Engl.notes (Oxford 1867). Note the choice of mesousin
at 265b3 as subliminally echoing mesotomein at 265a5.
 Page 230
12. This distinction in its relevance to the human species is as little
or as much 'according to nature' or arbitrary as that between horned
and unhorned or shell-en-cased and non-armored. We've seen the
dramatic reason for 'horned/unhorned'; the reason for
'feathered/unfeathered' must be to show th flipness of the Eleate's
attitude to the method of diaresis. Zoologically, it makes no more
sense than stopping to separate humans off from armored or
proboscis-owning species.
13. kai tot' êdê tês anthrôponomikês delôtheisês technês, pheronta
ton politikon kai basilikon hoion hêniochon eis autên enstêsanta,
paradounai tas tês poleôs hênias hôs oikeias kai autôi pautês ousts
tês epistêmês.
14. Taking into account the pythagorean connotations of katharon,
the subtext of this clause would be "until we have isolated and
pythagorized him."
15. The pun here is between -komikês (from komizô, superintend)
and kômikos (comic), in phrases such as tou tês agelaiokomikês
onomatos. Doesn't the verbal play which the Eleate practices here
imply an attitude of superiority toward the very ruler he is busy
distinguishing from the crowd of men who "provide for" or "feed"
other men? This seems to confirm the feeling behind the Eleate's
earlier assertion (259a) that the clever (deinos) individuallike
himself who advises rulers can be said to posses the kingly
'science'. In connection with the repeated and often outrageous
wordplay of the sophistic rhetorician, the hypothesis suggests itself
that, with it, Plato is helping his reader to perceivebehind the veil
of its virtuositythe essential frivolity of the Eleate's persuasiveness.
16. Since explaining by means of example and explaining one
example by means of another are not problematic, we gather that,
with this allusion, the Eleate is simply being up-to-date and topical.
Allusions like this (sometimes more particular, sometimes more
generalized) are so frequent in other dialogues as well, that it's to
be suspected that Plato seems unable to resist the temptation to let
his speakers be allusively topical.
17. Such as between xynergôn and xyngenôn or between peribolêi
and hypobolêi.
18. Note the overtone of defensiveness that can be picked up in a
detached reading of this simulation of sincerity.
19. In Plato's Sokrates' view of that thought.
20. Dramatically speaking, the long obtenance of the ancestral
constitution makes Athenian democracy in the Sophist's
redefinitions one of the lawful imitations of the 'one perfect, truly
scientific form of government' which he deploys in the sequel. At
303b (Athenian) democracy will, naturally, emerge as the worse
among the lawful forms of government. But guest that he is, the
Elean will compensate his Athenian auditors by letting it be the
best available form among governments when all are without laws.
When the Eleate criticizes unwritten 'patriotic' observances, he is
implicitly creating a space in which to attack the 'ancestral
constitution,' hê patrios politeia.
 Page 231
21. Note the echo which tacitly allows anomoiorêres to resonate
with anomos or anomia (lawless, lawlessness).
22. And the Eleate's "scientific law-maker" (ho meta technês
grapsas, 295e8) is a contradiction in terms.
23. To redefine and distinguish all the kinds of polity by the idea of
how well they approximate the te tou henos meta technês
archontos politeia, is circular; it makes all polities inferior to this
one. The Sophist's speeches also mask the fallacy of perfectionism
or utopianism: that both good and bad are inferior to 'best.' But
'inferior to best' isn't necessarily bad, especially when the best is
speculative or unattainablein fact or by definition, as here. The
Eleate's seventh" kind of polity (302c10), implicitly delegitimates
as well as explicitly revises the standard Greek list of six polities.
24. However, the reader has just been shown by Sokrates (in the
Euthydemus) that someone who really cares for knowledge rather
than display, can in fact match a pair of Sophists and not be
silenced by them.
25. Florilegium 2 vol.in one, Tauschnitz ed.of 1838; "Peri
Basileas," II.61-65. Gellius suggests that Xenophon's Cyropaedia
was his reponse to Plato's Republic or part of it; Attic Nights 3 vols.
text & tr. J.C.Rolfe (Harvard U.P. 1948-54). Note that if Xenophon
was indirectly countering Plato's Republic, he must have taken it in
a sense inimical to his own preference for oligarchy and monarchy.
 Page 233

Chapter 12
Plato's Counter-Utopia:
The Republic
Section I:
A Remedial Constitution
A Monumental Dramatic Sketch
Plato's Republic cannot be intelligently read without a knowledge
of what sort of book it is and how it was constructed. This applies
to all readers of the work, whether their interest in it is political,
philosophical, literary, practical or theoretical. Insistence on such
knowledge, moreover, has the advantage of making the book
accessible to nonspecialists, namely, to those for whom Plato
constructed it.
Literary publics in Plato's day were audiences of listeners more
than readers. Accordingly, like Herodotos, the dramatists, the
logographers or orators, Plato wrote mainly for auditors. Plato's
meaning suffers more than any other author's from
misunderstandings about the tone with which it is being
communicated because he relied originally on the live voice of his
philosophic or pedagogical reader to help convey the attitudes and
drift of his characters in their speeches and reasonings. Plato's
compositions are dramatized communicative interactions, namely,
they are intellectual mimes: off-stage and on a new dramatic scale.
 Page 234
Inspection of his total output shows that he wrote either dialogues
with a dramatic mise-en-scène, narrated fictional dialogues, or
unintroduced dialogues, the so-called "directly dramatic" dialogues.
The Republic, as it has been called traditionally, is a dialogue
narrated by Sokrates, the leading character in it. It is a conversation
of monumental proportions, but its large size should not obscure its
dramatic nature. The Greeks of Plato's day had an attention-span
superior to our own. To them a Tragedy meant a dramatic triad
followed by a satyr play, the whole lasting from four to five hours.
Classical Greeks loved to listen to Homer by the hour; the
professional rhapsode who recited him had to master, in the Iliad
for instance, a text that takes more than thirty hours altogether to
recite. The media of communication within which the Greeks lived
were, as Eric Havelock and others have emphasized, still oral-aural
during Plato's formative years. It is not only that the Greeks were
accustomed to the perception of overall structure in large-sized
verbal productions, but that they could also be trusted to appreciate
the fine points and novelties of new dramatic works or new
dramatic forms.
We have previously discussed the purely intellectual aspect of the
design or format underlying the dramatic form represented by
Plato's novel dialogical form. We can now add that from the
aesthetic point of view the genesis of this dialogue-form is just as
clear. It is the resultant of a combination of the exercises in
disputation or refutation (eristic and elenchus), developed by the
Sophists and practiced by their students, with the art of the
dramatic sketch, as practiced by Epicharmos and Sophron. But the
dialogues both avoid and satirize the abuses of logical
contentiousness, while keeping and refining the humor of the
dramatic vignette. In addition, the aesthetic raw materials of the
dialogue-form, instead of being the risible pretensions and
interactions of everyday life, are mostly conceptual in their nature
and theoretical in their bearings.
The Point of View and the Dramatic Date
When a dialogue, like the Republic, is narrated by the principal
speaker in it, that dialogue cannot but be told from the point of
view of the dramatic character who is the main speaker. What this
means was illustrated in the Protagoras. That dialogue has an
amusing introduction in which a friend teases Sokrates for an
alleged interest in the city's most beautiful youth, Alcibiades.
Sokrates counters that he finds Protagoras's sophía more beautiful
than Alcibiades' good looks. With some comic touches Sokrates
then narrates the serious discussion that took place between himself
and the great Sophist. They argue the ques-
 Page 235
tion of whether human goodness (aretê) can be taught. But, in the
course of the extended argument and as we saw, although both
speakers (Sokrates no less than Protagoras) are seen to have
reversed their positions, the impression persists that Sokrates has
"won" the argument. This is partly because we are in the habit of
giving our sympathy to him; but it is mainly because we have
witnessed the exchange from Sokrates' point of view. And the
summing up of the exchange is given by Plato to Sokrates to
perform. Neither the chess master, forced into a draw, nor the
tennis player who has lost a tie-breaker will sound like a loser if he
is also the narrator of the event.
A complication in connection with the point of view from which a
dialogue is told has to do with the historical references that the
characters make every now and again. A survey of the
anachronisms in the dialogues shows that history is treated from
Plato's own temporal standpoint. History is not seen from the point
in time contemporary with the dramatic characters in the dialogue.
Thus, for example, limiting ourselves to the first book of the
Republic, we're not sure of the date at which Bendis-worship was
officially recognized and, hence, that there already would have
been a public festival in her honor by the dramatic date of the
dialogue. At 336a Ismenias the Theban is said to be rich and
powerful, but this was not true of him until after Sokrates' death. 1
At 338c Polydamas, the wrestler, is assumed to be already famous,
though he did not actually become so until 408 B.C. This is some
years later than the latest dramatic date that can be supposed for the
dialogue, as we shall see. The Republic, then, reflects the historical
world of a turn-of-the-century, or early fourth-century, observer,
not that of its late fifth century characters. The dramatic date of a
dialogue is the date on which the named speakers are represented
as having held their discussion.
Thus, for Sokrates and Parmenides to have met at allas they are
supposed to have done by the fiction of the ParmenidesSokrates
has to be presented as very young and Parmenides as quite old,
since there is a more than forty-year gap between the historical
individuals who bear the names of the dramatic characters. As he is
said (127b) to be about 65 years old, and scholars have agreed to a
birth date of Parmenides near 514 B.C., it follows that the dramatic
date for this dialogue would be about 449 B.C. Because the
introductory conversation specifies the Great Panathenea as the
occasion that brought Parmenides to Athens, we can also suggest a
time of year for the meeting should we wish to do so. But we see
that it is neither possible nor necessary to be so exact about the
dramatic dates. It would not be intelligent to be more than
approximate in this matter, and a certain vagueness or
impressionism is appropriate.
Our best clue to the dramatic date of the Republic is the advanced
age
 Page 236
implied for Sophocles at 329b-c. He died in 406/5 B.C. and was
born in 497/6 B.C. We also know that Lysias had been forced to
return to Athens by the anti-Attic revolution in the colony of
Thurii. Protagoras is referred to as a living person in Book X
(600c). But we are not certain that he was still alive as late as
411/410 B.C. From the extant speeches of Lysias who became a
professional speech-writer after the confiscation of his property by
the Thirty Tyrants, we know that his father Kephalos was invited to
Athens by Pericles but not when. Neither do we know when
Kephalos died, though we do know that his other son,
Polemarchos, died in 404 B.C. at the hands of the Tyranny of the
Thirty. On the other hand, Kephalos refers to his sons as "lads"
(neaniskoi, 328d) with either humor or affection, and Sokrates'
remarks to the old gentleman imply that Sokrates does not think of
himself as old (382d). But at what age was an Athenian of that time
likely to consider himself old?
Thus, if Kephalos came to Athens around 460 B.C. and had been
there more than thirty years (he seems, at 331d, to be retired from
business); and if Sophocles was already old (say, about 70) but
Sokrates was not yet old (say, not yet 50); and if Protagoras was
still alive; then we get a range of possible dramatic dates for
Republic that goes from later than 430 B.C. to before 410.
However, the older we make Sophocles, the harder it is to keep
Sokrates from being over 50, or short of being old. And at a date
like 420 B.C. that makes Sophocles 76 and Sokrates 48, we run the
risk of not finding Lysias in Athens; though at this date Athens
itself was temporarily at peace.
The action of the Protagoras is represented as taking place some
time before the Peloponnesian war: Pericles and his sons are
spoken of as living (315a), and they died early in the War in 429
B.C. Sokrates speaks of himself as still young (eti neoi, 314b) and
of Agathon as a young boy (meirakion neon, 315d), while
Alcibiades is described (309b) as a youth whose beard is just
beginning to grow (neanias, hêbên . . . hypnêtou). A dating of the
action 432 B.C would satisfy the first condition mentioned and
make Sokrates 36, Agathon 16, and Alcibiades 19.
But again, Plato doesn't allow us to be so precise. For elsewhere in
the dialogue Hipponicus, the father of Protagoras' host Kallias, is
spoken of as dead (315d), whereas Athenaeuswho took
unsympathetic notice of this sort of "inconsistency" in Platostates
that Hipponicus lived on for ten years after this (Deipnosophists V.
218b). And at 327d Protagoras mentions Pherecrates' play Wild
Men as having been staged at the last Lenaia. As a matter of
historical record, this would have been the winter of 420 B.C. The
imprecision is great enough to look as much like anachronism as
dramatic inconsistency. Another intrusive historical fact from the
world of the fourth century is the allusion at 350a to the art of the
peltasts, a kind of infantry unfamiliar, or
 Page 237
exotic or inferior, to Athenians in the decade of 430 B.C. Again,
the composer of the dialogues is importing facts from his later
social world into a distinctly earlier one.
However, in this particular case we are dealing with a fact that
stimulates guessing about the date of composition of the dialogue,
since peltasts didn't become well-known till the 390's when they
were formally incorporated, under Iphicrates, into the Athenian
army. All we can safely say on this basis is that the Protagoras was
not written before this period. In fact, the dialogues do not always
contain even this kind of rough clue to specifiable times before or
after which they could or could not have been composed.
There are really no clues of this sort in the Republic that may be
used to date the writing of it. The stipulation at 540a that the most
trained and selected guardians cannot become true rulers until they
are at least 50 years of age, has sometimes been taken to imply that
Plato could not have composed the Republic until he was that age
himself. But it is a serious mistake to take so literally any of
Sokrates' ironic specifications (in whose hard precision there is
characteristic humor) when they are so embedded in a large-scale
satire directed at the pretensions of the "philosophers" themselves. I
put philosophers between cautionary quotes becauseas we shall
seethe reference to them in the Republic is exclusively to
"philosophers" who are capable of grasping, and living within, the
world of the ideal Forms.
It makes more sense to take as a clue Sokrates' so-to-say
"retrospective prophecy" of his own death in the passage at 517a,
which anticipates the general circumstances of his death at the
hands of his unenlightened fellow-citizens. We can on this basis
suggest that Republic must have been written after the trial of the
historical Sokrates in 399 B.C. But even this requires the
assumption that Plato was not thinking of some other critical
philosopher, such as Protagoras or Anaxagoras, who had already
suffered political persecution. The mention of Ismenias the Theban
at 336a does give us an approximate date before which the dialogue
could not have been started, since he did not come into prominence
until some five or six years after Sokrates' death.
The Human Setting and the Political Context
Just like the Protagoras, then, the Republic is going to be told from
the point of view of Sokrates as narrator. The chronological
standpoint, however, is that of Plato his creator. The latter fact has
less bearing than the former on the structure of those many
dialogues that are told from the point of view of Sokrates, or a
socratic disciple. 2 But it is worth dwelling on, because Plato is so
often
 Page 238
casually topical; and we see that his topicality derives from his
location in the history of his city.
The topicality is heightened in a number of dialogues by the
circumstantiality given to the dramatic openings. The Protagoras
takes place "in the house of Kallias, son of Hipponicus," on the
door of which Sokrates and his friend had to pound for admissionso
many were the other callers. The Crito and the Phaedo take place
in the jail where Sokrates is imprisoned, the Euthyphro "in the
porch of the King Archon" in whose court law suits were
prosecuted. The Euthydemus takes place "in the dressing room of
the Lyceum," the Phaedrus under the plane tree by the Illissos
River, the Charmides ''in the wrestling school of Taureas," and the
Lysis (if it is by Plato) "in the new palaestra" near "the little gate
that leads to the spring of Panops." 3 Curiously, this concrete sense
of place goes some way toward compensating for the counter-
historical allusions and the vagueness about dates of occurence of
the encounters.4
In the Republic we find that Plato has been quite deliberate about
the human setting within which the dialogue arises. Kephalos's
house is in Piraeus, the port of Athens. Historically, it was in the
Piraeus that the democratic forces had gathered during the Spartan-
sponsored tyranny of the Thirty oligarchs. Kritias, the most violent
of the anti-democratic leaders, had been killed in the battle at
Piraeus. We know from Lysias's speeches that Lysias had
contributed mightily to the democratic cause by supporting three
hundred soldiers and donating two hundred shields and two
thousand drachmas. Kephalos's heir Polemarchos, Lysias's older
brother, had been forced to drink the hemlock when seized by the
Thirty. We also know from Xenophon's Memorabilia (I.i.31) and
Isocrates' Against the Sophists how thoroughly anti-intellectual the
oligarchic junta had been. It had, for instance, issued a decree
prohibiting all "teaching of the art of words" to any except children.
Plato could not have chosen a more appropriate setting for Sokrates
to develop his counter-utopia in, than the household of the good-
natured old merchant in Piraeus. We are welcomed with Sokrates
into the bosom of a pro-democratic, pro-intellectual family. This is
one among many indications that Sokrates' "city in the sky" is
neither a straight utopia nor an intellectualized transform of the
Spartan constitution, as so many have so carelessly believed. It is
rather, as we shall see, an ironic attack upon Spartanism,
militarism, and pythagorizing oligarchism; it exhibits with patient
humor and at length the unpalatable, un-Athenian consequences of
the kind of social organization that would ressult from the
combination of these three much debated strains in Hellenic life.
Why would Plato have gone to the trouble of providing his
Sokrates with a patently pro-democratic, anti-Spartan setting if he
intended his construction to be taken literally as a pro-oligachal,
pro-Spartan discourse?
 Page 239
We shall see in the sequel that Sokrates' tone and humor act
repeatedly to remind us of Plato's ironic design. To the reader who
attends to the texture, tone, and imagery of the language, from step
to step of the monumental development, it will soon become clear
that these elements are amply resonated in the same over-arching
design and dialogical structure whose irony they so fittingly point
to and reinforce.
It has been too easily assumed that Plato was an admirer of the
social order and political "success" of Sparta. On grounds of
political and intellectual history alone, it is just as likely that Plato
had his doubts about an order and a state that were already, from
394 B.C. on, proving themselves inferior to Thebes, to a revived
Athens, and finally to their own once defeated and despised
neighbors. Not only had Spartans on foreign service proved
corruptible, but the system of decarchies, garrisons and repressive
oligarchies that Sparta had set up in the defeated cities after the
Peloponnesian War had made Sparta itself odious to the majority of
Greeks. The accrual of wealth by plunder and foreign payments to
Spartiate leaders had also led to the emergence of an economically
privileged class of "peers" at a time when the regular citizens were
finding it harder to keep their subdivided lands productive and
meet their obligations to their messes. In this respect, Sparta was in
flagrant violation of a major requirement of Sokrates' city in the
sky, namely, that it should avoid the self-destructiveness of having
a distinctly wealthy class and a markedly poor class (IV. 421d-
423b).
During the indecisive Corinthian Wars (394-387 B.C.), the Spartan
hoplites had proved vulnerable to the tactics of Iphicrates' light-
armed infantry. From the battle of Koroneia (394 B.C.) to the
decisive battle of Leuktra (371 B.C.), the Theban heavy infantry
had been more than a match for the best of the Spartan troops. The
irresponsible destruction by Sparta in 379 B.C. of the Olynthian
confederation, was a clear demonstration of that destructiveness to
Hellas as a whole, of which Greeks had been accusing Sparta since
before the peace of Antalkidas (387 B.C.). Finally, as regards even
the ideal intent behind some old Spartan customs, it was a current
saying that other Greeks might admire them but they would never
imitate them. 5
Sokrates, then, has foregathered with a martyr to the oligarchy and
an advocate of democracy. With them is Thrasymachos, a man who
had said that the Gods do not intervene in human affairs, for if they
did there would be no injustice (DK B8).The implication was that
the just state is a human construction and that justice is something
humans must achieve or fail of by themselves. In a fragment of a
political speech preserved by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (DK B1),
Thrasymachos can be summarized as saying that government
should be based on principle, and that the test of good government
 Page 240
is whether it produces harmony and is efficient; but that the
struggle for power makes it inefficient, disunited and factional.
Because of its allusion to the ancestral constitution (hê patrios
politeia) of Solon and Kleisthenes, some commentators think that
this speech was written for a young Athenian oligarch; but others
think it shows a moderate political realism.
Now, if Thrasymachos was himself as oligarchal as his
commissioned wordsand we abstract from the words given him by
Platothen it must be said that in Book I of Republic Sokrates has
silenced someone who, as a matter of historical fact was a defender
of oligarchy. On the other handagain abstracting from his role in
Plato's dramatizationif he was actually a political realist, then it is
an extreme realist who has been silenced. So, those who would
read the dialogue non-dramatically, and who would take the
counter-utopia in it as a political model, must now account for the
awkward fact that the "conservative utopia" they find in it
originates in an opposition to someone who was himself either a
reactionary or a realist.
The literalist, for whom Plato must come out anti-democratic, could
answer that it is Thrasymachos's vehemently expressed cynical
realism that Sokrates rebuts, not his documented conservatism or
realism. But the literalist who answers like this has ceased to be a
literalist, and has now entered into the dramatic reading of the
Republic that Plato's dialogical medium requires of us.
The literalist could also say that Republic is only refuting the kind
of realism represented by either the dramatic or historical
Thrasymachos, in order to replace it with a more securely
structured and intellectualy grounded political system. The reader
who wants the Republic to be at all costs an oligarchal utopia, or
closed society, could also say with regard to the setting described
above that even if all the rest of Greece was anti-Spartan, Plato
himself could have been as pro-Spartan in his own way as
Xenophon; and that there is quite another sort of irony in localizing
this discourse on the constitution inside a pro-democratic
household. After all, doesn't Book VI describe philosophy as a kind
of conversion? So, was Sokrates perhaps aiming to convert the
Kephalides and Plato's own relatives Glaucon and Adeimantos to
"philosophical élitism?" Before responding to this, let us remember
that Xenophon himself appears to have read the Republic as anti-
Spartan and anti-monarchical, according to Aulus Gellius (Attic
Nights XIV.3), who reports that Xenophon's Cyropaedia (c.390
B.C.) was the latter's answer to his reading of Plato's Republic, or
part of it.
We cannot be so sure that the Cyropaedia was a direct response to
a writing of Plato's. Perhaps it is only Xenophon's gentlemanly
answer to ideas about education and politics that were current
topics of discussion. But if there's any
 Page 241
truth to Aulus Gellius's story, it would show that Xenophon did not
take the Republic to be a defense of militarism, Spartanism or
aristocracy, but read it as inimical to his own preference for these
institutions! If there is no truth to the story, it has still reminded us
that the constitutional issue was inseparable in ancient Greece from
party politics, and was animating literary production in Plato's
working lifetime. Xenophon takes sides on the issue as a partisan,
would-be guide to youth. Plato "takes sides" in the Republic and
Gorgias as an ancient Tragedian would. It is his "successors" who
have tried to make it appear that he took sides in the conventional
sense.
The alternative that Plato was either pro-oligarchal or an
intellectual élitist is supported by no good evidence other than
inherited preconception, as well as by the same non-dramatic
approach that has led such diligent interpreters a Magalhâes-
Vilhena, Karl Popper, and A.D. Winspear to differ so radically,
claiming, respectively, that (i) Sokrates was a spokesman for the
aristocratic view, that (ii) in fact, and in spite of Plato, Sokrates was
a spokesman for the democratic view, and that (iii) while Sokrates
started out as an artisan and street intellectual, by the age of 40 he
had made it into the ruling-class circle of Pericles' friends.
In short, if the question is how to read the dialogues, then any non-
dialogical reading begs the question by silently treating them as if
they were non-dialogues. It begs the question because discourses
that are presented as conversational interactions, that have dramatis
personae who sometimes act a little out of historical character, that
commit anachronisms but respect verisimilitude, and that
sometimes interpose narrators between the reader and the reported
conversationsare discourses that call for a dramatic or dialogical
reading as opposed to a doctrinal, literalist or non-historiographic
reading.
The Intellectual Background of the Transmission of the Dialogues
It is anomalous that while Diogenes Laertius gives a verbal
definition (III.48) of Plato's dialogue-form that sounds "dramatic"
and that relates it to the art of dialectic, he still asserts that "it is the
form which he used to establish his own views" (toutô de echrêto
eis tên tôn heautôi dokoúntôn kataskeuên, III.55). But there could
hardly be a form less adapted to the imposition of doctrine than that
of Plato's dialogues. A proof of this is the unending disagreement
about just what the system of doctrine is, and how it may be pieced
together from dialogues that do such diverse sorts of things and that
allow the achievement of doctrinal consistency only on the basis of
strenuous inferential interpretation, and at the cost of sacrificing so
many aspects of the intellectual tasks
 Page 242
which the dialogues undertake. At the cost too of all the wit, humor
and allusive topicality that make them so entertaining.
To be able to defend what Laertius says about the form that Plato
developed because of his wise. fear of dogmatism, one would have
to be (like Laertius and the whole Hellenistic age) comfortable with
dogmatism. One would also have to have a different conception of
the nature and effect of dialectic. And this is indeed the case with
whomever Diogenes was quoting here. He thinks the purpose of
dialectic is to establish propositions, whereas we have seen that its
original function in Protagoras's time was to demonstrate the
refutability or relativity any proposition. The fact that Laertius
records that there is a great dispute (pollê stasis) about whether
Plato was a dogmatist only shows how strong the view must once
have been that he was not, given that the interest of Diogenes and
the noble reader he wrote for was entirely doctrinal (III.47).
The Sokratic, non-dogmatic, approaches to the dialogues would
already have been threatened by Theophrastos' (died 286 B.C.)
habit of extracting dogma from his predecessors for comparative
and "historical" purposes. It is true that Arkesílaos (c.315-241
B.C.), who loved dialectic, succeeded in reviving both the prestige
of the Academy and interest in the by now neglected works of
Plato. He did this in spite of the fact that his teachers are supposed
to have been, the doxographic Theophrastos and the doctrinalists
Polemo and Krantor. By this time "Plato's philosophy" was most
probably being studied in the works of Xenocrates and other
Academicians. And we shall see that there was also a political
determinant for the neglect of Republic and loss of its critical
intent"intent" in the aesthetic sense of its ironically critical
"design." 6
Arkesílaos combined his attempt to return to Plato's works with a
sustained attack on dogmatism. He is attacked, perversely, by his
skeptical contemporary Timon, the personal disciple of Pyrrho, the
founder of Skepticism, for being too systematic in his andti-
dogmatism! Arkesílaos' approach could hardly have been inherited
from his reputed teachersa point that will remind us of the
unreliability of most testimony from these times. The real objects
of his admiration were the non-dogmatists Plato and Pyrrho. But
given the need of the Academy to maintain its position against
competing sects that were dogmatic, Arkesílaos's return to Plato's
works themselves could not be lasting. It was shortly thereafter
transformed into a return to the system of "platonism" invented by
the Academy upon the death of Plato and imputed to his works by
such self-appointed "platonists" as Xenocrates and the
pythagorizing Speussipus.
Whatever the tensions within the Academy, non-dogmatic
approaches to the dialogues could not have survived much beyond
Carneades (213-129 B.C.), the great skeptic and head of the
Academy, since Antiochus c. 130-68
 Page 243
B.C.)two headships laterwas again asserting an eclectic system of
positive (stoicizing) doctrine. Later skepticism, which seems to
have continued independently of the Academy, came to an end
itself with Sextus Empiricus (c.160-210 A.D.) and Lucian the
satirist (c.115-200 A.D.) some decades before the flowering of
systematic Neoplatonism in Plotinus in the middle of the third
century A.D. Later skepticism such as Sextus's did not preserve the
dialectical, refutative understanding of Plato's dialogues. Sextus's
interests were medical and empirical, not dialectical in the Socratic
sense.
Since we find nothing in Diogenes Laertius that reflects the rise of
the new system of Neoplatonism (which we would not expect him
to omit from a book for a platonist), and since the last philosopher
Diogenes mentions is a pupil of Sextus Empiricus, it is best to
assign his work to the early third century A.D. So, by Diogenes'
time, the non-dogmatic tradition about the nature of Plato's
philosophic activity had been quite lost. It would seem that in
Plato's own time the public and the ordinary run of thinkers were
already demanding certified answers to their urgent questions. But
neither the relativism of the Sophists, nor the state of the dialectic,
nor Sokrates' annoying habit of questioning could satisfy the
demand either.
In fact, Plato's dialogues were a threat to the Academy's ability to
satisfy the public's demand for assertible beliefs. It was, we can see
in retrospect, over Plato's dead body that the Academy rushed to
meet the demand. And it met it with some of the egregious methods
common to the fourth century, namely, what we would call forgery,
imitation, editorial tampering, and with its own doctrinal
productions and methodical teaching. Cicero's summary in
Academica (I. 17-18) shows that it was clear to him that the Old
Academy had derived (!) its system from Plato's "multiplicity and
copiousness," but that it had thereby "abandoned the famous
Socratic custom of discussing everything in a doubting manner and
without admission of any positive statement. Thus was produced
something that Socrates had habitually reprobated entirely, a
definite science of philosophy with a regular arrangement of
subjects and a formulated system of doctrine." That the
Peripatetics, according to Cicero, 7 also did this explains the
obliteration of any consciousness of the non-dogmatic design of
Plato's dialogues that Aristotle might have bequeathed to a school
that was no more true to his consistency and moderation than the
Academy was to Plato's dialogism.8
In cultural history, it also happened that the Macedonian conquest
of Greece (a few years after Plato's death) laid the basis for the
emergence of Koinê Greek, and created the conditions under which
Plato's Attic would be difficult to understand for the new ruling
classes. High-placed Macedonian speakers who turned to the
Academy for literary assistance would naturally not be helped to
 Page 244
perceive anything in the dialogues that was satirical of the same
kind of military élitism that dorianizing Macedonians practiced.
Also, prominent philosophers, from Anaxagoras (the friend of
Pericles) and Sokrates the artisan hoplite to Aristotle (the friend of
the regent Antipater), seem ever in Greek history to have been in
danger of political liquidation, no matter what their circumstances
were. And this would give us the reason for Speusippus, the head
(and probable founder) of the Academy, to be in touch with the
Macedonians if not with king Philip himself. 9 If Speusippus was
in touch with the Macedonians, he was not doing anything different
from his great competitor Isokrates, the head of a rival school of
oratory and statecraft, who outlived Plato by ten years.
The loss of understanding about how to read Plato can be ascribed
not only to such generic causes as the rise of doxographic habits, or
the new need for political salvation, or the idealists' need for
system, or the failure of healthy skepticismthough these were all
operative; it must also be ascribed to the disappearance of the
antilogistic understanding of the dialectic as destructive of assertive
finalities. In other words, if there had been a tradition among
readers on how to take the dialogues, and the core of this tradition
was the knowledge that Plato had rescued philosophy by
overcoming the refutative, antilogistic use of the dialectic with
dialogical uses for it, then this tradition would have disappeared
with the disappearnace of the negative and relativizing uses of
antilogistic or eristic dialectics. Sokrates' allusion to "the dialectic"
in Republic VII (511bff. and 532af.) as really a process of group
indoctrination actually reflects how thoroughly the Academy
succeeded in burying these older meanings of the practice.
So, in spite of the many literary indicators, or self-focusing devices
in the dialogues, the dialogism of the dialogues did not survive this
change in the conception of dialectics. Other causes and
rationalizations operated to submerge the literary characteristics of
the dialogues and make them difficult to appreciate as the artfully
structured, non-dogmatic works which they are. Hellenistic or
Koinê speakers, even those who sought to write classical Attic,
would already have had trouble with the subtle versatilities of
Plato's language. We must remember that diglossy means
dysglossy. The condition in which the literary language has to be
taught in addition to the spoken language is not reached until there
are big discrepancies between the two. In the first centuries A.D.
this discrepancy gave rise to the Atticist movement that henceforth
dominated the teaching of Greek letters in the schools. Phenomena
such as the rise of hypercorrect forms and "atticisms," which never
occurred in classical Attic, loss of feeling for the optative mood all
go to show how imperfect the grasp of clssical Attic had become. It
would no longer be
 Page 245
certain that the textural indications in Plato's prose could suffice to
bring out the the humor, drama or irony of the dialogues, much less
to insure they be taken in the genial interrogative spirit with which
they were constructed.
No help could be expected from the seekers after ethical rationality
among the Epicureans and Stoics, and much less from the
platonists themselves who, by now, would have had no memory to
hide of the first Academy's de-dramatization and doctrinalization of
the dialogues. By the first centuries A.D. a "platonist" was already
someone wholike Plutarch or Apuleiusfelt free, on the basis of
inherited criteria external to the dialogues, to pick and choose
among the doctrines defended, refuted, or satirized by speakers in
the dialogoues. A platonist was now someone who claimed as his
own and as Plato's a majority of the doctrines selected for
systematization or adoption by the Academy, but who did not know
that the dialogueswhether accessible or notwere works of literary
art. Meantime, the Peripatetics had also joined in the de-
dramatization of the dialogues and the platonization of Aristotle,
while also downgrading and becoming as indifferent to his
dialogues as they were to the dialogues of Aristotle that they
allowed to become lost. 10
It also helps to remember that the Stoic reconceptualization of
"logic"dialektikê to themwas in part a response to the destructive
effect of the Zenonian-Sophistic conception of the dialectic as
eristic. In this response, Stoic "logic" is like Plato's "dialogic." To
the extent that the formal dialectic (the formal "logic") of the Stoa
was concerned with validity of inference rather than with
categorical truth-claims, that major premisses in this logic are
always molecular, that there is no provision in its extant account of
propositions for the universal affirmative categorical proposition,
and that axiom (axioma) meant only any claim to truth rather than
an apodeictic starting pointto this extent Stoic dialectic seems to
justify an interpretation that takes it to be rebuilding the pre-
dogmatizing dialectic into a constructive instrument that avoids the
destructiveness of Zenonian-Sophistic antilogistics.11
It is perhaps a Stoic victory over the "dialectic" as a skeptical
instrument that is needed to explain the surrender of the post-
Carneadean Academy to Stoic influence. Such a victory would also
have finished off any stand that a generalized philosophic
skepticism could still make against the rise of the eclectic stoicism
and platonism that preceded and led to the full-fledged system of
Neoplatonism in Plotinus. So it was that any tradition there might
have been about the non-dogmatic design of Plato's dialogues was
overwhelmed by the renascence of dogmatizing that followed upon
the expiration of the old contentious dialectic.12
We may note, finally, that the subtitles which Hellenistic editors
attached to the individual dialogues (such as: "On Friendship;
obstetric," or "On Rheto-
 Page 246
ric; refutative") are beside the point in several ways. In isolating
supposed "content" from the "form" of the dialogue they destroy
the literary integrity of the work. To neglect the form, the way in
which, something is uttered is to neglect the specific effectiveness
of what is being communicated. The Hellenistic classifications
denature the creative design of such a dialogue as the Gorgias by
referring to it as, for instance, "refutative" (anatreptikôs); it is more
than just that. Similarly it is a mistake to pick out the "content" of
Gorgias as rhetoric; for this dialogue is as much ''about" justice or
happiness as it is "about" rhetoric. These subtitles have misled
many an unwarned reader of Plato in translation or reader
uninformed about the intellectual discontinuity between the
classical and Hellenistic ages, as to the nature and integrity of the
dialogues they are reading.
Thus, the intellectual history of the Hellenistic age, together with a
realization of the changes in the conception and use of the dialectic
from Zeno and Protagoras to Chrysippus, Diodorus, and Sexturs
Empiricusnot to mention the social and bureaucratic enforcement
or self-perpetuation of the platonizing tradition of interpretation,
helps to understand why Plato's assimilation to the system builders
escaped challenge. If Plato was believed to be great, he was
thought to be so because he had a great system like the epical
Lucretius, and the esoteric, polymathical, just edited Aristotelian
(or Peripatetic) treatises of the first century B.C. If Plato's
dialogues are deemed to differ from one another very much, why,
that was exactly the talent of the system-builder: to bring disparate
elements into a comprehensive harmony. And hadn't Lucretius
himself taught the age, in keeping with Alexandrian aesthetics, that
the poetic vehicles of thought, including his own, could be safely
discounted as sugar-coating for purposes of serious reflection? At
the other end of the age, Lucian's outrageously iconoclastic
dialogues would only have confirmed the fear that the satirical
dialogue-form could never be a vehicle for significant
philosophizing; and that, if Plato was a serious thinker, he could
not have been writing ironic dialogues.
Notes To Section I
1. This, of course, could be taken as evidence that the Republic was
composed later than 399 B.C.
2. There is a real question, in the world of the dialogues, as to who
is a disciple of Sokrates. Crito is his friend, and not very reflective
yes-man, but not what one can call a disciple. Simmias and Kebes,
in the Phaedo, are disciples of Philolaus. Given their interest in
Pythagoreanism, the other "companions"as they are misleadingly
call-
 Page 247
edin this dialogue could be disciples (more than just auditors) of
Sokrates only if we turn Sokrates himself into a pythagorizer like
the very Academicians he is satirizing so gently and so
extensively. Meno doesn't become a disciple, nor do Charmides
and Phaedrus even though they give their promise to do so.
Apollodorus, Aristodemus, Eucleides could be called auditors
who are on Sokrates' side; while Theaetetus can perhaps be seen
as apt to have become a disciple had he survived, and not
devoted himself entirely to mathematics as the testimonies may
be taken to imply.
3. Cf. my "On the Form and Authenticity of the Lysis," Ancient
Philosophy X.2 (1990).
4. Dramatic dates, after all, are only an implicit matter, and
relatable to the historical allusions only by means of explicit
calculations that the ordinary reader has no reason to make.
5. The main primary sources for this period are the contemporary
but pro-Spar-tan Hellenica of Xenophon, the detached but later
(328-325 B.C.) Athenian Constitution, and the two judicial
speeches of Lysias that deal with the rule of the Thirty. The
universal history of the uncritical Stoic Diodorus Siculus and the
exemplary Lives of Plutarch are both highly derivative and
rhetorical, as well as 3 or 4 centuries later.
6. Cf. "The Hellenistic Obliteration of Plato's Dialogism," in
Plato's Dialogues: New Essays & Interpretations ed. G. Press
(Lanham: Rowman, Littlefield 1992).
7. Academica I.iv.17-18: "But originating with Plato, a thinker of
manifold variety and fertility, there was established a philosophy
that, though it had two appellations, was really a single uniform
system, that of the Academic and Peripatetic schools, which while
agreeing in doctrine differed in name. . . . But both schools drew
plentiful supplies from Plato's abundance, and both framed a
definitely formulated rule of doctrine, and this fully and copiously
set forth, whereas they abandoned the famous Socratic custom of
discussing everything in a doubting manner and without admission
of any positive statement. Thus was produced something that
Socrates had been in the habit of reprobating entirely, a definite
science of philosophy, with a regular arrangement of subjects and a
formulated system of doctrine."
8. See my The Return of the King The Intellectual Warfare over
Democratic Athens Rowman, Littlefield in press); chapters IV and
V, on the overwriting and platonizing reinterpretation of the
Aristotelian corpus by the Peripatetics and its editors.
9. See E. Bikerman and J. Sykutris "Speusippus Brief an König
Philipp," Sitzungsberichte Sächsische Akademie 80.3 (1928). If this
letter is authentic, it is evidence that Speusippus was capable of
reinterpreting the Republic non-satirically and non-critically in
order to avoid Macedonian disfavor.
10. Some of the Peripatetics, such as Aristoxenus, were actually
Pythagoreans themselves, not just pythagorizers. Others, like
Demetrius of Phaleron, were outright oligarchists committed to the
literalist, spartanizing way of reading the Republic. Cf. again, my
The Return of the King. To this day we have not finished
untangling what is
 Page 248
Theophrastos's from what is Aristotle's in the Aristotelian
corpus, nor finished identifying the places where these records
of Aristotle's lecture-notes are likely to have been overwritten or
interpolated by the Peripatetics of very different views who used
them.
11. See Benson Mates's Stoic Logic; but what Mates calls "logic"
the Stoics called "dialectic."
12. It's possible that the persistent idea that there was another side
to Platoin one rationalizing view, an esoteric sideis only a distorted
reflection of this lost tradition. As it is, we are left with only the
dialogues from which to infer Plato's creative and critical
objectives. The series itself of dialogues that are by Plato should
suffice, as in the case of other artists and writers, to tell what his
project was.
 Page 249

Section II:
A Structural Critique
Why People Think Sokrates Is Plato's Spokesman
Given that from the deaths of Plato and Aristotle and the rise of the
Stoa, most people expected all philosophersexcept the Skepticsto
dogmatize, it is no wonder that Plato was asimilated first to the
dogmatizers and next to the system builders. And given that the
dialogues are often narrated from a "Socratic" point of view, it is
not surprising that Sokrates (the dialogical character) was taken to
be the principal expositor of "the system" now presumed to be
found in Plato's dialogues. Plato has put his conversational
explorations in the hands of his Sokrates, and of the latter's
serviceable contemporaries or near contemporaries. The totalling
of these explorations, however, does not add up to a system of
answers but to a system of questions. A responsive look at what the
speakers are doing, and saying to each other, including what
Sokrates says (in the dialogues that are by Plato), shows that what
they say is a function of Plato's dramatic use of them. Thus, Plato's
Aristophanes, Sokrates, and Alcibiades appear to speak "in
character" in the Symposium; though his Thrasymachos and the
eristic brothers in Euthydemus seem overstated. But whether in
character or in caricature, they all speak according to the individual
design of the dialogue and their role in the conversation.
So just who, or what, was this "Sokrates," who says different,
perhaps conflicting, things in different dialogues, and who takes
different roles in the dialogues in which he occurs? He fits neither
of the hardened misconceptions according to which he is either (i)
Plato's spokesman, or contradictorily, (ii) the historical Sokrates.
Plato certainly admired the latterto the point, I would suggest, of
becoming a true Socratic himself, but in a different medium,
namely, Plato does with his dialogue-form, and for all readers,
what the historical Sokrates did on his feet for individuals in face-
to-face encounters. But the historical Sokrates is certainly not
Plato's spokesman either.
Plato's Sokrates, in a weak sense, could be said to be a little of both
the historical Sokrates and what Plato, in idealizing him, would
have wished the historical person to be and do. Plato has him say
things that are surely invented. And there actually was a Sokrates
to whom we think we owe the demand for definitions and the
technique of interrogative induction, someone who also was in the
habit of demonstrating their ignorance to others out of their own
mouths, without asserting any doctrines of his own. In saying this,
 Page 250
we already risk mantling the historical personage with attributes of
the dialogical character. The active master, whose interrogative
practice Plato followed in his own literary way, does seem never to
have imposed dogmatically or systematically any doctrines that he
called his own; especially not, e.g., the technicalities of the theory
of ideas, or the "philosophy of political history" and the
astrological mysticism of the nuptial number with which he plays
in Book VIII of the Republic.
Plato has followed the practice of the historical Sokrates by
refraining from the assertion of his own beliefs. He surely had them
(like all of us), but the dialogue-form prevents us from ascertainly
exactly what they were. The theory of ideas was not that of the
historical Sokrates; and, how can it be believed to be Plato's when
Plato is also the author of a critique of it so thorough, in the
Parmenides, that "the father of philosophy" as Sokrates calls him
can be said to have refuted it. Doctrinalists would have to say that
"Plato" has contradicted himself (though not in his own voice).
Dialogical readers are able to say that the exchanges and
refutations in this dialogue are a warning about the use made in
other dialogues of the theory as Plato's Sokrates plays with it, tests
it, or ironically "expounds" it with such diagrammatic clarity that
we can see both its attractiveness and its weaknesses.
It is the humorless, literalist translations of the dialogues, together
with neglect of the literary indicators (or self-focusing devices) in
the exchanges, that allow doctrinalists to read them as if Sokrates
was making categorical assertions or imposing theories. This self-
blinding practice is a main internal factor that keeps readers from
questioning the externalist tradition of interpretation that claims to
find a system of philosophy embedded in the dialogues. Thus, the
reader who feels that she cannot fully understand the Republic
because she doesn't entirely understand or agree with the system
called platonism, can be advised that innocence of system and
doubts about doctrine are the truly Socratic starting-points for
understanding Plato.
Plato's Sokrates is a literary construction. 'He' exhibits the vitality
and intellectual skill of a character in a play in the dialogues
surrounding his death, especially the Apology, Crito Phaedo
sequence. We carry over the solidity of his characterization there,
into the dialogues where he is simply having fun (Ion) or is only a
skeptical onlooker (Sophist, Politicus), is learning something as a
youth (Parmenides), or is being catechical (Philebus) or
interrogative (Meno, Charmides). If we don't read the dialogues in
the dramatic order by beginning with the Parmenides, and begin,
say, with the Euthyphro, we can't help importing elements of the
legends about Sokrates into Plato's characterization of him; we
open the door to what I call externalist, or irrelevant collateral
information which distracts us from the leads in the text and
literary texture of the
 Page 251
dialogue itself. A literalist reader who's been told that Plato is an
"idealist" will, for instance, have to face the big puzzle or
contradiction in Sokrates's "intellectual development" that is
represented by the claim that, having heard the theory of ideas
refuted in his youth, he goes on to propound and apply it
uncritically in middle age.
If any intellectual development is to be postulated, in contravention
of the dramatic order of the dialogues, between the Republic and
the Parmenides, it would have to be assigned to Plato, not his
character; for that would be regressive. But we need not postulate
any such odd "development." We do so only because tradition has
taught us to look at the doctrines and not the works, to look at the
vase-paintings and not the vases. 1 Dialogical readings of the
dialogues, and respect for their dramatic order, free us from having
to make assumptions that we can't verify about the chronology of
their composition. Better yet, in not having to assert or deny what
has never been adequately proved or disproved, and in ceasing to
worry about what doctrines are supposed to stand or change, we are
freed to appreciate the equal validity and integrity of these two
great dialogues as different sorts of virtuoso construction.
In the dialogues, Plato is using and re-using a theory, not his
theory, in different contexts and for different intellectual purposes.
The theory was the subject of much discussion in the Academy.
Plato's Sokrates anachronistically at first believes it (as in the
Parmenides), plays with it satirically (as in the Phaedo), improves
upon it while diagrammatizing it to expose its weaknesses as well
as its strengths (as in Republic). We won't grasp what Plato is
doing with his dialogues if we don't perceive that the character of
Sokrates is a function of, varies with, the plots of the dialogues he
is in. As Aristotle says about the characters in Tragedy at Poetics
vi.1450a19, the characterizations are for the sake of the plots not
the other way around. Aristotle, it will be remembered, associates
Socratic dialogues with the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchos,
thoughhe saysthere is no common name for both (i.1447b) their
dramatic sketches and the genre of Socratic dialogue. As Sokrates
says in the Kratylos, "Speaking is an action, is it not" (387b)?
By the plots I mean the intellectual or aesthetic design of given
dialogues. Where there is any characterization of a speaker, it will
be seen, by the unindoctrinated reader, to depend on that dialogue's
design; though, of course the characterization will also reflect in
some degree the historical figure whose name has been given to it.
So it is with Thrasymcahos, Anytus, Theaetetus, Kallicles and
others besides Sokrates. So, in the Republic, Thrasymachos is made
to speak like a cynical advocate of the politics of power, not as
moderate or realist that might be inferred from his fragments. What
Alcibiades and Aristophanes say about love in the Symposium is
somehow in character, yet
 Page 252
not historical. What Sokrates says about love in the Symposium and
the Phaedrus is equally a dramatic invention.
Not only is it not historical, but Plato has taken pains to interpose
Diotima, a storifying Sokrates, a gate-crashing Apollodorus, and
Aristodemus between himself and the reader, in case the reader
should want to attribute to the author, as his doctrine, this one
among the several witty eulogies of Love in the Symposium.
Readers since the late fourth century have nonetheless persisted in
giving the name "platonic love" to Diotima's doctrine. Namely: to
Sokrates' humorous, aestheticizing, intellectualistic allegory about
how to avoid the pains of love by doing entirely without sex or
peoplea recommendation implausible and risible to a classical
Greek. But traditionalists insist on calling the ironic allegory
"platonic love" because it fits so well with the ascetic side of the
Neoplatonist system that has been so influential in the West since
its inception.
Now the dramatic Sokrates is a very strong (if skeptical) speaker,
as well as a remarkable and lovable figure. Parmenides in his
dialogue and Aristophanes in his are quite as brilliant; but Plato's
Sokrates is given more to do than they in the dialogues as a series.
As far as he's the most active thinker in the dialogues, he's also the
most "authoritative" that the reader encounters. This promotes our
preference for listening to him more than to other characters, in
spite of the paralogisms and rhetorical devices he is allowed to
practice in the dialogueswith or without tongue in cheek. Thus, the
dramatic form which protects Plato, the author, from dogmatism
and assertiveness is the same form that keeps the reader from facile
criticism of Sokrates the knowledge-seeking character. It is a
consequence of Plato's deliberate art that the reader identifies with
Sokrates in the intellectual action of the dialogues. Of other
characters, perhaps only Parmenides and Aristophanes, as we've
suggested, come near to gaining for themselves as much sympathy
from the reader as Plato's immortalized Sokrates.
Architectonic Irony of the Republic
Everybody agrees that there are many kinds of irony to be found in
Plato's works. Here we will clarify two of the more neglected
kinds, namely, architectonic irony and structural contrast or
"paradox." I call architectonic irony the principle built into the
dialogue form by Plato, which allows the individual dialogues to be
conceptual experiments as well as social and intellectual satires and
constructions. Structural parallelisms and contrasts are the larger
jointings or nervatures, by means of which the author effects his
design in given dia-
 Page 253
logues. We will attend to the design aspects and imagery of the
dialogues in the next section. Included in our conception of
architectonic design is the structure of the engaged reader's
response in its dianoetic openness, determinability, and
directionality.
We illlustrate. Though the nature of the Sophist and of the man of
politics are the manifest aims of the inquiries in the two dialogues
Sophist and Politicus, Friedländer says, with some plausibility, "Is
it not the Philosopher we are really looking for, who looms behind
the inquiry and whose definition must be given after we have
determined the nature of the Sophist and the statesman" (Plato
Vol.I, p.152)? Friedläinder points to the wordless irony of
the fact that Socrates by virtue of his silent presence, represents ironic
tensionsunspoken yet felt. Behind the two definitions of the Sophist and
Statesman" 2 remains the task of discovering the nature of the
Philosopher. This is . . . so much the center of expectation that it has . .
. been assumed that there should have been a third dialogue called
'Philosophos'; some have found this dialogue in one of the others which
are extant or concluded that the two dialogues are fragments of an
uncompleted trilogy.
"But suppose," Friedländer then asks, "this only made us victims of
Platonic irony?"
The answer is that yes, the reader has been brought into
collaboration with Plato's design in the two dialgoues. But we
notice that not all readers perceive the irony; and that in the present
state of the tradition it takes a sophisticated reader like Friedländer
to perceive it in even the incomplete way that he does. If we ask,
would a member of the living Plato's audience have perceived the
irony? I think that yes, he would have; but he would not have
expected the expansion into a whole new dialogue of Parmenides'
recommendations about how best to train for and practice the
search for knowledge. Unless, of course, he was one of the
Academicians working at imposing a literalist, platonizing
interpretation on the dialogues. H. Alline believed, in his Histoire
du Texte de Platon,3 that Sokrates' misgivings about the incomplete
communicativeness of the written word in the Phaedrus prove that
Plato was misunderstood by his earliest readers. But whether this
was so or not, are not those misgivings just the kind of thing the
historical Sokrates would have discussed with the young Plato, if or
when he found him addicted to writing rather than practicing the
Socratic art of oral inquiry.
While a dialogical reading makes it clear that Plato did not need to
compose a dialogue on "the knowledge-seeker" (philosophos), the
speculative question whether he should have leads to some
observations about the dialogues as
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a whole. We find that the figures that stand out as most often
satirized, or criticized exhibitively are those of the Sophist, the
politician, the educator, the poet, and those ironically called "the
true philosophers" by Sokrates.
Briefly and for example: in the Ion Sokrates criticizes the poets for
claiming to know what they don't know; in the Euthyphro he
satirizes them for what they say about the Gods; and in Republic he
has the pythagorized city-in-the-sky banish them. But in the Meno
he praises the poets because they are divinely inspired and,
possibly, the only ones who have judgment besides the inspired
saviors of Athens already mentioned. It is as educators of youth
that the poets are criticized throughout the dialogues by Sokrates.
And it is as educators of youth that the Sophists are satirized in the
Sophist. But there is no satire of the philosopher as such, although
a certain kind of philosopher is ironically alluded to in the Republic
as being the "true" philosophers. But before turning on the irony
Sokrates had said, at 475c) that he who loves all learning and
cannot get enough of it may justly be called a "philosophos" or
knowledge-seeker. And he does rehearse, in the Theaetetus (173c
ff.), the apartness from the market-place of those that make up the
band of non-contentious unworldly philosophers. The latter are not
condemned in this passage, but they emerge from Sokrates' words
as rather unreal.
Plato doesn't need to define explicitly what the true philosopher
does; he does so implicitly in his own practice, and exhibitively in
his works as a whole. Why should Plato have put this most
important of his productive assumptions into the mouth of some
speaker or dramatic character, when his practice is never to speak
in his own voice and always to put some distancefor aesthetic and
reflective reasonsbetween himself and his characters' discourses?
To state his normative beliefs about the nature of the search for
knowledge (or any at all of his beliefs), Plato would have had to
intrude himself into a dialogue and step outside the practice of the
dialogue-form. That is why there is no third dialogue to match, or
balance, the satire of the Sophist and Politicus. The dialogues don't
deal in assertion, but in the dramatization of assertion; and there
was no call for Plato to dramatize what he was deliberately and
successfully doing. He would have had to dramatize his practice of
dramatizing Athenian intellectual life!
Plato did not practice philosophy in the assertive mode, but in the
active and exhibitive modes of judgment: in the active mode in so
far as he was a searcher and teacher, in the exhibitive mode
because he was a literary maker. And what he made was a product
that could withstand both the dissolving force of antilogistic
dialectics, and be true to the non-dogmatic example of the
historical Sokrates. Plato, if I may use Aristotle's terms, has
resorted to the productive art-and-science of the intellectual mime
to provide us with a non-
 Page 255
contentious mode of "philosophizing." The Republic, as an
example, is a great re-enactment (mimêsis) of a worthwhile
instance of reflective political exploration; it is a dramatic and
intellectualperceptive, humorous, searchingexhibition of the
practice of conversational inquiry addressing itself to constitutional
and related problems.
Many readers who respond to the versatility of Plato's dramatic
prose, but are blocked from a perception of its exhibitive and ironic
effectiveness, have found the proscription of the poets in Republic
X, a paradox and a stumbling block. Unaware of their lapse into
literalism, they ask, how can such a literary master, banish himself
and his poetically-gifted fellows from the "ideal," most-to-be-
wished-for state and reduce art to the functions of propaganda and
indoctrination? How can the Ideal State not include the epic, lyric,
and dramatic arts that the Athenians knew and cherished? They
have not understood that Sokrates is only acting in a manner
consistent with what he had been fabulating under Plato's
management. Is it Plato, then, who is contradicting himself? No;
because neither is Sokrates his spokesman nor is he speaking in his
own voice; rather, Sokrates is speaking in strict accord with the
design of the dialogue he's in, and in the sardonic spirit of the
extended construction he has launched upon, after his eristic bout
with Thrasymachos and in acquiescence with Glaucon's desire to
examine, not the frugal healthy or true city, but the luxurious,
fevered state.
The company and the situation favoring, Plato's Sokrates has
decided to undertake the question of the nature of justice. Because
of the direction taken by the reasonings of Polemarchos,
Thrasymachos, Glaucon and Adeimantus (I.331e-II.368a), Sokrates
is faced with the difficult task of showing (i) what justice really is
(359a, 366e), (ii) what it does for its possessor that makes it
superior (kreitton) to injustice (367b, 368a), and (iii) what it does
and in and of itself for its possessor (367b ff.). 4 Since Sokrates
says he's going to do this by creating a larger context within which
the question may be easier to answer, we expect a straight answer.
And it is at first an inquiry into the place and function of justice in
the city-state. From this Sokrates hopes to get an idea of its place
and function in human nature. The larger context is going to be a
concrete context: the principle from which communities take their
rise (369b) is the need to cooperate in creating the sufficiency that
by themselves individuals cannot.
The minimally necessary city (hê anankaiotatê polis) is not small
(370e), but it will need imports that it must pay for from surplus
production (370e); this, besides division of labor it will need
overseas traders (371a). This city will have to have a market-place
and token money to facilitate exchange; this entails shopkeepers
and wage earners in addition to the artisans and specialists
 Page 256
who produce the goods. To avoid both poverty and war, human
reproduction will be controlled, and feasts will be ''inartificial" and
moderate. Justice in this frugal city will perhaps consist in some
need that the citizens have of each other, but it doesn't seem easy to
perceive the opeartion of justice in it very clearly, Sokrates and
Adeimantus agree (371e10-372a3). Nonetheless, the true and
healthy city (alêthinê, hygiê polis) is this minimal and necessary
community (372e), even if it doesn't clarify the coming into being
of justice and injustice.
But Glaucon, the well-to-do Athenian gentleman, immediately
rejects this city as unlivable (372c,d) because, he says, it lacks the
amenities that minister to what Sokrates calls our unnecessary
appetites or artificial needs. So Socrates moves grimly on to
consider these new needs, which make for the luxurious or fevered
state (truphôsa, phlegmainousa polis). Sokrates and Glaucon
quickly discover from the nature of this city that it must ever be
prepared for war, because the luxurious state is the expansionist
state. In fact, the first thing the fevered city allows them to see
clearly is the origin of war (373e) and the coming-to-be of
professional soldiering (374dff.). It is also at once revealed that in
the expansionist fevered state combat is the most important work,
art, and training (epistêmê, ergon, technê, epimeleia, 374d-e).
Defense of the state requires more knowledge, ability and leisure
on the part of the guardians than any other business. And they run
into their first paradoxthat a good guardian (phulaks agathos) is
hard to create because he must combine the contradictory traits of
fierce aggressiveness and gentleness of disposition. A good
guardian must in fact be like a well-bred (gennaios) watchdog who
attacks strangers but is tame to those it knows.
These paradoxical creatures who are needed by the warlike state
and whose formation will be the subject of the rest of the
discussion, can, suggestively, be called "Polemarchos-machines."
For they are the embodiment of Polemarchos's abandoned principle
that justice is to benefit your friends and hurt your enemies (332d).
That we can categorize them this way is not an incidental paradox
but the beginning of an overarching irony in the discussion as a
whole. If Glaucon's customary Athenian amenities are to be
preserved, the first thing we'll get is not justice but the
institutionalization of war. So, in order to continue their search for
the origin of justice, and to see how it might be instituted, the
speakers will have to pursue justice through the mediation of the
kind of education to be given to the guardians (376d), and through
the agency of their collectively temperate characterthis character
having been formed to combine love knowledge with courage and
strength (376c).
"Come then," says Sokrates, "let us educate these men in our
discourse as if we had the leisure and as if we were telling stories
or fables (hôsper en mythôi
 Page 257
mythologountes) (!) Sokrates' words are unmistakeable; he is going
to tell his listeners a story about justice, the shape of which will be
the elaboration of a constitution designed to insure the right kind of
character in its citizens. In the light of Sokrates' statement it is
astonishing that people have taken his constitution both so literally
as political program and so positively as a Utopia, and that they
have not perceived the humor with which Sokrates fabulates his
ironic Counter-Utopia.
Note what has happened. Sokrates has been provoked by Glaucon's
rejection of the true and healthy city into an experimental and
sardonic discourse. He is going to tell a fable about how to develop
the class that guards the luxurious state and services its wars. So
the first provisions are for censorship of the stories that are to be
told to this class throughout its life, and for controlling the kind of
God-talk and hero-saga that is to be permitted. The speakers have
just seen that the dynamic of the state now being constructed is
military protection of non-necessary satisfactions. For this state
Sokrates at once invents a false rhetoric. He breezily gets his
Athenian auditors to acquiesce in the suitability of this naive
Sunday-school sort of talk, for the sake of the character-formation
of the guardians. We find his friends letting him suggest that in a
state thus built on manipulated myths where the rulers are
permitted to lie, the citizens will nonetheless grow up truthful.
Worse, the purpose of the censorship over what may be said about
the fortunes of men is (i) to create an equivalence between
sôphrosynê and submissiveness (389d-eff.), and (ii) to perpetuate
the myth (Sokrates' word) that justice is profitable and that
injustice, even when concealed, is unprofitable (392b)!
Sôphrosynê, in Greek usage, meant informed civility or intelligent
restraint or moderation.
Of all these paradoxical proposals, this one, more than the others,
reveals itself as a piece of ironical structuring. This was the very
thesis that Sokrates had tried to prove against Thrasymachos in
Book I. It was just because Glaucon and Adeimantus felt he hadn't
proved that justice in all circumstances is more advantageous to its
possessor than injustice that Sokrates undertook to show how
justice comes to be, what it is, and what it does for people. If it
were still a matter for proof, which it now is not, Sokrates would
have begged the question. But he is evading it in another way. He
is legislating the advantageousness of justice into existence, by
promulgating an ideology that will insure general compliance with
the principle he didn't quite succeed in proving.
That the guardians are Polemarchos-machines; that it is the
fevered, not the healthy, state that we must consider; that this state
gives rise to, and must be geared for, war; yet must make its oldiers
gentle; that this state gives rise to censorship; that the myths about
Gods and heroes must be inane; that truthfulness will be enforced
by rulers permitted to lie; that sôphrosynê must be
 Page 258
equated with submissiveness; and that the belief that justice is
always more advantageous is a matter of compulsory ideology
rather than of experience: these are the ironical foundations upon
which Sokrates' fabulation rests. They are also some of the
paradoxes that generate the outlines of the rest of the constitutional
and educational construction.
It is also telling for my case that at this point (392d ff.) Plato makes
Sokrates undertake for the benefit of Adeimantus a detailed
explanation of the differences between dramatizing something and
telling about it. In the latterthe maker speaks in his own voice; in
the former he sounds like the speakers who are advancing the
action and never speaks in his own voiceas in Tragedy (394b).
Now this is not very relevant to the character-formation of the
guardians. So Sokrates works hard to make its relevance visible by
deriving it from the principle of one man, one occupation, and by
sharply separating the "imitator" of good deeds from the "imitator"
of bad. However, from this principle it follows that the same man
can never write both comedies and Tragedies, a conclusion (we
note) which contradicts that of the Sokrates in the Symposium.
The reason for this methodological excursion is that Plato, the
author, is letting Sokrates have fun with the literary discussions of
his day and is teasing the readerin parallel with Sokrates' twitting
of Adeimantusabout the method he (Plato) is following in the
dialogue as a whole, a method that Sokratesbecause he is using
narrationdoes not appear to be following in his allegory. That Plato
is being funny can be seen in the passage in which Sokrates creates
some "humor by extension" (395c-396d) by committing the fallacy
of extension. The guardians are not to be allowed to neigh like
horses, nor roar like bulls, nor grunt like oarsmen; nor imitate
thunder, women in love, or women giving birth. The wonder, here,
is how readers can miss the humor of the language. The solemn
statement that the guardians are to be forbidden these things and
must likewise be released from any other crafts because they are
the creatures and shapers (dêmiourgoi) of the freedom of the city
now stands out as the irony which it is.
Sokrates' sally into literary methodology is a veiled comment on
Plato's own method, for the benefit of the reader who might not
have caught on, and the delight of the reader who has. The alerted
reader finds that Sokrates' method has become narrative and
interspersed with questions and answers that only advance the
narrative, while Plato's method is fully dramatic. The action is
advanced entirely by dialogue, with the author not one of the
speakers.
Once we have perceived that this is what Plato is doing, the rest of
Book III falls into place. Sokrates' narrative construction assumes
its rightful tone. It is a tone of banter (paidia) rather than straight
instruction (paideia). And we note that his interlocutors no longer
question Sokrates dialectically in the
 Page 259
eristic sense; nor does he question them except to get on with the
story until it has reached its staged "conclusions." The "systematic"
nature of the development now becomes part of Sokrates' humor,
and affords opportunities for satire that wouldn't otherwise arise.
What looked utopian, or like political science, is now seen to be
satirical and counter-utopian. What looked like theory of
knowledge is seen to be aesthetic construction for the sake of
intellectual completeness, as well as exhibitive criticism of an
attractive but disputed view about knowledge and opinion. It
remains true in all of this that humorous reference to serious
matters is also a way of stimulating serious thought about these
matters.
The Tone and Texture of Sokrates' Narrative Construction
397 e:diplous, pollaplous anêr. A colloquial translation would be
"two-in-one, moonlighting men." It was a common complaint in
ancient Athens that justice could not be well served by juror-judges
who were cobblers of farmers or what have you. It was common
knowledge by Plato's time that Spartan officers had taken to
money-making. In Book I Sokrates had already insisted that just as
health was best served by expert physicians and navigation by
fulltime, expert pilots, so government ought to be served by experts
in government. "Wouldn't it be nice," Sokrates is implying, "if we
could get everybody to do his job by training for it, doing it
wholeheartedly, and worrying about no other." Moreover, any
concern with money-making jeopardizes the integrity of the
expert's concern with his primary occupation, in that money-
making is itself an occupation requiring a different expertise that
distracts from the true performance of function. When a city has
become dysfunctional, what a relief to imagine it restored to full
functionality, with every man in it discharging his office devotedly
and no man in it an competent pollaplous anêr, a distracted
"multiple man."
399c-e: tautas duo harmonias . . . tautas leipe. . . . Lyra dê soi . . .
kai kithara leipetai. "Leave these two modes to us . . . you then
have left the lyre and the cither." The only two musical instruments
that will be allowed in the inflated city are the lyre and the cither
because they are Apollonian in their harmonies, simple, and
adequate. But in allowing the shepherds a small flute (syrinx),
Sokrates waxes unexpectedly onomatopoeic (399d6); and then
quite suddenly declares that by purifying and censoring the modes
of music-making they have also succeeded in purging the whole of
the fevered city! To complete the purification of the fevered city,
Sokrates adds, all that's needed is to also censor the rhythms that
will be allowed to go with these harmonies. So, by just
 Page 260
limiting the lyre and cither to two kinds of harmony and by
encouraging certain sorts of rhythm rather than others, the fevered
city will be made healthy andequally wonderfulthe restraint of the
fighting-men will be insured. Cither to the tiger you are riding, and
you'll be able to get off it safely.
402d-403c: Because they have been made musical, the guardians
can be trusted to fall in love only with those who have beautiful
souls; and because the intense pleasure of love subverts
temperance, intimacy will not be permitted between guardians and
their lovers. They will behave decorously, like fathers and sons.
But with the sarcasm comes a sugar lump, a rehearsal of the
standard Greek sexist fantasy of the coincidence of a beautiful
disposition and manner with a beautiful bodily form. Or is the
sugar lump just another bit of Socratic teasing?
424b-415d: Tis an oun hêmin . . . mêchanê genoito tôn pseudôn tôn
en deonti gignomenôn . . . gennaion ti hen pseudomenos peisai
malista men kai autous archontas, ei de mê, tên allên polin . . .
Mêden kainon . . . alla Phoinikikon ti, proteron men êdê pollachou
gegonos. "Could we somehow . . . contrive one of those falsehoods
that arises to suit a need . . . some one noble lie specially to
persuade the rulers themselves, and if not them, the rest of the city?
. . . nothing novel . . . just the sort of Phoenician thing that has
happened already in many places?" I blush to say so, says Sokrates,
but a cleverly derived lie on the old Phoenician model could well
help the the new state we are fabricating. We will persuade all with
our myth that the land itself engendered the different orders in our
city, and conferred on each of her children the particular proportion
of metals in his makeup. Those most fit to rule will be the ones
most mixed with gold; those most mixed with silver will be the
auxiliaries (epikouroi), those with iron and brass will be the
farmers and artisans. If the guardians could be persuaded that the
rigors of their early training were only a childhood dream, their
belief would become literal and they would fight for the state (and
their status) as for their mother. Besides, with gold in their souls
(416e)e they would need none in their pockets; they would be
incorruptible (!). It is, in any case, for their gold that people are
most admired (timiôtatoi).
415a: ho theos plattôn: I translate literally the passage in which this
pun is embedded. Like many puns it is at first unbelievable: "listen
then to the rest of the story. 'Brothers you certainly all are in this
city,' we shall say to them in our myth, 'but the God, in making (ho
theos plattôn) those of you who are fit to rule, mixed gold into your
origins, which is why these ones are most honored'." This play on
words can be taken in several ways. Without any strain it could
mean "the God in plato-ing those of you, etc." If we take it as "the
plato-ing God" it becomes the subject of "mixed gold into your
origins, etc." with only a little awkwardness. Most extravagantly, it
could also be taken as
 Page 261
"the God Plato." This calls up a picture of Plato, Zeus-like, giving
his consenting nod to the narrative fertility of his Sokrates. Platto
means "to make or shape" in Attic Greek.
415e ff. and 417a5-b3: Here Sokrates pulls off a great reversal, the
equivalent of the peripateia in Greek drama. The luxurious city,
which was to include all the amenities, is being turned into a
Spartan camp. The great danger of a military takeover of the state
by the guardians will never materialize because the right education
(tês orthês paideias) of these athletes of war would never allow it.
If this seems blithe or incautious in the light of the history of
militarism, it at any rate sets up the conditions for continuing the
discussion of the education of the guardians.
466d-468d: When the question is raised whether the projectd
community can in fact be realized among men (466d), Sokrates
evades the question by going into an uncalled-for discussion of the
war-training of children. This discussion culminates in the
assignment of rewards and punishments, respectively, to those who
show most courage and to those who show cowardice or are
captured by the enemy. The captured are simply abandoned
forever. The cowards, however, are demoted down to the ranks of
farmers and artisans. The one who wins the prize for valor will not
only be crowned by his peers, but will be allowed to love (philein)
any whom he pleases to do so, whether boy or girl. Glaucon adds
that in order to stimulate valor during a campaign, the man most
distinguished for bravery will by law be allowed to have
intercourse with, and will not be denied by, anyone who pleases
him; for this will lead to brave offspring.
Paul Shorey called this a piece of "deplorable factiousness," and
the one passage in Plato he would delete. But it is actually a sharp
satire against some deplorable Greek customs and fantasies. I mean
deplorable to Plato, not to his Glaucon. As for Plato's Sokrates, he
would not be engaged in satire if he didn't deplore what he was
satirizing. I'm not talking so much about the explicit bisexuality, as
about the condoned promiscuity to which even the unwilling must
legally yield. It is not much of a reward for a supposedly educated
guardian who has taken the supreme risk in battle. If this is not
satire upon some inadequate conceptions of love and courage, then
I'll have to admit that I don't know what satire is, which is possible,
and that Plato did not know much about love or courage, which is
impossible. It is obvious that the children and adolescents brought
out to watch the war (as part of Sokrates evasion of the question)
are more likely to fall within the scope of the guardians' erotic
license than to learn about fighting. And if this is objectionable, the
fevered and "purified" city's whole method of servicing the
institution of war must be objectionable. What will the
adolesclents, anyone of whom is now
 Page 262
subject to being sexually used, actually have learned about fighting
wars in the process? That the brave dead are accorded a hero's
grave, whereas the brave who also survive are formally ac claimed
for doing what they were trained to do, and are sexually indulged?
And don't we remember that at 403b Sokrates had enjoined chastity
upon the guardians in their relations with the young because sexual
pleasure is so intense it undermines temperance. If sexual
indulgence is appropriate after battle, and if the indulgence is for
the sake of the breed, why are boys made available?
Rereading the text, I conclude that Sokrates here is teasing
Glaucon, who has allowed that he is a recognized boy-lover. In any
case, not a thought is given to the effect of the suggested practice
on the unconsenting boys and girls. Kephalos's remarks about sex
in Book I seem to reflect a Greek fear that the practice of sex was
ever in danger of falling into a pattern of insatiability and
compulsiveness. The repeated injunction to be moderate, heard
everywhere in classical Greece, was of course an expression of this
fear.
Contradiction that it is of Sokrates at 403b, legalizing the erotic
availability of adolescents turns out be a remote consequence of the
community of wivesitself a veritably counter-Athenian notion. But
the community of wives is acclaimed by Sokrates to be the cause,
paradoxically (para to ethos 452), of the psychological unity of the
projected state (464a). It says something about the ironic nature of
Sokrates' discourse that he just as easily brings out objectionable
consequences of his own suggestions as he does the consequences
of unexamined beliefs of Glaucon, Adeimantus, or Thrasymachos.
It says, namely, that his proposals are deliberately provocative or
ironic. That the community of wives is so contrary to the social
habits and values of the Athenians, and that Glaucon claims so
much for it, confirms for us the provocative and comic intent with
which the suggestion is advanced. Doesn't it also imply that the
reform in musical education that was to "purify" the state and
assure the peaceableness of the guardians can not, by itself, be
relied on to do the job?
At Stephanus page 419, Adeimantus points out that the guardians
will not be a happy class, and will be parasitical upon the city like
idle mercenaries between wars (420). He is not answered until
much later by Sokrates, who assimilates the guardians for the
moment to the class of Olympic victors, whose honor is the
happiness of the whole city (465d ff.).
But Sokrates does sound a veiled warningveiled enough to keep his
interlocutors from taking alarm, but clear enough to alert the
reader. He does not elaborate it; the alerted reader, however, is free
to develop the warning. Paraphrasing Sokrates, its logical
antecedent would be, "if a guardian tries for a happiness that
negates his nature as a guardian and is not satisfied with the
moderate and orderly life . . . but is possessed by an unthinking
notion of
 Page 263
happiness that moves him to do what he has the power to do, and
take over everything in the city for himself . . ." "Then what?" we
ask. "Then," Sokrates evasively finishes, "it will be learned that
Hesiod was really wise when he said there is a way in which the
half can be greater than the whole." We elaborate what Sokrates
could not mention without bringing the discussion to an abrupt end.
Such a guardian will either be joined in his coup d'état, or opposed
by the other guardians. If they join him or he defeats them, there is
an end to the new city. If they oppose him successfully, Sokrates'
new system of musical education for soldiers will, still, have
proved insufficient to guarantee the internal security of the state he
is developing; for, what happened once might happen again and
with a different outcome.
Note that those among this unhappy class (419a) who are gifted
enough to be selected as rulers because of their "philosophical"
promise, are denied the freedom to continue to dwell among the
ideas, their love of which is just what makes them philosophically
promising. On a literalist reading dwelling among the ideas is, of
course, the best life. These few are forced by law to return and rule
among the inhabitants of the cave (519d). Intellectual happiness is
denied to the select best of the guardians as a class. What Sokrates
calls the happiness of the guardians seems to consist of the apt
fulfillment of their appropriate function, the honor they receive for
it, the practice of temperance and submission, and the achievement
of a pythagorean sort of knowledge which is being called
"wisdom." The precondition of this happiness is that the male and
female members of the guardian class must be effectively trained in
intelligent self-restraint (sôphrosynê), in soldiering, in the theory of
ideas, and in the application of the theory to the governance of the
city-state. By the end of Book VII this sober result has been
reached, as we've been seeing, by means of a number of discursive
tricks and comic turns. The platonizing tradition of interpretation
handles this paradox by scanting the discursive methods, and
focussing on the sober result as if it had been categorically asserted
and positively recommended, rather than as if it was being
ridiculed.
What we have here is like a caricature so good that the viewer is
made to face the humanity of his subject. Broader dashes fade in
the confontation, and with them the subject's satirized defects: "to
be this person is to be after all, human," the viewer thinks, rather
than asking, can there be humans like this?" In the first case we
feel, as with works of art, that we've learnt something in spite of
some unbelievable traits in the subject. In the latter case, which is
that of caricature that remains caricature, we are rightly amused or
repelled by real traits made perceivable by the caricature. In this
case the caricaturist brings out to bring down; in the first case, the
subject is allowed to project an authenticity that can't be brought
down. The Republic includes both sets of ef-
 Page 264
fects, with a preponderance of the second kind. But Plato has not
flinched from facing the political core of the problem of social
organization; he penetrates at moments to its inevitable contact
with naked power; hence the soberness with which his Sokrates can
also be taken.
Plato has brought into exhibition, with his satirical fabulation, the
unpleasant aspects and consequences of both Spartan and Athenian
beliefs and practices. It is the combined impact of these two kinds
of realization about political power and human practice (the one
tragic, the other comic) that earn for Plato his credibility as a
political thinker. The mistake of taking the satirical counter-utopia
of the fictional Sokrates as a normative political program simply
suppresses the irony in Plato's systematic review of the tragic facts
of war and power, and the comic facts of human practice and
unacknowledged concupiscence.
The Problem of Implementation and the Role of the 'Philosopher'
in the State
Sokrates' frequent practice of using myths or inventing allegories in
addition to his reasonings, as part of his attempts to enlighten his
interlocutors, distracts readers from the fabulous or nonliteral
import of the whole discourse of which the myths are a part. In
contrast to the parabolically intended story superadded to the
discussion, the rest of the discourse is taken non-allegorically or
non-dramatically. But if the rest of the discourse unfolds into satire
5 as in the Republic, it must of course be taken non-literarlly.
Auditors are assumed to be conscious of the situations which
Sokrates is satirizing; he is talking in a spirit of both exposition and
ironic exposure. Thus, in order to rightly appreciate Plato's
reflective activity, the reader must know something about the
customs, values, strivings and achievements of the Greeks from
about the middle of the fifth to the middle of the fourth century
B.C. But it is just because Plato's dialogical art reaches into
fundamental aspects of the human condition that he can also be
read with profit even when his social allusiveness is neglected, as it
mostly has been.6
Now, although the fictional Sokrates is quite gentle with those he
slyly calls the "true" philosophers in contrast to the Sophists, poets,
and politicians, he nonethless satirizes these 'philosophers' as well.
'True philosophers,' in fact, is his code-name for the orthodox,
Academic, or pythagorizing thinkers who assert the superior reality
of the Ideas and the ideal. But if we don't keep in mind that first
and foremost, Sokrates is satirizing the luxurious state that Glaucon
said he wanted, we won't understand the role of these 'true
philosophers' in the fabulated most-to-be-wished-for state; more
specifically, we won't
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understand the discussion about implementation of the projected
state (498a ff., and Book V, respectively).
In order to postpone the question of putting into practice the city he
outlined, Sokrates not only goes into the digression on military
pederasty discussed above, but also engages in an anti-Spartan
discourse on phil-hellenism and the proper relations among Greek
states (496b-471c. I call this discourse anti-Spartan because the
evidence is that Sparta, in the Archaic and Classical periods was,
(i) the most consistently harsh of victors toward her neighbors and
enemies, and (ii) the state that most emphasized its distinctive
differences from other Greeks.
Sokrates does not only procrastinate answering the question, but
has in the meantime said a host of things implying the
impracticality of the constitution of his "city in the sky." The
régime is intended as a strong purge and constitutional remedy for
a sick state, a city fevered (phlegmainousa 372e10) and weakened
by luxury (truphôsa 372e4). If something goes wrong with the
treatment; that is, if the guardians usurp their powers or fail in their
duty from bad breeding or ineffective education, then the luxurious
state has only exchanged one kind of ill-health for another. The bad
breedings follow from mistaken astrological calculations of the
"nuptial numbers," educational failures from ineffective musical
ratios or modes (545d-547a, and 399d-400d)! 7 If the treatment
fails, the luxurious state was bound to perish anyway at the hands
of a stronger enemy. But if the treatment suceeds, it is because the
luxurious way of life has been eliminated along with feverishness it
was causing. We see that Plato's Sokrates was not just treating
symptoms; though it often looks as if he is only playing. In any
case, it should be clear that the constitution he works out is not a
constitution for a healthy state.
It won't be right, then, for interpreters of Republic to raise the
question of implementation in the same terms as Glaucon, in a
literalist paraphrase of what he says (466d, 471c, 472c-d). What
Sokrates says is, "it was . . . a paradigm . . . we were looking for of
the sort of thing justice is." His purpose was to relate justness to
happiness (472c-d). "Our purpose," Shorey translates, "was not to
demonstrate the possibility of the realization of these ideals." The
last word in this translation is inserted by Shorey; its use involves
the difficulty of making injustice and the most unjust man "ideals,"
as well as justice and the just man. Bloom translates more strictly,
"We were not seeking them for the sake of proving that it's possible
for these things to come into being.'' His discourse, Sokrates
continues, is only a picture and must be taken as such; it is no less a
good picture because there is noting in existence that it copies, or
because it brings out what's negative about the most-to-be-wished
(malist'eiê kat'euchên)8 state which "is not entirely a day-dream"
(540d2).
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Sokrates next sets up the conditions for a joint satire of pure
intellectuality in politics and pure politics without intellectuality.
He asks, what change would both be the smallest possible move
that states could make, that would also produce the most far-
reaching consequences? To give full power at the top to 'the
philosophers' is the solemn answer (473d-e): precisely the kind of
power given to the rulers of Sokrates' paradigmatic city to the kind
of 'philosopher' who deals in the eternal ideas of the epistemology
of Book VI. The élitism here is also a recognition that drastic
political remedies require a dangerous concentration of power in
one or a few administrators. Plato's art is such that Sokrates'
satirical construction throws upincidentally but
felicitouslytheorems in the remedial political science of the
luxurious state. And what state in fourth century Greece was not in
need of remediation?
This is drastic and funny but not unserious. Sokrates implication is
that problem-solving including political problem-solving, (the
righting of wrongs, the ordering of confusion), is indeed a matter of
intellectuality. But when intellectuality insists on setting itself off
in its purity from other dianoetic functions and sources of psychic
energy, one not only gets the kind metaphysics that says that the
ideas alone are what is real and that the human world of everything
else is illusion, one also gets the kind of 'political science' in which
every individual is content to do one thing, in which everyone is
moderate and does his duty, in which warrior athletes share wives
and are content to remain warrior-athletes eternally training to
protect the comforts of the burgher class in which they cannot
share. One gets a world in which "philosophical" rulers, because
they have caught a glimpse of the eternal light, are expected to
function as leaders in the dark of the cave. One gets a society that
thinks a reform of the liberal-arts curriculum will generate
goodness in its graduates and will guarantee the internal security of
the state. One gets a world in which rationalizations have been
found for the most sexist of Greek fantasies, and in which
responsibility for one's mate and for one's children have been
eliminated.
In short, the price that the luxurious state must pay for survival
includes being governed by a kind of pythagorizing or
'philosophical' ruler who is naïvely pompous about numbers and
musical modes. It includes submitting to a rigidly Spartan type of
militarist life. It requires the sacrifice and exclusion of most of
Greece's literary riches and dramatic arts. We can believe that
Plato's Sokrates has in mind a connection between Athens's
military disasters and her greed, luxury, lack of discipline, and
inability to reform, and that the latter had something to do with her
disputatious intellectuality. He must have seen that the kind of
intellectuality fostered by Pythagorean mathematicism was
inimical to poetry and drama; and therefore an instance of the kind
of
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intellectuality that (like Positivism) is anti-intellectual because so
partial. For this is how Plato's Sokrates sees the luxurious city-state
and the Pythagorean 'philosophers.' We can already anticipate that
the return to the question of poetry in Book Ten, because it requires
the sacrifice of all of the city's literary arts and great dramatic
entertainments, isin its unacceptabilitythe final structural clue to the
impossibility of implementing the remedial constitution in Athens.
It would be unfair to the Sokrates of Republic not to notice that he
does leave room for distinguishing between another kind of
'philosopher' than the pythagorizing idealist whom he needs for his
systematic satire. "I think it necessary," he says at 474b, "to
distinguish . . . whom we mean when we dare assert that the
philosopher must rule:" when this has been clarified, it will be
seen, he saystongue-in-cheek, launching with quiet sarcasm into a
rehearsal of the fantasy of a pythagorist return to political powerit
will be seen to be "natural for them to both follow 'philosophy' and
to lead the city, and for the rest not to (!) undertake philosophy but
to follow the leader" (474c). This follows on what he had said, with
mock solemnity at 499b-c that "neither city nor constitution nor
mankind will ever be perfected" until the ''uncorrupted" and
knowing philosophers (i.e., the Academic pythagorizers) "take
charge of the state," and added that only if he said that this was
impossible (499c3) would he be ridiculed (499c5) for entertaining
day-dreams (euchaîs). If we ask, ridiculed by whom? the answer
has to be by the Academic pythagorizers, of course, who have
"hitherto been accounted useless" (achrêstoi (49966). For,
"when such 'philosophic natures,' at any time in the past or future or in
any foreign place outside our purview, have been or will come-to-be in
charge of the state, I am prepared to contend that the constitution I've
 described (hê eirêmenê politeia) has been, is, or will materialize
(genêsetai ge) at the moment (hotan) that this our Muse comes to
power in the city" (499c10-d5).
Sokrates' intent comes through when he quickly, perhaps mutedly,
adds, "It's not impossible for this to happen. I'm not speaking of
impossibilities" (499d6). The supposedly "affirmative" passages on
the possibility of implementation, at 502b and 502c, turn out to be
conditional only in their grammatical surface-form: "for when a
ruler will have laid down the laws and usages we have gone
through . . . it is surely not impossible that the citizens will want to
carry them out"; and, "that these things [the régime described] are
best, if possible"; and finally that, "it would appear . . . that what
we have said about legislation is best if it could come to be, and
that although it is difficult for it
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to come to be, it is not however impossible." So insistently
hypothetical is Sokrates' phrasing here that there can be little doubt
of the unwillingness-to-affirm behind their evasive tone. That what
Sokrates is advancing is some political criticism not a political
program, is confirmed by the passage in Book IX where Sokrates
concedes that "the city whose founding [we] have described in
words (têi en logois keimenêi) . . . can be found nowhere on earth"
(epei gês oudamou . . . autên einai). "But perhaps," adds Sokrates,
"there is a pattern (paradeigma) laid up in heaven (ouranôi) for
him who looking, sees it, and can settle for it, or in it." 9
We can now settle on the meaning of the allegory of the mutinous
ship (488a7-489c), with which Sokrates meets Adeimantus's
challenge to his giving of power to the 'philosophers' whom
everybody knows to be useless (achrêsthoi). Sokrates has in mind
the cosmic or ascetic philosophers, who though they may not look
as good as the well-favored ship's pilot, are going to be more
perceptive (488b1) and better navigators than he, since their whole
concern is with calculation and with order (!). But in making the
analogical case for their usefulness as scientists and navigators,
Sokrates admits that they lack the political art of acquiring public
office (488e) that would allow them to save the ill-managed ship of
state. Now, Plato's Sokrates mixes his parables as others mix their
metaphors. He goes from here to the analogy of the multitude as
the great beast (493a-e), which is either blind or sophistical itself or
must be placated by expert Sophistic handlers. This overlaps with
Sokrates' account of how the best-endowed natures are corrupted
by the public and diverted from the arduous pursuit of knowledge.
We thus get the dilemma that the unworldly knowledge-seeker who
"knows" how to rule but lacks the art of holding office and
soothing the multitude is quickly destroyed by it, whereas the man
of talent who is responsive to the crowd is soon corrupted by it. It
follows in the over-arching allegory of the state that the drastic and
ascetic measures of the remedial constitution are the only
remaining alternative, "difficult" and "impossible" as this
alternative is.
The Machinery of the Divided Line, and the Conception of Justice
In the Parmenides the father of philosophy told the (dramatically)
'young' Sokrates that what is distinctive about philosophy is that in
approaching its subjects (i) it proceeds in terms of what is
graspable by reason alone more than anything else (i.e., mainly in
conceptual terms), (ii) it considers antilogical alternatives and
hypothetical consequences, and (iii) it undertakes a wide and
thorough search. In the Republic we find a 'mature' Sokrates
emphasizing (i)
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again, but with a stress on grasping the 'eternal realities' rather than
on problem-solving or settling indeterminacies (500b-c). We also
find him practicing (iii) in a satirically directed way from 372 on,
and mentioning it. And insofar as he brings out the remoter
counter-cultural consequences of 'saving' the luxurious state, he is
practicing (ii), but without mentioning it.
The emphasis on acquiring a grasp of the eternal, unchanging
realities shows that Sokrates is talking about a certain sort of
philosopher, not about philosophy as such. The allusiveness here is
to the numerological and ascetic aspects of the Pythagorean
discipline or way of life. But if good thinking depends only on the
ability to see things mainly in terms of reason, i.e.
conceptualistically, then Pythagoreanism is not enough, even if it
serves as a beginning. For reason is not only mathematical, nor are
concepts only numerical. So, the first thing to notice about the
epistemology and metaphysics which Sokrates puts on exhibit in
Book VI is that it can be seen to have made Pythagoreanism more
plausible by adding other kinds of ideas than numbers to what is
'real.' And the theory of ideas, as diagrammatized by the Divided
Line, can be seen to be a generalizationwithin Sokrates' extended
playful-nessof mathemorphic Pythagorean idealism.
Now, the resulting theory of ideas is a systematization or
"explicitation" of the assumption behind the technique of
conceptualization that calls for essential definitions. It is not a
theory of knowledge that fits other techniques of thinking or other
kinds of definition. The call for essential definitions, which is
voiced in Book VI (507b ff., 535b; and also V.476b-d), by the
fictional Sokrates is a demand upon the perceiver to isolate in
thought and fix in speech the set of unchanging characters of a
thing that distinguishes it from the things not in its own class, and
to group it with those that are. This is the demand that generates the
'immutable realities' that are alone worthy of the 'true philosopher's'
contemplation. It isn't an accident in this theory of knowledge that
the objects of thought or ideas of things come out as what is truly
real and imperishable, while the objects of perception emerge as
imperfect, perishable, and unreliable.
Made to order as it is, this is the epistemology needed to
rationalizae the inversions and deprivations of pythagorizing
ascetisim. Sokrates needs to feature the theory at this point in his
fabulation about 'good government' by militarist askêsis and 'true
philosophy,' because the 'true philosophy' (improved
Pythagoreanism) he is satirizing got its ascetic practices from its
theory of reality. The discursive State, must, naturally, have a
theory of reality that justifies the political practices he is
sardonically pushing. Thus, the epistemolgy and metaphysics now
broached by Sokrates arise at this point for good dramatic and
narrative reasons. They sanction and cap the systematic satire
against
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the luxurious state. That the theory of ideas came to hold so much
interest in its own right does not detract from its aesthetic
appropriateness in the Republic. Nor should this interest obscure
for us (as it has in the past) the playful virtuosity and masked
paralogisms with which Sokrates presents the theory towards the
end of Book VI. It is another irony that in all of his works Plato's
extraordinary mind causes the theories he is playing with to
undergo improvements at the hands of their proponents. For some
readers they are so improved that they become acceptable without
further question.
It remains the case, however, that the epistemology featured within
the Republic is subject to all the criticisms implied by the
procedures recommended by Parmenides in his dialogue. While
these epistemological deficits have been "answered" by
Neoplatonists and idealists, they are nowhere countered by any
character in the dialogues. The dramatic rôle of the theory in the
Republic was to point up the strange consequences, for existence,
of a view that believes only numbers and ideas to be real, and that
what is real does not change. The Sokrates who is telling a long
story about how the sociopolitical order might be changed cannot
be expected to believe that 'the philosophers' he is putting into
power are right in thinking that reality is changlessnessalthough
once in power, they will allow no changes.
The changes in the political order which Sokrates so shrewdly
discusses in Book VIII are real enough and freighted with real
consequences; they are not just passing examples of some
unchanging types of political order. Timocracy, oligarchy,
demagogy and tyranny may all be unhappy forms of the degenerate
state; but their purpose in Book VIII is to focus on, sharply and
amusingly, the painful reality of political deterioration and bad
statemanship in Plato's time. Those who insist that the theory of
ideas is being applied to politics in Book VIII should consider that:
if tyranny, demagogy, oligarchy, etc. are particular examples of the
forms of the state, Sokrates still treats their degeneracy as real; but
if they are forms of the state, then this implies (for the theory of
ideas) that there are degenerate forms.
In being empirically faithful to aspects of its political subject-
matter, Book VIII doesn't cease to be knowingly satirical. There is
no denying the prima facie aptness of the theory of ideas in relation
to the theoretical and mathematical sciences. That is just why
Sokrates can 'expound' it as the theory of his geometrizing ascetic
philosophers. But it's worth drawing attention to the fact that
Sokrates hasn't found it applicable to the practical science of
politics. We remember how useless to his fellows, and how
vulnerable, the light-blinded philosopher is who returns to the
image-governed politics of the ill-lit cave.
Because Book VIII depicts worthless types of mencontrary to the
instructions of Books II and IIIthe Republic itself would not be
allowed to circulate
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among the guardians. Here is another irony, that the underlying
observational political sociology that comes to expression in Book
VIII, is to have no place in the ideal or most desirable state. We
now know what conclusion to draw from this irony. But this is the
place to add that as an implicit commentary on the possibilities of
politics, the Republic, like the Gorgias, is a profoundly pessimistic
document in its overall effect. If all constitutions are corruptible
and the ideal constitution is impossible (as in Republic), and if
politicians can only mislead and not benefit the citizens (as in
Gorgias), then these two dialogues complexly enact a very
negative exhibitive judgment on both constitutional theorizing and
practical political science.
This is also the right place take up what I call "the non-incident
with Thrasymachos," which failed to happen at 498d in Book VI.
The question was whether it's believable that people will ever give
absolute power to 'the philosophers,' as required by Sokrates'
fabulation. Adeimantus has his doubts, and as we are given to infer,
has tried to prod Thrasymachos back into the discussion against
Sokrates. But Thrasymachos never opens his mouth, and from his
silence and Sokrates' words we understand that he is willing to let
Sokrates be friendly. It is fair to ask, why does Plato take the
trouble to show us Adeimanus hoping that Thrasymachos will take
up the discussion against Sokrates again?
The disputable nature of the requirement that would give power to
'the philosophers' makes the question relevant, but so does the fact
that Adeimantus has just allowed his objections (at 487b-e) to be
bypassed by Sokrates. According to Adeimantus and Glaucon (at
the beginning of Book II) Thrasymachos was not answered fully
enough in Book I; yet here he chooses not to intervene, only to
remain silent at this crux and opportunity.
The reason is that Plato wants his reader to gather that
Thrasymachos has understood that Sokrates is no longer engaged in
disputation (as in Book I, with himself or Polemarchos) but is
instead in the full swing of his ironic construction. Sokrates did
announce that he was going to tell a long story, and has begged the
indulglence of his auditors. Thus, Adeimantus's objections at 487b
are beside the point; for they assume that Sokrates has forced his
interlocutors to the proposition just reached by means of formal
disputation. Actually, the auditors have been giving him their
assent because he is telling them what the cleaned-up state will
look like. He is doing it with some show of logic, and Adeimantus
may have fallen for the paralogic, forgetting that he and his brother
have given permission to Sokrates to proceed with his fabulation.
10
In dramatic perspective the theory of ideas isn't only an exhibitive
criticism of the Pythagorean sense of reality, it is also an evasion of
the question about
 Page 272
'the good.'It came as Sokrates' response to Glaucon's question at
506d. Sokrates replies that he can answer, not for 'the good itself,'
but only for the offspring (ekgonos) of the good. He can tell him
what the good generates, namely, the theory of ideas and the
separation of the ideal realities from the illusory world of
appearances; but he cannot tell what 'the good itself' is.
In other words, though the fictional Sokrates repeatedly calls for
esential definitions, he cannot himself give Glaucon an essential
definition of 'the good.' This parallels the way in which the Divided
Line episode will preach the desirability of getting to certain
foundations beyond the hypothetical knowledges of the special
sciences, but will not tell us how to get it outside of group
indoctrinationthe euphemism for which is 'the dialectic.' And the
reader's willingness to accept as appropriate the Republic's seeming
inconclusiveness on these matters, becomes a test of his or her
dramatic understanding of the Republic.
Is the Republic also inconclusive about the problem of justice as it
was raised in Book I by Sokrates himself, and in Book II by
Adeimantus and Glaucon? Here the case is different; we do get a
kind of answer. But it is not a straight demonstration of the thesis
defended by Sokrates against Polemarchos and Thrasymachos; nor
is it the essential definition of justice some readers have hoped for.
At 588b Shorey misleadingly translates, "now we have agreed on
the essential nature of injustice and just conduct" where the Greek
says "since we have agreed on the respective effects [or
effectiveness] of acting unjustly and justly" (IX. 588e). If these
words are going to be taken as any kind of definition, they are at
best an operational or functional definition, not an essential
definition as Shorey would have it.
Courage, temperance, and sagacity were defined in the context of
the luxurious state. These, according to Sokrates here, are three of
the four excellences that make a good man; the fourth is justness
(dikaiosynê). The auditors are told they can get an understanding of
justic by thinking of the good man and subtracting the three
excellences just quoted: the remainder of his nature will be justice.
They must also keep in mind the ordering premiss of the
remediated state, that one man may only do the one job he is best
suited for (432d-433d). Justice in the individual is thus part of
goodness (aretê), and a function of the "purified" state. The
auditors are never actually told what goodness is, and they are told
that the "paradigmatic" state (592b-c) exists only in the realm of
discourse. So, what the non-incident with Thrasymachos was
pointing to, structurally speaking, and functioning as a reminder of
is the difference between the formal disputation about justice in
Book I and the satirical fable about it from the middle of Book II to
the end. The fable conveys, among other things, that justice is very
hard to come by.
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Sokrates caps the monumental construction with the final allegory-
within-his-fabulation known as the myth of Er. It concerns the son
of Armenios (614b ff.) who rose up from his funeral pyre to report
what he had seen and been allowed to remember from the world of
the dead. There is a delicate turn to the report that connects it
structurally to the question of the implementation or desirability of
the régime in the sky.
In the world between incarnations there are many destinies to
choose from. "The drawer of the first lot . . . was one who had
come down from the sky (ek tou ouranou); he had lived his former
life in a well-ordered community (tetagmenêi politeia) sharing in
excellence (aretês) from habituation but without philosophy." Such
a man, we notice, is of the same class as the auxiliaries who have
not studied philosophy in the projected city-state but have been
conditioned to be excellent. The choice among possible destinies
that this sort of man makes, Sokrates points out, is the most
unhappy and destructive of all. He chooses to be a tyrant. And he
chooses the tyrant's way of life because "he is unpracticed in
troubling" (ponôn agymnastous). He blames the disastrous life that
results from his choice not on himself but on chance and the Gods.
Indirect as the short allegory is, it clearly tells its auditors that the
whole constitutional scheme and its pythagorizing, educational
foundations produce only a shaky kind of excellence in the class
whose training was discussed in detail. And could there be a text
more conclusive than this (619b-d) to show that Sokrates is being
ironic throughout his long discourse, however serious "his" or
Plato's ulterior political and philosophic aims may also have been?
Notes to Section II
1. I venture another parallel: The Dutch master Houkgeest's
painting of Niewe Kirke in Delft (in the Mauritius House Museum)
reproduces the graffiti on the pedestals of some of the columns.
Attributing to Plato as his own the opinions which speakers voice
in his dialogues, is like attributing to the painter Houkgeest the
statements contained in the graffitti of the church which is his
subject.
2. "Statesman" is the translation of basilikê anthrôpos; so it should
not be used to also translate politikos anthrôpos. The latter should
be rendered "political person" or "politician." Stasiastikos, the third
term used in the Politicus means, "party politician" or ''partisan."
3. (Page 9, note 4).
4. 359a: . . ."it is for their profit to agree with each other neither to
do injustice nor to suffer it; and . . . this is the beginning of laws
and conventions among men, and this is the origin and substantial
nature of justice (dikaiosynê)"
 Page 274
366e: "But what each of them [i.e. justness and unjustness] is in
itself, by its own inherent force, when it is within the psychê of
its possessor . . ."
367b: "Don't merely show us by reasoning (logôi) that justice is
superior to unjustness, but make it clear what each of these in
and of itself does to him who has it, whereby the one is evil and
the other good."
5. A satire to which we are alerted by the sardonic tone with which
Sokrates responds to Glaucon's request to look at, and live in, a
luxurious city, from 372e3 on in Book II.
6. And, we add, even when the so-called argumentation in the
dialogues is the focus of logicalist attention. The reader will have
noticed that I translate logoi as "reasonings" or "discourses" more
often than as ''arguments." The logicalism of his time, like Plato's
own knowledge of mathematics and the other conceptual materials
in his works, is absorbed by and into the dialogism that draws his
readers into those aspects of intellectual and political life which the
dialogues reflect upon.
7. The passing but deep joke against the Pythagorean faith in
numbers is taken up in the last part of this chapter.
8. The most to be wished for state. It has not been noticed enough
that the Republic uses this language with some frequency; viz. at
Rep.III.399b5: euchêi = "prayer"; Rep.V. 450d1: euchê = "wish-
thought"; Rep.V.456b12: oudè euchaîs = "not utopian";
Rep.VII.540d2: mê pantáipasin . . . euchas = "not altogether a
wish-dream". The standard "Ideal State" takes the affective quality
out of "the most desirable" or "most-to-be-wished-for" state.
9. The main clause of the antecedent in the first quotation has a
participial construction that gives it conditional force (as happens
in ancient Greek); and we find that what is conditionally proposed
in the consequent of the compound sentence is only the possibility
that the citizens might want (ethelein) to carry out the projected
laws. Even this possibility is qualified by the particle dêpou
("surely"), which in its reigned certainty has a dubitative or
mocking effect. The second passage quoted is part of a claim,
advanced with irony, that Sokrates has already sufficiently
rehearsed the conditional "that these things are best, if (eiper)
possible." The third passage quoted, ostensibly a summary of the
preceding, asserts not a fact but a relationship of a hypothetical
sort, namely, that if (ei) it could be realized then "the polity which
Sokrates has fabled in words" (hê politeia, hên mythologoumen
logôi, 501e) would be the best to follow.
10. This is not unlike the situation in the Phaedo, where we are
prompted to see the 'companions' taking Sokrates reasonings as if
literally intended, even while Simmias and Kebes are quite aware
of Sokrates' detachment and intellectual dominion over the subject-
matter.
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Section III:
The Mathematical Humor in Books VIII and IX
Structural and Allusional Ironies of the 'Nuptial Number'
Readers of translations which render only one or two of the dozens
of word-platys, witticisms or puns in the Republic can be said, in
strict fairness to Plato, to have read only a translation based on
some generalized platonist interpretation of it. This would be not so
much because all translation imports interpretation of the original,
but because readings which are oblivious to the abundant irony,
wit, and humor of the dialogue are the textual foundation upon
which platonists and other literalist readers have always based their
understanding of the work. This chapter will, therefore, bring
forward a representative sample of what is withheld by literalist
translations.
Note at once that translations which claim to be literal cannot
really be so if they omit a whole dimension of the original. By
omitting the wit, word-play, irony, and humor of the original they
condemn themselves to be simply literalist. We take up one of the
funniest passages of all, both because of its surprising complexity
and its lack of subtilety: the elevation of language in it is so visibly
an affectation that it turns, in its pomposity, into a satire of its own
elevation. Plato's artistry, moreover, primes us to the humor of the
passage by preceding it with a self-focusing device, 1 just as we get
to it, that warns against the Muses doing exactly the kind of thing
that Sokrates is about to do (545d8-e3).
Sokrates, beginning Book VIII, is trying to tell Glaucon "in what
way a timocracy might emerge from an aristocracy" (545c-d).
Don't change-overs in the constitution only happen when "those
who have the rule" are divided among themselves, he says waxing
oratorical. Shall we then pray, like Homer, to the Muses to tell us
how faction first fell upon the princes;2 and say that they are
speaking in a tragical high-flown way, pretending seriousness but
having fun with us as if we were children (545e)? How will they do
that (ºB)? As follows:
Since destruction overtakes everything that exists anyway, our
polis will also be undone; for the best calculations of those bred to
be the rulers will not prevent unblessed breedings out of season.
This is because, for the begettings to be godly (theíoi, 546b4), they
have to happen at a time governed by a complete (téleios) number.
But human births, Sokrates continues (challengingly3 and tongue-
in-cheek), must come under
 Page 276
"the first number in which increases by root and square are given three
dimensions, with four marking-points of things that make like and
unlike, that wax and wane, and make all commensurable together and
rational, from which numbers, three and four wedded with five and
cubed produce two harmonies, one square, so many times a hundred,
one oblong: one side being one hundred squares of the rational
diameter of five less one each, or of the irrational diameter less two; the
other side one hundred cubes of three. This whole number, geometrical,
master of gestation on earth, is controller of better and worse births"
(W.H.D. Rouse).
In getting to the humorand geniusof what's going on in this passage
and its environment, we must obviate the linguistic difficulties
which might otherwise block its perception; they may safely be
relegated to a long footnote. 4
If Plato himself was doing something mathematical of which he
was in control and to which there is a solution as he put these
words in Sokrates' mouth, it would follow that what they represent
is a problem calling for such outstanding numerical agility as to be
a challenge to the mathematical pretenders. It would also seem to
be a problem not aurally soluble without the aid of graphics. But if
it had no solution (contrary to what we will find), then Plato's
Sokrates would simply be laughing at the mathematical pretenders,
who would not be able to tell whether it was a solution, while also,
as usual, continuing to play with and gently satirize some of the
latest intellectual developments in Pythagorean or pythagorizing
circles. The complexity of the calculations called for is, in any
case, a way of either laughing at the mathematical pretenders, or
with both those who can solve the problem and those who don't
have such pretensions.
But what does it mean that the problem can be worked out on
platonist or neoplatonist assumptions, as J. Adam has worked it out
in his commentary to the Republic.5 Rouse's summary of Adam's
solution is quoted verbatim in an appendix to this essay, which the
reader may now wish to consult. To see next how this interlude fits
with the rest of the work, we must move from the textural level of
analysis to the structural or architectonic level. We have to look at
the location of this passage in relation to what's going on in the
dialogue as a whole. It means that Plato, in his detached way, is
making a gift to his pythagorizing friends of some interesting
mathematizable but mythical correlations which he knew they
would enjoy. Trapped into the mythification by the mathematics,
they would be smiled at as mythifiers6 by rationalists but pleased
with themselves over the pythmagoric7 accession to their stock of
numerological treasures.
 Page 277
Now, something like what is going on here has happened before, in
the extended fabulation within which Sokrates puts on exhibit (and
so inevitably satirizes) a picture of the Ideal State and its problems.
What happened before can be seen to have occurred when the
reader reaches the end of Sokrates' ironic re-invention (and
improving) critique of the pythagorizing curriculum in Bk. VII, the
critique that culminates in a discussion of 'dialectic' as the capstone
art-and-science required for the correct perception 8 of reality. The
question had been raised as to what non-banausic arts, in addition
to music and gymnastics, the warriors should be required to study:
ti oun . . . mathêma anankaîon polemikôi andrì thêsomen (522e1)?
First came arithmetic and calculation studied, however, in such a
way as to lead to "the contemplation of the nature of number by
pure thought . . . and to facilitate the conversion (metastrophês) of
the soul from what is perishable to truth and reality" (525c).
Geometry will be the next requirement, Sokrates had continued,
fitting his attitude to the Pythagorean view of the matter, "for
geometry is the knowledge of what is eternally existent" (527b5-6),
and not "a practice . . . of squaring and protracting or fitting-and-
joining" (527a6-7). Stereometry must be the next study because it
is presupposed by astronomy the non-utilitarian science that
"compels the soul to look upwards (!) and leads 'from here to
there''' (529a2-3).9 Astronomy, the fourth study-requirement, is that
which deals with being (tò ón) and the invisible (aóraton). It must
be followed by the study of harmony which the Pythagoreans call
its sister-science (530d7), as long as the latter can be made to serve
the purpose of "coming to examine the vexed problems
(problêmata aníasin, 531c3-4) of which numbers are inherently
concordant and which not and why in each case."
The problem, in other words, is to be able to tell
mathematicallyahead of time not after the fact of the measurable
melodywhich ratios and chords will be harmonious. The problem is
called "devilish" or "superhuman" (daimónion) by Glaucon, but is
called "useful" by Sokrates if it can help him who searches for the
good and the beautiful. Sokrates is again improving ironically on
the Pythagoreans' views of music, suggesting (in line with the
theory of ideas) both (i) that these should become more apriorist
and theoreticist, and (ii) that they could be brought into relation
with the theory of the good. The historical irony is that the satirical
suggestions became, respectively, the literal scientific research-
project of succeeding Pythagoreans, and that of the later system-
building Neoplatonists! The suggestion about 'the dialectic,' we
note, brings Sokrates' discourse on the education of the guardians
back into narrative line with the story he is fabulating about the
ideal city in the sky.10
This, we can now see, parallels what the challenge of calculating
the nuptial
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number effectuates: namely, it is an a priori, mock-numerological
or Pythagorean guarantee of the mettle of the warrior-class as well
as an excuse to be held in reserve to cover the failures of the Ideal
State when taken literally as a political program. Secondly, it is an
allegorized reminder of the difficulties in said state should it be
implemented, given the gap between calculation and human sexual
practices. That only the most competent mathematicians would
know enough to be able to perform the calculation is quite in line
with the élitism of the Archons to be selected out from the warrior-
class. It is also, of course, a matter of some behind-the-scenes
amusement to Plato, the competent mathematician who is Sokrates'
stage-manager in this and the other dialogues.
To the philosopher of art, Plato's discursive practice here also
suggests a corollary in literary aesthetics, namely, that some works-
of-art have so deep a coherence that they allow or suggest coherent
secondary elaborations based on exogenic interpretants. 11 Finally,
that the specifications for the number have to be understood in
terms taken from the anti-literary and exogenic neoplatonist
tradition of Plato-interpretation both tells us something about
contemporary intellectual conditions in Speusippus' Academy, and,
circularly, tells us that those for whose benefit Plato is composing
were also those whom he thought would understand the
numerology with which he has loaded Sokrates's discourse.
Some Textural Ironies
Let us now look at some places where Plato's Sokrates is being
funny, creating some "humor by extension," as we might call it.
The guardians, Sokrates is saying at 395b8ff., are to be released on
principle from all other artisanship because they must be the
craftsmen of the freedom of the city; they may pursue only what
contributes to this, and their re-enactments may be only of this
freedom. If they are to do any acting (eán de mimôntai, 395c3),
they may perform only what is appropriate to brave, sôphron,
pious, free men; for it is to this kind of acts that they must be
habituated. Thus we will not permit our wards to act the part of
women, young or old, either quarrelling or calling on the gods,
either inflating themselves for their good fortune or lamenting their
grievous misfortune, still less women in love, in heat, in labor or in
sickness. Nor may they play the part of slaves of any gender, or of
cowards, or imitate the misdeeds of mockers and cursers whether
drunkards or nefarious, nor those of bad or mad men or women.
They will not even be allowed to imitate blacksmiths, oarsmen or
their time-keepers; and neither may they neigh like
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horses, or low like bulls, or plash like rivers or sound like either the
sea, the thunder-clap or any such thing. That the lively list of
ignobilities is so long and some of it so improbable, stresses for the
reader that the tone in which it is spoken is one of banter (paidiá)
not of instruction (paideîa).
Note next how the transition is made to some witticisms that are
more allusional than textural or imagistic. When the rhetor,
Sokrates goes on to tell Glaucon (396e3), must include doings of
which a good man would be ashamed, he will naturally proceed
much less by mimetic re-enactment and very much more by
straight narrative. But the debasing kind of speaker, who thinks
nothing unworthy of himself, will imitate anything from stormy
weather to creaking machinery, from pan-pipes to birds and beasts.
His diction will work wholly through mimetic voicings and
gestures, and hardly at all through narrative. In contrast to such lax
recitalists, the good speaker who is right for our polity will need
only two musical modes to go with his words, the brave or Dorian
and the free or Phrygian mode. Such a speaker can do without, as
our city must do without, all multi-strung many-keyed zithers and
panharmonic pipes: out, too, with the outsiders who make them and
whom we should not support.
Sokrates is allusively using Pythagorean preferences about 'purity'
in music, notions which rated some of the Greek musical modes
over others, on behalf of the comic cleansing from his "ideal city"
of all carnivalesque or Tragic entertainments. Auditors and readers
of the dialogue would, upon reflection, notice that in this city there
will be neither compensatory fun at the popular level (as at the
Lenaia), norin the absence of Tragedydeep enlightenment at a more
intellectual civic level (as at the Great Dionysia). And these were
cultural activities whose absence the habituated Athenian public
would surely feel, if not resent. The point, in being subtly counter-
Athenian, is also subtly counter-Utopian. It is another measure
among many signalling, like the outrageously counter-Athenian
proposal about the community of wives, the paradoxical (para to
êthos) or repugnantly contrary-to-custom shape of the Ideal State
which Sokrates is constructing. The allusiveness and musicological
details in the discourse Sokrates is holding with Glaucon, a reputed
music-lover (398e1), are again evidence of Plato's considerable
knowledge of music and the music-controversies of his time, in
spite of Sokrates' claim to ignorance about them (ouk oida . . . tas
harmonías, 399a4).
At 399c-e, however, Sokrates suddenly says that by allowing to it
only the two instruments, the lyre and the simple cithara, plus the
two modes he is in fact purifying (diakathaírontes) the luxurious
city; for these are Apollonian in their harmonies, simple and
adequate. Interrupting himself for a moment, Sokrates here allows
the shepherds, by exception, to keep their herding-flutes;
 Page 280
but he doesn't fail to wax suitably onomatopoeic in expected (or
perhaps mock) response to the erotic associations of the flute in
Greek culture. 12 In any case, this reform in the musical education
of the guardians will not only assure their peaceableness and block
any inclination the warrior-class might have to take over
"everything in the city" (to hapanta en têi polei, 466c1), it will also
keep the feverish city healthy, if combined with the other counter-
Athenian measures slyly put forward in Sokrates' ironic
reconstitution of the Ideal State.
Now Sokrates had been talking about modes of mimetic activity
since 399c, and as if interested in the subject for its own sake. At
397e, we are allowed to perceive the literary determinant of this
development. Sokrates wanted to bring the conversation around to
a sociopolitical question much discussed in the democracy, that of
the double-dipping or multiple, moon-lighting man (diploûs,
pollaploûs anêr, 392e2). It was a common complaint that justice in
the law-courts could not be well served by state-paid juror-judges
who were actually full-time cobblers, farmers, tradesmen or
artisans. We recollect that in Book I Sokrates had insisted that, just
as health is best served by expert physicians and navigation by
qualified pilots, so government ought to be served by those
knowledgeable in government. "Would it not be a good thing,"
Sokrates is implying, if we could get everybody do his job well by
training whole-heartedly to practice it, and not have to worry about
supplementary jobs for money. Doesn't any concern with money-
making jeopardize the integrity of the expert's concern with his
primary function, given that money-making is itself an art requiring
a different expertise that distracts from the true performance of
function (346a-c)? When a city has become as dysfunctional as the
feverish city, what a relief to imagine it restored to full
functionality, with every man in it discharging his office devotedly,
and no man an incompetent pollaplous anêr, a distracted "multiple
man."13
Modelling for Fun, and the Feasiblity of the Discursive Polity
In Book IX of Republic Sokrates takes his auditors from an inquiry
into how the tyrannic man develops, within the cyclical
deterioration suffered by every state, out of the demotic or
demagogic man (571a),14 to the admission, at 592b, that "the city
whose founding they have described in words (têi en lógois
keiménêi) can be found nowhere on earth" (epei gês oudamoû . . .
autên eínai). "But perhaps," adds Sokrates, ''there is a pattern
(parádeigma) laid up in heaven (ouranôi) for him who looking,
sees it, and can settle for, or in, it."
Non-interlocutory or counter-dialogical, silent or literalist, readings
of the surface-meanings of the prose in this book all maintain that it
is trying to
 Page 281
show that justice is demonstrably better, more profitable, and more
conducive to happiness than injustice. Now this was what Sokrates
said, back in Book II, that he would try to do for Adeimantus and
Glaucon whose accounts, at the beginning of that book, of the
apparent advantages of unjustness were quite earnest and rather
worried. But it is not what he's been doing in the dialogue since his
radical change in tone, at 372e-373aff., in response to Glaucon's
rejection of the minimally necessary, true and healthy city
(anankaiotátê, alêthinê, hygiês polls) as a "city for pigs," in favor
of the luxurious or fevered city (truphôsa, phlegmaínousa polis).
"If what you want," he says, "is to take a look at the fevered city-
state, there's nothing to prevent us from doing so." Accordingly, the
extended look which they now take at the sick city is conducted by
Sokrates in a consistently sardonic, ironizing tone of voice. Of
course, Sokrates also often sounds exploratory or interrogative,
mildly or strongly so, because he is constructing an ideal city-state.
Because it is a fevered state, however, it will be in need of
remediation; so, as he builds the Ideal State to see what it looks
like, Socrates must also build into it the remedies that will both
bring down the fever and defend it from external predations upon
its surpluses and luxuries. Hence its need for an invincible warrior-
class, conditioned into submissiveness to an archon-class with the
pythagorizing education suited to the rulers of a militarized state.
Just as it is the anti-poetic bias of the Pythagorean fraternities that
lurks (or, is being alluded to) behind the need for literary
censorship that keeps reappearing 15 throughout Sokrates'
ironically-ideal State, so it is the Pythagorean preference for one-
man rule or rule by the few that is behind both the claim in Book
IX that the happiest city-state is that with kingly rule
(basileuoménês, 576e4). This is also what's behind the earlier
passages that elevated 'the philosophers' into models of the kingly
ruler (basiléas de autôn eînai tous en philosophían, te kai pros ton
pólemon . . . arístous, 543a5-8). It was, of course, also behind the
promotion (pour épater les bourgeois) of the philosophy professors
to the kingship back in Book V, at 473c9-e1 (and at 499b8f. in
Book VI). Here in Book IX, the enjoyments of the rational king are
said to be the greatest and most authentic and those of the tyrant the
emptiest (aêdéstata ara . . . ho tyrannos biôsetai, ho de basileús
hêdista, 587b) as the conclusion of Sokrates' satirico-critical rating
of the sorts of men and the kinds of state that these sorts lead to.
So we come to the mathematico-metaphoric amusement that the
comparison is made to yield when the proportional amounts of
pleasure enjoyed by the two types are arithmetized. Does not the
tyrant come third from the oligarch, since the demagogic man is in
between them? But the oligarchic man is again third from the
kingly man if we insert the aristocratic man between
 Page 282
them. So, three times three (i.e., 9) is the arithmetical distance
between the tyrant and authentic pleasure. But the phantom
pleasure of the tyrannic man would seem to be a plane figure,
according to the number of its magnitude. Then squaring this [9 x
9], and cubing it (81 x 9, katà de dynamin kai tritên auksên dêlon
dé apótasin, 587d), see what the distance becomes. It's visible
surely to a good reckoner (logistikói). Conversely, if you want to
say how far off the king is from the tyrant in true happiness, when
you've done your multiplication and addition, you'll find that the
king lives seven-hundred-and-twenty-nine-times (enneakaieikosi-
kai-eptakosio-plasiakis) more happily than the tyrant, and the
tyrant is by just-as-many-times (pollaplasiôsei) separated from
happiness.
A tidal wave (katapephórêkas) of an unmanageable (amêchanon)
measure of the difference, says Glaucon (587d6)! But a correct
number, says Sokrates, if days, nights, months and years are of
human relevance. 16 This arithmetization of the disproportionate
difference between the tyrannic man and the kingly, tells us that
Sokrates is ironically taking a Pythagorean view of the matter.17
For, since this view began by taking one-man rule to be the best
form of government, Sokrates' after-the-fact numerology is like
frosting for a cake that's already been eaten, and must therefore
have come over as ironic to anyone who could see (as we do now)
how ad hoc it is, the more so that Glaucon applies the adjective
'unmanageable' to the attempted proportionality when the point of
the geometry of proportions is to increase the manageability of the
matter under study. Amêchanon, we notice, is used twice in ten
lines so that its connotation stretches into "amazing,"
"inconceivable" (587e5, 588a8).
"Now that we've gotten to this point in our story (lógou)," Sokrates
says, "let us take up again the question that we began with,"
namely, that which generated his extended discourse in the first
place back at II.361a5-361b. I translate lógos as "story" to remind
the reader that Sokrates had also said that "there would be no
difficulty in unfolding the tale (lógôi) of the sort of life that awaits
each (361d9), "each'' here being the unjust and the just man
respectively. The question is the claim "that injustice is profitable
to the completely unjust man who is reputed just." What comes
next mandates commentary. "Now, then," translates Rouse, "it is
time to reason with [he who made the claim] again, since we have
now agreed on the real meaning of doing justly and doing
unjustly." Shorey translates "Let us, then, reason with its proponent
now that we have agreed on the essential nature of injustice and
just conduct." Rouse captures better what peidê diômologêsámetha
to te adikeîn kai to díkaia prattein hên hekateron echei dynamin
(588b) says. Shorey's translation is visibly biased by his essentialist
(idealist) interpretation of the Republic. "Since we have agreed on
the respective effects of acting unjustly and practicing in-
 Page 283
justice," is as literal as the Greek allows. And these words, of
course, do not allow us to say that Republic has succeeded in
defining justice, as so many literalist or 'platonizing' readers want
to claim. A logician would be content to say that Sokrates' long
discourse does provide anecdotal material for inductions about
justice and injustice.
"It's Easier to Model in Words Than in Wax" 588d1f.
"Let us create (plásantes) 18 a picture (eikóna) of the soul in words
(lógoi)" so that he who made that claim can see-and-know (eidêi)
what it was that he said. "An image," he continues, "like one of
those mythologized (mythologoûntai) of old": a multi-form
monster which can grow other animals out of itself, tame or wild,
and also change them into whatever it likes. Assume the model's
made (períplason). Now make a shape of a lion and one of a man,
the lion much larger than the man, and mold the three to grow into
one that looks like a man on the outside. They are now rounded
(peripéplastai) into one.
We can now show the man who says it pays to be unjust and that
acting justly is unprofitable, that he's doing nothing other than
fattening and strengthening this monstrous hybrid, weakening the
man inside it so he can't resist his hydra or his lion and can only
leave all his parts to bite and fight each other. Yes, that's surely
what we do when we praise injustice. But,
On the contrary, he who says that justice pays would be telling us what
we must do and say to make the man inside us (ho entòs anthrôpos)
have the command over the whole person and give him charge of the
hydra-head like a farmer who nurtures and trains his plantings but
plucks out the weeds, making an ally of the lion's nature, and caring for
 all his creatures alike, so that they are friendly to him and each other,
thus fostering all (589a7-b7).
So that in point of pleasure, fame and profit, it's the one who
commends justice who speaks the truth; but he who disparages
justice has no sense of what he's rejecting. Since no one goes
wrong (hamártanei) willingly, he should be persuaded that the fair
part must not be enslaved by the bestial part of our nature, but that
the brutish should be subject to the human or godly part. He'll be
persuaded because selling out to our savagery is like selling a son
or daughter into slavery, and a ruin worse than Eriphylê's when she
took the necklace as the price of her husband's life.
Now this is a more pointed and powerful image than we who live
in a
 Page 284
graphic, propositionalized culture can at first appreciate. The
differentiations it makes are dramatic, looming with polymorphous
menace; while its similes are keenly suited to an agriculture-based
society which was still largely oral-aural. Moreover, from 590b on
Sokrates takes care to enforce the point dialectic-ally, by means of
leading-question and answer. Yet, for all the discursive creativity
deployed by Sokrates since he promised, back at II.368b9, to come
to the aid-and-assistance of the case for justice, for all his story-
telling, myth-making, spell-binding parallels and comparisons, is
this alla propositionalist might saythat he can come up with
explicitly in refutation of the case for injustice: another image,
another bit of symbolism?
The answer is, yes it is "all," and it's all that's called for, on a non-
propositional, poetically responsive reading of the Republic. We
recollect, in any case, that Sokrates had not promised more, or
anything different, when agreeing to diereunesthai (368c6) "pursue
the search (zêtêma) to the end;" for we, Sokrates had said, are not
clever (deinoí) persons (i.e., not sophistic arguers) and (I
paraphrase) must be allowed to use our own methods. And this has
followed upon an acknowledgement (at 368b) that the straight
refutative arguments that he used on Thrasymachus the Sophist
have failed to persuade Adeimantus and Glaucon. While Sokrates'
"methods," as we can see explicitly from the Phaedo, depend a lot
on exhortation (paramythías) and credibility (písteôs), and call for
an exchange of stories (diamythologômen, 7062-4).
We interrupt again to note that, in the exchange from 590c-dff.,
there occurs a question that raises suspicions about itself as an
interpolation, given that it seems out of place in the dialectical
sequence and Sokrates' train of thought: "Why does utilitarian
artisanship and hand-work seem to you to bring scorn?" What
purports to be the answer in the next sentence is not a response to it
at all. Since it refers to the weak man whose best part can't control
the brood of beasts within him it is, rather, a continuation or
expansion of what Sokrates was saying at 590b5-c1. But as a
reflection of the Hellenistic, intellectualistic prejudice of no-longer
democratic Athenian culture, the prejudice fits well with both
pythagorizing intellectualism and the militarist-intellectual culture
of the auxiliaries and Archons who have been completely
separated, in the Ideal State, from the merchant- and artisan-classes
they are supposed to govern and protecteven while being educated
to despise them.
But if the question is not really out-of-place because it leads to the
statement that such banausic artisans need to be ruled by (and
serve) those who are ruled by their own divine inner man, then it is
the inapposite answer at 590c2-6 that must be textually suspect.
There is a complete absence in the text of any connection between
the artisans' occupations and their lack of self-mastery
 Page 285
such that they must be ruled by those who can rule themselves, a
connection without which the passage is a rhetorical non-sequitur.
Of course, "he should not be ruled to his own hurt" as
Thrasymachus has implied," Sokrates adds mitigatingly and
evasively; it is better for everyone to be ruled by what's divine and
intelligent (hypò theiou kai phronímou, 590d5) whether it is in
himself or imposed from the outside. The disconnection cannot be
(literalistically) excused as weakness in the argumentation here,
because Sokrates is not arguing but fabulating and analogizing
here. He is, rather, detouring past details that could not be
mentioned without detriment to the pythagorizing flavor of his
discursive construction. Thus, for example, while it is inferrable
that the nonmilitary classes receive no education at all, it is clearly
implied that only the education previously outlined leads to self-
mastery; so that a contradiction lurks in the passing remark about
children's not being allowed to be free until they have internalized
some self-governance of the sort provided by the Ideal
Constitutionchildren are to be given an education like, or the same
as, that of the guardians?
Sokrates recoups rhetorically by returningin a peroration called for
by the daring of his verbal modellingto "the man of sense (ho ge
noûn echôn, 591c1). . . . whose studies (mathêmata) will make his
soul such as we have said," and who "will always be trying to bring
the harmonies of his body into tune with those of his soul" (591d1-
2). Such a man, who can order all things in his own life, and can
thereforeaccording to the logic of Sokrates' constructionorder the
lives of others, will not (however and paradoxically) want to
practice politics in the city-state, even his own, "unless some
divine chance befalls" (symbêi, 592a8). The purpose of the paradox
is to set the seal of its purely discursive nature upon Sokrates's
ironizing construction in the seven-and-a-half books that have
brought us to this point. The purpose of the exception is, of course,
docu-dramatic, since Sokrates at the end of his life did have to act
with public exemplarity when faced with the politics that brought
him to trial.
That we are dealing with a utopian construction, a counter-utopia
actually, is immediately confirmed by Glaucon's "I understand: you
are speaking of the city laid out in discourse whose establishment
we have just completed, for I do not think it exists anywhere on
earth" (592a8-b1). "Perhaps," counters Sokratestrue to the
discursive job he's been doing of ironically buttressing the theory
of ideas with diagrams, numerations, and concrete imagesthere is a
paradigm of it laid up in heaven for him who looking, sees it, and
settles for, or in, it. For it makes no difference to him [namely, he
who has completed the pythagorizing lessons (mathêmata)
prescribed for the guardians of the Ideal State] whether It exists or
will come to exist, since he will practice only Its principles.
 Page 286
Appendix
W.H.D. Rouse Great Dialogues of Plato, p.344, note 2:
The exact meaning of this [passage] depends upon an arithmetical sum,
which, however, is clear. Those who wish to understand the details may
find them in Adam's admirable excursus to Book VIII, to which I am
much indebted. The general idea is that every birth is symbolised by a
circle with a moving circumference. At the beginning is the begetting:
and if the circumstances are all favourable, the birth takes place when
the circumference completes the circuit; if not, all goes wrong. The
numbers are numbers of days in the seven-months birth 33 + 43 + 53 =
216, and the number of days in a divine birth (3 × 4 × 5)4 = 3,600 ×
3,600 (a square) = 4,800 × 2,700 (an oblong) = 12,960,000. The
perception of the number is connected with Pythagorean beliefs; Cf.
p.399, n.4. These things belong to a commentary, not to a translation;
and I am content to give renderings of the mathematical terms, which
no doubt delighted the Athenian audience, who loved such
speculations. See J. Adam The Republic of Plato II, pp. 264ff. (in
Appendix to Book VIII). . .
Here is Note 4 to Rouse's p.399, which refers to the mention of the
Pythagoreans at Republic 660b2:
A very important and interesting society. All they said and did was kept
a profound secret. The members were severly tested and trained, and
the popular idea of them was that they were ascetics. Those who were
fit studied physics and metaphysics, music and religion; their science of
numbers was remarkable, and Plato is fond of alluding to it.
Notes to Section III
1. U. Eco's term; cf. The Limits of Interpretation (Indiana U.P.
1990). This is not just Post-Modernist jargon (of which we must be
wary when it is only jargon) but a name for the (implicitly self-
reflective) trope whereby an author draws attention to the form of
what he is doing.
2. As at the beginning of the Iliad between Achilles and
Agamemnon.
3. "Challengingly," because Socrates is playing on the pretension
of so many Greek intellectuals to mathematical ability or interest;
"tongue-in-cheek" because the high-soundingness of the
verbalization of the complex derivation echoes the bantering (eres-
 Page 287
chêloúsas, 545e2) tone just ascribed to the Museswhether the
derivation is going to be actually intelligible and executable or
not.
4. auksêsis = "increases" (Rouse), "multiplications" (Cornford),
"augmentations" (Shorey). "homoiountôn te kai anomoiountôn =
''that make like and unlike" (Rouse, Cornford), "of the assimilating
and the dissimilating" (Shorey). dynámenai te kai dynasteuómenai
= "by roots and squares" (Rouse, Cornford, Adam ad.loc.),
"dominating and dominated" (Shorey; Miguez [Spanish]:
"predominante y dominados"). apostáiseis . . . horous =
"dimensions . . . marking-points" (Rouse), "distances . . . limits"
(Cornford, Shorey). prosêgora kai rhêta pros allêla =
"commensurable together and rational" (Rouse), "consistent and
rational with one another" (Cornford), "conversable and
commensurable" (Shorey). epítritos pythmên pempadi syzugeis =
"three and four wedded with five and cubed" (Rouse), "three
multiplied by four and five" (Cornford), "a basal four-thirds
wedded to the pempad" (Shorey).
An 'increase' is not necessarily a 'multiplication'; to be a 'root' or
a 'square' is not the same as to be 'dominant or dominated'; a
'distance' is only one kind of 'dimension', nor are 'conversable'
'commensurable' 'rational' and 'consistent with one another'
synonymous. 'Rational with one another' is a bit puzzling, unless
it means 'responding, or proportional, to one another'. We ask
ourselves would a competent fourth-century Greek
mathematician have understood the ambiguous terms, if they are
technical terms, univocally or operationally, where we can not?
But we also keep in mind that in the culture outside of
 pythagorean or mathematical circles mathematical terms were
not yet stabilized.
5. The Republic of Plato 1902, (Cambridge U.P. 1963); vol.II,
ad.loc. and Appendices to Book VIII. Rouse's translation follows
Adam's interpretation of the text, while his footnotes to it (Great
Dialogues of Plato, p.344) provide the student with a good
summary of Adam's lucid 42-page Appendices on the nuptial
numbertoward the end of which Adam reminds us, interestingly,
that Socrates has warned us in advance that the Muses are jesting.
That Plato's (neglected) literary skills are underpinned by sound
mathematics in no way detracts from, or supersedes, them. The
dialogical reading of the dialogues facilitates the reader's sense of
that characteristic of Plato according to which he is formidably
serious even while jesting à outrance. Plato is as skilled in literary
artistry as he is in conceptualist analysis.
6. Just as the mythifications of the sophistic rhetorican from Elea,
in the Politicus, are smiled at by the elder Socrates in that dialogue.
7. The pun is that pythmên means "base," "foundation," as in the
formula above: "epítritos pythmên pempáidi syzugeis" . . .
8. The need for 'dialectic' arises when the sciences have been
completed and are waiting to be coordinated and used. 'Dialectic'
can then be seen to be the group discussion"the progress (poreían,
532b4) of thought," namely, the indoctrinationwhich enforces what
the unconditional (anhypotheton, 511b7, 532a-533d) premisses or
start-
 Page 288
ing-points of life and reason will be under the discipline of
pythagorean rule. Socrates' virtuoso diagrammatization of the
epistemology of the theory of ideas admits quite frankly that the
starting points of all the knowledges, or sciences, are
hypothetical or conditional.
9. We note that enthénde ekeîse were colloquial code-words for the
passage from this world to that one (Hades).
10. To be successful the dialogical approach calls for attention to
the constitutive form of Plato's works as dramatizations which put
communicative interactions (opinions-and-arguments-in-
confrontation with each other) on exhibit and under observation.
Such attention helps the reader to distinguish when given speakers
are being satirical or ironic, and when heated, assertive, pompous,
quibbling or sophistical, etc.
11. By exogenic I mean alien or allothentic (C.S. Peirce's term)
interpretants that import interests into the work which are external
to its own interests and in denaturing contradiction with its
implications or design. For a scrupulous, succint, and counter-
dogmatic history of this interpretive tradition, see E.N. Tigerstedt
The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato
(Helsinki: Soc. Scientarum Fennica 1974). For a brief but full
account of Peirce's interpretationist semiotics, see J. Buchler The
Philosophy of Peirce Selected Writings; Ch.7: "Logic as Semiotic:
The Theory of Signs" (London: Routledge 1940); and my
Literature, Criticism, and The Theory of Signs (Philadelphia:
Benjamins, 1995).
12. Plato's Socrates, in other words, does not miss still another
chance to have verbal fun.
13. This paragraph repeats what I have also pointed out in The
City-State Foundations of Western Political Thought (Lanham:
U.P.A. 2 rev.ed. 1993).
14. In the Greek, he is the dêmotikós manthough also sometimes
called the dêmokratikós man. I stick to 'demotic' and 'demagogic'
because Socrates's references throughout Books VIII and IX are to
the degenerative forms of the state. Do translators forget this
because of the tradition that can only think of democracy in its
degenerate forms?
15. Somewhat superorogatorily, as at, e.g., 387b, where epic poetry
is rejected. The phenomenon of the anti-poetic intellectualism of
the Pythagoreans is placed in historical context in my short essay
on "The Intellectual Content of Hellenistic Alienation," 4th Intl.
Conference on Greek Philosophy, Rhodes, 1992.
16. Figuring a year to be made up of 364+ days and 364+ nights,
we get our number 729. There could also be an allusion here to
what Philolaus the Pythgorean called a great year of 729 months,
according to J. Adam and W.H.D. Rouse.
17. A view which favored legitimate kingship and emphasized its
great difference from tyranny. Hence the reinforcement or
legitimation of dynastic claims by the Pythagorean claim that the
king must rule with knowledge or science, or be advised by men-
of-knowledge. That oligarchy or monarchy had not a chance of
prevailing in the Athens
 Page 289
of the first half of the fourth century, followed from the bloody
discredit which the Thirty had brought it to in 404/3 B.C. And it
follows from this, not just from the tone of Socrates' prose, that
he is playing with this wish-dream of the Pythagoreans, not
proposing it literally. 595a4 tells his auditors, however, that
someone believing in the rationale he has just given for the life
of the kingly man will not want to practice politics. This is both
paradoxical and a reminder of the politics that had led to the
exile of the Pythagoreans from southern Italy. See, e.g., P.
Krentz's The Thirty at Athens (Cornell U.P. 1982) and the
literature on Pythagoreanism in the bibliography.
18. The form platte, five lines down (588c6), reminds us that plattô
"make" "mold" or ''create," puns with the author's name, and recalls
the pun at 415a "the god in making (plattôn) you [the guardians],"
a pun which alert readers will take, not only as as a self-focusing
device, but as a witty one. By calling the maker of these shapes a
clever artist (deinoû plástou, 588d1), Socrates could be implying
that he's doing something a bit sophistical, in the manner of the
Sophists to whom he so often applies the adjective deinôs either
ironically or as a code-word for "sophistical."
 Page 291

Chapter 13
Excursus:
The Question of Form and the Problem of the Laws
The External Evidence from the Aristotelian Politics
The scrupulous historiographer has to admit that the oldest
references to Laws are centuries late and self-conflicted, not
excepting the supposedly crucial allusion in Book II of the much-
interpolated Aristotelian Politics. It is uncritical both to accept
without demur the reference to Laws at 1266b6 as being by Plato
and to reject without further consideration the statement at 1265a1-
5 that Laws is "for the most part a collection of statutes."
That we don't find suspect a passage that believes Sokrates is the
main speaker in Laws bespeaks a predisposition to overlook the
mistake. We actually find Bluck, for instance, repeating the
mistake in his edition of Plato's Meno (p.410)! It is not a mistake
Aristotle would have made; we do, however, remember that once
he left the Academy, he would have had access to the posthumous
Laws only as an outsider. Thus, either we bring Aristotle's
intelligence into question or we question his access to the book he
has been said to certify.
The fact that only about one third of Laws, as we have it, consists
of said statutes means that we are failing to take the passage with
critical seriousness. The Aristotelian Politics knows a Laws that
comes around in the end, not at the beginning, to advancing a
constitution like that of Republic on a literal interpretation of
Republic. But our Laws is already trying in the earlier books to be
like the previous polity taken literally not ironically, and de-
dramatized out of its interactional mode and context.
 Page 292
The book that we call the Aristotelian Politics doesn't know Laws
well enough to know who the speakers in it are. As edited by a
Peripatetic, the Politics could also be deliberately imposing an
interpretation upon it that claims Sokrates to be Plato's mouth-piece
tout simple. Notice that Laws, having just been described as a
collection of statutes, is then referred to as a Socratic discourse.
This categorization cannot be by Aristotle, because it is in
noticeable contradiction of the Poetics and its description of
Socratic dialogues at vi. 1447b5 as being closer to the mimes of
Sophron and Xenarchos than any other genre.
Next there is the fact that the text of our Politics goes back only to
the first century B.C., to the compilational and editorial efforts of
Andronicus and Tyrannion at Rome two and half centuries after the
death of Aristotle. R. Shute thinks that Cicero did not know our
Politics, which was being edited in his lifetime; but Susemihl and
Hicks think he knew it in an earlier form. In any case, Cicero says
(De Legibus ii.6) about the Academic Laws that it is practicing,
with its prefaces and preambles, something recommended by
Charondas of Zaleucus. But the examples of Charondas's
legislation given by Diodours Siculus (XII. 11-20) are all of
Neopythagorean origin, as we can see from the corresponding
places in Oldfather's edition. It is in fact a characteristic of the early
Hellenistic Pythagorean writings that they included separable
"prooimia."
Not only has Cicero unwittingly pointed to the Neopythagorean
character of a great part of Laws, but L.A. Seneca in the next
century quotes Poseidonius (f. 100 B.C.) as saying "I to not
approve (improbo) that Plato's laws should have the preambles
added (adiecta) to them" (Epistle XCIV. 38). This is a good
indication that there had once been a question as to whether the
preambles belong where thy have been placed. It begins to seem
probable that Laws was still in process of elaboration between the
end of the fourth and the end of the second centuries B.C.
On examination, the supposedly crucial piece of external evidence
from Aristotle turns out to be an uncritical use of a first century
source for an allegedly fourth century event: it is only "evidence"
generated by an unwillingness to practice the discipline of source-
criticism.
What Constitutes Internal Evidence?
The rest of what needs to be said about this locus in the Politics has
to be stated out of an internal criticism and comparison of the two
large antithetical works (supposedly on the same subject) attributed
to Plato. That Republic and
 Page 293
Laws are antithetical was precisely what the Academy, once it had
published the latter (with or without prefaces), successfully labored
to hide. But only a dialogical reading of the Republic that recovers
its ironic and satirical tone, its critical allusiveness, and the
architectonic of the total conversation can make manifest its
overwhelming differences from Laws, while also suggesting the
reasons for which the Academy felt it had to neutralize the
Republic's dangerous anti-militarism and costitutional criticality
with the hierarchical, gerontocratic Pythagoreanism of the Laws.
Other readers have perceived aspects of the marked stylistic and
doctrinal (or anti-doctrinal) gulf between the two works. But they
have not prevailed against the consensual compromise of the
stylometric-analysts and content-analyzers because they have not
challenged strongly enough the shallow conception of style which
the doxographic and stylometric analysts apply in reading Plato's
dialogues.
The original reason for the literal doxographic, non-satirical
method of reading the dialogues was the desire of Speusippus and
Xenocrates to claim Plato as the source of their own dogmatic
systems. But the method has also been such a help in denying the
"doctrinal" differences between the Republic and the Laws, that it
is a wonder that Ast, Zeller, and Mueller were able to assert radical
differences by using the same non-dialogical method. On second
thoughts it is no wonder: rather, we shall have to discard a method
that can equally be used to maximize the differences as well as the
similarities of "content," while also maximizing or minimizing at
will the underlying discontinuities of aesthetic design and political
intention in the two works.
The aesthetic design of an ancient work can be distinguished from
whatever political intentions readers might want to attribute to it,
because its literary shape is something perceptible that can only be
neglected not changed by the reader, or declared irrelevant to its
'content;' while the abstracting of this 'content' can be done either
with respect for, or to the neglect of, the meaning-determinative
context that carries it or the social context it alludes to or
presupposes. But there will usually be considerable continuity
between the form or design of a work and what we call its content,
whether political or not, if by its 'content' we mean its meaning.
The form of the work, the shape of it as a complex sign, will, in
fact, also be a determinant of the meaning or meanings of the work.
So it is a failure of the doxographical, or doctrine-seeking, method
of analysis that its notion of "intention" is both fallacious and does
not distinguish between the aesthetic design of a work and its
author's intentions. Authors' intentions are varied in nature and not
necessarily relevant to the meaning of the work. Nor are they
visible, as the design of a work is; and unless confessed to
 Page 294
by the author, intentions must be inferential, though even then they
may be irrelevant to the literary shape and effectiveness of the
work. The 'content' of a work may not be legitimately separated
from its 'form.' And a method of reading the dialogues that jumps
(without further qualification) from something said by one of
Plato's characters (who will always be in a communicative
interaction with some other speaker) to what it claims is a belief of
Plato's own, is a method that systematically violates the integrity of
Plato's dialogical constructions. It is not only arbitrary, it has never
been adequately justified, while being the cause of the endless
disputes about what Plato's alleged doctrines really were.
Observe the logic of the use of an externally completed system
called platonism when the question of the authenticity of a doubtful
dialogue arises. The question that's asked is "do the doctrines
extracted from this dialogue, when purged of their interlocutory
pregnancy, fit or not fit the system that as a system has been
elaborated by fusion with catalytic amounts of supplementary,
frame-work-creating, non-dialogical material? This material
consists mainly of assumptions that are needed to re-anchor and
reconnect to each other just those doctrines that have been set adrift
from their dialogical and interactional locations. It also consists of
inferential biographical information from dubious sources. Now,
once we have submitted the resistant, undoubted dialogues to this
sort of treatment in order to get 'system' and platonism out of them,
what can we expect will happen to a less dialogically integral
dialogue that is less resistant because it is not by Plato? It will of
course fit the system more easily than authentic, thoroughly
integral dialogues such as the Protagoras or Gorgias. This is one
of the things that has happened with the dogmatizing Laws and that
has served to make it "reconcilable" with a doxographically treated
Republic.
The doxographic treatment of a dialogue, of course, entails (i) its
de-dramatization, (ii) obliteration by neglect of its satirical or ironic
dimension, and (iii) separation from their context and as doctrine,
of given things said by speakers that happen to fit the externally
created system of pythagorizing idealism called platonism by the
Speusippean Academy.
The Republic is foredoomed to come out as Utopian if it is taken
out of space and time, and if the reader begins by removing this
political work of literature from the state, date, and sociohistorical
circumstances of its time and author. Nor can it be said that a
method of reading the dialogues for itemizable doctrine has
generated an internal critique of Plato's work, if by internal is
meant a reading that does not impute to Plato as his own doctrines
that he nowhere defends or rejects in his own voice. We will return
to the possibility of a valid, internally generated criticism of Plato's
dialogues when we
 Page 295
have dealt with the other principal piece of external evidence from
Diogenes Laertius that Laws is by Plato.
The External Evidence from D.Laertius and Aulus Gellius
The report in D. Laertius (III.37) is that Laws was posthumously
transcribed (metegrapsen) by Philip of Opus from wax tablets
(ontas en kêrôi) left by Plato. But a work the size of the Laws could
not literally have been left in wax: an impossible number of tablets
would be required. Although a work thirty or forty percent the size
of our Laws could, conceivably but improbably, have been left "in
the wax," this possibility can be accepted only at the price of
admitting that more than half of Laws is not by Plato. So it is
inferred that en kêrôi was meant figuratively, in which case
Laertius must have been referring to a sketch or outlineH. Alline's
"brouillon" (Histoire du Texte de Platon). However, once we have
inferred this outline, we may not subsequently equivocate: an
outline is not a first draft in the sense of a more or less complete
rapidly written version. So let us finish first with the possibilities
implied by the notion of a first draft.
A draft by Plato himself would still have required the materially
improbable pile of wax tablets. But would it have required the
unusal number of editorial corrections and improvements that the
text of our Laws has received and still calls for? If Phillipus, or the
transcriber, were not a mere scribe, how could he have tolerated for
the equivalent of 600 modern pages the clumsy ungrammatical
prose of such a draft? What rationale could a member of the
Academy have offered for circulating so defective a transcript
except that it represented the very words of the Master?
But what member of Plato's circle in his lifetime would not have
known that this was not Plato's prose? Such writing would pass as
Plato's only with those who knew little or no literary Greek. And
whom did the Academy need to address that knew so little literary
Greek in the political environment of Athens in the decade between
346 and 336 B.C.? Clearly: the Macedonian military aristocracy
that became the ruling class of Greece with its victory at Chaeronea
in 338 B.C. However, why would the Academy need to close ranks
behind a posthumous political writing like Laws that favored a kind
of military élitism, unless there existed a feeling, dangerous to the
Academy's survival, that it was unsympathetic to or had ridiculed
Spartanizing élitism and militarism?
But how could such a report have arisen about the Academy when
it already possessed a Plato's Republic, which, as the literalist
doxographers read it,
 Page 296
is a defense of militarism, élitism, and pythagorizing
intellectualism? The truth is that the non-dialogical, doxographic
reading of Republic is against the grain of the work, and that it was
contructed to be read (as we have seen) as an extended critique by
satire of just the institutions of spartanizing militarism and
antipoetic or pythagorizing intellectualism. With Athenians who
knew enough to confirm the anti-Macedonian implications of
Plato's brilliant counter-utopia, Laws created the possibility of
tergiversation: it could be argued that the work would not have
been accepted as Plato's if tampered with by an editor, and that it
was the sincere product of Plato's infirm last years. It could also be
insisted that Republic be interpreted in the light of, or in line with,
Lawsjust as Book II of the Aristotelian Politics interprets it.
But there is external confirmation in Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights
XIV.3) that Republic was at one time read as inimical to militarism,
Spartanism, and oligarchist faction. The notice in Gellius suggests
that Xenophon's Cyropaedia was the latter's response to his reading
of Plato's Republic or part of it. If the Cyropaedia actually was a
direct or indirect response to ideas about education and politics in
the Republic, it would show that Xenophon did not read this work
as a defense of militarism, Spartanism or élitism. He must rather
have read it as an attack upon these institutions, all of which he
himself favored.
On the alternative that Diogenes meant only a "plan" or "outline"
by his phrase, a dialogical and dramatic reading of Plato tells us
that a plan, if it were by Plato, would have consisted of notations
about how to bind together dialogically the chunks of ratiocinative,
argumentative material Plato was only too familiar with from a
lifetime in Athens of intellectual activity and observation. On the
assumption that Plato was in the habit of writing outlines in
advance of his work, a plan by Plato would have laid out with some
precision the situations, interactions, reversals and associated bits
of pivotal dialogue that were central to the development of the
work or to the advance of the action. But this is just what an editor
or scribe could not have supplied. And this is just what is
obtrusively missing from the Laws: good dialogical binding
between its parts.
Thus, if it is to be used at all, the traditionstill alive with the last of
the Scholarchs in the sixth century A.D.that Phillipus was the
editor and scribe of Laws can only be taken, if it is to make sense,
as a cover for the fact that he had been charged by the Academy
with "publishing" a work that Plato did not write. Given the
combination of defective sources, biased or careless reports, as well
as the practice of many kinds of forgery throughout the Hellenistic
age, we emphasize that while this is historiographic inference, it is
at least explicit and discussable. Have the contrary claims that
Laws is all of it by Plato himself been equally explicit and
historiographic about their inferential
 Page 297
nature? Since good history cannot be extracted from external
evidence of such poor quality, the best anyone can do in this
dimension is to apply both the techniques of source-criticism and
literary criticism with as open a mind as possible.
Mimetic Structure and Socio-Intellectual Allusivness of the
Dialogues
Not to accept the analogy between an interesting play and an
interesting dialogue of Plato's is to betray a total
indifferenceinnocent in a reader of translations, deliberate in the
scholarto Plato's extraordinary skill as a prose master. More than an
analogy it is a matter of contraries within the same class: Plato is in
the same class as Shakespeare, Molière, and Shaw, while also their
opposite in the sense that he achieves everything through
conversation whereas they use, besides, stage action and stage
directions. Also, Plato's materials are competing ways of thinking
rather than customs or competing ways of living. But the stage-
dramas and dialogues bring forward for our observation reflection
or enjoyment, attitudes, values and the consequences of holding
them. These authors are all in their own ways being ironical,
critical, celebrative, comical, tragical or dialogicalin a word,
dramatic; or more generally, exhibitive.
In any case, the obstructed and muddled sentences, the distinctions
badly made or expressed, the anacoluthons and transposed clauses,
the bad spelling, the ungrammatical use of particles to which
Burnet adverts in the decent obscurity of his learned Latin, 1 all call
for an internal critique of Laws from the point of view of style,
rather than stylometrics, and for a comparison with other dialogues
from the point of view of 'texture' and 'structure' rather than
'content.' Under 'structure' I have reference to the plotting, the
interactional developments among characters, or else, to the
paradoxical situations or contrasts built into the dialogues. By
'style' I mean the constitutive technique of composing the work into
a whole, including the techniques that work (or don't work) to
make it live as it unfolds, so that the critic can see how the author
has exploited the textural (or micro-structural) qualities of the
verbal exchanges in a way that resonates with the architectonic of
the conversation as a whole. Surely style must mean more than a
small arbitrary selection of numerable linguistic choices such as the
use of particles in one combination rather than another, or diligence
in the avoidance of hiatus, or a preference for constructions with
hôs rather than hoti. Nor can that be a study of style which refuses
to notice that all usage in the dialogues is idiolectic and mimetic,
namely, appropriate to the character and occasion projected by the
author.
A way of reading Plato that treats anything in his dialogues it wants
to call a 'proposition' as looking for its place in a system of other
propositions clari-
 Page 298
fled outside the dialogues cannot be right; nor can a way of reading
Plato that omits one whole dimension of his work. This dimension
is the pervasive wit and constant allusiveness of the conversations,
neglected by translations and minimized by the commentaries.
What translation, for example, has ever reflected the fact that there
is a play on words on dozens of pages of the Republic? It follows
that passages and turns upon which the paradoxical or ironic
structure of the dialogue hinges will not be perceived. Appreciation
of the topicality of the dialogues is also impeded by a lack of
historical knowledge about the Athenian climate of opinion, and
the changes in it during Plato's lifetime.
It may not be possible to understand fourth-century Attic as fourth-
century Athenians did; and we cannot approximate that
understanding on the a ssumptions of any period other than Plato's
own; especially not those of the Hellenistic period with which the
misreading of Plato began. But it is just these assumptions that we
often appeal to in order to understand Plato, when we want to get
away from our own! In any case, we must break with the centuries-
old practice of controlling our assumption-making in Plato-
interpretation by reference to the anti-Socratic needs of
Neoplatonism or idealist oligarchism. We now need to consider
what happens when we assimilate Plato to the historical,
interrogative Sokrates rather than to the history of a dogmatic
system, bits of which Plato lets us see through, laugh at, or wonder
about in his dialogues.
The application of historical or literary sensibility to the reading of
the dialogues shakes us loose from the overload of exogenic
interpretation under which they lie. The relevant contextual
information needed to catch the allusiveness of the dialogues can't
be said to be external to them when it is part of their interpretation.
It creates the nonreductive context for understanding what the
interlocutors have in mind. Such collateral knowledge is not
allothentic; 2 it does not transform the dialogue into something
which it was not designed to be.
The dialogical approach relates Plato's works in a verifiable way to
the concerns and crises of his time, rather than speculatively to the
work of his successors. It respects the individual integrity of each
dialogue by refusing to purge anything said within it of its
interlocutory pregnancy. And it respects that dialogue's integrity by
looking for the generative tensions or structural formalisms and
modes of deployment that infuse the dialogue with intellectual and
mimetic life. It is a reassuring result of the dialogical approach that
with it there are no "arid" technical digressionsas they get calledand
no "irrelevant" myths or stories in the dialogues. On the contrary,
the reasonings and the stories are restored to their continuity with
and relevance for each other.
Because conclusions about the chronology of the composition of
the dia-
 Page 299
logues are themselves all circularly based on the unproved
assumption that Laws is by Plato, they have no bearing on the
question of how Plato ought to be read: the other operational form
of the question of what constitutes internal evidence of Plato's
authorship. Insofar, however, as chronological starting-points are
gotten from the unwarranted belief that certain doctrines and their
modifications could have been held only in a certain order, and
insofar as variations in the use and expression of certain doctrines
are identified with doctrinal developments in Plato's mind, what the
doxographical approach offers is not a historical but a
psychologistic account of his activity. Clearly, it is less inferential
to study the techniques of which a work is the product, than it is to
postulate changes of mind as the cause of new works or their order.
And how do we decide which was Plato's first work? Later
Antiquity said it was the Phaedrus by reason of its "youthful"
content; but Lönberg, also by reason of its content, thinks Phaedrus
to be one of Plato's latest. With the addition of stylometric analysis,
others have placed Phaedrus somewhere in between!
Plato's Philosophic Awareness and Formal Mastery
Look at the firmness of the formalism, or dynamic structure, that
holds together the Protagoras, Parmenides, Republic, and Gorgias,
or at the masterly way in which the ironic situations and contrasts
are developed in the Apology, Crito, Phaedo, or Meno. All of these
are well-knit wholes both formally and intellectually. The mutual
refutation of the master disputants that eventuates out of the set
exchanges in Protagoras is identified with the structure of the
antilogy, the end-product of the Zenonian-Sophistic "dialectic."
Plato's thorough integration of logical with dialogical form in the
the Protagoras celebrates, by a skillful personification of it, the
antilogical mode of argument that Protagoras developed out of
Zeno, as we have seen. In covering the possible answers to the
question "can human excellence be taught," Plato has allowed us to
see the dialogue-form as a dramatization and critique of the process
of cooperative, or competitive inquiry. We have also seen how the
Parmenides both illustrates and constitutes a criticism of the forms
of dialectical reasoning or argument.
The formalism at work in Republic is also complex, as we hope to
have shown. After the disputatious introduction, the greater part of
it is an allusive satirical fable generated by the logic of extension or
comic protraction. Sokrates' refutation of Thrasymachos's cynical
definition of justice was felt by Adeimantus and Glaucon not to
have been enough. So, Sokrates proceeds to refute it ironically by
showing that the pursuit of the 'ideal state' both creates unac-
 Page 300
ceptable counter-cultural social consequences and generates
exactly the right conditions for the arrival of the very tyranny it
sought to avoid; i.e., it brings back into operation Polemarchos's
already refuted onception of justice in the person of guardians
made good by habituation alone (like the man from the sky in the
myth of Er who chooses a tyrant's destiny) and who combine the
Simonidean traits of gentleness toward their friends with savagery
toward their enemies.
The view that might is right is hard to refute dialectically; but it is
nonetheless felt by Adeimantus and Glaucon to be wrong. At the
same time the view that the 'ideal much-to-be-wished-for state'
might be a good thing, though initially attractive, is refuted by its
conversational protraction into a pictured antithesis which is the
opposite of Athenian happiness. In short, it is autocratic power,
whether defended cynically and materially (as by Thrasymachos)
or covertly and idealistically (as in the sardonic remediation of the
fevered state) that is controverted by Sokrates in the dialogue as a
whole. Meanwhile Plato has provided an exhibitive reflection upon
the implications of giving full play to three disturbing strains in the
culture of his city, namely, spartanizing militarism, the extremism
of faction, and the pythagorization of the intellectuals.
Were it not for the interpolation of (a short version of) Kritias's
Atlantis-story, the cosmological discourse in Timaeus could be
seen to grow naturally out of an initial encounter, and become an
imagistic conceptional synthesis, in cadenced prose and in the form
of a creation story, of the best in nature-philosophy down to Plato's
time. But Plato's art is so completeas Fénelon said about
Demosthenesthat it ceases to be visible. This must be why, in spite
of the fact that his characters present themselves as storifying, Plato
is taken as a ''pure philosopher," rather than as the conscious artist
his constructions show him to be. Meanwhile, Plato's virtuoso
awareness of Presocratic natural philosophy is obliterated in Laws
by the cosmological theology of Book X of said Laws. The tolerant
scientific synthesis in Timaeus is censoriously replaced by the
dogmas of an astral religion that can in no way be described as
either a development of or deterioration from the cosmological
discourse by Plato's Timaios. The cosmological theology of Laws
is a substitute for and replacement of the cosmogony in Timaeus,
not an evolution out of it.
The design of Laws recommends an ideology compatible with that
of the Macedonian conquerors, under the guise of a mixed
constitution and as the result of extended, slow-paced 'philosophic'
ponderation. That the antithetical exhibitively critical design of the
Republic was so soon obliterated and successfully assimilated to
that of Laws is one of those instances of social his-
 Page 301
tory in which a good work goes unrecognized or is put to alien
uses, as a consequence of the same overwhelming determinants
that are causing radical changes in the ambient society as a whole.
Don Quijote, for example, which was also satirical and progressive
about its subject-matter (knight errantry), escaped the fate of
Republic because the Renaissance happened to be progressive
about that aspect of the Middle Ages. But the suppression of the
critical effectiveness and design of the Republic was made possible
by the fact that, confidently witty and (like Don Quijote) ironically
progressive, it fell upon the ears of a radically regressive,
pessimistic and subjugated Hellenistic society.
The doxographical approach neglects the ability with which Plato
combines logical with dialogical form, but it does admit that Laws
is seriously deficient in logical and literary form. Nonetheless it
insists that the Laws be taken seriously (as Plato's) because of the
"importance of its contents," as Lutoslawski says in coupling Laws
with Timaeus. "For a philosopher," says this non-philosopher,
"contents are more important than form." More important than
logical form? The logical mistakes in Laws are not presented as
committed in the heat of argumentation, and cannot be explained
away dramatically. Lutoslawski has already noted that both Laws
and Timaeus are 'directly dramatic' and more simple aesthetically
because of the importance of their content [?]. But in downgrading
aesthetic form Lutoslawski has also wiped out the need to observe
logical form. The Timaeus is not affected by the blunder because it
is a prose poem that, as such, was not put together logically;
although like much poetry, its cosmogonic discourse wears a
semblance of good logic.
But with regard to the Laws, it is enough, for the stylometrist, to
say that it is concerned with "the deepest problems of thought"; for
according to Lutoslawski, this concern precludes the attention to
form found in the 'narrated dialogues.' Trashing the packaging,
however and so to speak, in order to get at the contents only
uncovers a lumpy combination of monarchism and militarism,
élitism and anti-intellectualism, numerological organization,
hierarchical authoritarianism, and astral theology. A reading that
finds such contents to its liking may be allowed to find them
"important" and "deep"; but such a reading would be less
inconsistent to want them better defended than they are in the
tortuously artificious Laws.
Can a Designer Forget How to Design?
The political effect of negating the (critical) dialogical reading of
Republic now becomes clear: the drastically remedial
authoritarianism of this polity is
 Page 302
justified, as an implementable political program, by the
luxuriousness of the inevitably fevered city. The tendency to
feverishness in the Athenian polis, the lapses of democracy into
demagogy are turned into the essence of city-state life on this
approach. And authoritarian hierarchism is then offered as the
necessary, saving answer to the 'self-destructiveness' of the city.
But in the absence of good form, admitted by Lutoslawski for
Laws, there can be no good thought without good logicinductive,
deductive or narrative. Not cohering narratively or logically, we are
left with an arbitrarily interconnected, portentously serious content
that is held together only by the reader's conviction that Laws is by
Plato!
But once a writer has learned the art of composing dramas, or
narratives, or (as in our case) conversational mimes, he does not
then write non-dramatic dramas, non-narrative narratives, or non-
dialogical dialogues which nonetheles claim to be dramatic,
narrative or dialogical. But this is just what is claimed for the non-
dialogical, monotogous Laws, that it is a fully dialogical work of
Plato's. An author in his last phase will perhaps write outsize plays
or difficult novels, like Shaw's Back to Methuselah or James's The
Golden Bowel. These late, formidable works, however, are still
well constructed in specifiable respects. They are in the nature of
attempts to extend the author's techniques rather than failures to
have technique. If Dante's Commedia vis-à-vis Aquinas's two
Summas or Shaw's Introductions to his plays are invoked to prove
that "the same philosophical content" can be expressed in different
forms, our attention is drawn all the more to the importance of the
poetic form in the former and the essay form in the latter for their
vitality and readability.
Laws is neither treatise nor epic discourse, neither dialogue nor
disquisition, but is monotonous and and monologous. Witness the
witless device of the old Athenian to save himself from
interruptions or dialogical interaction at 839a ff., where he reminds
the others with a simile about forging dangerous rivers that he is
younger than they and will find it more convenient to go ahead and
argue with himself alone. This is peculiar because any dialogical
interaction has been so minimal throughout, and all differences so
quickly obviated. The opening of Book V in which the Athenian
directly (and anti-dialogically) addresses the reader over the heads
of his conversational companions is not defensible on an analogy
with Chaplin's speechat the end of The Great Dictatorto the movie-
house audience, over the heads of his audience in the photoplay.
For the latter is not an anti-dialogical device but the dramatic
device that closes down the film, allowing it to open out into the
political world of the movie-goer, as social commentary.
We verified from Sokrates' detour into literary methodology,
contrived at Republic 392d ff., that Plato is a conscious literary
master. There is another
 Page 303
locus in the Apology where the knowingness of Plato's touch again
becomes visible. We saw that under the alternative-penalty option
Sokrates first proposed free meals for himself in the Prytaneum as a
just reward for his intellectual service to the city-state (37a1). But
since this won't be allowed by Anytus's majority, he proposes a fine
of one mna [about one silver dollar], which is so little as to the
avoid admission of guilt that Sokrates cannot on principle permit
himself. But because this is less than he Sokrates can afford, it is
unacceptable; so after appearing to confer with Plato, Crito
(Sokrates' uncomprehending old friend and yes-man), and
Critobolus, they agree to a fine of 35 mnae.
It is here that we can see Plato's deliberateness. On a literalist
reading of Plato's mention of himself in this dialogue, there is no
explanation for the enormity of Plato's indifference here: according
to this reading, his beloved teacher's life is worth only 35 silver
dollars to a man who, in combination with Crito and his son, could
have afforded very much more. But as we've seen, the Crito and
Phaedo show (among other things) that Sokrates' other companions
have not understood Sokrates' stand. They have not understood that
Sokrates is content with the good existential alternative he
developed in the Apology out of Anytus's threat. Plato has of course
understood the just and detached course of action he has portrayed
his Sokrates as following. With this mention of himself, he lets us
see that he has kept Crito from interfering with the ethical
alternative decided on by Sokrates for himself. The 35 mnae are
what Sokrates can put together on his own; whereas Crito by
himself would have put up a sum large enough to save Sokrates
from what Crito thinks is a misfortune. But Plato is with his
Sokrates knowing it is not a misfortune.
Here is one last example (among more that could be given) of
evidence for Plato's detached relation to views that the
doxographers believe him to be struggling to develop. Observe
again how the auditors in both the frame-dialogue and the narrated
dialogue of the Phaedo are portrayed as unreflectively believing
that Sokrates' deliberate mode of departure is a great misfortune.
The dialogue shows (88d) how Echecrates and the Pythagoreans
other than Simmias and Kebes were already taking the reasonings
reproduced in Phaedo's narrative with complete literalness. Their
dismayed response to Kebes' refutation of the belief that the soul
can survive the wear and tear of repeated reincarnations shows that
they have not understood the conscious courtesy and irony with
which Sokrates and Simmias and Kebes have engaged in the
arguments about matters of specific Pythgorean concern, in order
to pass the time of Sokrates's last day doing what he loves best to
do, namely, investigating worthwhile matters in conversation with
young people. And, as he says at
 Page 304
91b, if there is truth in what I say, fine; and if there is nothing in
what I say, at least I will not have burdened my friends with
lamentations (!). So, Simmias and Kebes let us reason as hard as
we can about this.
Oral-Aural Community of the Polis, Visual-Graphic Anomie of
Conquered Easternized, Greece
The Speusippean Academy, as the evidence indicates, was actively
discussing the doctrines of the recently extinguished but now-
revived Pythagorean school, and was probably the matrix for such
books on "laws" and "constitutions" as the Peri Nomoi attributed to
Archytas. There is thus nothing improbable about the production,
by one or several members, of a large-scale work imbued with the
very spirit exuded by our Laws and lacking just the dramatic
binding that Laws lacks, but that is present in Plato's works. It is
present, too, in every other monumental work of pre-Macedonian
Greece from Homer and Herodotus to Thucydides and the
Republic: Aristotle does not fail to note the dramatic quality of
Homer's recital, Herodotus's narrative of Xerxes' invasion of
Greece is fatefully paced, Thucydides' dramatized the interaction of
his historical actors by having them sepeak in their own voices.
Unfortunately knowledge of this intellectual environment and
audience-demand is limited to the specialists, and has not been
applied to the problem of disentangling Plato from the first
generation of his transmitters and re-interpreters.
Thus, P. Merlan could rehearse the plentiful evidence that
platonism and Neoplatonism were developed by the generation
immediately following, and partly overlapping with, Plato, without
perceiving that Plato was not a platonist, i.e., that he was not the
first stage in creating the foundations of platonism and
Neoplatonism, but was, rather, their fatherly satirizer and critic. 3
Where Republic is all intellectual drama and pointed political
satire, Laws shuffles forward as a garrulous and winding
enumeration of laws and prescriptions with preambles that must be
studied by the citizens. We note again that it was characteristic of
the Hellenistic Pythagorean political writings for which we have
evidence that they included separable prooimia. The verbal echoes
from the de-dramatized Republic claimed for the Laws respond to
the attempt by the author(s) of Laws to rewrite some of the
proposals in Republic in the mistaken belief that they were, or from
fear that they were not, prescriptively intended.
We have seen that the design of the greater part of Republic (from
Book II.373a) is (i) to put on exhibit the intimate relation between
the luxuriousness of the city and the repressiveness of the state. It is
also (ii) to satirize the
 Page 305
ideal of the best possible state and its pythagorizing rationalization.
It was the 'ideal state' that alienated oligarchist groups were now
appealing to, as an alternative to the appeal to the 'ancestral
constitution.' When appeal to the latter could no longer serve
extreme oligarchists as a basis for action to restrain the democracy,
they found a serviceable substitute in the notion of the ideal state.
Meanwhile, the relation between popular Athenian imperialism and
Athenian luxuriousness was plain to be seen, independently of
Thucydides' documentation of its tragic consequences. Because the
'ideal state' is defensible only in theory and is in practice inimical to
the moderate forms of constitution, we can now appreciate Plato's
strategy of discrediting it exhibitively through satire, with a
depiction of its painful, un-Athenian social consequences and of its
idealizing intellectual basis.
As we make our way through the laborious but weak
argumentation of some parts of the Laws, the embarassing question
now and again arises, whether it could possibly be the work of an
unsuccessful imitator of the comedy in Plato's dialogues? After all,
the three elders are not only being made to speak like self-
important slow-witted old men, but they keep reminding
themselves explicitly, and either comically or bathetically, that they
are old. It could be funny, once the reader gets over the
awkwardness of the prose, to hear one of them telling the other at
629a not to fall behind in following (ksynakolouthêsate) an
argument that progresses so slowly and isn't much of an argument
either. And how could some of the arguments be so weak, we
wonder, unless they were made deliberately so? As already
mentioned, the bit in Book X (893 ff.) in which the Athenian
arranges (with an elaborate simile) to be allowed to talk to himself
is certainly an anti-dialogical procedure. It shows the reader how
little difference there is between letting the Athenian talk to himself
and talking to others. Is the author of this part of the work
parodying or reflecting the abandonment of the earlier,
interactional type of dialectical inquiry by members of his circle?
The literal dullness of the discourse in other parts of the work
makes us doubt the aptness of such a question. But the assonance
of tone and spirit among parts of Laws must also be the result of
the two or more centuries it seems to have taken to elaborate the
work into the form in which it has come down to us.
At 810e the fussy reluctance of the Athenian to discuss natural
philosophy in its connection with legislation not only shows him to
be unsure of an organic connection that is undoubted in Republic,
but it also shows the author(s) to be building additively and
episodically. The author is quite careless of the cohesiveness
among the parts of his protracted contrivance. If the author(s)'
notion of coherence is the same as the Athenian's, it is a very
external one; namely, that there will be coherence in the state if its
constitution is guided by
 Page 306
numerical ratios. But the repeated use of (Pythagorean) duodecimal
divisions in his constitution does not produce any literary
coherence, and very little logical consistency as the monologous
discourse unfolds.
It is also anomalous, from the compositional point of view, that the
human occasion of the meeting is defined twice: once at the
beginning of Book I and again at the end of Book III. It is not that
the situation is changing as the conversation moves on and,
therefore, gets redefined, as in the Phaedrus for example. Towards
the end of Laws III the Athenian, who has begun to repeat himself,
asks for a test of whether his discourse so far has succeeded in
teaching how best to administer a city and how best a man may
conduct his personal life. The Cretan answers: go ahead with your
discourse, and I will see whether I can use any of the laws you
propose; for, you know, it just so happens that I've been asked,
with nine others, to frame the laws of a new colony. This is not a
test of what has previously been said, but a formalistic contrivance
for getting the conversation going again. This is shown by the new
assumptions the Athenian then goes on to make, and by his
essentially untestable suggestion that we should now imagine
ourselves in such ideal conditions that we are free to legislate
whatever may need legislating in order to produce "complete
goodness" in men.
A borderline case that could be either failed or half-hearted satireor
a positive if paradoxical proposalis the suggestion in Book I (639
ff.) about testing character at supervised wine parties. This proposal
exploits the no-longer original observation of the surprising
corruptibility of morally untested Spartans when on foreign service.
The proposal cannot be taken as structurally satirical because it has
no architectonic connection with the selection of magistrates,
inspectors and supervisors later in the discourse. I suppose this is
why the episode remains with the reader as incidental comedy.
Again, the place of music as a (believable or unbelievable) basis of
education is not so pivotal, speaking compositionally, as it was in
Republic. Although much more is said about it in Laws, it is all too
hortatory and quite hollow. Yet at the same time, the equation
between the man with a good musical education and the good
citizen is no longer a paradox (or jest) as it was in the Republic.
Boringly expounded as the equivalence is here, the boredom does
not turn into satire.
It is unconvincing to find readers who, like Lutoslawski, have
systematically overlooked dramatic form in their study of Plato
suddenly noticing, when they come to what they call his later
works, a lack of dramatic form in them, as well as in the Laws.
Such readers give us no reason to trust their sense of dialogical
form: a stylometrist who thinks that Laws and Timaeus are equally
lacking in style must have a deficient conception of style. 4
Avoiding the issue of the adequacy of hiatus-avoidance as a
stylometric
 Page 307
index, what the statistical results appear to show is that Sophist,
Politicus, Timaeus, Philebus, and the pseudo-Platonic Kritias are
the dialogues distinguished by a minimal occurrence of hiatus in
them, and that Laws avoids hiatus less successfully than these but
much more successfully than all the rest of the dialogues. This is
taken as a reason for grouping Laws with the set of five dialogues
just named rather than with any other set. But the question is never
raised as to whether Laws can be associated at all with any of
Plato's dialogues. It is nowhere established that Laws is, in fact, by
Plato. On the contrary, as A. Boeckh's careful analysis of the prose
of the first three books of Laws shows, 5 it would be far-fetched to
claim it as Plato's prose.
And scholars, like Friedländer,6 who assume that Laws is Plato's
last dialogue are involved in both invoking stylometrics and then
not respecting them; for, on the stylometric test of hiatus-
avoidance, Sophist, Politicus, Timaeus, Philebus, and Kritias are
later than Laws. And if the first four of these sometimes brilliant
(and not easy) pieces are later than Laws, what happens to the
hypothesis that the deficiencies of Laws can be explained by old
age and infirmity? It would take a separate chapter to consider the
basis and uses of stylometrics and its conception of style. The gap
between Plato's brillaint dialogical achievements, down to the
Sophistês, Politicus, Philebus group alleged by stylometrists to be
among his last, and the regressive failures of the monologous Laws
is an expression of the historical discontinuity between the semi-
oral-aural culture of the Classical polis and the visual-graphic
anomie of the alienated culture of subjugated Hellensitic Greece.
What makes Plato so vulnerable to misunderstanding is that his
working lifetime fell exactly between this and another great
cultural divide.
Plato was born on the far side of the divide between the oral-aural
modes of thinking (prevalent before the adoption of the Ionian
alphabet at the unhappy end of the fifth century) and the more
completely visual-graphic modalities of the alienated culture of
subjugated Hellenistic Greece in the second half of the fourth
century. He is also separated from us by the abrupt changes
precipated by expanding Macedonian militarism. There is
something of these four worldsthe classical democratic Athenian
polis, Dorianism and Macedonianism, the oral-aural and the visual-
graphic culturesin the corpus of Plato's (and pseudo-Plato's)
dialogues as it has come down to us. What has been particularly
confusing to philosophic students is the presence, within the
Classically controlled dialogical format of Plato's works, of the bits
of doctrinal "raw material" out of which the Hellenistic age was to
construct its own differently motivated world-view in combination
with non-Greek influences. The difficulty is compounded by the
fact that the foundations of the Western tradition lie just as much in
the Hellenistic society and the Greek
 Page 308
classics as mediated by Alexandria and Rome, as in the perceptive
non-alienated humanism of the Tragic age of Greece of which
Plato and the Classical dramatists were the heirs. Thus, when we
see that Laws is not by Plato, we can also see what its real
importance is: it must be taken, and should be studied, as a major
founding document of the 'ecumenical,' orientalized, Romanized
and anguished Hellenistic age.
Notes
1. And which A. Boeckh documented in more detail, for the first
three Books of Laws, in his In Platonis qui fertur Minoem . . .
(Halle: Hemmerde 1806).
2. A term in Peirce's semiotics for interpretants of signs not
determined by the qualities of the sign itself. They posit, or lead to,
something other than the object determined by the sign.
3. Cf. From Platonism to Neoplatonism (The Hague: Nijhoff
1953).
4. In referring to the Timaeus, I limit myself to the cosmological
discourse which is its main concern, to the exclusion of ante-
cosmogonic prelude. See Chapters 14 and 15, below.
5. In Platonis qui vulgo fertur Minoem eiusdemque Libros Priores
de Legibus (Halle: Hemmerde 1806).
6. Vol. Ill, p.447 ff.).
 Page 309

Chapter 14
A Garland of "Yesterdays"
A Narrative Wreath To Celebrate the Festival of an Unnamed
Goddess
In the dramatic fiction of the Timaeus Sokrates has, on "the day
before" xthes, told his friends about a previous conversation he
once held on the subject of the constitution. The clauses "My
yesterday's discourse was mainly about the sort of constitution and
the kind of men which seemed to me to make it the best (aristê,
17c1-3)", and "when you requested me yesterday to go over my
views of the constitution (20b)," tell us that the Sokrates in this
dialogue discussed the constitution in summary form the day
before. Timaios adds that what he said about it was approved by
all.
But it is a big leap from here to the assumption, unbridged by any
text except the iteration at 19a6-10, that this discourse was a
summary of Sokrates' extended construction in the Republic, given
that all that these lines affirm is: "such indeed is what was said
Sokrates." For one thing, Timaios, from distant Lokri, was not
present at Sokrates' conversation about the constitution with the
Kephalidai in Piraeus; so how can he be a witness to its accuracy as
a summary of what it claimed to be a summary of?. For another, if
what is said between 17c6 and 19b is a rehearsal of that summary,
it is neither to scale in scope, nor isomorphic in content with the
discourse in Plato's Republic, even though Timaios confirms that
17c-19b has left nothing out. Still less is the summary consonant
with the sardonic tone in which Sokrates had developed his ironic
portrait of the Ideal State.
 Page 310
The differences in scope and content are enough to make it
impossible for the summary to be of Sokrates' extended fabulation
in the Republic of the remedial constitution needed to turn the
fevered (Rep.372e10) state into the Ideal State (the ''wished-for" . ..
"not altogether utopian" politeia (Rep.450d1, 540d2). As P.
Friedländer has said, "nobody any longer . . . believe[s] that Plato is
here recapitulating an original version of the Republic . . .. the state
sketched here would have preserved the machinery of the ideal
state without its soul." 1 Incongruent as it is with the political
import and entertaining intellectuality of Plato's Republic, the
summary given here is nonetheless designed to be taken as a
straight recapitulation of Sokrates's discourse on the constitution in
that work.
Its purpose would seem to have been two-fold. It provides a
dogmatic, Academic or platonizing interpretation of Plato's
implicitly skeptical work: this is the interpretation that captures the
Republic for doctrinal-systematic use by platonizing idealists such
as Speusippos, Xenocrates, and their successors. Secondly, it
announces and prepares for the addition of sequels to the Timaeus,
sequels that would further reinforce the oligarchist-idealist
components of the Ideal State taken literally as a utopia rather than
a counter-utopia. The experiment that makes the Kritias a sequel to
the Timaeus is more successful than that which tries to make the
Timaeus a sequel to the Republic. The first succeeds as much as it
does because the Kritias is composed from its beginning as a
continuation of the Timaeus. The problem is, it gives too much
evidence of not having been composed by Plato.
The fiction in the Kritias is that Sokrates, on the day before today's
meeting and Goddess-festival, has told his friends Timaios,
Hermocrates and Kritias about a previous conversation he once
held on the subject of the constitution. But even if we assume that
the reference of these words is to the political discussion in
Republic, this previous occasionexcept for the detail that it was on
the Bendideais itself undated and unlocatable in fictional-
biographic or dramatic time. The situation is worse if we take the
reference to be, not to the discourse within the Republic, but to the
complete Republic as the narrated dialogue which it is, and which
is therefore already a report of what had happened to Sokrates and
the Kepahalidai on the Bendideia "the day before."
So, even if that previous conversation about the state was his
discourse inside the Republic, then the previous occasion
mentioned yesterday is not this year's Bendideia. Today's rehearsal
of it in Timaeus, then, is of yesterday's summary of an undatable
discourse that took place on a given unfixed Bendideia. "Today,"
then, is not fixable either, by any reference to the festival-day on
which the discussion in Republic occurred.
Kritias does note at 21a, as Sokrates also does at 24e3, that today is
a festival
 Page 311
of the Athenian Goddess. The meeting-day of Timaios,
Hermokrates and Kritias in the Timaeus is indeed one day after this
festival. But this festival is not the Bendideia, as Proclus
mistakenly suggested. Bury's note to his translation of the Zurich
text of Timaeus says that the festival is "the lesser Panathenaea,
held early in June, just after (sic) the Bendideia." Archer-Hind also
thinks the reference is to the Lesser Panathenaea; and they fell 2
months later, like the Greater Panathenaea, around the 26 to 28 of
Hekatombaion. But the Bendideia fell on the 19th of Thargelion,
while the Panathenaea fell on the 28th of Hekatombaion. So
Proclus is wrong in claiming that the Timaeus takes place on the
day following the Bendideia. Festugière believes Proclus has
confused the Lesser Panathenaea with the festival of Athena called
the Plynterion which was on the 25th of Thargelion. 2 But all this
does is to reduce the discrepancy to some three-or-four to nine
days. So the claim that the conversation of the day before was the
one that Sokrates conducted with the Kephalidai in Piraeus at the
Bendideia is not supported by the text after all.
To put it in another way: the discourse in Republicif it is to be in
referencewould have to be "yesterday's" story potentiated, the
yesterdy of a 'yesterday,' since it is a narrated dialogue about what
happened 'yesterday.' So 'yesterday's discussion' in dramatic real
time could've been any discussion of the Ideal State. If it was
yesterday's discussion of the Ideal State discussed on the Republic's
main speaker's "yesterday," wouldn't the phrasing have been
'yesterday's discussion' of the state discussed by you "a yesterday,"
namely, on the eve of the Bendidea. In other words, the text of the
Timaeus does not of itself connect it dramatically to the Republic as
a sequel to it. So much for the literalist summary of Yesterday's
State.
We now take a closer look at the author's illusionist use of "Xthes."
Kritias promises that his description will transport the city "fabled"
(en mythôi, 26c10) yesterday by Sokrates into the realm of truth
(epì talêthès) by imagining that those ancient Athenians of the
elder Kritias are their ancestors and that the Best State will be, by
deliberate selection (27bl), populated by them. We notice at once
that the promise rakes in Solon as a supporter of the Ideal Polis
(27b2): He "makes them citizens of this state of ours . . . according
to the account and law of Solon" (katà dê ton Solônos Iógon te kai
nomon, 27b1f.). Among adult auditors, only those who were
themselves oligarchists would refrain from objection.3 Kritias
claims that the existence and Athenian citizenship of these
forgotten mythical men is legitimated by "the declaration of the
sacred writings" (27b5). Since citizenship was a jealously guarded
status in classical Athens, adult readers could not have helped
noticing that here it is granted on the basis of foreign Egyptian
documents of impossible age.
Not only has Solon been co-opted here for oligarchism by Kritias,
who
 Page 312
will, in his own dialogue, be offering a mythicized defense of that
political orientation, but also he will indirectly be enforcing an
oligarchist interpretation of the Republic and a neoplatonist one of
the Timaeus. Kritias naturally claims to have documents proving
the Solonic nature of his version of the state, "these very writings
(tauta ge dê ta grammata) from my grandfather (parà tôi papôi,
113b1f.) are actually now mine". This claim, we note, avoids
establishing that the discussants are meeting at Kritias's house; for,
if they were, he would have had to show the writings to his guests.
We review the way in which the impression of connection among
the Republic, Timaeus, and Kritias arises. In the last, Kritias
describes how the machimon, the purely military class, lived apart
from the other classes in the ancient God-governed territory that
became Athensseemingly because of the presence of divine heroes
(andrôn theiôn, 110c6) in it. 4 The members of this class had only
shared property, "and from the other citizens they claimed to
receive nothing (oudèn aksioûntes . . . dechesthai) but a sufficient
sustenance. And they practiced all those practices mentioned
yesterday (ta xthes lechthénta) for the proposed (hypotethéntôn)
guardians then described (errhêthê)." So let us look, from another
angle, to see whether yesterday's summary model for Kritias's
proposed state can really be pinned down in dramatic real time as a
summary of the one described in Plato's Republic.
Here at Kritias 110d3 'yesterday' has to refer to Sokrates' summary
at the beginning of the Timaeus, from 17c6 to 19boffered, he says
at 2063, "eagerly to gratify" (prothumôs echarizómen) Kritias the
oligarch and Timaios the Pythagorean. To two such personages,
naturally, only a pythagorizing oligarchy would be so gratifying;
and this is what the summary gives them. "For," Sokrates adds,
"you alone among the living, after getting our city into a suitable
(préponta) war, are able to confer on her all befitting qualities,"war
being, naturally, the rationale for militarization, and militarization
the excuse for concentrating power in one or a few.5
We pause to register that this one, at 110d3, is the only occurrence
of xthes in the Kritias. It is important because it refers back to the
uses of xthes at Timaeus 19a7 and 20b2 where Sokrates first refers
to then rehearses his discourse of yesterday. Then, 15 lines down,
Hermocrates interposes that "also yesterday" at Kritias's house
(20c7) "right after our return from you," Kritias had brought to
their attention his story "from ancient tradition" (ek palaiâs akoês
Tim.20d1, di'archaian akoên palaiàn 22b8). So, with its xthes at
110d3, these are the places by reference to which the Kritias
attaches itself to the Timaeus.
In the Timaeus, xthes is used three times in the first eighteen lines.
Three of our entertainees (daitumônes) yesterday, Sokrates says,
are our entertainers (es-
 Page 313
tiátôres) today. Timaios's phrasing implies that the entertainer
yesterday was Sokrates (hypò soû xenisthéntas). The three were
with Sokrates, but were they at Sokrates's? We are never really told
where that yesterday's conversation took place.
To be in the role of host and guest-friend to notables, we note, is
unusual for Plato's Sokrates in the undoubted dialogues, the
disputant who can barely put together 30 mnae for legal purposes,
as in the Apology. In the phrase "as soon as I left from thence"
(enthénde) forpresumablyhis own house, Kritias might be implying
that it was at Sokrates' place. But just where today's Timaeus
conversation is taking place we are not able to tell with certainty
from the dialogue itself. At Tim. 20c8 it is specified that
Hermocrates and his companion Timaios are lodging in Kritias's
guest-suite (20c8), and Timaios is named as "the third of our trio"
by Kritias (20d5). That the author is thinking of the place of today's
Timaeus conversation as being Kritias's house, is implied by
Hermocrates' being able to speak of a return (aphikómetha . . . kath'
hodòn) to it at 20c8-9. However, if it is taking place at Kritias's
house, wouldn't Kritias's scrupulous-sounding reference to the
writings in his possession have said something about having them
at hand? We see that the meeting's location had to remain masked
in order to protect the non-existent documents from having to be
produced.
The third xthes came when, in response to Timaios' request,
Sokrates is refreshing his auditors' memories by recapitulating what
he said yesterday "about the constitution, and the kind of principles
and men (hoía te kai ex hoíôn andrôn) which, for me, will make it
come out as the best" (17c1-3). But we note that the Sokrates who
has introduced the dialogue is unsocratically dogmatic in the
summary, and that he speaks of having proposed a discussion topic
for today, on top of his alleged 300-page politeia-discourse in
guestly recompense (so to say) for it. And, he is too specific about
what he wants from Kritias, namely, something whichin an insult
to himself (there is no Socratic modesty here)will "bring to life" his
yesterday's construction, as if the politeia-discourse in Republic
was not both lively and pointed!
The other six occurrences of xthes all come between 25e2-26e8.
The first at 25e2 (as already hypothesized), is part of Kritias's
attempt to get Solon's blessing, so to say, for the citizens both of
Sokrates' summarized polity and his prehistoric proto-oligarchal
Athenian archetypes. But this means that the authorand we are still
in the Timaeus, not yet in the Kritiaseither wants the reader to see
that Kritias is a tendentious mythologizer or else he wants the
reader to accept Kritias's mythopoeia. And these alternatives would
be unacceptable to any but an oligarchist audience.
The second and third occurences of xthes, at 26a5 and a8, are those
which
 Page 314
seem to locate the Timaeus conversation in Kritias's house. The
fourth, at 26b4, is that in which Kritias says it is easier to remember
some things heard in childhood than something heard yesterday.
Kritias then states, at 26c9-d4,
The citizens and the city which you described to us yesterday as in a
fable (hôs en mythôi), we will transfer to into the realm of truth (epì
talêthes) here (deûro), positing that one to be this one (thêsomen hôs
ekeinên tênde oûsan), and that the citizens you imagined are in truth
those forefathers of ours of whom the priest spoke.
The sixth occurrence of xthes is in the context of Sokrates' saying
that the story is especially suited to today's festival of the Goddess,
and that it is not invented but is a true account; and that, given his
speech of yesterday, "it is his turn to keep silent" (26e9). Notice
that it is Kritias's Atlantis-story that Sokrates has said is so
appropriate, not the creation story into which Timaios then
launches.
Now this, from the literary point of view, particularly from the
point of view of dialogue-construction, creates an anomalous
discontinuity. Given that most of the rest of the dialogue is going to
consist of Timaios's cosmological discourse, it's puzzling that it is
Kritias not Timaios that we find Sokrates addressing. So much so
that when Sokrates goes right on to say "it is now necessary for you
to discourse to us" (26e8-9), we notice (i) that Kritias has already
said (a few lines up at 26c7-9) "I am ready to tell my tale not just in
outline but as heard in full detail," and (ii) that he has already
given us, instead, an abbreviated version of the Atlantis story. So
what are these words an announcement of? Not of what Kritias did
do back at 20e-262. It is, rather, an announcement appropriate to
the longer story which he is going to tell in the Kritias. These
words, we see, are the means by which Kritias has been inserted
into the Timaeus-dialogue by being made Sokrates' addressee at
this point. This also is where Sokrates has begun to be co-opted
into the long-range scheme which attaches the Kritias to the
Timaeus and celebrates the Goddess in her non-democratic but
undeclared aspect of Athênê aristeutikê rather than in her old
Athenian aspect as isonomikê: the promoter of valiant deeds rather
than of equality under the law.
On the other hand, when Sokrates had finished his summary of
"yesterday's" description of the Ideal polis (at 20b), and reminded
both Hermocrates and Kritias that it is now their turn to comply
with his requestwhich was for a description of what that state
would look like when "engaged in a suitable war"Hermocrates
adduces that Kritias is ready with a story he has been working to
recollect since yesterday. And Kritias proceeds to tell it as we have
 Page 315
it, from 20e to 26e. But there is no mention at this early stage
(when it would have been proper) of it's being preceded by, or
having to be repeated after, the telling of a creation-story by the
honorable (tímios) Timaios. 6 That announcement doesn't come till
27a with an excuse about how, once Timaios has covered the
generation of the cosmos he, Kritias, will take over from Timaios
the humans about to be created in his discourse, and from Sokrates'
the selectively trained men mentioned in his polity. Is this
"anticipative hindsight" (as we could call it) on the part of the
manipulator we have hypothesized?
What Kind of Tale Is the Atlantis-Story?
The tale that Kritias tells more briefly at Timaeus 20e-26e, and at
greater length in the Kritias (108e-121c), was told him (he says)7
by his eponymous grandfather on children's day (koureôtis) of the
three-day feast of Apatouria (Apatouríôn). The relevant points are
(i) that, as the festival was thought to commemorate a happy
deception,8 it was a kind of April Fool's day, and (ii) that Kritias
the elder's friend, who brought him the story from Solon, was
named Drôpides. The first, or supper, day of the festival was called
the dorpeia; but the root verb-form drå ("make") in the first
syllable of Drôpides surely determines most of the color, the
connotational halo, of this name. "Maker-son" is a suggestive
English equivalent. Drôpô means "see through, cut through;" and is
related to drepô "gather or cull;" while drôpazein is synonymous
with emblêpein ''to gaze at, look in the face," with emblêma
meaning "insertion." All in all and in this context, Drôpides would
seem to suggest a "perceptive maker-up or bringer-forward of
stories."9 Given that the names of so many of the characters in the
dialogues are chosen in order to signal something about their
owners, it is not too much to presume that Drôpides has this kind of
aptness to it too. Like the self-focusing device mentioned above, it
silently alerts the reader to the author's detachment about the story
he is putting in the mouth of his speakers.10 But that it is a practice
of great authors like Shakespeare and Dickens, as well as Plato,
does not preclude it from being imitatable.
The contradiction between the statedly oral-aural nature (at 21a7)
of the story transmitted to, and by, Solon (in the Greek milieu) and
the anomalous claim by the Egyptian priest (at 24a1) to have
documents 9000 years old that certified it, is muted by the priest's
explanation of it as a matter of Egyptian cultural practices of long
standing, which non-Nilotic peoples are unable to follow because
of the illiteracy (23c3-4) and cycles of destruction that leave them
completely without a recorded past from which to go on.
 Page 316
Millenially-kept Egyptian records, however, allow the Egyptian
priest to tell Solon of a prehistoric Golden Age of Athens among
whose exploits was the defeat of a mighty host from the island
empire of Atlantis in the west. This army was bent on extending its
Afro-European conquests to both Athens and Egypt (25b). But
Athenian valor and leadership defeated it, and liberated all who
dwell on this side of the Pillars of Hercules. Unfortunately,
however, cataclysmic quakes and floods then occurred which
swallowed up not only the triumphant warriors of Athens but also
the whole island territory of Atlantis, leaving the ocean impassable
because of the mud shoals in which it came to rest.
The purpose of this telling is at once made clear in the next
paragraphs, from 25d7 to 26e1, which also pile more 'explanations'
on the already 'explained' survival and transmission of the
extraordinary story. Kritias says and marvels that while he cannot
remember all the details of Sokrates' yesterday's account, "not a
single detail of [Kritias's account] has escaped [him] . . . even
though it's so very long since I heard the tale . . . it is indelibly
fixed in my mind like those encaustic designs which cannot be
effaced" (26b-c). "Marvellous indeed," he says, "is the way in
which the lessons of one's childhood 'grip the mind,' as the saying
is'' (26b2-4). More importantly, Soloh's Kritias-transmitted
description of prehistoric Athens' Golden Age turns out by
convenient coincidence to be the very equivalent of Sokrates'
yesterday's description of the Best State.
It is clear that the purpose of Timaios's prefatory prayer, at the
beginning of the Kritias, is to link it up with the Timaeus. At the
end of the prayer, Timaios (in accordance with Pythagorean
fashion) calls knowledge (epistêmê) the completest and best of
medicines (pharmákôn), and turns the discourse over to Kritias.
But note: Kritias who was first made to speak at 20d4 of Timaeus,
had there relegated Timaiosthe central speaker of the Timaeusto the
status of "our third partner."
Two or three things obtrude themselves about the indulgence he in
turn asks for. First, when Sokrates grants it he extends it to
Hermocrates' future address, thus bringing him too into the loop
which Hermocrates (however) never enters. Secondly, lines 107b1-
e1 are a long digression about the problems of representation
(mimêsis), in the course of which he insults his auditors by
speakingwith unPlatonic clumsinessof their inexperience (apería)
and ignorance (ágnoia) in the matter of representing the Gods. At
the end of the digression (107e2-3), thirdly, Kritias claims that his
"account is given on the spur of the moment." 11 And this is false;
whoever the author is has forgotten that, in the Timaeus, both
Hermocrates and Kritias stated that he had given a lot of thought to
the matter since the day-before-yesterday's meeting with
 Page 317
Sokrates. This is one difference between the Kritias in Timaeus and
the one in his own dialogue.
Let us look at some compositional differences between the stories
as told in the Timaeus and in the Kritias. That "the [Atlantean]
dwellers beyond the pillars of Hercules" and "all (pâsan) that dwelt
within them" are the peoples at war (108e4), contradicts the fact
that in the Timaeus account the empire of Atlantis was said to have
conquered Libya and parts of Europe within the pillars of Hercules,
as far as Etruria (Turrenías, 25b1-2).
While Kritias at 109a says that he must give precedence (anánkê
kat'archás) to the military and political situation of Athens, he only
devotes 31/2 Stephanus pages to it. But to Atlantis be gives more
than twice as many (113c-121c). He then narrates, at 109b, that the
Gods piloted (oíaki . . . ekybérnôn) the mortal herd with
psychological rudders of persuasion instead of the rods and staffs
of shepherds. This language tries to color over, with non-violent
imagery, Kritias's actual historical image as the bloody tyrant that
he was. 12 But it forgets to abandon the standard sophistical-
pythagorean reference to the rulers as herders.
Sophist that he is (as, e.g., in Plato's Charmides), Kritias flatters the
Athenians' love of knowledge and artfulness by putting them under
the aegis of Athena and Hephaistos, the Gods of philosophía and
philotechnía, and by making the Athenians autochthonous. He
flatters Greek localism by twice insisting (109d3-4, 110a7-8) that
the names of these first earth-born Athenians have been preserved,
even while their works and writings were destroyed by intervening
floods. He infers this because Solon stated that the Egyptian priests'
narrative of the war mentioned most of the names of the heroes
before Theseus, such as Kekrops, Erectheus, Erichthonius and
Erysichthon.13 Kritias says he returns to this point about the names
at 113a because Solon got them from the priests in Egyptian, and
had to translate their meaning (tên diánoian onómatos) back into
Greek when beginning to draft his poem about all this, and "these
very writings are . . . now in [his] possession, and [he] learnt them
by heart when a child" (113b2-3). The other reason for this is to
cover up the fact that Kritias's narrative is a purely Greek story.
Note the assumption that proper nouns have meanings, not just
denotation.
Note the clumsy writing at 110c1-3, where all the species of
herding animals of both sexes are said to be naturally able to attend
(prosakoúein) to their own species-excellence (aretên). Could this
be an imitator's echo of Republic 397e, where Sokrates ironically
desiderates the principle that only if one man is allowed one job,
only then will it be properly done. . . ? Two pages down the
farmers are real (alêthínôn) farmers who practice only farming;
though they are also men of good taste and noble nature
(philokalôn kai euphuôn, 111e4), namely, men whoin after-
thoughtwould make "good oligarchist material,"
 Page 318
like Xenophon perhaps, the archetypical militarist oligarch and
gentleman-farmer.
The military class, however, gets very rapid mention within a more
adagio account of an idyllic ecology. They live separately from,
though supported by, the productive classes whom they protect.
And they are mentioned, in just one reference at 110d4, as identical
with the guardians "posited" in what Sokrates said "yesterday"
xthes. But shouldn't it be "the day before yesterday,'' given that
yesterday was taken up with Timaios's cosmogonic discourse, and
that just before it reference was made to Sokrates' speech of
'yesterday'? The military class lives atop the acropolis next to the
temple of Athena and Hephaistos. While it is repeated that they are
allowed no gold or silver, as in the Republic, they are now said to
live side by side with (or, in community with) the priests. 14
Different from the Republic also is the implication at 12c5-7 that
their buildings, houses and profession were hereditary rather than
occupied by selected, successfully trained warriors. And where in
Republic there is only a general statement that reproduction must
be controlled, here it is specified that their number must be forever
limited to 20,000. No such figure is given in the Timaeus version of
the Best State either.
Kritias's lines from 112el-el0 sound like a peroration to the part of
his discourse that deals with the proto-Athenians. So we notice that
lines 113al to 113b7, already cited as explaining why we have the
prehistoric names in Greek, are misplaced where they arejust
before Kritias launches into his loving, much longer description of
the Atlantis that wished to conquer ancient Athens and Egypt. An
effect of this description is that it expands the reference of
Hermocrates' expectation that Kritias will "exhibit and celebrate the
goodness of these ancient citizens" to include the Atlanteans more
than the proto-Athenians (!).
The Athenian part of the Kritias Atlantis-story, then, doesn't
coincide enough with either the Athenian part of the Timaeus
version of the story, or with the content and spirit of the original
Republic for it to be believably by Plato himself. But this proves
nothing about the authenticity of the Timaeus. It does suggest re-
examining the Timaeus for signs of tamperings which permit
attaching the Kritias to it.15
This is a good place at which to note that the Sokrates of the
Timaeus as we have it, is discursive in an uncharacteristic way. He
is neither interrogative, as in the undoubted elenchtic dialogues, nor
is he inventively and wittily discursive as in the undoubted longer
dialogues; nor, again, is he the complete and attentive listener of
the Politicus and Sophistuntil, that isTimaios launches into his
cosmologic paean. One valid criticism of the fussy introduction to
this paean, is that, where Sokrates ought to have little else to do
than listen to Timaios's poetic creation-story, he is made to talk
dogmatically in an un-Socratic,
 Page 319
assertive way. Lastly, his interlocutors alternate with him and each
other in a rather disjointed way.
The Sokrates of the ante-cosmological part of the Timaeus comes
under suspicion because, on ending his summary of the ideal polis,
he says he isn't up to praising the Best City and its people
sufficiently. But this is contradicted by the fact that this is just what
Sokrates did do on a literalist reading of Republic, and what he
ironically did on a dialogical reading of same. "But that is no
marvel," he continuesin words that are rambling and unskilfully
indirect (from 19dl to 20a)considering that neither the poets ("not
that I disparage them") nor the Sophists ("although I believe them
to be practiced in beautiful speech-making") are good at
representing political men who are also men of knowledge and men
of action (19e6-8).
Next, compare the wording on either side of the first telling of
Kritias's tale, with the wording which agrees that telling the tale
again later will be appropriate to, and "in entire harmony and
accord with" (pantôs harmóousi kai ouk apaisómetha) the equation
between Kritias's mythical Athens and Sokrates's Best City. At 21 a
Sokrates wants to hear the story that Kritias wants to tell at 20e-
21a; but notice that Kritias wants at the same time to praise the
(unnamed) Goddess whose festival it is.
Adult auditors will perceive (i) that, as a story based on 9000 year-
old documents, it will be a myth, (ii) that, as derived from an
Egyptian priest by Drôpides Makerson and transmitted to
grandfather Kritias to be told on Apatouria Deception Day, it must
be an invention, and (iii) that, because told on children's
Citizenship and Joking Day, it is right for it to be both edifyingly
ideological and a fabulation.
While the anti-democratic, counter-Athenian biases of both the
dialogue and the Atlantis-story may be left to the reader to spot, it
would take many more pages to document the lapses in the prose
and the loose ends in the construction of both the Kritias and the
ante-cosmological part of the Timaeus. 16 Nor is there room to
more than mention the mythical significance of Lokri in reinforcing
the lesson that valiant deeds will overcome numerical
disadvantage. Are not oligarchists by definition always at
numerical disadvantage in relation to the rest of the polis-dwellers?
Lokri's army of 15,000 defeated a Krotonite host of 120,000 "by
the Sagra" river, a feat so incredible that the phrase became
proverbial for good news that is hard to believe. But: would not a
friend of Athens have, rather, invoked the famous victory at
Marathon of the 10,000 Athenians (and 600 Plataians) who there
defeated a Persian host of over 60,000? What the victory at
Marathon preserved was the assembly-democracy of Athens; so the
oligarchist does not mention it.
We may not leave without remark the enormous contradiction in
the ploy
 Page 320
that makes Kritias, the blood-stained, certified extreme oligarch,
the teller of an alternative foundation-story that co-opts Solon, the
founder of Athenian democracy, into holding up as a new model
for Athens a romanticized militarist oligarchy. Is it the frontal
boldness of the ploy or just the passage of time that has succeeded
in obviating Kritias's inappropriateness as the teller of an Athenian
foundation-story?
It could only have been at a time when oligarchism was riding high
in post-classical Athens, that anyone would have dared to put
Kritias forward as having anything to do with the foundation of
Athens, the city he had terrorized, bloodied, and lost his life to.
And if it is not the "frontal boldness" of the oligarchist Plato-
imitator that chose him, we have to hypothesize that enough time
has gone by for people to have forgotten the horrors he perpetrated
upon the Athenians. In this case, the words in Aristotle's Rhetoric
(1416b26-28) would seem to apply: "people don't need a story
when you praise someone like Achilles; but if it's Kritias, then you
must [narrate], for they don't know [what he did] . . ." In this case
and a fortiori, Plato could not have been the author of the Kritias.
That the story is in places oriented toward children makes it apt for
telling to the feudal corps of Royal Pages, consisting of the
children of the nobles, at the Macedonian court. As the celebratory
discourse which Sokrates had said (21a3) he wants it to be, why,
finally, does the Goddess in whose honor it is recited remain
unnamed?
The answer has to be that the adult part of the audience to whom
the story is addressed did not need to be told, since she is the
embodiment of their self-image as a conquering aristokratía.
Dêmokratía, the Goddess of classical Athens, has now been
overcome not only in deeds but also in words by the platonist
imitator(s) who composed the Kritias and connected it to the
Timaeus. Avoiding explicit use of the terms dêmokratía and
oligarchía, to both of which there were objections, the author's
story has implicitly honored "temperate aristocracy" (aristokratía
sôhrôn) as the oligarchs were pleased to call it. 17 The festival of
the Athenian Goddess that Kritias has been celebrating is not just
that of Athênê poliás (protector of cities) but rather (under her
equivocal aspect as apatouria) that of warlike Athênê aristeutikê
(promoter of valiant deeds). Kritias's creator has replaced the
Athênê isonomikê of the classical polityalien as she had to be to the
Macedonian conquerorswith a Goddess more acceptable to himself
and those who saw themselves as the ruling class after the passing
of Philip and Alexander.
Notes
1. Plato 3 vols. Tr. H. Meyerhoff, Princeton U.P. 1969); v. 3,
p.356-7.
 Page 321
2. Respectively, Archer-Hind's The Timaeus, p.66 ad loc.; and
Proclus Commentaire sur le Timée Tr. & Notes A.J. Festugière
(Vrin 1966); p.55.
3. Solon was, of course, the founder of the Ancestral Constitution
(hê patrios politeia), and the legislator who "put an end to
unlimited oligarchy (oligarchían. . . katalûsai lían ákraton),
emancipated the people, established the hereditary democracy
(dêmokratían katastêsai tên patrion) and harmonized the different
elements of the state" (miksanta. ..kalôs tên politeian, Aristotle
Politics II. 1273b35-74a21).
4. The word málchimon, we note, is used twice in the Timaeus
(24b1, 25d2), and twice in the Kritias (110c5, 11263). It is used
just once in the Republic (III. 386c1, in the dat.pl.), and only before
the specifics about the warriors' education have been introduced.
But where the two standard words for the military class in Republic
were phúlakes for "guardians" and epikouroi for "auxiliaries," the
former occurs only at Krit. 110d5 and 112d4, the latter not at all in
the Kritias. "Guardians" is used at Tim. 18a3, 17d3 and, with a
different meaning, at 40cl.
5. Does not the rhapsodic prose, from 110e-111a3, about the
fertility (!) of what we and its inhabitants know to be "rocky
Attica" throw doubt on the author's knowledge of the country he's
describing?
6. Cf. also the pun at 20a1 and 20a4, between timàs and Tímaiós.
7. We have been assuming in all of this what can only be an
assumption: that there is only one author to the two Kritias's,
namely, that the oligarchist imitator who composed the Kritias is
also the one who wove the Atlantis-story into the Timaios.
8. An Athenian-Ionian admission-to-citizenship or socialization
festival, it was also a celebration of the victory of the Athenian
champion Melanthus over the Boetian king Xanthius. At the start
of combat, and contrary to the rules, a man in a goat-skin came into
view behind Xanthius. When Xanthius, deceived (apatáô), turned
to check this out, Melanthus slew him; and according to a scholium
to Aristophanes' Archanians 146, the apparition was due to
Dionysos. An alternative derivation supported by F. Welcker
(Griechische Götterlehre 1863) is that "apatouria" comes from a
for hama, and patória, as suggested by Xenoph.'s Hellenica i.7.8,
en hoîs (apatoúriois) hoi te patéres kai hoi suggeneîs ksuneisi
sphísin autoîs. The first day of the festival was called dorpia or
dorpeia (Photius Lexicon, and Athenaeus iv.171).
9. See E.Boisacq Dictionnaire Étymologique del la Langue
Grecque (Heidelberg: Winter 1923), and P. Chantraine
Dictionnaire Étymologique del la Langue Grecque (Paris:
Klincksieck 1968). Applying the literary convention that exploits
the consonance of name with character to Kritias, his name, for
historical reasons, could only be a standing symbol of and
synecdoche for oligarchism and political terror. The phonetic
overtones of the word itself become sinister because of the cruel
and arbitrary judgments(kritês = judge)of the tyranny of the Thirty.
10. It is another question whether speakers other than Socrates are
always as detached from their stories as Plato's Socrates usually is
from his. How detached, for
 Page 322
instance, is the sophistic rhetorician from Elea, in the Politicus-
ophistês, from the myth he makes up in the course of his defense
of one-man rule? Notice that it is Socrates who insists, before
the telling, that it is a reliable oral-aural report of Solon's
(Sólonos akoên, 21a4-8), and then again at the end of it (at 26e5)
that it "is not an invented fable but a true history" (mê plasthenta
mython all' alêthinón lógon eînaipam-megápou). Are these
interjections uttered in the same ironic tone as that which comes
over in the quoted words of the Egyptian priest at 24a1, words
about which even the literalist A.E. Taylor could not but say that
they "could hardly be anything but satirical" (op.cit., p.54).
Taylor is struck by the anomaly of the priest's claim to have in
his possession manuscripts nine-thousand years old.
11. And, accordingly prays to Mnemosynê at 108d3.
12. The claim by Avery that Kritias was not always an oligarch
does not hold up; the examination of it by Adeleye reconfirms not
only his extreme oligarchism, but also his cleverness. Cf. G.
Adeleye "Critias Member of the Four Hundred?", TAPA 104
(1974); p.1-10. Xenophon's Hellenica (quoting Theramenes) says
that he was "the sharpest hater of the commons (misodêmótatos)
during the democracy, and the most anti-bourgeois
(misochrêstótatos) during the aristocracy" (II.iii.47).
13. In Greek the inseparable prefix erï- is, of course, an intensifier;
so the word-play is with theos (=divine) and chthôn (= earth):
"very divine," "very earthy."
14. The Zurich text (XV, p. 113), has hierôn here, as does the
Oxford text; but Bury, who is otherwise translating from the Zurich
text, follows Hermann who prints (Vol.IV, p.428; Praef.xxx)
hieréôn "priests." The latter imports a difference with the Tirnaeus
version of the Athenian part of the story in which it is said that "the
priestly class is separated off from the rest" Tim.24a6.
15. This suggestion does, however, lead to the question, if the
beginning of Timaeus was touched up to allow for attachment of
the Kritias, how come the beginning of Republic was not touched
up by the inclusion of Kritias and Timaios in it among the other
named auditors at Rep.328b? This would have made it indubitable
that the 'yesterday's' discourse mentioned in Timaeus was indeed
the Republic. What was the situation in the Academy, on this
hypothesis, that protected the Republic but not the Timaeusif the
latter was touched up?
16. See my The Return of the King The Intellectual Warfare over
Democratic Athens; Chapter III, "The Prelude to the Timaeus, and
the Atlantis-Story" (in press), for a fuller account of these
anomalies.
17. A term original to Thucydides' (in Book III, Chapter 82 of his
history).
 Page 323

Chapter 15
A Poetic Cosmography:
The Timaeus
Problematic Connections of the Timaeus
The first thing to understand about this dialogue is that the
introductory conversation between Sokrates and Timaios does not
refer to a previously completed dialogue by Plato, or to a dialogue-
in-progress by him. This is not only a conclusion to which we are
led by our study of the Kritias; it is confirmed by the anomalies in
the prelude to the cosmogonic discourse in Timaeus. The fiction of
the dialogue, in accordance with the wording at 17c and 20b, is that
Sokrates has the day before told his friends about a conversation he
once held on the subject of the constitution. 1 At 21a Kritias notes
that today is a festival of the Athenian Goddess.
If "today" is a festival of the Athenian Goddess, then the anomaly
arises that the day following on which Kritias recounts the Atlantis
story more lengthily in honor of the Athenian Goddess is also, and
still another, festival of the Goddess, under a different butas we
sawunnamed aspect. It doesn't matter whether "today's" festival
was the Greater Panathenea or the Lesser; neither of these festivals
falls even in the same month as the festival of the Thracian Bendis
that was the occasion of the dramatic conversation narrated by
Sokrates in the Republic. According to such sources as Proclus
(fifth century A.D.), the Bendidea fell on the 19th of the month
Thargelion, while the Greater Panathenea fell in Hekatombaion.
However, according to Plutarch (second century (A.D.), there was
a festival of Athena called Plynterion that fell in the last week of
Thargelion.
 Page 324
Thus, Kritias's mention of a festival of Athena could be made less
incompatible with the claim that the conversation of the day before
was the one Sokrates conducted in Piraeus at the Bendidea, by
reducing the discrepancy to about four-to-nine days. It is then
supposed to follow that the otherwise unmentioned auditors of the
narrated Republic were the four people alluded to in the first line
of the Timaeus, only three of whom are present today. As just
noted, however, this claim doesn't achieve full consistency; and it
is not based on any clue to be found in the text. It is based, rather,
on inferences grounded in "facts" adduced by a platonist centuries
too late to be safely usable in this application, especially since the
platonist is visibly straining to buttress his own interpretation of
Plato. The first lines of the Timaeus read: "One, two, threebut
where, my dear Timaios, is the fourth of our yesterday's guests who
are our hosts today?"
There would be an allusion to that writing that came to be called
the Republic only if yesterday's discourse (so to call it) had had for
its subject-matter either the whole of Republica published narrative
for an unspecified audienceor the fable of the remedial constitution
developed by Sokrates within it, for hearing by Glaucon,
Adeimantos, Polemarchos and Niceratus, Lysias and Euthydemus,
Thrasymachos, Charmantides and Kleitophon (327cl-4, 328b). But
all we hear of yesterday's discourse is Sokrates' summary of it from
17b to 19b, a summary which Timaios says has left nothing out (!).
Right here, two problems arise: Timaios was not there to be now
able to certify anything about it, if what is being referred to is the
Republic or its politeia passages. And Sokrates has just spoken of
hosa humin kai peri hôn epétaksa eipein "the nature and extent of
the subjects which I set out for your discussion" (17b4f.); but the
Republic and its discourse were a narrative kind of entertainment,
neither dialectical nor peirastic, neither interrogative nor refutative.
As a summary, moreover, 17b to 19b is clearly not isomorphic with
either the narrated dialogue as-a-whole or with the constitutional
construction begun by Sokrates in the middle of Book II. Still less
is the summary congruent in spirit with Sokrates' ingeniously
satirical politeia-discourse in the Republic. The summary is given
in a dogmatic, literalist spirit totally at variance with either the
subtle shadings or sharp extremes of the constitution fabled forth in
the Republic. And it is given by a Sokrates who is quite uncritical
of the Spartanizing and pythagorizing notion of the ideal statea
notion which had become an issue among political theorizers of the
day, and which the Sokrates of the Republic satirizes so wittily and
extensively.
For readers who have appreciated the satire, and who wish to
respect the irony that generates the architectonic structure of the
Republic, this at once creates many problems. The enormous
difference between the satirical ac-
 Page 325
count of the most-to-be-wished-for, pythagorizing state and the
literalist acceptance of it in Sokrates' summary and Kritias's myth
in the Timaeus, obliges such readers to consider alternatives to the
traditional views of the relations between Timaeus and Plato's other
dialogues.
If Sokrates' words from 17c to 19c are taken as definitive of his
view of the "ideal state" (as it's usually translated), then they
amount to a repudiation of what he did and said in the Republic. It
would then seem to follow that the Timaeus was composed in an
entirely different context, and a very separate time, from that in
which Plato had turned his attention to the stereotype of the
oligarchist constitution or its idealization. The traditions about
Plato are that he had a very strong interest in geometry and natural
philosophy; the traditions also are that he had a strong interest in
political philosophy. The only clues we have as to whether these
interests were simultaneous or successive, or in what order, come
from the dialogues themselves; and we have just seen, in the humor
about the nuptial number, an example that favors the thesis of a
simultaneous interest in the mathematical, verbal and political
knowledges. Even if the contexts in which Plato dramatized each of
these subjects were widely separate, however, the discrepancy is so
startling as to require an explanation. We cannot expect the
skepticism about the most-to-be-wished-for state which the
Republic enacts, to be overridden by the three-line summary of an
uncharacteristically dogmatic Sokrates in the Timaeus; or,
obversely, that because of the three-line dogmatism and
oligarchism in the latter, Plato was motivated to compose his
monumental Republic in a burst of creative criticality on behalf of
fairness to all the kinds of constitution.
If, however, we have read the Republic dialogically by the time we
get to the Timaeus, then we understand that it is because of
Sokrates' sane skepticism that Timaios calls his cosmogony
something which is offered (epheksês, 30c2) as only a "likely
account" (3067). This need not and does not detract from the piety
of Sokrates' reception of the poetic but pythagorizing allegory to
which he consents to listen. Perhaps we are to think of Timaios as
improving upon Pythagorean nature-philosophy in analogy with the
way Sokrates had improved upon and formalized the Pythagorean
curriculum in Book V of the Republic. Hence the poetic and pious
quality of the offering. All this of course on the assumption that the
cosmogonic account that begins at 28c is indeed a composition of
Plato's.
The unthinkable alternative which our study of the Kritias
suggested in Chapter 14 is that the author of the ante-cosmogonic
part of Timaeus has not understood, or does not want to take, the
Republic as the wittily critical work which it is just because the wit
is aimed at the oligarchal counter-ideal of the constitution. This
author might well have been a platonist trying to pass off
 Page 326
the Kritias and his prelude to the Timaeus as Plato's, by making
them look like the parts of a tetralogy of which the Republic is the
first dialogue. But if the Republic is the first part of a tetralogy,
why doesn't it have a mise-en-scène at the beginning that prepares
for parts two, three and four? As it now stands, the Kritias is
preannounced belatedly in the Timaeus, the second part of the
would-be tetralogy. And we've seen that it does not correspond
entirely to its anticipation in the Timaeus.
The Timaeus is not preannounced, and its summary of the ideal
constitution does not fit with the satire of it in the Republic. And
this is precisely what leads us to believe that the prelude to the
Timaeus is the insertion of a platonist expositor who (in accordance
with the anti-dialogical practice of the Academy) is helping to
impose system and doctrine upon a set of exhibitive works dealing
in the dramatization of the conflict of opinion and doctrine. If Plato
himself had wanted to attach the Timaeus to the Republic as its
sequel, he would have done it less inferentially and more
unmistakeably.
Readers who de-dramatize the Republic, and drain it of Sokrates'
humor, in order to insist that it is intended to be materially
actualized will be contradicting themselves if they also agreewith
the Sokrates of the Timaeus-preludethat there is a need to give
dramatic life or motion to the figures and agents created by Plato's
Sokrates in the (supposedly) earlier discourse. Since these readers
believe "yesterday's" discourse to be the Republic, they are now
involved in a misreading as well as a contradiction. For if the types
and figures in the discursive fable of Republic need animation and
illustration, it must be because they are not perceived as materially
actualizable. In fact, the Republic has already tested the political
stereotype of the pythagorizing constitution and found it as much
subject to criticism as all the other stereotypes of the constitution.
That constitution, in so far as it is oligarchal, is not only subjected
to Sokrates's explicit sarcasm in Book VIII, but the whole of the
Republicfrom the middle of Book II onis an exhibitive critique of
it.
We may also ask how appropriate it is, from the historical point of
view, for Timaios, the fifth-century physiologist from distant
Locris to apply a theory of the fourth-century Athenian Academy
in the way he does at 39e, 48e-49a, 46dl-2, 51d4-7 of the Timaeus?
That his acceptance and application of the theory of ideas is just so
ready and absolute could, however, be a sign that Plato (in the
cosmogonic part of the dialogue) is showing the pythagorizers how
to formulate a nature-philosophy that is both mathematical and
idealist. Timaios, in the cosmogony as a whole, combines
Pythagorean mathematicism with Empedoclean, Anaximandrian,
Anaxagorean, and stoicheometric nature-inquiry. As Friedländer
says,
 Page 327
What Plato recreated . . . was not a single doctrine, but the whole
tradition of natural science before him, including the doctrines of
medicine. 2
Adding his well-digested idealism to this combination, Timaios
emerges as an eclectic with the doctrinal attachments required by
the fiction in which he functionsnot as the Locrian who was (later)
said to have composed a treatise On the Soul of the World.
Once the "system" of the Timaeus cosmogony is understood as the
sort of synthesis it is, we are able to see how easy it was for a first-
century (A.D.) forger and pythagorizing platonist to compose the
summary called Peri Psychas Kosmô and foist it upon an allegedly
historical Timaios of Locris. Hellenistic readers would not have
found anything wrong with the compoundedness and syncretism of
his discourse, or with its allegedly fifth-century date.
What Kind of Likely Account is the Timaeus?
As a matter of intellectual history, we must take into account the
fact that, after Plato's death, the Academy was founded or captured,
and then led, by such pythagorizing platonists as Speusippus and
Xenocrates, Philippos, Herakleides, Polemo, and Krantor. As
Edelstein says (following Wilamowitz),
The situation changed in the Old Academy . . . under . . . Xenocrates. . .
. He systematized Plato's philosophy; in his hands it became a doctrine
that could be taught and learned.3
What has escaped inquiry are the successful efforts of the Academy
to distract the readership from the dialogical, implicitly critical
nature of Plato's own works. We don't know the details of the
process by which works by members of the Academy and other
imitators got mixed in with Plato's compositions. It is certainly not
the case that Plato composed all thirty-five dialogues included in
the corpus. We saw, in Chapter 14, how the Kritias got attached (in
the literary sense) to the Timaeus; and I elsewhere show what a
good imitation the Lysis dialogue is.4 About a dozen works in the
corpus have been identified as doubtful or spurious; but others have
escaped detection because of the general failure to perceive the
exhibitive mode in which Plato practiced philosophy. Discrepancies
and similarities of stylein the serious difficult-to-mathematize sense
according to which style is constitutive of a whole workhave not
been given equal weight with arbitrarily selected discrepancies and
 Page 328
similarities of ''content" or "language" in deciding whether to
attribute a work to Plato or not.
Dialogues of doubtful attribution cannot be classed as authentic on
the sole basis of their so-called platonist content; for such a
criterion begs just the question of whether Plato was advancing a
platonist system or whether he was, rather, exposing such a system
by dramatizing it, just as it is admitted that he satirizes the
Sophists. Speaking historically, what happened was that members
of the Academy succeeded, in the eyes of the world, in exempting
themselves from the sharp dramatizations and implicit judgment to
which Plato subjects them (along with other thinkers) in the
dialogues. Their success was due to the public's need for doctrines
which would compensate for its loss of community. And the way in
which the Academy met this need was by quoting at will and out-
of-context from any of the dialogues with passages apt for the
purpose.
We return to the 'content' with which Plato has packed Timaios's
cosmogonic discourse. Consider the established view, voiced in
English by Cornford, that: "[Timaeus] borrows something from
every pre-Socratic philosopher of importance, not to mention
Plato's contemporaries. Much of the doctrine is no doubt
Pythagorean"; or, Cleve's slightly qualified claim to the effect that:
"Timaeus [is] the synthesis of almost everything that was before."
Friedländer spells it out, and adds something of value: "The
Timaeus must be understood as concentrating the whole of pre-
Platonic cosmological thought. There is Anaximander in Plato, and
Pythagoras, and Empedocles, and Anaxagoras, and Leucippus-
Democritus, and there is at the same time a struggle against each of
them. Plato . . . is no -ist or -ean, not even a Pythagorean, and least
of all a Platonist." 5
I would suggest, in addition, that the cosmogonic discourse in
Timaeus, if it was composed by Plato, is his "answer to
Parmenides" in the special sense that it is Platos's "Doksa" or Way
of Seeming." Timaios's repeated reminder that he can give only a
likely account (eikota mython 29d, etc.), because he is dealing with
what changes and has origins, are the equivalent of the Goddess's
insistence to the youth in Parmenides' poem that of the whole
world of seeming and becoming, there can be only an "acceptable"
account. Both the Goddess in the poem and Timaios in the dialogue
agree that cosmology is incapable of an exact or self-consistent
account of its subject-matter (29c). But there is some difference in
the spirit with which they offer their respective, merely likely
cosmographies.
The cosmography in the Way of seeming is offered in a spirit of
knowingness and logical enlightenment. The enlightenment
consists of the insight, shared with the youth by the Goddess, that
all discourse about becoming is bound to
 Page 329
come into contradiction with itself. The knowingness consists in
the clever and "perverse" or ironic choice of the two most
immaterial possible principles with which to generate the material
world. These are the insubstantial "substances" night and light. The
ironic implication is that a plausible and original cosmology can be
invented by anyone clever enough to manipulate the generative
opposites in such a way as to save the appearances.
Plato's strategy is different. He invents Timaios not in order to
show the sense in which cosmographies are all equally plausible,
but rather to show the sense in which all the comsomographies are
so plausible thatby means of some adjustment in the imagerythey
can be made to "agree" with each other in a likely account of the
perceptible world. Where the Goddess's sample cosmography was
an ironically artificial example of the genre, invented as a negative
warning device, the cosmography of Plato's Timaios is a beautiful
grand-scale cosmography to end all cosmographies. Both Plato's
and that of the Goddess are, therefore, willful creations or tours de
force. But the factor of artistic completeness or aesthetic
wishfulness, which looms so large in Plato's dialogue, must also be
conceded to Parmenides' sketchy, badly preserved construction.
Though the two designs are equally aesthetic constructions, they
are ironic in different ways.
The majestic tone that Timaios adopts from the beginning of his
cosmological discourse as good as promises that he will build on a
commensurately majestic scale, whereas Parmenides' Goddess was
ironically content to remain schematic. But it is important to notice
that it is just Timaios's idealistic dualism and its consequences that
frees him, in turn, to build as he pleases and on a heroic scale. The
belief that the world of perceptible phenomena is merely a world of
perishable appearances liberates Timaios from the need to give a
self-consistent account of it. It sets him free not only to "imitate"
but to outdo Parmenides' Doksa or cosmography.
Like Parmenides' Goddess, Timaios materially constructs the
perceptible world out of immaterial elements: in this case, the
mathematical elementals, or geometric analogical terms into which
he ultimately analyzes it. He also proposes that time, which is
coeval with the perceptible cosmos, is made in the everlasting
image of eternity. In other words, Plato's Timaios (more literally
than Parmenides' Goddess) is playing with the notion that the
material or changing world is constituted from that which is not
material; he is criticizing the notion by drawing out the weird
consequence that time is a copy of timelessness (sic: x is a copy of
not-x). The respective cosmogonies found in the poem of the one
and the dialogue of the other, then, cannot have been designed to
be taken literally as self-consistent accounts. It is clear that Plato
has perceived that Parmenides and the Pythagoreans, in their
different ways, have
 Page 330
"accounted for" change in terms of what does not change. 6 But he
has accepted Parmenides' cautionary implication that it can only be
done with inconsistency. Hence, all that Timaios can offer to give
Sokrates in this matter is "an account not less likely than any other
account;" and this includes all the extant cosmologies or accounts
of the eastern, western, and Attic Greeks that Plato so brilliantly
synthesizes and surpasses in the cosmogonic discourse of the
dialogue.
The contradictoriness consists in Timaios's being forced, on this
approach, to constructfor purposes of explanationthe total series of
becomings out of elements of Being, when actually Being is not
reducible to bodies and no becoming is possible to the geometrical
elements of Being. Thus, what we get is not so much explanation
but allegory as explanation. And it is an acceptable allegory
because of the beautiful way and the consummate skill with which
it has been put together. Plato has not refuted Parmenides. He has,
rather, answered a poetic work of criticism with another work of
poetic construction. Sometimes, indeed, a radical work of art, like
Parmenides' poem, can only be responded to by an artist with
another work of art. Parmenides has not been refuted because
Timaios's cosmology does not synthesize Being and becoming, just
as Parmenides implied they could not be synthesized. What
Timaios's discourse does select from and recombine, is previous
Greek attempts to account for visible nature. And we have to
concede that "to account for" has been circumscribed by
Parmenides and Plato in "their" cosmographies to mean ''present an
acceptable discourse about." Here is the ultimate irony underlying
the dialogue's operating view of natural philosophy; namely, that it
is at best a matter of mythology or rhetoric, not of logically
consistent demonstration.
However, in several substantive respects, Timaios's cosmography is
an "advance" over that of Parmenides' Goddess. It is very possible
(with all that we have just seen) that Plato wants us to infer, or
agree with Parmenides' implication that the study of ideal modelsin
the sense of reasoning about Beingis a different matter from
reasoning about becoming or the perceptible world. It is also the
case that with his conception of psychê intermediate between the
intelligible world of Being and the perceptible world of becoming,
Timaios in his discourse has gone beyond the Goddess in
recognizing a new kind of thing besides (i) that which comes-to-be
and (ii) that which is. He has recognized the that-according-to-
which things come to be, namely, a forrnal "cause." This is (iii) the
category of that-within-which or that-out-of-which things come to
be, the matrix or receptacle (hypodochê, ekmageion) or "space"
(chôra, 50d-51b).
Plato's Timaios would seem to be improving upon, or interpreting,
the Goddess's notion of Being with his conception of "the
intelligible living being in itself" (the auto ho esti zôion, or noêton
kai teleion zôon, 39d-e). The visible
 Page 331
world of living things is made by the Demiourgos in the image and
likeness of the intelligible world, i.e., the intelligible living being.
The latter is very much like the Goddess's all-inclusive Being,
which excludes not-being or nothingness.
But Timaios recognizes that the most generic and ultimate forms
within Being are three, namely, Existence, Sameness, and
Difference (35a-b). I would suggest that this is an attempt to
forestall a misunderstanding to which Parmenides' overall thesis is
liable. This is the common misunderstanding that in denying the
possibility of accounting consistently for change, Parmenides
meant to deny differences. Like Parmenides' Goddess, Plato's
Timaios has seen that differences do not belong with not-being;
like sameness, they are merely less than all of Being. In any case,
as the set of all paradigms that perceptible things are modelled on
(or modelled by), Timaios's conception of Being is easier to
understand than the conception in Parmenides' poem of Being as
the exclusive alternative of not-being; since not-being, according to
the Goddess, cannot even be talked about, only mentioned; for if it
can be talked about at all, it must belong with Being.
The two "improvements" on the poem's cosmography, the
conception of psychê (which reunites the intelligible and sensible
worlds) and the conception of a differentiable "disorderly" plasma,
which is that out of which the creative rationality of the
Demiourgos comes, go a long way towards softening the
dichotomies in both the Parmenidean concept of Being and the
Academic theory of ideas. These are the dichotomies according to
which becoming is condemned to being not consistently
accountable, with perception being unreliable or irrational because
necessarily incomplete. Plato's Timaios gives us a way in which
perception can be said to participate in rationality through the
mediation of psychê, at the same time that becoming is plausibly
allowed to show all the diffrences that it actually does exhibit on
top of the geometrical order that structures it.
But we must not, because of this, fall into the confusion of reading
Timaios's discourse as if it were a metaphysics. It may be more
impressivein spite of touches of humor, as in the account of the
appetitive epithymêtikon part of the soul and the mirrorlike quality
of the liverand more complete than Parmenides' Doksa, but like the
Doksa it is only a speculative, not strictly logical cosmology; nor is
it an ontology. If it's an account of existence, it is one in which
logic is not prescriptive for existence, as in Parmenides' Alêtheia,
or Way of Being. It is not, as the latter is, a discussion of what
there inclusively is, was, and always will be, and of how to speak
of it with consistency. It is rather an account of how best to picture
the perceptible cosmos that at any one time is less than Being or the
All. What Timaios's discourse gives us is an interpre-
 Page 332
tive total image of the cosmographic universe, precisely what
Joseph Campbell calls a mythology. 7 If it is a product of art rather
than time, not an interpretive image developed over generations by
the society, this mythology at least synthesizes all the best insights
of Greek natural philosophy down to Plato's time.
There is, finally, a historical explanation for the tone of piety and
poetry that prevails in the cosmogonic discourse of the dialogue. It
is not foolhardy to believe that, in addition to the things we have
said Plato was doing in the part of the Timaeus that is by him, he
was also showing that it is possible to make use of the doctrines of
the physikoi without committing blasphemy (asebeia). For it was a
common though confused belief in Sokrates's time that to be a
"physicist" or "meteorosophist"8 was to be an atheist, a non-
believer in the Gods of the city. It was just the existence of this
belief that gave force to the indictments against Sokrates that led to
his death. So, by denying this belief in practice, through the written
exercise of Timaios's lively and pious discourse, Plato has found
still another way of exonerating his Sokrates. Plato in his creativity,
with the slanders against Sokrates in mind, found a way of
exhibiting the deep compatibility between piety and the natural
philosophies suspected of impiety. He was also reaffirming in the
exhibitive or dramatic mode that Sokrates, obliged as he is to take a
conspicuously minor role as a silent auditor, was not himself a
meteorosophist.
Notes
1. "The main heading of the discourse spoken yesterday by me was
the kind of constitution and the kind of men which seemes likely to
turn out best" (17c). Xthès pou tôn hyp'emoû rêthéntôn lógôn perì
politeías hên to kephálaion, hoía te kai eks hoíôn andrôn arístê
katephaínet' genésthai.
2. Plato Vol. 3, p.362, (English translation).
3. Plato's Seventh Letter, p. 163. See again Cicero's Academica
I.17ff.
4. Ancient Philosophy Vol.X, No.2; p.173-191.
5. F.M. Cornford Plato's Cosmology The Timaeus of Plato. Tr.
with a Running Commentary; p.3. F.M. Cleve The Giants of Pre-
Sophistic Greek Philosophy vol.2; p.453 note. P. Friedländer
"Structure and Destruction of the Atom Acc. to Plato's Timaeus,"
U. of Calif. Publ. in Philos., vol. 16, No. 11; p.229. Sinnige's
doubts about any Democritean influence on Plato are to be taken
seriously, as far as cosmogony is concerned; see his Matter and
Infinity in the Presocratic Schools and Plato. Taylor's hypothesis
that Timaios is intended by Plato to represent an amalgam of
(otherwise unknown) fifth-century Pythagorean religion and
mathematics with Empedoclean biology is too selective; and it
absolves the Timaeus of all anachronism in the synthesis that
Timaios
 Page 333
brings from Italy in the fiction of the dialogue. But Taylor's book
includes much useful detail (A Commentary on Plato's Timaeus,
Oxford 1928).
6. The one ironically, the others with literal intent.
7. In The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, p.4.
8. Aristophanes' term, in Clouds 360).
 Page 335

Chapter 16
The Equivocity of Beauty:
Plato's Sokrates and Hippias the Sophist
That the Spartans Are Law-Breakers
It's amusing that the first thing to occur in the Hippias Major, in
response to Sokrates' friendly greeting of him as a man of
knowledge (sophos), is Hippias's nine-line praise of himself as one
who is also and fully an Elian statesman. This reminds us of how
quick he was, in the Protagoras, to put himself forward as also an
elegant speaker on the poem of Simonides upon which Sokrates
had just discoursed with an irony completely missed by Hippias. So
will Hippias, throughout the present dialogue, repeatedly miss the
irony underlying Sokrates's great politeness to him.
By making his Sokrates call Hippias a complete, public and learned
man (281b-c), Plato makes sure that the reader will catch the
allusion to the problem of the "inbetweeners" (methoria) posed in
the Euthydemus (305c7): these "halfway men" who do not test
themselves in action are neither fully men of knowledge (or
knowledge-seekers) nor practicing men of politics, but only
political advisers or speechwriters. "But then, Hippias, what can be
the reason that the men called very wise in older times, Pittacus,
Bias and Thales' Milesian followers, as well as those down to
Anaxagoras laterwhat can be the reason that they nearly all
refrained from public affairs?"
Hippias, in his vanity, falls into the trap: "they just weren't
intellectually (phronêsei) capable of both, Sokrates." Can we say
then, asks Sokrates slyly, that just as there has been progress in the
other arts (technai), so your art of
 Page 336
knowing (sophistôn technên) has also progressed to where the
ancients are of no account in point of knowledge (sophían),
compared to yourself?
Just as you say, Sokrates, except that I usually praise our ancestors
rather than the living, as a precaution against the envy of the latter
and anger of the former (282a). The reader notes that this is already
inconsistent of Hippias, and has a practical as well as an egocentric
ground. Well, Hippias, it is true that Gorgias the Leontine Sophist
and our own Prodicus and, Protagoras before them, all have been
men of knowledge who were successfully able to conduct public
affairs while combining them with private exhibitions of discursive
skill for money (282b-d). But, Sokrates, you don't know the best of
it. In Sicily, although Protagoras was also there, I made a great deal
of money even in the smallest townsprobably more than any two
Sophists together. That just shows you, Hippias, says Socrates with
quiet sarcasm, how superior the men of today are to the ancient
men of knowledge who cared nothing about money. For don't we
mostly agree that wisdom begins at home; and isn't there a proverb
(horos) that says he is wisest for himself who makes most money
(28362-5)?
The reader notices that here, as at 300c-d much later, Sokrates is
ironically setting up the amount of money made by a man of
knowledge as the criterion of his wisdom and knowledge. But
Hippias does not notice the irony. So tell me, says Sokrates, baiting
his trap, where did you make the most money. It must have been in
Sparta, Hippias. Oh no, Sokrates, I made no money at all there
(283b9).
That is enormously unbelievable, Hippias. Does not your
knowledge (sophía) increase the human excellence (aretê) of those
who acquire it? Were you unable to make the sons of the Spartans
better men? Far from true, Sokrates. Well then, Hippias, was it
because the Spartans, unlike the Siciliotes, don't want to become
better men? No, Sokrates, they do. Didn't they have money then,
Hippias? They have plenty of that, Sokrates! In that case, Hippias,
the Spartans must think they themselves can educate their sons
better than you can. Not at all, Sokrates. Then you must have been
unable to persuade them that associating with you, Hippias, would
benefit them; for how could the fathers begrudge this benefit to
their sons, that they should become as good as possible (283e)? I
don't think they begrudge it, Sokrates.
"But surely Sparta is a well-governed (eunomos) city-state?" says
Sokrates ironically, beginning the series of questions that will bring
him to the refutation, at 285b5-7, of that widely-held
preconception. This is a good point at which to resolve a difficulty
left over from the Crito, where the personified laws of Athens are
haranguing Sokrates (52e-53a) and have said to him, "you have had
seventy years in which you could have left us if we did not please
 Page 337
you. . . . But you preferred neither Lacedaemon nor Crete, which
you are always saying are well-governed (eunomisthai) . . . but you
have stayed in this city no less than the blind, the limbless, and the
halt (who couldn't leave if they wanted to). . . ." Clearly, the
personified laws are alluding to Sokrates' ironic "praise" of Cretan
and Spartan laws, which he has not preferred to those of Athens,
even after his trial. He is honoring the latter in action by choosing
to remain Athens, in the Crito. Here in the Hippias Major, the
irony about Sparta's law-abidingness becomes sarcastic disproof.
"Now it is in well-governed states that human excellence (aretê) is
most highly honored." "Certainly." And you, Hippias, know best of
all how to impart (paradtidonai) this excellence?" By far, Sokrates.
Well, Hippias, just as the man who knows best how to impart
horsemanship would be the most honored and best paid in
Thessaly, would not he who can best transmit the knowledge that
leads to excellence (mathêmata eis aretên) be most honored and
paid most money in Sparta and any other well-governed Greek
state? Are you saying, Hippias, that such a man will do better in
Sicily or an unimportant city like Inycus? Yes, Sokrates, because of
the ancestral custom of the Lacedaemonians never to change their
laws and never to educate their sons by any usages other than their
own (284b7-9). "Do you mean, Hippias, that it is the inherited
custom of the Spartans not to act rightly, and to make mistakes
(exhamartanein)?" "I wouldn't say that, Sokrates."
"But, Hippias, would they not be right (orthôs) in doing what is
better rather than worse, in the educating (paideuontes) of their
young?" They would, Sokrates, but it is not lawful (nomimon) to
educate them in a foreign way (xenikên). The Spartans certainly
heard me with pleasure and praised me, and if anybody had ever
got paid there for teaching, I would have received the most. But it
is against their law. "But the law, Hippias, is it for the hurt or the
help of the city-state?"
Legislation, Sokrates, is for the benefit of the state, but I think a
badly made law hurts the city-state. So, Hippias, it is for the
greatest good of the city that the legislators make the laws, and
without this it is not possible to have good government
(eunomías)? True, Sokrates. When, therefore, the law-maker's
attempts miss the good, they also miss what is lawful and mistake
the good; what do you say? Strictly speaking, Sokrates, you are
right; but that is not how men usually put it. Which men, Hippias,
those who know or those who don't know? The many, Sokrates. Is
it these, Hippias, the many, who know the truth? Oh no, Sokrates,
not at all. So, Hippias, those who know reason (hêgountai) that, in
truth and for all men, what is more beneficial is more lawful than
what is not so beneficial; don't you agree? I agree, Sokrates.
But it is of more benefit to the Spartans, as you say Hippias, to be
educated
 Page 338
in your foreign way than in their local fashion. Yes. But you also
say, Hippias, that what is more beneficial is more lawful. Yes. It
follows from what you say, Hippias, that it is more lawful for the
sons of the Spartans to be educated by Hippias than by their
fathers, if in reality you are better for them. But, Sokrates, of
course I am better for them. Then, Hippias, the Spartans are
departing from the law (paranoumousin) in not paying you to bring
up their sons. I agree with your argument on my behalf, Sokrates,
and cannot oppose it.
In that case, my friend, we find that the Spartans are lawbreakers,
says Sokrates, making the refutation as strong as possible. And
they are so in the most important matters. Yet they have this
reputation for being law-abiding (285b5-7)! The irony of Plato's
Sokrates, here, cuts both ways: once against Hippias's overweening
presumption, and once more against the unexamined preconception
about Sparta, "the well-policed," as it came to be called.
Sokrates Presses Hippias about the Beautiful
Hippias has to explain to Sokrates that it wasn't geometry ("many
of them, I dare say, never get as far as arithmetic," he scornfully
reports) or reckoning or grammar or harmony that the Spartans
wanted to hear about, but genealogies, heroes and the founding of
cities in times past. "So," says Sokrates (285e9ff.), "I see that the
Spartans apparently enjoy you as a man who knows many things
and use you to tell stories agreeably, just as children are told them
by old women." Indeed yes, Sokrates, and this has increased my
reputation. And there is one most beautiful (pankalos) speech,
which I invented then, that you must come to hear the day-after-
tomorrow in Pheidostratus's schoolroom, about the most beautiful
(pankala) occupations a young man can follow. Eudicus, son of
Apemantus, has arranged it; so be sure to be there yourself. It
should be noted that this is the speech that the Hippias Minor, as it
opens, assumes to have just been given by Hippias and heard by
Eudicus and Sokrates among the auditors.
"That I will, God willing, Hippias," Sokrates replies. But for the
moment, answer me briefly a question that mention of your speech
brings to mind. is a question about the beautiful. I was recently
thrown into some confusion by a forward fellow who asked, "How,
Sokrates, do you know what sort of thing (hopoia) is beautiful and
ugly? Tell me, would you be able to say what the beautiful is (ti
esti to kalon)?" I was upset, continues Sokrates, and promised
myself that I would ask the very next man of knowledge (sophôh) I
met. I would then be able to face my questioner, having heard and
learnt from you. With a pun (386e1) that homonymizes "arriving at
the
 Page 339
right moment" with "coming upon beauty" (eis kalon hêkeis),
Sokrates goes on to ask Hippias to instruct him properly as to what
the beautiful itself is (auto to kalon ho ti esti).
The punning indicates the fun Sokrates is having, and also the
degree to which he is controlling the interrogation. The seemingly
natural but actually abrupt way in which Sokrates asked the last
question draws the reader's attention to it. It both assumes that there
is such a separable thing as beauty in itself, and that the what-is-it?
type of question about anything is appropriate, when, in fact,
beauty might not be substantive, but adverbial, adjectival, or
processual, and therefore not definable by the kind of essentialist
definition called for by the theory of ideas. Is Sokrates again
indirectly testing the theory of ideas by seeking whether its
application can clarify our understanding of beauty? Is the reader
supposed to gather that the theory of ideas cannot help importing a
fallacy of question-framing into our research?
We notice, as Sokrates explains the nature of the question to
Hippias here, that it's the same type of question as Sokrates asks in
the Euthyphro. Was the form of the question of special interest to
Plato's contemporary philosophical readers, or is he drawing
attention to it by dramatizing it? The present-day,
historiographically alert reader notices at 287a6-7 that Sokrates,
having asked to be instructed about beauty, is being more than
courteous when he asks permission to bring up counter-instances:
he is working on the methodological principle recommended by
Parmenides in the Parmenides, and made most explicit by the
Popperians in modern times.
Well, Hippias, my troublesome friend would surely have asked you
something like this about beauty, after your beautiful speech about
beautiful occupations. "Friend from Elis, is not 'justice' that by
which the just are just?" Hippias confidently answers that it is by
justice, and also agrees that it is by wisdom that the wise are wise
and by goodness that the all good things are good. "Then," infers
Sokrates, "these things (toutois) are something that is (ousi ge tisi);
for, otherwise, there would be no mode to their being at all (ou gar
de pou mê ousi ge)." An equally good translation would be: "Then,
these things certainly have some sort of being; for, otherwise, they
would not be in being at all" (287c8-9). All right, they are in being
(ousi), agrees Hippias.
Just as in the Euthyphro Sokrates had wanted to be told what the
being (to on, ousía) of "holiness" or "piety" was, he has here
accepted the same form of question as worthwhile. He is raising a
question analogous to the one put by his troublesome friend, about
"beauty." "What is this something, the beautiful" (287d4-5)? Since
Hippias is hesitant, Sokrates himself relates that what his friend had
asked is not what thing is beautiful (287el), but what "the beautiful''
is (ho ti esti to kalon). He is again, in other words, asking for a
 Page 340
statement of the being (ousa, fem.nom.ptc.s.; ousi in the dative) of
beauty, or, more accurately what the being substantivized ousía of
it is.
A fair maiden (parthenos kalê) is beautiful, answers Hippias; and if
your friend tries to refute that, won't he appear ridiculous? Not
necessarily, Hippias; he will say are not the Thracian mares praised
by the God as beautiful, and is not a beautiful lyre or a beautiful
vase, beautiful? That's rather vulgar of him, says Hippias, to import
things like that into a formally serious (semnôi pragmati)
discussion. But, Hippias, if it is a well-wrought urn, we will have to
agree that it's beautiful. Not quite, says Hippias; for, compared to a
beautiful mare or maiden, it is judged to be of less worth as to
beauty (288e7-8).
I see, Hippias, says Sokrates, we are to use the reply of Herakleitos
that the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to a man? Hippias
agrees emphatically. But won't my friend then say, Sokrates
persists, that the most beautiful girl or the wisest sage is in all
respects ugly compared to the Gods? We will not deny it, Sokrates.
But then, Hippias, my friend will laugh and say: "Sokrates . . . the
question was 'whatever can the beautiful in itself be' (hoti auto to
kalon ho ti pot'estin), and you have answered with something that
is as ugly as it is beasutiful (289c). So, Hippias, what do you advise
me to say? Just that, Sokrates; humans are not beautiful when
compared to Gods.
But Hippias, my friend will say: I did not ask about what could be
both beautiful and ugly. He will insist, "does it still seem to you,
Sokrates, that the beautiful in itself, that form by the addition of
which all other things are beautiful and made to appear beautiful
(eti de kai dokei soi auto to kalon, hôi kai t'alla panta kosmeitai hai
kala phainetai, epeidan tôi prosgenetai to eidos), that that is a
maiden, a mare, or a lyre?"
"Oh well, Sokrates, if that's what he's looking for, nothing is easier
to answer," says Hippias, confidently committing one of the great
howlers in the history of aesthetics. "Tell him . . . this thing you are
looking for, the beautiful, is none other than gold . . . for we all
know, I'm sure, that wherever it is added even what at first
appeared ugly appears beautiful when adorned with gold" (289e).
Hippias, he will only jeer at me and say: "do you think Pheidias is a
bad artist?" You will be right to say "no," Sokrates. "To be sure,
Hippias; then he will say, 'what you call the beautiful, did Pheidias
not know what it is?' . . . he did not make he eyes of Athena of
gold, or her face or her hands and feet . . . but of ivory.'"
We shall reply Sokrates, that Pheidias did right; for ivory is
beautiful. But, Hippias, the stones that he used for the pupils of her
eyes will also have to be said to be beautiful where it is appropriate
(prepôn). "But ugly when not appropriate?" asks Sokrates. "We
shall agree then," Hippias winds up saying at
 Page 341
290d, "that whatever is fitting, or appropriate to, a particular thing
makes that thing beautiful."
The Comic Elenchus Continues
Would it have been fitting, he will askSokrates persistsor
appropriate to our beautiful pot to use a golden ladle, if someone
had cooked some beautiful soup in it; or would a figwood ladle
have served? By Herakles, Sokrates, who is this ignorant fellow?
Well, Hippias, he is a nuisance (mermeros). But which of the two
ladles shall we tell him is appropriate to the pea-soup (etnos) in the
pot? The figwood ladle will make the soup aromatic, and avoid
chipping the pot and draining off the heatall of which the golden
ladle cannot do. We will have to say, won't we Hippias, that the
figwood ladle seems more appropriate? Sokrates, I cannot disagree;
but for my part, really, I would not answer when this fellow asks
such questions.
You are right, my friend. For you, it wouldn't be appropriate to be
stored with words that do not befit your beautiful clothes, your
beautiful shoes, and your reputation for knowledge among the
Greeks. But as for me, Hippias, he and I are not incompatible
(ouden . . . phyresthai), says Sokrates truthfully and ironically; so
instruct me, and for my sake answer. All right, Sokrates, I will tell
you. You seem to want an answer such that the beautiful comes out
as the kind of thing that will never appear ugly anywhere to
anybody. This is quite perceptive of Hippias; Hippias is not always
self-engrossedly stupid: at 29662, for instance, he has picked up on
and is mimicking Sokrates' style in telling him how very beautifully
his argument is going. What Hippias fails to perceive, he does not
perceive from vanity and self-confidence. To be unable quickly to
grasp the theory of ideas and its essentialist notion of definition is
not a failure of practical intelligence but of intellectualist
indoctrination. Sokrates himself says, "you understand me
beautifully," as if sure to be amused by anything Hippias says.
"I say then," Hippias says, "that for everybody everywhere the
most beautiful thing is to be rich, healthy and honored by the
Greeks; to reach old age, and, after burying one's parents
beautifully, to be beautifully and splendorously buried by one's
own children." Applauding with ironic delight, Sokrates has to tell
Hippias that his friend, however, will only laugh at them for saying
this. He might even give Sokrates a well-deserved beating. And I'll
tell you in his words, Hippias, why the beating would be deserved;
your long dithyramb, he would say, is unmusical and beside the
point. The point was: what is the beautiful itself (to kalon auto),
which makes everything that is beautiful, beau-
 Page 342
tiful? Don't give me Hippias's answer; you can't even understand
my question! Sokrates has to add: don't be angry, Hippias, if I
quote him in this way.
"I know well enough, Sokrates, that what I just said is beautiful, is
so and will seem so" (292e). "Will it be so too, my friend will ask,"
says Sokrates. And he will also ask, was the beautiful also always
beautiful? "It was," answers Hippias. "And for Achilles as well,"
Sokrates continues, "did the visitor from Elis say that it was
beautiful to be buried later (husterôi) than his parents, and for his
grandfather Aeacus, and all those born of the Gods, and for the
Gods themselves?'' 1 "Glory be, Sokrates, what is this? The man's
questions have become blasphemous." But, Hippias, asks Sokrates,
would the question be so impious if someone else asked it? Perhaps
not, Sokrates; but I was not speaking of Gods or their children and
the heroes. I was speaking of others.
According to your argument, however, says Sokrates to Hippias, it
was disgraceful and impious of the heroes Tantalus, Dardanus, and
Zethus but beautiful for Pelops to have done as you said. So it is
beautiful for some and not beautiful for others (293c), Sokrates
summarizes. And my friend will say I have not answered his
question about what is always beautiful. But you know, Hippias, he
isn't always so harsh; sometimes he makes suggestions himself.
Like what, Sokrates? Such as that we should examine whether the
beautiful is not the fitting, as we were close to saying earlier.
Sokrates now repeats the ambiguous phrasing of 289d2-5, but in a
different mood and with a twist. "Do we say that the fitting (to
prepon) is that which, when it is also present (paragenomenon),
makes the things it goes with appear beautiful, or do we say that it
makes them to be beautiful, or neither?"
Sokrates reminds him that if you call the "fitting" whatever makes
something look more beautiful than it is, then the fitting would be a
sort of deceit and could not be what actually and in the first place
makes things beautiful (294a-c). But Hippias still insists that it is
impossible for something really (onti) beautiful not to appear
beautiful. But Hippias, Sokrates has to answer at 294d, is it not the
case that what people and cities differ and fight about is what is
really beautiful; or are people just ignorant about it? They are
ignorant about what is beautiful, answers Hippias. But, says
Sokrates, would they be ignorant of it if the beautiful always
appeared as such when it really is?
Sokrates not only means that the fitting cannot be the beautiful, if it
is something that has to be added to make the beautiful appear
beautiful, he has also implied that if the fitting is what makes things
always beautiful, why does the fitting not always appear beautiful
to everyone? So, Hippias, you must make up your mind; the fitting
has to be one or the other. It cannot be both what makes things
beautiful and what makes them appear so. Hippias chooses the
position that the fitting is what makes things appear to be beautiful.
"Well,
 Page 343
well Hippias, then our judgment (gnônai) as to what the beautiful
can be has quite abandoned us, since the fitting has now been said
to be different from what is beautiful.
Hippias is baffled by this development, even though he still
believes that "what the beautiful is" (Sokrates' phrase) is not hard to
discover (heurein): "I know that if I could be alone for just a little
time and examine this by myself, I could tell you with complete
accuracy" (295a4-8).
The reader sees that the handsome, dignified Sophist has been quite
baffled by the argumentation. The reader will perhaps want to read
on, now, to the end of the dialogue to determine (i) what Sokrates
the dramatic character is trying to do within the exchange with
Hippias, whom he is careful not to offend, and (ii) what Plato the
creator can be found trying to show or enact with his dialogue as a
whole, when the reader looks at its overall design. His Sokrates
remains comically and ironically refutativebut not eristically so to
the end, in the polite way he has chosen to follow. What is the
cause of Sokrates' fruitless persistence with Hippias?
It seems to me that he is testing a type of question rather than
pursuing a particular question. Just as in the Euthyphro, Socrates is
here also asking the kind of essentialist question that follows from
(or leads to) the theory of ideas, in order to see if it is answerable.
But since "beauty" like "holiness" has no independent being, the
question that asks for a statement of its being in isolation is hard to
answer. Hippias is unable, even if only in thought, to dissociate the
attribute from the activity, institution, or thing of which it is the
attribute. Nor is he philosophic enough to tell Sokrates he is
committing the fallacy of question-framing. Sokrates, on the other
hand, persists in treating the attribute as if it were isolatable other
than in thought or a pure form-giving power or activity. Hippias
appears vaguely aware that something like this is going on, at 301b,
as we shall see later.
We see, then, that Plato the designer of the dialogue has been using
the refutative powers of his Sokrates to put on an exhibition of the
non-viability, or invalidity, of the essentialist type of question when
its subject is not an independent process, substance or activity. In at
least this respect, Plato's Sokrates is probing a weakness in the
theory of ideas. And he has had Sokrates embarass a dignified
Sophist rather than a dignified Academician (if there were any at
the time of writing). The dialogue could, therefore, be described (in
Hellenistic fashion) as peirastic or pedagogical.
It would thus seem to be bad logicas well as an instance of the
intentional fallacyto say, as I.M. Crombie does 2that because all the
attempted definitions of beauty are picked to pieces by Plato's
Sokrates, "the purpose of the dialogue" is primarily to illustrate
"what a Socratic definition is." How
 Page 344
can the "purpose" of the dialogue be to illustrate, when all the
definitions are rejected and none that is illustrative is given? The
very last attempt or statement by Hippias is exempted from
questioning by Sokrates, both out of courtesy and the need to bring
the conversation to an end.
In reading through the rest of the dialogue the reader will be in a
position to judge whether my reading of it makes the most sense
out of Sokrates' insistent but charming refutativeness, his device of
the troublesome cross-examining friend, and the not unfriendly
colloquial relationship between Plato's Sokrates and his Hippias.
The Refutation of Hippias's Aestheticism
Yes, Hippias, says Sokrates at 295b, I believe you'll find it [what
the beautiful is] if you go off on your own. 3 But please, find it
while I am here, or if you wish, let us continue to search for it
together. If we find it, splendid. If not, you will certainly (sic) come
by it later by yourself. So let us try once more, and you will keep
me from going wrong. Suppose we say that what is useful (ho
chresimon) is, for us, beautiful.
After some discussion they find that if something is useful, it is
only because it has the power to do or accomplish something.
Sokrates leadingly infers that it must be power (dynamis) that is
beautiful; and that powerlessness is ugliness. Hippias, as could be
expected, responds with enthusiasm that this especially so in
political affairs. To be powerful in one's own state is the most
beautiful thing of all, and it is a disgrace to be powerless. It is
characteristic of the humor in this dialogue that the practical turn
Hippias gives to Sokrates' questions and answers (here and at 289e,
for instance) is amusingly wrong just because one can see the
equivocation that, if accepted, would make the absurd practical
answer a correct one.
Well said Hippias, continues Sokrates (296a). But wouldn't it also
follow from your reasoning that knowledge (sophia) is the most
beautiful thing and ignorance (amathía) the ugliest? Let's go slow
here, Hippias. What are you afraid of, Sokrates? Your account was
going so beautifully (!). Well, think, Hippias, could a person have
the power to do what he neither knows (epistaito) nor knows how
(dynaito) to do? Notice the equation of knowledge (epistêmê) with
power (dynamis) implicit in the way Sokrates states the proposal
here. No, Sokrates, how could he?
But then, Hippias, those who commit bad mistakes and do evil
involuntarily (akontes) would not do so unless they had the power
(edúnanto). Clearly not (296c). Yet, Hippias, it is by power that
those who are are able and pow-
 Page 345
erful, not by powerlessness. And what one does, one does because
he has the power to do it. But men do more bad things than good
and they make mistakes involuntarily (akontes). Hence, Hippias,
this power to do and these usable things (chrêsima), when used to
do what is evil, cannot be beautiful. They are, Sokrates, if used to
do good things. Even so, Hippias, we can no longer say that the
powerful and useful are always, uconditionally (haplês), the
beautiful.
Now, Hippias, what is useful and powerful for doing good is
beneficial (ôhelimon)? Certainly. Then beautiful bodies and
beautiful customs and knowledge (sophía) and the rest are beautiful
because they are beneficial. Evidently, Sokrates. Then, Hippias, the
beautiful seems to us to be the beneficial? Quite so, Sokrates. We
note that the approach of the interlocutors has not changed:
Sokrates is still asking the same type of questions that call for the
isolation of what is not isolatable except in discourse, and by
someone practiced in the theory of ideas.
But the beautiful is also shown by Sokrates in this dialogue not to
be equatable with good. And the reader notes that Sokrates'
reasoning from 296e9 to 297d is rather sophistical. He says it is the
beneficial that creates good, and what creates is a cause. Thus, if
the beneficial is the beautiful, then the beautiful is the cause of the
good. And if it is a cause, it must differ from its effect. Therefore,
the beautiful and the good are not the same. This result mightily
displeases both Hippias and Sokrates; and at 297d6 the latter finds
thes statement of it more ridiculous (geloioteros) than anything
they have said so far. The position, in its application to beauty,
comes close to being explicit at 297a5-10, that that which is the
cause of x (the beautiful) cannot itself be x (the beautiful). Is the
reason this cannot be made fully explicit, that it would followto the
detriment of the theory of ideasthat the beautiful-in-itself is not
itself beautiful? But, says Sokrates, if the formulation they have
reached is not beautiful but ridiculous, then he no longer knows
where to turn.
Meanwhile, Hippias shows no sign of acknowledging the ethical
criticism of his own way of life that the conclusion implies. He has
made, and is presented as having made, beauty the primary pursuit
of his life. His success in this pursuit is the cause of his earnings
and reputation. The reader feels, however, that the implicit
criticism of Hippias's "aestheticism" in Sokrates' words is related to
Hippias's reiteration in the next paragraph (297e) that he wants to
meditate upon and rethink the whole question.
But I can't wait for that, Hippias, says Sokrates. My desire to know
is so great, I think I have just found a new way out. The beautiful,
Hippias, is that which delights through the senses of hearing and
sight.
Don't you think, HIppias, that will silence my abrasive friend
(298a)? It seems to me, Sokrates, you have stated well what the
beautiful is. The reader
 Page 346
sees that Hippias has been lulled into using Sokrates essentialist
terminology. But Hippias, wait; have we not forgotten beautiful
laws and beautiful customs, which have another form (eidos) of
beauty. Perhaps, Sokrates, your friend won't notice it. No, Hippias,
nothing escapes him. He is the man I would be most ashamed of
talking nonsense to (lerôn) while claiming to make sense. Who is
this man, Sokrates? He is Sokrates the son of Sophroniscus, admits
Sokrates finally: he would no more permit me to speak carelessly
and without examination than he would allow me to say that I
know what I do not know!
Perhaps Hippias's pleasing appearance has made Sokrates think
about the relation of the beautiful to the pleasing. It would seem,
Hippias, continues Sokrates at 298e, that the pleasures of the other
senses are not necessarily beautiful. Thus sex is most pleasant
(hêdiston) to perform but most embarassing (aischiston) to watch.
My troublesome friend would, however, say: you are still
discussing what appears beautiful, while I have asked what is
beautiful. But that is just why, in our answer, we restricted the
beautiful to that which is pleasant through seeing and hearing.
Nonetheless he will pounce and ask, do you mean that which is
pleasant through both sight and hearing, or through either sight or
hearing alone, or through both together? Shall we not reply,
Hippias, through either or both? In any case, he will say, do not
different pleasures not differ insofar as they are pleasures, but in
virtue of some other quality that you say makes some of the
beautiful? 4 He will add, it is not because they are visual or
acoustical that the pleasures of sight and hearing are beautiful; and,
Hippias, we will have to agree.
"So, Hippias, there is something which itself (to auto) makes them
to be beautiful, which is the common thing (to koinon touto) which
belongs to both together and to each individually" (300a9-b1).
"For, otherwise, they could not both and each be beautiful."
Sokrates seems to mean by this that both kinds of beauty, those due
to pleasurable hearing and those due to pleasurable viewing, could
not be beautiful if they did not have this element in common; and
that it is also due to this element that the beautiful things in each
separate class are beautiful. Hippias agrees: I answer your friend,
Sokrates, as you do and think it is as you say.
Sokrates' Eristic Irony
But now, Hippias, if both these [kinds of] pleasures are affected [by
this element], but one of them individually is not, then it is not by
its effect that they
 Page 347
are beautiful (299b5-7). On the heels of what has just been said,
this sounds like an extraordinary turnabout by Sokrates. It sounds
as if Sokrates and his conscientious prompter were contradicting
themselves. It certainly seems so to Hippias, who, however, falls
into what we shall discover to be an eristic trap. What can Sokrates
be planning or doing here, and why?
As we continue through this part of the exchange and come to the
eristical disproof at 310dff., it becomes clear that Sokrates is
determined to contradict Hippias (with all politeness) at every turn.
It is as if Plato, Sokrates' manager, had decided to insist not only
that beauty is an equivocal term, but that on this approach there
will always be some objection or instance counter to its definition.
Sokrates has already been quite sophistical in his selective
assimilation of the cause-effect relation to the father-son relation
(297b-c), and in his unqualified assumption that father and son
cannot be the same. As the argument was developing, this seemed
expedient because it served to keep the good from being a
derivative of the beautiful. More mildly put, it served to preserve
the thesis (297bff.) that the beautiful, though it cannot be the cause
of all good, can be the cause of some goods.
This, in turn, gives us the clue to why there have to be counter-
instances to prove the thesis that surprised us above: that though
there is something in itself that makes the collectivity of things that
are beautiful beautiful, this something is not necessarily also what
makes sub-collections of beautiful things beautiful. More closely
analyzed, the refutation or proof involves an equivocation, as we
shall see. But if it is taken dialogically as valid, then the
implication would be that Plato's Sokrates has shown Hippias that
even if there were an idea of beauty, it still could not be relied
upon, logically, to be what makes everything that is beautiful
beautiful.
Hippias is emphatically certain that Sokrates cannot prove the
point. Sokrates is ironically modest, pretending to doubt that he can
prevail against the knowledge that has earned so much money for
Hippias. "It will become apparent," says Hippias, "that what you
are saying amounts to nothing (300d8-10); for, you will never find
a quality which, if both of us do have it, neither you nor I have it."
If both of us are just, would not each one of us be just, Sokrates?
And if each of us were tired, would not both of us be tired?
"You see, Sokrates (301b), you do not scrutinize (skopeis) affairs in
their wholeness, nor do your conversational companions. But you
scoop out (krouete) the beautiful and each of the things that are
(tôn ontôn), taking them into your discourse, and chopping them up
(katatemnontes). For this reason you do not notice how
compounded (megala) by nature and interconnected or continuous
(dianekê), are the corporealities (sômata) of being (tês ousias). And
at this moment you are so oblivious that it seems to you that there
is some condition
 Page 348
(pathos ê ousia) which can belong to the aforesaid pair together but
not to each member of it, or again to each but not bothso
unreasonable (alogistôs), uncritical (askeptôs), naive (euêthês) and
unreflective (adianoêtô) are you" (301b-c).
The reader feels that if Hippias has a point here, he has made it
badly and has become too censorious to escape dialectical
retribution. Instead of invoking the natural complexity of all being,
or the inseparability in nature of some constitutents of things,
Hippias goes into a frontal attack upon Sokrates' (seemingly)
sophistical proposition that what applies to both need not apply to
each and vice versa. Plato lets the reader see that Sokrates knows
what Hippias is trying to say; for Sokrates calls it "the reasoning
(logôi) about the interconnectedness (dianekei) of being" (ousias)
farther on, as if it were a post-Parmenidean commonplace. But for
the moment he is content to ask, ironically or with false modesty,
whether Hippias still wants to listen to him after making such a
grave admonition against his naïvete and inferior reasoning.
Sokrates knows that Hippias's general proposition does not by itself
suffice to refute the narrow point he is bent on making. You will be
speaking, Sokrates, says Hippias presumptuously, to someone who
knows how it is with anyone who has taken up argumentation; so,
speak on if you want to. Is not Hippias's last claim here, unnoticed
by Hippias but not unnoticed by Plato, a comment on Hippias's ill-
stated position? Within the class of all who have taken up public
speaking, only the few "knowing" ones (like Hippias) can
anticipate what is in the other's mind to say. Yet this exceptional
attribute does not separate Hippias from the class of public
speakers. Nor could the being of this attribute easily be defined in
itself, apart from an account of public speaking and speakers. In
any case, many a reader will be stimulated to consider that there are
at least two kinds of question about definition that relate to this
dialogical exchange. There is the kind of thing or process which,
like specific pleasures in Aristotle's definition of pleasure, can be
defined, but not apart from the activity of which it is the
accompaniment. And there is the problem of the contraries, which
are subclasses within the same class, e.g., "knowing" and
"unknowing'' speakers, good art and bad art, etc. The irony is that it
is not his knowingness that makes Hippias a man of knowledge
(sophos), as Sokrates calls him.
Sokrates' first question alarms Hippias, but he has to agree. Is not
each of us, Hippias, one; and is it not our condition to be one? Yes.
Then if one, each of us would be odd? Yes, Socrates. Then are we
both an odd number, being two? Impossible, Sokrates! Then are we
not both indeed even? Yes. Then, since we are both even, is not
each of us even? Certainly not, Sokrates. Then, Hippias (302b), it is
not absolutely necessaryas you claimthat what both
 Page 349
are each is, and what each is both are. The reader cannot help
sensing that Sokrates has been equivocating. But that is not the line
that Hippias's response takes. Hippias takes another tack, which is
not incorrect, but which by itself is insufficient to uncover the
equivocation. "It is not the case with things of this sort, Sokrates,"
he says, "but it is with the sort of thing I mentioned before (302b4),
That is enough for me and welcome, says Socrates, since it allows
that with some things it is so but with some things it is not so. The
scrupulous reader will notice, nonetheless, that as a twosome the
pair are the arithmetical sum of two individuals. But the two
individuals, taken as alternates, are what is called the logical sum
of two individuals (S or H). So, in this special sense, the pair and
the units share the property of being "sums." Also, the pair are what
is called a logical product (S and H), while the unit is an
arithmetical product of one by one. In this special sense, both the
pair and the unit share the property of being "products." What
Sokrates has done is play with the sense in which the human
individual is odd when taken as a numerical unit, and the sense in
which the human pair is not odd when taken collectively. But,
distributively, it is clear that the pair of them remain individuals.
Sokrates has been equivocating between the logical sum, or
alternative, of two individuals and the arithmetic sum, or addition,
of the individuals.
Sokrates has been relying on the arithmetical tautology that by
definition odd is not even. To refute this premiss of Sokrates in its
equivocal application, Hippias could have replied that when
numbering domestic couples, these couples have the property of
being family units. Thus, what is taken as even, the domestic
couple, can be taken as odd. And what is odd, the family unit, can
be taken as even. But Hippias is not logically perceptive enough to
attack the assumption behind the claim instead of the claim itself.
And while readers have always recognized that Sokrates is
presented as far superior to Hippias, there has not been an exact
enough understanding of the respects in which he is so in this
dialogue. On our reading, it is clear that Plato's Sokrates, who
makes no money, is the technically superior Sophistif one who
makes no money from his discursive ability can be called a
Sophist.
Does this mean that the exhibition is an implicit attack upon the
version of the theory of ideas that calls for clear and acceptable
definitions? Or does it mean that the exhibition is an implicit call
(i) to include among the ideas which inform all things, ideas that
are really a cluster of contingently associated ideas, or (ii) to
exclude, as just suggested, calls for essentialist definitions or
definitions of predicates that are not primary beings, as Aristotle
was to call them? The latter are definable in terms of their
attributes, but, according to Aristotle, cannot themselves be
predicated of anything else. In the case of
 Page 350
beauty, the paradox would be that if the ideas are the primary
realities or beings (as in one version of the theory of ideas), then
beauty being an idea, cannot be predicated of anything else. Yet, it
is constantly being predicated of many things. But if beauty is a
predicate, it ought not to be defined in abstraction from what it is
the attribute of. And if it is an inevitably equivocal predicate, how
can one hope for a definitive statement of its nature?
But if the Hippias Major is an exhibitive demonstration or implicit
judgment that neither essentialist definition nor the theory of ideas
can provide a good understanding of beauty, why is Hippias's
resistance to the theory's notion of definition so quickly satirized
and dismissed? Probably because Hippias resists without
understanding the theory. It has to be someone who understand it,
namely Sokrates himself, who is dramatized as failing to make the
theory work in relation to beauty. That is to say, he is shown as
pressing the essentialist notion of definition too far. And he is
shown to be capable of some sharp and interesting eristics.
The reader has to concede that this is a dialogue in which Plato is
not particularly concerned with the image of his friend as not
impious; he is, rather, paying tribute to him as a master disputant.
That there is only incidental concern to present him as an ethical
dialectician (at 297a), and that Plato creates no opportunity to
defend either Sokrates' natural or civic piety (as in the Timaeus and
Meno respectively), while being true to the fact of Sokrates'
insistence on definition, all this argues that the Hippias Major was
written in a context within which the question of Sokrates' civic
reputation was not relevant, and in which the author felt free to
make the particular literary and intellectual use of Sokrates that he
makes in this dialogue.
Having tamed the irrepressible Hippias with his equivocal proof,
Sokrates rehearses the position at 302c6-8 that when what is
pleasing to sight and hearing is beautiful, it is beautiful because of
the being (tê ousia) of beauty in each and both kinds. Socrates then
asks Hippias (303b-c) to which group of things he thinks beauty
belongs. Does it belong with that group, the numerical sorts of
things, where it is not necessary for the collective attribute to
belong to the member and vice versa? Or does it belong with the
group of things in which the member necessarily shares in the
property of the collectivity and vice versa? In asking, Sokrates
smuggles in a funny example of the latter group, to which Hippias
agrees without comment, and a novel example of the numerical
group, which Hippias also fails to appreciate.
If we are collectively beautiful, says Sokratess, then we are each of
us beautiful. But the reader knows that Sokrates was not of
beautiful appearance in the conventional sense, whereas Hippias
was; and that Sokrates, in the world
 Page 351
of the dialogues, was spiritually a beautiful person, whereas
Hippias is markedly egocentric and vain.
The novel example from the other group, which Sokrates mentions
in passing, is "irrational" (arrhêta) and rational (rhêta) numbers.
The Greeks may not have meant quite the same thing as we do by
these terms in mathematics. Hippias, who supposedly knows
numbers and geometry, does not take Sokrates up on this example
either. In her edition of Hippias Major, Tarrant rejects the example
but notes that Heath, in his History of Greek Mathematics (I.304),
believes the example can be explained if we allow that "the
irrationals known to Plato included more than mere surds or the
sides of non-squares." The point for us is that, in the world of the
dialogues, Sokrates always seems to know more mathematics than
the professed experts such as Hippias here, Theodorus in the
Politicus, the Pythagoreans in the Republic, and so on. In any case,
it will be of interest to show that in the current sense of irrational
number, Sokrates was right.
In the paradigmatic proof, consider x plus , where x is also
irrational.
1. Suppose x is not irrational in the equation ;
2. If x is rational, then ;
3. But if x is rational, so is (2 - x);
4. But this is impossible, since, by step 2, , which is
irrational, i.e., it cannot be written as the quotient of two integers,
as required by the present-day definition.
5. Therefore, x cannot be rational, and is irrational (assuming that
"rational" and "irrational" are exclusive alternatives);
6. Thus, the sum of two irrational numbers can be rational; and
Sokrates was right even in the current sense. 5
Under Sokrates' prompting, Hippias next says that he chooses to
speak of the beautiful in such a way that if a collectivity is
beautiful, so are its members, and if each is beautiful, so is the
collectivity (303c5). And, of course, Sokrates continues, we cannot
take only what is beautiful through sight or hearing as the model of
all beauty, because of the impossibilities we have agreed that to
give rise to (303d8-9). So, Hippias, my scrupulous friend might go
on to ask, would you claim "the beautiful to be pleasure which is
beneficial" (hêdonê ôphelimon 303e8-9)? I would say yes; would
you too, Hippias? I too.
But my friend the questioner will then say, being beneficial is just
what makes things good. And, what is and what is made are
different things; so, we have arrived where we started earlier. For
neither could the good be beautiful nor the beautiful good, if they
are different from each other. "Quite true, we
 Page 352
shall have to say Hippias, if we wish to be reasonable"
(sôphronômen), says Sokrates.
Hippias, however, feels he must reassert his own brand of
reasonableness or "no nonsense" (mê . . . anoêtos 304b). Well,
Sokrates, let me tell you what all this amounts to: no more than the
trimmings and shavings of discourse, chopped up bits and pieces,
as I said a moment ago. What is beautiful and worthwhile (pollous
axion), says Hippias with the recognizable realism of his time, is to
be able to produce good speech well, in court, in the Assembly or
in public anywhereso as to convince the audience and carry off the
great prize of safety for oneself, one's property and one's friends.
Give up, therefore, these detailed, petty (smikrologias) reasonings
and avoid appearing foolish (anoêtos) by participating in so much
idle talk and nonsense (lêrous kai phluarias 304b6).
Well, Hippias, it is lucky that you know what one's occupation
ought to be, and you are lucky to practice it so well. But I, by some
spiritual chance (daimonia tis tychê), wander about always
prepossessed by diffculties. And when I show you men of
knowledge what these difficulties are, I am verbally abused and
told to quit trifling. But when, on the other hand, I let you convince
me that public speaking in the courts and assemblies in pursuit of
what one wants is best and beautiful, my conscientious refuterwho
lives with meimmediately takes me to task and makes me ashamed,
when I'm back home, for having discussed beautiful pursuits
without knowing what the beautiful itself is. In such troubling
perplexity, is it better to be alive or dead? Thus, I am buffeted on
both sides. But it is perhaps necessary to endure all this for the
probable benefit in it. For I think, Hippias, that I have benefited
from my discussion with you and my questioner. It now seems to
me that I know what might be meant by the proverb "there can be
difficulty in beautiful things" (chalepa ta kala 304e10).
Notes
1. As the son of a Goddess, Achilles is a counter-example to
Hippias's latest definition. Also, it wouldn't be possible to bury
your parent if he is Zeus; it would in fact be blasphemy to a Greek.
2. An Examination of Plato's Doctrines, Vol.I, p.87.
3. Note the incipient criticism of monologism lurking in this
remark.
4. Aristotle will later explicate, and qualify, this point about
pleasure in his Ethics Book X. Aristotle will also (as Grote reminds
us) include the beautiful in the list of equivocal terms in Topics i.
106a21.
5. The formal proof was kindly provided by Dr. Woo J. Kim,
SUNY at Stony Brook.
 Page 353

Chapter 17
Problems of Morality, Inspiration, and Practice
The Hippias Minor
Hippias has just delivered his presumably beautiful lecture on
beautiful occupations for the young, in the schoolroom of
Pheidostratus, as promised in the Hippias Major, 386b. Since
Hippias used Homer as his text and Homer is not available for
questioning, will Hippias answer both for himself and Homer,
Sokrates asks (365c-D)? Quite so Sokrates, ask short (embrachy)
questions about whatever you like." Hippias, the reader notes, has
already allowed himself to be put at a dialectical disadvantage,
since he is, Himself, an exponent of long speeches in discourse.
Could it be that he is not on the alert, in the presence of Sokrates,
because he was so politely treated by him and consistently flattered
in the Hippias Major?
By 366a Sokrates' short questions have brought Hippias to the
explicit admission that those who are false are capable (dynatous)
intelligent (phronimos) and knowledgeable (epistêmonas) judges in
those things in which they are false. But you agree, Hippias, that
"the true and the false are different, and the complete opposite of
one another?" I agree.
Now, Hippias, just as you have the greatest power in and know
most about correct calculation, would you not also have the power
to tell falsehoods systematically, where an ignorant man might tell
the truth involuntarily (366d-367a). As you say, Sokrates, I would.
Can we assume, Hippias, that there are people who are false in
calculations and about numbers. Such persons, Hippias, must
 Page 354
have the power to be false; for you yourself have just agreed that he
who has not the power to tell lies would never tell lies (267b4-6).
Yes, that was said.
Then it is the same man who has the most power to speak truthfully
and falsely in these matters, not opposite men as you believed
earlier? So it seems, Sokrates, at least in this field. Plato's Sokrates
then demonstrates that the case is the same in geometry and
astronomy (367d4-368a10). Well now, Hippias, consider whether it
is not the same with all knowledge (pasôn tôn epistêmôn). You are
the most knowing (sophôtatos) person in the greates number of
arts-and-sciences (technas); so, looking at your own arts, Hippias,
and not those of others, can you think of any science or skill
(sophia or panourgía) in which the above is not the case? Not at
the moment, Sokrates.
Then what follows, Hippias, for what we were saying earlier about
Homer's Achilles being true and Homer's Odysseus being false? It
doesn't come to mind (ou . . . ennoô), Sokrates. You are not using
your famous art of memory, Hippias. Do you not see that given our
conclusion that it's the same man who is true and false, if Odysseus
was false, then he became also true, and if Achilles was true, he
became also false; and the two men are not different and opposite,
but alike (369b)?
Oh, Socrates, you are always spinning out some such tangled
argument; you pick out the most vexatious part of it, stretching it
and sticking to details. But you do not argue (agônizei) the matter
under discussion as a whole (369c1). I can give you a satisfactory
discourse with many testimonies from Homer that he made
Achilles better and truthful, and the wily Odysseus a liar and worse
than Achilles. Then, if you like, you can oppose my speech with
one of your own, and our auditors will decide who speaks better.
Well, Hippias, I don't doubt that you are more a man of knowledge
(sophôteron) than I am. I always listen to those who seem to know;
I want to learn, and I ask them questions. I don't ask questions of
speakers who are not worth it; you can see, from this, who it is I
regard as having knowledgeSokrates adds ironically. Now I find it
strange that in the lines you quoted (Iliad ix.357 ff.), it is Achilles
who is not telling the truth; for he twice says he is going to return to
fertile Phthia (i.169 ff.) but actually does not.
You misperceive the case, Sokrates; Achilles has told a falsehood
involuntarily; the plight of the Greek army kept him from leaving.
But Odyseus tells his lies by design. You must be deceiving me,
my dear Hippias, and acting like Odysseus (370e11)! No way,
Sokrates; whatever do you mean? Homer, says Sokrates, has
represented Achilles not only as a deceiving Odysseus, but as
contradicting himself without its being noticed; is not that clever?
Doesn't Achilles tell Ajax or imply (Iliad ix.360 ff.) that he'll fight
again when Hector breaches the Greek wall and burns some of their
ships? You don't think the pupil of wise
 Page 355
Cheiron did that by design? No, no Sokrates; Achilles, again, spoke
so to Ajax out of good will. Odysseus, whether he tells the truth or
prevaricates, always does so by design.
Then, Hippias, it seems that Odysseus is better than Achilles. No,
no Sokrates. But did we not find, Hippias, that those who lie
voluntarily are better than those who lie involuntarily? But how,
Sokrates (372a ff.), could those who voluntarily do wrong be better
than those who do so involuntarily? We seem to make allowances
for the man who lies or does wrong involuntarily. The laws,
Sokrates, are more severe to those who do evil designedly.
You will see, Hippias, that I am being truthful (!) when I say that I
am persistent in the questioning of men who know (sophôn). This
may be the only good thing about me; for I am usually wrong about
the factsas is shown whenever I meet somebody reputed to know.
Thus, there is no greater proof of my ignorance that there is hardly
a single thing about which you and I agree, Hippias! "I do have this
one remarkable and saving quality: that I am not ashamed to learn,
but inquire and ask questions and am grateful to him who responds
with answers" (372c3-5).
But right now, Hippias, my judgment is the exact opposite of what
you say; and it must be my fault. I think that voluntary wrongdoers
and liars are better than the involuntary ones. Sometimes though,
Hippias, I think the opposite and must be wandering. But right now
I am possessed by the notion that those who err voluntarily in
respect to anything are better than those who err involuntarily. I
blame this on our previous discussion; it has caused me to believe
that those who err involuntarily are worse than those who do it on
purpose. So please do me the favor of curing me of this illness; for
it is better to be cured of ignorance than of a bodily disease
(373a1). But I will tell you beforehand, Hippias, that if you choose
to deliver a long speechthat you will not cure me; I couldn't even
follow you. But if you are willing to answer my questions, as you
did earlier, you will do me great good and yourself no harm. I
might even call on you Eudicus, since it was you who got me
interested in conversing with Hippias. So now, if Hippias doesn't
want to answer, ask him on my behalf to do so.
From the great lengths Sokrates goes here to avoid hearing another
long speech of Hippias's, the reader infers that Hippias was very
eager to launch into one, back at 369c8. Sokrates has labored to
prevent this without offending Hippias, who was actually
proposing an oratorical contest over what they were each claiming.
Eudicus naively tells Sokrates he is sure Hippias won't mind; "for
that is what he announced, that he would not avoid the questioning
of any man" (373b). Isn't that what you announced, Hippias,
Eudicus asks Hippiaswho does mind. That he is annoyed is shown
by his next words:
 Page 356
"But, Sokrates, Eudicus is always causing confusion in discussions
and seems to want to make trouble."
My excellent Hippias, says Sokrates, perceiving (like the reader)
that Hippias is annoyed, I don't do these things voluntarily at all;
for then, according to your reasoning, I would be knowing and
clever. I do them involuntarily (!), so you must "make allowances"
for me and forgive me; since you say that he who does evil
involuntarily ought to be forgiven. Sokrates' modestly hidden
sarcasm could not be more to the point. Eudicus lends his support:
do not refuse, Hippias, for our sake and for the sake of your
previous announcements. Well, I will answer, Hippias concedes at
last, with some grouchiness no doubt (373c). I do, Hippias,
urgently wish to investigate our subject; namely, which are the
better: those who err voluntarily or those who do so involuntarily?
Now I think the best thing to do is for you just to answer. Sokrates
has succeded in imposing his method upon the inquiry, the method
of short question and short answer.
Through his questions and Hippias's answers, Sokrates quickly
establishes that in race-running the one who runs slowly on
purpose is the better runner than the one who is slow involuntarily.
But it was just established that, in running races, slowness is a bad
thing and speediness a good thing. Now, he who runs badly
performs a bad and disgraceful act? But he runs badly who runs
slowly? Yes. Then, Hippias, the good runner performs this bad and
disgraceful act voluntarily, and the bad runner involuntarily. So it
seems (373e8). Thus, in running, he who does bad acts
involuntarily is worse than the one who does them on purpose?
Yes, in running.
Sokrates next shows that the case is the same in wrestling, in the
demonstration of bodily strength, and in singing. It is the one who
can sing out of tune on purpose who is a better singer than the one
who can't help doing it. Sokrates also shows that it is no different in
the utilitarian realm. An instrument with which you can do things
badly when you want to is better than one with which you cannot
help making mistakes. Sokrates' questions show that it is the same
with work-horses, dogs and all animals. So, too, with archery: he
who has a mind to miss, and can, has greater ability than he who
misses involuntarily. And is it not better, Hippias, in medicine also
to know how to harm a patient voluntarily rather than unwillingly?
Apparently so, says Hippias. And a slave would be better fitted for
his work who could do and make things wrongly on purpose than
one who makes mistakes involuntarily? Yes.
What about our own minds (psychês) then, would we not wish to
have them in the best condition? Yes. Will our mind be better, then,
if it does evil and errs involutarily (375d1-2)? But, Sokrates, it
would be terrible (deinon) to allow that those who do wrong
(adikountes) voluntarily are better (beltious)
 Page 357
than those who do so involuntarily. Yes, Hippias but from what has
been said, it appears to be the case. Not to me, Sokrates. "Once
more, Hippias, anwer me. Is not being just (dikaiosynê) either a
kind of capability (dynamis) or a knowledge (epistêmê) or both?"
Yes.
Well, Hippias, if being just is a capability, then the more capable
(dynatôtêra) a character is the more just he'll be, won't he? What
about knowledge now, Hippias? Will the mind and character with
more knowledge (sophôtera) not be more just; and the more
ignorant (amathestera) be the more unjust? Yes. So the soul with
both more power and knowledge will also be more just? Yes. But
the stronger and wiser soul was in every case found to be better
(ameinon) and to have more power to do both noble and evil
deeds? Yes (376a1). Whenever one does disgraceful acts (aischra),
he does them voluntarily, then, with the ability and skill (dynamin,
technên) to do so; and the latter go with justice, singly or together?
So it seems.
Would not the more capable and better soul, then, if it were (hotan
per) to do injustice, do it voluntarily; and the bad soul
involuntarily? Apparently. A good man has a good soul, and a bad
man a bad one? Yes. Then, it is characteristic of the good man to
act unjustly voluntarily and of the bad man to do it involuntarily;
that is, if the good man has a good soul. But of course he has,
Sokrates. Then he who errs voluntarily and does disgraceful and
unjust things, if there be such a man, would be the good man.
I cannot agree with you on this, Sokrates. Nor can I agree with
myself, Hippias; as I was saying, I am often at a loss in these
matterswhich is not surprising either in me or other folk. But if you
men of knowledge (sophoi) are also at a loss in these matters, that
is a terrible thing for us who, therefore, cannot be made to cease
from our ignorant wandering.
The Ion
At 541c Ion, the rhapsode from Ephesus, says: "My city, Sokrates,
is under the generalship of yours." Given the history of the late
fifth century, during which Ephesus was in alliance with or bound
to Athens until the satrap Tissaphernes captured it around 416 B.C.,
we may infer that the fictional date at which the meeting between
Sokrates and Ion took place cannot be later than this date. It is true
that between 394 and 391 B.C. Ephesus (with Samos and Rhodes)
was again in alliance with Athens; but Sokrates, as we know, was
dead by then.
Panosthenes is mentioned at 541d as an Athenian general of
foreign origin. According to Xenophon's Hellenica (I.5, 18-19) he
was sent to lead the force against Andros in 406/5 B.C. and had
captured the pro-Spartan Thuriien,
 Page 358
Dorieus. This may be an anachronism, dramatically speaking, but
(i) it is compatible with an early date of composition, if the Ion is
by Plato; and (ii) it is a less glaring anachronism than setting the
dramatic date of the encounter between 394 and 391 B.C. The
Athenian Constitution (XLI.3) mentions Heracleides, who is also
named in the Ion, as having raised the allowance of Assemblymen
to two obols; however, since all we know is that this measure was
passed some time before 393 B.C., the information is of no help. 1
Thus, Méridier's decision that the dramatic, or supposed, date
should be put between 394 and 391 B.C. is a practical
impossibility, if the dialogue is by Plato. Plato would not, after
Sokrates' death have written a dialogue that does nothing for
Sokrates' image in relation to the charges against him, or
committed so glaring a mistake.2
Ion is not a Sophist like Hippias; though both he and Ion seem to
discourse about Homer in much the same waywhen the inspired
reciter is not literally performing the epic. Like Hippias, he is
beautifully dressed; for his profession requires it; but he is
presented as even less intelligent than the Sophist. He too,
however, is treated by Sokrates with considerable tact. Sokrates
leadingly opens the exchange by claiming to be envious of one who
can bring out (ekmanthanein) the thought (dianoia) of the poets,
especially of Homer, who is the greatest. To make sure that the
point is not missed by the reader, Plato makes Sokrates repeat
himself: ''for the rhapsode," he says, "ought to make himself the
interpreter (hermênea) of the poet's thought (dianoias) to the
audience" (530c).
Ion completely misunderstands Sokrates' point; "You are right,
Sokrates, that is the hardest part of my art-and-science (technê)," as
he calls it. Though I think I speak about (sic) Homer better than
any man, including Metrodorus of Lampascus, Stesimbrotus of
Thasos, or Glaucon; for they never had so many or such beautiful
thoughts (dianoias) about (sic) Homer as I. Ion uses the same word
as Socrates, dianoia, but it is clear that Homer's thought and
somebody else's thoughts about him are not the same thing. The
equivocation comes under focus because Ion naturally refers to
some famous hyponoia-seekers, interpreters of hidden meanings
who competed in finding all kinds of allegories in the episodes and
passages of the epic. "You should hear me, Sokrates; I have
embellished Homer so beautifully (eu kekosmêka), Ion gushes on,
that I deserve a golden crown from the whole guild of "the sons of
Homer" (530d6-7). The reader thinks to himself, at this, that the
characteristic of great poetry such as Homer's is, precisely, that you
canot improve upon it. Ion, though a prize-winning reciter, doesn't
know this much about poetry.
I'll have to find the time to listen to you, Ion; but right now can you
answer a question for me? Are you impressive (deinos) with
Homer only or also with
 Page 359
Hesiod and Archilochus? No, no Sokrates, Homer is altogether
enough. Do Homer and Hesiod, Ion, ever speak about the same
thing? Yes, Sokrates, in many cases. In those cases, Ion, would you
expound (exêgêsaio) what Homer says better than what Hesiod
says. Where they say the same, Sokrates, I would do it equally
well.
In cases where they don't say the same thing, Ion, such as on the
subject of prophecy (mantikê), would you or would a good seer
expound better the similarities and differences in what the two
poets say about prophecy? A good seer would, Sokrates. But if you
were a seer yourself, would youhaving the ability to expound their
verbal agreementnot also know how to expound that on which they
differ? Of course I would, Sokrates. Then how is it, Ion, that you
are impressive on Homer but not on other poets? Doesn't Homer
talk about the same things as the other poets, says Sokratesgoing
along with the mistake of separating the poem's 'contents' from the
its constitutive form. Doesn't he talk about war, and the ways of
Gods and men, and heroes and Hades? True, Sokrates, but the other
poets do it in a different way (ouk homoiôs pepoiêkasi) from
Homer. The poetic reader of poetry has to grant Ion the distinction.
In a worse way, Ion? Far worse, Sokrates. And Homer in a better
way? Much better, Sokrates. Now, Ion, when people judge between
good and bad speakers on a given subject, is it not the same person
who judges that some are good and some are bad? Yes, Sokrates,
the same person. And if a person is not able to distinguish the good
speakers, that person won't be able to judge who is a bad one?
Right, Sokrates (532a3). Then, Ion, the same person is skilled
(deinos) in both things? Yes. And you say that Homer and other
poets all speak about the same thing, but not in the same way, and
that Homer does it well, the others worse. Yes, and I am right.
Then, oh best of men (beltiste), it is the case that you can
distinguish between the poets who speak better and the poets who
do not speak so well. Thus, Ion, you are after all competent
(hikanon) to be a judge (kritên) of other poets than Homer (532b-
c)! The reader who has enjoyed seeing Ion refuted, even if
somewhat sophistically, is now surprised at Ion's equanimity at the
elenchus. Ion's lack of annoyance, no doubt, corresponds to his
lack of logic. "Then what can the reason be, Sokrates, he says
undisturbed, "that when anyone discusses any other poet, I am
neither able to pay attention nor to contribute anything worthwhile,
but simply doze off; whereas if anyone should recall his Homer, I
am awake at once, alert and facile in discourse?
The reason is clear, Ion. It is because your ability to speak about
Homer is no art-and-science (technê) or knowledge (epistêmê); for
if it were, you would be able to speak on other poets too, since
there is an art of poetry (poiêtikê) as
 Page 360
a whole, right? Yes, Sokrates. And is it not the same, Ion, with the
whole of whatever other art-and-science you take; the same method
(tropos) of examination (skepseês) holds for all of them? The
reader who is not narrowly scientistic will note that Sokrates is,
perhaps, being ambiguous in his use of "same" as applied to the
methods used in different sorts of inquiryunless he means that
every sort of inquiry sticks to its own method in connection with its
own subject-matter. In any case, Plato's Sokrates has touched, in
passing, on another interesting philosophic problem.
The way in which Sokrates "explains" the problem to his naïve
interlocutor indicates that we should construe Sokrates' principle in
the latter sense. He calls it, with heavy irony, a worthless (phaulon)
and common (idiêtikon) statment, known to everybody. So, let us
think this through, Ion. Have you ever known anybody besides
yourself, Ion, who is a judge only of one good painter or one good
sculptor, flute- or harp-player, bard, or rhapsode; who has nothing
to say about the art of other painters, sculptors, bards, or rhapsodes
like yourself, Ion? No, I have not Sokrates; but, you see, I am
exceptional in this respect (533c9).
I do see it, Ion; and I'm going to tell you what it means. You speak
well on Homer, not from any art (technê), but because of a divine
power (theia dynamis) in you. It moves you like the power in the
magnetic Heraclea-stone that attracts iron rings to it and passes on
to them some of the same power to attract other iron rings. This
gives you a kind of suspended chain extending out from that one
stone. In the same way, Ion, the Muse inspires (entheous . . . poiei
533e5, theai moirai 534c1, 535a4, 536c3) a person who in turn
enthuses others who pass on their enthusiasm as it were in a chain
(533e6). Thus far the reader, who knows that audience enthusiasm
is contagious, can allow and enjoy the analogy.
Sokrates' next sentence, however, confronts him with an
identification of the practice of the good epic poet himself with that
of the rousing, rhapsodical reciter; and the identification is not
acceptable. It is just as unacceptable when extended to that cunning
craftsman, the lyric poet. But it is just from this extension that the
careful reader gets his clue as to what the author is doing here with
his Sokrates, whose own discourse has begun to wax suspiciously
rhapsodic.
For Sokrates to liken the workmanship of the poetic creator to the
whirling trance of the Corybantic dancers is an exaggeration; but
when he tells Ion that "by their own report" lyric poets cull their
songs from the bee-swarming glades and honey-dripping gardens
of the Muses, the reader perceives that Sokrates is taking some
over-used poetic metaphors with deliberate literalness, and
ironically turning their own words against the poets. The Greek
poet's inevi-
 Page 361
table prayer to be inspired by the Muses must by now have often
been the most boring part of his work. The reader sees that the
flighty nonsense spouted by Sokrates from 533e8-535a is an ironic
over-statement of the inspiration-theory of poetry-making. It may
be true that the poet who possesses no more than technical mastery
will never be a great or memorable maker; but it is just as true that
poems wholly the product of inspiration are extremely rare, and
nonce occurrences for their authors (who would then be right to
give credit to the Muses).
Since it is not by means of an art or science (technê) that they
compose, continues Sokrates, but by divine dispensation (theai
moirai), each is able to compose well (kalôs) only that kind of
poetry to which the Muse has moved him, whether it be dithyrambs
or odes, choric verses, epic hexameters, or iambics; but each is bad
(phaulos) in the other kinds (534c5). Factually, this is inexact in the
case of both ancient Greek and later times. For, Ion, if they had
properly learned the art-and-science of speaking beautifully about
one thing (peri henos legein) they would be able to do so about
other things. The reader notes Sokrates' separation of, and
equivocation between, matter and mode again.
This is the reason, Ion, for which God takes their minds away and
uses them as his ministers (hyperetais), as is the case with oracles
(chrêsimôidois) and holy prophets. It's so that we who listen will
know that these weighty things (pollou aksia) are said not by them,
but by God through them to us. And a great proof (tekmêrion) of
this is Tynnichos, who never composed any other poem worth
remembering except his very beautiful paean, the song that is on
everybody's lips, and which he himself said was "an invention of
the Muises (Moisan)." 3 Thus did the God prove his point, Ion, by
choosing to sing the best of songs through the worst of poets.
By the God, Sokrates, I believe you; my soul is quite moved by
your reasoning; so, it is by divine dispensation that good poets
interpret the Gods to us! With these words of Ion, who has been
moved by Sokrates much as he Ion moves his audiences, the
theoretical part is completed of the satire by overstatement of the
inspiration-theory of poetry. Sokrates goes on next to satirize the
thesis by example, and first of all from the example of Ion: "And
your rhapsodes, Ion, in turn interpret the works of the poets?" True.
And that, Ion, makes you the interpreter of interpreters. Now tell
me frankly, Ion, when you give your audience an especially good
thrill, are you in your senses (emphrôn) or are you beside yourself,
with your soul involved in the events you are enthusiastically
relating, wherever they might be taking place?
Your demonstration is very vivid, Sokrate. I can tell you frankly
that when I tell a tale of woe, my eyes fill with tears. And when I
tell of terrifying things,
 Page 362
my hair stands on end and my heart thumps. So, Ion, can we say
that a beautifully dressed man, with a crowd of harmless thousands
at his feet, is in his senses if he feels fear and weeps at a festival
where there is nothing to fear or bewail? To tell the truth, Sokrates,
we cannot. You are aware though, Ion, that you rhapsodes have this
same effect on most of your audience. Indeed yes, Sokrates, since I
have to watch my audience to make sure I'm producing the right
effect, and insuring my pecuniary reward (535e7). Sokrates has
brought out for the reader the twofold state of mind with which the
rhapsode operates; he is seen to be a sort of empathetic manipulator
of audiences for money who convinces himself that he is feeling
what he is making them feel in order to earn his fee.
But the spell which Sokrates' speculative enthusiasm had cast over
Ion is now broken. We see this from the fact that though Sokrates
invokes again and applies (to Ion and his audience) the analogy of
the divine magnetic power that emanates from the performing
rhapsodewho gets it through the poet, from the God, to transmit to
his audience Ion is not persuaded by the conclusion which Sokrates
wants to draw. This is Ion's case, says Sokrates, that just as it is
only from Homer and no other that he can get his divine charge
when reciting, so his impressiveness (deinos) in praising Homer
comes not from art-or-science (technê), but by divine dispensation
(theiai moirai). You speak well, Sokrates, but not enough to
convince me that I am possessed or mad when I praise Homer. Nor
would you believe it were you to hear me speaking about him.
Well, I'm willing to hear, but not until you've answered a question.
Of the many things in Homer, about which one do you speak best,
Ion? On all, Sokrates, without exception. But not, Ion, on those
things in Homer of which you have no knowledge (ouk eidôs)?
What could that be, Sokrates, of which Homer speaks that I do not
know? Unlike Sokrates, Ion is of course referring to the text of
Homer. Why, Ion, doesn't Homer speak in many places about many
crafts-and-sciences (technôn); for instance, chariot-handling? Yes,
Sokrates, I know exactly what Homer says about it and will quote it
to you. Ion quotes Nestor, at Iliad xxiii.335-41, on how to turn a
corner in a chariot race. But Ion, will a physician or a charioteer be
the better judge of whether Homer is right about what he says here?
A charioteer, of course. Because of his technê, Ion? Yes.
What we know, Ion, from the science of piloting we do not know
from the science of medicine? No. And we do not know medicine
from what we know of building construction? No. This would
apply to all the arts-and-sciences; but first answer me, are not
different technês different because their knowledge (epistêmê) is of
different sorts of matters (pragmatôn) or subjects? Yes. Is it not
 Page 363
true, then, for all the sciences-and-skills, Ion (538a), that if the
matters we know (gignôskein) by means of a given technê are
different from those known by another technê, then the things we
know are necessarily different? I think so, Sokrates.
Then for him who is without a given technê, it will not be possible
to know properly the things that are said of that art or done in that
science? True, Sokrates. Then, will a charioteer or a rhapsode know
better whether Homer speaks rightly about charioteering; for, Ion,
is not the rhapsode's technê different from that of the charioteer?
There is no inconsistency here with Sokrates' earlier statement that
he, Ion in particular, did not have a technê; there would, for
rhapsodizing in general, be a technê.
Sokrates now picks out and quotes a series of passages from Homer
in which the art of healing, a knowledge of fishing, and skill in
augury are respectively involved. Ion has to agree that, in each
case, it is the physician, fisherman, and augerer who are the better
judges of what is being said about their skills. So now, Ion,
Sokrates requests, pick out for me, from the Homer you have so
much more experience (empeirôteros) with, the kind of passage
that belongs to the rhapsode and his technê, about which he is the
proper judge over the rest of mankind.
I myself would say all passages, Sokrates. Surely not, Ion; how can
you be so forgetful? It is not right for a rhapsode to have no
memory. Why, what am I forgetting, Sokrates (540a)? You forget
you agreed that the art of the rhapsode was different, and knew
(gnôsesthai) different things, from the art of the charioteer. So I
did. Then, Ion, by your own account the rhapsode's art cannot
know everything. Except, perhaps, for just such matters Sokrates.
Alright, Ion; but since he doesn't know all matters, which ones will
he know?
The sort of thing, Sokrates, that it is proper for a man to say, and
what a woman should, the sort of thing that befits a slave or a
freedman, a ruler and the ruled. Do you mean, Ion, that a rhapsode
will know better than a ship's pilot, what commands are more
appropriate to give on board ship in a stormy sea? No. Will he
know better what to order for a sick man than his doctor? But he
will know how a slave should speak? Yes, Sokrates. Even if the
slave is a cowherd with many troublesome cows? Not in that case,
Sokrates. What about the sort of thing a spinning-woman would
say about working in wool? He won't know.
Will he know what befits a general to say when exhorting his
troops? Yes, Sokrates, that is the sort of thing a rhapsode will
know. So the rhapsode's technê, Ion, is the same as the general's? I,
at least, would know what a general ought to say. That, Ion, would
be because you are good at generalship, as well as being a
rhapsode. Now, when you make judgments in military science, do
 Page 364
you make them as a military scientist or as a rhapsode? For me,
there is no difference. What, no difference, Ion? Do you mean to
say that the art of the rhapsode and that of the general are one and
the same, not two different things (541a)? Ion commits the
absurdity of answering that the two contrasting technês are one and
the same.
So, whoever happens to be a good rhapsode is also a good general?
Certainly, Sokrates. And whoever happens to be a good general
will also be a good rhapsode? Not also, Sokrates. Right, Ion: but
are you not the best rhapsode in Greece? By far the best. So, are
you also the best general, Ion? You know it well, Sokrates; and I
have learned it from Homer.
Then how does it happen, Ion, that you who are the best general in
Greece go around peforming as a rhapsode instead of acting as a
general? Do you believe that the former are more needed, says
Sokrates sarcastically, than the latter? The reader can't forget that
both in Plato's time, and at the supposed date of the dialogical
exchange, the cities of Greece were in a state of constant warfare
with one another. Ion's excuse, at 541c, is that Ephesus does not
need him because it is under the military leadership of Athens, and
both Athens and Sparta prefer their own citizens as generals. This
is easily refuted by counter-examples of foreign generals in the
employ of Athens, examples that could be multiplied by historians
of other Greek states. Besides, Sokrates says, are not the Ephesians
themselves of Athenian origin, Ion?
Sokrates now returns to the main subject of knowledge (epistêmê)
and art or craft (technê) in relation to inspiration or divine vocation
(enthousiasmos, theiai moira) with another teasing refutation
between 541e1 and the end (542b). But the refutation is sophistical;
it is an example of the fallacy of false alternatives. As such, it is
continuous in spirit with Sokrates' "putting on" of Ion and his
rhapsodic activity by means of flattery, argumentation, and over-
statement.
If you are right, Ion, that it is by art or knowledge that you praise
Homer, you are deceiving me. Far from telling me the impressive
things you know about Homer, you have been as evasive as Proteus
and not told me what the subject is that your skill (hatta esti tauta,
peri hôn deinos ei) is exercised upon. However, if you are not a
knowing artist (technikos) but speak inspiredly about Homer by
divine dispensation (as I say you do), and are possessed by the
poet, then you are not deceiving me unfairly. Choose, therefore,
which of the two you wish to be considered (nomizesthai) by us:
dishonest (adikos) or divine (theios).
There's a big difference between them Sokrates; it is much nicer to
be called divine. Then the nobler title is yours, Ion, and as far as
we're concerned you are a divine and not an artistic eulogizer
(epainetês) of Homer. Sokrates has told Ion, in a polite, barely-
disguised ironic way, that however inspired and
 Page 365
successful a reciter of Homer he may be, he is neither a rational
(logikos) or knowledgeable-and-artful (technikos) critic nor a
thoughtful (dianoêtikos) expounder of the great poet. All he can do
when not reciting Homer is rave about him.
Notes
1. But this Heracleides is claimed by Wilamowitz to have been an
envoy to the Persians, i.e. as already serving Athens, in 423 B.C.;
and he seems to have been given the citizenship just after 403 B.C.
Wilamowitz gives his epigraphic evidence too succintly as:
Urkunde IG II2 8, which seems to refer to Inscriptiones Atticae
Euclidis anno posteriores (as this part of the old Inscriptiones
Graecae is now known), Vol. II/III 2nd ed. pt.8, published by the
Berlin Academy, 1913-1940.
2. Also mentioned in the dialogue is an Apollodorus of Cyzicus.
Either we know nothing about this Apollodorus, or he may be the
one buried in the Kerameikos and taken up by Wilamowitz (Platon
II, 2nd ed. 1920; p.33) whose grave-markings make him a
contemporary of Philip of Macedon. On the latter alternative,
however, the dialogue could scarcely be by Plato, or would have to
be assigned to the very end of his lifetime.
3. This is the form given in the text of Schanz, which is also used
by W.R. Lamb, the Loeb Library translator. It is printed by
Méridier, who collated Manuscripts T and W with F for his text of
the Ion. Baiter and Orelli print Moisan without comment in the
Zurich edition of Plato's works, as does Burnet in the Oxford
edition. It's of interest that Sokrates should use the Aeolic or
Sapphic form here. Is it a hint to the reader that he is now being
choric or lyrical? In transliterating the unusual form Muises instead
of Moises we, for our part, skirt the possibility that this is the
private joke of a Jewish copyist somewhere along the line of
transmission. The Doric form would have been Môsa. The lyric
choruses, in Greek Tragedy affected Doric forms; the spoken
verses of the actors were in iambic meters. If what Tynnichos said
about the the paean was not itself Aeolic and is one of Sokrates'
frequent ad hoc inventions, he may be using the obsolete form to
mitigate the possible impiety of making up stories about the
Goddesses. Because what he attributes to them is creditable,
Sokrates' scruple would come from the story's not really being true.
 Page 367

Chapter 18
Disputation, Education, and Dialectic:
The Euthydemus and the Euthyphro
The Epilogue on the Would-be Knowledge-Seeker and the Would-
be Statesman
After the first bout of contention (or "logmachy") with, and
refutation of, the young Kleinias by the professional Eristics
Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, Plato's Sokrates tells Crito (277
ff.) how he came to the rescue of the young man.
As Sokrates has been telling itfor this is a narrated dialogue
interrupted now and then by Crito the listenerthe two Eristics were
asked to display their skill in exhortation for the purpose of
bringing Kleinias closer to the study of philosophy and knowledge.
Instead, Sokrates has had to say to the "refuted" Kleinias that the
Eristics have chosen to proceed, first, to a playful demonstration of
how equivocal words can be and, secondly, to an equally playful
exhibition of the paradoxes that arise when questions about
knowledge and learning are asked.
Sokrates is keeping the confused Kleinias from giving up by
ironically suggesting that the extravagant word-masters were
merely (as in the Corybantic rituals) being festive before
proceeding to enthrone him, Kleinias, as a proper initiate into the
business of learning. Then, turning to Euthydemus and
Dionysodorus (278c9), he asks them to now be serious; and may he
Sokrates venture to give a crude example of what is needed, and of
what they will surely do brilliantly and better?
 Page 368
What is needed is an exhortation that will convince Kleinias to
devote himself to knowledge (sophía) and human excellence
(aretê). The sample exchange that follows between Kleinias and
Sokrates is, properly, the dialogue's first protrepticus, as in 282d6-
9 at the end of the exchange. This is the name given ever since to
exhortations to philosophy.
Because of Dionysodorus's contentious frivolity (283b) Sokrates
repeats and insists that he and Kleinias are serious about what they
want for Kleinias. They want him set upon the road to excellence
and knowledge. Dionysodorus promptly succeeds in appearing to
prove that this cannot be what Sokrates wants by equivocally
drawing a contrary-to-fact conclusion from Sokrates' words. This
annoys Ktesippus, the friend of Kleinias, and draws him angrily
into the logomachy.
As they get very savage (agriôterôs) in this second logomachy,
Sokrates tells Crito he intervened to calm Ktesippus down. The
reader sees that Sokrates does this (285a4-285c6) by suggesting,
with an extreme of irony joined in by Ktesippus, that he and his
party are in fact ready to undergo anything if only Euthydemus and
Dionysodorus will remake them into excellent (eis aretên) human
beings.
But Dionysodorus continues the logomachy by asserting, and
appearing to prove, that contradiction is impossible (285d8-286b8).
Sokrates has to intervene again. He reminds Dionysodorus that
what he has just argued isn't new and is much rehearsed by
followers of Protagoras. Dionysodorus's argument, Sokrates
continues, is self-refuting. He gets the Eristics to admit (286d-
287b1) that if contradiction is impossible, then there is nothing for
their art of refutation to refute and no reason why they should teach
it. However, this elenchus is evaded by the brothers because,
instead of answering Sokrates' questions as the rules of debate
required, they start asking him questions on the ground that he has
admittedas he ironically didthat they are wise (287b7, 287d4).
Sokrates lets himself be questioned.
Attacking quickly with an equivocation, Dionysodorus
interrogatively implies at 287e1 that Sokrates has made a mistake
in asking earlier "what Dionysodorus's phrase had in mind" (ho ti
moi nooî to rhêma). Sokrates catches him in the elenchus: Yes,
either I have made a mistake and your claim that mistakes are
impossible is refuted, or else I have made no mistake and your art
of refutation is a failure or is self-refuting (288a). At this Ktesippus
crows an insult at the brothers, and Sokrates has both to calm him
down and flatter them back into a colloquial relationship (288b-c).
It is here,, after this second logomachy, that Sokrates tells Crito
that he tried to bring Kleinias back to the point where they had left
off, namely, to where they were agreeing that one ought to pursue
knowledge and wisdom
 Page 369
(anankein einai philosophein 282d2). This is picked up again at
288d7: philosophêteon hômologêsamen teleutôntes). Sokrates'
second protrepticus for Kleinias has as its aim (again) ''to bring out
[the two Eristics] hoping that they will sympathize with my earnest
intent and so become earnest (spoudasêton) themselves" (288d2).
Since Sokrates by now has enough evidence to believe that the two
Eristics never will be serious in the required sense, his statement
has to be ironic. In any case, Sokrates wants to work out with
Kleinias what sort of knowledge it is that philosophy seeks to
acquire (288d-e). They work out in their exchange that it should
consist "in a combination of making, with knowing how to use, the
thing made" 28965-8). Could it be, Sokrates then asks, that, as the
Gods are my witness, if we learnt the art-and-science (technê) of
speechmaking, this art would be the one that makes us happy? I
think not, Kleinias rejoins. Why not, asks Sokrates.
Because, Sokrates, of certain speechwriters (tinas logopoious) who
do not know how to use the arguments and speeches they make up
themselves. True, grants Sokrates, yet when they are present, they
seem to me to be superwise (hypersophoi), and their art sounds
inspired and out of my reach (289e). This must be because it is a
branch of the art of enchantment and not inferior to it; for, while
the enchanter charms snakes and diseases away, our spellbinder
soothes and sways mass juries, legislative assemblies and other
multitudes. These words of Sokrates resonate with those of the
Elean visitor's description of the Sophist as a word-wizard in the
Sophist dialogue.
If these words are an echo, they could be a clue to the dramatic
order in which the three dialogues might best be read. Consider that
Sokrates deliberately leads Kleinias on, by his question about
generalship, to the rejection of it (and calculation and geometry and
astronomy) as the master-art that governs the use of more special
knowledges (290a-d). Notice that in his report to Crito of this
exchange with Kleinias, Sokrates laughingly and knowingly makes
a point of including the art of monarchy (tên basilikên) among
those they decided did not produce happiness. The phrase ô
daimonie Kritôn here does not mean "mysterious Crito," as one
translator would have it, but rather "blessed Crito" in the sense of
"my innocent Crito." Sokrates does not expect his old friend to get
the point, but Plato has signalled to his reader that there is a point
to be gotten here. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to find an
allusion in all this to the Politicus, in which the art of monarchy is
treated sophistically by the Elean visitor.
Moreover, if the reader can feel the force of the allusiveness as
pointing to the Sophist and Politicus, he will also give
consideration to the hypothesis that the epilogue of the Euthydemus
isn't just an exchange with Crito about educa-
 Page 370
tion, but is also one in which Plato gives his Sokrates equal time
(so to speak) for a response to the clever pretensions of the would-
be Eleatic 'philosopher' and 'statesman' in those two dialogues. But
if the Euthydemus is read before the Sophist and Politicus, its
epilogue on the 'inbetweeners' will serve to alert the reader to the
pretensions of the Elean.
Between 291c5 and 293a9 Sokrates rehearses with Crito the
reasoning according to which the science of kingship was judged to
fail of the criteria that it produce or guide other knowledges, and
that it necessarily leads to happiness. The fact that Sokrates
identifies the science of kingship with the science of statesmanship
at 291c6 reinforces the feeling that he is alluding to the
identification of the two by the Elean in the Politicus. When
Sokrates appeals to the Eristics for help with the problem, all we
get is a third long, fruitless logomachy (292d-304b). It involves
Euthydemus, Sokrates, Dionysodorus and Ktesippus, and will be
discussed below. For the moment we must pursue the implications
of the epilogue with Crito that began at 304b7.
You see Crito, says Sokrates musingly with quiet irony, what they
have to teach is easy enough to learnno matter how old you are.
You must of course pay, as with other professionals. But, Sokrates,
I wouldn't feel right using their arguments. Do you know, Sokrates,
what a clever legal speechwriter who was watching us said to me?
He said that though I was hearing the most accomplished
refutationists of the day, the trouble they were taking was worth
nothing. I insisted, continues Crito, that philosophy is a charming
thing. But he called me an innocent fellow (makarie) and said I
would have been ashamed for you had I really listened to the way
you permitted yourself to be used by those phrase-catching Eristics.
So Sokrates, says Crito, this speechwriter was wrong in
condemning philosophy but right, it seems to me, in blaming you
for your readiness to participate in this kind of refutationism before
so many people.
Well Crito, Sokrates responds, these speechwriters who make no
speeches are themselves to be wondered at. Prodicus called them
borderlines (methoria) between philosophy and politics (305c). Yet
they think themselves the wisest (sophôtatoí) of men and believe
they would be counted so if it were not for the philosophers. So
they downgrade the latter in order to be accounted the first in
sagacity (sophía). But when they do encounter a Sophist like
Euthydemus, they cannot handle it and are silenced. We perceive,
however, that Plato's Sokrates has just shown that they can indeed
be matched, and exposed to those who care for knowledge rather
than display.
It is natural enough, continues Sokrates, for these borderliners to
believe themselves wise, for they have absorbed some philosophy
and gotten some political knowledge. And since they take no risks
and avoid competition, they
 Page 371
enjoy only the benefits of their knowledge (305e1-3). Still, Crito
counters, you can't deny that there's some truth to the account they
give of themselves. We think, here, of the impressive rhetorical
showing made by the Elean visitor in the persuading of his young
interlocutors in the Sophist and Politicus, and of the effort it takes
on the reader's part to see through his fallacies and devices without
the kind of help that Sokrates provides against the two Eristics in
the Euthydemus.
Yes, Crito, says Sokrates, it is a question of appearing seemly,
rather than of holding to the truth (306a1). Only if philosophy and
statecraft are both bad, are those who possess a little of each better
than those who possess much of one or both (306b7f.). If both
philosophy and the practical science of politics are good, but have
different aims, then those in the middle who share in both have
nothing to say because they are inferior to both. If one of these
things is good and the other bad, says Sokrates completing the
logic of the case, such inbetweeners are worse than the one but
better than the other. Sokrates has proved that at most the
borderliners can only achieve second best.
However, he continues, since these people will not admit that both
philosophy and statecraft are bad, or that one is good and the other
bad, it follows that the borderliners in philosophy and politics can
only be third bestin point of knowledge and practicerather than
first, as they so passionately wish to be thought. Nonetheless,
concludes Sokrates generously, we should be heartened by any
body who struggles to say anything that makes good sense in
matters requiring judgment (306c9-10).
But Sokrates, Crito returns, my doubt about what to do for the
education of my sons has not been removed. Critobolus is of an age
to need a tutor and guidance. But when I look at those who profess
to be educators, I do not find a single one who is suitable. So,
Sokrates, how am I to turn the youngster towards the pursuit of
knowledge (epi philosophían)? The indications here and in the
Apology about Critobolus's age are too vague for use in ordering
the dialogues dramatically; but they are not in confict, since Crito
at 306d6 stated that his son is already "grown up" (êdê hêlikian
echei).
My good Crito, don't you know that in every profession the
incompetent outnumber the competent? You wouldn't use that
argument against generalship, or athletics, money-making, or
rhetoric. So don't use it against the pursuit of knowledge. But
carefully (basanisas) observe and test those who practice it; and if
you find it not worthwhile, then recommend against it. "But if it
should appear to you as I believe it to be, then take courage and
pursue and practice it yourself and your children" (307c).
Sokrates' earlier allusion to speechwriters was, we now see, an
allusion to the would-be philosophers and would-be statesmen,
teachers of public speak-
 Page 372
ing and politics who were "making the rounds of the cities"
(Sophist 216c) in his and Plato's time. And Plato, we notice, deals
more in allusiveness than in specific allusions. Beyond this
particular interdialogical allusion, Sokrates can be seen to have a
multiplicity of references in his exchange with Crito. We are not
told, in the relevant dialogue, whether the Elean visitor was a
speechwriter or not. But he certainly is one of the borderliners
between political science and philosophy.
We don't know whether Antisthenes was an ethical dialectian like
Socrates, as well as being the writer his fragments suggest. We do
know that Isocrates was a good pamphleteer more than a public
speaker, and though a moderate political critic, also a borderliner as
defined by Sokrates. None of these is comparable to the ethical
dialectician that Sokrates is in Plato's dialogues. Nor do they
compare with Plato the dialogical philosopher, or with the cogent
constitutional critic and witty exhibitor of contemporary political
currents that Plato is in his dialogues.
But taking Sokrates' ironic demonstration of the worthlessness of
Euthydemus and Dionysodorus together with his allusion to the
Elean visitor, we see that they amount to an agreement with
Isocrates warning work Against the Sophists with respect to their
professional pretensions. That Sokrates lists rhetoric among the
alternatives available to Critobolus assures us that he doesn't
believe all rhetoricians to be borderliners between knowledge-
seeking and politics. As we know from the Gorgias, Plato's
Sokrates has a developed conception of a true art-and-science of
rhetoric. So if we are to conclude that Isocrates falls short of this
conception, either because of lesser philosophic ability or because
(unlike Pericles) he did not devote himself fully to the practice of
politics with speaking as an integral part of it, then it is we the
readers who are making the inference or comparisonnot Plato's
Sokrates. It remains true, however, that we make the inference
under the influence of Sokrates in the Phaedrus, Gorgias, Sophist,
Politicus, and Euthydemus, silent as he almost is in the last two of
these rhetorically engaged dialogues.
Protreptics vs. Logomachy, Ethical vs. Refutative Dialectic
The contrast could not be greater between the way in which
Sokrates reasons with Kleinias in the two protreptic exchanges with
him and the crass insensitivity with which the two Eristics "refute"
Kleinias with supposedly unanswerable questions (aphykta
erôtêmata). 1 Plato, as other readers have noticed, is here
dramatizing the difference between disputation for the sake of
victory by refutation or anastropheturning the other's argument
aroundand disputation for the sake of education or inquiry.
 Page 373
In asking the two self-appointed "teachers" to persuade Kleinias
that it's necessary to pursue knowledge and be concerned with
goodness (aretê 275a4), Sokrates is explicit in making it clear to
his auditors that like others, he is worried (phoboumetha) about the
dangers of being corrupted to which young men like Kleinias are
exposed when teachers are unsuitable. They are turned away from
the search for excellence (aretê) to some other kind of life. Was
Sokrates only being ironic in hoping that Euthydemus and
Dionysodorus would be able to lead a student into excellence?
What follows in the remaining logomachies (283a-288b; 293b-
304b) is a clear and forcefully staged exhibition that it is just such
competitive Eristics as these two who are bad for the young, not
conscientious questioners like Plato's Sokrates. But it is the former
who are applauded by the onlookers in the gymnasium, not
Sokrates. Yet Sokrates has steadily met their fallacious devices
with rationality and with an explanation for some of them. Rather
than inviting applauses, Sokrates ironically joins in the
encouragement of their eristic efforts in order to test how far they
will go in their sophistry, and to test whether there is some point
past which they will give it up for something more serious than
showmanship. They never do.
At 272b-c Sokrates had told Crito, with tongue in cheek, that he
desires (epithymô) to acquire the science (tautês tês sophías) that
the two Sophists have to teach, namely, the science of disputation
(eristikês). Sokrates ironically fears that he may fail to learn it, just
as he failed to learn the harp from Metrobius, even though he was
given "plenty of proof and reassurance" that it is not impossible for
older people to acquire new knowledge. It is to inform Crito, who
asked him of what the science (tên sophían) consists, that Sokrates
has told the whole story of the exchange between the Eristics,
Kleinias, Ktesiphon and himself.
On completing the story at 304b, Sokrates continues the irony with
his friend. He tells him he must "arrange to join us in taking lessons
from the pair." For as long as they are paid, they promise both that
the acquisition of their knowledge will be easy, no matter what the
learner's age, and that it won't interfere with the learner's money-
making (304c). Crito, however, staunchly rejects their kind of
argumentation, now that it has been rehearsed in shameful detail.
Crito now shows awareness of Sokrates's detachment in action
from the pair; but (as just seen) ventures to admonish him for
wasting his time with such people. Sokrates ends the dialogue by
distinguishing between bad practitioners who constitute the
majority of any profession and the few good ones.
As for philosophy, he concludes, people must be allowed to pursue
it in their own way. Is this phrase calculated to reinforce our
understanding of why Plato's Sokrates can stand to be silent in
certain dialogues, while other speakers take the lead in claiming to
be "philosophical"? By usage in debate, silence
 Page 374
was expected from an involved onlooker, if he was not the agreed-
upon respondent. But as we saw in the Republic, an onlooker like
Thrasymchos, who was considered an expert, could expect to be
allowed into the discussion. And, Sokrates concludes, you can
recommend for or against it, depending on what you find when you
have tested it for yourself. But Sokrates hopes his friend will find
philosophy to be such as he himself has found it, and just as
heartening (tharrôn).
It becomes clear to the reflective reader that the Euthydemus is
more than a dialectical farce designed to expose a pair of extreme
Eristics. From the contrasts focused upon, the dialogue emerges as
another implicit defense of Sokrates against accusations of impiety
and subversion, in distinction from the explicit defense he offers in
the Apology. Sokrates in the Euthydemus is clearly in no need of
taking lessons from the two Eristics in the dialectical art. The
visible design of the dialogue is, on the contrary, to show him (as in
other dialogues) to be an honest master for ethical ends of a
technique that Euthydemus and Dionysodorus have perverted to the
ends of money-making and salesmanship.
Note, however, that there is a marked contrast between this
dialogue and the Sophist and Politicus in point of the "visibility" of
its design. Two blatant word-jugglers are easily exposed by
Sokrates in the Euthydemus. But the Elean visitor in the last two is
(as we have seen) a covered-up rhetorical Sophist who is a brilliant
speaker. The way in which Plato presents him, as a subtle
persuader in a covertly antagonistic relation to Sokrates that only
the readeroutside of Sokrates himselfis supposed to perceive, is so
finely calibrated to the Elean's ability and to his slurring over of the
differences between the practice of political advisement which he
calls "philosophy" and Sokrates's practice of inquiry and ethicality,
that it makes the design of the Sophist and Politicus harder to bring
out, even for an alerted dialogical reader.
The Euthyphro and the Dialectic
One of the most straightforward applications of the method of
question and answer is surely that of Plato's Sokrates in the
Euthyphro. Not only does he appear in the dialogue as a
knowledge-seeker addressing a friendly expert (3c1) about very
relevant subjects (cf. Phaedo 70c1), he is no less kind to the self-
important Euthyphro than he is to the innocent Phaedrus, the slow
Protarchus, the brilliant Theaetetus, and the handsome, conceited
Meno. He is not kind to Meno's host Anytus, however, since it falls
to him (in that dialogue) to bring out the fact that it was not for his
intelligence but for his money that Anytus was being elected to
public office. In all of this Sokrates, naturally,
 Page 375
cannot help being his usual ironic or 'Socratic' self. The Euthyphro
can also serve as a test of how dialogical the reader's understanding
is of this and others of Plato's dialogues. I spell this point out, since
it is methodologically central to the question of how Plato should
be read. 2
It is a corollary of the dialogical approach that "whatever is said in
a dialogue [of Plato's] is said [by a dramatic character] to another
dramatic character [in the dialogue] . . . and is not addressed, over
the heads of the dramatis personae, to the auditors [or readers] of
the work."3 To this, a scholarly reader has responded,
What of the Euthyphro, for example? Surely Socrates' meaning is not
accessible to Euthyphro (the only other character present in the
dialogue) and can only by appreciated by the reader. This is a key
dimension of Plato's literary irony; strictly speaking, it is a dimension
of irony that is not present in spoken discourse.
Now it is true that, as in the Meno, the things Sokrates is saying
are, on a number of occasions, overheard [or meant to be
overheard] by other auditors than the principal interlocutors. There
is nothing in this that violates the dramatic integrity of the
dialogue. To claim that Plato or his Sokrates addresses the reader
directly, however, is to confuse the dialogue-form, as practiced by
Plato, with the essay-form in which an author chooses to address
his reader directly for whatever purpose, or for purposes which
unfold, or are made explicit, as the essay gets on with its subject.
But a dialogue of Plato's is just this: the dramatization in writing of
a fictional intellectual encounter, namely, of what is already a
communicative interaction. To interrupt this interaction would be
to destroy the very fiction that the dialogue is staging; so Plato
never does it, he never speaks in his own voice.
That a main speaker such as Sokrates is not understood by his
interlocutor is not unusual in the dialogues, as in the case of
Sokrates vis-avis Protarchos or the rhetorical Sophist from Elea
vis-a-vis his young and tractable respondents. Among the other
auditors in the Philebos, for whose benefit Sokrates is discoursing,
is Philebos himself, while in the Sophist and Politicus what the
rhetorical Sophist says is meant to be heard (among the others) by
Sokrates at whom the Elean does not fail to aim a few barbs (as we
saw in Chapters 10 and 11). When there is only one interlocutor
and he does not understand (as in the Euthyphro), it is the reader of
the dialogue who is expected to perceive both the point missed by
the interlocutor and that the interlocutor has missed it, or is evading
it. Previous chapters have worked through several examples of just
this phenomenon as it occurred. To respond, in these cases, as if
Plato or his Sokrates is addressing the reader directly is, precisely,
to de-dramatize the
 Page 376
dialogue; it is to purge pregnant proposals of their interlocutory
force and reduce a live exchange to a set of abstract propositions
some of which are arbitrarily assigned to Plato as his own beliefs
without specification of the decision-procedure by means of which
we can be sure they are Plato's.
In the Euthyphro we find that Euthyphro is an admirer of Sokrates
(3a8-9). We infer that it is the same acquaintance as the one
referred to in the Kratylos (at 396d2) as an expert on divine
etymologies (cf. Chapter 20 below). He is also the one whose
conversation earlier in the day (Kratylos 3962e) has inspired
Sokrates to sudden inventiveness about related matters. What this
means from the point of view of the dramatic order of the dialogues
is that the action of the Euthyphro must have preceded the
conversation in the Kratylos, (if it was that conversation that
Sokrates had reference to).
Sokrates also quotes Euthydemus at 386d of the Kratylos as the
author of a sophism to which he and Hermogenes cannot agree.
Since the thesis ascribed to Euthydemus is indeed advanced by him
in "his" dialogue (at 294a ff. and 296c), we can presumethough not
with certaintythat the Euthydemus is also prior, dramatically
speaking, to the Kratylos. A fourth-century Athenian reader might
be expected to know that this was a well-known paradox espoused
by that particular Eristic. Still speaking dramatically, we shouldn't
put the Euthydemus immediately before the Kratylos, since the
Euthyphro seems to fit that place best. The dramatic reasons for
putting the Euthydemus right after the Sophist and Politicus were
given above. The biggest one was that the epilogue on the half-way
men of knowledge and the half-way statesmen appears to be part of
Sokrates's answer to the Eleate's covered-up attack upon him in the
latter two dialogues. An independent reinforcement of this dramatic
order is the fact that other readers have found, at 291c ff. of the
Euthydemus, a reference back to the subject of the Politicus, the
science of monarchy, during the second protreptic discussion with
Kleinias.
We thus come to the Euthyphro, in which a chance encounter has
given Sokrates the knowledge-seeker an opportunity to learn about
the nature of piety and to consider whether he might not have
transgressed against it. From Euthyphro's description of himself
(3b-c), we learn not only that he considers himself an expert on the
matter, but that as an expert he cannot believe that Sokrates could
be the object of a public accusation (graphên) of impiety.
Euthyphro has also somehow sensed from acquaintanceship with
Sokrates' that, on the contrary, Sokrates' philosophic activity is a
source of vitality and spiritual warmth for the Athenian community
as a whole: "it seems to me before all else," he says, that he
[Meletus] has begun to do harm to the city by striking at its hearth"
(3a8-9: moi dokei aph'hestias archesthai kakourgein tên polin,
epicheirôn adikein se). But Euthyphro is also considered eccentric,
or
 Page 377
extreme, by his fellow-citizens when it comes to matters of
religion. He startles them by drawing novel conclusions from the
received myths. But in contrast to Sokrates the persistent
questioner, he is not prosecuted or considered impious. At 5c
Euthyphro shows himself not to have the slightest fear of Meletus
and his type of indictment. On the contrary he is confident that he
could quickly bring Meletus himself into question in connection
with such matters as piety or reverence, and holiness.
That is the very reason, says Sokrates with an irony not perceived
by Euthyphro, I want to become your student. I wish to know what
holiness (to hosion) and piety (to eusebês) are, in opposition to
impiety and unholiness. Please tell me, Euthyphro.
As an example of impiety, Euthyphro gives his father's pollution-
causing negligence; and he tells Sokrates what he's doing about it.
Euthyphro feels he can prove the rightness of his action by citing
the precedent in which Zeus punished his father for evilly
devouring his children. People will be inconsistent, says
Euthyphro, if they approve of what Zeus did but disapprove of
what I am doing. The reader can see that Euthyphro has some sense
of the need to to avoid inconsistency, but that he has no feeling for
context. It is Euthyphro who, in comparison to Sokrates, is
unrealistic.
Is that the reason, then, that I am under indictment, asks Sokrates.
Is it because I find it hard to accept such stories about the Gods
(6a)? If you believe such stories, Euthyphro, I shall have to do so
too. But you have not, in the meantime, sufficiently instructed me
in response to my question as to what holiness is (6c11-12). I will
try (peirô) to clarify my question. I didn't ask for examples, but for
that aspect (ekeino auto to eidos) of it by which all holy things are
holy. For you did say, Euthyphro, that it was by virtue of this one
idea (míâi idéai) of holiness that things were either holy or unholy
(6e1); or don't you remember?
The reader sees that Sokrates is putting words in Euthyphro's
mouth; for, looking back at the conversation so far, all that he has
claimed is that his usefulness consists in having "exact knowledge"
of all such religious matters (ta toiauta panta akribôs eideiên 5a). It
is Plato's Sokrates who had asked at 5d whether the element of
holiness in all holy acts is not the same from act to act, and whether
its opposite unholiness is not also an invariant characteristic (mian
tina idean) that makes unholy acts unholy? It becomes clear that
Euthyphro has agreed at 5d6 to this way of putting the question
without understanding it. "Teach me then," Sokrates said, "what
this form (tên idean) can be, so that in looking at it and using it as a
model (paradeigmati)," I can tell what acts of yours and of others
are holy or not.
Very well then, if that's how you want it explained, says Euthyphro
seeming
 Page 378
to but not really catching on: That is holy which is liked by the
Gods, and what they dislike is unholy. "Beautiful, Euthyphro, you
have answered in just the way I wanted . . . (!). You will, of course,
now go on to teach me further that what you say is true." "Of
course" (7a6).
But have we not agreed, Euthyphro, that that the holy and the
unholy are opposites? Yes, we have. And haven't we also
maentioned that the Gods quarrel and disagree with each other?
Yes. Now, Euthyphro, it is not differences that can be settled by
measurement that cause their quarrels. Is it not, rather, differences
about right and wrong, good and shameful, noble and evil that
divide the Gods? It then follows from what you say, does it not my
noble Euthyphro, that some of the Gods think some things right or
wrong, good or shameful, noble or evil, while others of them think
that other things are so? You are right, Sokrates (7e6).
Then it would appear, Euthyphro, that the same things are dear to
and loved by the Gods as are hateful to, and hated, by them. So it
seems, Sokrates. And does it not follow from this that the same
things would be both holy and unholy? I'm afraid so, says
Euthyphro, refuted. Thus, Euthyphro, it would not be surprising if
prosecuting your father is pleasing to Zeus but hateful to Kronos
and Uranus, and pleasing to Hephaestus but hateful to Hera, and so
on (8b4).
But Sokrates, I don't think any of the Gods disagrees with any other
that he who kills wrongfully should pay the penalty. Not even men
dispute that, counters Sokrates; when men defend themselves, it is
never by arguing that though they have done wrong, they should
not pay the penalty. What they argue, Euthyphro, is that in the
particular case, they have not done wrong. So, would it not be the
same with the Gods, if and when they do dispute, that they would
dispute about individual acts, some Gods saying they were done
against justice, others saying they were done justly? So it would be,
Sokrates (8e10).
The reader notes that Euthyphro is refuted in the first place because
his isolation of the characteristic that identifies an act as holy does
not work. An act cannot be called holy if it has to be compared to a
series members of which are both holy and unholy. That Sokrates
has made Euthyphro feel he has failed to find a distingusihing trait
of holiness is shown by the fact that Euthyphro immediately went
on to assert something that all the Gods could be counted on to
agree to. But he is quickly shown that the application of this
universalized claim to Euthyphro's particular case does not justify
it. This is because, from "all the Gods think wrongful killers should
pay the penalty" it does not necessarily follow that "all the Gods
think Euthyphro's father, in the circumstances, is an unjust
homicide" (9a-b).
 Page 379
Sokrates asks Euthyphro, in the second place, if he were to grant
that all the Gods found the action of Euthyphro's father hateful,
whether this would imply that Euthyphro now would claim as the
distinguishing trait of the holy and the unholy that they are,
respectively, what all the Gods love and all the Gods hate; whereas
that is neither holy nor unholy, or both, which some Gods love and
some Gods hate? What is to prevent it? asks Euthyphro. Consider,
Euthyphro, Sokrates warns, whether by taking this as your
hypothesis you will not easily be able to teach me what you
promised.
''But I would say, Sokrates, that what all the Gods love is holy, and
the opposite, that what what they hate is unholy," insists
Euthyphro. Now, Sokrates had warned at 7a: "Should we examine
this, Euthyphro, to see if it is correct or should we just permit
ourselves . . . to accept as correct anything someone agrees to?"
And Euthyphro had answered: yes, we ought to examine our
statements; though he is still insisting at 9e9 that his own statement
is true.
Sokrates Takes Over the Inquiry
While he has all along been the leader in the conversation, Sokrates
continues to maintain the polite and ironic pretense that he is being
instructed by Euthyphro. And this even though the latter's "let it be
examined" (skepteon 9e9) might justify Sokrates' now taking the
lead explicitly. Sokrates' restraint in this respect is a response to
Euthyphro's touchiness as an expert, and while Sokrates is teaching
a lesson to Euthyphro in the practice and logic of definition, Plato's
reader is getting a lesson in how to use the art of cross-examination
with sensitivity.
Specifically, by the time the exchange reached 8a9, Sokrates has
shown Euthyphro that his definition of holiness (at 6e1-7a1) has
not distinguished holiness from unholiness, so that the question
asked has not been answered. And, by the time the exchange
reaches 9a-b, Euthyphro has been shown that his generalization
about paying the penalty does not deductively cover the suit he has
brought against his father, and so does not prove the holiness of his
case. "So please try to show me clearly, Euthyphro, that all the
Gods believe your action is right in this case." Claiming to be
harder to teach than a jury, Sokrates next reflects that even if
Euthyphro had proved to him that all the Gods thought the death in
question wrongful, he would still not have learned what the
definitions of holiness and unholiness are to be. So picking up
Sokrates' lead, Euthyphro repeats in amended form his belief (9e1-
3) that what all the Gods love is holy and, contrariwise, what they
all hate is unholy. And he again agrees with Sokrates that they
should examine the statement for its correctness.
 Page 380
What Sokrates now proceeds to teach Euthyphro is not only hard
for the latter to grasp; it is also difficult for the uninitiated reader.
This is the next point in the logic of definition; namely, that a trait
or property of a thing may be distinctive of it, yet not be one of its
defining attributes. Sokrates makes this point by showing
Euthyphro with much trouble and several analogous examples that
the act of loving is a prior condition of there being something
loved (10c). Once Euthyphro appears to have grasped this, Sokrates
applies it to Euthyphro's proposal: "What is loved and liked by the
Gods is loved because of their loving it?" Of course, answers
Euthyphro, not yet aware that he is being refuted again. So,
Euthyphro, what is loved by the Gods is not the same as what is
holy! Why not, Sokrates? Because, Euthyphro, we have just agreed
that the holy is what the Gods love: they have to be loving it for it
to be loved. They have to be making it holy by loving it. Thus, the
holy is not dear to the Gods because it is holy, but it is holy
because the Gods are loving it (10e). It is holy, Euthyphro, as a
consequence of the Gods loving it.
You see Euthyphro, continues Sokrates, you have only told me
about something that happens [from the outside] to the things we
are discussing. You haven't wanted to make clear to me what the
being (ousía) is of holiness itself. You just don't state its being (ho
ti . . . on 11b1). So be kind and don't hide it from me. Tell me
again, from the beginning (or, "in principle," if there's a double
meaning to ex archê), what the being can be of holiness (ti pote on
to hosion), but without going into anything about what the holy
may happen to undergo.
On the surface Sokrates appears dissatisfied with Euthyphro's
"definition" because it's only an account of what is done to the
definiendum by some agents. But, pursuant to Sokrates' habit of
testing (by wanting to apply) the theory of ideas whenever the
chance arises, he is also trying to get Euthyphro to give him an
essential definition of holiness. Sokrates wants to see what the idea
of holiness looks like to an expert. Euthyphro, on the other hand, is
dissatisfied with his own performance as an expert because his
words won't stay put, making it hard for him (he says) to say what
he means. He blames Sokrates for this, comparing him (at Sokrates'
instigation) to Daedalus the inventor, whose constructions were
self-moving and got away from their owners. But, Euthyphro, these
are not my contrivances, Sokrates expostulates: they are your
words (11c7), he says disingenously, unless I'm exceeding my own
ancestor Daedalus and contriving to make other people's machines
self-moving as well. Sokrates may not really be enjoying the jest he
started, and wants to drop it.
It may be worth dwelling on the comparison for its aptness. It is a
real hit by Euthyphro, even if Euthyphro doesn't intend everything
its author is hint-
 Page 381
ing at with the jest. The reader is allowed to see the power of the
dialectic, whose compulsion Sokrates is following. He is also
getting an exhibition of what happens when the demand is made
that the being (ousía, on) of a meaning or quality be considered in
itself in abstraction from the acts or things of which it is a quality.
To the contemporary reader, who was conscious of the theories of
knowledge that some intellectuals and some members of the (future
or present) Academy were developing, the image could also stand
as a parable about how the theory of ideas arises from this demand
for the being of a thing in isolation. The ontological side of the
Daedalus metaphor is just this: that in Classical Greek speech, to
ask for the being of a thing was to ask for its power of existing and
acting by itself, even though not everything is capable of
independent activity. It was not, as the Hellenistic and Latin ages
were to say, to be asking for the "essence" of the act or thing, but
for the constitutive principles of the activity or the active powers of
the thing.
Enough of this, Euthyphro; and, since you seem to be tiring (11e6),
I will myself help you to instruct me about holiness; don't give up
prematurely. Now, don't you think it necessary for everything that
is holy to be just (díkaios), says Sokrates taking the lead explicitly.
"I do." But, Euthyphro, is it also the case [conversely] that
everything that is just is holy; so that some just things are holy and
some are not? "I don't follow what you're saying, Sokrates." Yet
you are as much more expert than I as you are younger. Exert
yourself, Euthyphro: did not the poet say of Zeus the creator that
"wherever fear is there also is restraint" (aidôs)? But is not the poet
wrong? Don't many people fear things, like disease and poverty,
and yet have no respect for them? You're right, Sokrates. But on
the other hand, Euthyphro, it seems that where there's restraint
there's also fear. For fear seems to be more inclusive than restraint,
so the latter is only a part of the former. Do you follow me? Yes,
entirely.
Well, Euthyphro, that's what I mean about holiness: not everything
that is just is holy; for holiness is a part of justice (12d2-3). Do we
agree or disagree? I think you're right, Sokrates. The next thing,
Euthyphro, would be to discover what part of justness holiness
might be (to poîon méros . . . tou dikaíou). This is what you must
try to teach me, so that properly instructed and as your pious pupil,
I can tell Meletus to desist from prosecuting me for impiety (12e2).
"This then is what I think, Sokrates: that part of justness is pious
and holy which relates to the service of the Gods (12e6-10); the
rest of justice has to do with relating to men." Euthyphro seems at
last, under Sokrates' lead, to have come up with a definition of
holiness that (i) identifies this quality as part of a more inclusive
kind of quality and (ii) distinguishes it from other parts of
 Page 382
that larger quality. But Sokrates has not finished his dialectical
lesson in the practice of definition. He will find a vagueness or
ambiguity in one of the key terms of the definition.
By "service or attention" to the Gods, Euthyphro, do you mean the
same kind of service or attention we pay to other things? For
example, the horse breeder and the dog breeder and the herdsman
all serve and attend to their respective charges, do they not?
Certainly. But does service and attention (therapeía) always
accomplish the same thing, Euthyphro? I mean does it not try to do
some good to its subjects. Yes. "Then, Euthyphro, if holiness is
service and attention to the Gods it is a benefit to them and makes
them better" (13c6-7). Would you then agree that when you do
something pious you are making one of the Gods better,
Euthyphro? Certainly not, Sokrates, that is not what I meant. I
didn't think that's what you meant either, Euthyphro, which is why
I had to ask you just what you meant by "service and attention to
the Gods."
It is the kind of service, Sokrates, and attention that servants pay to
their masters (13d6). I see, Euthyphro, it is a kind of "waiting
upon" (hypêretikê). Now, Euthyphro, what does the attending
(hypêretikê) of the physician produce? Health, of course. And what
does the shipbuilder's kind of attention produce? Ships, of course.
Tell me then, Euthyphro, what is it that the art of attending to the
Gods accomplishes? It's clear that you know, since you say that
you know more than any man about matters godly (13e5-8). True,
Sokrates. So tell me then, Euthyphro, what do the Gods accomplish
by using us as servants (hypêretes)? Many fine results, Sokrates.
But so do generals and farmers accomplish many fine results,
Euthyphro. What is the chief result that the Gods accomplish in
distinction from them?
Well, Sokrates, it is a great task to learn these things accurately
(14b). But I can tell you unconditionally (haplôs) that when
someone knows how to speak and practice what is agreeable
(kecharismena) to the Gods in prayer and sacrifice, that is holiness.
And such things are the salvation of private homes as well as of the
commonwealth. But the opposite of what is agreeable
(kecharismena) to the Gods is impious (asebê 1467); it destroys
and overturns everything. I don't think, Euthyphro, that you are
really eager to instruct me. You were so close to answering my
question, but you turned aside and have missed what I need to
know about holiness.
"Still the questioner must follow the one questioned wherever he
leads," says Sokrates (14c3). Has Sokrates got things deliberately
and amusingly turned around for dialectical purposes? Isn't it
usually the one questioned who follows the lead of the questioner?
Are you not saying, Euthyphro, that holiness is some kind of
knowledge (epistêmê) of sacrificing and praying?
 Page 383
Yes. And sacrifice is to give gifts to the Gods, while praying is to
ask from the Gods? Precisely, Sokrates. Then, according to this
account (logos), Euthyphro, holiness is knowledge of giving and
asking. You understand perfectly, Sokrates.
Well, I am eager for your expertise (sophía), Euthyphro. Tell me,
then, what this service (hypêresia) to the Gods is? Do you say it is
an asking from and a giving to them (14d8-10)? Yes. Is the right
way of asking to ask for what we need from them? Yes. And the
right way of giving is to give them what they might need from us?
For it would not be knowledgeable (technikon), Euthyphro, to give
someone what he does not need. Right, Sokrates.
Then holiness would be an art-and-science of trading (emporikê)
betweem Gods and men? Yes, Sokrates, if it pleases you to call it
trading. No, Euthyphro, I don't want to call it that if it is not the
case. But tell me, what benefit (ôpheleia) it is that the Gods gain
from the gifts they get from us? We know, he continues drily, that
all good things come to us from them. But what benefit to the Gods
get from us? Or, Euthyphro, are we such winners in this trading
that we get "every benefit" from them, and they nothing from us?
Missing the humor in the question, Euthyphro answers, you don't
suppose do you that the Gods gain any benefit from what they get
from us (15a6-7)? Well, Euthyphro, what ought these gifts from us
to the Gods be? Nothing else than honor (timê), prizes (gera) and
thanks (charis), Sokrates. Then holiness, Euthyphro, is agreeable
(kecharismenon) to the Gods, but not beneficial (ôphelimon) or
dear (philon) to them? It seems, Sokrates, that of all things it is
especially dear (philon) to the Gods.
Well now, Euthyphro, we have come around full circle to saying
again that the holy is what is dear to the Gods (15b). So don't be
surprised any more at your own words not staying put and
wandering off. And don't blame it on me, when you yourself are
more skillfull than Daedalus. You remember discovering, don't
you, that holiness and what is dear to the Gods are not the same but
different? And here you are again, saying that what is dear to the
Gods is holy. Is this so or not, Euthyphro (15c6)?
Either we were wrong in our agreement a while ago, or we are
wrong now Euthyphro. So it seems, Sokrates. Then we shall have
to start our examination all over again from the beginning. What is
holiness (ti esti to hosion)? I still want to know, and you must
know, Euthyphro, otherwise you wouldn't be doing what you are
doing now under the heading of holiness. You wouldn't be risking
the anger of the Gods or the contempt of men if you didn't know
your action is right. I am sure you think you know the difference
between the holy and the unholy. So please speak, my excellent
friend, and don't conceal your knowledge from me.
 Page 384
It'll have to be some other time (eis authis), Sokrates, as now I am
rather in a hurry; it has become time for me to leave.
Sokrates is disappointed. But the reader of the dialogue as a whole
can now reflect that whereas Sokrates has "refuted" Euthyphro in
the sense that he has shown what is wrong with each of his
attempts at definition, Euthyphro has not on his side noticed that
Sokrates was not putting his questions quite fairly. He did not see
that he was being asked for a statement of the independent being
(ousía) of something that, as a quality, has no independent being
except in thought. Euthyphro is shown to be not capable of this
kind of logical perception.
Proof, for Euthyphro, was to be found in analogy and precedent. 4
He does not know the difference between a statement and its
converse. Nor does he appreciate the difference between a
classifying property and an affection of an act or thing. So, how
could he be expected to see what Plato's intellectual reader might
be expected to see? The fact that so many of Plato's readers have
failed to see that Sokrates' apparent enthusiasm for abstract things
and for precision in discourse, is itself an illustration in practice of
the fallacy of question-framing that leads to the theory of
essentialist definitionthis fact is, in turn, due to the belief of such
readers that Plato is the author of the theory of ideas which creates
the demand for essential definitions.
A dialogical reading of the Euthyphro shows, rather, that Plato
knew all about the theory, and is in this dialogue showing that there
is an easily missed relation between the fallacy of attributing
isolated being to qualities or meanings that don't have it, and the
theory of definition called for by the Academic theory of ideas.5 It
is no wonder, then, that though he was the leader in a search for
some specific knowledge, this search has ended in failure. But what
the dialogue as-a-whole has enacted or exhibited about Athenian
society in relation to trials for impiety, is that people too easily
proceed to take serious actions without much examination of the
opinions upon which such actions are based.
Many commentators have remarked that the Euthydemus is a
dramatized object-lesson in the fallacies considered by the
Aristotelian treatise On Sophistical Refutations. We have now also
seen in what respects the Euthyphro complements the Euthydemus
in being a dramatized object-lesson in the practice of definition.
The latter dialogue very obviously shows who it was among the
superficial "men of knowledge" that were "corrupting the young
people of Athens." The Euthyphro shows that, as far as the
education of the young was concerned, it was also all too easy for
them to be confused by conflicting stories, myths or beliefs about
the Godssince even an expert like Euthyphro could lose his way
among them. But, of the dialogues we have considered, it is
 Page 385
the clever behavior of the Elean visitor in the Sophist and Politicus
which would have given Plato's Athenian or intellectual
contemporaries most cause for worry. This is because that
rhetorical Sophist operates with a (covered-up) technique that is not
perceived by those whom it manipulates, nor by most of those who
are given a chance to observe it in action.
Notes
1. 275e: "whichever way the young man answers he will be
refuted;" and, 276e: "all our questions are like that, they leave no
escape."
2. For an understanding of how communicative interaction worked
in a culture that was still partly oral-aural, see Kevin Robb
"Orality, Literacy, and the Dialogue-Form," in Plato's Dialogues:
the Dialogical Approach ed. R. Hart (Mellen Press, in press).
3. This same point is also made explicit in my The Return of the
King The Intellectual Warfare over Democratic Athens (Rowman,
Littlefield in press); MS page 51-52.
4. Cf. again Kevin Robb "Orality, Literacy, and the Dialogue-
Form," op. cit.
5. We may ask, further, does not the Euthyphro as-a-whole imply
(or implicitly enact) the judgment that the theory of ideas is of no
help to the expert in any specialty, and that it also hasn't helped in
clearing up for the Athenians the politico-judicial difficulties
created by Anytus' and Meletus's charge of impiety against
Sokrates?
 Page 387

Chapter 19
The Intellectual Pleasures and the Moral Excellences:
The Philebos and the Laches
"I am amazed and delighted by Plato's skill in the dialogues, especially in
those which preserve the Socratic character, like the the Philebos.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On the Ancient Orators

The Philebos as a Socratic Dialogue

The Gorgias can be seen to have woven three great themes together
into a brilliant dialogical unity. These themes are (i) Sophistic and
virtuoso rhetoric, (ii) the relation of pleasure to, and the pursuit of,
the good and (iii) the combination of intellectual honesty with
intellectual mastery. None of these is a simple theme; and we
notice that the three are, separately, just the complex subject-
matters of the Phaedrus, the Philebos, and the Apology and Phaedo
respectively. It is also the case that the Apology is itself an
exemplification of true, as opposed to Sophistic, rhetoric and an
account of one man's self-controlled, not unhappy, pursuit of the
good and knowledge of the good. The Phaedrus contains a set of
examples of virtuoso speechmaking as well as a critique of that
skill. In it and in the Philebos, Sokrates conducts a kind of
catechistic discussion with younger or unformed characters.
By "catechistic" I mean that neither Phaedrus, the untrained
youngster, nor Protarchos, the agreeable pleasure-seeker who
dislikes displeasing, are pre-
 Page 388
sented as capable of engaging Sokrates in a truly disputatious
exchange. Unlike the conversations with Thrasymachos,
Parmenides or Protagoras in other dialogues, the one with
Protarchos is neither eristic nor antilogistically dialectical. It is,
rather, a case of "persuasion by instruction" than of "persuasion to
belief," to use the terms employed in the Gorgias (454b-458e).
In the Apology, however, Sokrates delivers a more or less
continuous address to a jury of Athenian citizens in their capacity
as his judges, within the existential situation of a politicized trial
for his life. And while one of the set speeches in the Phaedrus is
explicitly designed by Sokrates to meet the standards of human and
intellectual validity required to make it an example of technê
(informed science or intelligent art), it is really of the Apology
among Plato's works that we must ask: does it adequately or fully
exemplify Sokrates' practically achieved idea of a human science of
rhetoric? The set speeches in the Symposium cannot fairly be
judged by this standard, because they include those of other
speakers and are constructed within a context of intellectual fun-
and-games; but they will be considered in a later chapter. The
speeches in the Symposium are not purely about love and pleasure;
some of them them take cognizance of the nature of man and the
most worthwhile life; and, like the Gorgias and Philebos, the
Symposium even touches on the nature of Tragedy and Comedy.
With What Is the Philebos Designed to Be Concerned?
The question at issue in the Philebos is whether the life of the mind
is better than the life of pleasure, or whether there is not some third
way of life that is best, which is neither the life of pure pleasure nor
a purely intellectual life. But the reader who come to the Philebos
from the intellectual satisfactions of the Gorgias will want to know
why this issue is raised again for discussion in the Philebos? Was
not the view that pleasure is the good refuted by Sokrates within
the drama of the Gorgias? Is the issue about pleasure renewed in
the Philebos in order to permit Plato's Sokrates to introduce and
defend the conception of intellectual pleasure? Or is it in order to
introduce, in a pleasant way, the difficult discussion of the one and
the many, the finite and infinite?
After all, any hard discussion of a tangled subject assumes that the
intellectual effort makes acceptable the displeasure the discussion
must undergo to solve its problem or achieve its intellectual aim!
Intellectual effort always begs the question logically in this way, of
whether something can be both a displeasure and a good. Or, does
the Philebos renew the issue of pleasure versus the good, thirdly, in
order to oppose to the Gorgianic conception of rhetoric a Socratic
conception of dialectical method in the service of instruction? For
 Page 389
although Gorgias's conception of rhetoric was refuted by Sokrates
in the Gorgias, that conception is asserted again by Protarchus in
the Philebos at 58a.
As a matter of fact, Plato's Sokrates in the Philebos opposes what
we will call the classifying kind of dialectical method not to
rhetoric, but to disputation, as we see from Stephanus pages 16c-
17a. There, Sokrates supports and explains the dialectical method
as nondisputatious in terms of how it uses the one-many, finite-
infinite distinctions. This is surprising, insofar as the original
function of dialectic, with Zeno and Protagoras, was to refute or
relativize an opponent's assertions, and insofar as, with Sokrates,
this method is often used disputatiously even if ethically. Of
course, not all of Sokrates' conclusions in the Gorgias are reached
fairly (or without irony)for example, his extravagant non-factual
claims about Athenian Tragic poetry in contrast to his fairly earned
conclusion about the uselessness of Sophistic rhetoric to a just man.
So, if there is to be a non-disputatious dialectic, it must be a
dialectic or question-and-answer process in which the conclusions
are not predetermined or reached by inapt or unjust distinctions.
Non-disputatious dialectic, in other words, is a process of honest
query or exploration by means of questions and anwers that make
just distinctions.
We are also surprised to find that Protarchos has such a loose
understanding of the method of question and answer that he
requests Sokrates to answer for him when the question is too
difficult. Certainly, when Sokrates answers for Protarchos, it is not
disputatious. But I call it a misconception by Protarchos, because it
is then not dialectic eithersince, strictly speaking, it was the duty of
the dialectician to ask his questions in such a way that the
respondent could give short answers, yes or no. But we should not
be surprised when Sokrates tells Protarchos that even though there
is no better method than the dialectical, the method has yet often
left him stranded and helpless (aporon 16b)! Unfortunately, honest
conversational inquiry and good distinction-making cannot solve
all problems.
Since Sokrates does not trouble to clear up Protarchos's
misunderstanding about what is formally required of dialectical
interlocutors, we can grant that it is not to introduce some new
conception of the dialectic that the Philebos broaches again the
dispute about pleasure. Is it, then, in order to let his Sokrates
discourse in a non-contentious way about unity and plurality, finite
and infinite that Plato dramatizes the problem of pleasure in the
way he does here? If it is, why has he chosen such immature and
stubbornly lazy respondents for Sokrates' as Protarchos and
Philebos, respectively, in connection with such portentous subjects
as limit and unity, infinity and plurality? Protarchos is no help at all
with them, and Philebos couldn't care less about such complicated,
displeasurable matters.
 Page 390
As a matter of fact, Philebos's near silence throughout the dialogue
named after him is a consistent active judgment the message of
which is ''there is for me no pleasure in argument and it is,
therefore, to be avoided." But Protarchos can participate in the
argumentation just because he is not a consistent defender or
representative of the unmixed life of pleasure. Protarchus does
assert later (58a) that the principle at work in Gorgianic rhetoric is
the aim of causing pleasure. In the dramatic context of the
dialogue, however, this only serves to exhibit the implicit
contradiction in believing both that good and pleasure are
altogether the same, as Kallicles (in his context) had at first
maintained, and that Sophistic rhetoric requires for its success the
work of a practiced effort to please the audiencea point that there is
no opportunity to make or dramatize in the sharply contentious
atmosphere of the Gorgias.
Not only is the context different from the Gorgias in that the
Philebos is not disputatious, and that the interlocutor in it does not
keep reverting to positions that have been once refuted; the design
and construction of the Philebos reflect a process by which the
untalented Protarchus is corrected and instructed rather than
refuted. More importantly, its design must respond to the difficulty
that it is the non-contentious, lazy but principled, silence of
Philebos that has to be refuted, if the onlookers (or observant
reader) are to be convinced by Sokrates. Anticipating a little in
order to convince my own reader, it can be pointed out that if it is
not the case that the mere absence of pain is pleasurea doctrine that
Sokrates disproves (42c-43d) and rejects (at 51c)then Philebos's
mere, but strategic, avoidance of painful argument cannot be
pleasurable either. And Philebos is refuted, whether or not he
believes or asserts the doctrine!
The Cause of Pleasure, and Reason the Combiner
Early in the dialogue Sokrates proves that as between the ways of
life in dispute, it is the third or mixed life of pleasure and
intelligence that is "the victor"; and the proof is accepted by
Protarchos and Philebos. Philebos, however, still believes that
pleasure is the good and that because it belongs to the class of
infinite things (apeiron), it can be absolutely good (pan agathon
27e-28a). Sokrates quickly points out that pain also belongs to the
class of infinite things and can be absolutely evil (pan kakon), but
that would not make it good to Philebos. So, it is not the element of
infinity, its unlimitedness, that makes pleasure good. It must be
some other element that makes it so.
When Sokrates, next, leadingly requests that they must be careful
to accurately locate intelligence (phronêsis), knowledge (epistêmê),
and mind (nous)
 Page 391
within the previously accepted division of everything that exists
into finite, not finite, mixture thereof, and cause of said
mixturePhilebos spots Sokrates' intellectual bias. So Sokrates good-
humoredly explains to Protarchos that, naturally, men of
knowledge (sophoí) are given to exalting mind since this exalts
themselves, and whether they are right to do so will have to be
investigated (28c). This parallels the self-exaltation of the political
rhetoricians in the Gorgias, with the difference that Sokrates gives
the appearance here of detaching himself from the sophoí; whereas
Kallicles self-importantly identified himself with politics.
Sokrates is not deterred from showing to Protarchos step by easy
step, and with a convincing analogy between the body and the
cosmos, that the universe must also have a soul. And if it has a
soul, it has intelligence. But intelligence is the cause of the order of
beauty in the universe. It follows that intelligence and mind belong
with the class of things that are causes, in the fourfold division of
all things which Sokrates has heuristically established.
With this, Protarchos sees that he has been eased without noticing
it into admitting what he was at first against, namely: that the life
of intelligence rather than the life of pleasure should win "the
second prize." For pleasure has been classed with the indefinite, a
thing repellent to most Greeks; and intelligence has been classed
with activity, a thing admired by most ancient Greeks. Sokrates
briefly and smilingly apologizes for the trick (paidia) he has played
on Protarchos. But this makes the reader wonder.
Protarchos is not talking as if he has been fooled, but rather as if he
had learned something and been instructed. The reader sees that
what Sokrates is admitting with his unnecessary apology is that he's
gotten some pleasure (sic) from his quite ad hoc construction of a
sweeping classification of all existing things that permits him to
demonstrate the superiority of intelligence. His satirical allusion,
back at 15d, to "the great and vastly complicated battle" over how
to classify is now justified: the happy solution he has invented
gives him the right to mock a little the pretentious disputations of
the nature philosophers of Plato's time.
We can now also explain to ourselves why Sokrates is not troubled,
as Protarchos explicitly is at 28e, by any thought that he is
committing an impiety against the universe. The classification he
has made up is not a classification in nature philosophy, but an
intelligent exercise in distinction-making that will (i) peacefully
and pleasantly prove his ethical point and that will (ii) reflect
critically and satirically upon the contentiousness of the muddled
polemicists of his day.
So it is not dialectic or cosmology that emerges as the main subject
of Sokrates' concern in this dialogue. Rather it is intelligence the
distinction-
 Page 392
maker and combiner, the very intelligence that Sokrates is proving
to be a cause of pleasure and with which Plato, the author, is
dramatizing for the reader the pleasures of comedy, of instruction,
and of dialectical classification. More exactly yet, it is the rôle of
intelligence in the construction of the good life that Sokrates
wishes to defend before his pleasure-loving audience. We get the
feeling, as we see him doing so, that his underlying concern all
along was to introduce and get acceptance for the conception of
intellectual pleasure. This conception was not dealt with in the
discussion of pleasure in the Gorgias.
Now, we know from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 1172b9 that
the view that Sokrates' hedonist audience prefers was the view of
Eudoxus the geometer. To a fourth century observer it must have
seemed ironic that the proponent of the view that pleasure is the
only good was a professor of geometry: as if the geometry to which
he was devoted was not a good, or as if there was no pleasure in the
pursuit of geometry. Opposed to Eudoxus' hedonist view was the
intellectualist notion of Speusippus the Academician that only
knowledge is good, a view not surprising to find in someone
influenced by Pythagorean-ism (N.Ethics 109667-8). 1 This makes
it appear that Sokrates, in this dialogue, is mediating between the
two positions, and as giving reasons for a viewmuch like Aristotle's
in Book X of the Ethicsin which the intellectual pleasures are
defended as the greatest for man, and the purest.
Is it the ironic spectacle of the self-contradicting mathematician
hedonist, or is it the agreement of his Sokrates' agreement (up to a
point) with his, Plato's, student Aristotle that is causing Plato the
author to present his Sokrates as so amused throughout the
dialogue, and ever so gently sarcastic? Perhaps this double
awareness is a good explanation of why Sokrates tags himself at
59d-e as proceeding like a craftsman in his construction of the
mixture of pleasure and knowledge that will make life good and
that will convince his audience to abandon the lazy and inferior life
of uninformed pleasure? For this is just the respect in which
Sokrates has been practical and ingenious, as we see from the
apposite division of all there is which he invented for the purpose,
and from his avoidance of all theoretical isssues that are not
relevant to the instruction of Protarchos or the refutation of
Phileboswho, in his silence, emerges as a more consistent hedonist
than the laughable professor of geometry.
Is not this complex awareness, finally, the reason for the digression
(47b-50e) on the malicious nature of comedy that would,
otherwise, have been bad pedagogy as well as out of place? Keep
in mind that Protarchos is presented as a slow student, who should
not, therefore, be given the difficult cases first. The reason for the
digression is that with it Plato gives his reader a chance both to get
detached enough to see what the fictional Sokrates is doing and to
 Page 393
classify the Philebos theoretically as itself an example of the
pleasurable genre, comedy, whose complex nature the digression
explains.
There remain at least two unsettled points that are worth taking up,
because the persistent misunderstanding of them shows how little
the spirit and tone of this conversation have been appreciated. For,
the Philebos is not the purely expository lecture that so many
readers take it as; nor is is as solemn as the commentators have so
grandly been in their misperception of it.
On Stephanus page 36d Sokrates, who wants Protarchos not to
wander from the point, addresses him colloquially as "ô paî 'keínou
t' andrós." It means quite simply, "my' boy' as he calls you," since
Philebos is the only other speaker in the conversation and since he
has earlier referred to his companions as ''boys." 2 R.H. Hackforth
unconvincingly translated the expression as "Philebos the
younger," and this causes him to mistranslate the rest of the
sentence as "should ask himself that question." There is no referent
for "Philebos the younger" in this dialogue, and there is no
occasion for either Protarchos or Philebos to be asking questions of
themselves either. H.N. Fowler translates awkwardly, "son of that
man;" so also does A. Diès with his, "o fils d'un tel homme,"
instead of "'boy' to this man," and he suggests that it may mean
"son of Philebos" in so far as Protarchos is a pupil of Philebos.
R.G. Bury thought the expression meant "son of Gorgias." E. Poste
correctly rejects Fowler's other suggestion that it might involve a
reference to Protarchos's father, but makes the anti-dialogical
suggestion that Plato is defending himself here from contemporary
accusations of boring lengthiness in discussion. One fears for these
readers that there can't be much joy in their (non-interactional)
perusal of the dialogue. But it is just such uncomprehending ways
of reading the West's sunniest and liveliest philosopher that have
turned himin translation, commentary, and paraphraseinto a dull
and cryptic systematizer or mystifier.
Turning to Sokrates' passing description of the life of pure thought
as perhaps the most godlike (theiótatos 33b), it is not so much the
limits of his agreement with the doctrine that was to become
Aristotle's that we should ponder, as the easy way in which
Sokrates can make pointed use of any doctrine when it suits him to.
First of all and most basically, page 33b is a characteristically
comic satire of the ever-feasting, ever-laughing Olympians of the
Homeric epic. It is slyly done: the pleasure-loving gods of the
Greeks are suddenly and plausibly turned into the purest
(Academic) intellectuals. And by purest I mean anaesthetized: it
would be unseemly (aschêmôn), Sokrates says, for the Gods to feel
either pain or pleasure! As it happens, this coincides with the
doctrine of Speusippos (sic), to whom it was the advantage of the
life of pure thought that it avoided both pains and pleasures.
 Page 394
Aristotle's view, on the other hand and as we know, was that the
greatest and most distinctively human kind of pleasure is that
which accompanies intellectual activity. Is Sokrates, perhaps, also
chiding this view for wanting, a little pretensiously and naively, to
make intellectual activity divine? In any case, we see that with his
happy dramatic anachronisms, Plato is ever the detached and lively
satirist of the intellectual life of his time and circle. To recapitulate,
we can say that a dialogical approach that is sensitive to the
interactional tone of the Philebos shows its main concern to be
neither the dialectic, nor cosmology. By a dialogical approach is
meant one that considers the communicative encounter as a whole,
that is careful not to violate the texture or integrity of its literary
form, and that looks for the tensions internal to the dialogue that
generate its interactions without neglect of the socio-intellectual
context that the action presupposes or might be alluding to.
That Protarchos has been won over, dramatically speaking, to the
idea of intellectual pleasure is indicated by the fact that it his
request to Sokrates to be told more about it which closes the
dialogue. Given Protarchos's slowness, Sokrates is only a small
winner; the honors, here, are pedagogical not eristic. That the
indolent hedonism of the silent Philebos has been adequately
refuted, is left by Plato for the reader to decide.
The Laches
Where the Ion as a whole airily satirizes the anti-intellectualism
and extravagance of the rhapsodes and hyponoiasts, the Charmides
enacted a serious critique of the over-intellectualism of Kritias's
definition of sôphrosynê and brought out the paradoxes that flowed
from Kritias's conception of knowledge of knowledge. In contrast
to his rô1e in these two dialogues and in the Hippias series, Plato's
Sokrates in the Philebos is not a game-player against poetasters and
Sophists, and he doesn't charm his interlocutors into puzzled
acquiescence. The game-player in the Philebos is Philebos himself,
the nearly silent hedonist. And Sokrates appears in that dialogue as
the patient expounder to Protarchos, by means of question and
answer, of conceptions of pleasure and the good that override the
possible incompatibility between knowledge as the good and
pleasure as the good which Philebos seems to fear.
Sokrates had resisted the over-intellectualism of Kritias's definition
of sôphrosynê in the Charmides; but in the Laches we find him
moderating between definitions of courage, another practical moral
excellence, in such a way as to bring out the unity of all the
specifically human excellences (aretai). This unity will follow
from Sokrates' own intellectualist conception of courage in
 Page 395
relation to knowledge. Thus, the six dialogues mentioned
conveniently supply the reader with some parameters by means of
which he can form an estimate of the nature and limits of Sokrates'
intellectualism in the world of the dialogues.
Two experienced generals, Laches and Nikias, the latter a politician
of high standing in Athens, are consulted by two anxious fathers,
Lysimachos and Melesias, about how to get their sons educated to
be the best (aristoi genointo 179d) and to achieve the bestlike their
grandfathers Aristeides the just, and Thucydides, the general who
was a rival of Pericles. The two undistinguished parents want
advice from their distinguished friends, who are also fathers, on all
the things a young man should learn and prepare himself for.
On this particular day they have brought Laches and Nikias to see
the performance of an expert teacher of fighting in heavy armor.
Nikias, characteristically, is only too ready to give advice, like
Nestor of old. Laches is very earnest about the point made by
Lysimachos here, and by Sokrates in the Protagoras and Meno,
that public men like Aristeides and Thucydides tend to neglect their
families. But he finds it astonishing that as long as the two fathers
are consulting himself and his colleague, they are not also
consulting Sokrates their demesman, who is present, and known to
be a persistent inquirer into the very subject they're worried about
(180c).
Nikias agrees with Laches about Sokrates; and Lysimachos who
has described himself as quite out of touch, finally remembers who
Sokrates son of Sophroniscus ismainly because the two boys have
often praised the latter in his hearing. I am glad to hear, Sokrates,
says Lysimachos, that you do so much honor to your father. Indeed
Lysimachos, says Laches (181a8), he upholds not just his father's
but his country's name. We were together in the retreat from
Delium (424 B.C.): I tell you, if the rest of the army had been like
Sokrates, there would have been nothing for Athens to be ashamed
of, and no defeat.
Sokrates, says Lysimachos, that is great praise from worthy men;
and I rejoice to have rediscovered you and be able to renew the
family friendship and share our thoughts and children. But what do
you say on this topic of fighting in armor for the young? On this,
Lysimachos, I'll do my best to advise as well as do the other things
you say. But it seems more appropriate, myself being younger and
less experienced, that we should first listen to your more
experienced friends. Then, Lysimachos, if I have anything to say in
qualification or addition, I might try to explain it to you. So,
Nikias, says Sokrates, turning to him with what is also a typical
Socratic turn, why doesn't one of you please tell us?
Nikias unhesitatingly responds with a page-long speech (181e1-
182d7) in favor of learning the skill, on the grounds mainly (i) that
it leads on to the
 Page 396
greater art of generalship, and (ii) that this art (epistêmê) will make
anyone more courageous (andreiôteron).
Laches' response, while twice as long (182d8-184c4) is more
considered. In effect, it is a recommendation against learning the
art of fighting in heavy armor. If there were an advantage to
practicing it, the Spartans would long ago have taken it up; but the
teachers of the skill are not welcomed and seem afraid to go there.
Not one of these experts in arms has ever distinguished himself in
battle. On the contrary, Laches once saw Stesilaus (the "master"
whose performance they have seen) make a spectacle of himself as
a heavy-armed marine with a special spear. Although there may be
something to the skill, as Nikias suggested, when it comes to cases,
it seems to be of little use and can only claim to be worth it.
The reader will recollect, here, that as a matter of historical fact and
about the time of writing of this dialogue, the successes and
advantages of light infantry over against the hoplites may already
have been making the skills of the peltasts newly respectable. Thus
if we suppose the dramatic date of the dialogue to be no later than
the battle of Mantinea (418 B.C.) in which Laches fell, Laches is
more up-to-date in his thoughtful skepticism than the old-fashioned
Nikias, who was to perish as leader of the expedition against
Syracuse in 415 B.C. A fourth century reader would most likely
have been on Laches' side in this discussion and would have seen
that Stesilaus's search for expertise in heavy armor was either
regressive or a response to difficulties felt by the heavy infantry
when facing the new tactics of the light-armed peltasts.
Laches ends by saying that only great courage could redeem the
professor of a skill that made such claims. And he reminds
Lysimachos to ask Sokrates what he thinks (184c8). Well,
Sokrates, says Lysimachos, since our two conselors disagree, we
need to hear your view, and for whom you will vote. You think,
Lysimachos, says Sokrates a trifle testily, that such things should
be decided by vote; and you too, Melesias? If your son needed
advice in preparing for a contest, would you follow that of the
majority of us or that of a good well-instructed trainer? That of the
latter, Sokrates. And his alone, Melesias? Most likely, Sokrates. I
should think so, says Sokrates; for, if a question is to be answered
properly it must be judged (krinesthai) by knowledge (epistêmê)
not by majorities. 3 Melesias has to agree.
So should we not proceed, continues Sokrates (185b ff.), by
looking for the most knowing (mathôn) and best prepared teacher
of the skill which is to benefit us; for, hoplomachy is only a means
to the end which we seek. Is not what we seek, Nikias, a
something-to-be-learnt (mathêmatos) by the young men for the
sake of their life-activities or soul (psychês)? Yes.
The real question, says Sokrates, is which one of us is expert
(technikós) and
 Page 397
well instructed in the tendance of the psyche? But Sokrates, Laches
butts in, some people become more expert (tehnikôtéros) in some
things without instructors. Yes, Laches, but you wouldn't trust
them, would you, without inspecting some of their well-executed
works? True. But if none of us is such an expert, we must start a
search for such a one, says Sokrates ironically; for we don't want to
risk ruining the sons of our friends (186b8). Now I myself,
Lysimachos and Melesias, have had no teacher in this subject,
although I have longed for one since my youth. I could never afford
the fees for professional men-of-knowledge (sophistais).
But Nikias and Laches are both richer and older, so they may have
been taught the art (technê) of being great and good men (kalos
k'agathos) or discovered it already. Indeed it seems to me, they
must be able to educate a man, or they wouldn't have spoken so
freely on what's good or bad for the young unless they believed
they had the knowledge to do so (hikanôs eidénai). What makes me
wonder, however, is that this being sothey disagree with each
other! In consequence, Lysimachos, you must get permission from
them for me to ask questions, in case their civic responsibilities are
too great for them to be educators themselves, or in case the
experiment is too new for them to try upon the sons of their friends
(187b).
Lysimachos, invoking also Melesias, gets an agreement to a
proposal that the three of them, Nikias, Laches, and Sokrates,
undertake a joint inquiry into the questions that have arisen (187c-
189d). Nikias is willing, but is quick to warn that joining with
Sokrates in such an investigation is a very serious, personal, and
exhausting business (187e-188c). Laches has no objection, so long
as the discussant exhibits consistency between his words and his
actions; and he thinks that Sokrates is just that kind of speaker. In
fact, Laches has himself seen the proof of Sokrates' courage already
(188c-189c). So it is provided that Sokrates will speak with and
question them on behalf of Lysimachos and Melesias.
Well, Nikias and Laches, instead of examining who our teachers
were and whom we may have changed for the better, I would
propose an alternative and equivalent inquiry. Have we not been
asked by our friends as to the manner in which human excellence
(aretê) can be united with the souls of their sons? Yes. Then,
gentlemen, isn't it necessary to begin by knowing what human
excellence is; for if we have no idea of what this excellence in fact
is, how are we going to advise anyone about how to acquire it
(190c)? We have to know what it is, says Laches. And knowing it,
says Sokrates, we must say what it is. But, my excellent friend, let
us not try to state all at once what the whole of human excellence
(aretê) is. Let us first see whether we know enough about some
part of it [to state what that part of it is]. Let's do that, Sokrates.
 Page 398
Then let's choose that part of excellence that learning hoplomachy
is supposed to encourage, namely, courage. Let us first try to state
what courage (andreía) is; after that we can investigate to what
extent and in what way the young may be able to acquire it. The
first is easy enough Sokrates, says Laches: he has courage who can
keep ranks and stand his ground in facing the enemy. You speak
well, Laches; but, through my fault, you missed what I had in mind
with my question. What do you mean, Sokrates? Are there not
other ways of being brave, Laches, when tactics require mobility,
or in facing the hazards of the sea? Can we not be courageous in
sickness, in poverty, or in politics; or courageous in resisting or
fleeing from the desires and pleasures? Yes, Sokrates. So, Laches,
can you tell me now what is the courage which is the same in all
these cases (peirô eipeîn andreían . . . ti on en pâsi toútois tautón
estin, 191 e9).
I don't quite get your meaning, Sokrates, says Laches, not
perceiving that what Sokrates wants is (i) what we would call an
essentialist definition of courage and (ii) what we would call a
dispositional rather than behavioral statement about it. When
Laches has understood what Sokrates wants, he comes up with a
definition of courage as a sort of psychological endurance: that is
what belongs to all the instances mentioned, he says. Yes, Laches,
but only wise perserverance (metà phronêseôs kartería) is good,
not foolish (met'aphrosynês) persistence (192c8-dl). True. So,
Laches, you would say that courage is intelligent (phrónimos)
endurance (192d)? So it would seem, Sokrates.
But what, Laches, does an enduring man have to be intelligent
(phrónimos) about, in order to be courageous? We agreed that
foolish boldness (aphrôn tolma) was disgraceful and harmful. Yes.
But courage is something noble (kalón)? We agree, Sokrates. So
foolish daring cannot be courage? No. Yet something is out of tune
in our reasoning, Laches, when a brave man who fights knowingly
against greater numbers cannot be called brave or intelligent. Let
us, at least, perservere in our search, else courage herself will laugh
at us; for tenacity (kartería) may indeed turn out to be a part of
courage (189a4). Sokrates, I am quite fired up with ambition
(philonikía) to state what courage is, for I think I know; but I am
most annoyed that it escapes me for the moment! Do you mind,
Laches, if I invite Nikias here to join in the hunt? Help us in our
perplexity, Nikias, by giving us your thinking about courage in
words (194c).
Well, perhaps, Sokrates you are neglecting the advice you once
gave. You said that each of us is good at what he is knowlegeable
(sophós) about, but bad in what he is ignorant (amathês) of. True
enough. It follows, Sokrates, that if the brave person is good, that
person has knowledge (sophós estin). Laches doesn't quite
understand, so Sokrates explains that Nikias means that the
courageous man is a man with knowledge.
What kind of knowledge (sophían), Nikias, ask Laches and
Sokrates both
 Page 399
(194e)? Courage, answers Nikias, is the knowledge (epistêmên) of
what is to be feared and hoped for, both in war and in all other
cases (195a). How oddly (átopa) Nikias talks, Sokrates; surely
knowledge (sophía) is different from courage. That is just what
Nikias denies, Laches. Sheer babbling Sokrates, says Laches. Then
we must instruct him, Laches, not abuse him.
Nikias interrupts: No, Sokrates, Laches wants me to be refuted just
as I was a moment ago! Quite, says Laches, I will try to show that
you are talking nonsense (oudèn . . . légeis), Nikias. Is it not the
professional or expert, says Laches, who knows what is to be
feared in a given case? It is the physician who knows whether a
symptom is dangerous or not; but this does not make him brave,
Nikias. But Nikias has not implied (the reader notes) that the
physician or expert who knows what is to be feared and hoped for
in his own field, is therefore courageous. A physician, says Nikias,
only knows what is healthy or diseased in his patient, not whether it
is better to live diseased than to die; for this is not his province. Do
you think, Laches, that the same thing are to be feared by those
who are better off dead as by those who do better to live? No, I do
not, Nikias. Well, Laches, do you still grant the knowledge of this
sort of thing to anybodyphysician or expertor only to the man
whose business it is to know (epistêmoni) what to fear, namely, the
brave man?
Do you understand his meaning Laches, interposes Sokrates. It
must be the soothsayers (mánteis), Sokrates, whom he's calling
courageous; for who else would know which of us is better off
alive than dead. Laches, says Nikias, the soothsayer knows only the
signs (ta sêmeia) whether someone will suffer sickness, death,
defeat or victory, loss or gain. Why, Laches, should he know any
more than others what is better among these things for a person to
suffer or not to suffer (196a)?
This now I don't understand, Sokrates; for Nikias is not able to
recognize anybody as courageousunless he means some God. We
are not in a law court; why can't Nikias admit he has contradicted
himself or that what he means amounts to nothing? Sokrates again
interposes, let's ask Nikias to clarify; if he is really saying
something, we might agree; if not, we can teach him something.
You do it, says Laches. Yes, Laches, says Sokrates, but for both of
us.
So, Nikias, you say that courage is known to the brave person
alone? I do. But does not your position require either that we deny
courage to the fighting animals or that we grant that they know
what it takes a brave man to perceive? According to your account,
Nikias, the wild beasts must be said to be naturally courageous.
This causes Laches (at 197a) to gloat a little, thinking Nikias has
been refuted.
But Nikias will not admit anything to be courageous that appears to
be so from thoughtlessness (hypò anoías). He associates courage
with forethought
 Page 400
(promêthías) and lack of it with overconfidence (thrasútêtos),
daring (tolmês), and fearlessness (aphobos). Most people are one of
the latter; whereas by brave acts (andreía), he Nikias means
intelligent acts (ta phrónima). Don't be startled, Laches, I'm not
talking about you or Lamachos or many Athenians: I grant you to
be intelligent (sophên) since you are all brave.
I shan't say a word to that, Nikias, even though I come from
sarcastic Aexone. 4 Better not Laches, says Sokrates; Nikias is
making some knowing distinctions derived probably from Damon
(see 180d) and Prodicus, the finest of the Sophists in this respect.
Better such finery, Sokrates, in a Sophist than in a stateman, says
Laches, unable after all to contain his sarcasm. But it is proper,
Laches, for a statesman to share in the greatest amount of
knowledge (phronêseôs); to me Nikias seems worth questioning
some more. Then you do it, Sokrates, Laches repeats. Yes Laches,
but you are not released from being part of the discussion. So be it,
Sokrates, if you require it (197e9).
Tell us again, Nikias, from the beginning: did we not, as we started
our account, consider courage to be a part (méros) of human
excellence (aretê)? Quite so. And we all also judged that it is a part
amons other parts, which, taken all together, are called excellence
(aretê)? Yes, of course. Now, Nikias, do you mean the same as I do
by these parts, namely, such qualities as intelligent responsiveness
(sôphrosynê), justness (dikaiosynê), and others (198a)? Certainly,
Sokrates.
Going on, Nikias, to what is to be feared or hoped for, I hold it is
fearful things that cause fear and that things hoped for do not; and
that fear is the expectation of impending evil (198b).5 I too would
say the same, Sokrates. Now, Nikias, it is the knowledge (epistêmê)
of these things that you term courage? Very much so. There is a
third point, Nikias, about which we must test our agreement. Your
friend and I judge that knowledge (epistêmê), in any field, covers
equally and can deal with its subject-matter insofar as it has
present, past, and future aspects. Healing or farming, for instance,
don't change when they deal with what is foreseen or to come.
"And in matters of war Nikias (198e-199a) you too will testify that
it is generalship (stratêgía) which best thinks ahead (promethêitai)
about the consequences, and that rules over the soothsayer's art
rather than serves it, because generalship knows better about what
can happen in warfare. Thus, the law requires the general to give
commands to the seer, not the seer to the general. May we say this,
Laches? We may.
The Athenian reader could not have missed the allusion here to the
historical fact that it was Nikias's hesitation, on the grounds of
unfavorable auspices, that contributed to the disaster at Syracuse. It
is just possible to take Sokrates' words here as a defense of Nikias's
assertiveness over the seers, at 195e. Yet it is more likely that the
allusion is a criticism, given that it is Laches and not
 Page 401
Nikias who gives explicit assent to the proposition and that Laches,
at 195e, had claimed that Nikias's view implied that only seers have
the knowledge required for courage. Nikias refutes the implication
with logic; but if his critics were right, he did not practice his own
logic. And Laches is justified, in the world of the dialogues, to
suspect Nikias of sophistry.
In any case, Nikias consents to the position that it is the same
knowledge that has understanding of the same subjects, whether in
their future, present, or past aspects. Well, Nikias, says Sokrates,
we have also agreed that what is to be feared or hoped for are
things to come (méllonta, 199b6) that are bad or good, respectively.
Yes. Then it follows, Nikias, that courage is not only a knowledge
of what is to be feared or what dared, but also of what was and was
not fearful in the past, and what will and will not be fearful in the
future. So it would seem, Sokrates.
So you, Nikias, have given us only one third of courage, not the
whole of it, in your answer. For according to your own account, we
now see there are two more parts to it; do you accept this modified
account, Nikias? I think I do, Sokrates. But now, my fortunate
friend, do you think there could be anything lacking in a person
whose excellence (aretê) was such that he knew (eideiê) all about
the past, present, and future of good and bad things? Such a man
could lack neither intelligence in practice (sôphrosynê) nor justness
(dikaiosynê) nor respectfulness and piety (hosiótês), because only
he would know how to relate to Gods and men with respect to what
is to be sought or avoided. You have a point, Sokrates, I think.
Then what you are talking about now, Nikias, is not a portion
(mórion) of human excellence (aretê) but the entirety of it. Nikias
and his fellow discussants now appear as self-refuted: But earlier,
you know, says Sokrates, we said that courage was one of the parts
of excellence. We did, Sokrates. And what we are now saying
seems not to be so. It seems not. Thus, Nikias, we have not
discovered what courage is (!). It seems we have not, Sokrates.
And I, Nikias, says Laches, getting sarcastic again, thought you
would find it, when you were so above my answers to Sokrates,
especially since you have had instruction from Damon (200a). All
right, Laches, but now you're acting like everybody elselooking at
the ignorance of others and not at your own. I've said all that could
be expected on our subject for now. I must try to make my account
more adequate and more accurate with the help of Damonwhom,
by the way, you ridicule without having metand with the help of
others. But if I reach any security about the matter, I won't
begrudge sharing with you the instruction you certainly need
(200c).
Well, Nikias, you are a man of knowledge (sophês). But I advise
Lysimachos and Melesias to dismiss both you and me, and to retain
Sokrates to educate
 Page 402
their sons. If mine were of an age, this is what I would do. I agree
with you, Laches, and will send my son too to Sokrates, if he
wishes; but so far he has refused and recommended others. You
may have better luck at the moment, Lysimachos, if you ask him.
The point here is that Aristeides, Lysimachos's son, who is named
as an example, is listed among those who fail to respond to
Sokrates' pedagogic midwifery in the Theaetetus (150e ff.).
Plato now gives us an ending much like the one in the Euthydemus.
On the basis of their demonstrated ignorance, they all decide to go
'back to school' againyoung and old, including Sokratesand to meet
again on the morrow for that purpose. The reason for this is, as
Sokrates charmingly explains from 200e1 to 201b5, that while he
cannot refuse to try to improve anybody who wishes it from him,
he has failed in their inquiry as much as the others. They are all in
need of knowledge, and Homer says we should not be ashamed to
pursue what we need, old as some of us are. To remain in a state of
demonstrated ignorance is inadvisable; they must do all they can to
arrange to change themselves.
The reader is left with the feeling that Plato's Sokrates is both
inviting the older men back into the ways of persistent questioning
that are characteristic of youth, and diplomatically avoiding sole
responsibility for the minds of some over-privileged young men
whose fathers are his friends. The reader also feels that there is
something ironic about Sokrates' self-characterization as not a good
teacher, since it is just his art of questioning that has brought the
discussion to its self-conflicted ending. We may think that, by
example, Sokrates can be seen to be teaching not any particular
subject but how to ask the right questions.
Yet his questioning of an experienced and knowing man like
Nikias and his questioning of an experienced and courageous man
like Laches did not produce the desired definition of courage. And
Sokrates is a courageous man himself! It would seem that Plato is
letting the reader see that, on Nikias's intellectualist approach, it is
difficult to bring statements and practice together. But when his
Sokrates gives hypothetical and interrogative support to Nikias's
intellectualism, the outcome of making an excellence a matter of
knowing or insight isin the world of the dialoguesthat human
goodness, aretê, is indivisible, a most interesting proposition.
It is also of the greatest interest that Sokrates' questioning of the
practical Laches (i) brings out the element of endurance or
steadfastness (kartería) that courage requires, and (ii) seems to lead
into the requirement (within the dialogue) that courage be
something knowledgeable as well. Did Plato expect or hope that his
philosophic reader, looking at the dialogue as a whole, would see
that the latter requirement is overstated by the speakers and
allowed to be
 Page 403
overstated as part of the design of the dialogue? If the
overstatement is part of the design of the dialogue in its exhibitive
integrity, then Plato can be said to be using his Sokrates in the
Laches to show forth something about the limits of intellectualism.
Back inside the world of the dialogues, the reader has been given a
measure of Sokrates' own intellectualism, refutativeness, and
intelligent self-restraint or sôphrosynê.
Notes
1. N.Eth. I.vi. 109b67-8: ''Indeed, Speusippos appears to have
followed the Pythagoreans." At X.ii. 11729b9, cited above, we
read: "It seemed to Eudoxus that pleasure was the good . . ."
2. Philebos 36d: "Still, my boy, as that man calls you, we must
examine whether this is relevant to the inquiry."
3. The reader who is reading Plato on his own, who has to consult
the commentators because he is reading a translation or the copied
and recopied text of an ancient language, may have noticed that
some crucial questions in the interpretation of Plato's works are
decided by little more than consensus (or, majority), with some
such formula as "most commentators agree that . . ." The irony is
that these annotators don't follow the advice of Plato's Sokrates
here, just because they are not themselves Socratic. They work,
rather, within the so-called "platonist tradition" inaugurated, not by
Plato the Socratic, but by his dogmatic, pythagorizing Academic
successors.
4. A deme that practiced rough and ready wit.
5. It is worth noting that Sokrates repeats this definition at
Protagoras 358d).
 Page 405

Chapter 20
The Kratylos:
Sokrates the Name-Maker
The New Alphabet and the Technique of Literary Name-Giving
Plato's Kratylos, like the Euthydemus, is almost entirely an amusing
virtuoso dialogue. But in distinction from the latter, the satire in the
Kratylos is not directed to defending the image of Sokrates as a
versatile refuter of those who really do corrupt the young people of
Athens.
Two passages at 396d-e and 401a can be singled out; but they also
have their place in the dialogue as part of Plato's thematization of
Sokrates' modest ignorance and matter-of-fact respectfulness.
Sokrates' suggestion that he and Hermogenes undergo a
purification on the morrow of their discussion of names is a
precaution inspired by Sokrates' recent encounter with Euthyphro
the Prospaltian (396d-e). Bergk's conjecture that Eupolis's comedy
Prospaltioi satirized Euthyphro's officiousness, just as Plato's
Euthyphro does, reminds us of the sane humor that can be found to
underlie so many of Sokrates' serious discussions. 1 But such
passages seem not to have kept Sokrates' enemies from misusing
his literary game with names against him. Thus, the tradition of
reinterpreting the fertile wordplay in the Kratyloswhich could be
made to look impiousas a solemn inquiry into "the correctness of
names" and the origin of language, can be seen as a response by
Sokrates' friends to this move of his enemies. "On the Correctness
of Names," is indeed the subtitle given to this work by its
uncomprehending Hellenistic editors.
Operationally, the question is whether to take the dialogue as the
playful
 Page 406
satire that its tone suggests it is (and as offering an exhibitive
lesson in literary name-giving) or to read it as a humorless inquiry
about words and speech. The objection to the latter alternative is
that from it Plato's Sokrates emerges as a bad methodologist and
questioner and, uncharacteristically, as not having the slightest
interest in accurate definitions or clear accounts of the subject-
matter.
One hypothesis about what stimulated Plato into composing the
Kratylos is that it was his response to the enactment of the law
proposed by Archinos during the Archonship of Eucleides
(403/402 B.C.) that made the Ionic alphabet mandatory in all
official documents of the Athenians. This speculation perhaps finds
some partial verification in so far as it explains the sarcastic
references to an otherwise mysterious "law-giver," and in so far as
it explains the comment-by-satire of this law-giver's supposed
name-giving labors. The decreed imposition of a single alphabet
surely had an impact on the intellectual life of the times. The little
understood allusivenes of the Kratylos could therefore be an
allusiveness to the discussions about language and writing stirred
up by the pro-Ionic decree of 403/2 B.C.
We shall also see that besides being a comic virtuoso dialogue, the
Kratylos plays with as it practices the secret, known to good writers
of drama and fiction, of how to choose suitably suggestive names
to characters that they will bring to life in their works. That this is
the case can be anticipated from the fact that most of the names
"explained" by Sokrates are mythical or literary names.
Sokrates is called in by Hermogenes to conciliate and explain the
differences between himself and Kratylos in connection with
naming. According to Kratylos, Kratylos's name is right for him
and Sokrates's is for Sokrates, but Hermogenes' name is not right
for Hermogenes. Kratylos believes this even though, as
Hermogenes points out, he also believes that each thing has a right
(orthotêta) name of its own by nature and among all nations. But,
Hermogenes complains, this is just where he becomes ironic
towards me and clarifies nothing (oute aposaphai ouden
eirôneuetai te pros me), claiming to know something that, if he
made it plain, would cause me to agree with him. Now, Sokrates, I
would readily listen to your interpretation of Kratylos's oracle if
you can bring it out. But I'd rather hear what you yourself have to
say about the correctness of names. Note that, if Kratylos stands for
Herakleiteanism, his (typically) cryptic responses have been
complained about and made a matter of dramatic record.
In Sokrates' response it also becomes a matter of dialogical record
that Prodicus the Sophist is doing great business lecturing, at
adjustable rates, on the beautiful (to Sokrates) but difficult subject
of the correctness of terms. So,
 Page 407
Sokrates jests, since I could only afford the one-drachma lesson, I
am still ignorant of the subject; whereas to those who take the full
fifty-drachma course Prodicus claims to give complete knowledge
of the subject. However, I am ready to investigate the matter
together with you and Kratylos, Hermogenes. His denial that
Hermogenes is truly your name, I suspect, is only a joke (skôptein).
For to deny it, Kratylos must think you don't make money, as a son
of Hermes should, because you have so much already, son of
Hipponicus. (Hermes was the God of gain, Hipponicus was very
rich.) But to understand such things is difficult. We must join
together to find out who is right.
Well, Sokrates, says Hermogenes, I have concluded that
correctness of names is a convention (ksynthêkê) and agreement
(homología), like the names we give our domestics. It is not by
nature (physei) but by habit and custom (ethei kai nomôi) that
usages come to be. But, Sokrates and Kratylos, I'm ready to learn if
it's not so.
You may be right, Hermogenes; you say names are arbitrary and
publicly agreed upon. Now tell me, do you think there's such a
thing as true speech and false speech? Certainly, Sokrates. And that
speech that states the things that are (ta onta) as they are (hôs estin)
is true, while that which states them as they are not (hôs ouk estin)
is false? Yes. It is possible then to say in words that which is and
that which is not the case (385b7)? Quite. The ontologically
minded reader notes that Plato's Sokrates has not asked whether
true speech can state what is the case about something in all
respects, but Sokrates' wording tends to assume that it can.
Sokrates now draws Hermogenes into a fallacy of division: "So it is
possible," he concludes, "to utter either a false or a true name
(ónoma), since speech can be true or false?" Yes, of course (385d).
Then whatever name or names a person gives something, those will
be its names for that person, Hermogenes? Yes, just as different
city-states have have their own different names for the same
thingand the barbarians, too.
Does it also appear to you about the things that are, that in their
own being (idíai autôn hê ousia) they are such as they appear to
me, and that they are to you, such as they appear to you, Protagoras
implies by saying that man is the measure of all things? Or,
Hermogenes, does it seem to you that they have some stability in
their own being (echein . . . aura hautôn tina bebaiótêta tês ousías
386a)? This has torn me, Sokrates; but I just don't believe
Protagoras can be right.
But Hermogenes, presses Sokrates, do you believe there are no evil
men? I think there are many very evil men; and yes, Sokrates, I
think there are also some few good men. Well, Hermogenes, about
all these, do you think that the good men are perceptive or
intelligent (phrónimos) and that the very bad ones
 Page 408
are irrational (áphronas)? That is how it seems to me, Sokrates.
But, Hermogenes, if Protagoras speaks truly and things are such as
they seem to each person, would it still be possible for some to be
intelligent but others foolish? No, Sokrates. Note that where a
moment ago Sokrates quoted Protagoras as saying that things are
to each as they appear to him or her, he is now saying that
Protagoras said that things are (eînai) as they appear to each
(386c2-4). Hermogenes (like many translators) does not note the
difference. But it will be worth observing whether the equivocation
is repeated, since the latter formulation is more impeachable.
So goodness (aretê) and its opposite are not equally and always
characteristic of everybody, as Euthydemus implies, Says Sokrates.
No. "Then, if this is neither the case nor is it the case that each
thing is to each individually (idíai), it follows (386d-e) that matters
(prágmata) have some stability in their own being not related to or
dependent upon us . . . but exist in their own order (kath'hautà) in
relation to the being which they have from nature." I think so,
Sokrates. Then Hermogenes, actions too (kai hai prÿxeis) are
performed according to their own nature, not according to our
judgment (387a), for actions also are one form (eîdos) of being
(286e8-9). When, for instance, we try to cut anything, should we
cut it any way with any means we wish, or shall we cut rightly by
cutting according to the nature of cutting and being cut, and with
natural means; or shall we do it contrary to nature (parà physin)
and be mistaken and fail to do it?
Sokrates, we see, has moved on to say that there are actions in
themselves, which ought to appear absurd to Hermogenes, since
actions require an agent. Secondly, Sokrates is transparent in the
assumption that there are naturally right or wrong instruments; but
instruments are artefacts, and either made or selected by humans.
Thirdly, Sokrates drags Hermogenes into the fallacy of all-or-none.
There is no one natural way to cut up a chicken, or means with
which to do it, such that any other will result in failure.
Hermogenes, however, finds nothing wrong in Sokrates' conclusion
about this being the manner of all actions (kai t'âlla houtô).
Now is speaking (légein) not an action (387b8)? Yes. Then,
Hermogenes, if a man were to speak as fancy dictates, would he
speak correctly; or will he do so when he speaks about things
according to nature and with nature's means? When he does what
you say, Sokrates. So then is not naming (onomázein), which is
part of speaking about things, also a kind of action (387c8)? Yes.
"But acts appeared to us as not being relative to us, and as having a
kind of nature of their own" (387d1-2). The alert reader will catch
the self-contradiction in this last claim, which stares out at the
reader from the juxtaposition of the expressions hêmin (to us) next
to pros hêmas (re-
 Page 409
lative to us) separated only by one word "not." But Hermogenes
doesn't see the contradiction and agrees.
At first it appears that it is in order to create complications that
Plato has Sokrates persist in his all-or-none approach throughout
his assimilation of names to instruments (órganon). "A name,
Hermogenes, is thus a kind of teaching tool for threading through
(diakritikòn) that which is (tês ousías) like a weaving rod" (kerkìs
hyphásmatos 388c1). Is whoever uses a shuttle skillfuly (kalôs) a
weaver, Hermogenes? Yes. And whoever uses names skillfully is a
teacher? Yes, and whose work does the weaver use, when using his
shuttle? The carpenter's who made it, Sokrates. And his art
(technê), Hermogenes. Yes, Sokrates. So, whose work and art will
the teacher use who uses a name? I can't tell, Sokrates. Doesn't the
law seem to you, Hermogenes, to give them to us? 2 Probably, says
Hermogenes, uncomprehendingly.
Then, Hermogenes, it is not for every man but only for the law-
giver and name-maker to give names, says Sokrates with sarcasm.
And this law-giver, it would seem, is rarest of craftsmen to be
found among men. The sarcasm here is, possibly, directed at the
Assemblyman who proposed the law about the use of a single
alphabet, or at the commissioners appointed to enforce it, with
whom remonstrance became impossible once the law was passed.
It is also possible that Sokrates is implying that there is or should
be no such thing as a law-giving name-maker.
Now Hermogenes, let's see what the law-giver has in view when he
lays down names. Does not the carpenter who makes a shuttle look
(blepôn) towards something fitted to weave with? This is cheeky of
Sokrates, since nature has not provided us with a model (unless it
be the spider) of anything "naturally fitted to weave." But the term
"naturally" (epephýkei) allows an equivocation that makes it
redundant. But Hermogenes does not notice, and agrees with
Sokrates' preposterous proposition. He also agreees to the more
plausible (and famous) proposal that should the shuttle be broken
(katagêi, an Ionic form), the carpenter will make another, looking
not at the broken shuttle but at the form (eîdos) in relation to which
he made the one he broke. What a non-craftsman like Hermogenes
forgets here is that the inventor or maker of a shuttle has to keep in
mind the function (what it has to do) of a shuttle, and has to look at
either some sketches of an artefact that might be able to perform
this function or at the material prototype he's been working on.
This prototype is not a form in the sense of a disembodied idea, as
Sokrateshimself an artisanwould know. But, of course, he is
leading Hermogenes on deliberately.
Then, Hermogenes, it would be just to call form that which
"shuttle-itself" is (autò ho estin kerkìs 389a). And all the shuttles
for the different kinds of
 Page 410
garments must have the form (eîdos) of shuttle, such that each one
of them is given that nature (tên physin) that is most naturally fitted
to its respective function (to érgon, 389c1). 3 Yes, Sokrates. In
other words, Hermogenes, says Sokrates pressing on, it would
seem that for each kind (hekátôi eîdei, 389d1) of weaving there is
by nature (physei) a corresponding kind of shuttle, and it would be
the same for other things: the artisan must give them the form
appropriate to their work (389c-d).
Well then, best of friends, won't the legislator (nomothetês) have to
be looking at that which "name-itself" is (pros autò ekeînos ho
estin ónoma), since he must know how to lay down, with suitable
sounds and syllables, the name naturally fitted (peyhykos) to each
thing by nature (physei), if he is to be a master (kyrios) layer-down
of names. To an auditor, or reader, unfamiliar with the theory of
ideas this must have sounded like very strange language. That
Sokrates is not imposing but amusedly testing the theory (for which
so much was being claimed) in relation to the practice of name-
giving, can be caught from the deliberate repetitions or
redundancies he resorts to (pephykos, physei, "naturally," "by
nature") in deploying the awkward analogy. He has already
equivocated between the prototype or sketch of an artefact and the
idea of it.
Sokrates' amusement at his own rhetoric can be felt in the way his
next sentence (389d9-10) slips in, and excuses, the awkward fact
that different master layers-down of names give different names to
the same thing. We must not forget, Hermogenes, name itself
(toûto: referring back to "name-itself") on that account. For, neither
do different smiths put "tool-itself" in the same iron, but they make
the same tool for the same purpose in a different bit of iron. As
long as they give the iron the same form (idéan) or shape, the
instrument will be right whether it is made here or in a foreign
land.
This is a visibly bad, question-begging analogy, since bits of iron
from different countries don't at all differ from each other in the
way that bits of language do really differ from country to country.
Note, too, the continuing equivocation between (or, equating of)
form, idea, and shape.
Similarly, Sokrates concludes, so long as the law-giver, Greek or
barbarian and with whatever syllables, gives the proper form of
name (to toû onómatos eîdos . . . to prosekôn) to each thing, he is
no worse a law-giver than any other anywhere (390a). Next,
Hermogenes, is it not the user of the artefactshuttle, ship, or
lyrewho will know best (gignôskô, epítamai) whether the proper
form (to prosêkon eîdos) has been built into (ergázomai) the thing
made? Yes, Sokrates. So, who is the best judge and overseer, here
or abroad, of the lawgiver? The user, is it not, says Sokrates,
answering his own question.
Here Hermogenes agrees to the several propositions (requiring
much qualification) presupposed by Sokrates' answer, as well as to
the dubious analogy
 Page 411
between the skilled users of material artefacts and knowing users of
the law. Is it not the participating people (dêmos), the reader thinks,
or the practicing politician (politikòs) who are users of the laws,
and have they not been characterized by Sokrates in other
dialogues as unknowing and sophistical? But Sokrates side-steps
thoughts like these by quickly interposing his own surprising
answer as to who the user of the laws and overseer of the lawgiver
is: He is the dialectician (dialektikòn 390c9-10), who knows how to
ask and answer questions!
Using rhetorical inflation, Sokrates now tries (390d-e) to impress
upon Hermogenes the portentous importance of the matter, as a
cover for baldly reasserting Kratylos's position in playfully
intellectual terms. So you see, Hermogenes, Kratylos is right in
saying that names are related to things (prágmasi) by nature
(physei), and that only he is a craftsman in name-giving who keeps
turning to look at (apobléponta) that which is by nature the name
of each thing (eis to tê physei ónoma on hekástoi), and who can put
its form (eîdos) down in letters and syllables. There is an added
reference to letters here; before, Sokrates had mentioned only
sounds and syllables.
Sokrates may have overdone it; for, as the reader notes,
Hermogenes ends up perplexed and in need of more convincing.
He wants examples to demonstrate what Sokrates solemnly said is
the natural correctness of names (391a). Sokrates immediately
appears to take it all back: I, Hermogenes, have not said there is
any one (oudemían, 391a4) natural correctness of names. What I
said was that I did not know, and that I would join you in searching
for the truth about it. To us it has appeared that there may be by
nature some sort of correctness of names, and that not everyone is
good at giving names to things (391b1-2). Is this not so,
Hermogenes? Quite so, Sokrates.
Then the next thing to do is to find out what sort of correctness
belongs to namesas long, that is, as you really want to know. But of
course I desire to know, Sokrates. Then investigate! But how am I
to investigate? With the help of 'those who know' (epistaménôn),
whose assistance is insured by payments of money, says Sokrates
with sudden sarcasm. These are people called Sophists, or men-of-
knowledge (sophistaí), from whom your brother Kallias got his
reputation for knowledge. Since you don't yet control your
patrimony, beg Kallias to teach you the correctness he learnt about
these things from Protagoras. But that, Sokrates, would be absurd; I
reject Protagoras's book On Truth as worthless. Sokrates is so
good-humoredly ready with a response that he must have known it
was what Hermogenes would say. Then, Hermogenes, you will
have to learn from Homer and the other poets if you don't like the
Sophists!
From here on the reader is put on the road to discovering that the
limited sort of rightness that names have is "literary," or
mythographic; or else, that
 Page 412
their confection is a kind of nicknaming with historical causes, as
in Agamemnon's case (see 395a), the war leader (agei, he "leads;"
agôn "combat") who stayed on (menô), resolutely (memnôn)!
Homer, you know, continues Sokrates at 391d-e, often
distinguishes between the name the Gods give a thing and the name
men give the same thing. "For, clearly, the Gods call these things
by the names which are naturally right. Don't you think so,
Hermogenes?"
This bit of pseudo-orthodoxy would have come across to an
Athenian reader as ironical, as it does to the modern reader who
remembers that it was legitimate to burlesque the Gods and heroes
in satyr-plays on the Athenian stage. Hermogenes, who is very
young (391c), lets this pass. But Sokrates' ironic tone in this
dialogue could well have been turnedat a later timeagainst the
image of the historical figure, whether it was his trial or his
reputation that was being discussed. Sokrates' friends would, then,
have been forced to take passages like this as literally and
respectfully intended. In any case, Hermogenes still wants
examples.
Well, is it not an august (semnon) kind of thing to know, continues
Sokrates in the same ironic tone, that the Scamander ought rightly
to be called the Xanthus River, as the Gods call it, or that the
kymindis bird is rightly called the chalkis (Iliad xiv.291) or that the
hill Batieia is rightly called Myrina's tomb (Iliad ii.813)? Batieia
suggests a wall-like hill; Myrene the Amazon was the eponymous
heroine of the Aeolian town with the same name. These matters,
Hermogenes, are perhaps too high for human understanding
(392b). It will be more within our power to examine the instances
of Scamandrius and Astyanax, the alternative names of Hector's
son. But (the reader notes) at the end of the specious reasoning with
which Sokrates accounts for them, when Hermogenes incautiously
says, "I see," Sokrates abruptly confesses, "I still don't understand
it myself, Hermogenes; do you? Hermogenes at once breaks down:
"No by Zeus, I don't really understand."
Then let's try the [easier] example of Hector's name, Hermogenes.
Did not Homer himself give it to him? Note that Plato's Sokrates is
saying, here, that the poet of the Iliad is the name-maker of its
characters. Is not hektôr suggestive of loudness, that is, or
possessing (kektêtai) and holding (echein) what one rules (krateî)?
Sokrates is no more fanciful here than the authors who invented
names for Mistress Quickly and Falstaff, for Mr. Gradgrind and
Mr. Bounderby, for the Newcomes or the Forsythes. So far, Plato is
contributing to the demystification of the Iliad. Perhaps this was a
response to the mystification of it by the hyponoiasts, the
allegorical interpreters referred to in the Ion and Hippias Minor.
For the moment Sokrates returns to the point that monstrous births
(téras)
 Page 413
are not, or shouldn't be, named after the species they're born into
but are aberrations from. Again, if all that "prodigious" means is
"different," then this is only dressed-up tautology. A two-headed
calf is still a calf. But reversing Sokrates' example, a foal born to a
cow is not a calf but a colt. And if, Hermogenes, a human being has
a nonhuman offspring, that offspring should not be called human
(393c). So it seems, Sokrates. Fine, Hermogenes, but please defend
(phúlatte) yourself from being misled by me.
Is every offspring of a king, for instance, to be called a king?
Sokrates is returning to the question left over from the examples of
Hector and his son (where the explanation was by association), and
going on to the question of the letters of the alphabet (grámmata,
stoicheîa). He has also put Hermogenes and the reader on notice
that he's in the mood for pulling misleading wonders out of his
discursive bag. Notice the multiple pun, just made, between
phylattô (defend) and phyleteuô (admit into a species or tribe) and
phil-atto (= phil-aittô; attô and aittô were the Attic forms of aïssô):
aittô meant "shoot quickly" or "look sharply." Is there also a hint at
philattikos (pro-Attic), and so perhaps, by implication, at the pro-
Ionian alphabet?
And it makes no difference, Hermogenes, whether one combination
(syllabê) or another is used to signify (sêmaínei) the same thing, or
whether a letter is added or removed as long as the being (ousía) of
the thing predominates clearly in the name. What do you mean,
Sokrates?
Hermogenes hasn't understood that (in connection with our
examples) it does not matter whether a literary or mythopoeic name
is spelt Quicklie or Quickley, Falstaffe, or Bounderbie, or Gadgrind
or Newcombe or Forsyte, instead of the way Shakespeare, Dickens,
Thackeray and Galsworthy spelled them. I mean nothing colorful,
Hermogenes, says Sokrates. You know, for instance, that only four
letters of the alphabet are named just as they are spoken e (eh), u
(ü), o (o, as in Spanish or Italian), and á (a sound between English
"owe" and "awe"). For the others, Hermogenes, we use names that
add vowels and consonants, as in the case of bôta. But the addition
doesn't obscure the nature of the letter that the law-giver intended,
so finely did he know how to lay down names, Hermogenes, for the
written letters! I think you're right, Sokrates.
Then Hermogenes, says Sokrates, reversing himself about the
king's son, won't the latterby the same reasoning (!)probably be a
king, and the offspring of a good man be good, that of a handsome
man handsome (394a). Again, the reader will be aware of Sokrates'
arbitrariness here if s/he remembers that this is just the big question
that is so hard to answer in other dialogues, namely: Why are the
sons of good men not always good? So, Hermogenes, the offspring
of a given species (génous) should in general re-
 Page 414
ceive the same name. And the expert in names will permit some
variability in the spelling, which will not confuse him at least.
But what [combination of] letters, says Sokrates, as if puzzled in
passing, does Archepolis have in common with Astyanax and
Hector, though it means the same thing? It's not only in the case of
monstrous births that the offspring does not receive the name of the
species. The impious son of a pious father, Hermogenes, ought to
receive the name of his species (394e). This claim is, logically, an
amphiboly. He ought not to be called Theophilos (loved of God) or
Mnesitheon (mindful of God), but something signifying the
contrary, if names are to be in fact correct. Quite certainly,
Sokrates. So Orestes (mountain dweller) and Agamemnon (see
above) are undoubtedly correct, Hermogenes? So it seems,
Sokrates (395a1).
So too, says Sokrates venturing into some subtle puns, is the name
of Atreus probably correct. For the murder (phónos) of Chrysippus
and his raw savagery (ômos) against Thyestes (''sacrificer,"
"boiler") are all baneful (atêra) and not wonderful (taking initial
alpha as privative) for his human excellence (aretê). Taking into
account that Doric alpha corresponds to Attic eta (ei), aretê is an
anagram of atêra, which it confronts (pros) in the text of Sokrates'
"explanation." The play on words, here, makes two points
exhibitively (i.e., without stating them). Practically the same
syllables in a different order yield words of opposite meaning. Two
homonymous, almost identical-sounding words have not only
opposite meanings (atêra and a-têras) but meanings behind which
there lurks a dreamlike similarity. Is it an accident or was it
deliberate that phónos (murder) and ôma (raw) when put together
succeed in punning with homophônos, "speaking the same
language," "being in unison with"?
Of course, Hermogenes, there's been some variation in the name
Atreus, but to experts (!) the meaning remains plain. His
stubbornness ateiras, fearlessness atreston, and destructiveness
atêron are correctly included in its composition. Sokrates now
proceeds in such an inspired way (395c-396d) to account for the
names of Pelops, Tantalos and Zeus, incidentally purifying and
intellectualizing the connotations of the latter, that Hermogenes has
to exclaim: why, Sokrates, your utterances are oracular and
absolutely inspired!
Well, Hermogenes, it must have been Euthyphro with whom I
spent the morning, who inspired me. I listened a long time. He was
inspired and quite filled with divine wisdom. What we remember of
the intraction in the Euthyphro is that Sokrates was disappointed by
its lack of result. So, if these words have reference to it, it can only
be that Sokrates in his emulative, fertile way is being more pious
and inventive than Euthyphro. Or else, these words are just an
ironic after-comment on Euthyphro's claim to expert knowledge of
things divine. This frees us to see that the reason for which
Sokrates next says that it
 Page 415
is their duty, first, to make use of this transmitted enthusiasm to
finish their investigation today and, secondly, to get themselves
purified tomorrow by a priest or man-of-knowledge because
Sokrates has become uneasy about the application of his ironic wit
to the name of Zeus, the divine patron of hospitality and all things
Greek.
This is confirmed by the fact that Sokrates now shies away from
divine names and goes on at once to heroes, men, and some
common abstract nouns. It is not until Stephanus page 401b402d
that he returns to the names of Gods, with accounts of their names
from Hestia to Poseidon and Pluto. It must be because Sokrates has
been having fun with and improving upon Euthyphro's manner of
dealing with things divine that he feels he must be purified in case
he's overdone it. What would be the point of dragging Euthyphro
into the conversation at this place, unless the author wanted his
reader to understand that this is one of the things Sokrates is doing?
A classical Greek would also have felt that it might be unlucky to
speak jestingly about the house of Atreus, so awful were the crimes
and sufferings of that miasmic and fateful family.
That Sokrates soon starts up again (at 397c) with a question about
why the Gods are called sacred (theîos) does not negate this
analysis of his feelingthat he might need, like the Atreïdes, to
expiate something himself, since that feeling has other
determinants. And theîos, "godly," "sacred," is not, the reader is
bound to observe, a proper noun or name, but the term for a class
theoí, the Gods, or the class adjective theîos for a set of beings.
Sokrates' manifest reverence for Zeus, in any case, does not keep
him from applying his wit to lesser Gods like Poseidon and Pluto
or from applying it to other classes of beings. 4
Sokrates quickly gives his auditor a methodological hint about the
manner in which he is proceeding at lines 397a3-5 and 397b8-9.
Sokrates finds it necessary to permit (chrênai eân) exceptions, for
which he has a plausible excuse, but one that would falsify his
assumptions. He is also going to "verify" these assumptions by
looking in just the place where one can find examples of naturally
correct names. (This is, of course, question-begging.) The place is
where things are always naturally the same (ta aeì onta kai
pephykóta 397b9). Now that we know how to proceed,
Hermogenes, and have some impression (týpon) to look to, would
it not be just (díkaion) to begin with the Gods and see how they got
their names correctly (397c)? Sokrates is getting on, as promised,
with today's work.
I suspect Hermogenes, says Sokrates, launching into his next series
of puns, that the earlies Greeks, like some barbarians at present,
took for Gods the sun, moon, earth, stars and sky, and called them
theos, theoi after their eternal running theonta, thein of the
unchanging natural course in which they are visibly
 Page 416
set. And if it is how spirits or genii (daimonas) got their name that
you want to know next, Hermogenes, we must follow Hesiod's
clue. He says (Works and Days 121 ff.) that the golden race that
first lived on earth were called spirits when it became their fate to
go under, and that they are noble esthloí and guard us from evil.
Now the good, Hermogenes, are the wise (phrónimos), are they
not? Yes, Sokrates. That, Hermogenes, is what Hesiod meant about
daimonas, spirits; that first race was daêmones, "knowing" in its
goodness, as the old form of our language attests. It occurs to the
reader that if the old language did such a thing, it perhaps is
because of the variant spellings allowed before the adoption of a
single alphabet, unless Sokrates is making them up too. So, too, I
assert, Hermogenes, that every good man, living or dead, is
"spiritually" knowing and rightly called "genial," "spiritual," or
"divine'' (398c). We see Sokrates' ethicality asserting itself here just
as his intellectuality asserted itself in the case of Zeus. I too believe
you are right, Sokrates, says Hermogenes.
What about the term hero (hêrôs), asks Hermogenes, deeply and
innocently drawn into Sokrates' game by now. That's easy, says
Sokrates, because the name is so slightly altered. It makes clear that
the heroes came into existence out of love erôs. They were all born
because a God fell in love with an earth woman or a Goddess with
a mortal man. Remember the Old Attic sound, Hermogenes, and
you'll see that love erôs is that from which heroes spring. Or,
perhaps, Hermogenes, it is because the heroes were wise people
who were good at questioning (erôtan), says Sokrates with tongue
in cheek. For eírein, speak, is the same as légein, speak. So that
when their name is spoken in Attic, the heroes turn out to be
speakers and questioners and the heroic race proves to be a race of
speakers (rhêtorôn) and men-of-knowledge (sophistôn). Funny as
this consequence of the preceding pun is, it also sounds like a bit of
sarcasm against the disputatious intellectuals of Athens.
But Hermogenes, can you tell me something more difficult: the
reason why men are called anthrôpoi, men? No Sokrates, and you
can do it better anyway, says Hermogenes, not knowing what a far-
fetched answer he's going to get. The inspiration I caught from
Euthyphro gives you confidence in me, I see.
If Sokrates is satirizing or playing with the kind of explanation
Euthyphro in the Euthyphro says he gave the Athenians, it is no
wonder that (as Euthyphro there reports) the Athenians laughed at
Euthyphro.
It appears to me, Hermogenes, that the term for mankind was once
a phrase (rhêma) that became a noun (ónoma) when a single letter
in the middle and the pitched sound at the end were dropped; thus:
anathrôn ha opôpe, which means "the animal who looks up at"
(anathreî), or reasons (logízetai), about what he sees, ha opêpe.
What Sokrates glosses over, here, and Hermogenes
 Page 417
misses has no linguistic credibility. This is that it's two alphas that
are dropped, one of them aspirated, and that "dropping the low-
pitched sound at the end" involves dropping a whole syllable pe as
well as the long vowel ô before it, with ôpe being somehow
replaced by sigma.
About Sokrates methodology, it is to be noted that he had prepared
for these last accounts by asserting at 399a-b that (i) he might be
getting "wiser" (sophôteron) than he ought to: sophôteron is (of
course) ironic and connotes "more sophistical." Sokrates also (ii)
gives himself permission to insert letters into or remove them from
words. Procedurally speaking, this is surely and purely ad hoc.
Note, further, that Sokrates is at first tentative in his reply to
Hermogenes' question about pyschê, the "principle of life," or
"soul" as we call it. Plato lets the reader see that, in making up
stories about words, his Sokrates sometimes needs time. At 400a1
Sokrates decides his explanation is too unrefined (phortikón) for
Euthyphro and his followers. So he puts mind (noûs) together with
soul (psychê) and, in analogy with Anaxagoras, asserts that pyschê
is the power that holds nature, physis, together. Then physechê,
Hermogenes, was probably beautified into psychê [a counter-
phonetic suggestion]. Aping the Pythagoreans, Sokrates assimilates
sôma, "body," to sêma, 'tomb of the soul' (400b-c). But he points
out to Hermogenes that sêma also means signfor, the soul uses the
body to communicateand that the Orphics think of the body as the
safe enclosure (sôma) of the soul until it has been ransomed or paid
its debt.
Then at 400d-e Sokrates reminds Hermogenes in the name of Zeus
that they know nothing about the Gods or what they call
themselves. But he and Hermogenes can try to account for the
secondary kind of correctness pertaining to the names men use for
them in their prayers. The Gods must be assured, says Sokrates,
that we are not investigating them, but only what thoughts men
have had in giving them names. "For, in that there is no impiety or
offense (anemesêton 401a6-7). What is another "methodological"
remark by Sokrates turns out to be also a defense of him by Plato
the author against the possibility of an accusation of impiety.
Although a reader of good will can agree that no impiety has been
committed by Sokrates, he may feel rather overwhelmed by the
mixed tone of intellectual playfulness and solemnity that colors
Sokrates' responses. This tone and mixture is well exemplified in a
remark preliminary to his explanation of the name Hestia (401b6-
8). "It's at any rate likely, my good Hermogenes, that the first to
give names were not low persons (phauloi), but some meteôrológoi
and adoléschai." If the last term is literally translated as "great
talkers," this could mean either "noble speakers" or "babblers.'' If
meteôrologoi is literally
 Page 418
translated as "nature philosopher," the reader has to accept an
equivocation between "student of things on high" and "student of
high things." And pausing over Sokrates' meaning here only serves
to invite meteorosophist into the connotations of ''nature inquirer":
'Meteorosophist' was the term Aristophanes invented in Clouds
(360) for the farcical caricature he chose to call "Sokrates" in that
comedy.
In this way, Sokrates succeeds, for the open-minded and careful
reader, in actually showing up by out-doing the name-givers,
Sophists or legislators whom he appears to be praising. Name-
giver here can also stand for those who give high-fallutin'
explanations of names. But since Sokrates knows that he himself
has been giving highflying answers to most of Hermogenes'
questions, and that others have called him a babbler about things on
high, he also succeeds in calling the reader's critical attention to his
own verbal virtuosity, thereby rightly making it suspect as
assertion.
The Dimension of Self-Irony in the Kratylos
If what we've seen so far of the dialogue is largely caricature, as the
commentators have often noted, it is also lively socio-intellectual
criticism. And it includes a measure of Socratic self-irony that has
not been sufficiently recognized. However, consideration of
Sokrates' effervescent inventivenesswhich "accounts for" or plays
with almost eighty more terms before he gets to the point of his
exchange with Hermogeneswill have to be neglected for the
moment. Fourscore examples are too many to handle by means of
the induction, concurrent analysis, and paraphrase we have so far
used to bring out what is happening in the Kratylos. It will help
more to pursue the element of irony in the dialogue, while at the
same time following up the string of orientation-statements,
methodological warnings, and hints about what he is doing that
Sokrates throws out in the course of the dialogical exchange.
We jump to 425c-426c, where Sokrates gets permission to turn
from his notions about the earliest names to a sample account of
how letters and syllables are combined (syntíthenai, 425a1) by the
law-giver to make words, according to the processes of mimetic
making (poiôn . . . apomimoúmenos 427c10). Sokrates says that,
though it seems ridiculous that things can be made clear by
mimetic letters and syllables, it is the best account (kratistos . . .
logos) he can give. Other accounts are as dubious as stage-gods out
of a machine, or as evasive as those who say that the names of the
Gods are pre-Greek or too ancient to investigate. For the later
names to be understood, Sokrates insists, the earliest names must
first be explained. When Hermogenes agrees to this,
 Page 419
Sokrates says he now thinks that his notions about the earliest
names have so far been presumptuous (hybristikâ) and laughable
(geloîa). This is a broad hint to the reader about how to take the
"etymologies" previously offered.
But as far back as 401e4, Sokrates had said, "but perhaps I am
talking nonsense." This was because he had been humorously
connecting phonetic variants of words with their different
"ontological implications." Hestia, he says, comes from essía, the
supposed ancient pronunciation of ousía, which has a variant ôsía.
Those who say ôsía would agree with Herakleitos that all things are
in motion, and that, as the cause of moving, ôsía is rightly called
othoûn. "But I may say no more of this since we know nothing,"
concludes Sokrates, reverting for a moment to his basic stance in
the world of the dialogues.
Almost immediately "a swarm of wise insights invades [his] mind."
Sokrates seems to see Herakleitos saying wise Homeric things as
old as the reign of Rhea and Kronos (402a); namely, "that all things
are in motion and nothing rests, and that things . . . are like the
stream of a river, so that you cannot step twice into the same
waters." Sokrates then marshals the names of Tethys and Poseidon
into line with those of Rhea and Kronos as connoting and
reinforcing the Herakleitean view of a world entirely in motion.
The thing for the reader to note is that Sokrates has made it explicit
here that he is being mantic not logical, in his account of words.
At 403d he characteristically repeats that there's no desire greater
than the thought of being made a better person by continual
association with someone. Hermogenes agrees. Then, Hermogenes,
we must believe this to be the reason why no one wants to return
from the other world (ekeîthen "from over there"). For Hades'
power and knowledge of speaking are so beautiful that this God is
the perfect Sophist (sophistês) who does so much good for those in
his realm of riches that they wish to associate with him forever;
ploutôna is a pun between Hades' other name Plouton and "riches."
The other part of the jest addresses the Pythagoreans. "Hades also
refuses to associate with persons who still have bodies; he only
meets with them when their souls have been rid of body, its desires
and evils" (404a1). And does not Hades seem most philosophical,
adds Sokrates slyly, in believing that he can bind men to himself by
their desire for human excellence (aretê)? Such association, we
reflect, was what many of Sokrates' young listeners seem to want
from the Sophists in the world of the dialogues.
Fourth century polemicists would have had to count what Sokrates
now says about Persephone (Pherrephata) and Apollo as praise of
the Gods. The principle he invokes in order to purge their names of
fearful associations is ad hoc, made up. He says that the changes in
their names were produced because
 Page 420
people prefer euphony to the truth. It was by being euphonized,
Hermogenes, that the scary connotations crept into their names.
Hermogenes agrees; and Sokrates proceeds to an entertaining
acount of the origin of Apollo's patronage of music and harmony,
of purifications in medicine and prophecy, and of archery. Sokrates
cannot refrain from adding something that, through the mediation
of the word môsthai (seek after), makes "philosophy" and
"inquiry," generators of the name of the Muses, who are Apollo's
associates.
When young Hermogenes asks about Aphrodite and Dionysos,
Sokrates replies that there is both a serious and a playful (paidikós)
account. I will restrict myself, Hermogenes, to the playful account,
since there is nothing to hinder it (i.e., Sokrates 'inner voice' is not
preventing it); and the Gods, Hermogenes, do have a sense of
humor (philopaísmones 406c).
Loyal Athenian that he is, Sokrates will of course provide a civic
and festive origin for his Goddess's surname "Pallas." He, naturally,
gives an intellectualist and ethical account (407a-c) of the name
"Athena," which agrees with and improves upon the accounts of
the Homeric interpreters as well as the account of the "ancients."
Sokrates, we note, can't be said to be tampering here with the Gods
of the city; although as is usual in this dialogue, the homophonies
(sic) with which he works contravene linguistic probability. The
reader remembers Sokrates' earlier associating of the syllable om
with the term phonos in such a way that they seemed to pun with
homophônos (395b). Sokrates is getting away with murder.
Sokrates brings the questions about the Gods to an end at 407d.
"Let us leave the Gods to the Gods as I am afraid of discussing
them, Hermogenes," says Sokrates after fifteen pages of playing
with their names. "But you may set me any other problem you
please, and I will show you 'what Euthyphro's horses can do'" (i.e.,
how much I can extend Euthyphro's method). Just one more please,
Sokrates; can you do Hermes for me, since Kratylos says I am not
properly named Hermogenes.
Sokrates lets Hermogenes believe that Kratylos is right by deriving
Hermes from hermeneús, "interpreter," "messenger," and emêsató
"contrive cleverly" (408a5). The law-giver decreed, says Sokrates
making it up: ''Oh humans, he who cleverly contrived speech
(eírein emêsato) ought rightly to be called Eiremês by you." But we
have beautified the name into Hermes. And it is likely (eikotôs),
my friend, that "Pan" is the double-natured (diphyê) son of Hermes.
How is that Sokrates?
It is because speech makes all things (pân go 'round and around
(sic), and is also twofold, being either true or false. Like Pan's
upper parts, Hermogenes, true speech is smooth and divine (leîon
kai theîon) and lives among the Gods. But falsehood dwells among
the many below, and is like Pan's tragic goat part.
 Page 421
For myths and falsities occur mostly in Tragic life, says Sokrates,
referring to Athenian drama with wit and ambiguity. So,
Hermogenes, if Pan is the son of Hermes, he is either speech itself
or the look-alike brother of speech. For the readers who want the
Kratylos to be about the origin of speech, this will have to be their
"likely" (eikotôs) account of that origin.
But at 409d Sokrates begins to worry that the Muse of Euthyphro
has deserted him. Now note, Hermogenes, the device I introduced
with all such puzzling words as the one you just proposed (409d3-
4): I say that the following are foreign words whose fitness cannot
be seen in Greek but only in their own language (409e). We must
not propose forced explanations (!) of them but should set them
aside, says Sokrates with both irony and self-irony. The irony is
missed by Hermogenes; perhaps because Sokrates goes right on
with "accounts" of 'air' and 'ether' and 'earth' (gê) and 'seasons'
(hôrai), and eniautós or étos (year). Hermogenes is impressed. Yes,
says Sokrates, again with irony, I think I've ridden out (elaúnein, as
in Euthyphro's chariot-and-horse metaphor) far towards wisdom.
You are indeed advancing, Sokrates. You may say "too far" (tácha
mâllon), Hermogenes! Sokrates, in other words, knows how far he
has gone; but not the admiring literalist Hermogenes.
In taking Sokrates literally and non-ironically, what we see
happening to Hermogenes here is also what happened, historically,
with the knowing or unknowing readers and pythagorizers who
also take Sokrates literally and non-ironically. The whole dialogue
begins to look like another self-focusing device with which Plato is
representing to us how he wants (or doesn't want) to be read.
When Hermogenes says he'd like to examine the correctness of the
noble words associated with aretê, excellence, such as phronêsis,
synêsis and dikaiosynê (taking thought, understanding, justness,
respectively) Sokrates replies that since he has put on the lion's skin
(like the heroic Herakles or the donkey in Aesop), he must wade
bravely into this doughty tribe of words. Sokrates is rewarded for
his humorous courage by an access of prophetic insight
(manteúesthai 411b). The primordial name-givers are like many of
today's men-of-knowledge (sophôn), says Sokrates, offering a
sarcastic glimpse into the doctrine of the eternal round of world-
motion and restlessness. They search, Hermogenes, around and
around so agitatedly after the nature of things that they get dizzy
and think it is the all (to pân) that is reeling forever, not
themselves.
So it is, Hermogenes, for the terms you have brought up. They
were given under just such an assumption, says Sokrates,
proceeding to some etymologies so acutely amusing that they can
only be a satire upon Sophistic Herakleiteanism (411d-412e). But
at 413a Sokrates tells Hermogenes of reach-
 Page 422
ing a point with these thinkers, in his attempt to understand justice,
beyond which the accounts they gave him were said to be for
initiates only, or else very much in dispute. So he, Sokrates, is
more perplexed than ever about justice. This has the ring of a true
report to Hermogenes, who says: you really have heard these things
Sokrates, and are not making them up. And what about the other
things, Hermogenes? Not entirely, Sokrates. Then listen,
Hermogenes; perhaps I can inveigle (eksapatêsaimi) you into
believing that what remains to utter is not hearsay. Sokrates is as
good as telling the auditor that his accounts, which are satirically
outdoing those of his or Plato's contemporaries, are invented
accounts.
That Sokrates is pleasing himself, satirizing others, and being self-
reflective in a comic way, ca be gathered from the fact that he ends
the series that goes from phronêsis and dikaiosynê to alêtheia with
some remarks on maíesthai search (421a5), and ónoma, name.
These remarks account for them in terms of Sokrates' favorite
occupation, inquiry or search (zêtein). The closeness of maiesthai
to maieuomai (to help bring forth) will not escape the reader of
other dialogues.
He will reflect that in the Kratylos, Sokrates is not delivering
another person of his thoughts, but unburdening himself of the
emulative impulse to outdo, and silence by satire, the puny punsters
in the confused intellectual environment. As the reader knows from
other dialogues, Sokrates cannot resist a pun or play on words. He
incidentally prompts the reader again about the identity of one of
his targets by equating 'falsehood' with the opposite of motion
(421b-c) and alêtheia (truth) with the 'divine motion' of things. He
makes sure the reader doesn't miss the jest against Sophistic
Herakleiteanism by equating 'being' (to ón, ousía) with 'going' and
'not-being' with 'not going:' after all, Hermogenes, don't most
people pronounce ouk on as ouk ión, 'not going' (421c).
You have bravely laid low this tribe of words, says Hermogenes,
who is beginning to enjoy the virtuoso performance that is denying
his initial thesis. But, Sokrates, what of the pieces you've knocked
them into, such as ión, rheón, doûn? I will not only say,
Hermogenes, that they are probably foreign words, but also that
some may be too old to trace (!). These excuses (propháseis)
however, says Sokrates giving them their name, are not playing the
game (ou . . . agôn déchesthai). If we had to answer about terms in
terms of other terms indefinitely, we would at last give up. So at
what point, Hermogenes, is it fair (dikaíôs) to stop (422a)?
If the terms which you're now asking about, Hermogenes, are
elements, won't we have to use a different method of search into
their correctness? Probably. Make sure then, Hermogenes, that I
formulate correctly the principle
 Page 423
that underlies the correctness of the elements to which other terms
are traced back. I think, Hermogenes, there is only one principle for
all, both the earliest and the latest terms: the wish (eboúleto) was to
make clear the nature of each thing. Of course. But, Hermogenes,
how could the earliest terms, which were not supported by any
previous terms, be appropriate? Answer me, what would we do if
we had no voice or tongue? Wouldn't we make communicative
signs with hands, head and body? The signifying (dêlôma) would
occur by means of bodily mimesis of that which we wished to
clarify (dêlôsai 423b), would they not? Yes. So too is it a kind of
imitating when we use tongue, or mouth or voice. It appears,
Hermogenes, that a name is a vocal miming of what is meant, and
he who imitates with his voice names what is meant. But wait,
Hermogenes, this is not quite right.
Imitators of sheep and roosters are not giving names to them, and
musical mimesis when vocal is not naming. No, Sokrates. The way
things sound or look is what music and art express, and this kind of
mimesis has nothing to do with the technique of name-giving. Yes,
Sokrates. Doesn't each thing have its own proper being (ousía
423e)? I think so, Sokrates. So the mimesis of this being, by means
of letters and syllables (grámmai te kai syllabaîs), would show
what each thing is, right? Yes, Sokrates. And what, Hermogoenes,
will you call the person who is able to do this? The name-maker,
Sokrates.
So, Hermogenes, we must now find out whether in the case of the
elementary kind of terms you cited"ro[ll]," rhoês; "go," iénai; doûn
(Hermogenes' word 5), and scheseseôs (Sokrates' word6)whether in
this case the name-maker has grasped what-there-is (tou óntos) so
as to copy or counterfeit (apomimeîsthai) its being (ousían 424b).
The theory of ideas tests out so clumsily when applied to the
alleged "elements" of name-making, and Sokrates' tone is so
ambiguous here that the reader has to ask whether Sokrates is not
showing how badly or funnily it works, rather than asserting the
theory as the platonist commentators have always claimed. In any
case, whatever we think of Sokrates' analogy between the making
of pictures in painting and the making of language by name-giving
or rhetoric (425a), he seems to take it back by saying (at 425b) that
he would not know how to scientifically (technikôs
epistêmêsômetha) verify in what manner the ancients proceeded
from the analogy. But though he seems to revoke it, he persists in
applying the analogy down to 427d.
Of course, Hermogenes, the hypothesis that the Gods gave things
their names, which are, therefore, correct is safer. But then we
would be acting like the Tragic poets who solve their insoluble
problems by bringing a God-in-a-machine onto the stage. Again,
says Sokrates (repeating himself) the claim that we got our first
names from foreign peoples, or that their antiquity makes them
impossible to investigate are only evasions. So, Hermogenes, says
Sokrates
 Page 424
coming to the point anticipated above, even though I think my own
notions about the earliest names are presumptuous (hybristiká) and
laughable (geloîa), I will give you my view of elementary terms
unless you know of something better.
At the end of the exposition (426c-427d), which is as linguistically
comical as promised, Sokrates and Hermogenes ask Kratylos
whether he agrees or has a better account. Hermogenes, in fact,
insists, that Kratylos take his turn with Sokrates; and Kratylos is at
last brought into the exchange.
Significantly for the reader, Sokrates at once says to Kratylos
"actually I myself would not insist (ischurisaínên) on any of the
things I've said with the help of Hermogenes" (428a8). If what you
have to say is better, Kratylos, I will accept it. You seem to have
examined such things yourself, and to have learned from others. I
would gladly learn from you, Kratylos. The latter, it turns out, has
been greatly impressed as a Herkleitean by Sokrates oracular
utterances, as he calls them, "whether inspired by Euthyphro or by
some other muse dwelling inside yourself."
You know, Kratylos, I have been wonder-struck at this knowledge
of mine all along, and do not believe (apistô) it. We ought to re-
examine what I've said; for, the worst of all deceptions is self-
deception. The correctness of a name, we said, consists in its
showing (endeíksetai) the nature of (hoîón esti) the thing named,
did we not? That satisfies me, Sokrates. Then, Kratylos, are names
given for the sake of instruction? Certainly, Sokrates (428e).
In the Exchange with Kratylos Sokrates Becomes Refutative and
Admonitory
Now, this last opinion was a view attributed to Antishthenes, who
according to D. Laertius (VI.17) had written a treatise entitled "On
Education, or Names." But, while Antisthenes is said (VI.3) to have
been the first to define statement (lógos) in the very way Sokrates
has just defined the correctness of names, Laertius also claims he
maintained that aretê (human excellence) consists in deeds, not in
reasoning (lógos) or learning (VI.12). We cannot infer from his
mere title that Antisthenes contended so baldly that to know the
name was to know the thing, as Kratylos does at 435d.
It will also depend on whether we translate lógos as rational 'word'
or 'statement.' Antisthenes is reported by the Aristotelian
Metaphysics (1024b32) as believing, just like Kratylos, that it is
impossible to speak falsely, a thesis to which Sokrates will object.
However, since Antisthenes was not a Herakleitean but a "semi-
Socratic," it probably makes more sense to gener-
 Page 425
alize the allusiveness of this part of the dialogue as addressed more
to grammarians as a wholejust as the earlier satire was addressed to
Herakleitean and idealistic users of names who sought to reinforce,
with mere word analysis, their respective dogmas.
Kratylos agrees with Sokrates' Antistheneian definition of the
correctness of names at 428e, but he can't easily accept corollaries
that Sokrates brings with it. He doesn't accept the analogy in
which, if some painters represent their subjects better than others,
then some law-givers are better name-givers than others (429b,
430d-e). This is because, for Kratylos, if a name is not correctly
given, it is not a name at all (42968-9). His deeper reason for this is
that he takes the Sophistic, Antistheneian position that it is
impossible to speak a falsehood, because that would be to say what
is not (429d).
He also holds that a mistakenly attributed predicate is not a term
but a mere sound without purpose (matên 430a). The third big
claim that separates him from Sokrates is that the [Greek] language
itself and its elements seem to prove implicitly the rightness of the
Herakleitean thesis that all is in motion (437a1). In each of these
three claimsand in the fourth: that to know the name is the know
the thingKratylos is either refuted or seriously cautioned by
Sokrates.
The last twelve pages of the dialogue are thus refutative rather than
satirical. And the dialogue can be said to be named after Kratylos
in the spirit in which the Euthyphro and Euthydemus are named
after speakers who are refuted or admonished. In the courteous
confrontation between the dramatic Sokrates' and Kratylos, the
latter emerges as a surrogate for the contemporary combination of
some views of Herakleitos with some views of Antisthenes and
some other Sophists. The refutations are gently administered
presumably because Kratylos has only just embarked on these
studies and because, as Sokrates says at 430c-d, he wants to remain
the young man's friend and not be contentious.
In the first refutation Sokrates gets Kratylos to agree that the name
and its object are different, and that the former is an imitation of
the latter. Well, Kratylos, can I not say to a given person "this is
your picture," and show him either a likeness of himself or that of
some woman? Granted. Then, Kratylos, if some such assignment
occurs, we will call one kind speaking truly and the other kind
speaking falsely (431a-b). And if names can be assigned in this
way, either fittingly or unfittingly, would it not be proper to do the
same with verbs and nouns? And, since verbs and nouns are
combined to make sentences, the same must be true of sentences?
Kratylos agrees, or appears to do so. But we soon see that he has
not accepted Sokrates' comparison between paintings and the
earliest names (onómata).
 Page 426
Sokrates has just said (431c) something he will retract at 432b-d;
namely, that the painter who reproduces all of his model makes a
good picture, but that he who adds or omits also makes a picture,
albeit a bad one. By the same reasoning, Kratylos, does not the
copier (apomimoúmenos) of the being of things who uses syllables
and letters give us a good image (eikôn) or name when he gives all
that is appropriate, but a bad image or name if he omits from or
adds to this? Perhaps, says Kratylos. Then one name-maker, or
lawgiver as we called him, can be better than another (431e)?
That's possible, says Kratylos, adding: but when we use the art of
grammar (hê grammatikê technê) to make up names, if we add
subtract or transpose any letter, the name is not written at all, it
becomes a different word.
What you say, Kratylos, is only true of the aggregates named by
numbers. If you add to or subtract anything, they change their name
and nature. Ancient Greek used letters of the alphabet to represent
numbers. But this does not apply to the sort of thing images are. If
some God were to make an image of you, Kratylos, reproducing
totally and in detail everything you are, it would not be an image
but your double and would be indistinguishable from the original.
So, you could not tell the name from the thing if it duplicated
everything about it. So long as the distinct impression (typos) of the
thing can be found in the name or statement of it, the latter will be
correct, just as Hermogenes and I have been saying. Note that
Sokrates has not only retracted what he said at 431c8, but has also
committed the fallacy of over-extending his analogy, in order to
sidestep Kratylos's objection.
You cannot, without contradiction, Kratylos, both maintain that a
name is the representation of a thing anal that the representation is
a name only when it reproduces all the appropriate (prosekônta)
traits of the thing (433a-b). If you don't grant this, Kratylos, you'll
have to find another account of the rightness of names. But
Sokrates, what you say seems reasonable; and I grant it.
However, the reader's feeling that Sokrates has employed social
competence here to get Kratylos' agreement is confirmed when the
latter confides (433c7-8) that he has not been persuaded to the
proposition that some names can be less than well formed. But
neither will Kratylos give up his belief that a name is a
representation (dêloma: what has been clarified). He also believes
that some names are first names (prôta onómata 438c), the others
composite; and that it's different and better to make things clear by
means of similarity, than by means of chance elements (434a).
You're right, says Sokrates, picking up on Kratylos's concession
and also preparing to bring off the next refutation by getting
Kratylos to contradict himself out of his own mouth (se 434e4).
Then, Kratylos, will not 'first names' have some kind of similarity
to what they imitate? Yes. Am I right, Kratylos,
 Page 427
that rho resembles rushing, motion and hardness? Yes. And lambda
connotes smoothness and softness? Yes. Don't the Athenians call
sklêrotês (hardness) what the Eretrians call sklêrotêr? Yes. Do rho
and sigma have a likeness to the same thing; and does the final rho
mean to them what sigma means to us? Or, is it [the last letter] not
meaningful to one of us? They mean the same to both [groups],
Sokrates, as they are alike. Are they alike in every way, Kratylos?
As equally expressing rushing they are, Sokrates. What, Kratylos,
about the lambda in 'sklereotes,' hardness? Does it not express the
opposite of hardness? Perhaps it has no right to be there, Sokrates,
and should be removed or replaced. Still, Kratylos, do you not
understand what is meant when someone says sklêron using today's
pronunciation? Yes, my friend., but that is because of custom
(ethos 434e), says Kratylos refuting himself!
Kratylos cannot now deny that custom and convention contribute to
the clarification (delôsis) of what we have in mind to say (435b6-
7). But having now asserted this proposition and reinforced it with
the telling counter-ex-ample of the names of numbers, Sokrates
takes the opportunity to repeat (i) that he would be pleased for
names to be as far as possible (katà to dynatón) like the things
named, but (ii) that in truth the lift (holkê) words get from
similarity is small (glíschra), and it is necessary to use the carriage
(phortikós) of custom to get to the correctness of names.
Perhaps speech will be most beautiful (kállist'an légoito) when it
uses similarity as much as possible and most ugly when it does the
opposite, says Sokrates, honoring an aesthetic impulse seldom
recognized by translaters and commentaries. But, Kratylos, the next
question is what good names do and what is their capability
(dýnamin)? To instruct, Sokrates; the simple truth is, says Kratylos,
as if quoting dogma from good authority, he who knows the names
knows the things. This is the only method; and it is the best way to
teach (436a). I am certain that inquiry (zêtein) and discovery
(heurískein) follow the method you mention of discovering names
in order to find out what the things are.
Come, Kratylos, let us think this through. The investigator who
pursues names and their meanings runs a great risk of being
deceived. This is a most pregnant understatement, coming from a
Sokrates who has devoted more than three times the space he gives
Kratylos to the ad hoc devising of questionable but entertaining
connotations for over fourscore terms!
How can that be, Sokrates, asks Kratylos, showing that he has
missed the satirical point of Sokrates' exchange with Hermogenes.
Because, Sokrates answers, the first name-giver would have laid
down names according to his notion of the nature of things, and if
his conceptions were not right, we who follow him shall have been
deceived.
 Page 428
This possibility had not occurred to Kratylos because, as the reader
sees, he had thought: if it's a name, it's correctly given. He offers a
new but ineffectual counter-argument to the disturbing suggestion.
As a speaker yourself, Sokrates, haven't you noticed that all names
come into existence in the same way for the same purpose (436c)?
Logically, Kratylos, that is no counter-reason; for, names could all
be consistent with each other, but if the starting point of the
deduction contains an error, they will necessarily be wrong, too. 7 I
shall be surprised, Kratylos, if names are really consistent with
each other, But it is more important to re-examine the foundation
(tês archês) to see whether it is rightly laid (hypókeitai 436d-e). We
said, Kratylos, that names signify the being (ousían) of things,
showing us that the all is coming, going and flowing. Quite so,
Sokrates; that is their correct significance, says Kratylos, showing
his Herakleitean commitment.
Well, let's look again, Kratylos, at the ambiguity of epistêmê,
knowledge. It seems to mean that our soul stands still (histêsin) at
things. Or take bébaion (firm); it sounds like 'be based,' like being
at rest not in motion. And historía (inquiry) means much the same,
that it stops (histêsi) the flux. And pistón (faithful) certainly means
that which stops (histán). Again mnêmê (memory) connotes rest
(monê) in the soul, not motion.
Playing the same game as earlier in the dialogue but with an anti-
Herakleitean purpose, Sokrates finds stronger counter-instances.
Consider hamartía (mistake), and symphorá (misfortune), which
sound bad. If you follow only [possible origins of] the names, they
will appear the same as good words like synêsis (understanding,
agreeing with), and epistêmê (knowledge). We have to guess the
connections Sokrates is going on here, such as homarteîn
(accompany, attend) which is a synonym for hepésthai (follow,
attend) which can be brought into relation with epistamai (know),
and hence with epistêmê. Sympherôn (useful, opportune) can be set
beside symphorá (misfortune). Through syneimi (go with) synêsis
can be associated with synienai (confront in a hostile way).
And, Kratylos, what about amathía (ignorance)? Doesn't it sound
like hama theôi ióntos (going with God)? So, Kratylos, names with
the worst meanings appear like those with the best. And if we took
the trouble, we could find many names to support the view that the
name-giver thought all things were really at rest rather than in flux.
But Sokrates, says Kratylos feebly, you see that most of the names
connoted motion.
Are we going to count names like votes, Kratylos, and proceed by
majority? Secondly, how will we count the vote of names with
meanings that could be listed on either side? Kratylos agrees that
they probably shouldn't proceed like that. Meanwhile the reader
may be asking how Sokrates can move terms and
 Page 429
connotations around so uninhibitedly, without his daimôn, his
conscience, emerging to stop him? The context supplies the
answer: Sokrates gets his license from Kratylos's Herakleiteanism,
according to which all things are ever moving. Sokrates has,
merrily and probingly, included names among the things not
allowed to rest. We notice that all the speakers grant that names
have undergone change since ancient times.
Furthermore, Kratylos, how could the law-giver have known the
first things he was yet to name, if there were no names and things
can be known only through their names (438a-b)? To this new
refutation Kratylos can only reply, I think there's something in
what you say, Sokrates; adding, it seems to me the truest account is
that a superhuman power gave the first names to things, which is
why they are necessarily correct. With the superlative alêthestaton
(truest), Kratylos has implicitly granted that some accounts can be
more true than others; but the Sophistic position he had officially
taken was that there can be true accounts only, and that false
accounts are impossible.
Then, Kratylos, it must also seem to you that this genii (daimôn) or
God contradicted himself in giving all those names that oppose
each other, as we just saw. But, Sokrates, one set of those names is
not really a set of names. Which of the two, Kratylos, those that
infer stillness or that infer agitation? We just agreed that we could
not decide by simple majority.
So, Kratylos, if the names are making contradictory claims to be at
one with the truth (homoia têi alêtheia), how are we to decide?
Since there are no other original names, it'll have to be by means of
something that is not a name that we'll decide which are the true
names, namely, which of them show the truth of things (439e). So
it seems. Then, Kratylos, says Sokrates refuting him yet again, it
would follow that the way things are can be learned without names!
What other way, Kratylos, can there be than to learn about things
from each other and their relations if they are related, and from
themselves, not from something different? For the names are
something different, we agreed. This is the likely (eikós) and most
legitimate (dikaiótaton) way. 8 What you say seems true, Sokrates.
For heaven's sake, Kratylos, stop that. Did we not, previously and
nonetheless, agree that rightly given names are like the things
named and like images of events? Yes.
So, Kratylos, even if we can learn both through the names of things
and from themselves, which would be the fairer and clearer way: to
learn from the image whether it's a fair likeness and what the truth
is that it respresents, or to learn from truth both the truth itself and
whether its representation has been properly worked out? The latter
certainly, Sokrates. How to learn about the things that are (ta ónta)
is perhaps more than you and I can ascertain. But it is
 Page 430
a welcome thing to have agreed that they are to be investigated not
on the basis of names but much rather through themselves (439b)!
Evidently, Sokrates.
One more thing we must examine, Kratylos, to avoid being
deceived by the names that appear to show that everything is
always in flux. Suppose it's the name-givers who are in a whirl, not
things. Look at what I often dream, Kratylos. May we say that there
is a something which is beauty itself or good itself, and so also for
each thing that is (439c-d)? To me it seems so, Sokrates. This
answer is surprising, from a Herakleitean; it shows that Kratylos's
answers have become perfunctory. Then let us examine this ''in
itself" (autò . . . ekeîno, 439d3), not to see whether a given face or
any such thing is beautiful or in flux, but whether the itself-
beautiful (autò . . . to kalón)as we may call itis always such as it is.
Necessarily, Sokrates. If it is always vanishing (hypeksérchetai), it
is not possible to say that it is this or that it is such, Kratylos. Must
it not at once become different and, passing away, cease to be what
it was, hand in hand with our talking [about it]. Necessarily,
Sokrates.
So, Kratylos, how can that be something which is never in the same
state? Conversely, if something is in the same state, it is not, for the
time being, changing. And if it is always the way it was and
remains itself, how can it change or move without giving up its
own form (tês hautoû idéas)? In no way, Sokrates. Nor, Kratylos,
could it be known; for as the knower approached, it would have
changed and changed in kind, so that the sort of thing it is and its
condition could not be known (440a). To know none of its
conditions is to not know a thing. Quite so, Sokrates. As Sokrates'
attack upon Herkleiteanism and the primacy of names deepens,
starting at 439b, so do Kratylos's responses become perfunctory.
This brings Sokrates to his peroration and parting exhortation to
Kratylos. Nor is it likely there would be any knowing if all things
are in alteration and nothing abides, Kratylos. There is such a thing
as knowing, for instance, because knowing does not change its
nature (eîdos) and become some other sort of thing. If knowing
were always being altered, there would never be any knowing. By
the same reasoning, Kratylos, there would be no knower and
nothing to be known. But if the knower lasts and what is to be
known abides, and if the beautiful and the good and each one of
these existences is, then I cannot think that they resemble a rushing
(rhoêi) and shifting (phorai).
Now whether this is the way things areSokrates adds, for the
benefit of Kratylosor whether what either Herakleitos or others say
about them is true is another question. But a thoughful person will,
surely not educate (epitrépsanta) himself by means of names or
heal (therapeúein) his soul with names alone. Nor, Kratylos, will
he trust names and their makers to know very much when they
reveal (katagignôskein) that all things, oneself included,
 Page 431
are rheumy and flowing, like leaky pots or people with catarrh.
This may be the way things are, Kratylos, and maybe not. So
consider, bravely and well, and accept nothing carelessly, for you
are still young and the right age for it. And if your search uncovers
anything, please pass it on to me.
I will, Sokrates. But I assure you I haven't been unreflecting, and
after taking pains and considering, it seems to me that what
Herakleitos says still stands (sic) (phaínetai échein hôs Herakleitos
legei [!] 440e1). Kratylos doesn't see that he has actually
contradicted himself with words that grant that something abides.
Eis aûthis, "another time," my friend; you will instruct me when
you come back. For now, go on to the countryside as you had
planned. Hermogenes here will set you on your way. Yes, Sokrates,
but you too must try and give thought to these things.
Notes
1. For Eupolis, see J.M. Edmonds' The Fragments of Attic Comedy,
I. Old Comedy.
2. Or, alternatively, "doesn't convention (nómos) seem to you to
give them . . ." Sokrates suggestively equates the law-giver
(nomothetês) with the name-maker (onomatourgós) at 389a.
3. Given the strangeness of such phrasing as "shuttle-itself" or
"shuttle-in-itself" in contrast with the ease with which one can say
"beauty-itself'' or beauty-in-itself," and the unworkmanly notion
that it's an idea that makes a shuttle what it is, Sokrates would seem
to be also testing or teasing, besides Hermogenes, the theory of
ideas.
4. It is not impossible that the Euthyphro, in so far as it is an
exercise in intellectual honesty, was to a degree composed in
expiation for the verbal foolery built into the Kratylos. Perhaps the
man-of-knowledge versed in purifications (kathaírein, 397a1) who
is an alternative to the priest at 396e-397a, is Plato's own Sokrates
as he conducts the scrupulous inquiry into piety and impiety in the
Euthyphro.
5. Either the pr.act.ptc.nom.s. of deô (bind, need, beg) or the
3rd.aor.inf.act. of didômi (give).
6. Aor.ptc. of echô (hold), which puns with the the genitive of
schesis (figure).
7. This is the same point that Parmenides enacted exhibitively in
the last part of the Parmenides, by showing forth in his antilogies
that you can reach opposite conclusions by deduction, if you don't
object to any of the premisses at the start of your reasoning.
8. Fowler translates "natural and straightest" here; Jowett has "true
or natural way"; Méridier's French says "natural and most
legitimate." There is a bias to using "natural" to translate
dikaiótaton, which is not Sokrates's at this point in the
conversation.
 Page 433

Chapter 21
The Symposium:
Sokrates, Eros, and Aristophanes
About the Setting
Apollodorus our narrator got the story of this dialogue from
Aristodemus who was present with Sokrates at Agathon's
symposium, or banquet. A certain Phoenix, who also knows of and
has been talking about the reunion in question, is not clearly
informed about it; so much so, that he has given Glaucon the false
impression (172d) that he was reporting a recent conversation. It
would appear that Plato wishes Apollodorus's account of the
famous eveningwhich would seem (in Thucydides' words) to have
achieved "the level of the mythical"to supersede all other accounts.
The banquet was convened to celebrate Agathon's first dramatic
victory on the day after it. According to Athenaeus (Deipnosophists
V.217a) this was in the year 416 B.C., during the archonship of
Euphemus when Alcibiades was at the height of his popularity and
Apollodorus and Glaucon were children. The time at which
Apollodorus tells the story is much later, but some time before the
death of Sokrates. Glaucon [is this Plato's relative?] has been
consorting with Sokrates for three years, but Apollodorus is a
longtime, well-known friend of Sokrates. Agathon has been absent
from Athens for many years. From Aristophanes
Thesmophoriazusae, it appears that he was in Athens till 411 B.C.;
but from Aristophanes Frogs (83-85) it seems he was absent in 405
B.C. Since Archelaus, the king of Macedon, Agathon's host was
assassi-
 Page 434
nated in 400 B.C., we can place Agathon's telling of the story
(dramatically speaking) somewhere between 405 B.C. and the end
of the century.
According to the fiction of the dialogue, the conversation took
place during the time of year when the nights were long (223c).
According to Athenaeus, Agathon won his prize at the Lenaia, the
Winter Festival or Lesser Dionysia. This could fit with and confirm
the reference in the dialogue, or be taken from it. The difficulty is
that at 175e Sokrates sarcastically refers to the "fact" that thirty
thousand Greeks have seen Agathon's play. For so many to have
seen it, it would've had to have been given at the Greater or City
Dionysia when the nights were short. Perhaps it only seemed a long
night because the whole of it was spent talking; but the
inconsistency, if there is one, reminds us to take the encounters as
calculated constructions by Plato, not historical reports.
That the reader is expected by Plato to give the words of his
speakers their full interactive value is shown by the fact that, as in
the Theaetetus, the narrator of the conversation has had ample time
to correct and verify his account by being himself a lover of
reasonings who has long kept company with Sokrates.
We can infer something about the dialogue's date of composition,
since Aristophanes (193a) compares Zeus's dividing up of his
mythical duplex human beings to the dividing up (diôkisthêmen) by
Sparta of rebellious Mantinea into several Arcadian villages. If this
reference is to what occurred in 385 B.C. in Peloponnesus
(Xenophon Hellenica v.2 1ff.), then it implies that the dialogue was
not finished till after this date. This date, coincidentally, is close to
that of the death of Aristophanes, whose last extant play is the
second Plutus of 388 B.C. Since we believe this play to have been
followed by just two more, Aristophanes' end is put at around 386
B.C., the second year of the ninety-seventh Olympiad. But if there
is no historiographic anachronism, then the reference could be
taken to imply that Aristophanes was still alive in 385 B.C.
Could Plato have been honoring the memory of Aristophanes with
the marvelous myth he gives him to invent in the speech that is the
central one of the seven orations reported by Apollodorus? I say
central because (i), it is pivotal insofar as Sokrates' speech is more
of a response to it than to the others. Sokrates indeed responds to it
as the speech whose extravagant wit must be matched or bettered,
and whose earthiness must be spiritualized with intellectuality. But
(ii) just as Aristophanes' metaphoric aptness is achieved by
satirically echoing the medico-physiological opinions of his day, so
is Sokrates' soaring intellectualism about love a full-blown satire of
Pythagorean anticorporealism and ascetic ideality.
 Page 435

That Sokrates' Speech Is Mainly a Response to Aristophanes'

Many readers have assumed that Aristophanes is anti-Socratic. But
this is a mistake based on a misunderstanding of his play The
Clouds. It's not the historical Sokrates that is there satirized, but the
stereotypes, already well-developed, of the sophistical or
speculative nature-philosopher and of the Pythagorean refugee
from Western Greece, looking for pupils or domicile in Athens, the
city of talkers (Kratylos 398d-e) and disputants. Aristophanes was
not satirizing successful men-of-knowledge like Protagoras or
Gorgias, but a composite of the nature of such thinkers as
Anaxagoras who had been fined and exiled by the Athenians, and
the impoverished Pythagoreans who made a virtue of their poverty.
1
That Sokrates came to be associated, at the end of his life and in
later memory, with the stereotype in Aristophanes' comedy can be
seen to be what's called a media event, something that happened to
public opinion as engineered by Anytus, Meletus and their party,
for the purpose of preparing or reinforcing the judicial move they
were going to make against Sokrates in the courts. In the Apology,
though it is not to be taken as a historical source, we find Sokrates
taking this media-event jokingly but seriously enough to be worth
explaining to the dikasts.
Given the influence of Sophism and the development of rhetoric in
the late fifth century, a component of Aristophanes' composite had
to be an equivocating or pedantic use of words that is not
characteristic of Plato's Sokrates. Perhaps Aristophanes gave the
name of "Sokrates" to the meteorosophist in his comedy (which
was not at first successful) because while the historical Sokrates
was the peer of the best-known successful men-of-knowledge of
the time, he was not rich or popular in the sense that they were.
This made him an example of the poor philosopher, but not one
who fitted the stereotype, since he did not grub for fees, or keep
school, or investigate cosmic phenomena. The reader is made to
notice at Symposium 174a that Sokrates is wearing his best sandals,
looking the opposite of a Pythagorean, and much concerned with
some thoughts of his own.
Sokrates and Aristophanes are not only the two critical spirits in
the group of love-praisers, they are also the only free men in it, in
the sense of not being personally bound to a particular lover or kind
of love. Alcibiades the seventh speaker, is madly in love with
Sokrates, whom he cannot seduce but continues to admire and
praise. Erynimachus the Asklepiad, who knows no more than his
profession and hides his mediocrity behind a doctrine of balanced
moderation, is in love with Phaedrus (176d, 177a, 223b), who
chose to become a
 Page 436
follower of Hippias rather than remain a student of Sokrates.
Agathon, talented, effeminate and Gorgian in his speech, is loved
by Pausanias (193c), the clever Sophistic defender of pederasty.
But like Alcibiades, Agathon also wants to be admired by Sokrates.
The two free men, however, are not loveless (223a for Sokrates;
117e for Aristophanes), or without a good understanding of love.
And in so far as there necessarily is something agonistic about the
Phaedrus-Eryximachus proposal that each banqueter take his turn
at eulogizing Love, the contest is felt by the historically aware
reader to really be between Aristophanes and Sokratesalthough the
fact that the dialogue is narrated by a Socratic follower (from the
Socratic point of view) distracts the modern reader from the
centering largeness of Aristophanes presence on the Athenian
scene at the turn of the century. Another complication about the
point of view is that it is not the business (in the world of the
dialogues) of the hearsay narrator of a long-past conversation, to
help the reader catch the tone in which the speeches were
delivered. Apollodorus has only to be careful to repeat accurately
what he heard from Aristodemus and verified with Sokrates. If the
pedagogue reader of the dialogue to contemporary auditors was a
good actor, that was surely helpful. And prose on a page is not
effective in this dimension.
Sokrates arrives halfway through the repast, and is forced by
Agathon the host to sit next to himself. The reason Sokrates gives
for consenting is ironic. The pride in his own sagacity (sophía) that
Sokrates caught in Agathon's eye at the moment of his triumph
before thirty thousand Greeks, surely, makes Agathon more
sagacious than Sokrates. So Sokrates hopes some of Agathon's
wisdom will seep down to increase his own meager supply of it.
You are arrogant (hybristês), Sokrates, says Agathon; but we will
have to plead the matter later before Dionysos, and he will judge
between us. That Sokrates is in a jestingly aggressive mood is
confirmed by his words at 177e where he describes himself "as
claiming to understand nothing but love matters," and therefore
having to agree with Phaedrus-Eryximachus proposal. That he
understands love matter is clearly true of the Sokrates of the
Phaedrus, but Sokrates is just as clearly making the claim with
festive irony.
Sokrates teasingly claims the same for Aristophanes, "who," he
says, "spends all his time with Dionysos and Aphrodite," and is
thus also qualified to comply with the proposal. That Sokrates is
thinking competitively is confirmed by his remark that those at the
bottom of the table, like himself, won't be getting a fair chance. He
adds, characteristically, that he'll be pleased if the earlier speakers
perform with suitable beauty and competence of speech. While
Sokrates does, later, argue with Agathon's lightweight Gorgianic
speech, we'll see that what he really has in mind to address is
Aristophanes' invention.
 Page 437
Now Dionysos was the God of Greek drama as well as of fertility,
agriculture and viniculture. Aphrodite, the Goddess of fertility was
more explicitly the patroness of love matters, especially, it would
seem of heterosexual relations. Thus, at Republic 329b, "service to
Aphrodite" means "serving a woman sexually." It seems that
Sokrates has vaguely, in a jolly way, "accused" Aristophanes of
several different things not entirely compatible with each other: of
writing plays and drinking heavily, and of both kinds of sexuality.
The reader notices that Aristophanes, as a professional comic, is
concerned at 189b to say things that are funny (geloîos) rather than
ridiculous (katagélastos); but the distinction is lightly made. He
and Sokrates both say things that are funny and ridiculous.
Furthermore, just like Aristophanes at 189b, Sokrates too says he
doesn't want to be laughed at, when his turn comes. So with
carefully chosen phrases from 199a to 199b, he arranges not to be
laughed at, even though he is going to tell his audience the
outrageous truth (199b4-5) about love in his ironic way.
Aristophanes' Account of Human Longing
The aptness of Aristophanes' account of love relationships is a
result of the pregnancy of his central metaphor of the human
organism in its rebellious relation to the Gods. People originally
were four-legged and four-armed, quick, strong, fertile and so
clever that Zeus was frightened by the threat into cutting all
humans into halvessomething like we are now. This at once made
us less dangerous to him, but unfortunately also less sufficient unto
ourselves. Originally of three different kinds with respect to the
two sexes, all humans now are only half the person they were
before, and have only half the sex.
Soon they began to long for their other half. When they met again
(191a5 ff.) "they would fling their arms about each other, and thus
entwined, yearn to re-merge their natures. They began to die off
from hunger and inanition, because they refused to do anything
apart from each other." Whenever one half died, the bereaved
remainderwhether half a manwoman or half a doublewoman or half
a doublemanwent seeking for the embrace of some other human
half, what we now call either a man or a woman. Zeus had pity, and
to keep us from dying out, he now turned our private parts around
to the front, just as Apolloat first and at Zeus's commandhad turned
our faces and half the neck around to the bisected side and patched
us up. The view of our own sectioned side and the resection of the
other would serve as a reminder of our primordial failure (palaioû
páthous). In this way, not only was reproduction of the species
ensured when male and female halves embraced,
 Page 438
but also assured was the surcease from the insatiable longing that
kept humans from their everyday duties and activities. It is from
this ancient time that the innate (emphytos) love of humans for one
another dates, as does the pair-bonding that works to soften the
pain of being human by making one out of two (190d-191d).
Aristophanes' funny story skillfully brings sexuality into a good
perspective where love's rightful place among human feelings and
in civilization can be accepted by the mature reader. Aristophanes'
myth is so apposite and sensitive, that we can now suggest that a
precipitating cause of Aristophanes' attack of hiccoughs was the
dishonest cynicism of Pausanias's self-serving sophistry about sex.
In any case, the explanatory power of Aristophanes' myth has not
been as fully appreciated as it deserves to be. 2 We do find Paul
Shorey warning (What Plato Said, p. 192) that we perhaps should
only take Aristophanes' anatomizing here as seriously as we take
the teleological physiology of Plato's Timaios. But his, of course, is
said from the literalist's point of view.
Men who are the slice of a manwoman will miss, and so pursue,
womanhood; so also will women who are slices of a manwoman
miss their man-part, and seek it restlessly. But women who are
slices of a doublewoman will prefer to seek companionship and
fulfillment among other sectioned doublewomen. There really is no
more shame, once we've understood this, about the association of
the latter kind of humanpieces than there is about that of the two
former kinds, which are heterosexual. So too, it is easy to
understand that youths who pursue manhood are valiant like the
male to whose attraction and commands they are responsive; for
they are slices of doublemen. A big proof (méga tekmêrion, 192a6)
of this, says Aristophanes' slyly, is that this kind alone is led to
show its manhood in the pursuit of politics. I say "slyly" because,
judging from his plays, the attitude of the historical Aristophanes to
politicians was decidedly negative.
Now we can understand, continues Aristophanes, the enduring and
wondrous nature of true love. It occurs whenever a human half
encounters his or her actual other half: they have found the other
half of their true selves. Nothing else could explain their desire to
be together forever. It is a deeper yearning than the sexual
attraction between the partners can account for. It is, in a word, the
human form of the desire for wholeness and the search for it. That,
he says, is what love (erôs, 193a1) is. And even though the lovers
who make their lives whole in their togetherness would not be able
to explain it themselves, it is what they live by and have a dim
apprehension of.
But because of our trespasses against the Gods, says Aristophanes,
becoming funny in another way, we lost this wholeness and were
divided up, like the Arcadians by the Lacedaemonians. We had
better behave ourselves and re-
 Page 439
spect the Gods lest we be cut down the middle once again, along
the line of our noses, and end up looking like those figures carved
on tombs. But I do seriously exhort all men to piety under the
leadership of Love (Erôs). Follow Eros; for it is those who oppose
him that the Gods reject. But if we are in a good relation to Love,
the God will help us, and we will find our true and well-beloved
counterpartas very few people do. And Eryximachus must not
make fun of what I say or think that I'm referring to Pausanias and
Agathon as possessing the perfect love defined by Pausanias as
existing only between males. I am talking about the whole world of
women and men to which the Love-God lends his aid and gives the
hope of achieving happiness through the respect that heals and
brings us back to our original natures (193c-d).
We observe that, on finishing his story Aristophanes takes pains to
keep Eryximachus from commenting. This confirms the impression
that Aristophanes was consciously amending some of the former's
views as well as replacing his cosmo-physiologic conception of
Erôs with a human psychological approach. For instance, not only
had Eryximachus said that the dissimilar (anómoion) craves and
loves the dissimilar (186b7-8), but he had (inconsistently) invoked
the principle that the most contrary (enantiôtata) qualities repel
each other most. Eryximachus confusion of principle is covered
over by a grandiose Herakleitean line about how "the one at
variance with itself is drawn together, like harmony of bow and
lyre." Thus, tautologically, there are either compatible or
incompatible "variances."
From this it is supposed to follow (i) that music is knowledge of
love matters relating to harmony and rhythm and (ii) that Pausanias
was right in saying that only some men, the orderly (kosmíois,
187d5) ones, should be allowed to make love and that they,
perhaps, are the ones whom love improves. Eryximachus also
claimed that disorderly love is the cause of all seasonal
disturbances and agricultural blights. That his whole discourse is
based on Pausanias's invidiously drawn distinction is shown by the
ridiculous definition of medicine with which he started: it is
knowledge of the love matters of the body with regard to its filling
and emptying. The good physician is the one who can replace
ignoble (aischrós) loves with noble somatic compatibilities (erôta).
Thus, Eryximachus, in applying Empedocles' view of the universal
force of love, has made the mistake of subsuming Empedocles'
second universal force, Strife, under love by defining it as a
diseased or debased form of compatibility. This would make love,
of one kind or the other, the cause of everythingincluding
especially disease. And Eryximachus has said almost nothing about
healthy love or the healing power of love because he seems to think
that Pausanias's praise of the heavenly kind has sufficed. But: this
is just what ap-
 Page 440
pears to have disgusted Aristophanes into the hiccoughs. And it is
why Aristophanes lumps these two speakers together in the
introduction to his own speech (189c).
Aristophanes has also said at 189c that men (including presumably
Pausanias and Eryximachus) have quite misperceived the power of
love. Ast and other commentators are right to claim that
Aristophanes has been revolted by Pausanias's special pleading,
cleverly covered-up as it is, in favor of just the form of pederasty
that Pausanias prefers and that completely excludes the female
principle from the good kind of love. That Pausanias knows he has
been sophistical is shown by his seemingly modest remark, as he
ends, "see how much the men-of-knowledge (sophoí) have taught
me" (185e). Actually, this is more like the vanity of the tennis-
player who admires his own strokes than like the irony it pretends
to be.
Though Eryximachus stands corrected, he cannot (all the same) but
be impressed by Aristophanes' account. I have so enjoyed your
discourse, he says to him, that I will obey you and not make fun
and will keep silent. So much of such scope (pollà kai pantodapá,
193e7), he adds, has been said already that were it not for my
confidence in the cleverness of Agathon and Sokrates, I would fear
there was no more to say. This is praise indeed; on the strength of it
alone Aristophanes' speech should be granted more structural 3
significance for the dialogue as a whole than it has been.
Eryximachus has recognized that Aristophanes has brilliantly
excelled over the previous speakers.
Does Aristophanes' account cover the cases of love that are
mistaken attractions, infatuations or neurotic interactions as we
would call them, with the same convincingness as the rest of his
speech? Yes, in that these would be cases of relationships between
complementary human halves that were not originally halves of
each other. Since the latteri.e., true lovers find each other so
infrequently, Aristophanes' account also makes sense statistically in
terms of the great number of unhappy loves, as well as of those that
come close to the complete model; while the principle that like
seeks matching like allows for degrees of likeness or fittingness.
Finally, it is an easy extrapolation, which tests and confirms the
power of his myth, that if Aristophanes had cared to account for
incest, he could have done so by categorizing it as either a
counterfeit of the proper type of original oneness or as a case in
which the incestuous partners are not matching halves or duplicates
but merely reduplications or reproductions of the same entity. This
would make incest, accurately enough, a form of self-love. In
contrast, Aristophanes' account of the best kind of love makes true
lovers both alike and other in the correspondential, not
reproductive sense of alike and other.
Clever and euphonic as Agathon's speech is in its Gorgianic way,
there can
 Page 441
be no doubt of its anticlimactic nature and rhetorical inferiority
compared to Aristophanes' speech. The applause Agathon gets
from the auditors in the dialogue is called for as much by the serial
arrangement of the performers and the politeness of the guests
toward the host they are honoring, as by the fluency with which its
conventional distinctions are made accessible to the audience in the
dialogue. But Sokrates himself, we soon see does not like it. Before
Agathon had even begun, Sokrates had voiced his disapproval
(194b-c) of Agathon's confident skill with mass audiences. There
are, naturally, more people at the banquet than speakers listed by
Aristodemus. We also remember that it is possible to arouse mob
emotions in the absence of an actual mob. Phaedrus has to cut off
Sokrates' dangerous cross-questioning and ask that Agathon
proceed to his speech without interruption.
As soon as Agathon ends his speech, we see from Sokrates' tone
and remarks that several things have displeased him about it.
Sokrates pretends he cannot compete with a speech which, by its
end (epì teleutês) is an astonishing crescendo of the most beautiful
words and phrases (198b). He feigns to fear that this overwhelming
reminder of Gorgias's original eloquence will, Gorgon-like, reduce
him to stony silence. He declares that his ignorance of what
Agathon called the one method (heîs trópos orthòs, 195a2) which
eulogies ought to follow, exempt him from his previous agreement
to speak. He (Sokrates) has been so foolish as to think that one
should select, from the truth about a person, the good things that
can be said. But Agathons' method is to somehow attach everything
that is good to his subject (198d-e). Sokrates confesses he is not
this kind of expert in love matters. This method works only for
those not acquainted with the subject; thus, he cannot be one of
these eulogists of Love.
But he can speak the truth about love, if they care to hear it in his
own words; but he would look ridiculous, if taken to be competing
with the eulogists. So, Phaedrus, says Sokrates, either let me off my
obligation or, if you must hear another speech, let me speak in my
own way about the truth in such plain words as occur to me. They
all insist on hearing him. Sokrates immediately gets permission to
put "a few small questions" to Agathon.
Eros and Intellect in Sokrates' Tale of the Prophetess
Is not love always of, or for,something Agathon; is it not a relation?
Does love desire what it is the love of? Certainly, Sokrates. Then,
Agathon, it follows that love necessarily lacks what it desires?
Agathon has to agree. Love, then, is directed towards the very thing
it lacks (200e)? Yes. Now, Agathon, did you
 Page 442
not previously state that love is of the beautiful, there being no such
thing as love of the ugly? Yes. But we agreed that love is of that
which it lacks and does not have? Yes. Then, Agathon, love cannot
itself be beautiful, if what it loves is what it lacks, Socrates
concludes. Agathon admits that perhaps he didn't know his subjec.
But your words were beautiful Agathon, says Sokrates (201c)
softening the refutation. Give me just one or two more: do you not
think that the things that are good are beautiful? Yes. Then,
Agathon, if love lacks beautiful things, it must also lack good
things. I see, Sokrates, that it is impossible to contradict
(antilégein) you. Me, it is easy to refute, says Sokrates modestly; it
is the truth that cannot be refuted. Sokrates' modesty is ironic
because it contradicts the facts of the world of the dialogues, in
which it is very difficult to refute Plato's Sokrates.
Thus, minimizing his differences with Agathon, Sokrates turns to
the discourse on Love he says he once heard from the mantic lady
from Mantinea. She was Diotima, whose name in Greek connects
her with the honoring of Zeus, and who was so well versed in
matters of sacrifice that she averted the great Plague from Athens
for a decade. The conversation which Sokrates now reports he had
with Diotima about Erôs, divides into two main parts. The first,
from 201 e to 204c, gives us a mythic genealogy of Erôs which is a
good metaphor for his conceptional derivation. The second part is
devoted to the works (ta érga) of Erôs, and is in effect a functional
definition of Erôs in the form of an allegory (204d-212a).
Thus, the reader is not getting what is usually called a 'Sokratic
definition' of love, and neither is Sokrates following ''Agathon's
method of exposition" as he diplomatically pretends at 201e-2. The
amused reader notes the coincidence by which the foreign
prophetess of Sokrates' story is said to have used the cross-
questioning (anakrínousa) or Socratic form of speech. According
to Sokrates, she also began, by another "coincidence," with a
refutation of Sokrates' claims about Erôs, whom he had described
in the same way as Agathon just now! Not only that; she used
reasoning and arguments just like the ones Sokrates has had to
bring against Agathon.
What do you mean, Diotima, Sokrates says he said, is Love ugly
and bad [since, as was just shown, he is not beautiful and good]?
For shame, Sokrates, is what is not beautiful necessarily ugly? Or,
says Diotima, is whoever lacks expert knowledge (sophón)
completely ignorant (amathés)? Is there not something in between
expertise and ignorance? What would that be, Diotima? Judging
rightly, for instance, without being able to give the reason, is
neither ignorance (because your judgment was true) nor knowledge
(because you can't give an explanation of it). So desist, Sokrates,
from saying that what is not
 Page 443
good is bad. Love is something between bad and ugly, and
beautiful and good.
But, Diotima, it is agreed that Love is a great God. By those who
know, Sokrates, or those who don't know? By everybody, Diotima
(202b10). Certainly not by your or me, Sokrates. Do you not agree
that all Gods are happy and beautiful? I agree, Diotima. And he is
happy who has good and beautiful things? Yes. But you just
admitted, Sokrates, Love desires good and beautiful things because
he lacks them. I have, Diotima. Not having them, Sokrates, how
can love be a God? He cannot be, Diotima. So, Sokrates, you see
you don't believe him to be a God.
As I said previously, Sokrates, he is something between a mortal
and an immortal. What is that, Diotima? A powerful (mégas) spirit,
Sokrates; for all spirituality shares in godhood and mortality
(202e). What power does he have, Diotima? To unify, by mediating
between Gods and mortals and mortal prayers and divine
commands. The immortal does not mix with the mortal (203a2).
But waking or sleeping, Sokrates, it is through Love or the spiritual
that human and divine intercommunicate. A spiritual man,
Sokrates, is someone who knows about these things; and Love is
one among many and various spirits.
Love's parentage is a long story, says Diotima, in answer to
Sokrates' question. Among the Gods at the feast for the birth of
Aphrodite was Resourcefulness (Póros), son of Counsel (Mêtidos).
But neediness (Penía) also came to the banquet. While
Resourcefulness was sleeping off an excess of nectar in Zeus's
garden, Neediness the unresourceful managed to lie beside him and
conceive his child, Eros. This is why Love has always been an
acolyte of Aphrodite, and is by nature a lover of beauty; for, he was
born on the birthday of the beautiful Aphrodite.
But being the son of Neediness, Love is always in want (203d4),
and hard, rather than gentle as people think. He also takes after his
father, and is a great high-strung schemer after everything that is
good and beautiful, keen for practical wisdom (phronêseôs), a
problem-solver (pórimos) interested in knowledge (philosophôn)
all his life, an impressive manipulator (goês, pharmakeús) and
Sophist (sophistês). By nature neither immortal nor mortal, he
oscillates between blossoming abundance and killing penury, and
stands halfway between expert knowledge (sophías) and ignorance
(amathías). Now, Sokrates, you know that the ignorant do not
know enough to desire, and therefore, pursue knowledge. In this
they are like the Gods and those already expert, who do not need to
pursue knowledge (philosopheî because they possess it already
(203e-204a).
Who then, Diotima, are the knowledge-seekers (philosophoûntes)?
Obviously, Sokrates, the intermediate sortamong whom is Love.
Since knowledge is
 Page 444
one of the most beautiful things, 4 and love is of the beautiful, Love
is necessarily a knowledge-seeker (philósophon). As such he is
something between an expert and an ignoramus, by parentage a
combination of witless helplessness and canny resourcefulness. So
don't, Sokrates, confuse that which is lovable (to erastón)fair,
graceful and whole as it iswith the lover (to erôn), who is in a
different class (idean), as I've just explained.
Lady, Sokrates says he said to the visitor, you speak well. But if
Love is like that, of what use is it to mankind? That, Sokrates, is
the next thing I will try to teach you. Keeping in mind that Love is
of and for beautiful things, what would you say is the love of the
lover? That the beautiful things become his (204d7), says Sokrates,
with dubious 'aesthetics' (as we call it) but correct 'erotics' (as the
Greeks called it). Still, Sokrates, your answer provokes another
question: what will he have who comes by beautiful things?
Sokrates says he was not able to answer that one readily.
Come Sokrates, enjoins Diotima socratically: suppose I asked,
what is the love of the lover of good things? To possess them,
Diotima. And what, Sokrates, will he get who gets good things?
Happiness (eudaimonía), answers Sokrates. Sokrates here is going
by the connotations of eudaimôn, "having good fortune," "blessed
by the Gods," etc.; he is not a possessive individualist. And that,
Sokrates is a complete (télos) answer, says Ddiotima; for we do not
ask a man who is happy what else he wants. Yes, Diotima, all have
this in common.
But, Sokrates, we don't mean that all men love the same thing, do
we? I was wondering, Diotima. Do not wonder, she says, for we
have abused the word love by applying the name for all forms of
love to the one kind we have singled out (205b). I'd like an
example, Diotima. Well poetry (poiêsis) in Greek means many
kinds of making, of bringing into being what did not exist before
(ek tou mê ontos eis to on); so that all craftsmen could be called
poets, makers or creators (dêmiourgoi).5 True, Diotima. But still
we separate out just those who make things out of music, meters
and words and call them, only, by the name which applies to the
whole process. True, Diotima. Diotima is not only correcting
Sokrates' logic in his story; she has begun to correct his aesthetics
by distinguishing it from erotics.
So it is with love, Sokrates; all yearnings for things that are good
and for happiness are love; though those who pursue happiness
through love of money, or love of athletics, or love of knowledge
are not called loving or lovers. And the story that says that those
who seek their other half are lovers is right only in so far as what is
sought is something good (205d-e). The reader will not fail to note
the allusion to Aristophanes' myth, here. For men everywhere
prefer to amputate an arm or a leg if it is doing them evil. Only if
what is one's own is good, do men love their own, Sokrates. So it
seems, Diotima. And do they
 Page 445
just love it, or do they love it all the time? That too, Diotima. In a
word, Sokrates, love is for the lasting possession of the good
(206a9-10).
The prophetess's allusion to Aristophanes' invention tells the reader
(as well as Sokrates' auditors) that she too is to be taken as an
invention and that, as stated earlier, it is Aristophanes' pregnant
myth that Sokrates' ironic allegory is trying to surpass.
Now, Sokrates, if this is what love pursues, just how are we to
describe the earnest manner and purposeful conduct that is called
love? What is such an effort (ergon) all about, Sokrates? I wouldn't
admire your knowledge so much and come to learn from it, if I
knew, Diotima. Then I shall state it for you. The aim of this activity
is an engendering, an engendering within beauty which requires
both body and soul (206b). It takes divination (manteías) to
understand that, Diotima. All mankind, Sokrates, yearns by nature
to beget; but it can be done properly only upon the beautiful, as
when, for example, a man and a woman come together. Now this is
a sacred business, Sokrates; for this engendering cannot occur in
what is out of tune with itself. For what is brought to birth is the
immortal part of the mortal creature. And the immortal cannot arise
from what is discordant.
While recognizing the validity of Diotima's modulation of
Aristophanes' claim into the statement that one can love one's own
only if it is good, the reader cannot yet grant that her rhetoric is up
to the standard of interestingness set by Aristophanes. Sokrates
comes to the points he is making, through Diotima, more
laboriously.
Lady Beauty, says Diotima, is the Norn or Goddess of this travail.
Hence it is that the conceiving power is aroused by and blossoms in
the presence of the beautiful. But it is repelled by ugliness, which
cannot unburden it. But beauty can and does disburden it; for love
is not just of the beautiful, but of engendering upon the beautiful
(206e). And why of engendering, Sokrates? Because the share of
immortality that falls to mortals is to be ever reproducing
(aiegenés). And since love wants what is good forever, it follows
that we yearn for immortality. For this reason, says the prophetess
with the same logic as underlay her previous inference, love is
necessarily of immortality.
On another occasion Diotima asked me, Sokrates continues, what is
the cause of this strange state of love and desire (207a)? "Where
men are concerned, she said, they may be supposed to act thus
from reason (ek logismoû). But what is the cause of the erotic
condition in animals, Sokrates? Note that in so far as Diotima is the
speaker, the question and its antecedent show an intellectualist
bias; but that in so far as Sokrates is the speaker, there is wit in
their juxtaposition. It's just because I need to learn these things that
I have come to you Diotima (207c), says Sokrates, keeping to his
fiction of the proph-
 Page 446
etess. He "needs" her to be able to propose the doctrine of
immortality without having to defend it himself. We resist change,
she says, and like to perpetuate what we can of ourselves, in the
midst of inevitable change.
It's strange, she continues, that the same is true of the soul (208a
ff.), and the possession of knowledge. Not only is what we have of
the knowledges changing and different at different times, but the
very process of remembering or concentrating (meletân, 208a5)
implies that knowledge fades and departs and has to be renewed.
This is the way all mortal things (thnêwn) are preserved, Sokrates,
not by remaining the same forever like what is divine (theîn), but
by a replacing of what ages, with afresh thing just like the old. By
this device (mêchanêi), Sokrates, mortal things share in
immortality both in their bodily and other parts. Do, do not wonder
that all things love their offspring and are earnest in the pursuit of
immortality (208b).
Sokrates says he was puzzled by her words, and asked: "So be it
(eîen), oh most knowing (sophôtatê) Diotima, is this really true?"
She answere like a perfect Sophist (hôsper hoi téleoi sophistaí
208c): Assuredly, Sokrates; just look at the avid ambition
(philotimían) of men all around you. It does not make sense until
you reflect that they are trying to get fame for all time. They seek,
like Kodros, Alcestis and Achilles, to create a deathless reputation
for human greatness (aretê) they are in love with what is immortal
(208e).
Those who are pregnant in body beget children against the future.
But those whose souls are pregnant conceive and bring foth things
appropriate to psychic life, namely, intelligent practice (phronêsin)
and other human excellences (aretaí). And these, among the poets
and craftsmen, are called the inventors or discoverers (heuretikoí
209a7).
By far the most beautiful and greatest sort of intelligent practice is
balanced, effective judgment (sôphrosynê) and justice (dikaiosynê)
whose concern is to order well the lives of cities and their
administration (oikêsis). When such a selective, restless and
pregnant soul finds another who is both beautiful, noble and
talented (euphyei), all his excellences are stimulated and he tries to
educate the beloved. The very thought of the beautiful beloved can
bring forth conceptions he has been bearing, and together they can
develop them, once they are born. Thus, those in this condition
enjoy more community and a surer friendship, since the products of
their togetherness are more beautiful and imperishable. Is this a
wishful, idealizing improvement and response to Aristophanes'
comic typing of the politician as a pederast concerned to acquire
dominance by handling public affairs? Diotima, who has just been
designated a super-Sophist by Sokrates, is becoming more
convincing with her analogy or equation between intellectual
products precipitated by intellectual affinity and the products of
loving generation.
 Page 447
Who would not rather have the literary children of Homer and
Hesiod, says the prophetess, than ordinary ones; or those of
Lycourgos and Solon, the progenitors, through their laws, of many
kinds of excellence (aretê)? Again, this is not quite true to
experience but it does appeal strongly to every man's love of
recognition, especially that of an ancient Greek.
Now, Sokrates, let's see if you can follow me into the higher
mysteries of Love, which I will open to you. This a clever ploy of
the prophetess who is also a perfect Sophist; with it, she has given
herself the discursive freedom to be not just equivocal but as
mythologically inconsequential as she pleases. Aristophanes' myth-
making was, in contrast, constrained by the conditions of good
metaphor and good comedy. The removal of constraints will make
it easier for the mantic Sophist lady to surpass other theologies and
eulogies of Love, in the respects laid down for the competition by
Phaedrus and Eryximachus. These were: entertainingness and
convincingness. But levels of metaphoric aptness and closeness to
experience have now been set by Aristophanes (in his correction of
Eryximachus) and by Sokrates himself (in his critique of Agathon)
that will be hard to match. It will, also, be difficult to be more
outrageously funny than Aristophanes was in his story about Love.
Even you, she tells Sokrates with mocking condescension, can be
an initiate (k'an su muêtheiês) in love matters, as far as we've come.
But I don't know if you'll be able to enter into the last revelation for
which this was the preparation if you were to be correctly led
forward (210a). . . . You must try to follow as far as possible,
Sokrates, says the prophetess. The right way forward is to be
concerned from youth with more than beautiful bodies. Correctly
guided, a person will begin with the love of one beautiful body and
there (!) generate noble reasonings (lógous kaloús). Next, he will
recognize that the beauty of one body is sister to the beauty of
another; and that if he is to pursue beauty of form, it would be
mindless not to recognize as one and the same the beauty in all
beautiful bodies. Strange, how to a modern ear this sounds both
abstract and intellectualistic and a bit impersonal in its sexism
(namely, one beautiful body is as good as another). It's likely that
the same ironic nuance struck an ancient Greel listener.
Transcending sexism must have required as much maturity in
ancient Greece as at any other time.
In learning to be a lover of all beautiful bodies in this way, says
Diotima, the lover will slacken his strong love for one person and
look down on it and count it a small thing (210b6-8). Many readers
will find this neither true to experience nor normatively acceptable.
But the Sophistic lady's next phrases make sense, once they can be
seen to describe the basis of Sokrates' interrogative or dialectical
pratice in the dialogues.
After this, continues Diotima, the initiate must learn that vitality or
beauty
 Page 448
of mind are more to be valued than that of the body. So that
however small the flower or meager the grace of a given soul, he
will bring it to blossom by means of the conversation that makes
the young better and teaches them to see beauty in good customs
and good laws. He will have been taught how to see that all beauty
is akin to itself, and have been helped to get bodily beauty into
perspective (210c).
The learner must next be led from the observation of social forms
to the branches of knowledge, and the beauty in all the knowledges.
Having had the whole scope of the beautiful thus opened to him, he
will be liberated from his slavish service of one beloved, or one
human, or one pursuit. From the great flow and surge (to poly
pélagos) of beauty, he should be able to generate the noble, large-
minded (megaloprepeís) offspring of good reasoning, namely, a
love of knowledge that is free of envy (philosophíai aphthónôi). At
this point, he must increase his strength, until he is able to discern
that unique knowlege (tina epistêmên mian) of beauty that remains
to be described. And here Sokrates, Diotima interrupts herself to
say, you will try to pay the most careful attention.
He who has thus far been taught and trained (paidagôgêthêi) in
love matters (ta erôtika) to look at beautiful things in their right
order is already on his way to the last stage (télos) of the science of
love, Sokrates. A wondrous vision of a beautiful nature will
suddenly be disclosed to him, as the end for which he has borne his
toils (210e3-8). The reader notes that the mantic lady from
Mantinea has reunified erotics with aesthetics, at a higher level, as
we like to say. This vision, Sokrates, is of something everlasting,
never diminished and total in its lustre, indisputable in its
pervasiveness, yet existing by itself with itself in its uniqueness
forever (211b1-2). In the meantime, Sokrates, all other things that
are beautiful partake (métechonta, 211b3) of it in such a way that
their perishable nature in no way alters it.
Thus, Sokrates, anyone who has climbed, by loving youth in the
right way (orthôs paiderasteîn 211b7), from that kind of beauty to
the perception of this has almost got hold of the final point (tou
télous). For the right way to be led in love matters is this: having
begun from those kinds of beauty, ever to proceed, for the sake of
this beauty, upwards step by step from bodily beauty to beautiful
relations, from beautiful practices to beautiful knowledges, and the
special knowledges to come at last to this knowledge that is the
study of the beautiful, in order to realize (gnôi) what it is in itself.
The reader will not miss how 'Socratic' this is in the special sense
that in the Phaedrus what was recommended is an intellectual love
of youth that preserves the student-teacher relationship. In fact, if
we translate to orthôs paiderasteîn as "the right method of boy-
loving" we get both an allusion to
 Page 449
Pausanias and a Socratic irony of the funniest sort, given the
occasion; namely, that the correct way to love a boy is not to love
him materially, but to start teaching him at once about form and
relation, so as to lead him to the knowledges and the beauty of
knowledge. This reading is confirmed by the fact that what
Sokrates' prophetess is saying sounds very much like a correcting
of what Pausanias, in his speech, had got all wrong. That the
prophetess does in fact parody Pausanias's style in some places is a
confirmation of this.
Why, however, has Diotima also now and then used the
terminology of the Mysteries? A careful check of this shows that it
is partly a matter of translation and interpretation. But in so far as
the analogy is operative, it is, first of all, as intellectualized as
Sokrates' ironic purposes require. Secondly, whatever the ritual
satisfactions or visual symbolisms that were solemnly dispensed to
the adepts of the Mysteries, in the analogy they are to be given up
for an idea alone and the study of it. Whether this is to be taken as
a covered-up challenge to the popularity of the Mysteries and a
tactical victory of idealism over the rituals, or as a challenge to the
idealists or Pythagoreans to practice what they were defending
theoretically and give up the religious allegories they were attached
toin either case, Sokrates' auditors (and Plato's readers) have been
treated to a powerful application of Socratic irony, implying an
unstated dilemma.
If the "idea" is pursued without true love, all we have got, in place
of personal love or religion, is an abstract idea. But if we pursue the
knowledges lovingly and are loving in our teaching and learning,
the beauty in them emerges as an idea of great scope and spiritual
sustenance. The interrogative that Sokrates' performance as a whole
puts to the reader is, therefore, can an idea (or idealism) do so
much, and if so, at what cost? Notice that Sokrates has himself
used the allegorical device of the mantic lady from Mantinea, as
well as a few sophistical nonsequiturs, to outdo the reasonings of
the previous speakers.
The hypothetical postulant of the inspired lady was brought (by
211d1) to the study of the being of beauty. In what follows, he is
said by her to discover that in this study is to be found the only life
worth living. And this is true enough for the dedicated artist in
pursuit of meaningfulness, and for the scientist in love with his
inquiries. Would it not be a noble life, the lady says, to look for
beauty, sacred and secular, in the right way, making contact with
truth (tou alêthous) rather than illusion (eidôlou) and generating
(tiktein) works of true human excellence (aretês)? Will this,
Sokrates, not earn for one the friendship of the Gods and make him
as immortal as a person can be, if only men could be immortal
(211d1-212a9)?
That, Phaedrus and gentlemen, is what Diotima convinced me of,
and why I try, says Sokrates, to convince others that love is the best
help our human
 Page 450
nature can have in the attempt to attain this possession (toútou tou
ktêmatos). Note how richly ambiguous is the grammatical
antecedent of "this possession." It could refer to the understanding
of beauty itself, to the production of excellent works, to closeness
to immortality, or to all of these together.
There is some surprise in the closeness of Sokrates' conclusionthat
love is the best help of human nature in its pursuit of
"immortality"to Aristophanes' position that love is the cure for all
human ills. Thus, though earlier in the discourse of Sokrates'
Diotima (205d-e), she had appeared to be putting the desire of
living things for organic immortality in the place of Aristophanes'
human yearning for completeness of identity as the motive power
of love, she has ended by conceding that she was talking quite as
much about the figurative "immortality," which can be achieved
through productive love and judgment. The human ambition for
excellent achievements from which fair and lasting fame follow is
still ambition. In taking fame or ambition to be the motive power,
Diotima has, after all, proved to be the Sophist Sokrates said she
was at 208c.
The reader with doubts about this categorization of her as "like an
accomplished Sophist" (208c) can now look again from 211c
through 212a at the equivocation in her words between the thought-
processes that lead to the separate, unmixed idea of beauty and the
sensory processes that are involved. The "study" and "knowing"
referred to by mathêma and gnôi are the result of erotic maturation
and processing of sensuous material. They can be called epistemic
processes because what they study is an idea, beauty itself. But at
211e2 Diotima uses ideîn (to see) either metaphorically and
ambiguously or as referring to sensory processes, just as she does
katideîn, (behold), at 212a1 and blépontes (looking for) at 212a2.
What this shows is that Plato was aware of, but not himself
committing, the equivocation that lies at the heart of the theory of
ideas; also, that his Sokrates is putting these words in the lady's
mouth to avoid the equivocation. Sokrates again appears to be
testing and probing for the limits of applicability of the theory to
'erotics,' just as he had tested it against the problems of aesthetics in
the Hippias Major.
As to whether Diotima's complex of beliefs about the power of
love is better than that underlying Aristophanes' brilliant
allegorythat is left by Plato for the reader to decide. It is the case,
from Aristophanes' point of view that the Mantinean lady is one of
the dispersed (sundered) people and doesn't know it, although the
reader knows it from the history of her town. Because she doesn't
admit it, she ascribes other causes to the depth of human longing.
From the point of view of her account, the historical Aristophanes
comes out as a fameworthy generator (lover) of dramatic works.
With his use of the mantic lady from Mantinea, the dialogical
Sokrates has avoided the explicit making of
 Page 451
judgments about Aristophanes. Since it is another dramatist,
Agathon, who is being honored, it is dialogically appropriate that
Aristophanesthe better writerbe honored only implicitly if very
fully.
Alcibiades' Encomium of Sokrates
Alcibiades' first words to Sokrates, after he crowned Agathon and
discovered that his other neighbor, at the banquet he has belatedly
joined, is, of all people, Sokrates are: By Herakles, here is that
always surprising man, Sokrates, catching me by surprise again. He
wades into Sokrates at once, and personally: there you are again,
Sokrates, reclining next to the handsomest person at the party
(Agathon) and not next to Aristophanes or some other lover of jests
(213c4)implying that Sokrates himself is one, and that it is with
Aristophanes that he belongs.
Sokrates reacts with mock terror. Protect me, Agathon, he says; the
jealous passion (erôs) of this man has become a threat to me since I
became his admirer (êrasthên). So please, Agathon, either reconcile
us or protect me from him. There'll be no reconciliation Sokrates,
says Alcibiades, I'll make you pay the penalty later. But first,
Agathon, let me crown Sokrates as well. Alcibiades transfers some
ribands to Sokrates' head. Else he'll pick a quarrel with me for
crowning you, who have had one discursive victory, and not him
who has been victorious in discourse over every man every time.
Alcibiades has not heard any of the discourses preceding his
arrival.
Two other things emerge from Alcibiades' lumping of Sokrates
with Aristophanes, and from Sokrates' first response to the attack.
Alcibiades, like other public leaders, seems to disapprove of
Aristophanes, from fear probably of his publicly stageable
criticisms; whereas Sokrates has no fear at all of the dramatist, and
is as responsive to him as Sokrates is to everybody else in the
world of the dialogues. Secondly, just as Sokrates' fear of
Alcibiades' jealosy was only mock terror, so his account of
Alcibiades' erotic-erastic relations implies only a mocking
tolerance of them. Because this tolerance verges on disapproval,
Alcibiades says he will pay him back later.
Now, Alcibiades had allowed himself to be admitted to the banquet
on the condition that the company would (i) accept his state of
inebriation and (ii) take a drink with him as well (213a3). So
Alcibiades appoints himself master of the revels until, he says, it
has its proper drink. He quaffs a huge potion and makes everybody
drink to Sokrates, saying he knows it's impossible to get Sokrates
drunk, no matter how much you make him down. At this point the
punctilious Eryximachus makes the procedural suggestion that
Alcibiades
 Page 452
should speak in praise of Love too, and that every man should
impose a request upon his neighbor to the right, thus allowing
Alcibiades to exact something from Sokrates. Alcibiades agrees.
But, my blessed Eryximachus, he adds with malice, you mustn't
believe what Sokrates just said. You know he means the opposite
of everything he says (214d). If I were to praise anyone else, God
or man, in his presence I would not be safe. You are blasphemous,
says Sokrates. By Poseidon, answers Alcibiades, I can praise no
one else as long as you are there. Do so then, says Eryximachus.
Does that mean, says Alcibiades, I can exact my penalty of him?
Just what do you mean Alcibiades, asks Sokrates; to laugh at me
with your praises? I will tell the truth, says Alcibiades, baiting his
trap, if you will permit me. As long as you speak the truth, says
Sokrates, I permit and exhort you to do so (214e). And, says
Alcibiades, since I intend to tell no lies you will please interrupt if I
say anything false, and point it out.
I will praise Sokrates, gentlemen, by means of similes not for fun
but for the sake of the truth. Sokrates is most like the Silenus
figures in the statue shops. made so that when opened out they
show, inside themselves, images of the Gods. And in appearance
Sokrates is most like Marsyas the satyr. Like the satyrs, he is also
hybristês, very much in charge; and if he denies it I have
eyewitnesses to prove it. The difference between you and Marsyas,
Sokrates, is that you produce your hypnotic spells by means of
words unassisted by instruments. Other orators leave us relatively
unmoved, but when people hear your words, even at second hand,
they are all struck and amazed. 6
If I told you that my own heart leaps and my eyes weep when I
hear them, you would think it's because I'm drunk. But no other
orator, however well spoken, has ever stirred me to anger and
shame at the unfree condition of my soul, and made me feel that
the kind of life I lead is not worth living (216a1). If I listened to
Sokrates I'd have to admit that I neglect my self for the sake of the
Athenians. So I flee from him as I would the Sirens, for fear of
tarrying to listen to him forever. I forsake him for the favors of the
crowd. I often wish he would pass away and stop haunting me, but
I also know that his disappearance would pain me more than his
haunting. Such is the effect of Sokrates' enchanted piping.
Observe how our satyr, here, favors handsome people (216d); yet,
like a Silenus figurine, if you look inside him you find only
sôhrosynê, intelligent responsiveness; even though, like Silenus, he
claims to know nothing. He quite disdains (kataphroneî bodily
beauty (216d10), nor does he care about wealth or public honors.
He counts these things and us all as worthless, and spends his life
being ironic (eirôneuómenos) and playing verbal games (paizôn)
with everybody (216e5-6). Whether anyone else has seen his real
seriousness,
 Page 453
or how beautiful he is on the inside, I at least have. To tell the truth
I was so proud of my own charms I tried in various ways to seduce
him, and to get him as a lover in quest for human excellence
(aretô). It was a painful failure, such is his cool disdain
(hyperôphanon 217e6). I have been deeply stung (dêchtheis) by his
philosophic talk, like many a gifted soul present tonight. I thought I
myself was being philosophical when I tried to seduce him.
Well, when he had heard me out, he said in his usual ironical
(eirônikôs) way: if it is true that I have the power to help make you
a better human being, then (unless you are bad at bargains) you
must see in me a shape more beautiful (eumorphías) than your
own. If this is what you see, you are trying to exchange ''bronze for
gold" (Iliad VI.236); I may be nothing much to the intellectual
sight (dianoías opsis) which the young lack (219a). I still fancied,
continues Alcibiades, that I had an effect and wrapped myself to
sleep under the same cloak as Sokrates. But Sokrates had not lost
his detachment or scorn, and was so insulting (hybrise 219c6) to
my charms, gentlemen of the jury, that it was no more than like a
night with my father or brother. Judge now whether this is not
imperiousness (hyperêphanías). Though I felt rejected, I still had to
admire his intelligent integrity (sôphrosynê) and resoluteness. So I
was at a loss, but could not be angry either, about Sokrates.
Now this had all happened before the campaign to Potidea (432
B.C.), on which we were messmates. Sokrates was unsurpassable,
both in enduring hardships and his capacity for good cheer. He
withstood hunger and endured the winter cold so impassively that
the soldiers thought he was contemptuous. One day he woke up
with some problem on his mind, so he stood examining it on the
same spot till noon, then till evening, and so till the next dawn, still
thinking. As the Sun rose, he offered a prayer to it and walked off.
Furthermore, on the day I won the prize for valor and was
wounded, it was Sokrates who saved me and my armor. But when I
tried to convince the generals to award the prize to him, it was he
who insisted they give it to me! And that's the truth. You should
have seen him, later, when the army was forced to retreat at the
battle of Delium (424 B.C.). He was retreating with Laches. Not
only was he more collected than the general, I also had to admire
how "imperiously he picked his way, with intimidating sidelong
glance"to use words from Aristophanes. The enemy did not dare
come near.
Next, I have to tell you how unlike anybody else, ancient or
modern, Sokrates is. He and his talk are so unusual (átopos 221d)
that no simile is possible, except perhaps with the Silenuses. At
first he sounds ridiculous, a cover for his hybristic hide or satyr-
nature (satyron dê tina hybristoû dorán). He talks plainly of such
common things, that the thoughtless might laugh. But when you
look into his reasonings, you find that only they make sense and,
secondly, that they
 Page 454
abound in images of human excellence (agálmat' aretês 222a) and
are concerned with how to achieve nobility and goodness.
That, gentlemen, is my praise of Sokrates. I have tempered it with a
mention of his arrogant acts (hýbrisen 222b1) towards me; though I
am not the only one he has done this to, or who has found his way
of loving so misleading (eksapatôn) that it turns the admired into
the admirer of Sokrates. I say this, Alcibiades concludes, to warn
Agathon against the same painful experience.
The audience in the dialogue laughs, but Sokrates verbalizes the
suspicion that readers of the speech may have reached: "It seems to
me," Sokrates says, "that you are sober, Alcibiades" (222c). But the
explanation that Sokrates, the lover of things intellectual and moral,
gives is again a mocking, ironic, and teasing one. After all, why
shouldn't Sokrates hope to make Agathon into a more consistent
and serious man? Sokrates' loving practice of philosophy takes his
interlocutors on their own terms, at least to begin with. Naturally,
this loving practice of knowledge-seeking is sometimes felt by his
fellow inquirers or students as a love of themselves. Sokrates
characteristically uses whatever loving attention he generates to get
them interested in such things as justice and justness, excellence,
knowledge and truth. He is so interesting to his auditors just
because he is not a loveless inquirer, and because he gives his
whole attention to his interlocutor and his needs in relation to the
subject under discussion. He is not an egocentric or monologous
arguer in pursuit of conclusions or victory, but an engaging and
engaged cooperative knowledge-seeker trying to do his auditor
some good.
Your real purpose, Alcibiades, continues Sokrates at 222c-d, has
been to estrange Agathon and me so that I may admire no one but
you, while Agathon remains the object of your exclusive love. But
the plot of your satyr-play has been detected! Agathon, says
Sokrates turning to him, do not allow Alcibiades to set us at
variance. You know, Sokrates, I think you are right; and his sitting
down between the two of us proves it. I will come, says Agathon,
and recline beside you.
By Zeus, says Alcibiades, Sokrates has beaten me again. At least,
my surprising friend, you could let Agathon sit between us. No,
says Sokrates, I am supposed to praise my neighbor on the right,
and if he moves towards you, he would have to praise me before I
had eulogized him. So let him be, Alcibiades, and let me praise
him. Aha, says Agathon, I shall move at once so that Sokrates can
praise me. As usual says Alcibiades, nobody has a chance with the
goodlooking young with Sokrates there (223a).
At this point a new crowd of revellers appears and several of the
symposiasts leave. Aristodemus (from whom Apollodorus got the
story) says he himself fell asleep for quite a while; for the nights
were long. Awaking at cockcrow,
 Page 455
Aristodemus saw that all were gone or sleeping except for
Agathon, Aristophanes and Sokrates sipping from the same large
bowl. Sokrates was arguing the two dramatists into an admission
that it is possible for the same man to know how to write comedy
and Tragedy, and that the skilled Tragedy-maker could compose
comedies as well. The two could hardly follow him from
sleepiness, and did indeed fall asleep as day approached. Sokrates
made sure they were comfortable, got up and walked away.
Aristodemus followed him to the Lyceum, where Sokrates had his
bath and spent the day very much as usual. And so, it was not until
evening came again that Sokrates went home to rest.
By way of epilogue, we may point out that Alcibiades' encomium
of Sokrates constitutes a narrative rehearsal of claims this book has
made about the Sokrates of Plato's dialogues, and how he operates
within them. He is said by Alcibiades to be verbally always in
charge, and rather hypnotic. He shakes people at their core, but the
intelligent don't stop loving him. Maturely, he enjoys bodily beauty
but does not need to possess it. He is always ironic and always
playing verbal games with others. But he is really serious, and
spiritually beautiful himself. Ironic as he is, he tries to help others
make themselves better human beings. He is persistent and can
concentrate intensely. He is intelligent in his integrity and
responsiveness, and he abounds in courage and energy. He is
cheerful and plain. He is seductive; he is misleading in his
discourse, which is many-faceted and unusually hard to categorize.
But what he does he does lovingly, as we have said. Next, Plato the
author, as distinct from Alcibiades the speaker, presents Sokrates as
sharing a loving cup with Aristophanes the comic social critic, and
as prevailing in an exchange about drama with two dramatists
because he knows (like his author) how close comedy can be to
Tragedy. Sokrates is also presented as sharply aware of the
interactional tensions in conversational situations, and addresses
them most aptly. He is, finally, inexhaustible.
Notes
1. The historical evidence for this is summarized in A. Melero
Bellido's monograph Arenas y el Pitagorismo.
2. I quote, for what it's worth, Paul Shorey warning (What Plato
Said, p.192) that we perhaps should only take Aristophanes'
anatomizing here as seriously as we take the teleological
physiology of Plato's Timaios. This, of course, is said from the
literalist's point of view. Yes, if we can see the humor in one case
we should certainly admit it in the other. But the effect of the
anatomical humor in the Symposium is much more serious than
that of the part played by the liver in the Timaeus. The question is:
having
 Page 456
responded to Plato's humor in one passage, why do literalist
refuse to respond to it in every other place?
3. I.e., more generative and architectonic effectiveness. Also taking
an interactional approach to the Symposium is H. Wolz's
"Philosophy as Drama: and Approach to Plato's Symposium,"
Philos. and Phenom. Research 30 (1970); p.323-353.
4. We may note here that 'knowledge,' in the world of the
dialogues, is repeatedly said to be 'beautiful' by Sokrates. By the
Pythagoreans and pythagorizers whom he satirizes or paraphrases,
on the other hand, 'knowledge' is most often said to be 'divine.'
5. In phrases such as this, which ascribe to "poetry" the entire
causation (aitía pâsá) of the new existent, lie the seeds of later
Greek acceptance of the non-Classical doctrine of creation out of
nothing, and of those aesthetics that systematically neglect the
importance of the materials and the medium of art.
6. Friedländer, on the basis of this passage, suggests that Plato is
here telling us that he conceived his own vocation to be that of
enchanting us with Sokrates' words at second hand (!). (Vol. III,
Ch. 20).
 Page 457

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(Breslau: Koebner 1881)
V.Tejera. Art and Human Intelligence (N.Y. Appleton-Century
1965)
. Modes of Greek Thought (N.Y. Appleton-Century 1971)
. "Dialogue & Dialectic," in Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts
1974, ed. Walton & Anton (Ohio U.P. 1974)
. "Methodology of a Misreading," Review-Article of Irwin's
"Plato's Moral Theory" Intl. Studies in Philos. Vol. X (1978)
. "Irony & Allegory in the Phaedrus," Philos. and Rhetoric
. Plato's Dialogues One by One (N.Y. Irvington 1984)
. "Ideology and Literature: Plato's Apology & Xenophon's Defense
of Socrates," in New Essays on Socrates, ed. E.Kelly (Lanham:
UPA 1984)
. Nietzsche and Greek Thought (Dordrecht: Kluwer-Nijhoff 1987)
. "Derrida's Poetics: A Report to the Muses," The Southern Journal
of Philosophy Winter, 1988
. "Bakhtin, Dialogism, and Plato's Dialogues," Ellênikê
Philosophikê Epitheôrêsê 6, (1989)
. The City-State Foundations of Western Political Thought, 2nd
rev. ed. (Lanham: University Press of America 1993)
. "On the Form & Authenticity of the Lysis," Ancient Philosophy
Vol. X. 2 (1990)
. "Dialogical Dyamics, Socrates, & the Need for Source-Criticism,"
Proceedings of The International Conference for Greek
Philosophy, Samos 1990; ed. K. Boudouris,Athens 1992
. "The Politics of a Sophistic Rhetorician, Plato's Politicus"
Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica (1992)
. Literature, Criticism, and the Theory of Signs (Philadelphia: J.
Benjamins, 1994)
 Page 462
. "Plato's Ironies: Structural, Textural, and Allusional, The
Mathematical Humor in Republic VIII and IX," Intl. Studies in
Philosophy XXVII (1994).
. "Rhetoric versus Evidence: How Not To Denature the Sources,"
Rev. of M.Hansen's Athenian Democracy in the Age of
Demosthenes, Philos. & Rhetoric Vol.28, No.4 (1995)
H.Thesleff. Studies in the Styles of Plato (Helsinki: Abo Akademi
1967)
JAK Thomson. Irony An Historical Introduction (Harvard U.P.
1927)
. The Art of the Logos (London: Allen and Unwin 1935)
E.Tigerstedt. The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic
Interpretation of Plato (Helsinki: Soc. Scientarum Fennica 1974)
M.Untersteiner. The Sophists 1949, Tr. K.Freeman (Oxford:
Blackwell 1954)
H.Usener. Unser Platontext (Göttingen: Gesellschaft der
Wissenschaften 1892)
G.Vlastos. Platonic Studies (Princeton U.P. 1973)
C.J.Vogel de. Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism (Assert: Van
Gorcum 1966)
M.Weber. The Agrarian Society of Ancient Civilization 1924
(Humanities Press 1976)
. The City 1921 Tr. Martindale & Neuwirth (Free Press 1958)
A.D.Winspear. The Genesis of Plato's Thought 2 ed. (New York:
Russell 1956)
A.D.Winspear and T.Silverberg. Who was Socrates? 2 ed. (N.Y.
Russell 1960)
F.Woodbridge. The Son of Apollo (Boston: Houghton 1929)
F.R.Wüst. Philip von Makedonien und Griechenland in den Jahren
von 345 his 33B B.C. (Munich: Beck 1938; repr. Arno 1973)
Xenophon. Works 7 vol. Ed. and Tr. Brownson, Marchant et.al.
(Loeb Libr. 1968)
E. Zeller. Platonhchen Studien 1839 (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1969)
. De Hermodoro Ephesio et Hermodoro Platonis discipulo
(Frankfurt: Voelker 1859)
. Plato and the Older Academy Tr. Alleyne & Goodwin (London:
Longmans 1876)
A.Zosaya. Plato. Diálogos Polémicos 2 vol. (Madrid: Navarro
1885)
G.Zunkel. Untersuchungen zur griechischen Geschichte der Jahre
395-386 B.C. (Dissertation: Univ. of Jena 1911)
Chapter 1
Plato. The Apology of Plato. Ed. J. Riddell. Rev. Text, Notes, & a
Digest of Platonic Idioms (Oxford: Clarendon 1867)
. The Phaedo of Plato. Ed. R.D.Archer-Hind. Intro., Notes,
Appendices (London: Macmillan 1894)
. Phaedo. Ed. J. Burner. Text, Intro., Notes (Oxford: Clarendon
1911)
 Page 463
. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito. Ed. J. Burnet. Text, Notes (Oxford:
Clarendon 1924)
. Plato's Apology. St. George Stock. Text, Notes (Oxford:
Clarendon 1899)
. Apologie. F.J. Weber. Einführung u. Kommentar (Paderborn:
Schoeningh 1971)
. Plato's Phaedo. W. Wagner. Text, Analysis, Critical Notes
(Cambridge: Deighton, Bell 1885)
. The Phaedo of Plato. H. Williamson. Text, Intr., Notes (London:
Macmillan 1904)
. Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. H.N. Fowler. Text
& Translation (Loeb Library 1914)
R.Burger. The Phaedo: A Platonic Labrynth (Yale U.P. 1984)
R.Carpenter. Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge U.P.
1966)
E.Derenne. Les Procès d'Impiété . . . à Athènes (Paris: Champion
1930)
A.P.Dorjahn. Political Forgiveness in Old Athens. The Amnesty of
403 B.C. (Evanston: Northwestern U.P.)
K.Dorter. ''The Dramatic Aspect of Plato's Phaedo," Dialogue 8
(1970)
L.Edelstein. "Platonic Anonymity," Amer. Jour. of Philology
Vol.83 (1962); p.1-21.
M.Fox. "The Trials of Socrates: An Interpretation of the First
Tetralogy," Archiv. f. Philosophie 6, 1956; p.226-261.
K.Gaiser. Platon und die Geschichte (Stuttgart: Holzboog 1961)
H.Gauss. Philosophischer Handkommentar zu den Dialogen Platos
4 vol. in 7 (Bern: Lang 1952-67)
G.Gilbert. The Constitutional Antiquities of Sparta and Athens
(London: Sonnenschein 1895)
J.Gillies. The History of Ancient Greece (Philadelphia: Wardle
1835)
T.R.Glover. From Pericles to Philip 4 ed. (London: Methuen 1926)
W.L.Green. Scholia Platonica (Haverford: Amer. Philological
Assoc. 1938)
N.Greenberg. "Socrates' Choice in the Crito," Harvard St. in Class.
Philol. 70, 1965
G.Grote. Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates 3 vol.
(London: Murray 1875); and 1888, in 4 vol. (N.Y: B.Franklin
1973)
. A History of Greece 12 vol. (London: J.Murray 1869)
K.Guthke. Modern Tragicomedy (New York: Random House
1966)
W.K.Guthrie. A History of Greek Philosophy 6 vol. (Cambridge
U.P. 1962-1981)
R.Loriaux. Le Phédon de Platon. Commentaire, Traducion, vol.I:
57a-84b (Namur: Faculté Philosophie et Lettres 1969)
M.Montuori. Socrates Physiology of a Myth 1974 (Amsterdam:
Gieben 1981)
K.Robb. "Orality, Literacy, and the Dialogue-Form," Plato's
Dialogues: the Dialogical Approach Ed. R. Hart & V.Tejera
(Lewiston: Mellen Press)
 Page 464

Chapter 2
Plato. The Parmenides of Plato Ed.T.Maguire. Text, Intro.,
Analysis, Notes (Dublin & London: Longmans 1882)
. Parménide Ed. A. Diès Text and Tr. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres
1950)
. Cratylus, Parmenides etc. Text. & Tr. H.N.Fowler (Loeb Libr.
1926)
G.J.Allman. Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid 1889 (New
York: Arno 1976)
R.Brumbaugh. Plato on the One. The Hypotheses in the
Parmenides (Yale U.P. 1961)
W.Chalmers. "Parmenides and the Belief of Mortals," Phronesis 5,
1960; p.5-22.
F.M.Cornford. Plato and Parmenides (N.Y. Bobbs-Merrill, reprint
n.d.)
H.Diels. Parmenides Lehrgedichte Griech. u. Deutsch (Berlin:
Reimer 1897)
Diels-Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 3 v. 7 ed. (Berlin:
Weidman 1954)
O. Gigon. 'Gorgias, "Über das Nichtsein,"' Hermes 1936
Gorgias. In Sextus Empiricus vol. II Adversus Mathem. VII 65-87;
Against the Logicians I, 65-87. Ed. & tr. R.G. Bury (Loeb Libr.
1957).
. In Ps.Aristotle Minor Works On Melissus, Xenophanes, &
Gorgias. Ed. and tr. W.S. Hett (Loeb Libr. 1955)
E.Kapp. Greek Foundations of Traditional Logic (Columbia U.P.
1942)
H.D.P.Lee. Zeno of Elea 1936 (Amsterdam: Hakkert 1967)
D.S. MacKay. Mind in the Parmenides. A Study in the History of
Logic (Columbia U. Dissert. privately printed, 1924)
C.Meinwald. Plato's Parmenides (N.Y. Oxford U.P. 1991)
M.Miller. Plato's Parmenides The Conversion of the Soul
(Princeton U.P. 1986)
J. Moravcsik. "Forms & Dialectic in the second half of the
Parmenides," Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy ed. Schofield,
Nussbaum (Cambridge U.P. 1982)
H.Pemberton. Plato's Parmenides: The Critical Moment (Darby:
Norwood 1984)
J.E.Raven. Pythagoreans and Eleatics (Cambridge U.P. 1948)
V. Rossvaer. The Laborious Game. A Study of Plato's Parmenides
(Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 1983)
W.Runciman. "Plato's Parmenides," Studies in Plato's
Metaphysics, ed. R.E. Allen (N.Y. Routledge 1965); 149-184.
G. Ryle. "Plato's Parmenides," Studies in Plato's Metaphysics, ed.
R.E. Allen (N.Y. Routledge 1965); 97-147.
M.Schofield. "The Antinomies of Plato's Parmenides," Classical
Quarterly XXVII (1977); pp. 139-158.
H.L.Sinaiko. Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in Plato: Discourse
& Dialectic in Phaedrus, Republic, Parmenides (Chicago
U.P.1965)
A.Speiser. Ein Parmenides Kommentar Studien zur Platonischen
Dialektik (Leipzig: Koehler 1937)
L. Tarán. Parmenides Text & Tr. Comm. & Essays (Princeton U.P.
1965)
 Page 465
Untersteiner. Parmenides. Testimonianze e Frammenti. Intro.,
traduzione e commento (Florence: La Nuova Italia 1958)
E. Zeller. "Ueber die Composition des Parmenides. .."
Platonischen Studien 1839
Chapter 3
Plato. Phaedrus. W.H.Thompson. Text, Notes, Essay (London:
Whittaker & Bell 1868)
. Phaedrus. C.Rowe Text, Tr. & Commentary (Warminster: Aris &
Philips 1986)
. Phèdre. Notice, Texte et Tr. Léon Robin (Paris: Les Belles Lettres
1960)
Aristotle. Rhetoric 3 vol. E.M.Cope Text and Commentary. Rev.
Ed. J.E.Sandys (Cambridge U.P. 1877)
. Rhetoric. J.H.Freese Text & Tr. (Loeb Libr. 1926)
A.M.Frankian. La Méthode Hippocratique dans le Phèdre de
Platon (Bucharest: Imprimerie Nationale 1941)
R.Hackforth. Phaedrus Translation & Commentary (Cambridge
U.P. 1955)
G.Ferrari. Listening to the Cicadas A Study of Plato's Phaedrus
(Cambridge U.P. 1987)
C.Griswold. Self-Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus (Yale U.P.1986)
Isocrates. Orations and Letters 3 vol. Text & Tr. G.Norlin &
L.R.Van Hook (Loeb Library 1928-1945)
I.M.Linforth. Telestic Madness in Plato, Phaedrus 244d-e
(Berkeley: U.Cal.Publ. in Classical Philology 13.6)
Lysias. Orations Text & Tr. W.R.Lamb (Loeb Library 1930)
J.Pieper. Love and Inspiration. A Study of Plato's Phaedrus Tr. R.
& C.Winston (London: Faber 1963)
A. Richter. Wahrheit und Dichtung in Platon's Leben (Hamburg:
T.F.Richter Verlag 1886)
L.Rossetti, Ed. Understanding the Phaedrus Proceedings of the II
Symposium Platonicum (Sankt Agustin: Akademia Verlag 1992)
C.Schmelzer. Studien zur Redekunst Bd.I Commentar zu Platon's
Phaedrus (Guben: Erlich 1869)
Themistius. Plaidoyer d'un Socratique contre le Phèdre de Platon
Text & Tr. H.Kesters (Louvain: Nauwelaerts 1959)
V.Tejera. "The Phaedrus Part I: A Poetic Drama," Understanding
the Phaedrus; p.290-295. Ed. L.Rossetti (Sankt Agustin: Akademia
Verlag 1992)
G.J.Vries de, A Commentary on the Phaedrus of Plato
(Amsterdam: Hakkert 1969)
Chapter 4
Plato. Meno. E.S.Thompson Text. Intro., Notes (London:
Macmillan 1901)
. Meno. R.S.Bluck Text. Intro., Notes, Commentary (Cambridge
U.P. 1961)
 Page 466
. The Meno of Plato St. George Stock Text. Intro., Notes; 3 ed. rev.
Appdx. (Oxford: Clarendon 1924)
. Meno. R.W.Sharples Text, Tr. & Commentary (Warminster: Aris,
Philips 1985)
M.Brown Plato's Meno. Transl. W.K.C.Guthrie; Essays &
Commentary (Bobbs-Merrill 1971
W.Burkert. "Platon oder Pythagoras? Zum Ursprung des Wortes
'Philosophie'," Hermes 88, No.2 (1960).
A.Cameron. The Pythagorean Background of the Theory of
Recollection (Menasha: Banta 1938)
Clement of Alexandria. Works 3 vol. Ed. O.Staehlin (Leipzig:
1905-1909)
. Stromateis. Selected Translations by J.E.Oulton. Intro. & Notes
(Philadelphia: Westminster 1954)
P.Cloché. La Politique Etrangère d'Athènes 404 à 338 av. J.C.
(Paris: Leroux 1915)
I.Cohen. "Programmed Learning and the Socratic Dialogue,"
American Psychologist 17, No.11 (Nov. 1961).
J.Eckstein. The Platonic Method (New York: Greenwood 1968)
K.Gaiser. "Platon's Meno u. die Akademie,"
Archiv.f.Gesch.d.Philos. 46 (1964); p.242-292.
G.B.Kerferd. The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge U.P. 1981)
J.Klein. A Commentary on Plato's Meno (U. of N.Carolina Press
1965)
P.Lacy de. Review of Bluck Plato's Meno, Amer.J. of Philology
(1963); p.96-99.
Photius. Bibliothèque 8 vol. Texte et Tr. R.Henry (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres 1959-1977)
A.Sesonske and N.Fleming. Plato's Meno Transl. & Criticism
(Belmont: Wadsworth 1965)
M.C.Stokes. Review of Bluck's Meno, Archiv.f.Gesch.d.Philos. 46
(1964); p.292-299.
G.Strycker. Review of Bluck's Meno, Gnomon 35 (1963); p.142-
149.
Thucydides. Peloponnesian War 4 vol. Text & Tr. C.F.Smith
(Loeb Library 1919-23)
M.J.Verdenius. "Notes on Plato's Meno," Memnosyne, 1957;
p.289-299.
G.Vlastos. "Anamnesis in the Meno," Dialogue 4 (1956); p.143-
167.
Chapter 5
Plato. Gorgias. Rev. Text, Intro. & Commentary E.R.Dodds
(Oxford: Clarendon 1959)
. Gorgias. Text, Intro. & Notes, Appendix W.H.Thompson
(London: Bell 1871)
. Gorgias. Text, Intro. & Notes G.Lodge (Boston: Ginn 1891)
Antisthenes. Fragmenta. Ed. F.Decleva Caizzi (Milan: Inst.
Editoriale Cisalpino 1966)
C.Cron. Beiträge zur Erklärung des Platonischen Gorgias (1870)
Gorgias. Testimonianze e Frammenti Ed. M. Untersteiner, in Sofisti
(Nuova Italia 1967)
 Page 467
W.R.M.Lamb. Gorgias. Lysias. Symposium Rev.Ed. & Tr. (Loeb
Library 1932)
W.Nestle. Gorgias. erklärt v. Cron u. Deutschle 5 Aufl. neuarbeitet
( : 1909)
H.J.Newiger. Untersuchungen zu Gorgias' Schrift Über das
Nichtseiende (Berlin: de Gruyter 1973)
. Olympiodorus In Platonis Gorgiam Commentaria. Ed. W.Norvin
1936 (G.Olms 1966)
H.Sauppe. Gorgias. Herausgeben von A.Gercke; erklärt v.
H.Sauppe ( : 1897)
L.Abel. Metatheatre. A New View of Dramatic Form (N.Y.: Hill &
Wang 1963)
W.Boder. Sokratische Ironie in den Platonischen Frühdialogen
(Amsterdam: Gruener 1973)
W.C.Booth. The Rhetoric of Irony (U. of Chicago Press 1974)
R.C.Elliott. The Power of Satire (Princeton U.P.1960)
J.Gassner. Ideas in the Drama. English Institute Essays (Columbia
U.P. 1964)
D.Hyland. Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues
(S.U.N.Y. Press 1995)
R.Jouguet. L'Impérialisme Macédonien (Paris: Albin 1937)
S.Kierkegaard. The Concept of Irony Tr.L.M.Capel (Indiana U.P.
1965)
L.Köhler. Die Briefe des Sokrates u. der Sokratiker (Leipzig:
Dieterich 1928)
G.Meredith. An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit
(London: Constable 1927)
D.C.Muecke. The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen 1969)
. Irony and the Ironic (New York: Methuen 1982)
G.Sedgewick. Of Irony Especially in Drama (U. of Toronto Press
1948)
B.States. Irony and Drama (Cornell U.P.1971)
V.Tejera. "Wie sollten Platos Dialogen gelesen werden?" (U. of
Trier: unpubl. Lecture)
J.A.K Thomson. Irony. An Historical Introduction (Harvard U.P.
1927)
R.Ussher. The Characters of Theophrastos. Text, Intro. &
Commentary (Macmillan 1975)
Chapter 6
L.Abel. Metatheatre. A New View of Dramatic Form (N.Y.: Hill &
Wang 1963)
W.Boder. Sokratische Ironie in den Platonischen Frühdialogen
(Amsterdam: Gruener 1973)
W.C.Booth. The Rhetoric of Irony (U. of Chicago Press 1974)
R.C.Elliott. The Power of Satire (Princeton U.P.1960)
J.Gassner. Ideas in the Drama. English Institute Essays (Columbia
U.P. 1964)
D.Hyland. Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues
(S.U.N.Y. Press 1995)
R.Jouguet. L'Impérialisme Macédonien (Paris: Albin 1937)
 Page 468
S.Kierkegaard. The Concept of Irony Tr.L.M.Capel (Indiana U.P.
1965)
L.Köhler. Die Briefe des Sokrates u. der Sokratiker (Leipzig:
Dieterich 1928)
G.Meredith. An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit
(London: Constable 1927)
D.C.Muecke. The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen 1969)
. Irony and the Ironic (New York: Methuen 1982)
G.Sedgewick. Of Irony Especially in Drama (U. of Toronto Press
1948)
B.States. Irony and Drama (Cornell U.P.1971)
V.Tejera. "Wie sollten Platos Dialogen gelesen werden?" (U. of
Trier: unpubl. Lecture)
J.A.K Thomson. Irony. An Historical Introduction (Harvard U.P.
1927)
R.Ussher. The Characters of Theophrastos. Text, Intro. &
Commentary (Macmillan 1975)
Chapter 7
Plato. Protagoras. A.M. & J.Adam Intro., Notes, Appendices 1893
(Cambridge U.P. 1957)
. Protagoras. Laches. Meno. Euthydemus. Ed. & Tr. W.R.M.Lamb
(Loeb Libr. 1924)
. Protagoras. Texte & Tr. A. Croiset & L.Bodin (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres 1948)
L.Bodin. Lire le Protagore. Intro. á la Méthode Dialctique de
Protagoras ed. par P. Demont (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1975)
B.A.Hubbard and E.S.Karnofsky. Plato's Protagoras A Socratic
Commentary (U. of Chicago 1982)
J.Coulter. Review of Aristophanes: Myth and Ritual A.M. Bowie
[Cambridge U.P. 1933] in Classical Philology (Summer 1995)
W.Empson. The Seven Types of Ambiguity (N.Y. New Directions
1947)
. The Structure of Complex Words (N.Y. New Directions n.d.)
L.Versenyi. "Protagoras' Man-Measure Fragment, (Sextus Pyr.,
1.216)," American Journal of Philology Vol.83, 1962; p.178-184.
Chapter 8
Plato. Charmides. Etc. Text & Tr. W.R.M.Lamb (Loeb Library
1927)
. Charmide.Etc. Texte & Tr. A.Croiset 2 rev.ed. L.Bodin (Les
Belles Lettres 1965)
 Page 469
. Charmides and Laches. Transl. R.Sprague. Intro. Notes (N.Y.
Bobbs-Merrill 1973)
T.Becker. Platons Charmides, inhaltlich erklärt (Halle: Pfeffer
1897)
M.Dyson. "Some Problems Concerning Knowledge in Plato's
'Charmides,'" Phronesis 19 (1974)
H.Herter. "Selbserkenntnis der Sophrosyne zu Platons Charmides,"
Festschrift Karl Vretska (Heidelberg: Winter 1970); p.74-88.
D.Hyland. The Virtue of Philosophy An Interpretation of Plato's
Charmides (Athens: Ohio U.P. 1981)
. "Why Plato Wrote Dialogues," Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968)
E.Martens. Das Selbstbezuegliche Wissen in Platons 'Charmides,'
(Munich: Hansen 1973)
J.Ohse. Zu Platons Charmides Untersuchungen . . . ub.die Echtheit
. . . (Fellin: Feldt 1886)
G.Santas. "Socrates at Work on Virtue & Knowledge in the
'Charmides,' Exegesis and Argument. Ed. E.N.Lee (New York:
Humanities Press 1973)
C.Schirlitz. "Der Begriff des Wissens vom Wissen in Platons
Charmides," Jahrbücher f. classischen Philologie 1897; p.451-67
& 513-37.
A.Spielmann. Die Echtheit des Platonischen Dialoges Charmides
(Innsbruck: Wagner 1875)
T.G.Tuckey. Plato's Charmides (Cambridge U.P. 1951)
B.Witte. Die Wissenschaft vom Guten und Boesen: Interpretationen
zu Platons Charmides (Berlin: De Gruyter 1970)
Chapter 9
Plato. The Theaetetus of Plato. Ed. L.Campbell. Text & Notes
(Oxford U.P. 1861)
. The Theaetetus of Plato. Ed. B.H. Kennedy. Notes & Transl.
(Cambridge U.P. 1894)
. Platonis Theaetetus. Ed. M.Wohlrab. Text, Proleg. Comm.
(Leipzing: Teubner 1891)
.Theaetetus. Sophist. Ed. H.Fowler Text & Tr. (Loeb Library 1921)
. Theaitetos. Der Sophist. Der Staatsman. Diès Text, German
Transl. based on Schleiermacher's of 1824. Ed. P.Staudacher
(Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesell. 1970)
W.Bondeson. "The 'Dream' of Socrates and the Conclusion of the
Theaetetus," Apeiron vol.3.2 (1969)
F.M.Cornford. Plato's Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge
1935)
K.Döring. Die Megariker. Kommentartierte Sammlung der
Testimonien (Amsterdam: Gruener 1972)
 Page 470
K.von Fritz. Platon, Theaetet, und die Antike Mathematik 1932
(Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesllschaft 1969)
W.Hicken. "Knowledge and Forms in Plato's Theaetetus," Journal
of Hellenic Studies (1957)
J.Klein. Plato's Trilogy. The Theaetetus, Sophist, and the
Statesman (U. of Chicago 1977)
G.Matthews. Plato's Epistemology (New York: Humanities 1972)
R.Robinson. Essays in Greek Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon
1969)
D.Roloff. Platonische Ironie. Das Beispiel: Theaitetos
(Heidelberg: Winter 1973)
T.G.Rosenmeyer. "Judgment and Thought in the Theaetetus,"
Papers of the SAGP, 1959.
Chapter 10
Plato. Sophistes and Politicus. Ed. L. Campbell. Text & Notes
(Oxford: Clarendon 1867)
. Platon. Der Sophist. O.Apelt. Burnet's Text, Griech.-Deutsch 2
ed. by R.Wiehl (Hamburg: Meiner 1967)
. Sophist. Theaetetus. Ed. H.Fowler Text & Tr. (Loeb Library
1921)
R.S.Bluck. Plato's Sophist. Ed. G.Neal. Commentary (Manchester
U.P. 1975)
L.Campbell. "On the Position of the Sophistes, Politicus and
Philebus in the Order of Platonic Writings," Trans. of the Oxford
Philol. Soc. 14, 1888-89.
A.Diès. Définition de l'Étre dans le Sophiste (Paris: Vrin 1963)
M.Frede. Praedikation und Existenzaussage. Platons Gebrauch yon
"ist" . . . "ist nicht" im Sophistes (Goettingen: Vandenhoek 1967)
W.Kamlah. Platons Selbstkritik im Sophistes (Munich: Beck 1963)
A.C.Moorhouse. Studies in the Greek Negatives (Cardiff: U. of
Wales 1959)
G.E.L.Owen. "Eleatic Questions," Classical Quarterly No.10,
1960.
A.C.Pearson. Verbal Scholarship and the Growth of Some Abstract
Terms (Cambridge U.P. 1922)
P.Seligman. Being and Not-Being. An Introduction to Plato's
Sophist (The Hague: Nijhoff 1974
Simplicius. In Aristotelis de Caelo Commentaria. Ed. I.L.Heiberg
(Berlin: Reimer 1894)
. In Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quattuor Priores et . . .
Posteriores Commentaria 2 vol. Ed. H.Diels (Berlin: Reimer 1882
and 1895)
H.Steinthal. Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen
und Roemern 2 vol. 2 ed. (Berlin: Duemmler 1890)
J.Stenzel. Entwicklung der Platonischen Dialektik yon Sokrates zu
Aristoteles (Breslau: Trewendt & Granier 1917)
 Page 471
. Plato's Method of Dialectic 1940. Tr. D.J.Allan
G.Vlastos. Platonic Studies (Princeton U.P. 1973)
. Ed. Plato I. Metaphysics and Epistemology. Critical Essays.
J.Zafiropoulos. L'École Eléate (Paris: Collec. d'Études Ancienne
1950)
Chapter 11
Plato. Sophistes and Politicus. Ed. L.Campbell. Text & Notes
(Oxford: Clarendon 1867)
. Le Politique. A.Diès Texte. Tr. & Intro. 3 ed. (Les Belles Lettres
1960)
. Platons Dialog Politikos. Übersetzt u. Erläutert O.Apelt
(Leipzing: Meiner 1914)
E.Barker. Greek Political Theory. Plato and his Predecessors
(London: Methuen 1918)
A.Boeckh. Philolaus des Pythagoreers Leben (Berlin: 1819)
A.Delatte. Essai sur la Politique Pythagoricienne (Paris:
Champion 1922)
E.Delebecque. Essai sur la Vie de Xenophon (Paris: Klincksieck
1957)
H.N.Fowler. Plato Politicus. Philebus. Text & Tr. (Loeb Libr.
1925)
K.von Fritz. Pythagorean Politics in Southern Italy (N.Y.:
Columbia 1940)
K.Gaiser. Platon und die Geschichte (Stutgart: Holzboog 1961)
R. Höistad. Cynic Hero and Cynic King (Uppsala: Blom 1948)
E.L.Minar. Early Pythagorean Politics (Baltimore: Waverly 1942)
V.S.Nersesyants. Political Thought of Ancient Greece (Progress
Publishers 1986)
W.Nestle. "Spüren der Sophistick bei Isokrates," Philologus 70
(1911)
G.B.Nussbaum. The Ten Thousand (Leiden: Brill 1967)
T.Sinclair. A History of Greek Political Thought (London:
Routledge 1951)
Stobaeus. Florilegium 2 vol. in 1 (Leipzig: Tauschnitz 1838)
L.Strauss. On Tyranny. Rev. ed. (Cornell: Agora 1963)
. Xenophon's Socratic Discourse. An Interpretation of the
Oeconomicus (Cornell U.P. 1970)
V.Tejera. "An Eleatic Sophist on Politics," Philosophy & Social
Criticism 5.1-2 (1978)
. "The Politics of a Sophistic Rhetorician," Quaderni Urbinati di
Cultura Classica 41.2 (1992)
H.Thesleff. Introduction to the Pythagorean Writings of the
Hellensitic Period (Helsinki: Åbo Akademi 1961)
. The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period (Åbo Akademi
1965)
M.Timpanaro-Cardini Pitagorici. Testimonanze e Frammenti 3 vol.
(La Nuova Italia 1958-64)
J.C.de Vogel. Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism (Assen: Van
Gorcum 1966)
 Page 472

Chapter 12
Plato. The Republic of Plato 2 vol. Ed. J.Adam. Text, Notes,
Commentary and Appendices (Cambridge U.P. 1902; 1965)
. The Republic of Plato 3 vol. Ed. B.Jowett & L.Campbell. Text.
Essays and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon 1894)
. The Republic 2 vol. Ed.& Tr. P.Shorey (Loeb Library 1937)
Athenaeus. Deipnosophists 7 vol. Ed. & Tr. C.B.Gulick (Loeb
Library 1927-41)
Aristotle. Aristotle's Poetics: the Argument. G.Else (Harvard U.P.
1957)
Aulus Gellius. Noctes Atticae 3 vol. Ed. & Tr. J.C.Rolfe Loeb
Library 1948-54)
R.Bambrough. Plato, Popper, and Politics (Cambridge: Heffer
1967)
E.Bikerman & J.Sykutris. "Speusippus' Brief an König Philip,"
Sitzung Berichte Sächsische Akademie 80.3 (1928)
B.Bosanquet. A Companion to Plato's Republic for English
Readers. Adapted to Davies & Vaughan's Translation (New York:
Macmillan 1895)
W.Boyd. An Introduction to the Republic of Plato 1904 (N.Y.:
Barnes & Noble 1963)
W.L.Bryan. Studies in Plato's Republic For Teachers (N.Y.:
Scribner's 1898)
P.Cloché. Isocrate et son Temps (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1963)
M.Croiset. La République de Platon. Étude et Analyse (Paris:
Mellottée 1946)
A.Delatte. Essai sur la Litterature Pythagoricienne (Paris:
Champion 1915)
Demetrius. On Style. Ed. & Tr. W.R.Roberts (Loeb Library 1953)
D.Laertius. Lives of the Philosophers 2 vol. Ed. & Tr. R.D.Hicks
(Loeb Library 1965)
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. De Compositione Verborum.
W.R.Roberts. Text, Tr. & Notes (London: Macmillan 1910)
G.Else. "The Terminology of the Ideas," Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology Vol.47 (1936)
H.Gomperz. Sokrates und die Sokratik (Vienna: Wiener Studien
27.2, 1905)
F.Grayeff. Aristotle and his School (New York: Barnes & Noble
1974)
D.Lightfoot. Natural Logic and the Greek Moods (The Hague:
Mouton 1975)
R.Nettleship. Lectures on the Republic of Plato (London:
Macmillan 1901)
Proclus. Procli Diadochi in Platonis Rem Publicam Commentarii.
Ed. W.Kroll (leipzig: Teubner 1901)
G.Thomson. Studies in Ancient Greek Society Vol.2: The First
Philosophers (New York: International Publishers 1955)
T.Thorson. Plato: Totalitarian or Democrat? Selected Essays
(Prentice-Hall 1963)
T.G.Tucker. Proem to the Ideal Commonwealth of Plato (London:
Bell 1900)
Chapter 13
Pseudo-Plato. Laws 2 vol. Ed. E.B,England. Text & Commentary
(Manchester U.P 1921)
. Laws 2 vol. Ed. & Tr. R.G.Bury (Loeb Library 1926)
 Page 473
. Laws. Translation & Notes G.Burges (London: Bell, repr. 1902)
. Les Lois 4 vol. Texte & Tr. E.Des Plces et A. Diès (Les Belles
Lettres 1951-56)
H.von Arnim. De Platonis Dialogis Quaestione chronologicae (U.
of Rostok 1896)
A.Boeckh. In Platonis qui fertur Minoem eiusdemque priores
libros de Legibus (Halle: Hemmerde 1806)
. Ueber alas Kosmische System Plato's (Berlin: Veit 1852)
L.Brandwood. The Dating of Plato's Works by the Stylistic Method
(Dissertation U. of London: Dissertation 1959)
R.Brumbaugh & R.Wells. The Plato Manuscripts. A New Index
(Yale U.P. 1968)
I.Bruns. Platons Gesetze vor u. nach ihrer Herausgabe durch
Philippos von Opus (Weimar: Boehlau 1880)
M.T.Cicero. De Republica.De Legibus. Ed. & Tr. C.W.Keys (Loeb
Library 1928)
. Letters to Atticus 3 vol. Ed. & Tr. E.O.Winstedt (Loeb Library
1962)
Diodorus Siculus. Historical Library 12 vol. Ed. & Tr.
C.H.Oldfather et.al. (Loeb 1946-67)
F.Doering. De Legum Platonicarum Compositione (Leipzig: Borne
1907)
K.von Fritz. ''Philippos," Real Encyclopedie Pauly-Wissova (1928
ed.), No.42. Vol.38
W.Jannell. "Quaestiones Platonicae," Neu Jahrbücher f. Philol. u.
Paed. Suppl. 26, 1901
P.Lang. De Speusippi Academici Scriptis. Fragments, 1911
(Hildesheim: Olms 1965)
M.A.Levi. Political Power in the Ancient World Tr.J.Costello
(n.Y.Mentor Books 1968)
S.Lönborg. "The Chronology of the Platonic Dialogues," Theoria
Vol.5, Goteborg (1939)
W.Lutolawski. The Origin and Growth of Plato's Logic (N.Y.
Longmans 1897)
D.MacDonald. The Law in Classical Athens (Cornell U.P. 1978)
V.G.Méautis. Récherche sur le Pythagorisme (Neuchâtel: Fac. des
Lettres No.9, 1922)
S.Michaelson & A.Morton. "The New Stylometry: A One-Word
Test for Greek Authors," Clasical Quarterly No.1 (1972)
G.Morrow. Plato's Cretan City (Princeton U.P. 1960)
G.Mueller. Studien zu den Platonischen Nomoi (Munich: Beck
1951)
F.Muller. Stilistische Untersuchungen der Epinomis des Philippus
von Opus (Dissertation: U. of Berlin 192728)
W.Oncken. Die Staatslehre des Aristoteles 1875 (Scientia Verlag
Aalen 1964)
Poseidonius. The Fragments. L.Edelstein & I.G.Kidd (Cambridge
U.P. 1972)
L.A. Post. "Notes on Plato's Laws," American Journal of Philology
Vol.60 (1939)
M.E. Reesor. Political Theory of the Old and Middle Stoa (New
York: J.J.Augustin 1951)
C.Ritter. Plato 2 vol. (Munich: Beck 1910)
L.A. Seneca. Epistulae Morales 3 vol. Ed. & Tr. R.M.Gummere
(Loeb Library 1925)
G.Socher. Ueber Platons Schriften (Munich: Lentner 1820)
L.Strauss. The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws (U. of
Chicago Press 1975)
R.Stroud. The Axones and Kyrbeis of Drakon and Solon, U. Cal.
Classical Studies 19 (1979)
 Page 474
L.Tarán. Academica: Philip of Opus, and the Pseudo-Patonic
'Epinomis'
A.E.Taylor. Plato and the Authorship of 'Epinomis' (London:
H.Milfor 1930)
V.Tejera. "Plato, Platonism, and the Question of the Laws," Papers
of the Soc. for the Study of the Hist. of Philosophy, c.o. C. Walton
A.P.A. (New Orleans 1978)
. The City-State Foundations of Western Political Thought (U.P.A
2 ed. 1993)
H.Thesleff. Studies in Platonic Chronology (Helsinki: Soc.Scient.
Fennica 1982)
F.Tocco. Ricerche platoniche (Catanzaro: Asturi 1876)
F,Ueberweg. Untersuchungen ueber die Echtheit und Zeitfolge der
platonischen Schriften (Vienna: Gerold 1861)
Xenocrates. Fragmente, und Darstellung der Lehre, 1892. Ed.
R.Heinze (Repr. Olms 1965)
Chapter 15
Plato. The Timaeus of Plato. Ed. R.D.Archer-Hind, Intro., Notes,
Transl. (Macmillan 1880)
. Le Timée de Platon, 1841 2 vol. Ed. T.H.Martin, Études, Texte &
Tr. (Frankfurt: Minerva 1975)
. Le Timée. A.Rivaud Texte & Tr. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1963
G.Claghorn. Aristotle's Criticism of Plato's Timaeus (The Hague:
Nijhoff 1951)
F.M.Cleve. The Giants of Pre-Sophistic Greek Philosophy 2 vol.
(The Hague: Nijhoff 1965)
F.M.Cornford. Plato's Cosmology 1937 (N.Y. Bobbs-Merril repr.)
E.F.Dolin. "Parmenides and Hesiod," Harvard Studies in Class.
Philol. 65, 1962.
H.Frankel. Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy 1975 (Oxford:
Blackwell 1975)
O.Gigon. Los Orígenes de la Filosofía Griega 1968. Tr. Carrion
Gutiez (Madrid Gredos 1971)
E.Havelock. "Parmenides and Odysseus," Southern Journal of
Philosophy, Summer 1956
Nietzsche. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 1872. Tr.
M.Cowan (Regnery 1962)
T.Sinnige. Matter and Infinity in the Pre-Socratic Schools and
Plato (Assen: Van Gorcum 1968)
J.Warrington. Timaeus. Intro. & Transl. (London: Dent 1965)
W.Welliver. Character, Plot, and Thought in Plato's Timaeus-
Critias (Leiden: Brill 1977)
Chapter 16
Plato. The Hippias Major Ed. D.Tarrant. Intro. Essay &
Commentary, 1928 (Arno: 1976)
. Greater Hippias. Lesser Hippias. Ed. & Tr. H.N.Fowler (Loeb
Libr. 1926)
. Hippias Majeure, etc. Texte & Tr. A.Croiset, corr. L.Bodin (Les
Belles Lettres 1965)
 Page 475
. Hippias I und II, Ion. Übersetzt u. Erläutert O.Apelt (Leipzig:
Meiner 1918)
Aristotle. Topics etc. Text & Tr. E.S.Forster (Loeb Library 1960)
R.Brumbaugh. Plato's Mathematical Imagination (Bloomington:
Indiana U.P. 1954)
G.Grube. "The Logic and Language of the Hippias Major,"
Classical Philology 24, 1929.
T.L.Heath. A History of Greek Mathematics 2 vol. (Oxford U.P.
1921)
H.Helmut & H.Scholz. Die Grundlagenkrisis der
Griech.Mathematik 1928; and H.G.Zeuthen
. Les Livres Arithmétiques d'Euclide etc. 1910; Arno Reprint 1976)
H.J.Horn. Hippias Major. Untersuchungen zur Echtheitsfrage des
Dialogs (Univ. of Köln: Dissertation 1964)
M.Soreth. Der Platonische Dialog Hippias Major Zetemata No. 6
(Munich: Beck 1953)
E.de Strycker. "Die irrationelen in den Hippias Maior," Antiquité
Classique 10, 1941.
P.Woodruff. Hippias Major. Translation & Commentary
(Cambridge: Hackett 1982)
W.Zilles. "Hippias aus Elis," Hermes 1918; p.45ff.
Chapter 17
Plato. Plato's Ion. St. George Stock. Text, Intro. & Notes (Oxford:
Clarendon 1909)
. Plato: Ion. J.M.MacGregor Text, Intro. & Notes (Cambridge U.P.
1912)
. Ion. Politicus. Philebus. Text & Tr. W.R.M.Lamb (Loeb Library
1925)
A.Gouldner. The Hellenic World: A Sociological Analysis, Ch.2
(N.Y. Harper 1969; reprinted from Enter Plato: Greece and the
Origins of Social Theory 1965).
J.Haden. "Achilles, Odysseus, Socrates," Plato's Dialgues: the
Dialogical Approach ed. R.Hart (Mellen Press, in press)
Chapter 18
Plato. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito. Ed. J.Burnet. Notes (Oxford:
Clarendon 1924)
. Plato's Euthyphro, 1902. Ed. W.A.Heidel. Intro. & Notes (Arno
Press 1976; Repr. with Pseudo-Platonica 1895)
. The Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. F.M.Stawell. Text & Tr.,
Intro. & Notes (New York: Putnam's 1906)
. The Euthyphro of Plato. G.H.Wells. Text, Intro. & Notes
(London: Bell 1891)
. The Euthydemus of Plato. Ed. E.H.Gifford. Rev. Text, Intro. &
Notes, Appdices 1905, Arno repr.: 1973)
. Euthydemus etc. Text & Tr. W.R.M.Lamb (Loeb Library 1924)
Aristotle. Rhetoric Ed. J.H.Freese. Text & Tr. (Loeb Library 1947)
R.E.Allen. Plato's Euthyphro and the Earlier Theory of Forms
(N.Y.: Humanities 1970)
Kevin Robb. "Orality, Literacy, and the Dialogue-Form," Plato's
Dialogues: the Dialogical Approach ed. R.Hart (in press).
 Page 476
R.Sprague. Plato's Use of Fallacy. A Study of the Euthydemus and
Some Other Dialogues (N.Y. Barnes & Noble 1962)
L.von Sybel. Platon's Technik. An Symposion u. Euthydem
Nachgeweisen (U. of Marburg 1889)
E.West. "An Ironic Dilemma, Incompatible Interpretations of
Euthyphro 5a-b," Plato's
. Dialogues New Studies & Interpretations (Rowman, Littlefield
1993)
Chapter 19
Plato. The Philebus of Plato Ed. E.Poste. Rev. Text, Notes (Oxford
U.P. 1860)
. The Philebus of Plato. Ed. R.G.Bury Intro. Notes, Appendices
(Cambridge U.P. 1897)
. Philèbe. Texte & Tr. A. Diès (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1925)
. Laches. Texte & Tr. A. Croiset (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1921)
. Laches, etc. Ed. & Tr. W.R.M.Lamb (Loeb Library 1924)
. Laches and Charmides. Rosamund Sprague, Translation (Bobbs-
Merrill 1973)
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. H.Rackham. Text & Tr. Rev. Ed.
(Loeb Library 1934)
Eudoxus. In Greek Philosophy Vol.2 Ed. J.C. de Vogel (Leiden:
Brill 1953)
T.DeLaguna. "The Problem of the Laches," Mind 43 (1934); p.
170-180.
R.Dieterle. Platons Laches u. Charmides (U. of Freiburg:
Dissertation 1966)
J.Gould. The Development of Plato's Ethics (Cambridge U.P. 1955)
R.G.Hörber. "Plato's Laches," Classical Philology 63 (1968); p.95-
105.
G.Santas. "Socrates at Work on Virtue and Knowledge in Plato's
Laches," Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969); p.433-60.
W.Steidel. "Der Dialog Laches und Platons Verhaltnis zu Athen,"
Museum Helveticum No.7 (1950); p.129ff.
Chapter 20
Plato. Commentaire sur Le Cratyle. Text & Comm. C.Lenormant
(Athens: Coromélas 1861)
. Cratyle. Text & Tr. L.Méridier 3 ed. (Les Belles Lettres 1961)
. Parmenides. Cratylus. etc. Text & Tr. H.N.Fowler (Loeb Library
1926)
E.Boisacq. Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Grecque
(Heidelberg: Winter 1923)
W.Brandenstein. Griechische Sprachwissenschaft (Berlin: De
Gruyter 1960)
P.Chantraine. Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Grecque
(Paris: Klincksieck 1968-80)
A.H.Chroust. Socrates Man and Myth (South Bend: U. of Notre
Dame Press 1957)