Plato's Philosopher King: A Study of the Theoretical Background 0872493369

Citation preview

6Plato’s

6Philosophcr-Kmg

Published in Columbia, South Carolina, during the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the University of South Carolina and the two hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the United States of America.

6Plato’s Philosopher-King A STUDY OF THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Rosamond Kent Sprague

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA

ii

Copyright © 1976 University of South Carolina First Edition Published in Columbia, S.C., by the University of South Carolina Press, 1976 Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sprague, Rosamond Kent. Plato’s philosopher-king. 1. Philosopher-Kings. I. B398.P45S65 128'.2 ISBN 0-87249-336-9

Title. 76-6075

Dedicated to the Memory of My Teacher ERICH FRANK

354298

irorepov ovv t€ktopos pep Kai aKvreus eanv epya Tivbc Kai irpa^ets, avOpeoirov b'ovbev kdTLP,

dXX’ apyov ivecfrvKev, aristotle

Nicomachean Ethics

Then do the carpenter and cobbler have functions and activities but man none? Is he a lazy fellow without a function? Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 10971328-30

(Contents

xiii

Preface

i ii

Ion

The

1

Protagoras

m

The

IV

Lysis

311B-320C and

Charmides

Republic

I

VI

Republic

II-X

VII

The

Statesman

Appendix: The Index

447B-461B

29

217A-222B and

v

Gorgias

Euthydemus

288D-292E

57 75

100 Erastai

119

123

xi

SINCE THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK MAY LEAD THE READER TO EXPECT a work on Plato’s political theory, I hasten to explain that my subject is the status of the philosopher-king as man of art or science, rather than as head of state. It is to avoid this same misunderstand¬ ing that I have added the subtitle, A Study of the Theoretical Back¬ ground. In so doing I hope to direct the reader’s attention away from the more purely political aspects of the concept. The passage in Republic V (473C ff.) in which Plato asserts that philosophers should be kings (or, alternatively, that kings should take to the study of philosophy) is one of the most familiar in all his dialogues. And yet, with the exception of the Republic and some echoes in the Seventh Epistle, the philosopher-king makes very few appearances in Plato’s works. Should a study of Plato’s philosopher-king, then, be restricted mainly to the Republic? My answer to this question is clearly no, as may be seen from an inspection of the table of contents. But, with the exception of the Republic and the Statesman, I venture to guess that the dialogues listed are somewhat unexpected. To begin such a study with the Ion (a dialogue whose chief claim to prominence has usually been the lodestone passage at 533C-535A) may seem particularly ec¬ centric. My choice of dialogues has, however, been dictated by my desire (as indicated by the subtitle) to study the theoretical back¬ ground of the concept, as I shall now explain in more detail.

XIV

plato’s philosopher-king

The philosopher-king, for Plato, is a man of art or science; he has a techne. Furthermore it is axiomatic for Plato that a man and his art (that which he knows) are so intimately related that in every case the identity of the art tells us who the man is, and the identity of the man tells us what the art is. (I have called this the facultyobject principle.) This principle appears to function perfectly ade¬ quately for such arts as carpentry, cobbling, farming, medicine—all those matters that, as Alcibiades says in the Symposium (221E), are forever in the mouth of Socrates. Furthermore, if we ask for the product1 of any one of these arts, an answer is readily forthcoming: the cobbler’s art produces shoes, the doctor’s art produces health, and so on. There is another group of arts, however, for which the question as to product cannot so readily be answered. Among these are rhetoric, sophistry, and—strangely enough in such companystatecraft. The major problem of the book amounts, then, to this: If statecraft is an art that resembles rhetoric and sophistry in its lack of readily specifiable products, how is Plato able to regard statecraft as a genuine science (the science of the statesman or philosopher-king) but rhetoric and sophistry as shams? Or, to phrase the problem in terms of men instead of arts, how are we to dis¬ tinguish the philosopher from the rhetorician and the sophist? To do so is certainly one of Plato’s major concerns. To attempt a solution to this problem it is necessary to study statecraft primarily as an art rather than as part of Plato’s political theory. For this purpose I have employed a simple technical ter¬ minology by which I could conveniently distinguish the arts that had readily specifiable products from those that did not. Since the distinction appeared to be hierarchical in nature, the expressions “first-order” art and “second-order” art came readily to mind. It should now be somewhat more obvious why the book begins with a study of the Ion. This is a brief dialogue in which Plato compares a second-order art, that of the rhapsode, with a number 1 Plato usually asks the question in a much more general way than is in¬ dicated by the word “product.” He will say, of what, or about what, is such and such the art? (See Gorgias 495E, for instance.) In this way he can include arts such as mathematics, which would not initially appear to be first order. (See Charmides 165E ff. and Gorgias 451B.)

Preface

xv

of first-order arts, such as chariot-driving, and concludes that the rhapsode’s art is no art. Chapter II, which studies passages from the Protagoras and Gorgias, performs a similar analysis for sophistry and rhetoric. Up to this point it appears that to be an art of the second order is not to be an art at all. Chapter III concerns the Charmides, in which we again encounter the notion of a secondorder art, but in a new guise, as science of sciences. In spite of the aporetic nature of the dialogue, there seems good reason to believe that Plato meant here to accept the notion of a second-order art and to identify it both with temperance and with the knowledge of good and evil. The analysis of the Charmides incidentally isolates four special features that tend to appear (as a group) when Plato discusses the status of second-order arts. I have called these (1) tinos-words,2 (2) regresses, (3) reflexivity, and (4) uselessness. The Lysis and the Euthydemus are studied next (in chapter IV), since in each of these dialogues there is a substantial passage in which these special features occur. With Republic I, discussed in chapter V, we reach a stage at which Plato is ready to drop his aporetic treatment of the secondorder arts and to embark on something more positive. Thus we now find him shifting from a denial of the first-order status of justice (by means of the paradox that the just man is the best thief) to a recognition of the possibility that justice may be an art even though it is not an art of the first order; it is a second-order art. A discussion of selected passages from the remainder of the Republic in the light of Plato’s recognition of justice as a secondorder art or techne is the subject of chapter VI. It is here, of course, that we encounter the philosopher-king and find him to be the possessor of such an art. The final chapter is devoted to the Statesman, since it is in this dialogue, rather than in the Republic, that Plato really comes to grips with the relationship between statecraft and the other arts, and (by the method of division)isolates the statesman from his rivals. It will appear, too, from the close resemblances between 2 That is, “of what” words. Art (techne) is a tinos-word, since arts are “of” something.

XVI

plato’s philosopher-king

Plato’s treatment of the statesman and his treatment of the philoso¬ pher-king in the Republic, that to all intents and purposes he means to identify justice with statecraft. There is, of course, a difference of approach and emphasis, so that we might wish to think of justice as more self-regarding than statecraft. But Plato certainly believes that rule of others assumes rule of self; this is one of the important things that the soul/state analogy has to say. The just man is in a sense second order to himself, since he is concerned with making himself good. This is his “own business” and true function. The statesman simply performs the same function in a different way and on a larger scale: he makes others good by means of his own good¬ ness. Since I have introduced a certain number of technical expressions into this discussion of Plato, I ought to say a general word about them. Plato himself is possibly the least addicted to technical ter¬ minology of any major philosopher, and it was my natural instinct to follow his example. What I intended, however, was not to try to impose a special terminology on Plato but to devise a species of shorthand by which I could refer to certain persistent features of his thought. To have written “arts such as carpentry and cobbling, which have recognizable products, as opposed to those such as rhetoric and sophistry, which do not” every time I wanted to dis¬ tinguish the former type of art from the latter, would have become excessively cumbersome and tedious: hence my employment of the terms “first-order” and “second-order.” It may be, too, that terms such as “regress” and “reflexivity” may produce an expectation of much more logical precision than is present either in Plato or in my interpretation of him. Plato certainly gives no firm analysis of either of these notions, but he does indicate that regresses occur (particularly in connection with tinos-words) and that certain concepts turn back upon themselves. In these cases my choice of terms was intended to be more evocative than precise. It will probably appear odd and perhaps even arrogant that the book contains almost no citation of secondary sources. I wanted to write a short book that would be totally about Plato rather than a longer book that would, in greater or lesser degree, be about what

Preface

XVII

other people had said about Plato. At least the faults of the book cannot be blamed upon anyone except myself. For the purpose of quoting from the dialogues, I have used the following translations. From the Loeb Classical Library, by permis¬ sion of the Harvard University Press, Vol. Ill, the Ion (1925; rev. 1939), and Vol. V, the Lysis (1925), both translated by W.R.M. Lamb; Vol. Ill, the Statesman (1925; rev. 1939), translated by Harold N. Fowler; Vol. VII, the Cleitophon (1929; rev. 1942), translated by R.G. Bury; Vol. I (1930; rev. 1937), and Vol. II (1935), of the Republic, translated by Paul Shorey. By permission of Penguin Books Ltd., Penguin Classics, England, Meno and Protagoras (1956), translated by W.K.C. Guthrie, and the Apology (1945), translated by Hugh Tredennick. From The Dialogues of Plato, permission of Clarendon Press, Oxford, Charmides and Laches, translated by Benjamin Jowett, 1953. By permission of Thomas Nelson, Edinburgh, Gorgias, translated by W.D. Woodhead, 1953. By permission of Bobbs-Merrill, Library of Liberal Arts, Indianapolis, Euthydemus, translated by Rosamond Kent Sprague, 1965. ROSAMOND KENT SPRAGUE University of South Carolina Columbia, South Carolina

I The Ion

THE Ion WILL PROBABLY APPEAR A VERY STRANGE DIALOGUE WITH which to begin a study of Plato’s philosopher-king. As has been in¬ dicated in the preface, however, there is an intimate connection in Plato’s mind between an expert (in any field), that expert’s art or techne, and the subject matter or scope of that art. In the Ion, a short and presumably early dialogue, Plato’s attention is focused on the requirements to be met by an art if it is to be an art. The dialogue will therefore repay study as a general introduction to the topic of the philosopher-king and his own especial art, the art of statecraft. In broad outline, the dialogue may be summarized as follows: At 531A, after a brief introduction, Socrates elicits from the rhap¬ sode, Ion, the statement that he is skilled in the interpretation of Homer but in that of no other poet. Socrates then proceeds to attack this statement by two arguments that I shall call (1) the same and different argument (531 AC) and (2) the better and worse argument (531D-532B, with illustrations continuing to 533C). At 533C-535A we have the familiar lodestone passage in which Socrates expresses the view that the rhapsode, like the poet, speaks “by divine dispensation” (theiai moirai) and not “with art 1

2

plato’s philosopher-king

and knowledge” (technei kai epistemei); in other words, the rhap¬ sode’s art is not really an art. (Illustrations showing that the rhapsode performs while out of his senses follow at 535B-536D.) At 536DE, Ion is led to make a second important statement, that the topics in Homer on which he speaks well are all topics. This statement is answered by Socrates with what I shall call the specialfields argument (536E-541A). The effect of this argument is to show that the rhapsode has in fact no special field; the implication is again that he is no kind of expert. In spite of Ion’s protest at 541B that the good rhapsode is a good general, the dialogue ends with his once more being forced back upon the alternative of divine dispensation. Tire dialogue, then, revolves around two poles, around, that is, the statements made by Ion at 531A and at 536DE. In each case the arguments mustered by Socrates lead to the conclusion that the rhapsode is no expert and the rhapsode’s art no art. But what are the grounds of failure? It is this point that is of special interest, since, in observing just why the rhapsode's art cannot be called an art, it is possible to learn something concerning the requirements any art must meet to be considered a genuine art. Statement I: Ion is skilled in Homer but not in Hesiod or Archi¬ lochus (531A). Refutation A: The same and different argument (531AC). This first refutation starts out as a simple two-pronged affair in¬ tending to show that Ion’s thesis fails to hold either (1) when Homer and some other poet, such as Hesiod, say the same things or (2) when they do not. But Plato has complicated his argument in a manner that makes it, as a whole, inconclusive: it is unclear whether there are, or are not, cases that fall under the second al¬ ternative. Under the first alternative—cases in which Homer and Hesiod say the same—the argument runs quite easily: Ion says that he would expound both poets equally well when they say the same (531A11), and Socrates responds (but not until 531C2) by asking whether there are, in fact, any topics peculiar to Homer.

The Ion

3

Does Homer speak of any other than the very things that all the other poets speak of? Has he not described war for the most part, and the mutual intercourse of men, good and bad, lay and professional, and the ways of the gods in their intercourse with each other and with men, and happenings in the heavens and in the underworld, and orig¬ ins of gods and heroes? [531 CD] If Socrates had kept to the position that the subject matter of all poets is the same, Ion’s claim to be an expert in only one would have been disposed of readily. But this straightforward argument is interrupted by the brief passage in which Socrates considers the second possibility, cases in which the poets do not say the same. “For example,” he says, [what] about the seer’s art, on which both Homer and Hesiod say something . . . would you, or one of the good seers, expound better what these two poets say, not only alike but differently, about the seer’s art? ion: One of the seers. socrates: And if you were a seer, would you not, with an ability to ex¬ pound what they say in agreement, know also how to expound the points on which they differ? ion: Of course. [53iB] There are a number of points to be noted here. Tire first is that whereas Socrates did not at once specify any particular topic on which two poets might say the same, he does specify one, the seer’s art, on which they might not. This enables him to bring in a new person, the good seer, who would expound better than Ion the passages in which the two poets speak differently (concerning the seer's art) as well as those in which they speak alike. The possibility is then considered that Ion himself could be identified with the seer; if so, he would combine the ability to expound the points of agreement with the ability to expound the points of difference. Ion has, in fact, a rival, and we shall see later that similar rivals spring up on every side, so that in the end the rhapsode finds his occupation gone. Furthermore, Plato has begun to prepare the way

4

PLATO S PHILOSOPHER-KING

for the thesis that “when one has acquired a whole art, the inquiry (skepsis) is the same” (532D). Instead of concentrating, in the second part of his argument, solely on those passages in which the poets do not say the same, he carries along into this argument the conclusion already reached in the first part, that when two poets agree. Ion can expound them equally well. When he begins to characterize Ion’s rival and ultimate substitute, the good seer, there¬ fore, he presents him as a person possessing a double ability, that of being able to expound what the poets say in agreement as well as the points on which they differ (531B). What is really confusing in the passage is that, after these brief and (in view of the develop¬ ment of the dialogue) very suggestive lines allotted to the second alternative, Plato winds up the entire argument by asking Ion whether Homer does in fact “speak of any other than the very things that all the other poets speak of.” We do not know whether there was a genuine alternative or not.1 1 It seems to me worth noting Plato’s method here. Suppose that he had set out the passage 531AC in a really neat and tidy form. It might have run something like this: (1) “Same” argument (531A and C). (2) “Different” argument (53iB, but perhaps denuded of the references to similarity). (3) Conclusion (not given by Plato) to the effect that “same” and “dif¬ ferent” taken together cover all possible passages in the poets. But consider how it actually does run: (A) Part of the “same” argument (531A). (B) “Different” argument, complicated by incorporation of the conclusion reached at 531A (531B). (C) Resumption and conclusion of the “same” argument, carrying the im¬ plication that the “different” argument was not a genuine alternative (531C). Plato’s arrangement appears clumsy by comparison—at least it does so until the attempt is made to incorporate the suggested rearrangement into the dialogue. It then becomes clear that—whereas (C) leads easily into the “better and worse” argument at 531D ff.—(3) would hardly do so. Or try (B)—(A)—(C), putting the “different” argument first and allowing the two parts of the “same” argument to come together: then the conclusion at 531A cannot be used and the notion of the good seer would be defective. Or (A)-(C)-(B): again the transition to the next argument is affected. Reluctantly perhaps, it has to be admitted that there is a purpose in Plato’s untidiness; he is not playing with neat, detachable building blocks (as a sophist might) but weaving his argu¬ ments carefully into the texture of the dialogue as a whole. For the sake of

The Ion

5

Refutation B: The better and worse argument (531D-532B). Ion is willing to agree that Homer and the other poets speak of the same things, but he insists that Homer speaks of them better. Socrates then proceeds to argue, by means of examples—he uses the arithmetician and the doctor—that the same person will always distinguish, given the same subject and several persons talking about it, both who speaks well and who badly; otherwise, if he is not going to distinguish the bad speaker, clearly he will not distinguish the good one either, where the subject is the same. The conversation then continues as follows: That is so. And the same man is found to be skilled in both? ion: Yes. socrates: And you say that Homer and the other poets, among whom are Hesiod and Archilochus, all speak about the same things, only not similarly, but the one does it well, and the rest worse? ion: Yes, and what I say is true. ion:

socrates:

Therefore Ion, who has judged Homer to be the best of poets, must also have the ability to distinguish the inferiority of the poets who are worse than Homer. If so, he cannot be a judge of Homer only, but must be equally skilled in all the poets. The reason why Ion “drops into a doze” when other poets are mentioned is that he is “unable to speak on Homer with art and knowledge” (technei kai epistemei; 532C). The art of poetry, like every other art, is a whole, and it therefore has the same principle of inquiry (skepsis) running through it. A man who is an expert on painting or sculpdoing this he has not even cared to make clear that there is a distinction between speaking of the same things and saying the same things of these same things. On this basis Homer and the other poets might well share the same subjects but still differ in what they have to say about them, as was the case with the seer’s art. (The alternative was genuine, in other words.) Was this point clear in Plato’s own mind? As far as this particular passage is concerned, it remains im¬ possible to tell.

6

plato’s philosopher-king

ture or music—or even rhapsody—can judge the whole field, not just one representative of it. Ion must either give up his original claim to skill in the interpretation of Homer alone, or he must admit that the rhapsode’s art is no art. (He opts for the latter and accepts the alternative of divine dispensation, as we have seen.) The structure of the better and worse argument is not at all dif¬ ficult to understand, it being a typical Socratic induction leading to the statement of a general rule. This rule is then applied to the point at issue. In the course of the argument, however, Plato has called attention to a number of important requirements that must be met by a genuine art, and, mutatis mutandis, by the man who possesses such an art. It is essential to see what these are. As a preliminary point it should be noted that, in the dialogue, Plato is investigating an art that is an art of speaking. We have seen, too, that it is the interpretative part of Ion’s skill rather than the purely recitative part that is the focus of attention (see espe¬ cially 530BC), so that the art of the rhapsode is presented not simply as an art of speaking but as an art of speaking about some subject-in this case, a poet. Furthermore, the poet is also presented as a speaker speaking about some subject—war or the seer’s art, for instance. (The question whether the seer is in his turn a kind of speaker is not at the moment raised.) There is thus an ordering as follows: Ion speaks about Homer, who speaks about the art of the seer, or, to generalize: the rhapsode speaks about the poet, who speaks about X. The activity of the rhapsode, then, is clearly not on the same level as that of the poet. The poet’s art is an art about X, whereas the rhapsode’s art (if it is one) is an art about an art about X. This difference between levels is of so much importance for what follows in the rest of this book and will be referred to so frequently that it will be convenient to employ a technical terminology to refer to it. Numbers will be assigned to the various levels as follows: o: 1: 2: 3:

a subject matter that is not about any other subject matter an art that is about o an art that is about 1 an art that is about 2

The Ion

7

and so forth, as needed. In the example just given, the seer’s art would occupy the o level, and the arts of the poet and the rhapsode would be referred to, respectively, as a first-order art and a secondorder art. (If the seer’s art should be further analyzed as an art of speaking, its subject matter would occupy the o level, and the other orders would each be shifted one step up.) The point that is es¬ sential is that not all arts occupy the same level; there are some that involve speaking about other arts, and some that in turn speak about these. Plato keeps this distinction clearly in mind (although not, of course, using the terminology I have suggested), and if we keep it in mind also, it will greatly facilitate our understand¬ ing of his treatment of the arts both in the Ion and in other dialogues. We can now return to the better and worse argument with a view to discovering what Plato has to say about the requirements of a genuine art. Plato began this argument (the second of the two refutations of Ion’s claim to be expert in expounding one poet only) with two examples, both of which involve speaking: (a) When several people are talking about number and one of them speaks better than the rest, there is someone who will recog¬ nize this good speaker. This is the same person as the man who will recognize the bad speaker and is, furthermore, the man who has the art of numeration (arithmetike techne; 531DE). (b) Again, it will be one person, the doctor, and not two separate persons who will be able to recognize both the good speaker and the bad when several persons are discussing which foods are whole¬ some (531E). Both Plato’s examples consist of the following elements: 1. an expert (the arithmetician, the doctor) 2. good and bad speakers 3. subject matter of these speakers (number, wholesome foods) The first point to be noted is that neither the arithmetician nor the doctor is here performing his usual work; neither is engaged in his first-order function of calculating or of healing sick bodies. (Yet if they did not possess these functions and did not normally exercise

8

plato’s philosopher-king

them, it is doubtful if they could perform the function of judging which are the good and which the bad speakers in their own fields.) The second point is that this function of judging appears to be a second-order function. It could perhaps even be reduced to a form of speaking (saying that A is a good speaker or B is a bad speaker), so that the situation would resemble that in which the rhapsode speaks about the poet, who, in turn, speaks about X. But this will not quite do, since to interpret Homer is surely not the same as to judge that Homer is worth interpreting. Is the function of judging, then, a third-order function? This is a distinct possi¬ bility, since the value judgement does seem to precede exposition. If Plato thinks so, however, he does not make himself clear, since he does not tell us what he regards the relationship between the two functions, judging and expounding to be; we only know that they belong to the same man (531E, 532A). The third point to be made is that the arithmetician and the doctor are always, for Plato, genuine experts, and their arts are genuine arts; it will probably be safe to assume, therefore, that they represent a standard with re¬ spect to which the rhapsode’s art falls short. So far, then, the chief requirement to be met by a genuine ex¬ pert appears to be that he must have the ability to recognize both good and bad speakers in his own field. Accompanying this ability (in some unexplained way) is the ability to expound the subject matter of the entire field. The better and worse argument is really complete when Socrates has demonstrated Ion’s failure to comply with this requirement, but in the supplementary passage 532C ff. we learn something further (this time about the characteristics of the arts, not about those of their practitioners): what we learn is that the arts are wholes, and that the same principle of inquiry holds throughout (532D). In a sense, these are not new points but are the natural corollaries of what has already been said about the expert and his abilities. That is, if, in the same man, are to be combined the ability to recog¬ nize the good speaker and the ability to recognize the bad speaker, then the object of this man’s discernment must be a double object, comprising good and bad. We have here, in fact, an example of an

The Ion

9

assumption unformulated by Plato but nevertheless omnipresent in his works—that the faculty that knows an object in some way de¬ termines the nature of the object, and, conversely, that the object known in some way determines the nature of the faculty that knows it. The most obvious example is the divided line passage in the Republic, where types of objects are systematically correlated with types of faculties. Again, it could be argued that the whole of the Cratylus hinges upon this assumption, since Plato points out at the end of the dialogue (440A) the difficulty of saying that knowledge exists if all things are constantly changing. There is, to my knowl¬ edge, no accepted name for this assumption; I shall call it “the faculty-object principle.”2 Then too—and this is an assumption also unformulated by Plato— the man who possesses a faculty is likewise determined in his na¬ ture and function by its possession. It is just because a man can recognize the good and bad speakers on the subject of wholesome foods (or heal sick bodies) that we call him a doctor. The facultyobject principle, then, makes no real distinction, except in ter¬ minology, between the man and the faculty. The man is the faculty and the faculty is the man. Plato is therefore uttering a truism, not a paradox, when he insists that the man who knows justice is just (Gorgias 460B), or that the temperate man can say what tem¬ perance is (Charmides 159A). The Ion, in the course of the better and worse argument, pre¬ sents us with an inseparable triad, expert-faculty-object, in which the knowledge of good and evil is pervasive. The expert is the man who knows good and evil in the persons of the good and bad speakers, and they, in turn, as the objects known, form a whole that is in itself good and evil. We may begin to suspect that knowledge of good and evil is one of the earmarks of the expert, in fact. Ion, who lacks this knowledge, is not an expert, then, and by 2 Plato’s assumption also involves a correlation of the faculty and its object with the expert and his art or science. For instance, houses are built by the man who has the building faculty; this is the builder, the possessor of the building art. The principle could equally well be called ‘'expert-faculty-object” (where faculty implies possession of the relevant art) and will be so called where this seems appropriate. Compare Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI, 1, 113939-12.

10

Plato’s philosopher-king

the same token his art is not an art. What skill he does have in interpreting Homer must be of some other sort. Instead of being able to speak with “art and knowledge/’ he is moved by some divine power, since if he “had fully learned by art to speak on one kind of theme, [he] would know how to speak on all” (534C). In spite of many convincing examples (535B ff.), Ion is not quite willing to agree that he is “possessed and mad” when he praises Homer (536D); he still lays claim to an expert’s skill. Socrates now proceeds to attack this claim in a different way, one that will also tell us something about the requirements of a genuine art. Statement II: Ion claims to speak well on all parts of Homer (536E).

Refutation: The special-fields argument (536E-541A). Socrates precipitates Ion’s statement by a request to know on what thing in Homer’s story Ion speaks well; he receives the ex¬ pected reply, “on all without a single exception” (536E). But surely, Ion does not mean to include those things of which he has no knowledge? Ion does not admit that there are any such things. What Socrates now proceeds to do is to lay down a fresh set of requirements to be met by a genuine art and to show, once more, that the rhapsode’s art fails to meet them. They are as follows: 1. Every art has a power of knowing a particular business (ergon; 537c)-3 2. The particular business of one art cannot be known by an¬ other art—e.g., what we know by the art of piloting we cannot also know by the art of medicine (537C). 3. The arts are distinguished one from another by what it is they know; if two arts knew the same thing, they would be the same art (537D, 537E). (This is the corollary of 2.) 4. Whoever does not have a particular art will be incapable 3 Plato emphasizes the inseparability of the art and its ergon by writing “And to every art has been appointed by God a power of knowing a particular business’’ (italics mine).

The Ion

11

of knowing correctly the words or works of that art (538A). 5. The man who possesses an art will be the best judge of whether or not anyone speaks correctly on the particular business of that art (537c>

538B)-

Plato has introduced a very strong separation between the var¬ ious arts: each has its own special field upon which no other art encroaches. It is clear, too, that Plato means to extend this sepa¬ ration to the experts who possess the various arts. (See 540A.) Even if a man should possess two arts (e.g., horsemanship and lyre play¬ ing, 54oB)> he would do so by virtue of two distinct skills; he would almost be two separate men, one might say. Ion is now made to admit that when Homer speaks of chariot racing, it is the charioteer and not the rhapsode who will judge best if Homer speaks correctly. And so on for medicine, fishing, and the art of the seer. Then which are the passages of which the rhapsode is the best judge? (In other words, what is the rhapsode’s special field?) Ion again answers, “all passages,” whereupon he is reminded that he has already agreed to the general principle of one art—one particular business. If the rhapsode’s art were a genuine art, it would have its own particular business, but Ion is unable to say what this business is. He has grasped the point that the business of any one of the arts will immediately be pre-empted by Socrates for the relevant expert; he therefore tries another tack and sug¬ gests that the things the rhapsode knows are those things “that it befits a man to say, and the sort of thing that a woman should say; the sort for a slave and the sort for a freeman; and the sort for a subject or for a ruler” (540B). This is an interesting move, but nothing comes of it because Socrates brings the argument relent¬ lessly back to the arts (540B ff.). Picking up the term “ruler,” he gives it a particular content, “ruler of a storm-tossed ship” and then translates this phrase into “pilot.” Similarly, he reintroduces the doctor, describing him as “ruler of a sick man.” “A slave” be¬ comes a cowherd (who will know better than the rhapsode what to say to pacify his cows), and “a woman” becomes a worker in wool.

12

plato’s philosopher-king

Socrates then suggests to Ion that perhaps “he will know what a man would say, when he is a general exhorting his men” (540D). Ion happily accepts this suggestion but is immediately made to see that if the rhapsode knows what the general ought to say, he will know this in his capacity as general, not in his capacity as rhapsode. At this point, Ion becomes balky; he refuses to be deprived of the general’s art. It is in vain that Socrates points out that the two arts are not convertible (even if every good rhapsode were a good general, not every good general is a good rhapsode, as Ion himself admits, 541 A) and that if Ion is such a fine general it seems strange that he is unemployed (541B ff.). The dialogue ends with Socrates assuming that Ion has, in spite of his protestations of being a good general, failed to identify the rhapsode’s special field. He says to him: “you have professed to me that you know any amount of fine things about Homer, and you promise to display them; but you are only deceiving me, and so far from displaying the subjects of your skill, you decline even to tell me what they are ...” (541E). If Ion were really an artist (technikos), he would of course be able to do this; therefore he must be deceiving Socrates—unless, of course, he wishes to take up the position that he is not an artist at all but speaks by divine dispensation rather than by knowledge. Would Ion rather be called dishonest or divine? Faced with this alternative, Ion gives up his claims to art and chooses divinity. It was pointed out at the beginning of the chapter that the Ion revolves around two poles, the rhapsode’s statements that (1) it is possible to expound one poet with art and knowledge while re¬ maining ignorant of others, and (2) the rhapsode’s special field consists of all fields. In the course of refuting these two statements Plato has indicated a number of positive characteristics belonging to a genuine art (and, incidentally, to its possessor). It is these that I have tried to bring out, and they may now be summarized. From the refutation of the first statement we learn that arts are wholes, so that for Plato it is simply nonsense to suppose it possible to interpret one poet in isolation from the rest. Interpretation in¬ volves understanding what the poet says, and such understanding

The Ion

*3

involves recognition and understanding of the poet who speaks badly on a subject, not just of the poet who speaks well. Those who possess the ability to recognize the good and bad speakers are the experts in the special fields; thus the expert, in addition to the firstorder capacity of performing his particular function, has what is at least a second-order capacity of judging whether the poet speaks well about this function. This second-order capacity accompanies, and is perhaps presupposed by, the ability to interpret what the poet says, but Plato has not made clear the relationship between interpretation and judgment. What he has made reasonably clear is that the expert possesses knowledge of the better and the worse, or, as it is elsewhere phrased, knowledge of good and evil.4 Tire refutation of the second statement concentrates upon the isolation of the various arts from each other. Each has its own special field, and this field is known by that particular art alone. Furthermore, if the special field cannot be identified, there is no corresponding art, and, a fortiori, no corresponding expert. The ability to interpret and to expound will, of course, be lacking also, since it was the expert alone who possessed these abilities. The rhapsode’s art, then, is no art. Or, rather, we may say that it is not a first-order art. If it is grouped with other first-order arts, such as carpentry, medicine, or fishing, it fails to fit the pattern: the carpenter has the art of carpentry and knows woodworking; the rhapsode has the rhapsode’s art and knows-? But is it a second-order art? Ion, when he says that the rhapsode speaks well on all passages, seems to have in mind a situation more like this: the rhapsode’s art

4 See the discussion of the Charmides in chapter III.

14

plato’s philosopher-king

Then what sort of an art would the rhapsode’s art be? If to speak about an art involves knowledge of that art, the rhapsode ought, from Plato’s point of view, to possess first-order knowledge of all the arts. That such a master-of-all-trades should actually exist seems hardly credible (unless he were a god?), and the possibility is not even considered here in the Ion. But the problem of the secondorder art (and the second-order expert) continues to occupy Plato’s mind, becoming perhaps most acute in the late dialogue Statesman. In the following chapters I shall examine some of the most im¬ portant passages in which this problem appears.5 5 An interesting passage to compare with the Ion (and also with the Gorgias) is Dissoi Logoi VIII, in which the anonymous author states that “the man who knows the art of rhetoric will also know how to speak correctly on every subject” and concludes that such a man will know everything. “The reason for this,” he says, “is that he knows the art of all forms of speech, and all forms of speech everything that .” It is unclear, however, whether the author intended to accept his own conclusion or not. (Translation mine as published in Mind, 77, n.s., no. 306 [April 1968], pp. 155—67.) Compare also Sophist 232E for antilogike as second order.

II 311B'320C and Qorgias 447B-46 IB

6Protagoras

IN THE Ion Plato made it clear that the rhapsode’s art was no art, or, at least, was not what I have called a first-order art. He did this by the simple expedient of grouping it with a number of other arts that he considered to be genuine arts; it then became obvious that the rhapsode’s art fell short, in some important re¬ spects, of the criteria he had established for inclusion within that grouping. I believe that Plato intended us to draw the inference that the intitial grouping had been a mistake. Plato employs a similar technique on various other occasions, of which two are of special interest, Protagoras 311B-320C and Gorgias 447B-461B. The two rejected arts are those of the sophist and of the rhetorician. By noting the reasons for their rejection, it ■will again be possible to discover something about the characteris¬ tics of the genuine arts. Protagoras 311B-320C The young Hippocrates has come early to tell Socrates that he intends to become a pupil of Protagoras. As it is still too early for

*5

16

plato’s philosopher-king

a visit to the house of Callias where Protagoras is staying, Socrates questions Hippocrates to see if the young man has foreseen the con¬ sequences of what he intends to do. (He has not, as we may guess.) Socrates begins by asking Hippocrates to whom he is going and what it is that he hopes to become, when he goes to Protagoras and pays him a fee for his services. For instance, if Hippocrates were to go to his namesake, Hippocrates of Cos, he would be going to a doctor and would intend to become a doctor. Or again, if he went to Polycleitus or Pheidias, he would be going to a sculptor, with the intention of becoming a sculptor. By analogy, then, if he goes to Protagoras, he will be going to a sophist with the in¬ tention of becoming a sophist. At this, however, Hippocrates can be seen to blush (312A). Hippocrates’ blush may be explained by gentlemanly prejudice, but it should be noted that he has grasped the basic principle that Socrates has intended to convey, that to acquire the art is to be¬ come the man. If, that is, this case is like the other cases (312A). There appears to be at least one respect in which it is not quite like them, since it appears possible to receive from the sophist instruction “in the way of liberal education” (as one did from the schoolmaster) without wishing to become a professional purveyor of this instruction oneself.1 Nevertheless we still do not know what a sophist is, and for Hippocrates this means that he proposes to entrust his soul to something without knowing whether that thing is good or bad. (Here Plato seems to imply that to know a thing’s nature enables one to make a value judgment about it, or, at the very least, that the value judgment certainly cannot be made with¬ out knowing the nature of the thing.) What, then, is a sophist? Hippocrates replies (312C) that he is 1A passage in the Cleitophon (409BD) is relevant to this point in the Protagoras. Cleitophon describes the art of medicine as having a twofold effect, to produce new doctors and to produce health. If we try to apply this twofold analysis to justice, however, we will find that although we can say, analogously, that “one effect of justice is to produce good men,” we are unable to name “the operation which the just man is capable of performing for us.” (The reason why we cannot do so is that justice, like sophistry, is a second-order techne, as we shall see in chapter V.)

Protagoras 311B-320C and Gorgias 447B-461B

17

“one who has knowledge of wise things.” But this answer does not really tell us anything, since it has failed to specify the type of wis¬ dom constituting the sophist’s peculiar province. In the case of painting, for instance, we could say, “wisdom concerned with the making of likenesses.” Can Hippocrates give a comparable answer for the sophist? Of what art is he the master? Hippocrates now answers that the sophist is “master of the art of making clever speakers” (312D). This answer, Socrates replies, may be true but is not “sufficient.” From our reading of the Ion, we can guess what the answer lacks: It fails to specify what the clever speaking is about (peri tinos; 312E3). Again Plato goes to one of the genuine techniques, this time to lyre playing: it is the teacher of lyre playing who makes clever speakers on that subject. And again Hippocrates is invited to model his answer concerning the sophist on one of the genuine techniques. He is being led to assume that sophistry itself is, in fact, one of the genuine techniques. But, in working on this assumption, he cannot give the type of answer that the assumption leads him to expect. When Socrates asks, “and what is this subject on which the sophist is both an expert himself and can make others expert” (312E) Hippocrates gives up; he cannot tell. After warning Hippocrates again of his folly in proposing to en¬ trust his soul to a person of whose nature he is ignorant, Socrates proposes an answer to the question himself: We could call the sophist “a merchant or peddler of the goods by which a soul is nourished” (313C). At this point Hippocrates shows himself an apt pupil, since he puts to Socrates the exact type of question which Socrates has twice put to him: “but what is it that nourishes a soul?” Socrates’ answer is no more satisfactory than those of Hip¬ pocrates, however, since to say “what it learns” (313C7) specifies nothing as to the nature of such nourishment beyond the implica¬ tion that it must be some kind of knowledge. (Knowledge of what? we might ask.) Hippocrates is not allowed to ask for further de¬ tails; instead Socrates reverts to the dubious character of the sop¬ hists’ wares. Like the vendors of wares for the body, they praise all of their merchandise indiscriminately—not knowing the good from

18

plato’s philosopher-king

the bad. So it is unsafe to purchase knowledge from a sophist un¬ less one happens to be an expert in discerning which of their wares is good and which is bad.2 Socrates and Hippocrates now set out for the house of Callias (314C) without really having settled the question of what a sophist is. As soon as they are able to gain the attention of Protagoras (not until 318A) the question is renewed by a return to the subject of the content of the sophist’s art. If Hippocrates becomes a follower of Protagoras, what effect will the association produce in him? Protagoras states that Hippocrates will go home a better man each day. Socrates raises the inevitable question: Better at what? If Hip¬ pocrates were to become a follower of Zeuxippus or of Orthagoras, the question would be easy to answer: at painting, or at flute play¬ ing. Once more Plato forces the analogy between sophistry and the genuine techniques. Protagoras’ answer (318DE) is interesting on two counts, in what it denies and in what it asserts. First, he dissociates himself from the practices of his fellow sophist, Hippias, who plunges his students into the special studies from which they have just escaped, arithmetic and astronomy and geometry and music. Protagoras seems therefore to be denying that his art is one of the first-order arts. Second, what he does claim to teach a young man is “the proper care of his personal affairs, so that he may best manage his own household, and also of the state’s affairs, so as to become a real power in the city, both as speaker and man of action” (318E). Socrates is able to put a name to this subject at once. Protagoras is talking about the art of politics (politike techne), and what he claims to do is to make men good citizens. But can this subject be taught? In the case of the recognizably technical subjects, such as architecture or ship building, people will accept advice from no one except the expert, but when it is a question of government, all sorts of persons get up and are heard. The inference is that this art cannot be taught and thus there are no technical qualifications to be had (and no experts to be found). 2 In the Ion, the rhapsode did not know how to tell good poets (or poems) from bad ones; he lacked the knowledge of good and evil, in fact.

Protagoras 311B-320C and Gorgias 447B-461B

*9

If I am right in supposing that Plato adhered to the principle that the art is the man and the man the art (which is really an extension of what I have called the “faculty-object principle”), then what Plato intends to say here by having Protagoras claim to teach the political art is that he, Protagoras, is really claiming to be a statesman. The initial question, What is a sophist? was re¬ interpreted to mean, What is it that a sophist claims as his art? As that question has now been answered by a sophist himself, we now know what a sophist claims to be. Protogoras may think that he is simply a teacher, not a pretender to statesmanship, but if the po¬ litical art is synonymous with “making men good citizens” (319A), then (as we are to learn from the Statesman and the Republic) he is encroaching on the statesman’s task. Whoever does possess the political art, will not, however, possess an art that can confidently be grouped with what I have been calling the genuine or first-order arts. That is, “the many” certainly seem unwilling to group it with those arts (319BD). Whether we are to infer from this passage that they are right or wrong on this point is unclear. In other words, does Plato think (a) that the political art is a genuine art but is not recognized as such because the wrong people claim to have it, or (b) does he think that it is not a genuine art because no matter who has it, its subject matter remains uni¬ dentified? Plato implies the latter since in the passages prior to the identification of the sophist’s art with the political art, in which comparisons between the sophist’s art and the genuine arts were made (311B-313A and 318BD), it was the lack of subject matter for the sophist’s art that made the comparisons break down. Thus when Socrates equates the political art with “making men good citizens” at 319A, Plato may be expecting the reader to ask him¬ self the question, Good at what? If we are meant to ask ourselves this question, we certainly get no answer to it in the Protagoras. Or perhaps I should say, we get no clear answer. The evidence that Plato meant (a) not (b), is only supplied in other dialogues.3 In the part of his speech running from 319D to 320C, Socrates does one very significant thing: he ceases to speak of the political 3 See especially chapters VI and VII.

20

plato’s philosopher-king

art and begins to speak of virtue. Neither he nor anyone else com¬ ments on this shift in terminology; it simply seems to be assumed that the two are equivalent. So perhaps Plato means our answer to the question, Good at what? to be “Good at wisdom, justice, temperance, courage, and holiness.” But again we need to go to other dialogues to find out what this answer involves.4 The differences between the sophist’s art and the genuine arts brought out by Plato here in the Protagoras may now be sum¬ marized. Tire passages of comparison are four in number—two occurring before the definition of the sophist’s art as the art of politics (IA-IB), one producing that definition (II), and one oc¬ curring subsequent to it (III). I. Before the definition A. 311B-312B. If Hippocrates goes to his namesake Hippocrates of Cos and pays him a fee on his own behalf, he thinks of Hip¬ pocrates in the capacity of a doctor and a doctor is what he hopes to become. But in going to Protagoras he does not hope to become a sophist. Difference: In the case of a genuine art, the practitioner of the art is the same person as its teacher. If Hippocrates becomes a doc¬ tor, he would expect to be able to teach medicine as well as to practice it; the two functions go together. (There might pehaps be some practitioners who were not actual teachers, but certainly no teachers who were not practitioners.) The sophist’s art differs from the doctor’s in that there appears to be a separation between the two functions; Hippocrates might want to practice the con¬ tent of the sophist’s art, but he is horrified at the suggestion that he might teach it. B. 312C-313A. A painter’s wisdom is concerned with the making of likenesses, and the sophist’s wisdom is concerned with the mak¬ ing of clever speakers. A teacher of lyre playing makes people clever at speaking about lyre playing, but if the same question is asked 4 See, for instance, the dialogues in which a single virtue is considered: Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides, and also Republic I.

Protagoras 311B-320C and Gorgias 447B-461B

21

about the sophist, we cannot tell what he makes them clever at speaking about. Difference: Although any one of the genuine arts includes the ability to speak about its own content (this comes out clearly in the Ion, e.g., 537A ff.), the sophist’s art does not include it, if only be¬ cause there is doubt as to what that content is. It should be noted here that “speaking about lyre playing” is a second-order function, and that “making people clever speakers about lyre playing” is a third-order function. If the sophist’s art did have a specifiable con¬ tent, it would follow the same pattern, and the sophist, like the lyre player, would possess the same hierarchy of functions: doing X, speaking about X, and making clever speakers about X. II. Producing the definition 318B-319A. If Hippocrates associates with Zeuxippus he will get better at painting; if with Orthagoras, at flute playing, and if with Protagoras, at the art of politics or of making men good citizens. Difference: None is indicated. As I have already suggested, how¬ ever, Plato may want the reader to notice that the definition of the sophist’s art as “making men good citizens” calls for the further question, Good at what?—which is not the case with painting or with flute playing. III. After the definition 319B-D. If a question of architecture or of ship building comes up in the Assembly, people accept advice from the expert and refuse to accept it from the nonexpert. But if a question of government comes up, they accept advice from anyone, including the experts in the genuine arts. Difference: Apparently they believe that the political art cannot be taught and that, therefore, there are no experts in it. (Presum¬ ably the genuine arts can be taught, since experts in them do exist.) If we compare this whole passage from the Protagoras with the Ion, the most striking difference between them is, of course, that

22

PLATO S PHILOSOPHER-KING

whereas both raise the question of the subject matter of a particular art, the Protagoras also provides an answer. The rhapsode’s art (in spite of Ion’s insistence that it be identified with the art of the general) has no subject matter, hence it comes by divine dispensa¬ tion. The sophist’s art does have a subject matter (good men), since it is identified by Protagoras with the art of politics. As the dialogue proceeds, however, we find out that, although Protagoras claims that this art is teachable (and he is its teacher), he is un¬ willing to admit that it is a form of knowledge. I think Plato means to say that the art of politics (or virtue) is a form of knowledge, but that it has been assigned to the wrong man. Politics is an art, but it belongs to the statesman, not the sophist. Gorgias 447B-461B Socrates and Chaerephon have arrived too late for the exhibition speech by Gorgias, but in any case Socrates is much less eager to hear exhibition speeches than he is to ask Gorgias a question. He wants to know “what is the scope of his art and what he professes and teaches” (447C) or, to put it even more succinctly, he wants to ask Gorgias “who he is” (447D). This question about the identity of Gorgias is the key to the entire passage: we cannot know who he is until we identify his art. It will then be possible to investigate the characteristics of the art and to transfer them back to the man; the expert-faculty-object triad will be at work again. To find out what art is professed by Gorgias (and hence what he is called) presents no great problem, since the sophist readilv admits that, as he would be called a doctor if he were an expert in the same art as his brother Herodicus, so he must be called a rhetorician be¬ cause the art in which he himself is expert is the art of rhetoric (448B, 449A). The question on which Plato will focus his attention is, Is rhetoric a genuine art? If it turns out not to be, then, of course, there are no experts in it. Before Socrates embarks on the investigation of this question, however, he obtains from Gorgias an extremely important admis-

Protagoras 311B-320C and Gorgias 447B-461B

23

sion, that he, Gorgias, “can make rhetoricians of others also” (449B). This will prove to be a necessary element in the contra¬ diction that Socrates ultimately succeeds in producing at 460E461A; he will show that Gorgias cannot maintain both that he teaches his pupils justice (the subject matter claimed for rhetoric) and that his pupils could possibly act unjustly, since “the man who has learned anything becomes in each case such as his knowledge makes him” (460B). The question which is raised next is the one of scope (subject matter, content, about what). The usual illustrations are offered: as weaving has to do with the making of garments and music with the composing of melodies, so rhetoric has to do with what? Again the sophist has an answer ready: with words (449D). Socrates’ response to this is the sort we might expect; his next questions pro¬ ceed to show that the scope of rhetoric is still unspecified, since there are a great many other arts which also appear to be concerned with words, such as medicine, which is concerned with words about diseases. Gorgias attempts to meet this objection by distinguishing between arts involving manual activity and arts functioning through the medium of words alone (450B). But this will not do, since even an art like arithmetic has a subject matter (the odd and even) which precludes its identification with rhetoric. (In other words, Gorgias has failed to grasp the point that rhetoric is speech about speech—a second-order art—not speech about X, hence it cannot be classified with the first-order arts at all.) The question about scope being unanswered, Socrates puts it again at 451D. Gorgias’ reply, that the scope of rhetoric is “the greatest and noblest of human affairs,” is, if anything, less satisfac¬ tory than his answer about words. First, he has not specified what these affairs really are, and then when Socrates suggests that they may be the traditional health, beauty, and wealth, it can be easily demonstrated that in each case there is a rival (the doctor, the trainer, the businessman) who has a better claim to these particu¬ lar affairs than the rhetorician (452A-D).5 What does emerge 5 So in the Ion, there were constant rivals for any subject matter proposed by Ion as belonging to the rhapsode’s art (compare 538B an(l elsewhere).

plato’s philosopher-king

clearly, and is used in the next stage of the argument, is that the object of search is a blessing of some kind: it is beneficial. Socrates presses Gorgias to tell him what this great blessing is. This time Gorgias’ answer is more significant, since we find out that rhetoric is (x) a creator of persuasion and (2) a kind of power that controls the practitioners of the other arts (452E). Disregard¬ ing the second point, Socrates proceeds to concentrate on the first. Persuasion about what? What is the special province that rhetoric has for its own, encroached on by no other art? (Here the argument follows almost exactly the pattern of the Ion [536E ff.], where Socrates tries to discover the special province of the rhap¬ sode’s art, another art concerned with words.) At last Socrates obtains the answer he has anticipated all along (453B), that the kind of persuasion of which rhetoric is the art is “the kind employed in the law courts . . . and concerned with right and wrong” (dikaia kai adika; 454B). Socrates now proceeds to show that there are two forms of per¬ suasion about right and wrong—one producing knowledge and the other, belief without knowledge—and that rhetoric produces per¬ suasion of the latter sort. (The sort of persuasion which produces knowledge is really instruction, not persuasion [455A].) Socrates’ next speech (455AD) is complex but may be reduced to the following points: (1) when there is a gathering in the city to appoint an expert of some sort (doctor, shipbuilder, general) we consult the experts in the appropriate field, not the rhetorician. (2) On what subjects, then, will the disciple of Gorgias expect to be able to advise the city? Would advice from him be anticipated on those subjects belonging to the men just mentioned (this possibility Socrates has really ruled out already) or solely on those dealing with right and wrong? Gorgias’ belief in the powers of rhetoric is too strong to allow Socrates to rule out the first possibility, however. The art of rhetoric, he says “includes practically all other faculties under her control” (456A). It was Pericles, for instance, not the architects, who per¬ suaded the Athenians to build the middle wall; Gorgias himself has on occasion persuaded a patient to submit to the doctor’s knife, when the doctor could not. As to the matter of who is to be chosen

Protagoras 311B-320C and Gorgias 447B-461B

25

for a particular office, Gorgias himself could be chosen doctor in competition with an actual doctor, if he so wished. He admits, however, he ought not to misuse his power in this way, any more than a man who has learned the art of boxing ought to go home and strike his parents. These remarks by Gorgias are of great interest because they suggest three different ways in which one art might control another. First, it might exercise control in the matter of deciding whether or not the work of a genuine art shall be done (i.e., Shall the architect build the middle wall?). This is one of the functions of the ruler, as is explicitly pointed out by Plato in the Statesman (304D). Second, it might exercise control in the sense of actually replacing the genuine craftsman at his own work, as in the case of the rhetorician persuading the patient to undergo surgery. (I am assuming that this is normally part of the doctor’s work, but it could be argued that even if this is the doctor’s function it is not a first-order function. If so, this second case could be a variant of the first.) Third, it might exercise control in the sense of usurping the title normally given to another craftsman. Gorgias, that is, could get himself called a doctor in spite of his admitted inability to perform the doctor’s work. That rhetoric does possess the power of enabling an imposter to usurp the title—and, by implication, the functions— of a true craftsman, is one of the things that, in Plato’s view, makes it something to be feared. The question of the proper use of such a power thus becomes of paramount importance. This is obvious even to Gorgias himself, although his own interest in the matter is largely centered on his anxiety lest the teachers of rhetoric be held responsible for the possible misdemeanors of their pupils. Socrates now has in hand most of the material he needs to bring about the contradiction to be completed at 460E-461B. The con¬ tradiction will lie primarily between the two assertions elicited from Gorgias: (1) that the rhetorician’s special field is right and wrong (453B), which in Plato’s view entails that the rhetorician is neces¬ sarily a just man, as we shall see (460AC), and (2) that rhetoric can be misused (457B), which implies that the rhetorician is not a just man after all. After an interval (457C-458D) in which the discussion appears

26

plato's philosopher-king

about to be suspended, Socrates resumes at 458E by reminding Gorgias that he had claimed earlier (449B) to be able to “make a rhetorician of any man who wishes to learn from [him].” This is a point subsidiary to the main contradiction, but nevertheless impor¬ tant because it is by insisting on this point that Socrates will precipitate the assertion by Gorgias at 460A that if a pupil comes to learn rhetoric without possessing the knowledge of right and wrong, he, Gorgias, can teach him that too. “Stop there!” exclaims Soc¬ rates; in claiming to make his pupils just, Gorgias has claimed to make them good, so how can they possibly do wrong? They cannot wish to misuse the art of rhetoric as Gorgias earlier sup¬ posed; the sophist is guilty of inconsistency. The contradiction may seem forced and trivial, as indeed it does to Polus (461BC), but if we consider its repercussions for the earlier part of the dialogue, it is clear that such is not the case. Socrates’ initial question to the sophist was to ask him who he was (447D). As the discussion proceeded, Plato drove home the point that this question could not be answered until Gorgias could be induced to state the subject matter of the art that he professed. It took Socrates a considerable time to elicit from the sophist the desired response, that rhetoric, a kind of persuasion, was concerned with right and wrong. This, on the principle stated by Socrates at 460B (that “the man who has learned anything becomes in each case such as his knowledge makes him”) is equivalent to a claim to be a just man. Gorgias himself may be such a man (he probably was) but then how to explain the fact that his pupils may not be? (Plato must have in mind some who were not.) To sum up once again: if rhetoric is concerned with justice, the rhetorician must be just, and if he makes his pupils rhetoricians, they too must be just. But they are unjust, therefore (I think Plato means to say), rhetoric is not concerned with justice, and we still do not know who Gorgias is. If, in the language of the Euthydemus, we find ourselves back at the beginning of the labyrinth, the journey has not been uninstructive. Certain points are, of course, already familiar. We know from both the Protagoras and the Ion that we cannot define an art (or

Protagoras 311B-320C and Gorgias 447B-461B

2?

the practitioner of an art) except by identifying the special province of the art; we have learned to suspect, too, that failure to identify this special province will lead to the conclusion that the art is not an art, and that it has no genuine practitioners. Here in the Gorgias, as in the Protagoras, a special province has in fact been claimed, so that the question at issue then comes to be, Is this claim justified? To make the claim at least doubtful is, I think, Plato’s purpose in allowing Socrates to produce the contradiction at 460E-461A. Later in the dialogue, of course, he makes quite clear that rhetoric is a sham art—and, be it noted, that the art of which it is a sham is justice (464C).6 The question might be asked, Why has Plato complicated the situation by introducing the teaching of rhetoric? That is, could he not have discredited the claims of rhetoric to the subject matter of justice by concentrating on Gorgias himself and ignoring his pupils? There are several points to be made here, of which perhaps the most obvious is that the powers of rhetoric in the hands of Gorgias himself (he being a man of what we would call “good character”) was not the danger it could become in the hands of a Polus or, more strikingly, a Callicles. But Gorgias, who blithely assumes that to teach his pupils justice is an easy matter (460A), is really responsible for their wrong actions; he has, as it were, placed a loaded pistol in the hands of a child. Then too, Plato probably wishes us to ponder the question whether justice can, in fact, be taught. By grouping it with carpentry, music, and medicine, as he does in the argument 460AC (the one leading up to the conclusion that the man who has learned justice is just), he implies that, like these other arts, it can be taught. However, justice has clearly not been taught to Gorgias’ pupils, so that, as in the Meno, we may wonder if it has any teachers. If justice can be known and taught (which appears to be the basic assumption of the Republic) it will at least not be taught by rhetoricians. We have seen, too, that rhetoric is a form of persuasion, not of instruction: it would follow, 6 As we shall learn from the Republic, justice involves the knowledge of good and evil. A true rhetoric would also have this knowledge. See Phaedrus 260BD and, for a more comprehensive account, 277BC.

28

plato’s philosopher-king

therefore, that the subject matter of rhetoric is not a kind of knowl¬ edge. This could imply either that justice, being the subject matter of rhetoric, is not a kind of knowledge and cannot be taught, or that since it (perhaps) can be taught, it is therefore not the subject matter of rhetoric. All our evidence points to the latter alternative. The art of which justice is the subject matter (if any) is not a question Plato has attempted to answer here in the Gorgias.

The Qharmidcs

IN THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS WE HAVE SEEN SOME OF THE DIFferences between first-order arts (such as carpentry, medicine, or lyre playing) and second-order arts as those of the rhapsode, the sophist, and the rhetorician. Up to this point it seems as if Plato, in comparing the two sorts of arts, had intended to weight the balance in favor of the first-order arts, regarding them as genuine arts and the others as spurious. The second-order arts, because they have no recognizable scope, appear parasitic and empty. Moreover, since these second-order arts are just the ones of which Plato con¬ sistently disapproves, it certainly seems reasonable to suppose that, should any other art turn out to belong to the second-order, it also will meet with Plato’s disapproval. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It will turn out in fact to be the case that the art which Plato values most (that of the statesman and the philosopher: the kingly art) will have just this characteristic property of lack of specific scope. The statesman, then, has this in common with the rhapsode, the sophist, and the rhetorician: his art is an art of other arts, or as Plato puts it in the Charmides, a science of sciences (episteme epistemon). Far from having no scope (as appears to be the case when it is grouped—wrongly—with any of the first-order 29

plato’s philosopher-king

arts), this super-science has the widest scope of all, since it controls every one of the other sciences. The sophist’s art, for instance, might seem to exercise the same control, but its appearance of control will be a sham because there can be no genuine rule without knowledge. And if we ask, What kind of knowledge is required? the Charmides provides the answer: knowledge of good and evil. Since Plato be¬ lieved, further, that the man possessing a science will have the characteristics of the science possessed, it is clear that, if he plans to provide the statesman with a second-order art, the necessity of annexing this special kind of knowledge (good and evil) for the art provided becomes acute. Unless he does this, there will be no way of telling the statesman from the sophist or from any other practitioner of a second-order art. That one of Plato’s major preoc¬ cupations was to distinguish the true statesman from the false pretenders, need hardly be said. The Charmides, which is the one dialogue in which Plato devotes himself at any length to the investigation of the possibility and nature of a “science of sciences,” is an extremely difficult work. Its difficulty stems chiefly, as is usually the case with dialogues of the “what is X” type, from its aporetic character. Thus, while I believe that Plato intends to salvage the notion of a “science of sciences” from the Charmides, the severity of the Socratic elenchus to which he has subjected the notion might imply that, on the contrary, he wished to reject it. That this is not the case will perhaps become clear only as we proceed. For my purposes, the really essential part of the Charmides is, of course, the Critias section (beginning at 162E), but there are some points to be picked up from the earlier parts as well. It cannot have been far from Plato’s mind in writing this dialogue that two of its characters, Charmides and Critias, turned out to be members of the Thirty tyrants of 404 /•$. That these two men had failed to acquire the statesman’s art would be too obvious to state. But what was it about them that—in the account of a Socratic conversation taking place in perhaps about 432, ought to tell us that they probably never would acquire it? The question is readily answerable if we remember Plato’s constant linking of the expert,

The

Charmides

31

the faculty (or art) which he possesses, and the object known. Here the doctrine appears in the following form: if a person is (or has) a thing (in this case a virtue—temperance or sound-mindedness), this makes him an authority on it and he should be able to tell what it is (i.e., to define it). Just as the general should be able to tell us what courage is (Laches or Nicias in the Laches) and friends should be able to tell us what a friend is (Lysis and Menexenus in the Lysis), so, by the same token, an apparently temperate young man, such as Charmides, should be able to tell us what temperance is (159^). If he cannot, then the implication is that he is not genuine¬ ly temperate. In the Charmides, both Charmides and Critias fail to define that virtue. We are thus meant to conclude that neither one is temperate. And since, as the dialogue proceeds, we discover that the art of temperance is equivalent to the art of statesmanship, or wise rule (171E, 173AD), we are probably meant to conclude also that neither one is competent to govern. At the beginning of the dialogue, the young Charmides, beauti¬ ful in body and reputedly beautiful in soul, is brought forward by his older cousin Critias to tell what temperance is. According to Critias, Charmides is not only “the most temperate of the young men of today,” but he is also a philosopher and a poet (155A). Since, further, he comes of a distinguished family, and since he meets Socrates’ initial question with becoming modesty (incident¬ ally showing himself to need no instruction in the nature of defi¬ nition), he is indeed a promising candidate for the virtue of temperance. The details of Socrates’ refutation of the first two definitions offered by Charmides (that temperance is quietness and that it is modesty) are not important in the present context. The point is that Plato intends that Charmides’ refutation should tell against his temperance. We will, however, need to remember one question put by Socrates: “Can that be good which does not make men good?” (160E), since it is the failure (or, as I think, the apparent failure) of the science of sciences to be of any positive use that, in the end, causes Socrates to refuse to equate it with temperance. Temperance, being a good (161A), must be useful.

plato’s philosopher-king

The next definition offered by Charmides (one that is really the brain child of Critias, as Plato makes clear) is potentially much more fruitful than either of the first two: temperance is defined as “doing one’s own business” op literally, “doing the things of one¬ self” (to ta heautou prattein). Used uncritically here in the Char¬ mides, this definition appears as “a kind of riddle” (161C); rehabilitated in the Republic, however, it forms the basis of the specialization necessary for the existence of the good state. At Charmides 161E, Socrates asks, and do you think that a state would be well ordered by a law which compelled every man to weave and wash his own coat, and make his own shoes, and his own flask and strigil, and other implements, on this principle of everyone doing and performing his own and abstaining from what is not his own? The answer demanded is of course, no, and Socrates follows this up with the comment “but a temperate state will be a well-ordered state.” The conclusion is that “temperance . . . will not be doing one’s own business—not at least in this way, or doing things of this sort [italics mine].” As I interpret this passage (or, perhaps I should say, as I interpret the ultimate implications of it) Plato means that on the first-order level of weaving, cobbling and so forth, the prin¬ ciple of jack-of-all-trades, master of none would certainly hold. On this level, of course, the word “own” is being taken in its most literal and most trivial sense. The man may be doing his “own” business in that the coat and shoes he makes are intended for his private use, but he is not doing it in the more proper Platonic sense of doing the one thing for which he is especially fitted. At the firstorder level, one man would do better working at one task than at many, as is clear from Republic II 369E ff. On the other hand, if, as I have already suggested, the statesman is to possess a secondorder art or “science of sciences,” a kind of jack-of-all-trades is pre¬ cisely what he will have to be. That he is master of none as well is, however, a conclusion which Plato will stoutly resist. The states¬ man, if he is to be the practitioner of any art (and he is—the art of politics), will have to have a “business of his own”; Plato’s task is

The Charmides

33

to distinguish this business from the sort belonging to the firstorder arts. This he begins to do at the point where Critias takes over the “doing one’s own business” definition from Charmides at 162E. Plato sets about this task by forcing Critias to revise his defini¬ tion: to do what is one’s own is really to do what is proper to one¬ self, or one’s good. Temperance, then, in this revised definition, is the doing of good actions (163E). From this definition Socrates draws the rather unexpected inference that Critias must suppose that “temperate men [are] ignorant of their own temperance.” What Socrates means by this he explains as follows: a doctor (note the choice of a first-order technician) does not necessarily know whether his treatment will be beneficial (good) or not, nor even whether he will himself benefit from the work he is doing. The implication is that if he does not know his own good actions, he cannot know his own temperance, since good actions were what temperance was said to be. A completely new notion has been introduced here: it is the concept of what it will be convenient to call “reflexivity.” It is a vitally important concept since it is the turning in of temperance upon itself that will result in the introduction of the idea of selfknowledge and hence (by ambiguity )* of the idea of a “science of sciences.” It is as though temperance, in searching for the subject matter necessary to its status as an art, had extracted one from its own nature. Plato has, in addition, connected reflexivity with prophecy: to know one’s own nature is to know one’s good, and to know one’s good is to know what its effects will be. These two new characteristics, reflexivity and prophecy, do not belong to any of the first-order arts. None of these is reflexive, be¬ cause each has its own readily identifiable subject matter and has no need of extracting one from itself. As for prophecy, the doctor may know which of his patients is likely to recover, but whether recovery will be beneficial, this he cannot know. He is like the pilot at Gorgias 51 xE, who “is capable of reflecting that it is uncertain which of his passengers he has benefited and which he has harmed 1 The ambiguity consists in a shift by Critias from knowledge of self (heautou [165C7]) to knowledge of itself (heautes [166C3]).

plato’s philosopher-king

by not suffering them to be drowned.” Are reflexivity and prophecy then characteristics of the second-order arts? To answer this ques¬ tion properly would take us too far afield at the moment, but in general it can be said now that the second-order arts do appear to be reflexive and that they are also prophetic, but not just prophetic. The prophet is concerned with the future only, whereas the posses¬ sor of second-order knowledge will know the present and the past as well—he is omniscient, in other words.2 After Socrates has suggested to Critias that to define temperance as the doing of good actions may imply that temperate men are ignorant of their own temperance, Critias revises the definition once more: he now says 165B that temperance is self-knowledge. The next step is for Socrates to point out that if temperance is a kind of knowledge, it is a science (episteme), and sciences are “of” something. (A shorthand way of describing this move might be to say that Plato classifies episteme as a “finos-word,”3 like “love” at Symposium 199D ff.) He now proceeds in a very familiar man¬ ner: (1) certain first-order arts (sciences) are mentioned; (2) something is said about them; (3) the art in question is added to the list (with the tacit assumption that it belongs here); (4) the thing said about the arts originally mentioned fails to hold for the art in question. So in the present instance the sciences of health and of building each produce a beneficial effect (ergon), but what good effect is produced by a science of self? Critias cannot answer the question in the proffered terms—quite naturally, since the art of temperance should never have been grouped with the first-order arts at all. What is of exceptional interest in the passage is that Plato allows Critias to give a clear statement of exactly this point. At 166B he says You are just falling into the old error, Socrates. . . . You come asking wherein wisdom or temperance differs from the other sciences and then you try to discover some respect in which it is like them. But it 2 Compare Laches 198D ff. 3 That is, an “of what” word, as in the query often raised about scope or subject matter: peri tinos?

The Charmides

35

is not, for all the other sciences are of something else, and not of them¬ selves. Wisdom alone is a science of other sciences and of itself. And of this, as I believe, you are very well aware. . . . For, I think, dramatic purposes, Plato does not overtly allow Critias the credit for this highly significant speech, but he does call our attention to its importance (somewhat cryptically) by having Soc¬ rates ask Critias to “see what will come of the refutation” (166E). Since he has just said that it does not matter “whether Critias or Socrates is the person refuted,” we may be meant to guess that it was Socrates who has just been refuted by Critias and not the other way about. Certainly Socrates does take over the results of Critias' speech in the next section. He says “tell me then . . . what you mean to affirm about wisdom,” and Critias repeats that “wisdom is the only science which is the science of itself as well as of the other sciences” (166E). The science of temperance has now adopted still another charac¬ teristic: it has not only itself as subject (reflexivity) but it has the first-order sciences as well (what might be called “comprehensive¬ ness” or “universality”). Plato is now about to add something more: Socrates says “but the science of science will also be the science of the absence of science” (166E [italics mine]). This additional characteristic is one which has appeared else¬ where in a different guise. In the Ion Plato showed that the rhap¬ sode’s art was defective in that its practitioners claimed to be able to interpret good poets, e.g., Homer, without having any knowledge of the bad ones. Knowledge, he pointed out, is of wholes, that is, of the good and the bad. A comparable position is taken in the Cratylus, where it becomes important to know what names are given badly, not just what ones are given well; and possibly something of the same sort is also being touched on in Theaetetus 176A: “evils, Theodoras, can never be done away with, for the good must always have its contrary. . . .” By introducing the notion that “absence of science” forms part of the subject matter of temperance (a secondorder science), Plato is preparing the way for the redefinition of temperance as knowledge of good and evil, as we shall see. Before

plato’s philosopher-king

that stage is reached, however, something else of great interest occurs. At 167A Socrates brings together all of the points that he and Critias have agreed on as pertaining to the art of temperance (that its subject matter consists of (a) itself, (b) the other sciences, (c) the absence of science), and he reinterprets these points so that they now apply, not to the art of temperance, but to the temperate man. (Plato does not argue the legitimacy of this step; as an ad¬ herent of the expert-faculty-object principle, he would not have supposed its legitimacy to be in question.) The passage runs as follows: Then the wise or temperate man, and he only, will know himself, and be able to examine what he knows or does not know, and to see what others know and think that they know and do really know, and what they do not know and fancy that they know when they do not. No other person will be able to do this. And this is wisdom and tem¬ perance and self-knowledge—for a man to know what he knows and what he does not know. [167A] Plato’s purpose in shifting the characteristics person possessing that art will become strikingly whether he may not be directing our attention person. A moment’s reflection tells us who that himself.

of the art to the clear if we consider to some particular person is: Socrates

If one were looking for a summary description of Socratic knowl¬ edge as portrayed in Plato’s Apology, the passage just cited could hardly be bettered. The chief points of similarity are as follows: Uniqueness

Charmides Apology

“. . . the wise or temperate man, and he only. . . .” "No other person will be able to do this.” "The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless” (23B). “God has specially appointed me to this city”

(3oE).

The Charmides

37

Self-knowledge (positive and negative)

Charmides

“The wise or temperate man ... will know himself, and be able to examine what he knows or does not know. . .

Apology

“. . . I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know” (21D).

. . this I take it, gentlemen, is the degree and this the nature of my advantage over the rest of man¬ kind . . . that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it” (29B). Recognition of knowledge in others (positive and negative) Charmides . . and to see what others know and think that they know and do really know, . . . and fancy that they know when they do not.” Apology ”... I formed the impression that although in many people’s opinion, and especially in his own, he ap¬ peared to be wise, in fact he was not” (21C). “. . . these professional experts seemed to share the same failing which I had noticed in the poets. I mean that on the strength of their technical profi¬ ciency they claimed a perfect understanding of every other subject . . .” (22D). The citations from the Apology could be multiplied, but the nature of the Socratic mission is familiar and the parallelism is probably already clear enough. One additional point of similarity between the Apology and the Charmides should be mentioned, however. It can be no coincidence that the Socratic mission not only took its starting point from the oracle at Delphi but also that Delphi was where the familiar inscription, “Know Thyself,” as Critias reminds us at 164D, was to be found. And, Critias goes on, . . . the inscription, if I am not mistaken, is put there as a sort of salutation which the god addresses to those who enter the temple—as

38

plato’s philosopher-king

much as to say that the ordinary salutation of ‘Hail’ is not right, and that the exhortation ‘Be temperate’ is far better ... for ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Be temperate’ are the same. . . . If anything were lacking to show that Plato intends to accept the definition of temperance as a self-knowing science of sciences, this positive connection between the Socratic mission, temperance, and the Delphic inscription would seem to me to provide it.4 The possibility of such a science now undergoes additional testing (i6yBff.). Plato has already observed (165C) that science is al¬ ways science of something, (i.e., that the word “science” is what I have called a “tinos-word”) and has shown that its reflexivity or being a science of itself stems partly from this fact, since it was the fruitless search of science for a first-order subject which resulted in its ultimately settling upon itself as subject. What Plato does now is to select a series of additional tinos-words and to see whether reflexivity makes sense for these: it does not. The additional tinoswords are drawn from the senses (sight, hearing) and the emotions (desire, wish, love, fear), with one example even closer to science: opinion. In no case does it make sense to use these reflexively, e.g., to talk about a hearing which hears itself, a love which loves itself, or an opinion which is an opinion of itself. The science at issue, says Socrates, “is certainly a curiosity if it really exists” (168A). Plato then tries some quantitative expressions: “greater than,” “double of,” “half of.” These expressions are even less satisfactory, since we now get a series of paradoxes in which a thing turns out to be both greater and less than itself, and so on.5 Furthermore, since “that which has a nature relative to self will retain also the nature of its object” (168D), hearing would have to have a sound, and sight a color. 4 It is probably significant also that the Charmides begins with a conversa¬ tion between Socrates and Chaerephon, the man who asked the Delphic oracle if there were anyone wiser than Socrates (Apology 21A). 5 Non-reflexive versions of the quantitative paradoxes (that the greater will also be less and so on) do occur elsewhere in Plato. In the Phaedo 102BE we see him employing the theory of Forms to show that the taller can also be shorter. Compare Republic V, 479AC.

The Charmides

39

As a result of all these difficulties, it might seem as though the notion of a reflexive science would be decisively rejected, but no, there still remains a doubt: Socrates says (168E) “this relation to self will be regarded as incredible by some, but not by others.” We need “some great man . . . who will satisfactorily determine for us whether there is nothing which has an inherent property of relation to self..(169A). Socrates himself is uncertain as to whether such a science can exist (although we may suspect that he is the “great man needed); in any case, he would be unwilling to identify it with wisdom or temperance until he finds out whether it is any use. (Temperance is a good, and the good is always assumed by Plato to be useful and advantageous.)6 To investigate this second point—whether temperance as science of itself is advantageous—Socrates has, of course, to assume the first point, that such a science is possible; he can investigate this some other time (he never does so in this dialogue). If the science is possible, how does it enable us “to distinguish what we know or do not know” (169D)? The difficulties now raised boil down to two, and they are of a familiar type—involving lack of subject matter for the science in question. The first concerns the inability of a man to recognize the content of his own knowledge (he may know that he knows, but not what he knows), and the second his inability to recognize the content of the knowledge possessed by others (again he will know only that the person knows, not what he knows). There is always a rival science waiting to supply the missing content, thus leaving the science of sciences empty and, consequently, useless. The failure of the man who possesses this science to recognize what both he and others know (this knowledge would involve his being, say, a physician as well as a wise man [171C]) turns out to be particularly serious when we see what is lost as a result: We should never make a mistake, but should pass through life the unerring guides of ourselves and of those who are under us. We should not attempt to do what we did not know, but we should find out those 6 As, for instance, at Meno 87E.

plato’s philosopher-king

who know, and hand the business over to them and trust in them. . . . And the house or state which was ordered or administered under the guidance of wisdom . . . would be sure to be well-ordered, for with truth guiding and error eliminated, in all their doings men must do nobly and well, and doing well means happiness. [171D-172A] At 173B, Socrates’ utopian dream becomes even more rosy: “our health will be improved, our safety at sea, and also in battle, will be assured, our coats and shoes, and all other instruments and im¬ plements will be skillfully made, because the workmen will be good and true.” But whether “by acting according to knowledge we shall act well and be happy” is a point upon which he remains in doubt. The man who possesses the science of sciences, since he knows all sciences, would presumably be omniscient, a prophet knowing past and present as well as future (174A). But which science would it be that would make its possessor happy? Socrates enumerates vari¬ ous of the first-order sciences, but none of these proves satisfactory (174B). In desperation, Critias suggests the science of good and evil. Socrates’ reaction to this is violent: calling Critias a villain who has been dragging him round in a circle, he accuses him of hiding the fact that it is not a life according to a science of sciences that makes men happy but a life according to a science of one science only. The next few lines, from 174C3 to 174D9, contain a series of assertions that are meant as a refutation of Critias’ suggestion that the science of good and evil might be temperance. The argument is not easy to understand, but the steps appear to be as follows: 1. If the science of good and evil is taken away from the other sciences, the others will function as usual (174C3-7). 2. However, they will not function well or advantageously with¬ out it (174C9-D1). 3. The science of good and evil has as its product (ergon) our benefit; this science cannot be temperance, because temperance is of something else, namely, science and lack of science

(i74d4-9).

The Charmides

41

In step 3, I have had to reword the passage to bring out Plato’s point; he seems to be separating the two sciences on the basis of an unexpressed (but not unexpected) premise to the effect that dif¬ ferent products (or subject matters) must belong to different sciences.7 Thus, if temperance is already provided with one sub¬ ject matter (itself and the other sciences and the absence of science), it cannot at the same time be possessed of another (good and evil). The result is that the sciences may function, but they will not function well. Since temperance has all along been classed as a good, this is an unwelcome situation. Critias, now grasping at any straw, makes one last effort to save the combined notion of temperance as a science of science and of good and evil. He suggests that temperance, in controlling all the other sciences, might control the science of good and evil as well and in this way turn out to be beneficial. In other words he en¬ visages a situation like this : temperance

good and evil

shoemaking

carpentry

pilot’s art, etc.

This is an ingenious suggestion but is clearly not going to work. Critias has placed the science of good and evil in the same category as the first-order arts; it will therefore be required to perform a firstorder function. But, as we know quite well by this time, all the first-order functions are already allotted to their respective arts: “And will wisdom give health? ... It this not rather the effect of medicine? Or does wisdom do the work of any of the other arts— do they not each of them do their own work?” (174E). Wisdom 7 Compare the special-fields argument of Ion 536E-541A.

plato’s philosopher-king

(temperance) is nothing but the knowledge of knowledge and of ignorance; it cannot be beneficial. The time has come for Socrates to admit defeat; if he had been any good at making an inquiry, the best of all things would never have turned out to be useless. But before leaving the subject, he gives us a list of admissions that, he says, the argument protested against at the time they were made. We should see what these are. 1. There is a science of science (175B). 2. This science knows the works of the other sciences (175BC). 3. (a result of 2) The wise man has knowledge of what he knows and does not know (175C). This last is particularly irrational because it involves a man know¬ ing “in a sort of way” (hamos ge pos) things which he does not know at all.8 On the other hand, since there is reason to believe that this kind of knowledge is the kind that Plato attributed to Socrates and because it also seems probable that Plato regarded Socrates as a man possessing temperance (and hence being able to tell what it is), we should not be too quick to take the side of the protesting argument and to acquiesce in Socrates’ “defeat.” If we consider, further, that what the “argument” has usually done is to make mistakes in classification (that is, to mix first- and second-order arts together), the probability becomes even greater that Plato really did intend to describe temperance as a science of sciences. Not only that, but it seems likely that he meant to identify the science of sciences with the science of good and evil—-not simply to subsume the latter under the former, as Critias tried to do. (The result, of course, is that the science of good and evil becomes a second-order techne.) But the really positive evidence for this is in the Statesman and the Republic, not in the Charmides.9 8 When Plato wants to mediate between being and not being (rather than between knowing and not knowing) at Sophist 240B, he employs an essentially similar phrase: all’ esti ge men pos. 9 The early dialogue Hippias Minor could well be interpreted as an extended study of the idea that the good man must know both good and evil. (Here Plato presents his thesis in a paradoxical manner comparable, of course, to his dis¬ cussion of the best thief in Republic I.)

IV Lysis 217A-222B and

Euthydcmus 288D'292E

THE complexities of the Charmides stemmed largely from the following points: (1) that temperance, if it is to be a science, must be a science of something, i.e., that “science” (episteme) is what I have called a tinos-word; (2) that attempts to discover what the science of temperance is of consistently fail, and therefore the science is useless and cannot be a good. Why do the attempts to discover the subject matter of tem¬ perance consistently fail? The reason is, as has been indicated in the previous chapter, that the investigation proceeds on the as¬ sumption that temperance is a first-order art, like carpentry, where¬ as it is in fact a second-order art, like rhetoric or sophistry. Plato indicates this second-order character of temperance by two suggestions, that temperance is a science of sciences (the sciences meant are first-order sciences), and that it is a science of good and evil. “Good and evil” is a subject unlike any of the first-order subjects.) In the manner of the early aporetic dialogues, however, Plato backs away from a positive identification of temperance either with a science of sciences or with a science of good and evil. That he

43

44

plato’s philosopher-king

would accept such an identification, I have tried to show in the previous chapter. In the present chapter I wish to examine passages in two other dialogues where Plato is again concerned with tinos-words and finds himself (or, perhaps more accurately, places himself) in similar difficulties. One is the discussion of the first friend in the Lysis, the other the discussion of the kingly art in the Euthydemus, the operative words being “friend of” (philos)1 and “art of” (techne). Lysis 217A-222B In general the question posed in the Lysis (from 211D—the com¬ mencement of the conversation with Menexenus) has been, What persons are friends? or, Who is friend to whom? At 217A, we seem to be arriving at a satisfactory answer, that “only what is neither good nor bad proves to be friendly to the good and to that only.” Plato then proceeds to elaborate on this basic scheme by pointing out that it is the presence of evil that accounts for the friendship between these two. For instance, it is the presence of an evil (disease), that causes that which is neither good nor bad (the body) to be a friend to the good (medicine). At 218C, however, comes a passage, of a type by no means un¬ usual in the dialogues, in which a promising suggestion turns out to have some fatal flaw: Socrates, who has been filled with the joy of the successful hunter, is suddenly overcome with a suspicion that the conclusion to which he, Menexenus, and Lysis have just agreed is not true after all. At 218D he begins to explain his difficulty. A friend is a friend to someone (foi) and is so for the sake of something (heneka tou) and because of something (dia ti). In the example previously given, the body was a friend to medicine because of disease, but it was not then stated that the friendship was “for the sake of” anything; this point is new. What is the body a friend of medicine for the sake of? Obviously, for the sake of health. But health, being a good, must be a friend. And if health

1 The fact that philos takes the dative (toi) rather than the genitive (tinos) does not affect its status as a tinos-word.

Lysis 217A-222B and Euthydemus 288D-292E

45

is a friend, then whatever is true of friends in general will be true of health, namely that it will be a friend not only to something and because of something, but for the sake of something—this lat¬ ter being an additional friend. By equating “good” and “friend,” Plato has generated an infinite regress. He writes: Then will that something [health] be, on its part also, a friend for the sake of a friend? . . . Now are we not bound to weary ourselves with going on in this way, unless we can arrive at some first principle [archeJ which will not keep leading us on from one friend to another, but will reach the one original friend [ho esti proton philon], for whose sake all the other things can be said to be friends? [219CD] If he could succeed in reaching the first or original friend, the regress would of course be terminated, but there is something Socrates is afraid of: “that all the other things which we cited as friends for the sake of that one thing, may be deceiving us like so many phantoms [eidola] of it....” There is an interesting aspect to this observation. By pointing out that the first friend lacks the characteristic distinctive of all the other friends (namely, of generating an additional friend), Plato is of course separating the two types of friend from each other in a radical way. But why should he, as a result of this separation, proceed to the conclusion that it is the first friend which is the “real” friend and the others which are the imitations? He could easily have saved his previous definition by rejecting the newly in¬ troduced first friend and by either refusing to classify it as a friend at all or by making it a special case. The reason why he does neither of these things, but rather disqualifies the more usual type of friend, becomes clear from the nature of the illustration he now proceeds to employ at 219DE. A father learns that his son has drunk hemlock. Prizing his son above everything, the father now values, equally with his son, the wine which may save his son’s life—or even an earthenware cup, if one is needed to hold the wine. But in saying that the cup and the wine are of equal value with the life of a child, we are “uttering a mere phrase” (220B1), since “all such concern is not entertained

plato’s philosopher-king

for the actual things which are applied for the sake of something, but for that something for whose sake all the rest are applied” (219E). Plato is saying, in essence, that to speak of the means to a desired end as “good,” is to adopt a fagon de parler; the only true good is the good for the sake of which these other “goods” are chosen. This one true good differs from all other goods in not being chosen for the sake of anything except itself. The first and one true friend differs from all other friends in the same way; it is, as Plato puts it, “simply and solely the thing in which all these so-called friendships terminate” and “is a friend for the sake of nothing else that is a friend” (220B). Up to this point Plato’s attack on his original answer to the ques¬ tion, who or what are friends to whom (namely, that the neither good nor bad are friends of the good for the sake of some additional good and because of the bad) has been directed towards only part of this answer, the “for the sake of” part. It may be the case, he has argued, that each of the phantom friends is a friend of the good for the sake of some additional good, but this cannot be the case for the first friend, if the regress is to come to a stop. Plato now attacks the “because of” part of his answer (220B ff.). Plato’s line of thought is complicated, and at one stage he con¬ fuses it by mixing up “for the sake of” and “because of” (220E5). He begins from the premise that it is because of the bad that the good is loved. (This could be taken as: It is because of the bad that a friend is a friend, or could be illustrated by: It is because of disease that medicine is a friend.) But suppose there were no bad (as would be the case if the good is to be regarded as something in itself). Could the good then be a friend? Presumably not, since we no longer need it (“if there is no ailment there is no need for a cure” 220D). It would then be useless. But “is this not the nature of the good—to be loved because of the bad by us who are midway be¬ tween the bad and the good,2 whereas separately and for its own sake it is of no use?” (220E). Plato seems to be setting up a dilem¬ ma: either the good is in some sense a derivative good (since our friendly feeling towards it depends on the presence of evil) or, 2 Compare Symposium 20 3E ff.

Lysis 217A-222B and Euthydemus 288D-292E

47

if it is not derivative (that is, if independent of evil), then it is useless. The details of Plato’s argument (which I have by no means re¬ produced in full) are less important than the effect he wants it to produce, that is, the effect of separating the first friend (or highest good) from the other friends (or goods) in such a way that the initial account of what a friend is will fail to cover both cases. The incidental conclusion that an independent good has no use is produced here as an additional point against the “because of” part of his definition; it should not be taken as Plato’s last word on the subject, as we may guess from the fact that the science of good and evil in the Charmides turns out (from lack of subject matter of the first-order kind) to be equally useless. In the conclusion of the argument (and of the dialogue) there is another similarity to the Charmides. In that dialogue, the sci¬ ence of temperance, as a result of failing to find its own subject matter, experimented with itself as subject and became reflexive, a science of itself. So here in the Lysis, Plato’s final suggestion con¬ cerning “the objects of love and friendship and desire” is that they are ta oikeia—one’s own belongings. With this suggestion he im¬ parts a kind of reflexivity, though of a rudimentary sort, to the notion of “friend.” The entire Lysis passage that has just been discussed is somewhat less sophisticated than the science of sciences passages in the Charmides, but it makes most of the same points. Tire word “friend” (aside from its various ambiguities, which I have not touched on here3) is a term which is not naturally used in an absolute sense; to speak of a “friend” is implicitly to raise the ques¬ tion, “friend of whom?” In a similar way, the term “science” in the Charmides raises the question, “science of what?” Each of these tinos-words, therefore, generates some other word. By comparing the two dialogues further, we can also see that tinos-words tend to generate not only other words but also para¬ doxes, and that the paradoxes tend to be hierarchical in nature. It might at first seem as though the word “friend” would be unlikely 3

The word can mean not only “friend of’ but “fond of

and

dear to.

plato's philosopher-king

to produce any such paradox, since there seems no intrinsic reason why A might not be the friend of B and B the friend of A; the re¬ lationship would then be self-contained. But Plato has a special rea¬ son for wishing a paradox (in this case a regress) to be produced: he wishes, by means of his analysis of “friend” to say something about “good.” What he apparently wants to say about it is what all those who discuss the summum bonum must ultimately con¬ clude, that a highest good differs radically from all other goods simply in being highest.4 It is for this purpose that he makes con¬ stant shifts from “friend” to “good” and back again, and compli¬ cates the notion of “friend of” by additions such as “for the sake of a friend” and “because of a foe.” The term “science” in the Charmides might be expected to generate a different type of paradox, since while two friends might be friends of each other, two sciences cannot be sciences of each other. (A more technical way of putting this would be to say that “friendship” is a symmetrical relation, and “being a science of” is asymmetrical.) As a matter of fact, Plato shows signs of generating an infinite regress here as well and could easily do so by arguing that what a science is always of is another science. It suits him, however, to put a stop to the regress almost as soon as it begins, that is, to go no further than a science of a science of X, where X is the subject matter of a first-order science. Pre¬ sumably he sees no need to talk about sciences of any order higher than second order, but the machinery, of course, is there. The third and fourth points of comparison between Lysis and the Charmides have already been touched upon above. They are the uselessness of whatever term is settled upon as the ultimate term, and the reflexive character of the same term. We can now go on to see all these points recurring (to a greater or lesser degree) in the next passage, from the Euthydemus. Euthydemus 288D-292E The dialogue is constructed in a series of conversations alternating between eristic and protreptic in the following sequence: eristic— 4 Aristotle’s criticism of the idea of the good at Nicomachean Ethics I, 6, 109688 ff. is relevant here.

Lysis 217A-222B and Euthydemus 288D-292E

49

protreptic—eristic—protreptic—eristic. The section for discussion is the second of the two protreptic passages, 288D-292E. Since the second protreptic passage assumes the conclusions reached in the first (278E-283B), it will be useful to give a brief resume of the earlier conversation. Socrates persuades the young man Cleinias to agree to the following points: 1. All men desire to prosper (to do well, to be happy, eu prattein). 2. They will be most likely to do so by possessing many goods, such as health, wealth, noble birth, and the various virtues. 3. In addition to the various virtues, we need good fortune. 4. But good fortune turns out to be the same as one of the virtues, namely wisdom. 5. 6. 7. 8.

The goods already mentioned must be advantageous. They will be so only if rightly used. Right use is produced by wisdom. Wisdom is the only good; the other goods are good only if con¬ trolled by wisdom. 9. We must pursue wisdom if we are to be happy. The point of particular significance for the second passage is (8), the separating off of one particular good as occupying a favored po¬ sition, and the resulting classification of what are normally called “goods” as neutral in value. In the language of the Lysis, these are neither good nor bad. At the beginning of the second passage (288D), Socrates picks up his earlier conversation with Cleinias by reminding him that they had agreed on the necessity of pursuing wisdom. The discussion now becomes more specific: wisdom (or knowledge) of what sort? We can give one of its identifying marks straight away: it must be of a sort to benefit us. This is really a restatement of (5) above, but the next is a fresh one: the knowledge that will make us happy must “combine making and knowing how to use the thing which it makes” (289B). Socrates leads up to this point by remarking, “Nor does there seem to be any value in any other sort of knowledge which knows how to make things, whether money-making or medi¬ cine or any other such thing, unless it knows how to use what it

Plato’s philosopher-king

makes” (289A). In other words, the requirement to be met by knowledge is produced by a reference to a pair of first-order arts. Further, the testing of knowledge in terms of this requirement will be conducted in the context of the first-order arts. This type of maneuver, to set up some requirement to be met by an atypical case (such as the first friend, highest good, science of sciences, or, as here, knowledge) and then to test the fulfilling of this re¬ quirement not by the atypical but by the typical cases—is by now so familiar that we can already predict that no sort of knowledge “combining making and knowing how to use the thing which it makes” will be discovered. Various arts are now tried out to see if any will in fact meet the stipulated requirement (28gB ff.); none do. The arts of making lyres, flutes, or speeches are distinct from the arts that know how to employ these products, and the same is true for the arts that do not so much make as capture their products. (Under this heading Plato somewhat facetiously includes generalship—a kind of hunt¬ ing—along with genuine hunting, geometry, astronomy, calcula¬ tion, and quail catching!) The search continued, Socrates tells Crito, until he and Cleinias arrived at the kingly art. He says that [when we] were giving it a thorough inspection to see whether it might be the one which both provided and created happiness, just there we got into a sort of labyrinth: when we thought we had come to the end, we turned round again and reappeared practically at the beginning of our search in just as much trouble as when we started out. [291BC] The image of the labyrinth is Plato’s way of saying that the atypical or crucial case was reached, and that the argument then turned back on itself. We may now expect a regress. The steps by which the regress is reached are as follows (291C ff.): 1. The statesman’s art and the kingly art are the same. 2. Generalship and the other arts hand over their products to the kingly art, since only it knows how to use them.

Lysis 217A-222B and Euthydemus 288D-292E 3. But what result does the kingly art produce (as medicine pro¬ duces health and farming produces food)? 4. We may not be able to say what the result is, but at least it must be something useful and must provide us with something good. 5. Nothing is good except some sort of knowledge (compare this with point 8 in the earlier argument). 6. The results produced by the statesman’s art (see 1 above, but also 4) such as making the citizens rich, free, and undisturbed by faction—are neither good nor evil. 7. This art must make the citizens wise (i.e., provide them with a share of knowledge). 8. But in what respect does the kingly art make men good and wise? Does it convey knowledge of shoemaking, carpentry, and so forth? No. 9. It must “convey a knowledge which is none other than itself” (292D3-4). 10. Is this knowledge the one whereby we shall make other men good?5 11. If so, in what respect? (Compare this with point 8 above.) 12. Or shall we say that these others will make still others good, and so on? 13. It would still not be apparent in what way they are good. Our difficulties are as great as ever. Plato has, I think, contrived the failure of this argument with great care. The requirement that the art that will make us happy should be one of both using and making was derived, as I have al¬ ready mentioned, from the first-order arts: it is of no use to know how to make money or to produce health unless we know how to use these products. As a matter of fact, no one of the first-order arts combines the two skills: the arts of making and using may come in pairs (flute making and flute playing) but they are sepa¬ rate and distinct.6 Plato continues to illustrate this point at what 5 Or, “whereby we shall make other good men.” It seems to me significant for Plato that the Greek is ambiguous. 6 It is interesting to see Aristotle assimilating the using/making distinction to his concepts of form and matter, at Physics II, 2, I94a37~i95b8.

plato’s philosopher-king

might appear to be unnecessary length, but as he proceeds, a change takes place in the character of his examples: pairs of arts which are roughly coordinate give way to pairs in which one member is sub¬ ordinate to the other. The arts of hunting and fishing, for instance, hand over their products (captures) to the cook. In this way a master art is reached that is the recipient of all products; everything is handed to it, and it rules over all the other arts. What has hap¬ pened is that a persistent examination of first order arts has re¬ sulted in the erection of a single all-ruling art of the second order, a science of sciences. Having established this atypical case, Plato is ready with the usual elenchus, that is, he now asks for the firstorder product of a second-order art. The particular form taken by the elenchus is fairly complex, since it proceeds by a series of stops and starts. Just when the refutation will seem to have been accomplished, a further possibility is raised. This new possibility will then be rejected in turn. First refutation The kingly art has no identifiable product (292A). This appears to eliminate it from the competition since, although it has turned out to be an art of using (and in fact oc¬ cupies a favored position in this respect, since it uses all of the other arts), the stipulation was made that the art we are looking for should also be an art of making. The kingly art now appears to make nothing. (This refutation can, however, be classified as apparent rather than real, since the arts adduced that did have products were first-order arts, i.e., medicine and farming.) First new possibility At least we know what the product would be like: it would be something good (292A). Second refutation But there is nothing good except knowledge, as has already been agreed. If the master art is to confer knowl¬ edge, it will confer some particular sort of knowledge, but what sort? Certainly not shoemaking and carpentry. Again the kingly art appears to fail, but again the failure is based on the examples chosen as a basis of comparison: they are first-order arts once more. Second new possibility Perhaps the knowledge conferred by the

Lysis 217A-222B and Euthydemus 288D-292E

53

kingly art is knowledge of itself (292D3-4),. We can try to say what this is, that it is “that by which we shall make others good.” Third refutation But in what respect will they be good? Here Plato leaves the argument unfinished, but clearly he means to imply that the usual objection could be made: Good at what? At flute playing? and so on. Third new possibility “Or shall we go on to say that they will make others good and that these others will do the same to still others?” (292D). Fourth refutation It is still not apparent in what way they are good. That is, even assuming we allow the regress just mentioned, the question Good at what? still remains. As no further possible methods of rescuing the kingly art are suggested, failure is now complete; Plato has led us through the labyrinth and back to the entrance. Although we have apparently returned to the entrance of the labyrinth empty-handed—since no fresh competitors are suggested to take the place of the rejected art—familiarity with similar maneuvers by Plato in other dialogues should alert us to the fact that the passage just discussed contains as many signs of success as it does of failure. That is, there are certain positive aspects of the passage—of a kind already noted in the discussions of the Charmides and Lysis—that recur in the Euthydemus and that I think may reasonably be taken as renewed indications of Plato’s awareness of the major difficulties bound to be encountered in the delineation of the second-order arts. We may now remind ourselves of what these positive aspects are. (1) Tinos-words. Much less emphasis is laid on the mechanics of these than in the Lysis or the Charmides: that is, there is no passage in the Euthydemus that specifically states that those who are wise must be wise at something, and so forth. But the assump¬ tion is there and underlies the continual demand for the exhibition of products. We are beginning to see, too, that another tinos-word— and the most crucial one—is “good”; we cannot say that a thing is good without prompting the questions Good for what? or Good

plato's philosopher-king at what?—except, of course, in the case of the highest good. The atypical cases cease to be finos-words. (2) Production of paradox. The attempt to discover the master art and to make it useful resulted at one point in the production of a regress (292D). Plato envisages an unending chain of A making B good, B making C good, C making D good,..., without sug¬ gesting how the regress might be stopped. In the Lysis he stopped such a regress by making the hrst friend atypical; in the Charmides, by making “science of sciences” a terminal point—that is, there was no “science of science of sciences” put forward. Here he seems content simply to exhibit the regress, apparently with the idea of allowing its mere presence to discredit the kingly art. (3) Reflexivity. This occurs at 292D, where Socrates states that the kingly art “must not be the producer of any of those results which are neither good nor bad, but it must convey a knowledge which is none other than itself” (heauten). In other words, if knowledge must convey some good, and it has already been settled that there is no good except knowledge, reflexivity is bound to occur. Something similar took place in the Charmides, but by a different route: science of self became, through a search for the subject matter of temperance, a science of itself, that only much later became science of good and evil. (In the Lysis, reflexivity is only barely suggested, in connection with the idea that a friend is friend of its ''own things,” ta oikeia.) The occurrence of reflexivity in the Euthydemus is, furthermore, tied to the production of the regress: it is while trying to say what sort of knowledge this re¬ flexive situation produces that Socrates suggested that it might be “that by which we shall make others good”; the regress arose at just this point. Whether Plato had arrived at a well-thought-out connection between reflexivity and regress is doubtful, however; the most that can be said is that, where one occurs, it is usually worthwhile to look for some indications of the other. (4) Uselessness. One of the basic premisses of Plato’s ethics is certainly the assumption that the good is useful, advantageous, profitable. But when he comes to specify the type of usefulness that the good must have, his mind seems to turn most often to pro-

Lysis 217A-222B and Euthydemus 288D-292E

55

duction, that is, to the type of usefulness characteristic of the firstorder arts. Hence his constant inquiries (of the sort to be found at Euthydemus 291D ff. or Charmides 165C ff.) as to the products of the second-order arts. We have had hints, of course, concerning what the product of, for example, the knowledge of good and evil might be (as when Socrates asks at Charmides 160E, “Well, can that be good which does not produce good men?”) and Plato will definitely adopt this suggestion in the Republic and the Statesman. But in the dialogues we have been considering, Plato never appears satisfied to remain with this conclusion; he always comes back to the question, Good at what? Having come back to this question and found it unanswerable (as it is bound to be, since he has formulated it in terms of first-order products), there is nothing for him to do but to declare the second-order art, or entity, useless. In so doing, he is, I think, recording his difficulties with the fol¬ lowing situation: a second-order art, such as the kingly art of the Euthydemus, directs other arts (that is, it “knows how to use the things made”) but does not itself know how to do any of the things that these other arts know how to do. (It is not an art of making, in other words.) The statesman, therefore, finds himself in the position of ruling over craftsmen who know more than he does. But does he therefore “not know” what they know? In a way yes—a statesman is not a doctor; in a way, no—the statesman does seem to possess a kind of knowledge the doctor will never possess, namely the knowledge whether a man is genuinely benefited by being healed. Certainly this kind of knowledge must exist some¬ where in the good state; if the first-order craftsmen are not to have it, then the second-order craftsman must. The statesman, then, oc¬ cupies a paradoxical position: he directs, evaluates, and in a sense “knows” things that he does not know (a situation that, by the way, would be declared impossible by the sophist Euthydemus and his brother), or, to use the language of the Charmides, he “knows in a sort of way things he does not know at all” (175C). In this discussion of passages from the Lysis and the Euthydemus and in the brief comparisons of these passages with the Charmides, I have tried to emphasize likenesses rather than differences. Having

56

plato’s philosopher-king

identified a basic group of resemblances between the three dia¬ logues, (tinos-words, regresses, reflexivity, and uselessness), I felt I could then say with some confidence that, the presence of this interrelated group is an indication in each case that Plato is con¬ cerning himself with the same general problem: namely, the secondorder nature of the statesman’s art and the relationship of that art both to the good and to the first-order arts. Naturally there are striking differences between the three dia¬ logues. The Lysis, for instance, is concerned with the good (in the guise of the friend) and hardly at all with knowledge. The Charmides associates with reflexivity one characteristic, prophecy, which is missing from the other two. The Euthydemus concentrates on the kingly or statesman’s art to the neglect of the statesman himself. Nevertheless, all three dialogues, in their different ways, are in¬ vestigations of the problem I have indicated. We can now move on to dialogues in which Plato attempts a more positive solution.

^public

I

IN THE Republic Plato appears to abandon his aporetic treatment of ethical subjects in favor of more positive exposition. In Book I, however, he still pursues the method of the “What is X” dialogues, so much so that some scholars have even detached this book from the others and given it the name Thrasymachus. The actual genesis of the Republic is immaterial to the present study; what is important is to note that in Book I the techne-analogy appears in full force, is tested once more and is, in at least one sub¬ stantial passage, found wanting. The effect of the elenchus is that the crucial partner in the analogy, justice, turns out to be a secondorder art. But with this point established early, Plato deploys a series of arguments in which justice and the first-order arts are compatible, rather than at odds. A survey of the major technearguments in Book I will show the way in which this shift from negative to positive points takes place. To summarize all of the techne-arguments in Book I would be a lengthy procedure and is probably not really necessary in view of the analyses of similar arguments given in the preceding chapters. What I shall do is to set out the major arguments in tabular form,

57

58

plato’s philosopher-king

so that they may be inspected fairly quickly. I shall then try to bring out their implications.1 The analogies fall into the following four sets. Set I. (331E-334B)

Set II. (335B-336A)

Set III. (341B-342E)

Set IV. (346A-354A)

In conversation with Polemarchus, in an¬ swer to Simonides’ statement that justice is "to render to each his due,” or (with Socrates’ correction) “what befits him,” (to prosekon). The set contains eight argu¬ ments. In conversation with Polemarchus, in an¬ swer to the question, ought a good man to harm anyone whatsoever? The set contains three arguments. In conversation with Thrasymachus, in an¬ swer to his statement that justice is the interest of the stronger, where the stronger is equivalent to the ruler qua ruler. The set contains three arguments. In conversation with Thrasymachus, in answer to his statement that the shepherd takes care of the sheep for his good, not for theirs. The set contains three argu¬ ments. SET I: 331E-334B

Socrates/Polemarchus (Simonides) Justice is to render to each his due. Argument 1 a. Q A

The art that renders what that is due and befitting to what is the art of medicine? Drugs, food, and drink to bodies.

1 I have tried to recall the dialogue form by giving the arguments a question and answer scheme (Q, A). For the sake of filling up the table, however, I have often recounted the arguments more fully than Plato does, and I do not intend these tabular versions to be taken as a substitute for the actual text.

Republic I b. Q A c. Q A

59

The art that renders what that is due and befitting to what is the art of cooking? Seasoning to meats. The art that renders what that is due and befitting to whom is the art of justice? Benefits and harms to friends and enemies.

Stage 1: Justice (an art) is to do good to friends and evil to ene¬ mies. Argument 2 a. Q A b. Q A c. Q A

Who is able to benefit friends and harm enemies when they are ill with respect to health and disease? The physician. Who is able to benefit sailors with respect to the perils of the sea? The pilot. The just man is able to benefit friends and harm enemies in what action with respect to what? In making war and as an ally.

Stage 2: The just man is able to benefit friends and harm enemies (i.e., to be just) when he is their ally in making war. Argument 3 a. Q A b. Q A c. Q A

If [friends and enemies] are not sick, the physician is use¬ less? Yes. If friends and enemies are not at sea, the pilot is useless? Yes. If friends and enemies are not at war, the just man is use¬ less? No, he is useful in peace.

Stage 3: Justice is useful in peace. Argument 4 a. Q A

Agriculture is useful in peace for getting a harvest? Yes.

6o

plato’s philosopher-king

b. Q A c. O A

Tlie cobbler’s art is useful in peace for getting shoes? Yes. Justice is useful in peace for what? In engagements and dealings.

Stage 4: Justice is useful in peace in engagements, associations, and partnerships. Argument 5 a. Q A b. Q A

In the placing of checkers, is the just man or the player a better associate? The player. In the placing of bricks and stones, is the just man or the builder a better associate? The builder.

c. O A

In the striking of chords, the harpist is better? Yes.

d. Q A

In what association is the just man a better partner? In money dealings.

Stage 5: The just man is the best associate in money dealings. Argument 6 a. Q A b. Q A c. Q A

But when there is occasion to buy a horse, the man who knows horses is better? Yes. But when there is occasion to buy a vessel, the man who knows ships is better? Yes. But when there is occasion to do what, the just man is better? When money is to be deposited.

Stage 6: The just man is the best associate (most useful) when money is to be deposited (i.e., is useless).

Republic I

61

Argument 7 a. Q

A b. Q

A c. Q A d. Q A

When a scythe is useless, justice is useful; but when the scythe is useful, the vine-dresser’s art is useful and justice is useless. Yes. When a shield is useless, justice is useful; but when the shield is useful, the military art is useful and justice is use¬ less. Yes. When a lyre is useless, justice is useful; but when the lyre is useful, the musical art is useful and justice is useless. Yes. In all cases of the use of a thing, justice is useless (though useful in its uselessness). Yes.

Stage 7: Justice is useful when other things are useless (and vice versa), though useful in its uselessness.

Argument 8 a. Q A b. Q A c. Q A d. Q A

The man most skilful at inflicting a blow is the man most skilful at guarding against it. Yes. The man most skilful at guarding against disease is the man most skilful at inflicting it. Yes. The man most skilful at guarding an army is the man most skilful at stealing a march on the enemy. Yes. The man most skilful at guarding anything is the man most skilful at stealing it. Yes.

Stage 8: The fust man is the best thief.

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An initial observation that may be made on this set of arguments is that Plato seems perfectly indifferent to any distinction in termi¬ nology between justice and the just man, as he does, indeed, to terminological distinctions between any of the first-order arts and their practitioners. It is perhaps somewhat more striking for him, at the conclusion of the eighth argument, to announce that the just man is the best thief than it would have been for him to say that justice is the art of efficient stealing, but on the whole he shifts back and forth between the man and the art, the art and the man, for no apparent reason. This is exactly what we should expect from the arguments examined in other dialogues: the man who knows medicine is a doctor; the man who knows justice is just. This then is a point on which Plato seems to accept the analogy between justice and the first-order arts, or to put it another way, it seems that the expert-faculty-object principle holds at all levels.2 Another point to be noted is that the grouping of justice with the first-order arts no longer results in the familiar pattern of tinoswords, reflexivity, regress, and uselessness; Polemarchus’ answers are positive in content. The answers he gives, however, will produce, first, a conclusion unacceptable to Socrates (that the just man should not only benefit his friends but harm his enemies), then a species of paradox (that justice is useful only when other things are useless), and finally a conclusion that is sheerly ridiculous (that the just man is the best thief). Plato’s method of attacking the techne-analogy is in fact rather like his method in the Hippias Minor, in which the grouping of the good man with the good athlete, the good geometer, and so on, produces the equally ridicu¬ lous conclusion that it is the good man who does wrong voluntarily. The present set of arguments, then, issues in a reductio ad absurdum. Plato appears to be saying that, if grouping justice with the first-order arts leads to the conclusion that the just man is the best thief, then something must be wrong with such a grouping. On the other hand, although he may attack the fec/me-analogy in this manner, as well as in the manner of the dialogues previously studied, he does not intend to reject it in toto. Justice is not an art 2 The way in which the just man knows justice will not however be the same as the way in which the doctor knows medicine.

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if first-order arts are all the arts there are; it is an art if there are second-order arts as well. The next set of arguments between Socrates and Polemarchus is of great interest, since here Plato does two things that are distinctly new: in the first place he flanks a single techne-argument with two out-lying arguments, in neither of which he uses terms directly drawn from the arts; in the second place he works, not to a conclu¬ sion that he means to reject, but to one of the cardinal points of his own ethics. Reference to the table will make all this plain. SET II: 335B-336A Socrates/Polemarchus Ought a good man to harm anyone? Argument 1 a. Q A b. Q A c. Q A

When horses are harmed, they are made worse with re¬ spect to equine virtue. Yes. When dogs are harmed, they are made worse with respect to canine virtue. Yes. When men are harmed, they are made worse with respect to human virtue, and this is justice. Yes.

Stage 1: Men who are harmed become more unjust. Argument 2 a. Q

Musicians do not make men unmusical by the art of

A b. Q

music? No. Horsemen do not make men unfit for dealing with horses by [the art of] horsemanship?

A c. Q A

No. Just men do not make men unjust by [the art of] justice? No.

Stage 2: The good do not make men bad by [the art of?) virtue.

plato’s philosopher-king

Argument 3 a. Q

It is not the function (ergon) of heat to chill, but of its

A b. Q

opposite. Yes. It is not the function of dryness to moisten but of its

A c. Q A d. Q A

opposite. Yes. It is not the function of the good to harm but of its opposite. Yes. It is not the function of the just [i.e., good] man to harm anyone but of his opposite. Yes.

Stage 3: It is not true that the just man should harm anyone. It is in this set of ^arguments that Plato really begins to break away from the'aporeticStreatment of justice and starts to establish positive points. HFYtiTl uses the fechne-analogy in the second of his three arguments, but, as I have already pointed out, he flanks this argument by two others that employ terms other than those drawn from the arts; in the first we have animals,3 in the third natural qualities. These variant terms are not chosen at random; they lead quite obviously in the direction of the idea of function, an idea that will become increasingly important as Book I progresses. As the idea of function becomes more important, the second-order aspect of justice recedes. The reason for this shift, as I see it, is that Plato considers himself to have laid sufficient emphasis (for the moment) on the way in which justice differs from the other arts and he is now ready to specify the ways in which it resembles them. For this purpose, the analogy of justice with the arts is accepted. In the course of the two conversations between Socrates and Thrasymachus we shall see what these resemblances are.4 3 I think an interesting study could be made of the arguments in which Plato argues from animals to men. Examples occur at Apology, 20A, Laches 196E, Hippias Minor 375A, and of course there is the philosophic dog at Republic II, 375Aff. 4 Again I want to stress the fact that the tables are schematic only. In Set III and Set IV, the arguments have been contracted rather than expanded.

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SET III 341B-342E Socrates/Thrasymachus Justice is the interest of the ruler qua ruler. Argument 1 a. O A

The physician (in the strict sense) is a healer of the sick. Yes.

b. O A

The pilot (in the strict sense) is a ruler of sailors. Yes.

c. Q

Each has his advantage, and the art exists to discover and provide it. Yes. None of the arts has any other advantage than to be as perfect as possible. (For instance, the medical art needs no other art to consider its advantage, and so on.) Yes.

A d. O

A

Stage 1: There is no defect or error in any art, and each art seeks the advantage of nothing but its subject. Argument 2 a. Q A b. Q A c. Q A

Medicine does not consider the advantage of medicine but that of the body? Yes. Horsemanship does not consider the advantage of horse¬ manship but that of the horse? Yes. The arts rule, and are stronger than, that of which they are the arts. Yes.

Stage 2: Every art considers and enjoins the advantage of the weaker, not of the stronger. Argument 3 a. Q A

The physician (in the strict sense) seeks the advantage of the patient, not his own. Yes.

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b. Q A

The pilot (in the strict sense) seeks the advantage of the sailors, not his own. Yes.

Stage 3: No one who rules considers and enjoins his own advan¬ tage but that of the one for whom he rules. The first point to be noticed in this third set of arguments is that the analogy between justice and the first-order arts again ap¬ pears to be completely accepted. Whatever Plato says about the physician and the pilot is intended to apply also to the just man; this is how the statement of Thrasymachus will be refuted. (In the fourth set Plato will combine justice both with the concept of art as benevolent rule, that he has developed here, and with the idea of function from Set II.) Characteristic of the present set also, is its repetition. Except for the dismissal of the infinite regress in the final question and answer in Argument 1, the conclusions of the three arguments come substantially to the same thing, that art is for the advantage of its subject. Plato of course needs to state this with particular intensity since the position of Thrasymachus, that justice is the interest of the stronger, is its exact opposite. The dismissal of the regress is made subsidiary to the formulation of the anti-Thrasymachus position, but it is an extremely important point to note in view of the number of regresses encountered in earlier chapters and in view of what has been said about them there. The chief regresses that have been discussed are those relating to the first friend in the Lysis and to the kingly art (basilike techne) in the Euthydemus. The regress of the first friend in the Lysis seemed constructed mainly for the purpose of illustrating the point that wherever a regress is made to stop, an atypical case is bound to result. A terminal good, for instance, is unlike other goods—so much so, Plato thinks, that the difference between them is one of reality versus imitation. (This is an important philosophical obser¬ vation, of which an obvious and striking variant is Aristotle’s Un¬ moved Mover.) In the Euthydemus the regress generated by the search for an art combining making and knowing how to use the thing made was left open-ended, with the result that the search was

Republic I

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apparently fruitless. It was, however, the demand for the first-order product of a second-order art that generated the regress in the first place. Thus, I believe, Plato intended to say that the regress really did stop with the kingly art. The product of the art, if it has a product, is good men, these being in turn the successful practition¬ ers of the first-order arts over which the kingly art holds rule. The Lysis and Euthydemus passages combined, then, present us with the following situation: if a regress is stopped, the terminal stage is atypical; if it is not stopped, there will be no art that is not defective. There seems to be no doubt that where Plato has a choice between stopping or not stopping a regress, he will choose to stop it. (It is, in fact, characteristic of Greek philosophy general¬ ly that to point out the existence of a regress amounts to a reduction to the absurd.) We can thus be sure that Plato is willing to accept atypicality. But at what point does he think a regress must be stopped? As far as a regress of friends is concerned, the point of rest could be anywhere so long as there is one. With a regress of arts, however, the situation is not so simple. In the Charmides, for instance, there are sciences (first-order arts) and a science of sciences (the second-order art of temperance or the knowledge of good and evil), but there is no suggestion that the series should proceed any further. In the Euthydemus, the series was allowed to proceed, but the search for a master art was declared fruitless just on that account. The striking thing here in the Republic is that the regress is stopped, not where we might expect, at the second level, but at the first. The passage is as follows: Is the medical art itself defective or faulty, or has any other art any need of some virtue, quality, or excellence—as the eyes of vision, the ears of hearing, and for this reason there is5 need of some art over them that will consider and provide what is advantageous for these very ends— does there exist in the art itself some defect and does each art require another art to consider its advantage and is there need of still another for the considering art and so on ad infinitum, or will the art look out for its own advantage? Or is it a fact that it needs neither itself nor another

5 Shorey has

“is there,” but this is rhetorical only.

68

plato’s philosopher-king

art to consider its advantage and provide against its deficiency? For there is no defect or error at all that dwells in any art. Nor does it befit an art to seek the advantage of anything else than that of its object. But the art itself is free from all harm and all admixture of evil, and is right so long as each art is precisely and entirely that which it is. [342AB]

The passage is somewhat surprising at first glance, since it seems to do away with the need for any arts except the first-order arts. But if second-order arts are lacking, there will be no kingly art, no knowledge of good and evil, no arts of rule, and no ruler! Unless we are to assume some very extreme change in Plato’s position (and a further change in the opposite direction later on), it appears highly improbable that he is here dispensing with a group of concepts so central to his thought. The key to the passage comes in the last sentence: "the art itself is free from harm and all admixture of evil... so long as each art is precisely and entirely that which it is” (italics mine). Thrasymachus has insisted on speaking of the arts in their most precise sense, and the implications of this (which Socrates works out in a way Thrasymachus did not foresee) are that the doctor always functions for the good of his patient; this is what doctors are. On the other hand, Plato knows perfectly well that it is the doctor who could, if he were not acting in the "precise sense,” most efficiently produce disease. He says substantially this in the Hippias Minor and in the argument here in Republic I about the best thief. He knows too that even when the artist functions exactly as he should function (when the doctor is a "good” doctor) the results may not be good in a wider sense. Plato has expressed this concisely in the Laches at 195C. Nicias objects to what Laches has been saying because [Laches] thinks that the physician’s knowledge of illness extends beyond the nature of health and disease. But in fact the physician knows no more than this. Do you imagine, Laches, that he knows whether health or illness is more terrible to a man? Had not many a man better never get up from a sickbed?

At Charmides 174C, Plato ties up the same point with the secondorder art of good and evil, where Socrates says

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socrates: For let me ask you, Critias, whether, if you take away this science [of good and evil] from the others, medicine will not equally give health, and shoe-making equally produce shoes, and the art of the weaver clothes—whether the art of the pilot will not equally save our lives at sea, and the art of the general in war? critias: Equally. socrates: And yet, my dear Critias, none of these things will be well or beneficially done, if the science of the good be wanting. In other words, there will actually be no deficiency in any of the first-order arts qua art, so far as the execution of function is con¬ cerned, but there will still be no guarantee from the art itself that performance of function will, in a wider sense, be good. Plato illustrates the same idea in an entertaining manner in the Gorgias, when he has the rhetorician state that a man who has learned boxing ought not to go home and attack his friends and relations (456D). Gorgias would apply the analogy to his own art of rhetoric, saying that even if the rhetorician has power to usurp the office of the doctor, he should refrain from doing so. What he is really saying, Socrates points out, is that the “good” rhetori¬ cian must know, not only rhetoric, but right and wrong as well (459D). Rhetoric, as has already been pointed out in chapter II, is an art of at least the second order, and it is at levels beyond the first order that problems of good and evil become acute. Plato shows this at length in another part of the same dialogue, at 511C-513C, when he says that the pilot who brings us safe from Aegina at a price of two obols is not accustomed to give himself airs since he cannot tell whether it might not have been better for us if we had been drowned. The pilot qua pilot has performed his function perfectly, but Plato asks us to consider “whether what is good and noble is not something more than saving and being saved.”6 To return to the Republic: Plato’s purpose in this third set of techne-arguments is to show Thrasymachus that, if he insists upon speaking of the arts in the precise sense, he must take the conse¬ quences. If the doctor is always a doctor, then he always functions for the advantage of the sick, that is, of the weaker. It is, no doubt,

6 The burden of the

Apology and of the Crito amounts substantially to this.

plato’s philosopher-king

because Plato’s energies are directed towards this particular end that we have no suggestion of any second-order art that might be auxiliary to arts of the first order. So far as the first-order functions themselves are concerned, no auxiliary art is, in fact, needed. But if we go on to ask the preliminary question, Is it good that X should be healed?, the need at once arises. We now come to the fourth and final set of arguments, in which Plato reintroduces justice and combines it with the notions of rule and function. SET IV

346A-354A

Socrates/Thrasymachus The shepherd looks after the sheep for his own interest, not for theirs. Argument 1 a. Q

b. c. d. e.

A Q A Q A Q A Q A

Each of the arts is different from the other arts because its power or function is different. Yes. Medicine yields health. Yes. The pilot’s art yields safety at sea. Yes. The wage earner’s art yields wages. Yes. The art of Architecture yields a house. Yes.

Stage 1: No art or office provides what is beneficial for itself but what is beneficial for its subject. Argument 2 a. Q A

The unjust man will try to overreach both his like and his unlike, but the just man only his unlike. Yes.

Republic I b. Q A c. Q A d. Q A

71

The unjust man is intelligent and good, and the just man neither. Yes. The musician is intelligent and good and tries to over¬ reach only his unlike. Yes. The doctor is intelligent and good and tries to overreach only his unlike. Yes.

Stage 2: The man who knows—the intelligent man—is wise and good, and he is the one who (like the just man) tries to overreach only his unlike. Therefore the just man is wise and good, and the unjust man bad and ignorant; and jus¬ tice is virtue and wisdom, and injustice vice and ignorance. Argument 3 a. Q A b. Q A c. Q

A d. Q

A e. Q A f. Q A

The function of a thing is that which it only, or it better than anything else, can perform. Yes. There is a specific virtue or excellence of everything for which a specific work or function is appointed. Yes. Could the eyes fulfill their function (of seeing) if they lacked their own proper excellence (sight) and had in¬ stead the defect (blindness)? No. Could the ears fulfill their function (of hearing) if they lacked their own proper excellence (hearing) and had instead the defect (deafness)? No. Has the soul a function which only it can perform, e.g., management, rule, deliberation, and life? Yes. Does the soul have an excellence or virtue? Yes.

72

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g. Q

Will the soul perform its function well if deprived of its own virtue?

A

No.

Stage 3: Since the bad soul governs badly but the good soul well, and the virtue of the soul is justice and its defect injustice, the just soul and the just man will live well and the unjust ill. And since he who lives well is happy and he who does not is unhappy, the just man is happy and the unjust miserable. Perhaps the most obvious thing about this final set of arguments is that it is less an independent set than a summary of preceding arguments. Argument 1 in Set IV, for instance, is really a continua¬ tion of Set III, the series in which Thrasymachus found that his insistence on taking the ruler in the “precise sense” resulted in the defeat of his definition of justice as the interest of the stronger. Thrasymachus’ further mention of shepherds at 343B (where he takes issue with Socrates for supposing that “the shepherds and the neat-herds are considering the good of the sheep and the cattle and fatten and tend them with anything else in view than the good of their masters and themselves”) directly precipitates this first argument of Set IV, since Socrates now holds him to the notion of a “precise” shepherd: “you see that while you began by taking the physician in the true sense of the word, you did not think fit afterwards to be consistent and maintain with precision the notion of the true shepherd, but you apparently think that he herds his sheep ... as if he were a money-maker and not a shepherd” (345CD). Argument 1 does however differ from the arguments of Set III, in that it contains the idea of function already encountered in the third argument of Set II. It is difference of function that accounts for the distinctness of the various arts. In this way Plato shows that the true shepherd cannot be a wage earner (he means, of course, that good rule is not performed for profit) since the functions of the two arts are different. Plato is now ready to drop his direct attack on justice as the

Republic I

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interest of the stronger (Socrates shelves the matter aC^^^and to turn his attention to attacking the perverted sense of values that has led Thrasymachus to take such a position in the first place. To this end, in Argument 2, he executes what might be called a kind of reductio ad absurdum in reverse. He first elicits from Thrasy¬ machus the (absurd) premise that injustice is to be classed with virtue and wisdom, and justice placed in the opposite class. (He has to accomplish this with some care since Thrasymachus is not willing to state categorically that justice is vice [348C].) This done, he has only to choose some predicate of sufficient ambiguity to be approved by Thrasymachus as belonging both to injustice, even in its present guise of virtue and wisdom, and to the opposite of any one of the various arts. The moment Thrasymachus admits that the musician (who is intelligent and good) desires to overreach only his unlike, whereas the unjust man desires to overreach his like as well, the refutation has really been accomplished. The mechanics of this and the proceeding argument are less im¬ portant however than the fact that, in this final set, Plato is willing to group the just man with the musician and the doctor as he was not willing to do in Set I. There the grouping was allowed to issue in the absurd conclusion that the just man was the best thief. Here, with the idea of justice as function coming to the fore and the second-order character of justice receding, we find Plato emphasiz¬ ing the bond between first- and second-order arts (after all both are arts) rather than the distinction between them. An art of any order is distinguished by the work it does—the special field in which it operates. Tfljjy final argument, then, Plato focuses all his energies on justice as work or function (and on its accompanying concept of specific virtue or excellence) and concludes triumphantly that the just man (the man of good function) lives well and is happy, whereas the unjust man lives ill (functions badly) and is miserable. A noticeable feature of the argument is that, when Plato comes to approach this final conclusion, he should cease to speak of justice and the just man and should begin to speak of soul. A glance back to 335C (the first argument of Set II) shows that Plato equates the soul with the man possessing it—we do this in English too, of

plato’s philosopher-king

course—so that he will say both “is not justice the specific virtue of man” (335C), and “did we not agree that the excellence or virtue of soul is justice” (345E). The functions of soul will then be the functions of man. One of these is simply life (353D), but there are others, “management, rule, deliberation and the like.” We can therefore say that man will not only not live well without the specific excellence of justice, but he will not manage, rule, or deliberate well. There is a connection, then, between the just man and the art of rule. What this is, however, we will not find out until later in the Republic, when the guardian turns into the philosopherking. In discussing the arguments of Book I, I have tried to indicate that Plato’s attitude towards the analogy of justice with the arts is neither one of unqualified approval nor one of unqualified disap¬ proval. When his purpose is to emphasize the second-order char¬ acter of justice, as in Set I, he constructs a series of arguments apparently designed to show (by the absurdity of their conclusion) that to group justice with the first-order arts is a mistake. In Sets II and IV, however—when he shifts over to the ideas of function and specific excellence—and in Set III—when he concentrates on the relationship between an art and its object—he places justice on an equal footing with the first-order arts. There is nothing inconsistent in Plato’s procedure. The absurd conclusion of Set I is intended to demonstrate, not that justice is not an art, but that it is not a first-order art. In the remaining sets, Plato calls our attention to the attributes shared by arts of both orders: distinctness of function, special virtue or excellence, and rule for the advantage of the thing ruled. That these positive notions are fundamental in the Republic need hardly be said.

VI ^public II'X

THIS NEXT CHAPTER WILL APPEAR TO BE FAR LESS UNIFIED THAN THE one preceding, since it will comment on passages scattered here and there in the remainder of the Republic rather than dealing with a single book. Also, since the dialogue as a whole is both long and familiar, I shall make little attempt to summarize the connecting material, but shall assume a working knowledge of it. The passages chosen for comment will, of course, be those most relevant to the general theme of the book as developed in the earlier chapters,—particularly those passages bearing out the evidence of Book I that justice is a second-order techne. Here we shall discover that the philosopher-king is its possessor. The main topics to be discussed are: (1) the origin of the guar¬ dian from a fevered, rather than a healthy state, and the significance of this origin for the knowledge of evil by good; (2) the transfor¬ mation of the good judge, first into the guardian, then into the guardian separated from the auxiliary, and finally into the philos¬ opher-king; (3) the gradual assimilation of wisdom to justice; (4) the possible relationship of the sun, divided line, and cave to some of the difficulties previously raised by Plato in connection with the second-order arts; and (5) the taking up of the major

75

76

plato’s philosopher-king

themes of the Republic in Book X. The expert-faculty-object prin¬ ciple will function as a unifying factor in the discussion of these topics, uniting the philosopher-king with the art that he possesses and the objects that he knows. It will be convenient to begin with a passage in Book II, 369B372D. This passage comprises Socrates’ account of the city’s origin up to the point at which Glaucon inquires “if you were founding a city of pigs, Socrates, what other fodder than this would you provide?” The particular arts that arise in the city are dictated by the initial principle of human need and are stabilized by the sub¬ sequent principle of specialization and “minding one’s own busi¬ ness” (ta hautou prattein; 370A). All of them, be it noted, are first-order arts. Then, Socrates asks at 371E: Has our city, then, Adeimantus, reached its full growth and is it complete? Perhaps. Where, then, can justice and injustice be found in it? And along with which of the constituents that we have considered does it come into the state? I cannot conceive, Socrates, he said, unless it be in some need that those very constituents have of each other. Socrates thinks that this may be a good suggestion, and he proposes to follow it up. But there are two things to be noted about the present passage. One is that justice and injustice are not mentioned until the necessary quota of first-order arts has been filled and the city has at least an appearance of completeness. The second is that there is no suggestion that justice should be tacked on as an addi¬ tional first-order art. Quite the contrary: it will make its appearance either “along with” some one of the constituents already con¬ sidered, or it will be somehow relational in character, arising out of “some need that those very constituents have of each other.” This is certainly all rather vague, but does serve, nevertheless, to indicate that justice occupies a position quite distinct from the arts of farm¬ ing, cobbling, weaving, and building and also from the arts that are ancillary to these.

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The next passage (372E) follows closely upon the one just cited but deserves separate treatment since it belongs, not to the account of the “city of pigs,” but to that of the luxurious city. Socrates now contrasts these two cities in terms of a true and healthy state and a fevered one. It is by observation of this latter, not of the healthy state, that he and Adeimantus might perhaps “discern the origin of justice and injustice in states” (372E). The implications of this brief remark are far-reaching. The search for justice in cities (whether healthy or unhealthy) was initiated by the failure of Socrates’ arguments in Book I to convince Glaucon and Adeimantus that justice is better than injustice (368B). It was as a result of this failure that the move was made to put aside the search for justice in the individual and, instead, to look for it, written in larger letters, in the state (368DE). The examination of the “larger letters” will occupy Plato for many pages (the shift back to the individual does not occur until 434DE in Book IV), but it is clearly meant to be an aid to the search for justice in the human soul, not a substitute for it. When Plato does return to the individual, he comes equipped with the fruits of his analysis of justice in the state: that is, he can say that “the proper functioning of the money-making class, the helpers and the guardians, each doing its own work in the state . . . would be justice and would render the city just” (434C). He can then proceed, as we all know, to the application of the special virtues suggested by these three groups (temperance, courage, wisdom) to the three parts of the individual soul, and to the consequent definition of justice in the individual modeled on the definition of justice in the state. But in order to erect the three classes in the state and thus to acquire the virtues he needs for his analysis of the soul, Plato now performs what is really a very curious manuever. In the preliminary version of the state—the one that Adeimantus called swinish, but that Socrates called true and healthy—only one of the three necessary classes, that of the money-makers, appears with any degree of clarity. Hence only one of the three virtues, that of temperance, is even, tentatively provided for. There is some slight adumbration of the nature of justice, as has already been

plato’s philosopher-king

pointed out above, but it is very slight. Courage and wisdom, then, are so far unprovided for in Socrates’ version of the state. It is just at this juncture that Plato introduces the fevered or luxurious state. His reason for introducing it seems to be clearly this, that in view of his ultimate return to the question of justice in the individual, he needs to add to his state a class for which courage will be the distinctive virtue. In the healthy state, the citizens were careful “not [to beget] offspring beyond their means lest they fall into poverty or war” (372B-C); but the moment the healthy state falls ill of unnecessary desires, war and a professional warrior class are the inevitable result. Plato now has his virtue of courage; and still more important, the fevered state will indirectly produce wis¬ dom as well, since the class of philosophers results from Plato’s division of the class of warrior-guardians into rulers and ruled (412BC). Later, of course, Plato has his cake and eats it too, by purging the state of its excesses while still retaining the two classes that these excesses have produced! (See, for instance, 399E.) Not only, however, has the fevered state produced warriors and philosophers (with their attendant virtues of courage and wisdom), but it is also in this state—not in the true and healthy one—that we may be able to “discern the origin of justice and injustice.” Why is this? The simplest answer is that if justice is to be a species of relation—as was implied at 372A—it cannot be found in the healthy state, because the healthy state contains only one class.1 Furthermore, so long as the citizens continue minding their own business and attending only to their necessary desires (such being the earmarks of health), no additional classes seem likely to appear. Plato must change the character of the state (more specifically, he must inflate its desires and force it to go to war) if he is to produce any additional class or classes. It seems, then, that for Plato justice has its origin, not in health, but in disease; it has some connection with evil. If this were true of 1 There could, of course, be a species of justice between cobbler and fanner (each one “minding his own business”), but if this were to be the only sort, we would not find out much about the human soul when we returned from the state to the individual.

Republic II-X justice by itself, justice being the virtue in the Republic, Plato’s treatment of it would seem very strange. But it was not only justice that Socrates expected to find in the fevered state; he was on the track of injustice as well. It seems (as Aristotle states on a variety of occasions2) that knowledge of one of a pair of opposites involves knowledge of the other. In the true and healthy state there was a sense in which justice did not arise at all, simply because, by defini¬ tion, health in a state implies no possibility of meddling in the affairs of others. It is by contrast with injustice that justice makes a recognizable appearance. Plato’s treatment of medicine in this part of the Republic gives us a parallel situation—one that he seems consciously to intend from the number of passages in which the doctor and the judge occur together. The first point to be noted is that doctors do not occur in the healthy state, as Socrates initially describes it. They make their appearance in the luxurious state (373D): “doctors, too, are something whose services we shall be much more likely to require if we live thus than as before.” Presumably there were doctors in the healthy state, but they would probably have served only for the setting of broken limbs, or, as Plato will suggest later—in his account of the carpenter who has no time to be ill (406DE) — they would serve for the restoration of useful function to those who are in good training; this is the right use of medicine. In the fevered state, however, we will need not only doctors, for a variety of newfangled diseases, but also judges, for all sorts of licentious¬ ness (405A). This is a serious matter, for as Socrates says: Will you be able to find a surer proof of an evil and shameful state of education in a city than the necessity of first-rate physicians and judges, not only for the base and mechanical, but for those who claim to have been bred in the fashion of free men? Do you not think it disgraceful and a notable mark of bad breeding to have to make use of a justice imported from others, who thus become your masters and judges, from lack of such qualities in yourself? [405AB] 2 See, for instance De Anima I, 5, 411340., Ill, 6, 4301321 S., and Nicomachean Ethics V, 1, 1129318. See also Phaedo 97D.

8o

plato’s philosopher-king

Justice and health, in their proper forms, should be the responsi¬ bility of the individual (of the guardians at least, if not of the crafts¬ men). When injustice and disease arise in the luxurious state, they also involve the free man in the indignity of having administered to him externally, by the doctor and the judge, what he should be doing for himself. I think Plato means to say that, the more need the free man has need of these external persons, the less freedom he possesses. At 408C ff. Plato has accepted the necessity of physicians and judges for his state and begins to speculate about the characteristics of a good physician or a good judge. It is at this point that the parallel between the doctor and the judge breaks down, and it does so in a very interesting way. The best doctors will be the ones, Plato says, who “in addition to learning the principles of the art... had familiarized themselves with the greatest possible number of the most sickly bodies and . . . themselves had suffered all diseases and were not of very healthy constitution.” The reason that a doctor is allowed by Plato to be diseased is that his diseased condition is restricted to the body. But a diseased judge would be diseased in mind. How could he then heal other minds? For him, the situation must be different; he must be uncontaminated by evil and unfamiliar with it, a “late learner of the nature of injustice” (409B). He must understand it, but as “an alien thing in alien souls, [discerning] how great an evil it is by the instrument of mere knowledge and not by experience of his own.” Plato here faces one of the crucial questions of his whole philos¬ ophy—How is it possible both to know and not to know a thing? How, more specifically, can the good know evil? As for knowing and not knowing, an inspection of the eristic passages in the Euthydemus shows Plato making a sustained at¬ tack against the Eleatic view that would deny the possibility of simultaneous knowledge and ignorance. Euthydemus and his brother—in, for instance, the series of arguments at 276A ff.—have relied on the fact (pointed out later by Socrates) that the one word “learn” is applied to opposite sorts of men, to “both the man who knows and the man who does not” (278A). In another passage,

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beginning at 295A, they attempt to show by a transition from know¬ ing X to omniscience (and conversely from not knowing X to total ignorance) that Socrates “knows” the kingly art for which he has been searching. Plato’s refutation of these Eleatic arguments con¬ sists of denying the necessity for an absolute opposition between knowing and not knowing; he shows that the man who learns is, in one sense, knowing (intelligent) and, in another sense, not know¬ ing (ignorant of what he is about to be taught). Similarly it is possible for the same person to be both knowing (of X) and not knowing (of Y) at the same time.3 Plato s introduction of some third thing between two opposites can be paralleled in numerous other passages. The Lysis at 216D speaks of the good, the evil, and “that which is neither good nor evil.” In the Symposium at 201E ff., we discover that the opposite of beaut\T is not necessarily ugly, nor is the opposite of a god neces¬ sarily a mortal. In the Theaetetus we encounter the notion of “truly thinking what is false” (189D), and in the Sophist we find an image described as a kind of not-real entity that “really is” an image (240B). In the Republic itself the central ontology of the work is introduced by the important passage in Book V, 477A ff., in which Plato has opinion and becoming “tumbling about” (479D) between, on the one hand, knowledge and being and, on the other, nescience and nonbeing. Clearly, then, to characterize the good judge as one who both knows, and does not know, evil presents no difficulties for Plato. There are, however, difficulties for him in the second question, How can good know evil? The major tendency of Greek episte¬ mology, from Empedocles on (Anaxagoras is a notable exception) was to assimilate the knower to the known, the known to the knower. So, for Empedocles, “with earth do we see earth, with water water, with air divine air, but with fire destructive fire, with Love do we see Love, and Strife with gloomy Strife” [Fr. 109, Translation mine]. Tire Democritean theory of sense perception 3 For a fuller discussion of these passages, see Rosamond Kent Sprague,

Plato’s Use of Fallacy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 3-8,

and 22-25.

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functions in basically the same way.4 Plato’s epistemology in the Republic is philosophical rather than physiological; but the principle of like-to-like still holds, and nowhere more clearly than in the passage in Republic V just mentioned. Here we find a systematic correlation of knower-faculty-object: (A) The philosopher has knowledge and knows being. (B) The doxophilist has opinion and opines becoming. The like-to-like principle is so closely adhered to by Plato that the appearance of any member of either (A) or (B) immediately evokes the other members of the same set, and of that set only. That is, being is what is known (but never opined), and the philosopher is the person (and the only person) who knows it. By the same token, becoming is always opined and never known. On the basis of such an epistemology, how is the good judge to have an informed knowledge of injustice? To be strictly consistent, it would seem as though the person knowing evil (in the form of injustice or in some other form) must in some fashion be evil—but this Plato will not allow. Hence his somewhat cryptic remarks, cited above, concern¬ ing the good judge’s mode of knowledge of injustice: he knows it as “an alien thing in alien souls,” and so forth. Such a mode of knowledge must indeed be a case of both knowing and not knowing. Can we be any more specific as to the nature of this knowledge that belongs to the good judge? Yes, I think so: I believe it to be the knowledge of good and evil which appears, for instance, in the Charmides, sometimes as temperance, at other times (more signif¬ icantly for the present discussion) as “science of science and the absence of science.” The negative note that is sounded in the phrase “absence of science” does something to explain how Plato may have conceived the knowledge of evil by the good. Science is good and is positively known; “absence of science” implies not so much the presence of evil as the absence of good—knowledge of “absence of science” might then also have a negative character, and in this way Plato might not feel himself to be violating the principle of like-to-like. This is admittedly speculative, but the Charmides does 4 But see Theophrastus, de Sensibus 49.

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supply us with clear evidence that having knowledge of good and evil involves the wise man in having knowledge of both what he know'S and what he does not know and in “knowing in a sort of way that which he does not know at all” (175C). Later in the Republic, however, we find a discussion of these points which is far more precise. At 434D Plato made his tran¬ sition back to the individual after the lengthy discussion of the “larger letters” of the city that began at 368D. In order to demon¬ strate that the individual really did possess, in his soul, the same forms that had appeared as classes in the state, Plato first estab¬ lishes some points of logic needed to articulate the parts of soul. One of these is the principle of noncontradiction (436Bff.). An¬ other is a principle concerning relative terms (438CD). This lat¬ ter principle is not easy to put a name to but may be summarized as follows: If terms are related one to the other (Plato has in mind what I have earlier called tinos-words), then if one of them has a certain attribute, so has the other; but if either is taken abstractly (without any qualifying attribute), then the other must be taken in that way also. The point that concerns us now is that this principle is applied by Plato to the tinos-word “science” (episteme). He puts it this way. [Soc.] Science which is just that, is knowledge which is just that, or is of whatsoever we must assume the correlate of science to be. But a particular science of a particular kind is of some particular thing of a particular kind. I mean something like this. As there was a science of making a house it differed from other sciences so as to be named archi¬ tecture . . . and similarly of the other arts and sciences. [438CD]. More important for us, however, is what he says he does not mean. I don’t at all mean that [sciences] are of the same kind as the things of which they are, so that we are to suppose that the science of health and disease is a healthy and diseased science and that of evil and good, evil and good. I only mean that as science became the science not of just the thing of which science is but of some particular kind of thing, namely of health and disease, the result was that it itself became some

plato’s philosopher-king

kind of science and this caused it to be no longer called simply science but with the addition of the particular kind, medical science. [438E; italics mine] In other words, there is an indissoluble bond between medicine on the one hand and health and disease on the other, in that health and disease are what the medical science (and no other science) is of. But the bond is not so close as to impart identity to the mem¬ bers of the relation. As Plato expressly states, for a science to be of health and disease does not make the science itself into something healthy and diseased. By mentioning the science of good and evil in this context, Plato clearly means to say that an analogous situ¬ ation holds here too. The science of good and evil will not itself be good and evil; it will have some character as distinctive as that of “medical science” in relation to health and disease. Another look at the Charmides suggests two additional attributes of the knowledge of good and evil about which something may be said and which have their parallels in the Republic. One of these is what, in discussing that dialogue in chapter III, I have called “reflexivity.” Temperance was described not only as “science of science and the absence of science” but as science of itself (166C, E). That Plato is thinking along similar lines here in the Republic receives striking confirmation from a passage at 409DE. After de¬ scribing the legal trickster, who is the antithesis of the good judge, he writes: “Well, then, said [Socrates], such a one must not be our ideal of the good and wise judge but the former. For while badness could never come to know both virtue and itself, native virtue through education will at last acquire the science of both itself and badness” (italics mine). Badness knows neither itself nor its op¬ posite; virtue (goodness) can come to know both: in other words, good can know evil. The passage should not be pressed too hard, since it remains unclear, for instance, whether the acquisition of the “science of itself” is in any way a prerequisite or guarantee of the acquisition of the science of badness. What is sufficiently clear is that virtue (which I think it reasonable to associate, if not to identify, with the knowledge of good and evil) possesses some

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species of reflexivity or self-knowledge that its opposite conspicu¬ ously lacks. The analysis of the Charmides in chapter III showed a second attribute of the knowledge (science) of good and evil: that it was a second-order teclme. On this point, parallels with the Republic are much more numerous and much more precise. The first set of arguments in Book I were constructed (as I have tried to show earlier) to say the same thing about justice. The way in which justice is mentioned in the description of the healthy state (372BD) tends to reinforce this conclusion, and so, of course, will the ultimate definition of justice at 433AB. To define justice as “doing one’s own business,” without at the same time giving to this “business” any specific content, is certainly to separate it in a radical way from the types of business performed by the money-makers, the aux¬ iliaries, and the guardians. And once again, the mode of separation is between first and second orders. This passage at 433AB—containing the long-sought definition of justice—occurs, of course, after the division of the warrior class into guardians and auxiliaries at 412B. Tire good judge, however, was a personage introduced prior to this division. Thus, the al¬ location to him of the knowledge of good and evil was, I believe, a temporary expedient, because this knowledge must be reserved for the philosopher-king. Or, we may say, the good judge will himself become the philosopher-king, carrying this knowledge along with him. Before this latter stage is reached, however, it should be noted that there is something ambiguous about the activities of the guardian class. If we take the virtues of the three classes as a group, it makes sense to think of justice as second-order and the rest as firstorder. But when Plato begins to discuss the virtues one by one, he very quickly observes (428B) that “there is something odd” about wisdom, the virtue of the guardians. He asks to which of the numerous “knowledges” in the city we owe the fact that the city is wise and well counseled: To that of the carpenters? To the sci¬ ence of wooden utensils or brass instruments? To farming? No, we are looking for some science “which does not take counsel about

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some particular thing in the city but about the city as a whole and the betterment of its relations with itself and with other states” (428CD). This science resides in the class of guardians, and Plato has a name for it; it is the science of guardianship or government, phylakike. His technique of characterizing this science, is, however, almost identical with the one he employs elsewhere for the pu,rpose of forcing a distinction between first- and second-order arts. That is, he conducts a search for a particular art by asking a number of questions based on the assumption that the sought-for art can be assimilated to arts of the first order. In passages in the Ion, Charmides, and Euthydemus we have seen that Plato employs this technique in an elenchtic fashion, giving up the search when the analogy fails. (Failure is admitted, for example, when a regress occurs, or when the question about scope or product cannot be answered.) In the more positive atmosphere of the Republic, how¬ ever, the search is not given up; rather the art for which Plato is looking receives some definite characterization (it takes counsel about the city as a whole and so forth [428D]), one which sets it apart from the arts of the first order (it does not take counsel about some particular thing in the city). Wisdom, then, behaves in an ambivalent manner. As the special virtue of the guardian class, it occupies a position comparable to courage for the auxiliaries and temperance for the money-makers, with justice overarching all. But because the art of the guardian is an art of rule and because it concerns the city as a whole, wisdom has a strong tendency to leave the company of the first-order arts and to join forces with justice at the second level. That this is what we should expect from the description of the function of the philosopher-king will presently become apparent. Up to this stage I have tried to suggest the following points: (1) that justice is a second-order techne, and (2) that when com¬ bined with wisdom it is the knowledge of good and evil. I have also tried to indicate some of the issues involved in this latter point: the possibility of knowing and not knowing, and the knowl¬ edge of evil by good. In the course of the discussion there was oc¬ casion to note the early appearance of the good judge, a person who

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possessed this sort of knowledge, and to observe that the good judge was a forerunner of the philosopher-king. As a halfway house between the good judge, who makes his first decisive appearance at 409AB, and the philosopher-king, who does not emerge until 473CD, there is of course the guardian as separated from the auxiliary (412B), but not yet identified with the philosopher. The chief attributes of the guardian in the strict sense (as separated from the auxiliary) are those mentioned at the time and by means of which the separation is made. They are (1) rule and (2) complete devotion to the interests of the com¬ munity. These are in fact precisely the attributes that, when com¬ bined with the knowledge of good and evil already possessed by the good judge, add up to those to be possessed by the philosopherking. In the case of the philosopher-king, however, we find out (as we could hardly have done earlier) what the source of this kind of knowledge is: the vision of the good. I now come to the passages in Plato that speak most directly of the philosopher-king. Paradoxically, I shall have much less to say about them than I have said about the passages that, in the words of the subtitle of this book, constitute the “theoretical background” of the topic. It is as though a mountaineer were getting ready to climb a familiar but difficult mountain and had decided to employ some new equipment for the attempt. The actual climb might occupy much less time than the time given to preparation of the new equipment. So I have spent more pages in getting ready the concepts of first- and second-order arts, the faculty-object principle, tinos-words, and so on, than will be devoted to their use in the ex¬ position of these familiar passages in which Plato expounds the concept of the philosopher-king. The “third wave” by which Plato introduces the startling notion that either philosophers must become kings or kings must under¬ take the study of philosophy (473CD) is followed (after Glaucon’s violent reaction) by the passages occupying the remainder of Book V, in which Plato outlines for us what the philosopher’s nature really is. It is in this section that we get the correlation of philosopher-knowledge-being and doxophilist-opinion-becoming al-

88

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ready referred to in the discussion of the principle of like-to-like above. The importance of this correlation is two-fold: on the one hand, we are told what the object of the philosopher’s knowledge is, and on the other, we are led (as similarly in the case of the doxophilist) to assume that the fact of the object being what it is accounts for the philosopher being what he is. This relationship has been anticipated many times in passages that have been de¬ scribed as exemplifying the principle that I have called facultyobject or expert-faculty-object. Plato nowhere enunciates this principle, but he can often be observed to employ it. The present passage (474BC) is a case in point, for instance, since Plato’s alleged purpose in telling us what the philosopher knows is to inform us what the philosopher is like. In earlier dialogues he can be seen to pass easily from the artist to the art (the art itself being determined by its content) and back again. Examples of this occur throughout the special-fields argument of Ion 536E ff., for instance, and in Republic I, where, in the first set of arguments, Plato inter¬ changes justice and the just man at will. The explication of being, then, whether it appears in terms of wisdom and truth, as it does in the passages following the first en¬ counter with the philosopher-king (475B-487A) or in terms of good—as it does in the images of the sun, divided line, and caveserves always, for Plato, to explicate the nature of a person.5 We can think back to the initial question that Socrates desired Polus to put to Gorgias—“Ask him who he is” (Gorgias 447CD)—and remind ourselves that the question—Who is Gorgias?—was only answered by first isolating the sophist’s art (rhetoric) and by then posing the further question, What is rhetoric of? (the just and the unjust). What exactly is behind Plato’s adherence to a principle relating the nature of the man and his art so closely to the nature of the thing known? I suggested earlier that the epistemological principle of like-to-like, to be found as early as Empedocles, might be a con¬ tributing factor. In Plato’s hands, the principle becomes something

5 This was also true of the search for definitions in the early dialogues: the man who is temperate should know what temperance is, and so on.

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more. It may be a truism to point out that the very word “phi¬ losopher” means lover of wisdom (as indeed Plato’s coinage, “doxophilist,” means lover of opinion), but the fact remains that, for Plato, the man becomes the thing he loves. In Book VI, 500C, Socrates asks: do you think it possible not to imitate the things to which anyone attaches himself with admiration? Impossible, [Adeimantus] said. Then the lover of wisdom associating with the divine order will himself become orderly and divine in the measure permitted to man. It would be possible to regard the entire Symposium as written to invoke the same principle: that the man who truly knows beauty—which to Plato means the man who truly loves it—is the man who is truly beautiful. And it is no accident that the central exposition of this doctrine in the Symposium should be prefaced by a lesson in logic expressly designed to show that love is a tinosword. The homoiosis theoi of Theaetetus 176B belongs to the same family and so do the passages in the Phaedo that speak of the soul’s desire to rid itself of the body and return home to the realm of Forms. The recognition of the centrality of such a principle in Plato will serve as a rallying point for numerous passages in the Republic that might otherwise appear unconnected. It will be no surprise, for instance, to read the long passage describing the philosophic nature at the beginning of Book VI (484B-487A), and find it full of references to love of truth and assimilation to truth. The same theme is repeated at 501D: the lovers of wisdom are “lovers of reality and truth”; their nature is “akin to the highest and best”; it cannot be denied “that such a nature bred in the pursuits that befit it will be perfectly good and philosophic so far as that can be said of anyone.” Nor, perhaps, is it farfetched to suppose that at 497AB, when Plato speaks of the perversion of the philosophic nature in an alien soil, he is thinking along converse but similar lines. That Plato on occasion waxes lyrical when speaking of the phi-

plato’s philosopher-king

losopher’s relation to the good, the true, and the beautiful does not in any way imply that he has ceased to do some strenuous thinking concerning the philosophic implications of such a relation. We can now look at some passages in which he deals with the theoretical, rather than with the lyrical side. A few pages earlier I spoke of the ambivalent nature of wisdom when viewed from the standpoint of justice. At the stage in the Republic where Plato was most concerned to emphasize what might be called the epiphenomenal character of justice (that is, when he thinks of it as something which appears only when the other virtues function correctly), it seemed reasonable to say that justice was a second-order techne overarching a group of first-order technai. But when Plato shifts his attention to the virtue of wisdom as the special virtue of the governing class (having separated the guardians from the auxiliaries), the fact that the distinctive char¬ acteristics of the guardians are (a) rule and (b) concern for the whole tends to shift wisdom in the direction of the second order. We have now to consider what effect the appearance of the phi¬ losopher-king will have upon the status of wisdom and justice. I also suggested earlier that the good judge, who has a knowledge of good and evil, is a forerunner both of the guardian and of the philosopher-king. But although he disappears from the Republic as a distinct person, his distinguishing attribute—like those of the guardian—is handed over to the philosopher-king. The attributes of the philosopher-king, then, are those of the good judge and the guardian combined: knowledge of good and evil, rule, and concern for the whole. All of these are second-order attributes. It seems clear, then, that if the philosopher-king has wisdom, he will have wisdom of a second-order variety. This means, for all practical pur¬ poses, that the wisdom of the philosopher-king is the knowledge of good and evil. And since, to have this knowledge is “his own busi¬ ness,” one can say, too, that wisdom and justice have, in the phi¬ losopher-king, finally come together. The knowledge of good and evil, as attributed to the philosopherking, becomes, in the familiar images of the sun, divided line, and cave, simply the knowledge of good, or more strictly, the knowledge

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of the good. In these central passages, Plato is telling us who the philosopher is by telling us what the philosopher knows, as I have already said. When we understand his nature, then we shall be ready (Plato hopes) to accept the startling proposition that he should rule. I have no wish to expound these familiar passages in detail. What I do intend is to note how the knowledge of the good resolves some questions raised earlier in connection with the knowledge of good and evil as a second-order art. The chief difficulties connected with the second-order arts (which, it will be remembered, include rhetoric and sophistry) are as follows: they have no content, they are useless, and they generate regresses. The knowledge of the good, as expounded by Plato, avoids all of these difficulties, while still retaining its secondorder character. In the first place, this knowledge has all the other arts as its con¬ tent. That is, it is a science of sciences in the sense required by the Charmides. The Charmides, however, shied away from the idea of science of science at the last (i75Aff.). Although its benefits were recited (171DE; 173AD), such a science appeared not to exist, or if it did, to be of no use. The Republic, by introducing the idea or Form of the good, solves the problem of use and reinstates the notion of science of science all at one blow. Plato writes as follows: For you have often heard that the greatest thing to learn is the idea of good by reference to which just things and all the rest become useful and beneficial . . . and if we do not know it, then, even if without the knowledge of this we should know all other things never so well, you are aware that it would avail us nothing, just as no possession either is of any avail without the possession of the good. [505AB] In other words, we could have all the first-order arts and even perform them accurately (as at Republic I, 342AB); but without the knowledge of the good, they would in a last analysis be of no real use, because there is no built-in guarantee that their use will be a good use. We would never know, for example, whether the doctor may not poison someone or the boxer strike his mother. To

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put it another way, Plato is trying to distinguish the sense in which Dr. Crippen was a "good” doctor from the sense in which he was not. At the first-order level, yes—at the second, well, one might prefer to call in someone less efficient. The questions of use and content, then, go together. This is much more obvious if one starts at the first-order level than at the second. What I mean is this: Plato does not introduce the knowl¬ edge of the good and then proceed to introduce the first-order arts as an answer to the inevitable question, Good at what? Rather, he proceeds the other way—the first-order arts are introduced as steppingstones to the good and the good then descends to make them truly useful. (It should always be remembered that Socrates, in the Apology, admired the craftsmen most.) Thus the motion of his thought is not, What shall I deduce from the good? but—the statesman’s question—How shall I guarantee that good (efficient) doctors will also be good men? The other problem connected with the second-order arts was that of the regress. Knowledge is of course a tinos-word. Is Plato then faced with the recurring question, Knowledge of what? The answer to this is very simple: the good is not knowledge, but knowl¬ edge is of the good. (If the good were knowledge, the regress would in fact occur, as Plato very clearly indicates in his rejection of this suggestion at 505C.) The good is, by its very nature as the ultimate object of desire (505DE), that in which all things terminate—it is not of, or for, anything further. And because the good is a terminal point, its benefits do not, as it were, escape upwards in an infinite direction. Rather, they return into the system and work back upon the "knowledges” that form its content, making them good and useful. Thus Plato retains the good, both within the person of the statesman and within the context of the state. It has been noted before that when regresses end, reflexivity sets in. This fact is particularly noticeable in Plato’s exposition of the sun image ^oyAfh). Just as the cause of vision (the sun) is be¬ held by vision itself (508B), so, we may assume from the analogy, the cause of knowledge (the good) is known by knowledge. Plato may perhaps be saying something similar when—in the context of

Republic II-X the divided line—he not only places the good at the summit as a terminal point but speaks also of a descent from this terminal point (511BC). In the image of the cave, there is again a descent from the good as well as an ascent to it. The nature of the good, being sunlike, is creative (509B), and the very attainment of it in¬ volves the impossibility of remaining with it. There must then be not only an ascent but a return. This return is not a simple repeti¬ tion of the same journey—here the way up and the way down are decidedly not the same. When the released prisoner comes back to the cave, he is not the same man he was, as is immediately noticed by the prisoners who are still in chains (517A). In the images of the sun, line, and cave are mingled metaphysics, logic, ethics, and politics, but all are pointing in the same direction. Plato knows that the quality of a state depends ultimately on the quality of its citizens (Can Scythia be brave unless the Scythians are so? 435E) and that, therefore, if he wants a just state, he must have just men. But how to get them? His answer is that goodness comes only through contact with (i.e., knowledge of) the good. The contact may be indirect (as when the auxiliaries and artisans consent to be governed by the philosopher) and perhaps it remains somewhat mysterious; but contact there must be, and Plato’s scheme of education is entirely directed towards this end. Would vou, then, have us proceed to consider how such men may be produced in a state and how they may be led upward to the light even as some are fabled to have ascended from Hades to the gods? [Glaucon] Of course I would. [571BC] In the remainder of the Republic, the most important passage to be considered occurs in Book X. This part of the Republic is sometimes regarded as a kind of postscript, perhaps not entirely integral to the main theme. To approach it through the sequence of ideas that has been developed here may place it in a slightly different light. The passage I wish to consider runs from the beginning of the book, at 595A, up to the point at which Plato begins to reinstate

plato’s philosopher-king

the rewards of justice at 608C. Some general remarks will show what I take Plato’s purpose to be in this section. The first nine books of the Republic should, I think, be regarded as Plato’s answer to the statement by Thrasymachus that justice is the interest of the stronger, and especially to the view, accom¬ panying this statement, that injustice is profitable. Plato sees clear¬ ly that such a view attracts the wrong persons into the business of government, namely, those who want public office for the sake of gain and not for the benefit of the governed. His task—and a Herculean task it is—is to remove the perquisites of government (his rulers have to be coerced into office by “a penalty for refusing” 347A) and still to present the just life as something desirable. He does this primarily by an analysis of the nature of man (this amounts to a study of the human soul), an analysis intended to demonstrate what it is that men truly desire. At the end of Book IX, Plato believes himself to have recom¬ mended the just life as well as he possibly can. (See 588B ff.) Why then does he not end the Republic at this point? It is not, I think, sufficient to point out that the work is incomplete without the concluding myth. Plato still has something else to do. I have said that Plato’s task was to make justice more desirable than injustice. But what has made injustice so attractive? Plato would unhesitatingly lay the blame at the door of education. And education means the poets. And chief among the poets is Homer. There has already been one attack on Homer early in the dia¬ logue, in Books II and III. It might seem, therefore, that Plato had devoted sufficient space to this subject. But this early attack precedes both the analysis of soul and the central metaphysical passages in which Plato employs the theory of Forms. The attack in Book X, with this important material available, will be a much more reasoned attack. But why did he not omit the earlier attack if he were going to make a better one later? I think he retained that attack both because of the substantial role of Homer in primary education (he wants to settle such matters early) and because he wished to retain poetry, of a purified kind, in his own educational scheme—hence the apparent duplication of effort.

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Looked at in this way, the attack on poetry in Book X may be seen to draw together a large number of Plato’s major themes in the Republic and also to cast some light on questions raised in other dialogues. In the opening sentences, Plato reminds us of his earlier re¬ marks about poetry and then goes on to say “for that it is plainly not to be received is, I think, still more plainly apparent now that we have distinguished the several parts of the soul.” In this way, he prepares us for his ultimate rejection of poetry on the grounds (603AB) that its appeal is to the inferior element or elements in the soul. To lead up to this point, however, he takes another tack. He reminds us that poetry is essentially imitative and then pro¬ ceeds to exhibit, by means of the theory of Forms, what the on¬ tological basis of imitation really is. Plato’s exposition of the theory of Forms by means of an artifact (a bed) has troubled many commentators; but it really ought not to do so if we consider that he is expounding the theory for the purpose of attacking poetry, and the poet, in his view (and in the Greek view generally), is a kind of craftsman. Hitherto he has regularly lumped the poets and the painters in with the carpenters and the cobblers; it is, in fact, one of the features of the techneanalogy most striking to the modern reader that he should do so. But now he places the poets and the painters at a level inferior to that of the other craftsmen; the painter eyes the bed constructed by the carpenter, but the carpenter looks to the Form. To this point (597B), then, he has correlated an ordered triad of makers with another triad of things made. God Carpenter Painter

the Form of the bed the actual bed the painted bed

The relation between the levels is that of imitation, and the imita¬ tion practiced by the carpenter is superior to the imitation practiced by the painter because it is closer to the Form. (Later on, when Plato moves from painting to poetry, a kind of painting in words [601C], we shall see that the poet occupies the same lowly station.)

plato’s philosopher-king

What Plato now does is to elaborate upon this basic scheme by incorporating into it the other most important triads to be found in the Republic. The carpenter, for instance, is said to make, not real being, “but something that resembles real being” (597A). We are meant to add the ontological scheme of 477A, and its at¬ tendant distinction between reality and appearance, being and be¬ coming. (We do not hear anything about nonbeing, but perhaps we are meant to connect the painter, like the sophist, with this third member of the triad.)6 With the ontology comes the epistemology, so that we find the poet deficient in knowledge to the degree of his distance from true being. And will the imitator from experience or use have knowledge whether the things he portrays are or are not beautiful and right, or will he . . . have right opinion? [Glaucon] Neither. [602A] And again, . . . some people tell us that [Homer and the tragedians] know all the arts and all things pertaining to virtue and vice, and all things divine. For the good poet, if he is to poetize things rightly, must, they argue, create with knowledge or else be unable to create. [598DE] But on examining Homer, he finds that he has governed no cities and conducted no wars; he has, in fact, preferred words to deeds. The implication is (and we can hardly fail to recollect the con¬ clusion of the Ion)7 that his knowledge is a sham. Because “if he had genuine knowledge of the things he imitates, he would far rather devote himself to real things than to the imitation of them” (599B). Homer has not even left behind a way of life—this again indicates a failure in knowledge and, what is even more crucial, a 6 The parallels between Republic 596C ff. and Sophist 233D ff. are quite striking and would bear out this point. 7 “Then how, in Heaven’s name, can it be. Ion, that you, who are both the best general and the best rhapsode in Greece, go about performing as a rhapsode to the Greeks, but not as a general?” (541BC). On the other hand, Socrates, as a statesman, could be equally well described as preferring words to deeds. (Compare Gorgias 521D and Statesman 259B.)

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failure in ability “to educate men and make them better” (600C). So far, all is plain sailing: Plato appears quite clearly to be launch¬ ing an attack against poetry on the basis of the ontology and epistemology already provided by 477 ff., so that a working diagram would now look like this. God Carpenter Painter

Form Bed Picture

Being Becoming [Non-Being]

Knowledge Opinion [Ignorance]

But at this stage (601B), a complication occurs. Plato invites Glaucon to consider a fresh point: Is it not really the user who has knowledge and who instructs the maker what to do? The flute player, for instance, “reports to the flute maker which flutes re¬ spond and serve rightly in flute playing and will order the kind that must be made” (601E). If this fresh point is incorporated into the scheme above, it carries the somewhat startling implication that a flute player or his equivalent is a kind of god. Does Plato really mean to say something like this? I think that the answer is yes, and that the key to the matter is in the Euthydemus. It will be remembered that in the second protreptic passage of that dialogue (288D-292E) Socrates under¬ took to look for an art that “combined making with knowing how to use the thing which it makes” (289B). No such art appeared to be forthcoming, and the inquiry was ultimately given up, on the ground that a regress was imminent. But the search, I argued in chapter IV, was abandoned as a result of difficulties more ap¬ parent than real. By the implied status given to the man who uses things here in the Republic (who, be it noted, has the knowledge of good and evil in that he “reports about the goodness or the badness of the flutes” 601E) I think Plato means to emphasize his conviction that creative power by itself is nothing without knowl¬ edge of purpose and function. Plato has various ways of saying this in the dialogues. Euthy¬ demus 279BE, for instance, argues that the possession of goods will not be of any benefit unless we use them. In the Cratylus 390B it is the user of the shuttle, the weaver, who explains to the car-

plato’s philosopher-king

penter how it should be made. In the myth of Theuth, at Phaedrus 274E, Socrates distinguishes between the man who creates the things of art and “another who judgefs] what share of harm and of benefit they have for those who will use them.” And Plato regularly assumes that the good must be useful, as at Charmides 175A (of wisdom) and Meno 87E. By placing the user over the maker here in the Republic, then, he shows that it is knowledge of function that controls making. He does not at the moment indicate whether this will hold for arts of every order. I should guess that, as indicated by the Euthydemus, making and using go together for the second-order artist—but for the statesman only, not for the sophist and the rhetorician, who are in ignorance of function because they lack knowledge of the good. The statesman not only “makes” good men (through the right education), he knows how to use them in the state.8 Plato concludes his attack on poetry, as I have already indicated, by linking up the triads previously mentioned with the tripartite soul. The poet encourages us to indulge in or to admire emotions that in our more rational moments we would suppress; he thus appeals, not to reason in the soul, but to its inferior part. Nor is the analogy with the state forgotten: the strengthening of the inferior part of the soul through poetry tends to destroy the rational part, just as when in a state, one puts bad men in power and turns the city over to them and ruins the better sort. Precisely in the same manner we shall say that the mimetic poet sets up in each individual soul a vicious constitution by fashioning phantoms far removed from reality. . . . [605BC] Plato has thus brought the whole battery of the Republic to bear upon the system of education most strongly opposed to his own. Basically his criticism comes down to that which we en¬ countered in the Ion. The poet, although pretending to speak “with 8 A similar type of point is being made at Phaedrus 268A if. To know how to write speeches is not to know how to construct a tragedy (nor how to teach others to do so). Compare this whole discussion with Aristotle, Physics II, 2, 194333 ff., and Politics III, 2, 12771327 ff.

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art and knowledge” on all subjects, actually did so on none. In the Ion, however, we were given the impression that the lack of special field which was represented as being characteristic of both poetry and the art of the rhapsode was enough to disqualify these arts as genuine arts, in spite of the fact that they are second-order. When we discover in the Republic that philosophy is also second-order, this is disconcerting. But the difference between what might be called legitimate and illegitimate second-order arts is precisely that which the Republic provides: the vision of the good.

VII The Statesman

WHILE IT IS POSSIBLE THAT PLATO PROJECTED A FOURTH DIALOGUE, the Philosopher to complete the tetralogy of which the Theaetetus, Sophist and Statesman are the other three members, it is also pos¬ sible, and I think more probable, that in writing the Statesman he is also writing the Philosopher. After all, the philosopher is to be king, and the Statesman defines for us the royal art of statecraft. If we approach the Statesman in this way, perhaps remembering also Plato’s declaration in the Seventh Epistle (341C) that he would never give a written account of his philosophy, the Statesman becomes the dialogue from which we can learn most concerning the nature and function of the philosopher-king. This study began with a chapter on the Ion. In that dialogue, were raised the major topics of this book: the distinction between first and second-order arts, the idea of the expert and his special field, and even, in a rudimentary form, the knowledge of good and evil. The discussion of the Statesman to be undertaken in the present chapter will give us Plato’s mature consideration of the same group of topics. At the end of it we shall have come full circle. The task of defining the statesman is approached by Plato with 100

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a new philosophical tool already utilized in the Sophist, the method of division. But there is nothing new about the material on which the method is employed. Plato is still in search of the expert or technician who will know as much about the art of government as the cobbler knows about the art of shoemaking. The method of division is employed by Plato as a way of isolating this person from all competitors, as we shall see. The Stranger’s first step towards the definition of the statesman is to ask the young Socrates whether the statesman is to be ranked “among those who have a science, or not?” (258B). Having received an affirmative answer, he then proposes to find the man by divid¬ ing the sciences.1 The first division may surprise us. The sciences are parted into practical and intellectual, and the practical science (which includes the creation of “objects which did not previously exist” 258E) is discarded in favor of the intellectual. Since the statesman will ultimately be defined as producing something (the “web of the state” 305E) as well as possessing an art, it seems as if Plato has caused himself an unnecessary difficulty right at the start. But consider what his problem is: The statesman is to be a man with an art and a man with a product (good men). That is, he is to be a combination of the intellectual and the practical. Plato needs to find some way of getting these two things together, of combining “making and knowing how to use the thing made,” in the language of the Euthydemus. What does he do? He starts out with knowing and then smuggles production back in. This sleight of hand occurs at the third stage of the division. The statesman’s art is defined as one of commanding rather than of judging (260AB) and consists in giving one’s own commands as opposed to those of others (261A). But in this matter of commands, we find that all are issued “for the sake of producing something” (261AB)! Since Plato immedi¬ ately proceeds to divide the entities commanded (into animate and inanimate), with no suggestion that anything is in any way produced by being commanded, his reference to production seems

1 Here, as usual, Plato is perfectly willing to interchange the man with the art or the art with the man.

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completely pointless. It is only from looking ahead that we know this not to be the case.2 The division continues (with certain methodological digressions that I shall pass over) until a first definition of the statesman’s art is reached at 267C: The art is the art of herding human beings. This seems satisfactory, but only briefly so. The difficulty that now arises is one of a type already encountered in the Ion. Whenever the rhapsode attempted to annex some particular subject matter as his special field, some rival appeared to take it from him. If he claimed to speak well about chariot racing, the charioteer spoke better, and so on (537AB). Now, in the Statesman, a group of rivals appears, “merchants, husbandmen, and all who prepare grain for use, and also gymnastic trainers and physicians” (267E), all of whom claim that they too have to do with the herding of men. We have not really succeeded in making the statesman “stand forth alone and uncontaminated” (268C); that is, the division has not been made with sufficient care. Here follows the myth of reversal, the purpose of which is to help revise the first definition and “to make clear the nature of the king” (269C). The myth contrasts the age of Cronus, in which god is at the tiller of the world, with our own age, the age of Zeus, in which we are without a pilot. The mistake made in the first definition was the confusion of the divine shepherd of the previous age with the human shepherd. Furthermore, although this was a lesser error than the first, we failed to make clear the manner of his rule (274E-275A). If we read on a little further, however, we find that Plato by no means intends to give up the characteristics of the divine shepherd in defining the statesman. He intends, he says, to divide the art of tending herds in such a way as to “embracfej in the word both the kinship of the present time and that of the time of Cronus” (276A). If “caring” is substituted for “tending,” we have a class that includes them both, even though we now separate them again by proceeding to divide the art of human, not divine, caretaking. 2 It should be noted that, in the summary of the entire division given at 267A, there is no mention of the practical. I should guess that the omission was deliberate.

The Statesman This fresh division, form the important the tyrant and also statesman’s art: It (276E).

103

into compulsory and voluntary, serves to per¬ function of distinguishing the statesman from to provide us with a revised definition of the is “the voluntary care of voluntary bipeds”

This revised definition appears to meet with Plato’s approval, at least in outline, but is lacking in clarity (277C). We know the king, he says, but in a dreamlike way. The myth was not really a good form of example in that it told us too much. We need an example to put us back on the right track. Plato now begins the division leading to the definition of weav¬ ing. In spite of his various protestations to the contrary (e.g., 279A, 285E), this is not a subject chosen at random (the statesman will turn out to be a kind of weaver), and Plato hints as much when he speaks of weaving as “having the same activity as statesmanship” (279A). More important for us to notice at the moment, however, is the reason given for undertaking the definition of weaving: “Since there are countless others who contend that they, rather than the royal class, have the care of states, we must accordingly remove all these and isolate the king; and, as we said, to accomplish this we need an example” (279A). What the new exercise in division will do is give us practice in getting rid of contenders to a particular art. The importance to Plato of such a technique will be realized if we think back to the Republic and Plato’s struggles there to annex the ruling position for the philosopher. The situation is perhaps most graphically described in Republic VI, 488A ff., in the image of the ship of state. Conceive the sailors to be wrangling with one another for control of the helm, each claiming that it is his right to steer though he has never learned the art and cannot point out his teacher or any time when he studied it. . . . With such goings on aboard ship do you not think that the real pilot would in very deed be called a stargazer? [488B, E] And, Plato adds, “far the greatest and chief disparagement of philosophy is brought upon it by the pretenders to that way of life...” (489D).

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In Plato’s eyes, one of the chief virtues of the method of division is that, at every stage, something is thrown away. This is quite evident in his treatment of the art of weaving. The division itself is accomplished very quickly (279C-280A). The Stranger then says: stranger: Let us next reflect that a person might think that this description of the art of weaving was satisfactory, because he cannot understand that it has not yet been distinguished from the closely co-operative arts, though it has been separated from many other kindred arts. YOUNG SOCRATES: What kindred arts? r o Am [280AB]

In answer to young Socrates’ question, the Stranger proceeds to enumerate (in more or less reverse order) the arts that have been discarded in the course of the division (280B ff.). For instance, in the division of material defenses into equipment for war and for protection we got rid of the armorer’s art, and so on. He next goes on to the topic of the cooperative arts, these being much more serious rivals to the art of weaving and more difficult to separate off. In dealing with these, we arrive at an important distinction between contingent and actual causes. (Both kinds, by the way, are connected with production 281D—another indication that state¬ craft, when discovered, will not be intellectual only.) In the case of weaving, the contingent causes are the arts that produce the tools for weaving, and the actual causes are those that manufacture and treat (I think he means preserve) the actual clothing. The manu¬ facturing causes are then divided into separation (e.g., carding) and composition (which is further subdivided into twisting and inter¬ twining) to give us the completed definition at 283B: Weaving is “the intertwining of woof and warp.” When the Stranger asks why we did not say this straight away, the answer is that the example of weaving would not then have provided us with the practice we need for the task of isolating the king and statesman. The question raised as to the length of the division now leads Plato into a general discussion of the nature of excess and deficiency (283C ff.). He has the Stranger introduce the topic as though the

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discussion would be metalinguistic, but we soon discover that Plato’s division of measure into absolute and relative applies to something other than the fitting length of speeches. stranger: If we assert that the greater has no relation to anything except the less, it will never have any relation to the standard of the mean, will it? YOUNG SOCRATES: No. stranger: Will not this doctrine destroy the arts and their works one and all, and do away also with statesmanship, which we are now trying to define, and with weaving, which we did define? For all these are doubtless careful about excess and deficiency in relation to the standard of the mean; they regard them not as non-existent, but as real difficulties in actual practice, and it is in this way, when they preserve the standard of the mean, that all their works are good and

beautiful. . . . For if this is not admitted, neither the statesman nor any other man who has knowledge of practical affairs can be said without any doubt to exist. r „ . [284AB, C] This is a passage of exceptional interest. From it we learn two things of major importance. The first is that the very existence of an art— any art—depends upon the existence of an absolute standard. The two things are in fact completely interdependent, as Plato makes clear at 284D when he says “for if this [standard] exists, [the arts] exist also, and if they exist, it exists also, but neither can ever exist if the other does not.” Where there is no art there will of course be no expert, so that not only the statesman’s art but the statesman himself is ontologically dependent upon an absolute standard. The second thing we learn from this passage is that the existence of the standard is in some definite (though unexplained) fashion respon¬ sible for the value of the works approximating it. The question at issue may perhaps best be stated by reference to the Charmides: It was the knowledge of good and evil (i.e., the art of temperance and good rule) that was needed to guarantee that the first-order arts should be useful and beneficial (174CD). In other words (taking the two major points together), one does not have a teclme without a standard of precision, and the possession of such a techne

io6

plato’s philosopher-king

gives value (goodness and beauty) to the technical works per¬ formed or the things produced. The section on excess and deficiency, then, has special relevance to the statesman’s art (although it could of course apply to any art) because it is at the second-order level that the problem of good and evil becomes most crucial, and statesmanship is a second-order art. First-order arts have their own special fields and products, and these are well performed so long as the first-order artist fulfills his function (as at Republic I, 342AB). But the second-order arts and artists, whose special fields and products are less readily identifiable, do not automatically function well. At the same time Plato must solve the question of efficient function at the second-order level if he is to have good statesmen and good rule. In the Charmides he expressed this difficulty by specifying that the temperate man must know “in a sort of way,” that is, he must be both knowing and not knowing. He means, for instance, that the statesman need not know how to build walls, but he needs to know whether walls should be built.3 Decisions like these are second-order decisions. Plato could well leave the topic of excess and deficiency here, as far as its relation to the statesman’s art is concerned. But he now does something that may be surprising in the immediate context, although it seems less so if we consider his philosophy as a whole. He has the Stranger declare that the investigation of the statesman has been undertaken, not for the sake of this particular subject, but rather to make us better thinkers about all subjects (285D), and further, that the purpose of an absolute standard should be to exalt the method of division (286D). In other words, dialectic, the business of the philosopher, is even more important to him than the avowed purpose of the entire discussion, the discovery of the statesman. Or, if this is putting it too strongly, he shows his aware¬ ness that, without the work of the philosopher, even the statesman will never be found. “But enough of this,” says the Stranger at 287A: “Let us go back to the statesman and apply to him the example of weaving that we spoke of awhile ago.” If we remember that—when the method of division was applied 3 Compare Gorgias 455A and chapter II.

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to weaving—that method served first to get rid of the kindred arts and then of the serious competitors classified by Plato as contingent causes and actual causes, we shall be well prepared for the ensuing section, in which the Stranger treats the statesman’s art in the same way. The first operation (getting rid of the kindred arts) has already been performed. What we need to do now is to separate the contingent causes from the actual causes. The Stranger begins by observing that the ordinary type of divi¬ sion (into halves) will not be appropriate here, although the number of segments should be kept as low as possible. The final number of contingent causes is, in fact, seven: primary possessions (things like gold and silver), instruments, receptacles, vehicles, defenses, playthings, and nourishments (289AB). (Plato lists things but the relevant arts—and their practitioners—are meant to be supplied.) Tire number of the actual causes is, for the moment, six, and they are drawn from the class of slaves and servants—here, says the Stranger, “we shall find those who set up claims against the king for the ver\' fabric of his art” (289C). At first it seems as though this group, being primarily servile, would be the last place to search for a ruler. Actual slaves are promptly ruled out and so are various kinds of merchants, laborers, and what might be called civil ser¬ vants. With priests, however, the situation alters. There is certainly a servile aspect to their activities (they “know how to give the gods . . . the gifts that please them from us and by prayers to ask for us the gain of good things from them” [290CD]) ,4 but on the other hand, there is the tradition among the Egyptians (and to some extent among the Greeks) that the priest is also a king and vice versa. A proposed examination of “these elected priests and kings and their assistants” is postponed, however, because of the appearance of a very queer group of persons. They are of mixed race, “for many of them are like lions and centaurs and other fierce creatures, and very many are like satyrs and the weak and cunning beasts; and they make quick exchanges of forms and qualities with one another” 4 Compare Euthyphro 14C.

io8

plato’s pinLosopiTER-KiNG

(291AB). These new persons are a kind of sophist and are the members of that class who are the greatest charlatans. We should not, however, jump to the conclusion that Plato refers either to the eristics (such as Euthydemus and Dionysodorus) or to the more reputable sophists such as Protagoras and Gorgias. There is, of course, a sense in which they too “busy themselves with the affairs of the state” (291BC), but here Plato deals rather with the more obvious rivals of the true statesman, the representatives of the false forms of government. Having worked out in the Sophist a philosophical explanation of the notion of imitation (and having, incidentally, classified the sophist himself as an imitator), Plato now feels able to characterize the rival constitutions as imitative and their representatives as imitators. The constitutions discussed are the usual six: monarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, and two kinds of democracy. The method by which Plato tries to show that all are imitative is as follows: he first reminds us “that royal power was one of the sciences” (292B), and that it was, as the division showed, a science of command of living beings. He next inquires which of the six forms of government is likely to produce this science of ruling men. We can say right away that this kind of rule is not likely to occur except “in one or two or very few men” (293A) and that the criteria by which we identified the six constitutions (compulsion and voluntary obedience, wealth and poverty, law and lawlessness) do not apply to the man of science. Take the example of physicians: Whether they cure us against our will or with our will . .. and whether they do it by written rules or without them, and whether they are rich or poor, we call them physicians just the same, so long as they exercise authority by art or science . . . provided only that they who treat their patients treat them for the benefit of their health and preserve them by making them better than they were. [293BC] The true statesman functions in a manner analogous to that of the physician—he too pays no attention to the willingness or the unwillingness of his subjects or to whether he himself is rich or poor or to whether he rules with or without law. The only criteria

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are, once again, possession of science and preservation and improve¬ ment of the citizens and the state. Plato does not so much argue for the imitative character of the other constitutions, as simply state it (293E). I should say, in fact, that his thinking is remarkably confused at this juncture. For one thing, he seems to think that the criteria by which the constitutions are distinguished from each other are the same as those by which they are evaluated. (Compare 292C and 293A). For another, he appears to rule out democracy as a source of statesmen on the ground that the number of rulers will be few, not many (292E ff., 297BC, 300E). Then again, he does not make clear how the criteria introduced for increasing the number of named constitutions from three to five (291E) are actually employed. We can guess that voluntary versus compulsory rule will serve to distinguish monarchy from tyranny and that wealth will be the distinguishing mark of aristocracy, as opposed to oligarchy. But what about the criteria of lawful and lawless? These are carried along but put to no use in the distinction of constitutions until democracy is divided, much later, at 302D. Plato does, of course, have something important to say about rule without law and has probably been laying the ground¬ work for this. The Stranger embarks on the topic at 294A. The law, in Plato’s view, ignores two things about human nature. One is that men (and actions) differ, and the other is that “noth¬ ing ... in human life is ever at rest” (294B). The result is that no science can lay down rules “for everything and for all time”; if it attempts to do so, it will be trying to apply something that is always simple to something that is never simple (294BC). Plato employs the trainer and the doctor to illustrate these points, and to lead up to something still more important: if we would think it ridiculous if a doctor were not allowed to alter the treatment he had prescribed for a patient just because he had written it down, ought we not also to think it ridiculous if “he who has made written or un¬ written laws about the just and unjust, the honorable and disgrace¬ ful, the good and bad for the herds of men” (295E) were not allowed to alter them if the scientific lawmaker should come? And yet we act as if we thought the opposite, since we permit alteration of law

no

plato’s philosopher-king

—even when performed for the purpose of bettering the citizens— through persuasion only. If the good is performed through force, we call it an evil thing; whereas it is actually the unscientific error that should receive this title. Plato goes on to argue that, in the absence of the scientific lawmaker, there must, of course, be laws and there should be severe penalties for breaking them. But to assume that nothing can be wiser than the laws (and here [298A-299E] Plato alludes unmis¬ takably to the prejudices leading to the death of Socrates) is to bring about the ruin of all science and art. Plato does not consider that he has eliminated the imitators of the statesman’s art until 301BD, and he has much more to say con¬ cerning the effects of government with and without law than I have indicated. These passages, reflecting the mood of the Gorgias and of parts of the Republic, are less important for us than the points that may be picked up concerning first- and second-order arts. In the chapter on Republic I, it was noted that, whereas Plato differentiates the first- and second-order arts from each other on the basis of order (as in the agruments concluding that the just man is the best thief), he shows them to be alike on the basis of art (as in the remaining arguments in Book I). Here in the Statesman we have a passage in which he discusses the relationship of art or science to law and concludes that science (and the man of science) are above the law. This is an attribute of science not previously en¬ countered, and it appears to be one that Plato intended to hold for sciences of any order. (He argues, for instance, straight from the physician or the pilot to the statesman at several points.) Why is the man of science thus privileged? Because his aim is the im¬ provement and the preservation of the things or persons in his charge; he acts for their good. Others may attempt to do the same, but if they attempt it without science, they will be mere imitators of the true reality (300D). We may classify the statesman, therefore, as one possessing knowledge of the good in his capacity as man of science. But does his knowledge of good differ in any appreciable respect from that

The Statesman

m

possessed by the physician and the pilot? In other words, do the man of second-order science and the man of first-order science differ in the way in which each knows the good? So far, Plato has made no real distinction between them in this respect. The pilot makes the sailors better, and the statesman makes the citizens better: Plato seems to have shelved the persistent question of the early dialogues, Better at what? And what has become of the vision of the good, which in the Republic transformed the guardian into the philosopher-king? Has its place been taken by division and dialectic? In earlier dialogues Plato emphasized the derivative char¬ acter of the so-called “goods” in contrast with the one good that made all these useful and beneficial. This contrast seems to have been replaced by the concept of measure. Has Plato, perhaps through admiration of the efficiency of the first-order arts, done away with the distinction between the two orders? It almost seems as if this were the case. The elimination of competitors for the statesman’s art is not yet complete, however. As we have seen, Plato employed the example of weaving to indicate the method of procedure. In both cases, the elimination of kindred arts comes first (280B and 287B), followed by that of contingent causes and actual causes. The con¬ tingent causes (281C and 289AB) are dispensed with fairly readily, but the actual causes are more difficult to deal with. In the states¬ man’s case, the representatives of the rival forms of government are especially recalcitrant, and Plato devotes much space (291A-303D, to be exact) to disposing of them. The Stranger then says, but another group remains, which is still more difficult to separate, because it is more closely akin to the kingly class and is also harder to recognize ... I think all that is different and alien and incompatible has now been eliminated by us from the science of statesmanship, and what is precious and akin to it is left. [303D, E] There are three arts still to be separated from the art of the states¬ man, and they are, significantly, those of the rhetorician, the judge, and the general. We have encountered all three of these before, so that it is no sur-

112

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prise to learn that these are the arts considered by Plato to be the chief rivals of statecraft. In the Gorgias we learned that the proper subject matter of rhetoric was “right and wrong” (454B); in the Republic, the good judge appeared as a forerunner of the philoso¬ pher-king; in the Ion and in the Euthydemus the general’s art was the one which approached most nearly, in the one case, to that of the rhapsode (Ion 54iAff.) and, in the other, to that of the king (Euthydemus 290B, but also 290D). Plato has of course had many harsh things to say of rhetoric in its perverted forms, so that he takes pains in the Statesman to let us know that he speaks here of “that kind of oratory which partakes of the kingly art because it persuades men to justice and thereby helps to steer the ship of state” (304A). Again he makes clear that the judges he speaks of are “righteous judges” (305BC). (In the case of the general’s art, no credentials seem needed except the reminder [304E] that the mili¬ tary art is a science.) There is an additional bond between statecraft and its most serious rivals: all are, or have some of the attributes of, second-order arts. This is perhaps clearest in the case of rhetoric (see chapter II) but is also fairly definite for the activities of the good judge (if we assume that his stock-in-trade is justice). The second-order character of generalship is least clear, but I think that it may reasonably be inferred from the position that generalship occupies in the Ion and the Euthydemus, as the art immediately preceding an impasse or a regress. If statecraft is also a secondorder art, Plato will need to introduce some extremely positive way of distinguishing that art from the other three. A few pages earlier, however, I raised the question of whether Plato might not be giving up the distinction between first- and second-order arts in the Statesman. He seemed, for instance, to be relying so heavily upon the doctor and the pilot for his characteriza¬ tion of the statesman (especially in the discussion of men of science as being above the law), that the distinction is at least inoperative at that point. I would deny that it is given up, however, both be¬ cause Plato does the same thing in the latter part of Republic I (when he emphasizes the likenesses between arts rather than the differences between orders) and because of what is to happen next in the Statesman.

The Statesman

n3

At 304A, Plato reminds us that his purpose is to “eliminate [the rhetorician, judge, and general] and show him whom we seek alone by himself and undisguised.” He proposes to do this “by means of music,” that is by means of the various first-order arts. He proceeds next to distinguish between learning these arts or sciences and learning another, different, science “which tells whether we ought or ought not to learn any one of them.” (We may be re¬ minded of the question raised in the Laches, at 185BC, concerning the value of learning the art of fighting in armor.5) He then con¬ siders the relationship between this new art and the others: Does neither of them control anv other? or Do they^control it? or Does it control them (304BC)? Quite clearly, Socrates and the young Socrates agree, the new art should control the other arts. The next step is to applv this principle to the relationship between statecraft and the three arts from which it must be separated. Plato’s procedure is now perfectly straightforward. In each of the three cases, he shows that the art in question is subservient to a controlling art, and this controlling art he identifies with the art of statesmanship. So, for instance, for rhetoric, he differentiates the power of persuasion from the science that decides whether to per¬ suade or not. This latter science, “which controls the sciences of persuasion and speech” (304D), he attributes to the statesman. Having gone through the same steps for the judge and for the general he then concludes: the consideration of all these arts which have been mentioned [i.e., those of the rhetorician, judge, and general] leads to the conclusion that none of them is the art of the statesman. For the art that is truly kingly ought not to act itself, but should rule over the arts that have the power of action; it should decide upon the right or wrong time for the initiation of the most important measures in the state, and the other arts should perform its behests. [305CD] The other arts “control neither one another nor themselves,”6 (305D) but the art of statecraft (now apparently defined to Plato’s satisfaction) “holds sway over them all and watches over the laws 5

Something of the same sort seems to be hinted at in Euthydemus 274DE. is no reflexivity at the first-order level.

6 There

114

plato’s philosopher-king

and all things in the state, weaving them all most perfectly together”

(3°5e). In placing statecraft over what appear to be second-order arts, is Plato then making this controlling art into one of the third order? This is a possibility, but I think it is not necessarily Plato’s intention. When introducing the order terminology in chapter I, I pointed out that there need not be a permanent tie between a particular art and a particular order. Plato does normally seem to place a recognizable group of arts (e.g., those of the cobbler, farmer, sculp¬ tor, weaver, doctor, and pilot) at what I have called the first-order level; I meant by this that he normally treats these as being “of” a particular subject matter that is not itself “of” anything else. Hence, I have followed him by referring to these as first-order arts. When¬ ever he speaks of arts which are “of” these arts, then I have usually employed the term “second-order.” But as I also pointed out in chapter I, Plato usually takes up only two orders at a time. Here for instance, he does not raise the point of whether the art of the general might not itself be an art of other arts. The point he wants to make is that if the arts of the statesman and the general are considered together, then the former controls the latter. Or, to put it another way, the relationship between these two arts is identical with that between second- and first-order arts, even though it might be more accurate to describe it as a relationship between third- and second-order arts. Plato cares more about hierarchy than about order of a definite level. Plato has now completed his task of isolating the statesman, not only from the counterfeiting practitioners of other forms of govern¬ ment, but from those men of science—good in themselves—who are his most serious rivals. There remains, however, one more thing for Plato to do. I have referred several times to Plato’s search in the Euthydemus for an art that both “makes and knows how to use the thing made.” Plato indicated there that such an art, if discovered, would be the kingly art. At this point in the Statesman, he seems to have allowed for “knowing how to use the thing made,” since he has placed the statesman’s art (which he refers to also as the kingly art) in a

The Statesman

llS

position of decisional control. But the old question of the product of the controlling art still remains. What does the statesman make? Any product we suggest will be preempted by some one of the lowerorder arts. Does he then make nothing? And is the statesman’s art then useless? Earlier in this chapter I pointed out that in the first division (258E, 259D) Plato performed a rather odd maneuver: For pur¬ poses of defining the statesman, he threw out practical in favor of intellectual in the first division; but then put the practical (and productive) back again at a subsequent stage (261AB) although he made no immediate use of it. As I see it, he was preparing the way for the present, final section (305E ff.), in which we find out what the statesman’s product really is. Plato’s answer to this question, although somewhat veiled by the language of weaving, is staggeringly simple; The statesman makes good men. He now explains what the mode, or rather the modes, of production are. There are two methods by which the statesman may produce good men, and both are familiar features of the Republic. One is education; the other is eugenics. Here in the Statesman Plato speaks of the divine and human bonds by which the web of state is woven, but his meaning is clearly the same. In keeping with his announced intention of discussing state¬ craft “after the model supplied by weaving” (305E), Plato first differentiates the warp of the quick, courageous temperament from the woof of the gentle, decorous one. Both materials are good (despite any sophistical objections that might be raised concerning opposition between the virtues [306A]),7 and both are equally important in the weaving of the statesman’s web. The true, natural art of statecraft “will first test [these natures] in play, and after the test will entrust them in turn to those who are able to teach and help 7 This is a passage that lends support to my suspicions that, in the Protagoras, Plato is unifying the virtues by sophistical means. See also my discussions in Plato’s Use of Fallacy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 28m, and “An Unfinished Argument in Plato’s Protagoras,” Apeiron 1, no. 2 (1967): 1-4.

n6

plato’s philosopher-king

them to attain the end in view” (308D). Having ensured that the materials (i.e., the men) to be employed are genuinely good (308E309B), the art of statecraft then “binds the eternal part of their souls with a divine bond, to which that part is akin, and after the divine it binds the animal part of them with human bonds” (309C). The divine bond turns out to mean “true and assured opinion about honor, justice, goodness and their opposites.” It is no less, in fact, than the knowledge of good and evil so often recognized by Plato to be an essential attribute of whatever entity occupies the place of statecraft in other dialogues, whether it be the science of science and the absence of science in the Charmides, the kingly art in the Euthydemus, or the vision of the good in the Republic. It is this knowledge that, in Plato’s view, makes the statesman the supervisor of education; the implications of this decision are, of course, developed by him at length in the Republic and the Laws. The human bond is produced by eugenics—that is, by the planned intermarrying of persons of the two opposing temperaments already identified as constituting the warp and woof of the web of state. This then is the end [telos] ... of the web of the statesman’s activity, the direct interweaving of the characters of restrained and courageous men, when the kingly science has drawn them together by friendship and community of sentiment into a common life, and having perfected the most glorious and best of textures, clothes with it all the inhabitants of the state ... holds them together by this fabric, and, omitting nothing which ought to belong to a happy state, rules and watches over them.

[3nBC]

A science of knowledge, production, rule, and care: this is the science of Plato’s statesman. And this conclusion brings us back to a rather strange paragraph near the beginning of the dialogue—one perhaps somewhat obscure at the time, but now made clear. Plato’s first division led to a definition of the statesman as a herdsman of humanity (26701!.). This first definition was dis¬ carded by Plato both as not being sufficiently distinctive (a group of rivals disputed the title, 267E) and also, as a result of the myth of reversal, as having confused the divine and human shepherds. In connection with the point about rivals, Plato wrote as follows:

The Statesman

n7

... no one will ever raise such a contention against any neatherd, but the herdsman himself tends the herd, he is their physician, he is their matchmaker, and he alone knows the midwife’s science of aiding at the birth of their offspring. Moreover, so far as the nature of the creatures allows them to enjoy sport or music, no one can enliven or soothe them better than he; whether with instruments or merely with his voice he performs the music best suited to his own herd; and the same applies to the other herdsmen. Is this not the case? [268AB] Note what the human neatherd does for the animals in his flock: first, he mates them and second, he educates them, with music and gymnastic! Note too, that he alone, like Socrates in the Theaetetus, possesses the midwife’s science, (the philosopher’s science) and that a science is what he possesses. He is the physician of his flock (Plato’s paradigm art in the Statesman), and he can enliven the decorous natures and soothe the ones that tend to be too spirited. (See especially 310CE, and compare Republic 374E ff. and 410CE.) To have defined the statesman as a shepherd (and even to have confused the human shepherd with the divine, 274E) was to have given a definition better than we knew.8 In the Statesman, then, Plato is seen to draw together, in one person and one art, the threads of many dialogues. If we were to look for a single passage appropriate to Plato’s ruler as he defines him here—as matchmaker and educator; as man of science with knowledge of the good; as, in some sense, divine (through his forging of a divine bond)—we may perhaps find one, not in the Statesman, but in the closing words of a much earlier dialogue, the Meno. Whoever has [virtue] gets it by divine dispensation without taking thought, unless he he the kind of statesman who can create another like himself. Should there be such a man, he would be among the living practically what Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, when he described him as the only one in the underworld who kept his wits— ‘the others are mere flitting shades’. Where virtue is concerned, such a man would be just like that, a solid reality among shadows. [100A, italics mine] 8 For a ruler who is a bad herdsman, see Theaetetus 174D.

Appendix The Erastai

THE pseudo-Platonic dialogue Erastai has a direct relevance to the subject matter of this book. The argument of this brief piece may be summarized as follows: Philosophy is apparently an honorable thing, but it appears difficult to tell exactly what its nature is—as we ought to be able to do if we are to assert that it is honorable. We might suppose it to be the learning of many things (polymathia; 133C), but there are objections to this view. In matters concerning the body, for instance, moderation is the rule; and it seems that the same rule applies to the soul, since it is moderate rather than immoderate study that is beneficial. If we can identify the experts in these matters, we can learn from them exactly what sorts of exercise or study would be correct. At the moment we cannot seem to identify the expert who would prescribe the studies of the philosopher, so we must approach the problem in another way, by proceeding to guess at the suitable kinds of study without waiting for the expert’s advice. This procedure elicits the suggestion that the philosopher should know something of as many arts as possible—not as an actual prac¬ titioner, but “as is suitable for a free and educated man” (135D).

“9

120

plato’s philosopher-king

Socrates here is quick to point out that, if the philosopher is not the practitioner of any art, he will always be inferior to the man who is. And since good men are useful and wicked men useless, philosophers will have to fall into the latter class. This conclusion is unsatisfactory, however, and we must see if philosophy is not something else. It seems clear that those who know how to punish rightly—in the case of horses or dogs, for example—are also those who know how to make these animals into the best horses and dogs. This art of right punishment is, furthermore, the same as the art that dis¬ tinguishes the good animals from the bad. The rule holds in the case of one as well as of many, and for men as well as for animals. We may conclude then that justice, which is the art of punishing men, is also the art that distinguishes good men from bad. And since the art involves knowing one as well as many, it will also involve knowing oneself and one’s own goodness or badness. This self-knowledge is the same as temperance, so that justice and temper¬ ance are the same thing. Furthermore, it is in well-governed cities that punishment is correctly meted out, so that statecraft (and indeed every other kind of rule) may be equated with justice and temperance. Here, it seems, we have discovered the art in which the philosopher will be inferior to no one, but will always take the lead. Philosophy, then, is far from being polymathia and concern with the various technai. To use the terminology employed in this book, the purpose of the discussion in the Erastai seems clearly to be to give a secondorder status to philosophy and to separate it from the first-order arts. At the same time, we find that justice and statecraft are equated, as are justice and temperance, and that all three are equated with philosophy. Even more interestingly, we find that both self-knowledge and the knowledge of good and evil (men) are added to the complex, and that a clearer link between the two is given here than can be discovered in the Charmides: the knowledge of good and evil men must involve the knowledge of whether one is oneself good or evil, since one is oneself a man (138A).

Appendix

121

The writer of the Erastai, if not Plato himself, was an attentive student of the dialogues and has constructed a conversation that is completely consonant with the description I have attempted to give in the preceding chapters of the philosopher-king.1 11 am indebted to A. E. Taylor (Plato: the “Sophist" and the “Statesman,” ed. Klibansky and Anscombe [London, 1961], p. 246) for drawing my atten¬ tion to the Erastai.

Index

Adeimantus (in Republic), chapter VI passim Alcibiades (in Symposium), xiv Ambiguity: in Charmides, 33; of making men good, 51 n Anaxagoras, 81 Animals, used as illustration, 64, 120 Antilogike, 14 n Archilochus, as example, 2, 5 Aristotle, 66, 79; de Anima: (I, 5 41134 ff.) 79 n, (III, 6 430621 ff.) 79 n; Nicomachean Ethics: (I, 6 109668 ff.) 48 n, (V, 1 1129318) 79 n> (VI, In 3989-12) 9 n; Physics: (II, 2 194333 ff.) 98 n, (194337-19568) 51 n;Politics: (III, 2 1277627 ff.) 97 n Art(s): cooperative, 104; master, 52, 54, 67; pairs of, 52; requirements of genuine, 2, 8, 10, 12, 15; and special fields, 13, 73; and subject matter of different levels, 6; as wholes, 8. See also First-order art (s); Second-order art (s) Artifact (s), 95 Artisans, 9 3 Auxiliaries, 75, 85, 93 Beauty, 89 “Because of.” See dia ti (“because of”)

Becoming, 82, 96, 97 Bed, Form of, 95, 97 Being, 81, 82, 96, 97 Belief, 24 Better and worse argument, 1, 5-9 Blush of Hippocrates, 16 Boxing, 25, 69, 91 Bond: divine, 116;human, 116 Business, doing one’s own, xvi, 11, 32, 33,76,78,85,9° Callias (in Protagoras), 16 Callicles, 27 Carpenter: has no time for illness, 79; looks to the Form, 95 Causes, contingent and actual, 104, 107, 111 Cave, 75, 88, 90,93 Chaerephon: in Apology, 38 n; in Charmides, 38 n; in Gorgias, 22 Charmides, 30 Citizens, making men good, 19, 21 City, luxurious. See State, fevered, compared with luxurious city City of pigs. See Pigs, city of Cleinias (in Euthydemus), 49-56 passim Constitutions, 108-9 Control: of one art by another, 25, 30; of other arts by temperance, 41 Courage, 31, 78

123

124

PLATO S PHILOSOPHER-KING

Crippen, Dr., 92 Critias, 30; in Charmides, chapter III passim Cronus, age of, 102 Delphi, oracle at, 37 Democracy, 108, 109 Democritus, 81 Dialectic, 111 Dia ti (“because of”), 44-48 Dionysodorus, 108 Disease, 80, 84; and judge, 79, 80 Dissoi Logoi, VIII, 14 n Divided line, 9, 75, 88, 90, 93 Divine dispensation 1, 2, 6,12, 22, my Division, method of, xv, 101, 106, 111 Doctor: compared with statesman, 108-9; power of rhetorician to be chosen as, 25, 69; as prophet, 33, 68 Doxophilist, 82, 87, 88, 89 Education, 84, 98, 115, 116; and Homer, 94 Eidola, 45 Eleatic(s), 80, 81 Elenchus, 30, 52, 57, 86 Emotions, 98 Empedocles, 81, 88; Fragment 109, 81 Episteme, as tinos-word, 34 Epistemology, Greek, 81 Ergon, 10, 34, 40 Eristic(s), 48-49, 80, 108 Eugenics, 115, 116 Eu prattein, 49 Euthydernus, 108 Evil: and injustice, 82; and justice, 76; knowledge of, by good, 75, 81, 82, 84, 86; presence of, 44 Evils, cannot be done away with, 3 5 Excess and deficiency, the nature of, 104-6 Expert: advice accepted from, 21; in competition with rhapsode, 11; and knowledge of good and evil, 9; and sophist, 17; and special fields, 11, 13,100

Expert-faculty-object. See Facultyobject principle Faculty-object principle, xiv, 9, 76, 87, 88; and expert, 9, 19, 22, 30-31, 36, 62, 88 First-order art(s): examples, 29; explained, xiv, xvi, 7; mixed with second-order art(s), 42; temperance should not be grouped with, 34 First-order function; of arithmetician and doctor, 7; not appropriate to science of good and evil, 41 Form, and matter, 51 n Forms: realm of the, 89, 95, 97; theory of, 34 n, 94, 95 Fortune, good, 49 Friend, 31, 44-48. See also Proton philon (“first friend”) Friend of. See Philos Friendship, as a symmetrical relation, 48 Function: idea of, 64, 70, 74; knowledge of, 97; knowledge of, controls making, 98 General: art of, 50; as distinguished from statesman, 111-13; and rhapsode, 2, 12, 22 Glaucon (in Republic), chapter VI passim God, 95, 97 Good: at what?, 19, 20, 21, 55; as being useful and advantageous, 31, 39; and evil, 43; Form of the, 91; the highest, 48, 50; must always have contrary, 35; as tinos-word, 53—54. See also Citizens, making men good; Knowledge of good and evil; Neutral goods; Science, of good and evil Good, the, 91,93; as useful, 98 Good man, does wrong voluntarily, 62 Good men, 22, 51, 67, 98, 101,115 Government, advice on, 21 Great man, 39

Index Guardian(s), 74, chapter VI passim; not separated from auxiliary, 87 Happiness: and just man, 73; and science, 40; and wisdom, 49 Heneka tou (“for the sake of”), 44-48 Herding, art of, 102 Herdsman, ir6-r7 Herodicus (in Gorgias), 22 Hesiod, as example, 2, 5 Hippias (in Protagoras), r8 Hippocrates (in Protagoras), 15-22 passim Homer, 94, 96, 117; as example, chapter I passim, 35 Homioiosis theoi, 89 Ignorance, 81 Imitation, 95, 108, 110 Induction, Socratic, 6 Injustice, 78, 79; how known, 82 Instruction: and knowledge, 24; and rhetoric, 27 Interpretation: and judging, 13; of poets, 12,13 Jack-of-all-trades, 32 Judge: distinguished from statesman, 111—12; and doctor, 79, 80; as forerunner of philosopher-king, 85, 87, 90,112; good, 75, 85, 86; and knowledge of injustice, 82 Judging: and interpretation, 13; as second- or third-order function, 8, *3 Justice: assumed teachable in the Republic, 27; and first-order arts, 57, 62; as function, 73; as interest of the stronger, 58, 66, 73; as knowledge of good and evil, 86; man who knows, is just, 9, 62; and origin of injustice, 78; relation of, to statecraft, xvi; as second order, xv, 16 n, 57, 75-85, 86; as selfregarding, xvi; as species of relation, 78; as subject matter of rhetoric, 23

125

J ust man: and art of rule, 74; Gorgias as, 26; and happiness, 73; is best thief, xv, 42 n, 61, 62, 68, 73, 110; and rhetorician, 25, 26; should not harm anyone, 64 King, 100, 103

Kingly art, 29,44, 5°> 56> 112> 116; appears to have no product, 52, 55; as knowledge of itself, 53; and regress, 66, 67; searched for, 81; as second order, 68 “Know Thyself,” 37, 38 Knowledge: as atypical case, 50; identified with art of politics, 22; as nourishment, 17; as only good, 52; of opposites, 79; produced by persuasion, 24; recognition of, in others, 37; Socratic, 36; as tinosword, 92 Knowledge of good and evil: and expert, 9, 13; and its product, 55; and justice, 27 n, 86; and kingly art, 68, 116; and knowledge of use, 97; lacked by rhapsode, 18 n; and philosopher-king, 90; in relation to knowledge of better and worse, 13; required for control, 30; as secondorder art or techne, xv, 85, 91; as temperance, xv, 35, 67, 82; and true rhetoric, 27 n Knowing, 39; “in a sort of way,” 42, 83, 106; and not knowing, 80-82, 86; “that” but not “what,” 39 Labyrinth (in Euthydemus), 26, 50,

53

Laches (in Laches), 31 Lawmaker, scientific, 109, 110 “Learn,” an ambiguous term, 80 Letters, larger, 77, 8 3 Levels, difference between, explained, 6-7 Life, and soul, 74 Like-to-like principle, 82, 88 Lodestonepassage (in Ion), xiii, 1 “Love,” as tinos-word, 89

126

plato’s philosopher-king

Luxurious city. See State, fevered, compared with luxurious city Lysis (in Lysis), 31, 44 Making, and knowing how to use the thing made, 49, 50, 51, 52, 66, 97, 101,114 Man and his art, terms interchangeable, 62, 101 Master-of-all-trades, 14 Measure, 111; absolute and relative,

i°5

Medicine, 84; and justice, 79-80 Menexenus (in Lysis), 31, 44 Middle wall, 24, 25 Midwife, 117 Modesty, temperance as, 31 Music, 113, 117 Myth: of reversal, 102, 116; of Theuth, 97-98 Names, given well or badly, 35 Neutral goods, 49 Nicias (in Laches), 31, 68 Nonbeing, 81 Noncontradiction, principle of, 83 Odd and even, as subject matter of arithmetic, 23 Oikeia, ta, 47, 54 Omniscience, 34, 40, 81 Opinion, 97 Opposites, knowledge of, 79 Oracle at Delphi, 37 Orthagoras, as example, 18, 21 Overreaching, argument based on, 73 Painter, paints bed, 95 Paradoxes, 38, 42 n; generated by tinos-words, 47-48; and hierarchy, 47; and regress, 54 Pericles (in Gorgias), 24 Person, and being, 88 Persuasion, 110, 113; rhetoric as creator of, 24, 27; about right and wrong, 24 Pheidias, as example, 16

Philos, 44-48 passim; takes dative, 44 n Philosopher, 100 Philosopher(s): as governing, 93; how to distinguish from rhetorician and sophist, xiv, 29; nature of, 91; result from division of guardians, 78 Philosopher-king(s): and function, 86; and good judge, 75, 85, 87, 90, 112; and guardian, 74; and his art, 76; and knowledge of good and evil, 87, 90; as man of art or science, xiii, xiv; as possessor of second-order art, xv, 75, 90; relation of, to wisdom and justice, 90; and statecraft, 1; in Statesman, 100; and vision of the good, 111 Phylakike, 86 Pigs, city of, 76, 77 Pilot, not a prophet, 33, 69 Plato: Apology, 36, 37, 69 n, 92, (20A) 64 n, (21A) 38 n, (21C) 37, (21D) 37, (22D) 37, (23B) 36, (29B) 37, (30E) 36; Charmides: xv, 20 n, 29-42, 43, 47~48- 53- 54- 67- 8z- 85- 86- 91106, 116,120, (159A) 9, (160E) 55, (165C ff.) 53, (165E ff.) xiv n, (166C, E) 83, (171DE) 91, (i73AD) 91, (:74c) 68, (174CD) 105, (175A) 98, (175A e-) 91- (175c) 55-83; Cratylus, 35, (390B) 97, (440A) 9; Crito, 69 n; Euthydemus, xv, 26, 44, 48-56, 66, 67, 80, 86, 98, 101, 112, 114, 116, (274DE) 113 n, (276A ff.) 80, (278A) 80, (279BE) 97, (288D-292E) 97, (289D) 97, (290B) 112, (290D) 112, (295A) 81; Euthyphro, 20 n, (14C) 107 n; Gorgias, xv, 14 n, 22-28, 110, 112, (451E) xiv n, (455A) 106 n, (456D) 69, (460B) 9- (495e) xivn- (511C-513C) 69- (5llE) 33- (52lD) 96n; Hippias Minor, 42 n, 62, 68, ( 375a) 64 n; Ion, xiv, 1-14, 15,

Index 26, 35, 86, 96, 98, 99, (533C-535A) xiii, i,(536E) 88, (536E flF.) 24,

Polymathia, 118,119 Power: proper use of, 25; rhetoric as, 24

(537a ff-) (538B) 23 n, (54iA) 112, (541BC) 9611; Laches, 20 n, (185c) 113, (195C) 68, (196E) 64 n, (198D) 34; Laws, 116; Lysis, xv, 44-48, 49, 53, 54, 56, 67, (216D) 81; Meno, 27, (87E) 3911,98, ( 100A) 117; Phaedo, 89, (97D) 79 n, (102BE) 38 n; Phaedrus, (260BD) 27 n, (268A ff.) 98 n, (274E) 97-98, (277BC) 27 n; Protagoras, xv, 15-22, 26, 27, 115 n; Republic, xiii, xv, 19, 27, 42, 55, 57, no, 112,116; Book I, xv, 20 n, 42 n,

Product(s) of controlling art: dif¬ ferent ones belong to different sciences, 41; inquiries concerning, xiv, 50, 55, 67, 86; and master art, 52; and regresses, 67; and terms, first- and second-order, xiv Prophecy, and reflexivity, 33, 34, 56 Prosekon, to, 58 Protagoras, 108; in Protagoras, 15-22 passim Proton philon (“first friend”), 45,

17, 18

n,

127

21,

100, Z02, 112,

57-74- 85- 88> 110> 112> 116, (342AB) 91,106; Book II, 94, (369IC ff.) 32; (374E ff.) 117, (375A) 64 n; Book III, 94, (410CE) 117; Book V, 82, (473C ff-) xiii, (473D) 87, (477a) 8l- (479ac) 38 n> (479D) 81; Book VI, (488Aff.) 103; Books II-X, 75-99; Seventh Epistle, idii, (341C) 100; Sophist, 100, 101, (232E) 14 n, (233D ff.) 96 n, (240B) 42 n, 81; Statesman, xiii, xv, 14, 19, 42, 55, 100-17, (295B) 96 n, (304D) 25; Symposium, 89, (201E ff.) 81, (203 ff.) 46 n, (221E) xiv; Theaetetus, 100, (176A) 35, (176B) 89, (189D) 81. See also Pseudo-Plato Poetry, 94-99 Poets: expounded by rhapsodes, chapter I passim, 35; good and bad, 18 n Polemarchus (in Republic), 58, 63 Political art: can it be taught?, 21; identified with sophistry by Protagoras, 22 Politike techne, 18—19, 21 Polus (in Gorgias), 26, 27, 88 Polycleitus, as example, 16

5°- 54- 56 Protreptic, 48-56, 97 Pseudo-Plato: Cleitophon, (409BD) 16; Erastai, 119—21 Qualities, natural, 64 Quantitative expressions, 38 Quietness, temperance as, 31 Reflexivity, xv, xvi, 33, 39, 47, 48, 54, 62, 84- 85- 9y and prophecy, 33, 34, 36; and tinos-words, 38 Refutation: in Charmides, 35; in Euthydemus, 52-53 Regress(es), xv,xvi, 86, 91, 92, 97, 112; and atypical cases, 50; infinite, 45, 48, 66, 67; stopped, 67; and tinos-words, xvi, 48, 56, 62 Relations, symmetrical and asymmetrical, 48 Reversal, myth of. See Myth, of reversal Rhapsode: art of, as second order, 29; and general, 2, 12, 112; his art no art, 2, 6, 10, 13, 15, 3 5; lacks knowledge of good and evil, 18 n; lacks special field, 99; and rivals, 3, 23 n, 102; as speaker, 6 Rhetoric: as controlling other arts, 24; its subject matter right and wrong, 112; misuse of, 25, 26; as second order, 23, 29, 91; as sham art, 27; true, 27 n; what is, of?, 88

128

plato’s philosopher-king

Rhetorician(s): art of, rejected, 15; can be made by Gorgias, 23, 26; distinct from statesman, 111-13; lack knowledge of good, 98 Right and wrong, 24, 26, 69, 112 Right use, 49 Rival(s), 104,108, 112, 114, 116; of rhapsode, 3, 23 n, 102; of rhetorician, 23 Rule, 86, 87, 90; benevolent, 66; good, 105; and just man, 74 Ruler, functions of, 25; in “precise sense,” 72 “Sake of, for the.” See heneka tou (“for the sake of”) Same and different argument, 1, 2-4 Science: absence of, 35, 36, 40, 82, 84, 116; of good and evil, 40, 41,

42> 43- 47- 54- 84i of itself, 84iand

paradox, 48; what, makes men happy?, 40 Science of sciences, xv, chapter III passim, 43, 47, 50, 52, 54, 67, 82 Scythia, and Scythians, 93 Second-order art(s); difficulties in, 53; examples of, 29; explained, xiv, xvi, 7; legitimate and illegitimate, 99; mixed with first-order art(s),

42

Second-order function, 21; judging as, 8 Self-knowledge: positive and nega¬ tive, in Charmides and Apology, 37; temperance as, 34, 36 Shepherd, chapter V passim; divine, 102,116 Ship of state, 103,1 r 2 Simonides (quoted), 58 Skepsis, 3, 5 Socrates, 36, 110; young (in Statesman), chapter VII passim Sophist: art rejected, 15; lacks knowl¬ edge of good, 98; as merchant, 17; new kind of, 108; possibility of becoming, 16; in what is he expert?, 17; what is sophist?, 16

Sophistry: differences between, and genuine arts, 20—22; as lacking subject matter, 19, 88; as secondorder art, 16 n, 18, 91 Soul, 73, 78 n, 83, 92, 94, 95,98 Soul / state analogy, xvi, 77, 98 Speakers: good and bad, 7, 8, 11,13; produced by sophist, 17, 20 Speaking, art of, 6-8 Special field, 27, 99, 100, 102,106; of rhetorician, 25 Special-fields argument, 2, 10-12, 88 Sprague, R. K., 81 n, 115 n State: fevered, compared with luxurious city, 75, 77, 78, 79; good,32 Statecraft: how to distinguish from rhetoric and sophistry, xiv; relation to justice, xvi; relation to other arts, xv, 29 Statesman: isolated from rivals, xv; “makes” good men, 98; must have knowledge of good and evil, 30; must have knowledge of use, 55 Statesman's art: results of, 51; same as kingly art, 50; as second-order art, 56, 106 Subject matter: of different levels, 6; of good and bad speakers, 7; lacked by sophistry, 19 Summum bonum. See good, the highest Sun, 75, 88, 90—91 Taylor, A. E., 121 n Teachers: of medicine, 20; of sophistry, 20 Teaching, of rhetoric, 27 Techne (art), as tinos-word, xv n Techne analogy, 57-74, 95 Technical expressions, explained, xvi Temperance, chapter III passim; and art of statesmanship, 31; as con¬ trolling other sciences, 41; as doing of good actions, 33; as a good, 39, 41; as knowledge of good and evil, xv, 35,40, 105; as modesty, 31;

Index must be useful, 31, 42, 43; as quiet¬ ness, 31; as reflexive, 33, 47; as science of science and absence of science, 84; as second-order art (or science), xv, 35, 43; as self-knowledge, 34, 36; temperate man can say what, is, 9; temperate men ignorant of own, 33' 34> as wisdom, 41-42; wrongly grouped with first-order arts, 34 Theiai moirai, 1 Theophrastus: de Sensibus, 49, 82 Theory of Forms. See Forms, theory of Theuth, myth of. See Myth, of Theuth Thief, just man as best, xv, 42 n, 61, 62, 68, 73, 110 Third-order art(s), 114; function of, 8,21 “Third wave,” 87 Thirty tyrants, 30 Thrasymachus, 57 Thrasymachus (inRepublic), 58-74 passim, 94 Tinos-word(s): episteme (“science”) as, 34, 38, 43, 47, 83; in Euthydemus, 53, 56; explained, xv n; “friend” as, 44 n, 47; generates paradoxes, 47-48; “good” as, 5354; “knowledge” as, 92; “love” as, 89; and reflexivity, 38, 62; and regresses, xvi Uniqueness, of Socrates in Charmides and Apology, 37 Unmoved Mover, 66 Use, and content, 92. See also Right use

129

Useful, temperance must be, 31, 42, 43 Uselessness, xv, 48, 56; good and, 46' 47 User, and maker, 97, 98 Value judgment, 8, 16 Virtue, 20, 117; identified with art of politics, 22; identified with knowledge of good and evil, 84; will know itself and badness, 84 Virtues: special, of arts, 74; unified by sophistical means, 115 n Vision, 92; of the good, 87, 99,111, 116 War, 78 Warriors, 78; divided, 85 Weaving, 103, 104, 107, 111, 114, 1J5 Web of the state, 101, 115, 116 Whole, city as, 86; concern for, 90 Wholes, arts as, 8, 35 Wisdom: and good fortune, 49; as guide, 40; and justice, 75, 85-86, 90; and knowledge, 49; as science of self and other sciences, 35; as selfknowledge, 36; in state, 78; as temperance, 41—42 Wise man, 36, 37 Words: of rhapsode’s art, 24; as subject matter of rhetoric, 23 Zeus, age of, 102 Zeuxippus, 18, 21

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