Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method 3031136896, 9783031136894

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Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method

Gareth B. Matthews Edited by S. Marc Cohen

Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method

Gareth B. Matthews

Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method Edited by S. Marc Cohen

Gareth B. Matthews Amherst, MA, USA Edited by S. Marc Cohen Seattle, WA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-13689-4    ISBN 978-3-031-13690-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Editor’s Introduction

Gary Matthews was my colleague, co-author, and close friend for over forty years. By the time of his death in 2011, he had written a nearly complete draft of this book; but the draft remained, unnoticed, on the hard drive of his computer. Some years later, I was given access to the contents of that hard drive, and discovered the draft. With minor modifications and suppletions, it constitutes the book you have in front of you. In a few places, the draft was unfinished. Chapters 7 and 11 end abruptly (pp. 77 and 114); Chap. 10 ends in mid-sentence (p. 114). In these cases I have added just enough text to complete the points that I believe that Matthews was making. The reader should bear in mind that these additions are conjectural; they are enclosed in square brackets to identify them as such. Other editorial additions and comments are signaled in the footnotes with “—Ed.” Portions of Chaps. 8 and 9 were previously published (posthumously) in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (2018), 54:27–49. I am grateful to Gary’s children—Sarah, Becca, and John—for giving me the opportunity to bring this small masterpiece to light. S.M.C.

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Preface

I hope this book will be read by many of my fellow specialists in ancient philosophy. But they are not my primary target readership. With this book I want to reach readers for whom Plato was an important introduction to philosophy, but who did not go on to make ancient philosophy their primary field of study. For them the early dialogues of Plato may have first quickened their interest in philosophy; in particular, it may have been their introduction to philosophical analysis. They may have been intrigued by the figure of Socrates in these dialogues, or they may have become annoyed with him. But, whatever attitude they settled on, they may have been won over to the idea, so powerfully illustrated by Plato’s early dialogues, that few of us can give a rigorously satisfactory analysis of something so basic as, for example, what it is to perform a brave act or to be a brave person. The readers I have especially in mind, if they went on to read Plato’s Phaedo, or his Republic, will have realized that, in those middle dialogues, Plato gives his character, Socrates, a rather different philosophical personality from the Socrates of the Apology, or, say, the Euthyphro. In the Phaedo and the Republic the mischievously questioning figure of the early dialogues has morphed into a rather heavily didactic guru. He continues to ask questions all right, but now, surprisingly, he answers the questions he asks, and often does so through excruciatingly arcane lines of reasoning. Some readers find this reasoning challenging, while others are turned off by it. But the most striking thing is that Plato has his character, Socrates, present it, whereas in his earlier appearances, he had claimed not to know how to answer such questions. vii

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If the readers I have primarily in mind for this book had expressed puzzlement over the changes in the personality and methods of Plato’s Socrates, their professor may have tried to put that puzzlement to rest. After the death of Socrates, their professor may have told them, several different people besides Plato wrote dialogues to commemorate the life and philosophical practice of Socrates. Plato’s dialogues were clearly the best works in this commemorative genre. Then having memorialized Socrates in many memorable works, Plato clearly wanted to move on, their professor may have explained, and free his Socrates to present and defend philosophical conclusions that Plato himself thought worthy of consideration, even though his Socrates had now to assume a different philosophical personality and try out new philosophical methods. I don’t want to say that it is wrong to suppose Plato went from commemorating Socrates to co-opting the figure of Socrates for Plato’s own philosophical purposes. However, as I hope to show in this book, there is a much more interesting story to tell about what happened to the Socratic method in Plato’s middle and late writings than just to say that Plato outgrew it. Or perhaps it would be better to say that what I want to do is to tell the commemoration-to-cooptation story in a more interesting way. The more interesting story is, I think, a story that also bears on the practice of philosophy today. Why do those of us who teach philosophy courses today think it important to introduce our students to the practice of philosophy? What is it that we think our students will gain by taking a course in metaphysics, or ethics, or epistemology, or the history of philosophy? Is it that we want them to have a philosophically satisfactory theory of mind, or of causality, or of moral obligation? Probably not. Or is it that we at least want them to have a sophisticated concept of knowledge, or of time, or of the human good? I think that reflecting on the Socratic method—on why Plato thought it important to present Socrates as practicing that method, as well as on why he eventually lost interest in the method—can help us think about the place and importance of philosophy in education today, and in life. It is that thought that has motivated me to write this book. G.B.M. Amherst, MA Seattle, WA 

Gareth B. Matthews S. Marc Cohen

Contents

1 The Socratic Method  1 2 Analyzing Courage: Laches 11 3 Analyzing Piety: Euthyphro 23 4 Blameworthy Ignorance: Apology 35 5 Virtue in Socratic Ignorance: Charmides 45 6 Latent Knowledge: Meno 57 7 Forms Left Unanalyzed: Phaedo 69 8 Downgrading the Elenchus: Republic I–II 79 9 Farewell to the Elenchus: Theaetetus 93 10 Philosophy Professionalized: Sophist101

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11 Conclusion109 Bibliography115 Index117

CHAPTER 1

The Socratic Method

Abstract  What is the Socratic method? The term has been understood in different ways, so we will need to be clear about what it means here. I take it to be the so-called Socratic elenchus. This is a species of philosophical analysis whose aim is to arrive at the definition of a problematic concept by means of subjecting alternative proposals to potential refutation by means of counterexample. Six key features of the method are delineated. Keywords  Socratic method • Elenchus • Perplexity

Apparently Socrates did have a method. Even people who know very little about ancient philosophy will likely think they know that. But what was the method? And are we sure that Socrates had it? Most of what we think we know about Socrates we get from the dialogues of Plato. We think we know, or at least have good reason to believe, that Plato’s record of the trial of Socrates, the Apology, is a fairly accurate account of his (unsuccessful) defense against various charges, including the claim that he corrupted the young (Apology 24b). And we may think, perhaps with justification, that at least the early dialogues of Plato, such as the Euthyphro and the Laches, give us a reasonably good picture of the historical Socrates and the way he practiced philosophy. But do those

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0_1

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dialogues display Socratic fidelity to a single philosophical method? And, if so, what is it? One reason it is important to get as clear as possible about what the Socratic method in the early dialogues of Plato might be is that, whatever exactly the method is, Plato seems to have had his Socrates abandon it in the middle and late dialogues. Hardly anyone, of course, thinks that the middle or late dialogues of Plato present Socrates in a historically accurate fashion. So we don’t want to ask why Socrates himself, the historical person, changed his philosophical method. What we do want to ask, however, is why Plato had his dialogue character, Socrates, change methods. The title of this book, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, reveals my answer to that question: Plato lost interest in the method. But that is not going to be an interesting thing to say unless we can (1) become reasonably clear about what the Socratic method is, and (2) say something helpful about why Plato might have lost interest in the method. I hope to deal with (1) in this chapter and (2) in the chapters to come.

Meno, Republic I, and Theaetetus The challenge of dealing with (2) is made more difficult by the apparent fact that Plato does not have his Socrates figure make a clean break with the method of the early dialogues. We might think otherwise. We might think that the dialogue, Meno, makes just such a clean break. Thus the early part of the Meno presents what seems to be quite like an early Socratic dialogue. Typically, those dialogues end in perplexity (aporia). And, indeed, the first part of the Meno also ends that way. But the dialogue itself does not end there. Instead, Socrates’s conversation partner offers a diagnosis of their logjam. They had been unsuccessfully trying to say what virtue (arête) is. Socrates had admitted at the very beginning, even insisted, that he did not know at all what virtue is. And Meno, although he had begun by thinking he did know, was not able to respond successfully to Socrates’s questions. So at this point in the dialogue he no longer thinks he knows. And the fact that neither he nor Socrates knows what virtue is seems to him a most unpromising basis for successful inquiry: T1. How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing you did not know? (80d)

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This is the famous “Paradox of Inquiry.” It is followed by two other famous passages, which we shall take up in Chap. 6. Eventually Socrates explicitly announces that he will try out another method, the “method of hypothesis.” This is a method Socrates says he takes from mathematics (Meno 86de). I am going to argue that what the Paradox of Inquiry reveals is at least part of the reason Plato lost interest in the Socratic method. But, as I shall argue, it is by no means the whole story. The whole story is, I think, biographically and historically significant. But, primarily, it is philosophically important. This book is an attempt to tell that whole story. The whole story needs to take account of several puzzling facts. Thus, for example, after apparently abandoning the Socratic method in the Meno, Plato returns to it in the great middle dialogue, Republic, and again in the late middle or early late dialogue, Theaetetus. Moreover, although Book I of the Republic has been taken to be a standard example of Socratic method, the philosophical style of Books II through X show Socrates operating in quite a different way. The explanation for Plato’s brief return to the Socratic method in Book I has often been taken to be rather trivial: Plato was just recycling an old, previously unpublished, dialogue. I think Plato’s return to the Socratic method in Book I is far from trivial. I’ll offer an alternative explanation in Chap. 8. The explanation of why Plato returned to the Socratic method in his dialogue, Theaetetus, has been thought to be more elusive. Is that dialogue just a nostalgia trip for Plato? I don’t think so. I shall try to offer a better explanation in Chap. 9. Part of the difficulty I face in discussing why Plato largely lost interest in the Socratic method is that there are today several different meanings commonly attached to the expression, “Socratic method.” Educators today are most likely to understand it to mean a method of instruction carried out mainly, or perhaps even solely, by asking pupils questions, rather than giving them answers. A teacher who uses this method needs to make no claim that she is any doubt about what the right answers are to her questions. She very likely has chosen to teach by asking questions because she thinks it is best for her pupils to figure out the best answers themselves, simply by thinking about the matter, rather than by memorizing the answers the teacher gives them. Let’s call this “the Socratic method of instruction.”

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The Socratic Method of Instruction The Socratic method, so understood, may be used in the science classroom, where pupils are encouraged to conceive, for themselves, experiments that will help answer the questions the teacher poses. But it has an even more obvious application to instruction in mathematics, which is a purely rational, or a priori, discipline. It seems that, in principle, all of mathematics could be taught just by asking questions. In fact, a mathematics teacher recently taught a standard third-grade class, that is not what is called a “gifted and talented class,” binary arithmetic simply by asking those third-graders questions.1 Does this method of instruction by asking questions have any basis in the early dialogues of Plato? Well, Plato certainly does present the figure of Socrates as asking questions. So there is a general reason to connect the method of instruction by asking questions with Socrates. However, especially in his early dialogues, Plato also presents his Socrates figure as disclaiming knowledge of the correct answers to his questions. (This disclaimer of knowledge is what is called “Socratic ignorance.”) So the figure of Socrates in the early dialogues does not seem to be using what educators today call “the Socratic method.” There is, however, one prominent exception to the claim that Socrates, in the early dialogues of Plato, asks his interlocutor questions while disclaiming knowledge of the right answers. But the exception needs to be qualified in two ways. First, it appears in the dialogue Meno, which is not straightforwardly an early dialogue. It seems to be transitional from the early period of Plato’s writing to the middle period. Second, Socrates does not actually claim knowledge of the correct answers, even in this case, though it is entirely plausible to think that he does have such knowledge. The passage I have in mind is the one in which Socrates questions Meno’s houseboy about how to construct a square with an area twice that of a given square. I shall be discussing this passage in more detail in Chap. 6. But the point I want to make now is that the question Socrates puts to the houseboy is not a philosophical one, such as “What is virtue?,” the main question under discussion in the dialogue. Rather, it is a geometrical question. Although Socrates does not actually admit that he knows, from the very beginning, how to construct a square with an area  For an account of how this was done, go online to http://garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html.

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twice that of a given square, there is every reason to think he does. (The answer is, of course, that one should take the diagonal of the given square as the side of a square of double area.) I shall have a little more to say in Chap. 6 about the Socratic method of instruction. But this method is not what I have in mind when I suggest, in the title of this book, that Plato eventually lost interest in the Socratic method.

The Law-School Socratic Method A second candidate for what is today called “the Socratic method” is a prominent, although now somewhat controversial, method of instruction in law schools. (It was made famous in the 1970s by the book and film, The Paper Chase, by John Jay Osborn, Jr., and the book, One L, by Scott Turow.) This method, originally associated especially with Harvard Law School, is primarily a way of teaching case law by using the law classroom to mimic appellate court proceedings. Part of the point of this method is to motivate students to study carefully the assigned case for the day, reflect on the key terms in which the case is described, determine relevant precedents, identify the relevant rule or rules of law, and generalize in various ways from this particular case to other cases, some of which may be only hypothetical cases. Being subjected to the law-school Socratic method is meant to encourage law students to internalize a certain style of questioning, which is quite like questioning in courts of law, so that they can themselves function well as lawyers by anticipating the judicial scrutiny they and their clients will face, should the initial decision be appealed to a higher court. As it is sometimes put, this method is meant to train law students to “think like lawyers.” The law-school Socratic method is also a method of instruction. And so law professors cannot be expected, as a general thing, to disclaim knowledge of the best answers to the questions they pose. However, the law is not, of course, an a priori discipline, like, say, geometry. The law school professor will expect students to have studied the case assigned for the day and to be able to draw on germane precedents, rules of law, and relevant statutes. To be successful at this, students must have done their homework. And professors can be expected to be much better at answering their questions than their students are. However, even though law professors will sometimes ask questions that raise clearly philosophical issues, and therefore have only contestable answers, the law-school Socratic

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method is clearly somewhat removed from what we find Socrates doing in the early dialogues of Plato. In any case, it is not what I have in mind when I speak of Plato having lost interest in the Socratic method.

The Socratic Elenchus What I shall mean by “the Socratic method” in this book is what scholars call “the Socratic elenchus” (or “the Socratic elenchos”). It is the philosophical method on display in such early Platonic dialogues as the Laches and the Euthyphro. To us today, it seems to be a method of what we might call “philosophical analysis.”2 Many of us analytic philosophers were first introduced to philosophical analysis by reading and discussing the early dialogues of Plato. The Socratic elenchus may even today remain a salient paradigm for how to engage in philosophical analysis. I shall now identify the main features of the Socratic elenchus. What is a Socratic elenchus? In the elenctic dialogues of Plato, Socrates encounters one or more prospective conversation partners, an “interlocutor,” from whom he tries to elicit an account of the nature of one of the virtues, or perhaps the nature of virtue itself. In the scholarly literature Socrates is often said to be seeking a definition of virtue, or of bravery, say, or piety. To speak of the account Socrates seeks as a “definition” suggests, mistakenly, that Socrates wants to know the meaning of his word for virtue, or his word for one of the individual virtues, which is not really the case.3 What he wants is what we would today call an “analysis” of virtue, or one of the virtues. So, in an elenchus, 2  Stephen Menn has written a very learned article about how ancient geometric analysis seems to have influenced Plato at the time he wrote his dialogue, Meno (“Plato and the Method of Analysis,” Phronesis 47/3 (2002), 193–223). “The method of analysis,” so understood, is rather different from what philosophers talk about today as “philosophical analysis.” I am using “philosophical analysis” in the contemporary sense. 3  Michael N. Forster, in his paper, “Socrates’ Demand for Definitions” (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 31 (2006), 1–47) argues that what Socrates is after in the elenctic dialogues is indeed the meanings of his words for virtue and the individual virtues. Forster’s support for his contention seems to me quite unconvincing, though I cannot undertake to show that here. More challenging, I think, is the assumption that the target of the elenchus is an analysis of a concept, for example, the concept of justice. This assumption underlies, for example, the classic article by David Sachs, “A Fallacy in Plato’s Republic” (Philosophical Review 72 (1963), 141–58). I do not think that this assumption is correct either. In a further development of this book I hope to show why, and why it matters.

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1. Socrates wants an analysis of some F-ness. where “F-ness” will stand in for the virtue under investigation in any particular dialogue. We readers soon learn that the analysis of F-ness that Socrates seeks must offer necessary and sufficient conditions for an action or a person to count as being F (e.g., being brave, or pious, or perhaps simply being virtuous).4 So, in an elenchus, 2. The analysis of F-ness that Socrates seeks must specify necessary and sufficient conditions for an action or a person to count as being F. But that is not enough. The necessary and sufficient conditions Socrates seeks must identify a form (eidos)5 or essence (ousia), such that having that form or essence explains what makes an action or a person F. It cannot simply give us a property of all and only persons or things that are F.6 Thus, in an elenchus, 3. The account Socrates seeks must state the nature or essence of F-ness. Although one might get the impression that the interlocutors in the early dialogues are just people Socrates happens to meet, it turns out that interlocutors are generally asked about matters concerning which they are naturally thought to have some expertise, or perhaps some privileged access. Thus, in the Laches Socrates tries to get two generals to tell him the 4  Thus, for example, when Laches suggests that being courageous is just being willing to remain at one’s post, defending oneself, and not running away (190e), Socrates asks, rhetorically, whether one could not be courageous in retreat (191a). This counterexample is meant to establish that the analysis Laches had suggested, even if it supplies a sufficient condition for being courageous, does not establish a necessary condition. When Laches suggests that courage is wise endurance (192d), Socrates asks whether one would have to be more courageous to be willing to dive into a well if one were skilled at doing this or more courageous if one were not skilled (193c). This and other examples are meant to show that wisdom, that is, practical wisdom (phronêsis), is not even a necessary condition for being courageous. 5  “Bear in mind then that I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but that form itself (auto to eidos) that makes all pious actions pious” (Euthyphro 6d). 6  “I’m afraid, Euthyphro, that when you were asked what piety is, you did not wish to make its nature [or essence, ousia] clear to me, but you told me an affect or quality of it, that the pious has the quality of being loved by the gods, but you have not yet told me what the pious is” (Euthyphro 11a).

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nature of bravery. In the Euthyphro Socrates tries to get a theologian to tell him the nature of piety. And in the Charmides Socrates tries to get a teenager to tell him what the nature of a virtue is that he is said to have, namely, sôphrosunê (roughly, self-possession, or self-control), to which Charmides is thought to have a special access. Thus, in an elenchus 4. Typically, there is some special reason for thinking that the interlocutor should be able to provide an analysis of F-ness. Beyond the suggestion of some such relevant expertise, Socrates also suggests that for any of us to be able to tell whether some action or person is F, we must have in mind a paradeigma (a template) off of which we can read the explanatory, necessary, and sufficient conditions for some person or action to count as being F (see Euthyphro 6e). Thus, in an elenchus 5. Socrates suggests that we must have the account or analysis of F-ness in mind for us to be able to tell, of some particular person or action, x, that x is F. This requirement should be linked with what Plato scholars call “the priority of definitional knowledge.”7 It is, incidentally, something rejected by a number of recent philosophers8 and called into question by developmental psychologists.9 Finally, Socrates makes clear that he himself does not know what F-ness is, that is, he himself is unable to offer an account of F-ness that satisfies these five conditions. Thus 6. Socrates, the lead investigator himself, is unable to offer an account that satisfies the above five conditions. (“Socratic ignorance”) Together these six conditions specify a model of philosophical analysis as purely rational inquiry. Thus Socrates makes clear that he is not 7  Hugh Benson formulates this as his principle, (P): “(P) If A fails to know what F-ness is, then A fails to know, for any x, that x is F” (Socratic Wisdom, New York: Oxford, 2000, 113). 8  Including Geach [1966], Hilary Putnam, “The meaning of ‘meaning,’” in Philosophical Papers, ii., Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–71; and Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Harvard University Press, 1980). 9  See especially Eleanor Rosch, “Natural Categories,” Cognitive Psychology 4 (1970), 328–50.

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interested a mere survey of what most people think F-ness is. Nor, presumably, can he bias the outcome of the inquiry by, whether intentionally or unintentionally, giving his interlocutors hints as to the right answer. He cannot do that, since he does not himself know what the right answer is. His job as the lead investigator is simply to test the answers his interlocutors offer to his “What-is-F-ness?” question. It may not be essential to a Socratic elenchus that it end in perplexity (aporia). However, characteristically, that is what happens. In fact, the early dialogues of Plato are often referred to, not only as the “elenctic dialogues,” but also as the “aporetic dialogues.” So, somewhat tentatively, we could add this seventh characteristic: 7. The elenchus ends in perplexity (aporia). The fact that the elenctic dialogues typically end in perplexity is naturally taken as a sign of failure. But, as I argue in my book, Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy, it should not be understood that way. Philosophy, I argue, often begins in perplexity. “One reason philosophy often begins in perplexity,” I maintain, is that philosophy deals with inherently problematic concepts, concepts like time and justice, mind, and causality—concepts … of which we also find it difficult, if not impossible, to give a satisfactory analysis. (126)

As I hope to show in Chap. 10, Plato never lost his appreciation for the importance of perplexity to philosophy, even though he did lose interest in writing works that simply ended in perplexity. How this can be so, and why it matters, I hope to bring out in the chapters to come.

CHAPTER 2

Analyzing Courage: Laches

Abstract  The Laches presents an attempt to say what courage is. Its two interlocutors, Laches and Nicias, offer a number of candidates for the definition of courage, but Socrates shows them all to be defective. Their efforts end in perplexity, leading us to wonder whether the elenchus, as a form of inquiry, holds out a serious prospect of leading to the discovery of what courage is. Keywords  Courage • Laches • Elenchus

The figure of Socrates is familiar to almost everyone who has ever studied philosophy. He turns up, for example, in Plato’s early dialogue, Laches, in a discussion of whether young men should get training in armed combat, what is called “hoplite” training. (A hoplite is someone who would normally carry a spear and a shield for one-on-one combat.) Discussing the value of military training might seem an unlikely setting for a serious attempt at philosophical analysis. But Plato makes its introduction quite natural. Laches tells the assembled group that they should get Socrates involved in discussing the question, “Is fighting in armor a useful subject for young men to learn or not?” (181c) For Greek society, where the armies were made up of citizen-soldiers, the question was not unlike

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0_2

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asking today whether reserve officer training corps belong on college campuses. In characteristically coy modesty Socrates asks one of the others to speak first. So Nicias complies. He makes a speech in praise of the value of learning to fight in armor and then Laches follows up with a speech expressing the opposite point of view. The instigator of the discussion, Lysimachus, then asks Socrates for his opinion on the matter. “What’s that, Lysimachus,” Socrates replies, “Do you intend to cast your vote for whatever position is approved by the majority of us?” (184d).

The Need for Expertise Lysimachus wants to know what the alternative might be to going by majority vote. Socrates replies that what they need is an expert on the subject. But it soon turns out that the kind of expertise Socrates is calling for is expertise in “the care of the soul,” and in particular, expertise in virtue. Thus Socrates makes the question, “Is military training good for young men?” into this: “Is military training good for one’s character?” or “Does military training promote virtue?” Socrates next makes a move that is central to the motivation for a Socratic elenchus. He asks: T1. Isn’t it necessary for us to start out knowing what virtue is? Because if we are not absolutely certain what it is, how are we going to advise anyone as to the best method of obtaining it? (190bc).1

The importance of T1 can hardly be overemphasized. Laches agrees. What Socrates suggests, and what Laches agrees to, seems to be this assumption: A1. If one isn’t absolutely certain what virtue is, one will not be in position to advise anyone as to the best method of obtaining it.

This assumption, A1, may look innocent enough. But we should worry about how far Socrates would be prepared to generalize it. Suppose one 1  All the quotations from Plato, unless otherwise noted, come from Plato: Complete Works, edited with introduction and notes by John M. Cooper, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997. The translation of the dialogue, Laches, is by Rosamond Kent Sprague.

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isn’t absolutely certain what virtue is. Might one still know something about virtue, or at least have some true beliefs about virtue? The issue of how far Socrates is prepared to generalize A1 will be a key point for discussion in the chapters to follow.

A Requirement for Knowledge Socrates follows up with this statement: T2. We say … that we know what [virtue] is. (190c)

Laches agrees. Then Socrates adds: T3. What we know, we must, I suppose, be able to state. (190c)

Again, Laches agrees. What Laches agrees to may again seem quite innocent. But, if it is given a very strong reading, it should set off alarm bells. Here is a very strong assumption that might lie behind T3: A2. If one knows what virtue is, one must be able to offer a satisfactory account (logos) of what it is.

Admittedly, A2 goes well beyond what is explicit in T2. But if Socrates is not prepared to accept A2, but only some weaker assumption, one might well wonder what that weaker assumption is. On the other hand, if Socrates does assume A2, and is prepared to generalize from A2, further alarm bells should go off. Again, we are here broaching a topic that we shall return to in later chapters.

Focusing on a Part of Virtue Next, Socrates suggests that it would be too much to investigate immediately the whole of virtue and so they should first consider one of the virtues. The single virtue he singles out for investigation is the one most obviously relevant to the question about whether young men should receive training in fighting in armor, namely, courage. The here agreed-to assumption is thus that courage is not the whole of virtue but only a part of it, what we might call a “proper part.”

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A3. Courage is a proper part of virtue.

For courage to be only a proper part of virtue, or, as we might more naturally say, only one of the virtues, would presumably amount to this: A4. Every courageous act is a virtuous act, but an act can be virtuous without being courageous.

This assumption also seems quite innocent—so innocent as to be almost trivial. Yet, as we shall see, it is crucial to the outcome of the dialogue. We can guess what comes next. Socrates asks Laches to say what courage is. And Laches readily offers what he takes to be an appropriate answer: T4. Good heavens, Socrates, there is no difficulty about that: if a man is willing to remain at his post and to defend himself against the enemy without running away, then you may rest assured that he is a man of courage. (190e)

We might understand T4 to be an example of a way of being brave. But Socrates is not looking for examples. He treats T4 as an attempt to give an account of the nature of courage, that is, as an attempt to provide what we today might call a philosophical analysis of bravery—that is, an explanatory set of necessary and sufficient conditions for an act to count as being brave. Taken in that way, T4 is obviously open to counterexample. And Socrates immediately provides one:

A Counterexample CE1. But what about this man, one who fights with the enemy, not holding his ground, but in retreat? (191a)

Laches at first rejects the counterexample. He explains that he did not have in mind horsemen, who might indeed fight bravely in retreat. What he had in mind were soldiers in armor, hoplites, who (perhaps) don’t have the option of fighting in retreat. Socrates replies: T5. I wanted to learn from you not only what constitutes courage for a hoplite but for a horseman as well and for every sort of warrior. And I wanted to include not only those who are courageous in warfare but also those who are brave in dangers at sea, and the ones who show courage in

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illness and poverty and affairs of state; and then again I wanted to include not only those who are brave in the face of pain and fear but also those who are clever at fighting desire and pleasure, whether by standing their ground or running away—because there are some men, aren’t there, Laches, who are brave in matters like these? (191de)

This passage is important for several reasons. For one thing, it makes clear that Socrates will not count pointing to one case, or one kind of case,2 of courage as providing an analysis or account of what it is to be courageous. So CE1 does provide a counterexample to T3, provided that T3 is meant as an analysis of what courage is. Beyond that, T4 makes clear, in the variety of cases it includes, that Socrates’s conception of courage is a very broad one. One may naturally take the bravery of a soldier in the face of a fierce attack as one’s paradigm case of courage. But Socrates does not accord battlefield courage any special status. We might note in passing that Aristotle, who was clearly aware of this passage in the Laches, does accord battlefield bravery a special status as the paradigm of courage. In his Nicomachean Ethics, at 3.6, he maintains that other cases of the sorts mentioned in T5 are to be counted as cases of courage in only a derivative way.

A Second Try To show Laches what he requires for a satisfactory analysis of courage, Socrates offers “the power of accomplishing a great deal in a short time” as an account of what swiftness is (192b). Then he invites Laches to make another attempt at saying what courage is. Laches replies: T6. [Courage] is a sort of endurance of the soul. (192b)

In response to T6 Socrates points out that foolish endurance is hardly a noble thing. And, since courage is a noble thing, we must, at the very least, restrict the cases of endurance that are to count as courageous to the 2  There is some scholarly controversy whether in such cases as this it is individual examples that Socrates is offered and rejects as the kind of answer he wants in response to his “What is F-ness?” question. However, the point is that he wants a general account; neither supplying individual examples of F-ness, even paradigm examples, or kinds of examples, will do. He wants to have specified what makes the individual example, as well as instances of the kind, count as being cases of something that is F.

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wise ones. To be sure, Socrates’s reasoning here is open to objection. Some cases of endurance of the soul might be neither wise nor foolish. Socrates has not considered them. In any case, what Laches agrees to is this: T7. Wise endurance [is] courage. (192d)

Socrates then offers a number of counterexamples to T7. The most interesting of them are these three comparative examples. CE2. A soldier who “endures in battle, and [whose] willingness to fight is based on wise calculation because he knows that others are coming to his aid” is less courageous than one who holds out without any such wise calculation. (193ab) CE3. “The man who shows endurance in a cavalry attack and has knowledge of horsemanship is less courageous that the man who lacks this knowledge” and is, for this reason, less wise. (193b) CE4. One who is willing to dive into wells without knowledge of what is under the water is more courageous than one who knows what is there. (193c)

In this section Socrates makes the following plausible assumption: A5. If action x is otherwise similar to action y except that x is less wise than y, then, if (i) both are courageous and (ii) courage is just wise endurance, then x will be less courageous than y.

Yet, as Laches has agreed, the soldier who fights in the wise expectation of imminent reinforcements is actually less courageous than the soldier who has no such expectations (CE2). Moreover, the cavalryman without much knowledge of horsemanship, though less wise than the cavalryman with full knowledge, will actually be more courageous than his knowledgeable counterpart (CE3). And finally, one who dives into a well not knowing what is under the water is more courageous than the wise diver who knows what is there (CE4). So, by (A2), we conclude that courage is not wise endurance.

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Perplexity After having had Socrates provide counterexamples to his two proposals for an analysis of courage, Laches might be expected to concede defeat. But Socrates casts their effort to analyze courage as a sort of battle, and admonishes Laches to endure “so that courage itself won’t make fun of us for not searching for it courageously” (194a). Laches responds with this important reply: T8. I am ready not to give up. Socrates, although I am not really accustomed to arguments of this kind. But an absolute desire for victory has seized me with respect to our conversation, and I am really getting annoyed at being unable to express what I think in this fashion. I still think I know what courage is, but I can’t understand how it has escaped me just now so that I can’t pin it down in words and say what it is. (194ab)

In Laches we have a fully competent, but not philosophically trained, interlocutor who is also fully cooperative in the effort to come up with a satisfactory analysis of courage. Even after Socrates has rejected his two attempts to say what courage is, he still thinks he knows what it is, but says that he cannot put his understanding into words. So Socrates invites Nicias to take over the effort from Laches. Socrates, in his entreaty to Nicias to search for the analysis of courage, shifts the metaphor from a battlefield to being at sea in a storm: T9. Come along then, Nicias, and, if you can, rescue your friends who are storm-tossed by the argument and find themselves in trouble. You see, of course, that our affairs are in a bad way, so state what you think courage is and get us out of our difficulties [or perplexities] as well as confirming your own view by putting it into words. (194c)

As I have indicated, the word for “difficulties,” aporiai, could also be fittingly translated “perplexities.” And the words for “in trouble” and “in a bad way” are cognate to aporia. So here is a foretaste of the aporia with which the elenctic dialogues characteristically end. We might think that Socrates here says that he is also in perplexity simply as a generous or polite gesture of sympathy to Laches. But, as we shall see in a moment, Socrates insists at the end of the dialogue that perplexity belongs to him as much as to his interlocutors. So here we have at least an implicit expression of Socratic ignorance, as well as Socratic perplexity.

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Nicias Has a Try Nicias, when he takes over from Laches as Socrates’s interlocutor, recalls that he has often heard Socrates say: T10. Every one of us is good with respect to that in which he is wise and bad in respect to that in which he is ignorant. (194d)

Here we have an allusion to the Socratic doctrine that virtue is knowledge. Nicias moves on to suggest that being wise is at least a necessary condition for being courageous (194d). Socrates accepts this suggestion but moves on, with support from Laches, to ask Nicias what sort of wisdom courage is (194e). Nicias replies: T11. [Courage] is the knowledge of the fearful and the hopeful in war and in every other situation. (194e–5a)

So here we have the third suggested analysis of courage. According to T11, courage is the knowledge of what is to be feared and hoped for. Laches now offers a counterexample: CE5. In case of illness, aren’t the doctors the ones who know what is to be feared? … Perhaps you call the doctors the courageous [ones]? (195a)

But Nicias fights back. He insists that a doctor’s knowledge is restricted to health and disease. But sometimes, he goes on, recovery is more to be feared than illness. So the doctor’s knowledge does not automatically bring courage with it (195 cd). So Laches tries another tack. Seers, he says, will, by Nicias’s suggested account of courage, be the courageous ones. CE6. [Nicias] is calling seers the courageous. Because who else will know for whom it is better to live than to die? (195e)

Again, Nicias rejects the counterexample: T12. [T]he seer needs to know only the signs of what is to be, whether a man will experience death or illness or loss of property, or will experience victory or defeat, in battle or in any other sort of context. But why is it more suitable for the seer than for anyone else to judge for whom it is better to suffer or not to suffer these things? (195e–6a)

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The Crommyon Sow Socrates then offers a counterexample of his own, the case of a fabled beast, the Crommyon sow, noted for its fierceness, and, Socrates suggests, for its courage. Socrates says: CE7. I think that anyone taking this position [that is, accepting Nicias’s suggestion that courage is knowledge of what is to be feared and hoped for] must necessarily deny courage to any wild beast or else admit that some wild beast, a lion or a leopard or some sort of wild boar, is wise enough to know what is so difficult that very few men understand it. (196e)

But again, Nicias rejects the suggested counterexample. To Laches’s taunts, he replies: T13. By no means, Laches, do I call courageous wild beasts or anything else that, for lack of understanding, does not fear what should be feared. (197a)

Nicias goes on to point out that rashness is not to be confused with courage.

What Is to Be Feared and Hoped for Finally Socrates rejects Nicias’s suggested analysis, not by offering a counterexample to it, but rather by insisting that the knowledge of what is to be feared and hoped for is the whole of virtue, whereas, as they had agreed near the beginning of their investigation, courage is only a proper part of virtue. As we might more naturally put it, courage is only one of the virtues. Socrates concedes that hope and fear concern the future. But he insists that “there is not one kind of knowledge by which we know how things have happened in the past, and another by which we know how they are happening at the present time, and still another by which we know how what has not yet happened might best come to be in the future” (198d). He adds: T14. Then courage is not knowledge of the fearful and the hopeful only, because it understands not simply future goods and evils, but those of the present and the past and all times, just as is the case with the other kinds of knowledge. (199bc)

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Rejection Socrates concludes: T15. Then the thing you are now talking about, Nicias, would not be a part of virtue but rather virtue entire. … And we have certainly stated that courage is [only] one of the parts of virtue. … Then we have not discovered, Nicias, what courage is. (199e)

Laches advises Lysimachus that he and Nicias should withdraw as teachers of the young men and that he should enlist Socrates instead. Socrates responds: T16. Well, it would be a terrible thing, Lysimachus, to be unwilling to join in assisting any man to become as good as possible. If in the conversations we have just had I had seemed to be knowing and the other two had not, then it would be right to issue a special invitation to me to perform this task; but as the matter stands, we are all in the same difficulty [that is, in the same perplexity, aporia]. (200e)

Thus the dialogue ends in a characteristic expression of perplexity and Socratic ignorance. However, Socrates does add this puzzling coda: T17. What I say we ought to do, my friends—since this is just between ourselves—is to join in searching for the best possible teacher, first for ourselves—we really need one—and then for the young men, sparing neither money nor anything else. (201a)

Quite clearly the inquiry this dialogue presents has all six features of the Socratic elenchus, which I mentioned in Chap. 1. First, it is conducted by a lead investigator who asks questions of one or more interlocutors. It is, of course, true that Laches joins Socrates toward the end of the dialogue in raising questions about Nicias’s proposed analysis of courage. But it is still the case that Socrates is in charge of the investigation. Second, the F-ness that is the target of the investigation is the moral kind, courage. Third, the lead investigator, Socrates, claims not to know what courage is. Fourth, Socrates is not satisfied with anything less than an informative account, or analysis, of what makes something or someone courageous.

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When we get to the fifth characteristic of the Socratic elenchus I should say that the explicit motive for the inquiry is not to make clear what “inner template” one would need to have to recognize cases of courageous acts or persons. Instead, the explicit motivation is given in the first textual passage cited above: T1. Isn’t it necessary for us to start out knowing what virtue is? Because if we are not absolutely certain what it is, how are we going to advise anyone as to the best method of obtaining it? (190bc)

Finally, the dialogue certainly ends in characteristic perplexity. But that isn’t quite true. After the expression of perplexity, there comes Socrates’s suggestion that they all search for a teacher. He even makes explicit that he needs one as much as the others.

What Went Wrong? On one reading of this dialogue, Socrates is simply muddled. He first says that it would be too much to look for the whole of virtue and that it would be better to concentrate on just one part of virtue, namely, courage (190cd). But then, in the end, he rejects “knowing what is to be feared and what is to be hoped for” as a satisfactory analysis of courage on the grounds that it is the whole of virtue. But we know from other dialogues that Socrates was attracted to the idea that virtue is one. On a weak interpretation of this idea, which is called “the unity of the virtues,” all it amounts to is that one cannot have a given virtue, say, courage, without having all the others. But on a strong interpretation the terms for the individual virtues are just different names for virtue itself. So perhaps Socrates is confused as to whether he wants to accept the idea that virtue is one, and, if so, whether he wants to accept it in its strong or only in its weak version. The conclusion of the dialogue, however, does not actually point in this direction. The conclusion is that they all need a teacher to help them out. Socrates makes clear that he needs one as much as anyone else. So the explicit conclusion suggests that Socratic ignorance has left them all directionless.

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Unsettling Questions Yet there are several features of this situation that are somewhat unsettling. (i) Although Socrates himself never lays any claim to know what courage is—in fact, he insists he does not know—he clearly knows enough about what it is to come up with effective counterexamples to analyses offered by Laches and Nicias. There is only one case in which his interlocutor rejects Socrates’s counterexample; that is the case of the Crommyon sow. We readers can appreciate that Nicias has a good reason for maintaining that non-human animals, even though, like the Crommyon sow, they are capable of ferocity, are not capable of bravery. The fact that Socrates does not contest Nicias’s reasoning is further reason to think that Socrates must have a pretty good grasp of what courage is. Similarly, (ii) although neither Laches nor Nicias can offer an account of courage that satisfies the stringent demands of Socrates, they do know enough about what it is to offer suggestions that are worth taking seriously. Moreover, they know enough to be able to recognize that the counterexamples Socrates offers to their suggested analyses are (with the exception, again, of the Crommyon sow) effective counterexamples. Moreover, Nicias makes a good case for rejecting the sow counterexample. Finally, (iii) it is unclear how any of them, either Laches, Nicias, or Socrates himself, would be able to recognize a teacher, should they happen to find one. We should keep these unsettling thoughts in mind in the chapters to follow. These three points together should make us wonder whether the elenchus, as a form of inquiry, holds out a serious prospect of leading to the discovery of what courage is. What Socrates and his friends remain uncertain about at the end of the dialogue is whether knowing what to fear and what to hope for is what courage is, just by itself, or whether it is virtue itself, and not just one of the virtues. It is hard to see how Socrates could establish whether virtue is in this way one, just by an elenctic examination of people like Laches and Nicias. Could Socrates determine by elenctic examination whether a putative teacher of what courage is really has knowledge of what it is? It is plausible to suppose that Socrates might use an elenchus to prove that a candidate teacher does not know what courage is. He could perhaps do that by trapping the putative teacher in contradiction. But it is not clear how he could use an elenchus to establish that someone knows what courage is. We shall return to these worries in Chaps. 5 and 6.

CHAPTER 3

Analyzing Piety: Euthyphro

Abstract  A close reading of the Euthyphro, a dialog attempting to answer the question, “What is piety?” The discussion focuses on the central argument that piety cannot be defined as being loved by the gods. The six key features of the elenchus are all shown to be present, and the dialogue, once again, ends in perplexity. Keywords  Socratic method • Euthyphro • Piety • Paradox of Analysis

In some ways Plato’s early dialogue, Euthyphro, seems to be quite typical of his early dialogues. But in some ways it is also somewhat peculiar. Before I try to highlight some of the commonalities and some of the peculiarities, I shall attempt to give this dialogue a reasonably close reading. In this dialogue, unlike the Laches, Socrates has only a single interlocutor, who is, of course, Euthyphro. One important thing about Euthyphro is that he considers himself to be an expert in theology, the very subject on which Socrates questions him. Whereas Socrates’s chief interlocutors in the Laches doubtless considered themselves experts in warfare—they were, after all, generals in the Athenian army—they did not consider themselves experts in explaining what courage is, which is what Socrates questioned them about. One might argue that, since courage is the chief virtue of a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0_3

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soldier, and cowardice the chief vice, a general, of all people, should be an expert on what courage actually is. Moreover, in the dialogue, Laches and Nicias clearly begin by thinking they do know what courage is, although they do not exactly claim expertise on the subject. By contrast, Euthyphro begins by claiming expertise about piety, which is exactly what Socrates questions him about. When Socrates asks him if he has no fear of being wrong about what impiety is, he responds: T1. I should be of no use, Socrates, and Euthyphro would not be superior to the majority of men, if I did not have accurate knowledge of all such things [as piety and impiety]. (4e–5a)

As we should expect, Socrates denies that he has any such expertise. He responds to Euthyphro’s boast by saying that he should become Euthyphro’s pupil (5a). And he has a special reason to get clearer about the nature of piety, since he himself has been charged with impiety and is about to stand trial on that charge (5ab).

Filial Piety In addition to Euthyphro’s claimed expertise in theology, there is another reason why Euthyphro should know what piety is. He is on a mission to charge his own father with impiety. According to the story he tells Socrates, a family servant, in a drunken rage, killed a household slave. Euthyphro’s father had the man bound and thrown into a ditch while he went off to ask a priest what to do. Hunger, cold, and his bonds brought death to the man. The father was therefore guilty, as we should put it today, of negligent homicide. It might seem strange to us that someone thought guilty of negligent homicide should be charged with impiety. But the ancient Greeks considered homicide a desecration of the city that might bring divine retribution if it were not atoned for. Whereas we might think of negligent homicide as a crime against the state, the Athenians thought of it as a crime against the gods, and against the divine order. On the other hand, filial piety was also an important virtue of Greek society. For this reason, one who charged his own father with a serious crime would have to be very clear about the nature of the offense, as well as very clear that one’s father was guilty of it. Thus Socrates says to Euthyphro,

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T2. [Y]ou think that your knowledge of the divine, and of piety, is so accurate that, when those things happened as you say, you have no fear of having acted impiously in bringing your father to trial? (4e)

It is to T2 that Euthyphro offers his boastful response, T1.

What Is Piety? The stage is thus set for Socrates to ask his “What is F-ness?” question. And he does so with great care: T3. So tell me now, by Zeus, what you just now maintained you clearly knew: what kind of thing do you say that godliness and ungodliness are, both as regards murder and other things; or is the pious not the same and alike in every action, and the impious the opposite of all that is pious and like itself, and everything that is to be impious presents us with one form (idea) or appearance in so far as it is impious? (5cd)

Euthyphro agrees. So Socrates continues: T4. Tell me then, what is the pious, and what the impious, do you say? (5d)

Euthyphro responds in a way that is typical both for him and for the elenctic dialogues. It is typical for the elenctic dialogues that the interlocutor will first respond to the “What is F-ness?” question with one or more examples of things that are F. It is typical for Euthyphro that he counts his own actions as exemplary: T5. I say that the pious is to do what I am doing now, to prosecute the wrongdoer, be it about murder or temple robbery or anything else, whether the wrongdoer is your father or your mother or anyone else; not to prosecute is impious. And observe, Socrates, that I can cite powerful evidence that the law is so. (5cd)

Socrates, of course, will not accept mere examples of pious actions as a satisfactory answer to his question, “What is piety?” He gets Euthyphro to agree that there are many other pious actions besides the ones Euthyphro has mentioned. He proceeds:

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T6. Bear in mind then that I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but that form itself (auto to eidos) that makes all pious actions pious [or: by which they are pious], for you agreed that all impious actions are impious and all pious actions pious through one form, or don’t you remember? (6de)

Euthyphro says he remembers.

The Inner Paradeigma Socrates then adds something very important: T7. Tell me then what this form (idea) itself is, so that I may look upon it, and using it as a model [or: template, paradeigma], say that any action of yours or another’s that is of that kind is pious, and if it is not that it is not. (6e)

This passage is crucial for understanding the motivation of the elenchus in the Euthyphro, and perhaps in elenctic dialogues in general. In T7 Socrates makes clear that he supposes we recognize instances of piety, if at all, by “looking at” an inner paradeigma. What is this paradeigma supposed to be? The translator, G.M.A Grube, offers “model” as a translation. In line with that translation, we might suppose that what Socrates has in mind is the inner representation or model of a paradigm case of piety. But if we look ahead to what Socrates actually demands from Euthyphro, we see that it is not the description of a paradigm case of piety he is after; rather what he wants is an explanatory set of necessary and sufficient conditions for an action to count as being pious. With this in mind, I suggest that we translate paradeigma as “template” and understand it to be something from which we can, so to speak, “read off” explanatory necessary and sufficient conditions for an action to count as being pious. The idea that we need to be able to gaze at such an “inner template” to be able to determine whether a given action meets explanatory conditions that are both individually necessary and jointly sufficient for that action to count as a pious action, is both attractive and crippling. It is attractive because it seems to be the only foolproof way we could have of recognizing instances of pious actions. It is crippling because, as the discussion that follows suggests, we may well not be able to come up with any satisfactory set of such conditions, even though we think we know what piety is.

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The First Suggestion Euthyphro tries to respond to Socrates’s request. This is his first try: T8. Well then, what is dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious. (7a)

This response might be objected to in various ways. Most obviously, it seems to make no room for actions that, pre-analytically, ought to count as being neither pious nor impious. Other things being equal, scratching one’s ear would be an action that is neither pious nor impious. But according to T8, if it is not dear to the gods, it is impious, which is surely the wrong result. Socrates, however, says nothing about this difficulty. Instead he focuses on the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of disagreements among the gods. As pictured by the ancient Greeks, the gods are constantly bickering. As Socrates puts the matter, somewhat more politely (7e), they are “at odds with one another.” There follows an interesting and logically sophisticated discussion of what exactly the gods are in disagreement about (8d– e).1 But eventually Euthyphro offers this way around the problem of divine disagreement:

The Second Suggestion T9. I would certainly say that the pious is what all the gods love, and the opposite, what all the gods hate, is the impious. (9e)

This passage gives us the analysis that Socrates criticizes in the most famous part of the dialogue. In that discussion, both Socrates and Euthyphro drop the qualifier, “all.” But we can understand it to be implicit. So, with “all” as an implicit qualifier this is the suggested analysis they discuss: A1. x is pious ↔ x is god-loved. 1  Socrates makes what today would be called a “scope distinction.” The question is whether they disagree about whether wrongdoing should be punished. In effect, Socrates contrasts these two claims:

For all x, if x is a case of wrongdoing, the gods agree that x should be punished. The gods agree that, for all x, if x is a case of wrongdoing, x should be punished. His suggestion is that, even if (ii) is true, (i) is not.

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In the discussion Socrates seems to understand A1 as stating some kind of strong equivalence, strong enough to underwrite substituting, salva veritate, the expression “god-loved” for the expression “pious,” and vice versa, in almost any context.2 Socrates doesn’t actually discuss this assumption, let alone try to justify it. But, without this assumption, his crucial argument will not work. Next Socrates asks Euthyphro the question that has become the most famous passage from the whole dialogue: T10. Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? (10a)

This question poses what has come to be called “the Euthyphro Problem.” Suppose we try answering T10 by choosing the first horn of the dilemma it poses—that is, by saying that, for anything, x, such that x is pious, the quality of being pious is what makes the gods love x. One who grasps this horn of the dilemma is thereby committed to what later thinkers have called “theological rationalism.” For a theological rationalist, there is some reverential quality possessed by all and only those actions the gods love. Having this quality is what makes just those actions, and none other, pious.3 On the other hand, if we choose the second horn of the dilemma by saying that it is simply the feature of being loved by the gods that makes pious those actions that are, in fact, pious, we shall be accepting what later thinkers have called “theological voluntarism.” For the theological voluntarist it is the love or approval of the gods that actually makes an action that is pious to be pious. In the dialogue there follows a discussion that is one of the most obscure in all Plato. I shall not attempt a full reconstruction of it. It issues in this barely intelligible principle:

2  Not in every context, however. Even if “Being god-loved is a satisfactory analysis of being pious” is true, we won’t accept “Being pious is an analysis of being pious.” This is the “paradox of analysis.” It will be difficult to spell out in a satisfactory way just which contexts must allow for the inter-substitutivity of “pious” and “god-loved” in such a way as to leave Socrates’s crucial argument in the Euthyphro intact without running afoul of this paradox. 3  Choosing the first horn of the dilemma requires one to say that A1 is not an analysis of piety at all. It may be true of all pious acts that they are god-loved; it may even be necessarily true of all pious acts that they are god-loved. But this fact does not tell us what it is about the quality of being pious that makes the acts that have it loved by the gods.

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T11. I want to say this, namely that if anything comes to be, or is affected, it does not come to be because it is coming to be, but it is coming to be because it comes to be; nor is it affected because it is being affected but because something affects it. Or do you not agree? (10bc)

Socrates’s idea seems to be something like this. What makes something to be a carried thing is that someone carries it. But it is not the case that what makes someone carry something is that it is a carried thing. Similarly, what makes something a loved thing is that someone loves it. But what makes someone love it is not that it is a loved thing. Suppose now that some action, A, is the action of performing a certain ritual sacrifice. And suppose that A is loved by the gods. Then what makes A god-loved is that the gods love it. But what makes the gods love A is not that it is god-loved.

The Central Argument Mercifully, we don’t, however, have to understand T11 fully to understand a key component of Socrates’s rejection of A1. Socrates reasons this way: T12. But if the god-loved and the pious were the same, my dear Euthyphro, and the pious was being loved because it was pious, then the god-loved would also be being loved because it was god-loved. (10e–11a)

Socrates had secured Euthyphro’s agreement to a number of assumptions, including these three: P1. The god-loved and the pious are the same. (T9) P2. The pious is loved by the gods because it is, in fact, pious. P3. The god-loved is not loved by the gods because it is god-loved.

The first assumption, P1, is just another way of stating the analysis Euthyphro has proposed, that is, A1. The second assumption, P2, is a rationality assumption concerning the gods. We are to suppose that the gods have some reason to love what they love. And this reason is that those things they love have the quality of being pious, however that is to be understood. The third assumption, P3, is also a rationality assumption concerning the gods. Their reason for loving whatever they love cannot be simply that they love it. To say that they love what they love just because

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they love it is, in effect, to say that they have no reason for loving what they love. But if, as P1 tells us, the god-loved is just the very same thing as the pious, then, Socrates assumes, we should be able to substitute the expression “god-loved” for “pious” in P2 to get the contradictory of P3, namely, P3* The god-loved is loved by the gods because it is god-loved.

which Euthyphro, in accepting P3, has rejected. Socrates draws this moral from the discussion so far: T13. I’m afraid, Euthyphro, that when you were asked what piety is, you did not wish to make its nature (ousia) clear to me, but you told me an affect or quality (pathos) of it, that the pious has the quality of being loved by all the gods, but you have not yet told me what the pious is. (11ab)

Thus, Socrates rejects the second analysis suggested by Euthyphro, A1. Socrates does not reject A1 by appeal to counterexamples. Rather, he rejects it because it does not explain what makes pious actions pious. By giving us a feature of pious actions other than what it is that makes them pious, as if it were what makes them pious, he has rendered the gods’ love of pious actions unintelligible. If we were to suppose that having that feature is all there is to being pious, then we would be impugning the rationality of the gods by supposing that they have no real reason for loving what they love; they simply love it because they love it. It is not clear how much of this Socratic reasoning Euthyphro actually takes in. Socrates follows up T13 with the suggestion that they start over and try again to find a satisfactory account of what piety is. Euthyphro responds to this apparently unwelcome suggestion by giving his first sign of cognitive overload. It is his first admission of philosophical perplexity: T14. But Socrates, I have no way of telling you what I have in mind, for whatever proposition we put forward goes around and refuses to stay put where we establish it. (11b)

This feeling of cognitive vertigo is characteristic of what the elenctic dialogues induce. It is given, as we shall see, its canonical expression in the dialogue, Meno.

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Socrates tries to lighten the discussion up a little by comparing the statements of Euthyphro to the statues of the sculptor, Daedalus, which were so lifelike that, as it was said, they would run away. But Euthyphro refuses to take blame for the apparent motility of his statements. It is Socrates, he says, who makes them seem to move around and keeps them from staying put (11cd). Socrates then comes up with his own suggestion: T15. See whether you think all that is pious is, of necessity, just. (11e)

Euthyphro agrees to that suggestion. So Socrates presses on: T16. And is then all that is just pious? Or is all that is pious just, but not all that is just pious, but some of it is and some is not? (11e–12a)

Euthyphro has a little trouble with the idea of, as we might put it, “proper inclusion.” But with help from some examples, he comes to understand the point and makes this proposal: T17. I think, Socrates, that the godly and pious is the part of the just that is concerned with the care of the gods, while that concerned with the care of men is the remaining part of justice. (12e)

Socrates then asks Euthyphro for  some help in understanding what care is. But it is actually Socrates himself who provides the help. He says: T18. Now care in each case has the same effect; it aims at the good and the benefit of the object cared for. (13b)

Euthyphro goes along with this suggestion. But, after a long discussion, Socrates asks the crucial question: T19. But tell me, what benefit do the gods derive from the gifts they receive from us? (14e)

Euthyphro rejects the idea that the gods might actually be benefited by human beings. He asks, rhetorically, T20. Do you suppose, Socrates, that the gods are benefited by what they receive from us? (15a)

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Euthyphro is left saying that the pious is what is simply dear to the gods, that is, what they love (15b). Socrates reminds him of the argument he had produced earlier against the proposed account of piety according to which it is what is loved by the gods. Socrates asks Euthyphro to try again to say what piety is: T21. I know well that you believe you have clear knowledge of piety and impiety. So tell me, my good Euthyphro, and do not hide what you think it is. (15de)

But Euthyphro has had enough of the Socratic elenchus: T22. Some other time, Socrates, for I am in a hurry now, and it is time for me to go. (15e)

Thus the dialogue ends with the perplexity that Euthyphro had expressed in T14 left unresolved. Let’s think now about the six features characteristic of the Socratic elenchus that I mentioned in Chap. 1. First, this dialogue does have a lead investigator who asks questions of one or more interlocutors—in this case, only one. Sometimes this feature is more narrowly specified in such a way as to suggest that Socrates, as the lead investigator, simply asks questions and does not suggest any answers. But, as we have seen, Socrates here helps Euthyphro out by himself suggesting that all that is pious is, of necessity, just (T15), even if not everything that is just is pious (T16). Presumably, the idea is that piety is only one of the virtues, just as courage, in the Laches, is said not to be virtue entire, but only one proper part of virtue, that is, one of the virtues. Secondly, the F-ness that is the target of the investigation is indeed a moral kind, in a suitably broad sense of “moral,” since piety is one of the virtues. And thirdly, Socrates himself claims not to know what this F-ness is; indeed, he tells Euthyphro he wants Euthyphro to teach him what it is. In the fourth place, the lead investigator is not satisfied with anything less than a properly explanatory account or analysis of what makes pious acts pious. He rejects the suggestion that the pious is simply what all the gods love on the grounds that to say of an action that it is god-loved is at most to give a pathos of all pious acts, since it does not reveal the nature (ousia) of pious acts (T13).

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As for the fifth requirement, this dialogue presents one of the most explicit statements of the motivation for a Socratic elenchus. In T7 Socrates asks for a statement of what the form of piety itself is, so that he may “look upon it” and “use it as a template (paradeigma)” so as to be able to say of any action that it is pious, if it is, or not pious, if it is not. The last feature is that the investigation, typically, ends in perplexity. In the case of the Euthyphro, the statement of perplexity comes in the middle, in T14; but, since the dialogue ends with the very same issue unresolved that had led to the expression of perplexity in T14, we can say that the dialogue also ends in perplexity.

CHAPTER 4

Blameworthy Ignorance: Apology

Abstract  Both of the elenctic dialogues we have looked at in Chaps. 1 and 2 end in perplexity. So what is the point of the Socratic elenchus, if its prospects are so dismal? We might hope to find an answer in the Apology. There we find a possible motivation for the elenchus in a principle of “epistemic purity”—the idea that one ought not to think one knows something that, in fact, one does not know. Keywords  Socratic method • Apology • Delphic oracle

Why should we expect that Laches and Nicias can say what courage, or bravery, is? More specifically, why should we expect that they can do so in a way that will satisfy Socrates? They are not professional philosophers, or academic rhetoricians. Why should we think that they can offer explanatory necessary and sufficient conditions for an action or a person to count as being brave?

Examples I said in Chap. 2 that Laches and Nicias should know what bravery is, since they are generals. The idea would be that generals need to know what bravery is, since they are themselves soldiers and they oversee other soldiers, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0_4

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and soldiers need to be brave for them to win battles, where winning battles is taken to be the appropriate mission of soldiers. But one might protest that, in order to foster bravery in themselves and the soldiers under them, generals do not need to be able to state anything so rigorous as a set of explanatorily necessary and sufficient conditions for an act or a person to count as being brave. All they need is some good examples to follow. No doubt Socrates would reply to this objection that examples will be no good to Nicias or Laches unless they also know what it is about the examples that make them cases of bravery. Laches may have had a good example of bravery in someone who was “willing to remain at his post and to defend himself against the enemy without running away” (Laches 190e). But as Socrates points out, doing that is not a necessary condition for bravery; one might also be brave in retreat. Moreover, remaining at one’s post against enemy assault is not sufficient for bravery. There may be situations in which remaining at one’s post would be foolhardy and wasteful of one’s life, and therefore not even “wise endurance.” To know how to use the examples one has in mind, it is quite plausible to suppose, one needs explanatorily necessary and sufficient conditions for an action or a person to count as being brave. At any rate that seems to be the idea Socrates has in mind in the Laches. The same would seem to hold for the Euthyphro as well. Socrates rejects Euthyphro’s attempt to explain what piety is by saying, “The pious is to do what I am doing now” (Euthyphro 5d). Socrates says he wants Euthyphro to specify “that form itself (auto to eidos) that makes all pious actions pious” (6d). Then he says he wants to use that form itself as an inner template (paradeigma) so as to be able to “say of any action of yours or another’s that is of that kind is pious, and if it is not, that it is not” (6e).

The Hard Rock of Perplexity However, Socrates and his interlocutors are not able, in the Laches, to come up with a satisfactory analysis of courage. Nor are Socrates and Euthyphro able to come up with a satisfactory analysis of piety. In fact, the elenctic dialogues all end in perplexity (aporia).1 So what is the point of the Socratic elenchus, if the prospects for providing a satisfactory analysis of any of the moral kinds Socrates is interested in are so dismal? And why 1  Terence Irwin makes an exception of the dialogue, Crito. But it is not clear that that is an elenctic dialogue.

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might Plato have wanted to expend his great philosophical efforts and literary skill on presenting the elenctic dialogues? We might hope to find an answer to those questions in Plato’s Apology, which is, of course, Plato’s record of the trial of Socrates. In that trial Socrates seeks to defend his philosophical activity in the face of accusations made against him.

The Delphic Oracle The thing anyone who has read Plato’s Apology2 is most likely to have remembered is the story about how the Delphic oracle had said that no one was wiser than Socrates. This is a story that, according to Plato’s account, Socrates himself told at his trial and in his own defense. Presumably, Socrates meant it to help explain to jurors why he had gone around Athens badgering people with questions, with the result that, as he himself puts it in the Apology, “I am very unpopular with many people” (28a). Socrates reports being taken aback by the oracle’s assertion that no one was wiser than Socrates. Apparently he found the oracle’s claim difficult to believe. He considered whether it might have been a riddle. “I am very conscious,” he says, “that I am not wise at all” (21b). So he set about trying to determine if there were in Athens someone wiser than he. After examining a man thought by others (and, Socrates adds, slyly, by the man himself) to be wise, Socrates concludes, “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile [or fine and good, kalon kagathon], but he thinks he knows something, when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know” (21d). In the Apology Socrates goes on to relate how he examined others and found that they, too, just like the first man he interrogated, did not really know things they thought they knew. The only exceptions Socrates encountered—that is, the only people he found to know something fine and good—were the craftspeople, who, Socrates reports, did actually know many fine things (polla kala). Socrates does not explain what good or fine things the craftspeople knew but, presumably, it was things like 2  “Apology” as a title of this work is a transliteration of apologia, which means “defense,” not “apology.”

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how to throw a beautiful pot or how to make a handsome shoe (22d). But even the craftspeople came up short, at least by Socrates’s lights. The trouble with them, Socrates explains, was that they also thought they knew things that were beyond their area of expertise. Socrates says he prefers to be as he is, “with neither their wisdom nor their ignorance” (22d). The implication is that Socrates, in his own assessment, is also wiser than the craftspeople, and so wiser than anyone else he has yet encountered.

The Oracle Story Applied How well does this story fit the picture of Socrates we gain from the Laches and the Euthyphro? In those dialogues there is no suggestion that Socrates is trying to determine whether his interlocutors are wiser than he is. In fact, in the Laches Socrates goes out of his way to deny that he has any expertise “in the care of the soul” or in the nature of courage. He suggests that both he and his interlocutors look for someone who has this expertise. In his penultimate speech he says this: T1. What I say we ought to do, my friends—since this is just between ourselves—is to join in searching for the best possible teacher, first for ourselves—we really need one—and then for the young men, sparing neither money nor anything else. (201a)

In the Euthyphro Socrates initially makes it seem as if he accepts Euthyphro’s claim of expertise concerning the nature of piety, and offers himself as Euthyphro’s pupil to learn what it is. Perhaps we are to understand Socrates as less straightforward about his assessment of the situation. In any case, the Euthyphro does not offer any direct confirmation of the Apology story that Socrates was on a mission to see if the oracle was right and no one was wiser than Socrates. One trouble with the Apology story is that it seems to make the Socratic enterprise of only limited interest to the rest of us. I don’t know about you, but certainly no oracle has ever said that no one is wiser than I am! The serious point here is that the story of the Delphic oracle does not, by itself, offer a compelling reason why it might be worthwhile for others to engage in a Socratic elenchus. And. if the elenchus is to be taken as our model for philosophical analysis, we must say that the oracle story does not, by itself, help us understand why it might be worthwhile to engage in philosophical analysis. In any case, it is implausible to suppose that the

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main motivation for Socrates’s relentless activity in going around and asking other people questions they could not answer satisfactorily was his desire to find someone wiser than he was. Suppose, however, that I am wrong. Suppose that the historical Socrates did continue examinations throughout the rest of his life to see if anyone was wiser than he. Or suppose, at least, that Plato wanted us to think that continuing to see whether he was out-wisdomed by anyone else was what motivated Socrates to conduct his various elenctic examinations. What we would have to conclude, in that case, would be that Socrates never gave the rest of us any good reason to conduct, for ourselves, the elenctic examination of others.

Finding Another Motivation for the Elenchus If the Socratic elenchus is at least an interesting model of philosophical inquiry, the motivation for conducting such an inquiry must be something more than determining whether anybody is wiser than the lead investigator. And, in fact, as I have already pointed out, the motivation for conducting an elenctic inquiry in the Laches and in the Euthyphro is something quite different. In the Laches the motivation is to see whether we have an understanding of what courage is so that we can reasonably assess whether military training for young men might help instill courage in them. And in the Euthyphro the motivation is to determine whether we have an understanding of what piety is so that we can reasonably assess whether Euthyphro is doing a pious thing in charging his father with impiety. The motivation for philosophical analysis in the Laches and the Euthyphro thus concerns what the ancient Greeks call phronêsis, practical wisdom. We must often make judgments about whether a given action or activity is consistent with, or perhaps will even further, a certain moral virtue. We cannot reasonably make such judgments, the reasoning goes, if we are not clear about what the relevant moral virtue is. Perhaps Socrates’s requirements for being clear about what bravery is, or what piety is, are too stringent. But one can readily agree that, other things being equal, getting clearer about what bravery or piety requires will further one’s chances of making reasonable judgments about what will likely promote, or perhaps just be consistent with, bravery or piety. Is there, in the Apology itself, any suggestion that Socrates might have had a more satisfying motivation for practicing the elenchus than trying to establish that the oracle is right: no one is wiser than Socrates? I think

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there is. And I think that loftier motivation can provide a more plausible candidate for something that might motivate you and me to engage in philosophical analysis.

The Divine Mission To start with, we should emphasize something that I have already noted: Socrates in the Apology repeatedly characterizes his examination of others as a divine mission. In fact, he says that god has given him the mission of practicing philosophy in Athens (29d). He likens practicing philosophy in Athens to being “attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly” (30e). But how exactly does he suppose he functions like a gadfly when he conducts elenctic examinations? And why does he think it is a good thing for Athenians to have a resident and functioning gadfly?

Blameworthy Ignorance Perhaps the key to understanding why, according to the Apology, elenctic examination is a good thing for the person being examined is found in the following passage: T2. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know. (29b)

It seems that Socrates conceived his divine mission as a charge to eradicate a certain kind of ignorance, in fact, a blameworthy kind, namely, the ignorance of believing one knows what one does not know. “As long as I draw breath and am able,” Socrates tells the court, T3. I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul? Then, if one of you disputes this and says he does not care, I shall not let him

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go at once or leave him, but I shall question him, examine him and test him, and if I do not think he has attained the goodness that he says he has, I shall reproach him because he attaches little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things. I shall treat in this way anyone I happen to meet, young, and old, citizen and stranger, and more so the citizens because you are more kindred to me. Be sure that this is what the god orders me to do, and I think there is no greater blessing for the city than my service to the god. (29d–30a)

In this statement of his divine mission Socrates includes much more than merely conducting an elenctic examination of virtually everyone he meets. Still, it does seem to include at least that much. In fact, it also includes self-examination. A little earlier in the Apology he offers this testimony to his motivation: T4. It would have been a dreadful way to behave, gentlemen of the jury, if, at [the battles of] Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium, I had, at the risk of death, like anyone else, remained at my post where those you had elected to command had ordered me, and then, when the god ordered me, as I thought and believed, to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others, I had abandoned my post for fear of death or anything else. (28e)

The implication of T4 is that it would have been as bad to abandon what the philosophical god had ordered him to take up as it would have been to abandon the military post his duly-elected military superiors had assigned him. This sounds rather different than simply trying to establish whether anyone in Athens was wiser than he. Moreover, his god-given task, as he saw it, was not only to examine others, but also to examine himself. Socrates’s understanding of the god-given task of examining both himself and others was apparently aimed at keeping himself and others from believing that they know things that, in fact, they do not know. So his divine mission was guided by a principle that would belong to the ethics of belief.

The Ethics of Belief We might today think that this is a principle that should belong to the ethics of belief:

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P1. One ought not to believe anything on insufficient evidence.3

Socrates does not commit himself to P1, either in the Apology or elsewhere. Instead, this seems to be the focus of his concern: P2. One ought not to think one knows something that, in fact, one does not know.

It might seem puzzling how anyone could follow P2. How could one ever rule out that one believes that one knows all sorts of things that one does not, in fact know? Descartes faced this problem. In Meditation IV he asks why we should not blame God for letting us make mistakes. Surely, he suggests, God could have made us so that we never make any mistakes. Descartes’s first reply to this cognitive problem of evil (or perhaps better: problem of cognitive evil) by arguing that, whereas our will is infinite, our intellect is merely finite. This disparity is, he thinks, what allows us to make mistakes. To be sure, even with limited intellect, we wouldn’t make mistakes if we knew the limitations of our intellect. In particular, he says that we would not make mistakes if we didn’t think we know things that in fact we don’t know. He admits that God could have made us so that we would immediately recognize that some belief we have is not knowledge. But, he reasons, we can do that for ourselves. All we have to do is to remember to use the test for knowledge, namely clarity and distinctness. If we check each time to see whether we apprehend with clarity and distinctness what we think is some knowledge, we will recognize that what we mistakenly take to be knowledge is not the real thing. So we will not make any mistakes. Socrates does not have a criterion for knowledge, as Descartes does. So how can he guard against thinking that he knows something that he does not, in fact, know? And how does he think we can do that? Socrates’s answer seems to be that he and we should be always examining ourselves to determine whether what we think we know is also something we really do know. Although no elenchus, or series of elenchi, will prove that we really do know what we think we know, continuingly

3  This is the principle W.K. Clifford made famous and to which William James responded with his essay, “The Will to Believe.”

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examining ourselves and others is the best guard we have against mistakenly believing that we know something when, in reality, we do not. The idea here seems to be a certain sort of epistemic purity. It is not the epistemic purity of not believing anything on insufficient evidence, or for inadequate reason. Nor is it the epistemic purity of checking everything out for oneself—without appeal to authority, even the authority of experts. It is only the purity of constantly checking to see that what one thinks one knows is really knowledge. When Socrates speaks of the need to care for the soul, his idea may be that believing one knows what one does not know is a kind of pollution of the soul. Note that, so far anyway, Socrates’s epistemic ideal does not seem especially philosophical. To be sure, he speaks of not ceasing “to practice philosophy” (29d). But he doesn’t give us any examples of philosophical questions he might have asked someone, or himself, and then checked to see whether he or they knew the answer to that question. In fact, the only passage in the Apology in which Socrates mentions a specific question to which, as he claims, others think they know the answer and he doesn’t, is this one: T5. To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know. (29a)

I would certainly say that the question whether death is a blessing or the greatest evil, is a genuinely philosophical question. However, it is not a question about virtue, or one of the virtues. It is not even a question of the form, “What is F-ness?” and so it is not a question of the sort we have identified as framing a Socratic elenchus. Still, the epistemic ideal expressed in the principle P2 is a plausible motivation for conducting elenctic examinations of oneself and others. As we shall see in Chap. 10, Plato, even after he has lost interest in writing dialogues in the elenctic form, still finds that the evil of believing that one knows what one does not know a most blameworthy ignorance.

CHAPTER 5

Virtue in Socratic Ignorance: Charmides

Abstract  Our results so far raise a question: what is the point of coming up with philosophical analyses when one has little reason to think that those efforts will ever be entirely satisfactory? The Charmides may provide an answer, for it raises the possibility that the virtue that is the topic of this dialogue, sôphrosunê (self-mastery), may actually turn out to be the limited wisdom that Socrates claims to have, namely, self-knowledge. Keywords  Socratic method • Charmides • Sôphrosunê • Temperance

The Charmides is a puzzling dialogue. In many respects it looks like a standard elenctic dialogue. Socrates is again the lead investigator. He has two interlocutors—the beautiful boy, Charmides, and the boy’s uncle and guardian, Critias. Like other elenctic dialogues, this one portrays an attempt to answer a “What is F-ness?” question. And, like other elenctic dialogues, the F-ness under investigation is a particular virtue. The virtue this time is sôphrosunê, which is often translated as “temperance.” So far, we seem to have a standard elenctic dialogue.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0_5

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Self-Mastery However, the troubles begin when we try to figure out what exactly sôphrosunê is supposed to mean in this dialogue. In the Republic, which is not an early dialogue, but a middle one, it does seem to mean “temperance.” But for the Charmides that doesn’t seem right. For one thing, the English word “temperance” suggests a somewhat more limited and also perhaps more moralistic virtue than what Plato has in mind. The idea of being able to control one’s appetites and passions does seem to be part of what Plato might have had in mind. But I think Plato conceives sôphrosunê more positively as a kind of inner sovereignty. So I am going to render this elusive Greek term as “self-mastery.”1 Since the Charmides is an early Platonic dialogue, we can expect that Socrates will claim, as indeed he does claim, not to know the answer to the question, “What is self-mastery?” But here there is an irony of a sort that Plato loves to indulge in. Socrates is enamored of beautiful boys, and Charmides is, apparently, a knockout. Critias suggests to Socrates a way to get Charmides to sit next to him. “You see, just lately he’s complained of a headache when he gets up in the morning,” Critias explains. “Why not pretend to him that you know a remedy for it” (155a). Socrates agrees to the subterfuge, which works. Socrates explains what happens next: T1. In the end he came and sat down between me and Critias. And then … I really was in difficulties, and although I had thought it would be perfectly easy to talk to him, I found my previous brash confidence quite gone. And when Critias said that I was the person who knew the remedy and he turned his full gaze upon me in a manner beyond description and seemed on the point of asking a question, and when everyone in the palaestra surged all around us in a circle, then, my noble friend, I saw inside his cloak and caught on fire and was quite beside myself. And it occurred to me that Cydias was the wisest love-poet when he gave someone advice on the subject of beautiful boys and said that “the fawn should beware lest, while taking a look at the lion, he should provide part of the lion’s dinner,” because I felt as if I had been snapped up by such a creature. All the same, when he asked me if I knew the headache remedy, I managed somehow to answer that I did. (155cd)

1  And I will replace “temperance” with “self-mastery” in the translations of passages I quote from the Charmides.

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A little later Critias says this to Socrates: T2. Charmides not only outstrips his contemporaries in beauty of form but also in this very thing for which you say you have the charm; it was self-­ mastery (sôphrosunê), wasn’t it?

“Yes, indeed it was,” Socrates says. And Critias continues: Then you must know that not only does he have the reputation of being the most [self-masterly] man of the day, but that he is second to none in everything else appropriate to his age. (157d)

Although Charmides is the one said by Critias to have self-mastery, not Socrates, it is actually Socrates who first shows, in his encounter with Charmides, that he has self-mastery. This irony gives us a clue for interpreting the dialogue as a whole. But more on this later on.

A Natural Virtue? One might wonder whether it is plausible to suggest that a young boy already has the virtue of self-mastery. Surely having that virtue requires maturity. To mitigate the implausibility of supposing that the boy, Charmides, has the virtue of self-mastery, I suggest we take a look at Plato’s Laws, written many years after Plato wrote the Charmides. There, I think, we can find a clue as to what Plato might have meant by attributing self-mastery to Charmides: T3. Athenian: Then this is what [our companion] will say: “Give me a state under the absolute control of a dictator, and let the dictator be young, with a good memory, quick to learn, courageous, and with a character of natural elevation. And if his other abilities are going to be any use, his dictatorial soul should also possess that quality which was earlier agreed to be an essential adjunct to all the parts of virtue.” Clinias: I think the essential adjunct our companion means … is self-­ mastery (sôphrosunê). Right? Athenian: Yes, Clinias—but the everyday kind, not the kind we speak of in a heightened sense, when we compel self-mastery to be [practical wisdom] (phronêsis) as well. I mean [instead] the spontaneous instinct that springs up in children and animals so that some are continent and others incontinent. (710a)

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The self-mastery attributed to Charmides, I suggest, is a “spontaneous instinct” rather than a virtue that arises from discipline and cultivation. So conceived, self-mastery would be what Aristotle calls a “natural virtue.”2

Knowing One’s Own Virtues It is Critias in T2 who first attributes self-mastery to Charmides. Socrates later asks Charmides if he agrees with Critias, that is, if he agrees that he himself has the virtue of self-mastery. Charmides blushes and points out that it would be awkward for him to answer the question. He says it would be an odd thing (atopon) for him to deny he had this virtue. Moreover, to deny that he had it would be, in effect, to say that Critias and the others were lying when they attributed this virtue to him. But, if he were to agree that he had the virtue, that would appear to be distasteful or offensive, perhaps because it would be unseemly and inappropriately boastful to do so. Perhaps having the virtue of self-mastery would itself restrain him from agreeing that he had it! In any case, Socrates respects Charmides’s quandary but immediately puts him on the spot. Socrates says: T4. Now it is clear that if self-mastery is present in you, you have some opinion about it. Because it is necessary, I suppose, that if it really resides in you, it provides a sense of its presence, by means of which you would form an opinion not only that you have it but of what sort [of thing] it is. (159a)

So here we have a different basis for assuming that Socrates’s interlocutor should know what the F-ness is, about which he is being questioned. It is not because he claims to be an expert on the subject, nor is it because he has a role or position that presupposes knowledge of what F-ness is. Instead, it is because he is said to have the virtue of F-ness and so must know what it is. Charmides actually agrees to this rather questionable assumption. Then Socrates adds: T4. Well then, since you know how to speak Greek … I suppose you could express this impression of yours in just the way it strikes you? (159a)

2

 See his Nicomachean Ethics 6.13.

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The assumption behind T4 is very important. The idea is that one who knows what F-ness is should be able to say what it is, and presumably to say in a way that will satisfy Socrates. That is, he should be able to offer a philosophical analysis of F-ness. As we noted in Chap. 2, Socrates says to Laches, “And what we know, we must, I suppose, be able to state” (190c). So we have these two assumptions: A1. Anyone who has a virtue, v, knows what v is. A2. Anyone who knows what a given virtue, v, is, can give a satisfactory account of what v is.

The Argument If we add to A1 and A2 the following assumption, 1. Charmides has the virtue, self-mastery. then we can get the conclusion, 2. Charmides knows what self-mastery is and can give a satisfactory account of what it is. These two assumptions lie at the very heart of the Socratic enterprise in the early Platonic dialogues. The interlocutors Socrates encounters are not philosophically trained. Sometimes they come to understand and appreciate the demand Socrates is making on them, sometimes they don’t. Laches is an example of someone who really becomes engaged in the Socratic enterprise.

The First Two Suggestions Four suggested analyses of self-mastery are discussed in the Charmides. The first two are offered by Charmides, even if only reluctantly. This is the first one: T5. At first he shied away and was rather unwilling to answer. Finally, however, he said that in his opinion self-mastery was doing everything in an orderly and quiet way. … “So I think,” he said, “taking it all together, that what you ask about is a sort of quietness.” (159b)

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Socrates rejects this first suggestion for what, in the end, is a rather simple reason. His idea is that having the virtue of self-mastery is unqualifiedly a good thing. His assumption is that it is always better to have a virtue than to lack it. But being quiet, even if it is sometimes a good thing, is not always a good thing. So self-mastery cannot be just any kind of quietness. The second suggestion that Charmides makes is that self-mastery is a sort of modesty. Socrates’s refutation of this suggestion is similar to his refutation of the first one. Having a virtue is always a good thing. But while it is sometimes good to be modest, sometimes it is not. So self-­ mastery is not modesty. At this point Charmides seems to have exhausted his own resources. The other two suggestions he makes are, he says, taken from what others have said. He turns to what he says he has heard someone else say that self-mastery is. What are we to conclude from this development? The reason for supposing that Charmides could explain what self-mastery is was that he has the virtue and, for this reason, must know what it is. If we still think that the virtue, as Socrates puts it, “resides in him” and “provides a sense of its presence,” even though he is unable to offer an analysis of that virtue, then we should give up on assumption A2, the assumption that one who knows what a given virtue is will be able to give a satisfactory account of what it is. But the idea that one who knows what bravery or piety or self-mastery is should be able to explain what the virtue is, is too basic to the Socratic elenchus to think of Socrates as giving it up easily. It would, I think, be easier for Socrates to give up assumption A1, the idea that anyone who has a virtue would have to know what it is. He could either give up A1 altogether, or say that it applies only to virtues that are possessed in their fully developed form, not to “natural virtues” that children or young people have. It is strange that Plato does not have Socrates explain how it can be that Charmides fails to be able to say in a satisfactory way what self-mastery is.

Another Interlocutor Socrates does not get his third suggested analysis from Charmides himself; rather, he says he has heard from someone else that self-mastery is “doing your own things” (161b). We might not take this suggested analysis seriously if we didn’t know that Plato has Socrates, in the Republic, develop

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the idea that justice in the ideal city consists in having every person do the job that it is that person’s job to perform. Charmides, as it turns out, is unable to do much by way of explanation or defense of this third suggestion; he looks to his uncle, Critias, for help: T6. “I’m at a total loss,” [Charmides] said. “But perhaps the one who said it didn’t know what it meant either.” And when he said this he smiled and looked at Critias. (162b)

Socrates is not surprised to see Charmides ask for help from Critias. He comments: T7. What I suspected earlier was certainly true, that Charmides had picked up this saying about self-mastery from Critias. And then Charmides, who wanted the author of the definition to take over the argument rather than himself, tried to provoke him to it by going on pointing out that the cause was lost. Critias couldn’t put up with this but seemed to me to be angry with Charmides just the way a poet is when his verse is mangled by the actors. So he gave him a look and said, “Do you suppose, Charmides, that just because you don’t understand what in the world the man meant who said that self-­ mastery was ‘minding your own business’, the man himself doesn’t understand either?” (162cd)

So Critias is shamed into defending the claim that he seems to have made in Charmides’s hearing on some other occasion. When Socrates shows this third suggestion to be unsatisfactory, Critias, who has now taken over as Socrates’s chief interlocutor, produces the fourth and final suggestion, which is that self-mastery is knowing oneself (164d). This suggestion is developed and discussed at some length; it is clearly meant to be the most important suggestion in the dialogue. As we could have anticipated, it, too, is defeated in the end. When Critias takes over, the basis for the Socratic elenchus has shifted. The assumption we began with was the idea that (i) Charmides has the virtue of sôphrosunê, self-mastery, (ii) anyone who has the virtue should know what it is, and (iii) knowing what it is brings with it the ability to offer a philosophically satisfactory analysis of the virtue. But when Charmides turns the witness chair over to his uncle Critias, he has given up either (i), (ii), or (iii), or perhaps two of the three, or perhaps all three.

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Why Critias? So, for whatever reason, Charmides cannot give a satisfactory account of self-mastery to Socrates. But what reason is there for thinking that Critias ought to be able to answer his “What is F-ness?” question? Very little reason at all. Here is the crucial passage: T8. “Well, my dear Critias,” said I, “there would be nothing remarkable in his being ignorant of the matter at his age, but you, because of your age and experience, are very likely to understand it. So if you agree that self-mastery is what the man said it was and take over the argument, I would be very happy to investigate with you the question whether what was said is true or not.” (162e)

Perhaps Socrates here has given up A2,3 the assumption that one who knows what a given virtue is will be able to give a satisfactory account of what it is, although that seems unlikely. More plausibly, he has given up A1, the assumption that anyone who has a virtue should know what the virtue is that he has. Of course, he could have simply qualified that assumption so that it would not apply to a young person. Plato doesn’t make clear exactly how or why the ground for the elenchus has shifted. It is perhaps worth returning to the point that Plato later, in the Republic, develops the idea of “doing one’s own things” as an analysis of another virtue, the virtue of justice. Critias’s discussion of this idea here in the Charmides seems almost to be a rehearsal for the later discussion in the Republic. But the point I want to emphasize here is that it is not treated as something an intelligent teenager might come up with, but rather more as an account a philosopher might conceive. No reason is given in the dialogue for thinking that Critias should know what sôphrosunê is. In fact, Critias seems to be used by Plato as a stand-in for Plato himself. One gets the impression that it is Plato who wants to discuss whether there is virtue in doing one’s own things and, especially, whether self-mastery might just be self-knowledge.

3  [In the original manuscript, Matthews used the label “PEA” for the principle he thinks Plato is unlikely to have given up. But this label occurs nowhere else in the manuscript or in any of his other works that I am aware of. I suspect that it is a residue from an earlier, later discarded, draft of this chapter—perhaps it abbreviated “Explanatory Account Principle” (see Ch. 7, p. 72). It seems clear, though, that he had our A2 in mind.—Ed.]

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Justification for Conducting an Elenchus So the Charmides does not present Socrates as taking someone we might naturally think must know what F-ness is and showing him that, in fact, he does not know (with the implication that we readers probably do not know either). Instead, it presents Plato as constructing a somewhat artificial dialogical framework in which to consider whether there might be a virtue of quietness, of modesty, of doing one’s own things, or of self-­ knowledge. Why should he want to do that? We saw in the last chapter that Socrates took the Delphic oracle’s saying “No one is wiser than Socrates” to mean that he had wisdom at least to a modest degree. After interrogating some of his fellow Athenians, he concluded that there were many things they thought they know that, in fact, they did not know. So he concluded that his modest wisdom consisted simply in this: when he does not know something, neither does he think he knows it. Is there a genuine virtue that consists simply in having this modest wisdom?

Socratic Ignorance as a Virtue I suggest that the Charmides is Plato’s attempt to answer that question. If I am right, the main project of the dialogue is not to take a recognized virtue and then ask people to say what it is—people who either claim to be experts about what it is or at least ought, for some plausible reason, to know what it is. Rather the project is to take a recognized virtue and see if it can be understood as the virtue that Socrates preeminently exemplifies. On my reading, the aporetic conclusion of the dialogue is not so much a perplexity about what a commonly recognized virtue really is; rather it is a perplexity about how there could be a virtue in having the limited wisdom that Socrates claims to have. For Plato, this question would have great importance. No doubt Socrates was the most important single influence on his life. Even when he moved away from presenting Socrates in moderately faithful guises and, instead, used the figure of Socrates to present grand metaphysical theses, he must have had the real man in the back of his mind. So it would have been important for him to figure out whether there was indeed a genuine virtue that this man exemplified. For us today the question the Charmides raises is this: Is there any real virtue in trying to come up with philosophical analyses when one has little

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reason to think that those efforts will ever be entirely satisfactory? Even supposing that we come up with an analysis of justice, or truth, or causality, that we are satisfied with, the history of philosophy suggests that someone will find a difficulty in the analysis. Supposing that we cannot come up with informatively and explanatorily satisfactory sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for something, x, to count as being just, or true, or the cause of something, y, will there be some virtue in having made the effort and in recognizing that we have come up short? If not, why do we engage in philosophical analysis, and encourage our students to do likewise? Let’s return now to the dialogue, Charmides. Clearly the most interesting and important suggestion as to what self-mastery might consist in is the fourth one, self-knowledge. This is the way Critias makes this suggestion: T9. As a matter of fact, this is pretty much what I say self-mastery is, to know oneself, and I agree with the inscription to this effect set up at Delphi. (164d)

Critias offers to give Socrates an explanation of this suggestion, unless Socrates already agrees with it. Socrates replies: T10. “But Critias,” I replied, “you are talking to me as though I professed to know the answers to my own questions and as though I could agree with you if I really wished. This is not the case—rather, because of my own ignorance I am continually investigating in your company whatever is put forward. However, if I think it over, I am willing to say whether I agree or not. Just wait while I consider.” (165bc)

Socrates’s first move is to say that, if self-mastery is self-knowledge, then it must be a kind of knowledge, or science. If that is right, he goes on, we can ask what the object of this kind of science is (165c). Critias replies, quite plausibly, that it is science of the self (165e). Socrates then presses Critias to tell him what the product of this science of the self is. Critias resists specifying a product of this science. He finally says it is the science of itself and other sciences, or the knowledge of itself and other cases of knowledge (166c). At this point Critias accuses Socrates of ignoring the real question of what self-mastery is and simply trying to refute him. Socrates replies with an impassioned statement of his effort to preserve his wisdom:

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T11. “Oh come,” I said, “how could you possibly think that even if I were to refute everything you say, I would be doing it for any other reason than the one I would give for a thorough investigation of my own statements— the fear of unconsciously thinking I know something when I do not. And this is what I claim to be doing now, examining the argument for my own sake primarily, but perhaps also for the sake of my friends. Or don’t you believe it to be for the common good, or for that of most men, that the state of each existing thing should become clear?” (166cd)

This passage is interesting as another clue to what Socrates takes his wisdom to consist in. It is also a statement of his divine mission and the hint of a rationale for engaging in the elenctic inquiry. But it should not escape our attention that Critias has shifted his suggested analysis of self-­ mastery from knowledge of the self to knowledge of itself, that is, knowledge of knowledge.

CHAPTER 6

Latent Knowledge: Meno

Abstract  The Meno poses the question “What is virtue?”, and Socrates claims to be completely ignorant of the answer. Socrates’s and Meno’s search for an answer leads them to the famous Paradox of Inquiry, which poses a fundamental threat to the viability of the Socratic elenchus as a method of philosophical analysis. To meet this threat, two distinct requirements for a successful analysis must be met: the Targeting Requirement and the Recognition Requirement. In response to the Paradox of Inquiry, Socrates offers the Doctrine of Recollection. This response may provide a way of satisfying the Recognition Requirement, but the Targeting Requirement remains problematic. Keywords  Socratic method • Meno • Paradox of Inquiry • Recollection All the elenctic dialogues of Plato include some sort of disclaimer of knowledge by Socrates. We have noted such disclaimers in the Laches, the Euthyphro, and the Charmides. In the case of each of these three elenctic dialogues, the disclaimer of knowledge comes well after the beginning and it is stated in such a way as to leave unclear what are the limits to the ignorance Socrates is claiming for himself. In both these respects, the dialogue,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0_6

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Meno, is different. It opens with a disclaimer of knowledge. Moreover, that disclaimer is, with respect to the subject to be investigated, simply “over the top.”

Complete Ignorance Socrates’s opening statement of his own ignorance is a response to this question from Meno: T1. Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way? (70a)

Socrates responds to T1 with a rather long, tongue-in-cheek account of how the sophists had brought wisdom to Thessaly, Meno’s home, whereas, in Athens, he says, wisdom had simply died. He adds that should Meno ask any Athenian his question about virtue, he could expect this reply: T2. “Good stranger you must think me happy indeed if you think I know whether virtue can be taught, or how it comes to be; I am so far from knowing whether virtue can be taught or not that I do not even have any knowledge of what virtue itself is.” (71a)

Socrates goes on to speak for himself, rather than just “any Athenian.” T3. I myself, Meno, am as poor as my fellow citizens in this matter, and I blame myself for my complete ignorance about virtue. If I do not know what something is, how could I know what qualities it possesses? (71b)

Meno expresses incredulity at Socrates’s claim to be in complete ignorance as to what virtue is. He asks: T4. Socrates, do you really not know what virtue is? Are we to report this to the folk back home about you? (71bc)

Far from backing down on his claim of complete ignorance about virtue, Socrates actually expands it to include the assertion that everyone he has met is as ignorant about what virtue is as he is:

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T5. Not only that, my friend, but also that, as I believe, I have never yet met anyone else who did know. (71c)

By opening this dialogue with a repeated claim of complete Socratic ignorance about virtue, Plato is setting the stage for a new and different understanding of the nature and limits of the Socratic method. In the Apology Socrates had said it was likely that neither he nor his interlocutor knew anything fine and good. No doubt to know what virtue is would be to know something fine and good. So he could be expected to say here that it was at least likely he did not know what virtue is. But here he states flat out that he is completely ignorant of what virtue is. Is that in any way plausible? Since the claim of complete ignorance is repeated and emphasized, we readers are, no doubt, meant to ask how such a thing could be true. To Socrates’s insistence that he has never even met anyone else who knows what virtue is, Meno mentions the great sophist, Gorgias, who had visited Athens. Did Socrates not think Gorgias knew what virtue is, Meno wants to know.

Targeting Virtue Socrates wants to keep Gorgias out of the discussion. He asks Meno if he himself can say what it is. Meno thinks he can. In fact, he readily agrees to do just that. In this respect the Meno is rather more like, say, the Euthyphro than it is like the Charmides in that Socrates’s discussion partner is entirely confident he knows what the F-ness under discussion is and is quite ready to say what he thinks it is. Indeed, he tells Socrates later on in the dialogue that he has made many fine speeches about virtue, “on a thousand occasions,” and he had thought the speeches were good. Asked now to tell Socrates what he thinks virtue is, Meno begins by talking about the virtue of a man, the virtue of a woman, and the virtue of a child. Such a response, of course, will not satisfy Socrates. As he points out to Meno, T6. Even if [the virtues] are many and various, all of them have one and the same form which makes them virtues, and it is right to look at this when one is asked to make clear what virtue is. (72c)

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T6 is an application of what Aristotle later called “the one-over-many principle.” According to that principle, if two or more things are F, there must be some form, F-ness, that makes them F. Meno seems to get the point. Here then is Meno’s second attempt to say what virtue is: T7. What else but to be able to rule over people, if you are seeking one description to fit them all. (73d)

There follows this exchange: T8. Socrates: … Shall we not add to this justly and not unjustly? Meno: I think so, Socrates, for justice is virtue. Socrates: Is it virtue, Meno, or a virtue? Meno: What do you mean? (73de)

Meno recognizes that there are other virtues besides justice. He names specifically moderation (sôphrosunê), wisdom, and munificence. So now Socrates has forced Meno to amend his analysis of what virtue is. Instead of saying that virtue is simply the power to rule over people, he must add “and to do able to do so with one of the virtues, namely, justice.” But clearly that won’t do as an informative statement of what virtue is. Somewhat oddly, Socrates seems to treat Meno’s partial list of the virtues as a response to the question, “What is virtue?” That is, he interprets Meno’s response as amounting to something like this: “You want to know what virtue is? Well, virtue is, for example, justice, moderation, wisdom, and munificence.” Socrates then points out that giving examples of the virtues is not a satisfactory way of saying what virtue is. A satisfactory answer would have to specify what all the examples of virtue have in common that makes them examples of virtue.

Criteria for a Satisfactory Analysis There follows a short lecture on what it is to give a satisfactory definitional analysis. The two examples Socrates works with in this section are shape and color. Socrates offers this definitional analysis of shape: T9. Let us say that shape is that which alone of existing things always follows color. (75b)

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Socrates asks whether Meno finds T9 satisfactory. Meno says that it is foolish, and explains: T10. That shape, you say, always follows color. Well then, if someone were to say that he did not know what color is, but that he had the same difficulty as he had about shape, what do you think your answer would be? (75c)

Socrates replies that his answer would be a true one. But eventually Socrates takes Meno’s objection seriously and offers a satisfactory analysis of color as well. The serious point behind this byplay is something like the following: P. No proposed analysis of F-ness will be satisfactory unless (i) it specifies a condition or set of conditions that are necessary and sufficient for something or someone to count as being F and (ii) this condition or these conditions are informative in the sense that they explain what it is to be F.

I take it that P puts in formal terms requirements for a satisfactory analysis that emerged from Socrates’s discussions of piety with Euthyphro. In particular, condition (ii) of P responds to Socrates’s complaint that being loved by the gods is, at most, a pathos, that is, a feature or attribute, of pious acts, and not their ousia, that is, their essence or nature.

A Suggested Analysis After this excursion into what is required for a proposed definitional analysis to be a satisfactory one, Socrates returns to the project of getting Meno to say what virtue is: T11. Socrates: Come now, you too try to fulfill your promise to me and tell me the nature of virtue as a whole and stop making many out of one, as jokers say whenever someone breaks something; but allow virtue to remain whole and sound, and tell me what it is, for I have given you examples [of satisfactory accounts of what shape is and what color is]. (77ab)

Meno then makes his fourth and final attempt to say what virtue is: T12. Meno: So I say that virtue is to desire beautiful things and have the power to acquire them. (77b)

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What in T12 is translated as “beautiful things” could also be rendered as “fine things” or “noble things.” Socrates asks immediately if we could as well say “good things,” and Meno agrees. So the last suggested analysis of virtue is actually this: A1. Virtue is desiring good things and having the power to acquire them.

Socrates immediately undertakes to convince Meno that the first half of his suggested analysis—wanting good things—is vacuous, for the reason that everyone wants good things. As a first step toward convincing Meno of this, he asks him if he thinks some people actually want bad things. Meno says, “Yes.” Socrates presses further: T13. Socrates: Do you mean that (i) they believe the bad things to be good or that (ii) they know they are bad and nevertheless desire them?” (77c)

Meno says that some people want bad things believing them to be good, but others want bad things knowing them to be bad. Socrates then tries to convince Meno that nobody falls into either of these two groupings. As for there being (i) people who desire bad things believing them to be good, Socrates argues that what happens in cases that seem to be of this sort is that they want, not things that are actually bad, but rather good things they mistakenly suppose these bad things to be. His argument against there being (ii) people who desire bad things, knowing them to be bad, is somewhat more complicated. But the basic idea is this. Suppose Sam wants a smoke and having a smoke is a bad thing. Socrates reasons that, since anyone who wants something wants to have it, Sam wants to have a smoke (77c). Next, drawing on a prudential conception of goodness and badness, Socrates argues that, if Sam wants to have a smoke knowing that having it would be a bad thing, he will know that having it will contribute his misery (77e–78a). The next step in Socrates’s argument is the most questionable. He argues that if Sam wants to have a smoke and knows that having one will contribute to his misery, he wants misery. His assumption may be something like this. A2. It must be that one wants whatever consequences one actually knows will be the result of actually getting whatever it is that one wants.

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Armed with an assumption like A2, Socrates can easily get his conclusion. After all, Sam doesn’t want misery; no one wants misery. So either Sam doesn’t really want a smoke or he doesn’t know having a smoke will contribute to his misery. Thus, either he doesn’t want a smoke or he doesn’t really know that having one is a bad thing. This argument is valid. That is, the conclusion does follow from the premises. But each of its premises can be contested. One can certainly question the prudential conception of goodness and badness that Socrates relies on. And one can question the idea that we always want the known consequences of whatever we want. But, in the dialogue anyway, Meno does not reject any of these questionable steps. So he is stuck with Socrates’s conclusion that nobody wants bad things, knowing that they are bad. Since he is also stuck with the conclusion that no one wants bad things thinking they are good, he is forced to conclude, with Socrates, that, quite simply, no one wants bad things. And so the first half of his final suggested analysis of what virtue is, is vacuous. If the first half of “wanting good things and having the power to acquire them” is vacuous, we are left with only the second half: having the power to acquire good things. Socrates dispatches this remnant as an analysis of virtue this way: T14. Do you add to this acquiring, Meno, the words ‘justly’ and ‘piously,’ or does it make no difference to you but even if one secures these things unjustly, you call it virtue nonetheless? (78d)

Meno agrees that he needs to add “justly” and “piously” to his account (78e). But then Socrates points out that he is, in effect, saying that virtue is the power to acquire things in a manner that accords with the virtue, justice, which renders the analysis circular (79bc).

Perplexity After this fourth failure, Socrates again asks Meno to say what virtue is. But this time Meno declines and offers instead perhaps the most eloquent expression of philosophical perplexity we have in the history of philosophy: T15. Socrates, before I even met you I used to hear that you are always in a state of perplexity and that you bring others to the same state, and now I think you are bewitching and beguiling me, simply putting me under a spell,

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so that I am quite perplexed. Indeed, if a joke is in order, you seem, in appearance and in every other way, to be like the broad torpedo fish, for it too makes anyone who comes close and touches it feel numb, and you now seem to have had that kind of effect on me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb and I have no answer to give you. Yet I have made many speeches about virtue before large audiences on a thousand occasions, very good speeches as I thought, but now I cannot even say what it is. (80ab)

Socrates replies to T15 by saying that he accepts the torpedo-fish analogy, if the fish makes itself, as well as others, numb: T16. For I myself do not have the answer when I perplex others, but I am more perplexed than anyone when I cause perplexity in others. So now I do not know what virtue is; perhaps you knew before you contacted me, but now you are certainly like one who does not know. Nevertheless, I want to examine and seek together with you what it may be. (80cd)

We might take T16 to be simply another statement of Socratic ignorance. But we should not overlook the vivid way in which it ties Socratic ignorance to the perplexity that arises when one tries to analyze, or get someone else to analyze, something as philosophically problematic as virtue.

The Paradox of Inquiry Meno immediately follows Socrates’s admission of perplexity with a fundamental threat to the viability of the enterprise in which they are engaged, that is, a fundamental threat to the viability of the Socratic elenchus as a method of philosophical analysis. Here is the crucial passage: T17. Meno: How will you look for [virtue], Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know? (80d)

I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that the statements of Socratic ignorance the Meno opens with are the strongest disclaimers of knowledge we have in any of the Platonic dialogues. Socrates says in T2 and T3, not just that he does not know fully or completely what virtue is, but that he is completely ignorant about what it is—that he does not know at all what it is.

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When Meno presents what has come to be called “the Paradox of Inquiry” in T17, he presents that paradox as a difficulty for anyone who does not know at all what virtue is. However, he distinguishes two distinct threats to the success of elenctic inquiry for one who does not know at all what the F-ness under investigation is. To put the point positively, we can say that these two threats to successful analysis rest on two distinct requirements for successful analysis. The first is what we may call the Targeting, or Aiming, Requirement. Thus Meno asks, “How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all?” The second requirement is what we may call the Recognition Requirement. Thus Meno asks, “If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?” The Recognition Requirement threatens the possibility of any success from an elenctic inquiry in which one does not know at all what the virtue being investigated is, whereas the Targeting Requirement threatens the very possibility of even a successful beginning to the inquiry, given complete ignorance of what the inquiry is aiming at.

Recollection Socrates’s chief immediate response to the Paradox of Inquiry is the Doctrine of Recollection: T18. As the soul is immortal, has been born often and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things. (81cd)

Many readers of the Meno have found themselves unconvinced that the Doctrine of Recollection helps to resolve, or dissolve, the Paradox of Inquiry. On the face of it, the recollection doctrine seems to help more with the Recognition Requirement than it does with the Targeting Requirement. If we all have at least latent knowledge of what virtue is, then our situation might reasonably be compared to a person who goes to the airport to meet a friend she has not seen for a very long time. As she goes to the airport, she may not be able to offer even a crude description of the friend she is going to meet, let alone a description that would identify her uniquely. But she hopes nevertheless that, when the friend emerges at the airport, she will recognize her. And, indeed, that may well happen. Moreover, seeking to know what virtue is might possibly be like that.

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The problem about how we can aim the inquiry at the right target, however, when we do not know at all what virtue is, presents a different set of issues. As I see it, Socrates in the Meno, has two things to say about this problem. First, he simply admonishes us to search, even if blindly, in the hope that we will happen to hit on the right analysis. That, I take it, is the import of admonitions like these: T19. For we must, therefore, not believe that debater’s argument [i.e., the Paradox of Inquiry], for it would make us idle, and fainthearted men like to hear it, whereas my argument makes them energetic and keen on the search. (81d) T20. [W]e will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it. (86bc)

The other thing Socrates has to say is this: T21. As the whole of nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, nothing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only—a process men call learning—discovering everything for himself, if he is brave and does not tire of the search, for searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection. (81cd)

The relevance of Socrates’s claim that “the whole of nature is akin” is, I take it, that once we “recall” one bit of latent knowledge, we may be able to reason to another bit of knowledge. Thus, if we were to recall what a single virtue is, say, bravery, then we might be able to reason and find our way to another virtue, say, piety, or wisdom. According to the Doctrine of Recollection, then, we each have a cognitive structure in place at birth. The structure and the items that make it up are somehow accessible to us, even though we may lack the means to formulate a completely directed inquiry. Given the extravagant claim in T21 that “the soul has learned everything,” what is one to make of Socrates’s extreme disclaimer of knowledge at the beginning of the dialogue? What we readers are expected to do, I assume, is to reinterpret the opening extreme disclaimer of knowledge in the light of the later distinction between latent and manifest knowledge. Latently we know everything, even if we do not know at all, in a manifest way, what virtue is—where not knowing at all what virtue is means that we

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cannot even begin to give a fully satisfactory account of what it is. The reassurance the Doctrine of Recollection is meant to give us is that philosophical inquiry may somehow put us in position to recognize a fully satisfactory account of what virtue is as the right account.

Conclusion As I emphasized at the beginning of this chapter, the Meno begins with the most unqualified claim of Socratic Ignorance we have in the Platonic dialogues. Socrates claims not to know at all what virtue is. The Paradox of Inquiry leaves us with the conclusion that one who does not know at all what F-ness is, will not be able to target an inquiry or recognize a correct analysis, should one happen to turn up. One conclusion we can draw from this is that the Socratic elenchus will have no chance of success unless it is amended to modify the requirements so that (i) the lead investigator knows enough about what F-ness is to target the inquiry and (ii) the lead investigator knows enough about what F-ness is to recognize a satisfactory analysis, should one happen to turn up. The Doctrine of Recollection may be enough to satisfy the second requirement, the Recognition Requirement. But the Targeting Requirement remains a problem.

CHAPTER 7

Forms Left Unanalyzed: Phaedo

Abstract  In the Phaedo, Plato introduces a metaphysical doctrine—the Theory of Forms—which will buttress his response to the Paradox of Inquiry. Although Plato may not want his readers to think that the elenchus is hopeless as a way to arrive at a satisfactory philosophical analysis, it is notable that the elenchus does not play a role in the elucidation of this theory. This strongly suggests that Plato has come to see that the elenchus alone is insufficient as a way of dealing with the Paradox. Keywords  Socratic method • Phaedo • Socratic Fallacy • Theory of Forms Plato’s great dialogue, Phaedo, is a complex and challenging work that defies simple summary. It is recognized to belong to Plato’s middle period, the period in which Plato developed and gave the fullest account of his famous Theory of Forms. It is clearly not in the style of a Socratic elenchus. Although Plato uses the figure of Socrates as a master teacher in this dialogue, this Socrates is very different from the character we had come to know in the early dialogues. For one thing, this Socrates professes very little ignorance. On the contrary, he is here the confident expositor of one of the great metaphysical theories in Western philosophy. Although he does, in one section of the dialogue, allow his interlocutors, Simmias and

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Cebes, to develop interesting views contrary to his own, the work is mainly an extended lecture, interrupted only by obsequious expressions of approval from his hearers. The dramatic setting for the dialogue is Socrates’s jail cell, only hours before his execution. The ostensible project of the dialogue is to prove the immortality of the soul. But the means for achieving this end include a forceful presentation of Plato’s mature philosophical system.

Equality For my limited purposes in this book, one of the most important passages in the whole dialogue is this early discussion of equality: T1. Consider, [Socrates] said, whether this is the case: We say that there is something that is equal. I do not mean a stick equal to a stick or a stone to a stone, or anything of that kind, but something else beyond all these, the Equal itself. Shall we say that this exists or not? Indeed we shall, by Zeus, said Simmias, most definitely. And do we know what this is? Certainly. Whence have we acquired the knowledge of it? It is not from the things we mentioned just now, from seeing sticks or stones or some other things that are equal we come to think of that other which is different from them? Or doesn’t it seem to you to be different? Look at it also this way: do not equal stones and sticks sometimes, while remaining the same, appear to one person to be equal and to another to be unequal? Certainly they do. But what of the equals themselves? Have they ever appeared unequal to you, or Equality to be Inequality? Never, Socrates. (74ac)

The discussion continues: T2. Well then, [Socrates] said, do we experience something like this in the case of equal sticks and the other equal objects we just mentioned? Do they seem to us to be equal in the same sense [or: in the same way] as is [the] Equal itself? Is there some deficiency in their being such as the Equal [is], or is there not? A considerably deficiency, he said. Whenever someone, on seeing something, realizes that that which he now sees wants to be like some other reality but falls short and cannot be

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like that other since it is inferior, do we agree that the one who thinks this must have prior knowledge of that to which he says it is like, but deficiently so? Necessarily. (74de)

In T1 and T2 Socrates tries to convince us that we have a “prior knowledge” of what equality is—prior, that is, to our recognizing equalities in the sensible world: this stick equal to that stick, this stone equal to that stone. According to Socrates, no pairs of things we encounter in the sensible world are perfectly equal to each other. Moreover, we can recognize that fact. That is, we can recognize that, in the sensible world, even though x is equal to y, they are not perfectly equal to each other. But if we never encounter things in the sensible world that are perfectly equal, we must realize that perfect equality is something different from what we can see around us. How could we get to know about perfect equality? Not from sense experience. It must be from recollection. This is Socrates’s conclusion: T3. We must then possess knowledge of the Equal before that time when we first saw the equal objects [proeidenai, that is, “pre-know it,” have a priori knowledge of it] and realized that all these objects strive to be like the Equal but are deficient in this. (74e–5a)

Socrates seems prepared to generalize the conclusion to other properties, but perhaps not to universalize it.1 For a significant range of properties he seems prepared to say that they have no perfect, that is, unqualified, instances in the sensible world. For any F, within this range of properties, nothing in the sensible world is perfectly, or unqualifiedly, F. However, and this is the exception that gets him into trouble with the “Third Man Argument” of the Parmenides, F-ness is itself perfectly, or unqualifiedly, F. Moreover, and this is the point of the passages, T1, T2, and T3, we couldn’t realize that this sensible thing, or these sensible things, are only imperfectly, or only qualifiedly F, if we did not already have knowledge of the fact that F-ness is perfectly F. The “self-predication assumption” built into this line of reasoning is, doubtless, very unappealing to us today. We are not at all inclined to 1  Thus, in Republic 523be Plato concedes that the fingers that we see and touch are fully and completely fingers, that is, that the property of being a finger has unqualified instances in the sensible world.

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suppose that equality is equal, or circularity circular. But perhaps we can see some point to a modification of the reasoning Plato gives Socrates here. We may want to agree that no concrete instance of goodness, beauty, or justice is perfectly good, beautiful, or just. Then the Plato in us may try to point out that we cannot be fully justified in thinking this unless we have a good idea of what it would be to be perfectly good, beautiful, or just. What I want to point out here, however, is that Plato has Socrates argue that we have knowledge of what F-ness is if we realize that, although there are things in the sensible world that are F, none is perfectly F. There is here no assumption, as we are so familiar with it from the elenctic dialogues, that one does not know what F-ness is unless one can offer an explanatory set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as being F. It is sufficient for knowing what F-ness is that one be able to recognize that things in the sensible world are only deficiently F. In previous chapters I identified the assumption that one be able to supply an explanatory account of what makes F-things to be F for one to know that they are truly F, as a motivating assumption for the Socratic elenchus. Peter Geach called this assumption “The Socratic Fallacy.”2 There is a rather extensive literature on whether or not Socrates, or, behind him, Plato, is guilty of what Geach calls “the Socratic Fallacy.” I have myself offered3 what I call an “aporetic reading” of those passages in which Socrates seems to accept what commentators have called “the Priority of Definition.” On my reading, it is not that Socrates, let alone Plato, is actually committed to the Priority of Definition. What is true, I think, is that Socrates is made to find it puzzling, perplexing, how one could identify instances of F-ness without being able to say in an informative way what makes something count as an F. Whether Socrates is made to commit a fallacy in this, or whether, as I suggest, Socrates only finds it puzzling how one can recognize instances without “looking at” an inward paradeigma, off which one can read the necessary and sufficient identifying conditions, clearly this idea is a prime motivator for the Socratic elenchus. Here, in the Phaedo, Plato’s Socrates figure has undermined that assumption. Later on in the Phaedo Socrates is made to show a surprising disdain for analyses. Here is what he says: 2 3

 In Geach [1966].  In Matthews [2006].

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T4. I am going to show you the form of explanation (tês aitias to eidos) with which I have concerned myself. I turn back to those often-mentioned things and proceed from them. [Thus] I assume the existence of a Beautiful, itself by itself, of a Good and a Great and all the rest. If you grant me these [Forms] and agree that they exist, I hope to show you the explanation (aitia) as a result, and to find the soul to be immortal …. I no longer understand or recognize those other sophisticated explanations (aitiai), and if someone tells me that a thing is beautiful because it has a bright color or shape or any such thing, I put aside these other explanations—for all these confuse me—but I simply, naively and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing makes it beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe that Beautiful we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful. That, I think, is the safest answer I can give myself or anyone else. And if I stick to this I think I shall never fall into error. (Phaedo 100ce)

One could say that there is a rudimentary sort of philosophical analysis here. Thus Plato analyzes (i) x is beautiful as (ii) x partakes in the Beautiful But this is not an analysis of the nature of beauty. If we say it is an analysis of what it is to be beautiful, we have to concede that it analyzes being beautiful without saying what beauty is. Even if participating in beauty is recognized to be both a necessary and a sufficient condition for something being beautiful, it is not an informative condition. Many readers have been upset or annoyed with this “analysis.” I’ll try to say something a little later on to mitigate the annoyance. But the annoyance may be useful in that it acknowledges a change in the philosophical ambition that Plato has given to his character, Socrates. When Socrates says in T4, “I no longer understand or recognize those other sophisticated explanations” and mentions someone’s saying that “a thing is beautiful because it has a bright color or shape or any such thing,” he is deliberately turning away from the project of the elenctic dialogues. We do not have a Platonic dialogue in which an interlocutor actually says that something is beautiful because it has a bright color or a pleasing shape. But we do have a dialogue, the Hippias Major, in which the project is to provide an analysis of beauty. The motivation for that project is characteristic of the elenctic dialogues. Here is part of a speech by Socrates fairly early on in the dialogue:

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T5. Just now someone got me into perplexity when I was finding fault with parts of some speeches for being ugly (aischra) and praising others as beautiful (kala), he questioned me this way, really insultingly: “Socrates, how do you know what sorts of things are beautiful and ugly? Look, would you be able to say what the beautiful is?” And I, I’m so worthless, I was perplexed and wasn’t able to answer him properly. (286cd)

On the face of it, what it is for a speech to be beautiful would be something rather different a thing from what it is for a work of visual art, say, a painting or a sculpture, to be beautiful. But, later on in the Hippias Major, Socrates tries out the suggestion that the beautiful is what is pleasant through hearing and sight (298a). And we might well think that having a bright color is at least part of what makes some painting beautiful, or that having a pleasant shape is at least part of what makes some sculpture beautiful. As we might have expected, the Hippias Major ends in perplexity (304c), without Socrates or his interlocutor having arrived at a satisfactory analysis of beauty. But a striking thing about T4 is that it has Socrates saying that he won’t even try to arrive at informatively necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as being beautiful—“I no longer understand or recognize … [such] explanations.” In the Phaedo, then, there is abundant talk of such forms as justice, beauty, and goodness, but a resolute refusal to undertake an analysis of justice, beauty, and goodness. How are we to understand this development? There are at least two different ways of understanding what is going on here—what I shall call a “Minimalist Interpretation” and a “Maximalist Interpretation.” On the Maximalist Interpretation Plato has drawn a negative conclusion from the elenctic dialogues. They have produced no viable analyses of piety, courage, self-mastery, or even virtue itself. Furthermore, the Paradox of Inquiry, particularly in its Aiming Requirement, suggests that the project of finding a satisfactory analysis of the various F-nesses may be doomed from the very start. On the Minimalist Interpretation, by contrast, we do not suppose Plato has already drawn the conclusion that no elenctic examination of philosophically untutored Athenians will yield a satisfactory analysis of beauty, or any other philosophically interesting F-ness. However, he now thinks that he has good arguments for the existence of the Forms of, for example, Justice, Beauty, and Goodness, and he simply wants to see what can be established by appeal to such Forms, even without an analysis of any of them.

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Although I have some sympathy for the Maximalist Interpretation, I am going to proceed on the basis of the Minimalist Interpretation. It is much less speculative. Indeed, it is hardly speculative at all, since what Plato actually has Socrates do in the Phaedo is to develop two styles of explanation, neither one of which requires that we have an analysis of the various relevant F-nesses. There is another reason to accept the Minimalist Interpretation. Plato does not claim, in the Phaedo, that the elenchus, by itself, cannot produce a satisfactory analysis of an F-ness. In fact, he suggests the opposite. At 72e one of Socrates’s interlocutors, Cebes, introduces the Doctrine of Recollection from the Meno to explain how it is that we have knowledge of justice, beauty, and goodness. When the second interlocutor, Simmias, asks for a proof of recollection, he gets this reply: T6. There is one excellent argument, said Cebes, namely that when men are interrogated in the right manner, they always give the right answer of their own accord, and they could not do this if they did not possess knowledge and the right explanation inside them. (73a)

The only example we have in the Platonic corpus of someone’s being examined “in the right way” and getting “the right explanation” is the famous interrogation of the houseboy in the dialogue, Meno, about how to construct a square with an area twice that of a given square (82d–85b). Although Socrates in that dialogue does suggest that an elenctic examination of someone concerning one of the great “What is F-ness?” questions might likewise produce an analysis of F-ness, Socrates fails to do that, either in the Meno, or in any other elenctic dialogue. The reader is left to wonder whether success in the geometrical case simply marks an important difference between geometry and ethics, or, more generally, between mathematics and philosophy. Yet in the Phaedo Cebes suggests—and Socrates does nothing to correct this suggestion—that one who is examined “in the right way” might get the right answer about justice, beauty, and goodness. The fact that it is Cebes, and not Socrates himself, who makes this overly optimistic report of successful interrogation may be relevant. But it is hard to know how much to make of that. What we can say, I think, is that Plato does not want his readers to think, at this point, that the elenchus is hopeless as a way to arrive at a satisfactory analysis of F-ness. However, engaging in elenctic examination is not the project of Socrates in the Phaedo.

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When Socrates brings up the subject of the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good, he asks, “Do we say that there is such a thing as the Just itself?” (65d) and similarly for the other two Forms. And, much later on, when Socrates introduces the passage, T1, he says this: T7. I turn back to those oft-mentioned things and proceed from them. I assume the existence of a beautiful, itself by itself, of a Good and a Great and all the rest. If you grant me these and agree that they exist, I hope to show you the [kind of explanation which I am concerned myself] as a result, and to find the soul to be immortal. (100b)

This passage has suggested to commentators that the philosophical method Socrates employs in the Phaedo would be appropriately called “the Method of Hypothesis.” That appellation is harmless as long as we do not assume that we have here simply a repeat of the Method of Hypothesis in the Meno. In the Meno the hypothesis was “Virtue is knowledge.” It was eventually rejected on empirical evidence that one implication of the hypothesis (namely, that there are teachers of virtue) is false. In the Phaedo the hypothesis is “There are such Forms as Justice, Beauty, and Goodness.” Socrates does not try to refute that hypothesis at all—let alone refute it by empirical considerations. But he does appeal to empirical considerations to make it plausible. The passage is T1, which we looked at earlier in our discussion of the doctrine of recollection, and the empirical consideration is that “equal stones and sticks sometimes, while remaining the same, appear to one person to be equal and to another to be unequal” (74c). From this Socrates draws the conclusion in T2 that the equality between sticks and stones, that we experience by means of the senses, is deficient. Plato here has Socrates suggest that sticks and stones that appear equal to me and not to you are “striving to be equal,” that is, to be absolutely equal, but falling short. If they were purely equal, they could not even appear unequal to someone, or be equal only in one respect and not in another. Moreover, when we recognize that sticks and stones—indeed, any pair of physical objects—are equal only with a qualification, we implicitly recognize absolute equality, which can never appear unequal. But we couldn’t recognize that without having knowledge of pure or unqualified equality. If we have knowledge of pure or unqualified equality, then such a Form exists. Socrates suggests that we have similar knowledge of Beauty, Goodness, and other great F-nesses.

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So what is Socrates up to when he claims not to understand or recognize any informatively necessary or sufficient conditions for something, or someone, to count as being beautiful? A few pages before T1 there is a curious passage that should help give us a clue. Here it is: T8. [Socrates:] I thought my opinion was satisfactory, that when a large man stood by a small one he was taller by a head, and so a horse was taller than a horse. Even clearer than this, I thought that ten was more than eight because two had been added, and that a two-cubit length is larger than a cubit because it surpasses it by half its length. (96e)

Here are two explanations Socrates wants to reject: x is larger than y by a head. (96e1) 10 is greater than 8 by the addition of 2. (96e3)

Socrates thinks that, according to these two statements, something small makes something else large, which he considers absurd. One could equally well say that y is smaller than x by a head. But it can’t be that the same thing makes x large and y small (100e7–101b2). So here we have two constraints on explanation: Where F* is the opposite of F: ( i) Nothing that is itself F can make something else F*. (ii) Nothing can make one thing F and another thing F*.4 [Plato seems to be suggesting that any attempt to find informative necessary and sufficient conditions for being F will invariably fail; it will produce conditions that are either insufficiently general or insufficiently precise. Two cannot be what makes 10 larger than 8, because it is also what would make 8 smaller than 10; and it cannot be 2 alone that makes 10 large, because 3 would also make 10 large (i.e., larger than 7). What makes 10 large is not that it is larger than 8, or larger than 7, but that it is larger than something. That is to say, it is just largeness itself that makes x larger than y (not any particular amount by which x exceeds y). The effort 4  [The chapter ends abruptly at this point. In the bracketed text that follows, I have conjectured how Matthews might have completed it.—Ed.]

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to give informative necessary and sufficient conditions is doomed to include too much (as in the case of what makes one thing larger than another) or too little (as in the case of what makes something beautiful). Hence, Plato has Socrates retreat to the “safe but foolish” answer of T4. And what is notable about the safe but foolish answer is that it altogether abandons the attempt to formulate informative necessary and sufficient conditions for being F. To understand what it is to be F one must simply grasp the form of F-ness itself. There are two components to the grasping of the form of F-ness itself, one metaphysical and one epistemological. The metaphysical component is provided by the Theory of Forms; the epistemological component by the Doctrine of Recollection. Together, they constitute the solution that Plato offers to the Paradox of Inquiry. What is striking about this solution is that it does not include any significant role for the Socratic elenchus to play.]

CHAPTER 8

Downgrading the Elenchus: Republic I–II

Abstract  Although in the Phaedo, Plato seems to have abandoned the elenchus, it seems to return in the first two books of the Republic. But it would be a mistake to read Republic I as a standard elenchus. Rather, Plato wants to show that the classic elenchus depends on assumptions that will not always be met. And in Republic II, he makes it clear that the classic elenchus will be powerless against a well-worked out philosophical theory offered by a sophisticated professional. What will be required is a superior alternative theory. And that is just what Plato offers in the rest of the Republic. Keywords  Socratic method • Republic • Justice In Chap. 6 we noted that, whereas Plato began the dialogue, Meno, as an elenctic dialogue, he turned to another methodology in the latter part of the dialogue. He has Socrates try out something we can call the “method of hypothesis.” Socrates is made to say of this method that it is “the way geometers often carry out their investigations” (86e). Is this shift an indication that Plato is prepared to give up the Socratic elenchus? We might think so. After all, the elenchus has once again led to perplexity. And Meno has suggested a diagnosis of the failure, namely, the Paradox of Inquiry. Of course, Socrates had responded to the Paradox with his

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Doctrine of Recollection. But, as I argued in Chap. 6, that doctrine seems, at most, to respond to the Recognition Requirement of the Paradox; it doesn’t help with the Targeting Requirement. As we saw in the last chapter, Plato has Socrates, in the Phaedo, quite deliberately eschew a search for an analysis of the Beautiful itself. Moreover, he had argued, earlier in the dialogue, that we show that we know what equality is by recognizing that objects in the sensible world are only imperfectly equal—and that without even asking for an analysis of equality! With this move Socrates undermines motivations for the Socratic elenchus. Should we suspect that Plato has now already lost interest in the Socratic method, that is, the Socratic elenchus? Two facts block our drawing that conclusion. One is that Plato begins his great middle-dialogue, Republic with what seems to be another Socratic elenchus. The other is that Plato casts his late middle, or early late, dialogue, Theaetetus, as an elenchus. I shall try to deal with the first fact in this chapter and the second in the next chapter.

Why Another Elenchus? So why did Plato return to the elenctic form to begin the Republic? Many people have thought that there is an easy and philosophically uninteresting explanation. The explanation, they suggest, is that this book is, in fact, an early dialogue, called, perhaps “The Thrasymachus,” which Plato had never previously published. When he conceived his great work on justice, the Republic—according to this story—he pulled the Thrasymachus out of his drawer and used it to introduce this new and ambitious work. Sophisticated stylometric tests have been performed to establish that Book I of the Republic does, in fact, have the style of an early work. Unfortunately, the results of these tests are inconclusive.1 But suppose, instead, that they had been conclusive in establishing that the style of this book exactly matches the style of one or more early dialogues. Would that have shown that Republic I is really a left-over early dialogue? Surely not. 1  Vlastos, who himself counts Republic I as an early dialogue, has this to say about the stylometry issue: “leading stylometrists Constantin Ritter and von Arnim had concluded that [Republic I] should be treated as a separate dialogue, written in Plato’s earliest period, and then used, at a later time, as the introductory book of the Republic. This opinion has been followed by several scholars, but it is by no means generally accepted. Several recent scholars have disregarded it, though without offering extended argument for their view and ignoring the stylistic arguments in its favor” (Vlastos [1991], 250).

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Just as Prokofiev was able to write his “Classical Symphony” in the style of Haydn, so, too, Plato, that great literary genius, would have been able to write, even in his middle or late period, a dialogue in perfect imitation of one or more of his early dialogues. So even if stylometric evidence had provided conclusive evidence that Republic I matches exactly the style of certain early Platonic dialogues, that evidence would hardly have established that Republic I is, in fact, a hitherto unpublished early dialogue. So the basic question remains, even if it has now become somewhat more complicated: If Republic I is indeed an early dialogue, or if, instead, it is a dialogue written only in imitation of an early dialogue, why would Plato have wanted to use an elenchus to introduce an otherwise non-­ elenctic work, especially when, at the time he wrote Books II-X, he seems to have moved beyond that methodology? One thing I shall be trying to establish is that it is misleading and wrong-headed to say simply that Republic I is an elenctic dialogue. In certain respects it is indeed quite like one of the early elenctic dialogues. But in important respects, it is also quite different from any of them. Understanding and appreciating the differences, as well as the similarities, will help us understand why Plato became disaffected with the Socratic method. It is thus an important part of the project of this book to show how the use of a somewhat abortive elenchus to introduce the Republic is part of Plato’s effort to bring out the limitations of the Socratic elenchus and to show the need for quite a different approach to philosophy than was characteristic of his great teacher, Socrates.

Republic I as an Elenchus The “What-is-F-ness?” question of Republic I is “What is justice (dikaiosunê).” The book has usually been understood to be an elenchus in which there are, in turn, three interlocutors, Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus, each one with his own answer to what justice is. The answer that Socrates draws from Cephalus is: (i) Justice is telling the truth and paying your debts. When (i) is rejected, Polemarchus, the second interlocutor, offers this account: (ii) Justice is benefiting your friends and harming your enemies.

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When (ii) is rejected, Thrasymachus, the third interlocutor, gives us this explanation: (iii) Justice is the advantage of the stronger. Socrates responds to the first suggestion with a famous counterexample: It wouldn’t be just, Socrates points out, to return a weapon to a friend who has, in the meantime, gone mad. Nor would justice require, he adds, that one tell the whole truth to someone who had gone out of his mind (331c). Socrates responds to the second suggestion by offering an involved argument for the conclusion that it cannot be just to harm anyone (335d). And his response to the third suggestion is this: “No one in any position of rule, insofar as he is a ruler, seeks or orders what is advantageous to himself, but what is advantageous to his subjects, the ones of which he is himself the craftsman” (342e). As one would expect in a Socratic elenchus, there is an expression of perplexity (aporia), when Polemarchus says, “I don’t know any more what I did mean, but I still believe that to benefit one’s friends and harm one’s enemies is justice” (334b). There is also an expression of Socratic ignorance along the way (at 337e) and the book ends with just such an expression: T1. Hence the result of the discussion, as far as I’m concerned, is that I know nothing, for when I don’t know what justice is, I’ll hardly know whether it is a kind of virtue or not, or whether a person who has it is happy or unhappy. (354bc)

Looking More Closely However, to try to read Republic I as a standard elenchus is, I want to show, a serious mistake. Consider, first, the way Socrates treats his first interlocutor, Cephalus. He does not really examine Cephalus elenctically at all on the nature of justice. Instead, Socrates asks Cephalus, “What’s the greatest good you’ve received from being very wealthy?” (330d) And Cephalus replies that being wealthy does a lot to save us from having to cheat or deceive someone against our will and “from having to depart for that other place in fear because we owe sacrifice to a god or money to a person” (331b).

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Socrates himself then extracts from this comment of Cephalus the analysis of justice as telling the truth and paying your debts. Not only is Socrates, not Cephalus, the one who states the first suggested analysis of justice, Socrates also immediately refutes this analysis he has suggested with his counterexample of returning a weapon to someone who has in the meantime gone mad. Thus Plato has Socrates show no real interest in whether or not Cephalus mistakenly believes that he knows what justice is, which would be the project of a standard elenctic examination. Socrates then lets Cephalus excuse himself from the discussion. It is Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, who is made to suffer elenctic examination. Polemarchus latches onto the “paying your debts” part of the account Socrates had attributed to his father. Polemarchus links paying your debts to a proverb of Simonides, according to which, “it is just to give to each what is owed to him” (331e). Polemarchus understands the Simonidean saying to mean that one ought to benefit one’s friends and harm one’s enemies (332d). There follows the only standard elenctic examination in the whole of the Republic. Socrates responds to Polemarchus by getting him to agree that justice is a human virtue, that is, a human excellence (aretê) and that the virtues make those who have them better than they would otherwise be. It is, he adds, the function of human excellence to make people, both oneself and others, better, rather than worse. And so it cannot be the function of justice to harm anyone. In this reasoning Socrates makes use of an analogy between virtue and a craft (technê). Thus he speaks of “the craft we call justice” (332d) and uses this analogy to buttress his claim that the function of justice is to make people better, not worse. Thrasymachus, who has been listening restively to the exchange between Socrates and Polemarchus, finally barges in. He immediately chastises Socrates for always asking questions and never giving any answers. He thus objects to the Socratic method of elenchus. In particular, he insists that Socrates should offer and defend his own opinions. As we shall see, Socrates does soon depart from the elenctic methodology by seeking to establish a positive thesis for himself. More on that in a moment.

Justice as a Real Kind A second assumption that Thrasymachus rejects is the very idea that there is such a thing as the essence or nature of justice. According to him, justice is always the product of a power relationship within a given political

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structure. Among the several attempts by Thrasymachus to formulate his idea that justice is the advantage of the stronger, the following is perhaps his most interesting and challenging: T2. Democracy makes democratic laws, tyranny makes tyrannical laws, and so on with the others. And they declare what they have made—what is to their own advantage—to be just for their subjects, and they punish anyone who goes against this as lawless and unjust. This, then, is what I say justice is, the same in all cities, the advantage of the established rule. Since the established rule is surely stronger, anyone who reasons correctly will conclude that the just is the same everywhere, namely, the advantage of the stronger. (338d–9a)

One thing that makes this formulation so clever is that, although it does seem to offer a perfectly general explanation of what justice is said to be, it does so without allowing that justice has, in itself, any real nature or essence. As I stated earlier, the aim of the Socratic elenchus is to offer a satisfactory account of the nature or essence (ousia) of some F-ness. It aims to do this by asking an interlocutor to say what F-ness is and then to see if that interlocutor’s answer can be discredited by finding a counterexample to it or by finding it defective in some other way, for example, by showing that, although it does specify a feature all and only F-things have, it does not single out what makes F-things to be F. But if there is no such thing as the essence or nature of F-ness—if, that is, F-ness is not a real nature—then the project of elenctic examination as I have characterized it is misconceived. And Thrasymachus wants to demonstrate that it is misconceived. What can Socrates do to show that justice is, contra Thrasymachus, a real kind, and not just a nominal kind? One thing Socrates attempts to do is, again, to appeal to the craft analogy. Thus he first asks Thrasymachus whether the “stronger,” that is the ruler, or ruling class, doesn’t sometimes make mistakes. Thrasymachus has to admit this possibility. Socrates then seeks to lead Thrasymachus into contradiction: T3. Haven’t we agreed, that in giving orders to their subjects, the rulers are sometimes in error as to what is best for themselves, and yet that it is just for their subjects to do whatever their rulers order? …. [Thrasymachus agrees. Socrates goes on.]

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Then you must think that you have agreed that it is just to do what is disadvantageous to the ruler and those who are stronger, whenever they unintentionally order what is bad for themselves. (339de)

Thrasymachus tries to escape from this trap by insisting that the stronger is not stronger in the moment in which he makes a mistake. “A ruler,” he insists, “insofar as he is a ruler, never makes mistakes and unerringly decrees what is best for himself, and this his subject must do” (341a). But now, by making clear that his conception of a ruler is a normative one, Thrasymachus has opened the way for Socrates to appeal again to the craft analogy. Just as medicine seeks, not its own advantage, but that of the body, and horse-breeding seeks, not its own advantage, but that of the horses, so, Socrates argues, “no one in any position of rule, insofar as he is a ruler, seeks or orders what is advantageous to himself, but what is advantageous to his subject, that on which he practices his craft” (342e).

The Craft Analogy Unlike Polemarchus, Thrasymachus does not buy the craft analogy; he scoffs at it. “You think,” Thrasymachus derides Socrates, T4. that shepherds and cowherds seek the good of their sheep and cattle, and fatten them and take care of them, looking to something other than their master’s good and their own. Moreover, you believe that rulers in cities—true rulers, that is—think about their subjects differently than one does about sheep, and that night and day they think of something besides their own advantage. (343b)

All told, Thrasymachus has now rejected three assumptions that underlie the possibility of success for a Socratic elenchus. First, he has rejected the idea that we can learn what justice is by having the lead investigator simply ask questions, without ever giving any answers. Second, he has rejected the assumption that justice even has a nature or essence. And third, he has rejected the idea that justice is like a craft, the basic assumption Socrates had used to defeat Polemarchus. Thrasymachus goes on to draw out an implication of his claim that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger. If it is to the advantage of the stronger, he reasons, it will also be to the disadvantage of the weaker.

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“You must look at it as follows, my most simple Socrates,” Thrasymachus explains, “a just man always gets less than an unjust one” (343d).

The Profit of Injustice To his last claim Thrasymachus adds a further point that Glaucon will pick up in Book Two. “Those who reproach injustice,” Thrasymachus adds, “do so because they are afraid not of doing it but of suffering it.” He goes on: T5. So, Socrates, injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice. And, as I said from the first, justice is what is advantageous to the stronger, while injustice is to one’s own profit and advantage. (344c)

Plato tells us that Thrasymachus had intended to leave at this point. But Socrates is inspired to make one last effort to overturn Thrasymachus’s position. He says he isn’t convinced that injustice is more profitable than justice. He puts this question to Thrasymachus: “Do you really include injustice with virtue and wisdom, and justice with their opposites?” (348d). When Thrasymachus says he does, Socrates gives this very revealing response: T6. That’s harder, and it isn’t easy now to know what to say. If you had declared that injustice is more profitable, but agreed that it is a vice or shameful, as some others do, we could have discussed the matter on the basis of conventional beliefs. But now, obviously, you’ll say that injustice is fine (kalon) and strong and apply to it all the attributes we used to apply to justice, since you dare to include it with virtue and wisdom. (348e–9a)

The elenchus requires, for it to reach any conclusion at all, even a negative one, that the lead investigator and the interlocutor share a number of background beliefs. Without an area of agreement, the investigator and the interlocutor will not agree on what counts as a counterexample to a given suggested account of F-ness. Nor will the investigator be likely to find other beliefs that the interlocutor will agree to and that can be shown to conflict with the interlocutor’s suggested account. As those of us who have already read the later books of the Republic will know, it is the central project of the whole work to establish that justice is

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profitable and that the just person is the happy, or fully flourishing, person (eudaimôn). But why should Plato have wanted to introduce this thesis in Book I, in the context of an attempt, a failed attempt, to conduct an elenctic examination of Thrasymachus? If Socrates had been able to establish that the just person is the happy person, regardless of that person’s external circumstances, and regardless of the power relationships between that person and the ruler or ruling class of the society, Socrates would certainly have defeated Thrasymachus. In fact, he would have defeated him in more than one way. First, he would have established that explicit claims made by Thrasymachus, such as, “a just man always gets less than an unjust man” (343d), are simply false. Second, he would have taken an important step toward establishing that, contrary to what Thrasymachus assumes, justice does have a real nature or essence after all. Thus it would be because of the nature of justice that one is, if just, then happy—regardless of the power relationships in which one finds oneself.

Plato’s Assessment of the Elenchus So what can we learn about Plato’s attitude toward the Socratic elenchus from Republic I? Here are three points: (1) One prerequisite for conducting a successful Socratic elenchus is that the interlocutor or interlocutors be cooperative. They must think about the question they are asked and answer sincerely, or else the attempt at elenctic examination will fail. This prerequisite is clearly not met in the exchange between Thrasymachus and Socrates. Here is a passage that brings out the failure: T7. [Thrasymachus] … either allow me to speak, or, if you want to ask questions, go ahead, and I’ll say, “All right,” and yes and no, as one does to old wives’ tales. [Socrates:] Don’t do that, contrary to your own opinion. [Thrasymachus:] I’ll answer so as to please you, since you won’t let me make a speech. What else do you want? (350e)

(2) For an elenchus to succeed, Socrates and his interlocutors must believe, or be brought to believe, that the F-ness under investigation is a real kind, that, as Socrates sometimes states the matter, F-ness is an eidos. In effect, Thrasymachus denies that justice is an eidos.

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(3) Socrates and his interlocutors must share enough background beliefs to make it possible for them to agree on relevant counterexamples and on background assumptions that will determine whether a given suggested analysis of F-ness coheres with their belief systems. Polemarchus seems to share with Socrates both beliefs about what a craft (technê) is and the belief that virtues, such as justice, are crafts, or at least like crafts. But Thrasymachus rejects the craft analogy. So he is unreceptive to an important line of reasoning Socrates wants to employ. We may conclude from Book I that no elenchus will be possible unless (1) the interlocutor cooperates in being examined by the lead investigator, (2) the interlocutor is willing to at least assume that there is a real nature, F-ness, to be investigated, and (3) the interlocutor shares relevant background beliefs with the examiner.

Glaucon Takes Over Glaucon, who had been listening to the discussion in Book One, takes over at the beginning of Republic II. His aim is to recast the obstructionism of Thrasymachus as an alternative theory of justice. Here I am going to make a contrast between what I will call an analysis and what I’ll call a theory. On my stipulative understanding of these two terms, an analysis of justice will be something it is reasonable to think an ordinary, un-­ philosophically-­trained interlocutor might be able to come up with. And so, it is an appropriate target for an elenchus. A theory, by contrast, is more philosophically ambitious. It is not something that one can expect to hear from a philosophical naïf. A theory of justice might include an account of why being just is a good thing, or perhaps why people at least think it is a good thing. It should include some response to skeptics who either deny that there is such a thing as justice or else deny that it has the importance or role often assigned to it. What Glaucon does at the beginning of Republic II is to produce a theory of justice in my stipulative sense of “theory.” His theory takes its inspiration from the outbursts of Thrasymachus, but, of course, it is more systematic and better developed than anything Thrasymachus says. Glaucon’s theory of justice is not anything he himself is ready to endorse. But he wants it to be a target for Socrates to attack, or at least respond to. He wants Socrates to refute it. In this way Glaucon professionalizes the inquiry into the nature of justice and takes it away from inquiry into what

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philosophically untutored citizens have to say about justice, which is what an elenchus would naturally focus on. Glaucon gets started by drawing a threefold distinction among (i) things good in themselves, but not for their consequences, such as harmless pleasures, (ii) things both good in themselves and good for their consequences, such as health, and (iii) things good, not in themselves, but rather good for their consequences, such as physical training. Glaucon uses this threefold distinction to make clearer both what he takes the view of Socrates to be and also what he thinks a more sophisticated version of the view of Thrasymachus might look like. According to this Neo-Thrasymachan theory, justice will be something that is good for its consequences, but not good in itself. According to Socrates, by contrast, justice is both good in itself and good for its consequences. Glaucon announces his intention to develop a full-blown Neo-­ Thrasymachan theory of justice in this way: T8. First, I’ll state what kind of thing people suppose justice to be and what its origins are. Second, I’ll argue that all who practice it do so unwillingly, as something necessary, not as something good. Third, I’ll argue that they have good reason to act as they do, for the life of an unjust person is, they say, much better than that of a just one. (358bc)

The Social Compact So what kind of thing does Glaucon think people suppose justice to be, and what do they think its origin is? Here is his statement: T9. They say that to do injustice is naturally good and to suffer injustice is bad, but that the badness of suffering it so far exceeds the goodness of doing it that those who have suffered and done injustice and tasted both, but who lack the power to do it and avoid suffering it, decide that it is profitable to come to an agreement with each other to come to an agreement neither to do injustice nor to suffer it. As a result they begin to make laws and covenants, and what the law commands they call lawful and just. This, they say, is the origin and essence (ousia) of justice. It is intermediate between the best and the worst. The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty; the worst is to suffer injustice without being able to take revenge. Justice is a mean between these two extremes. (358e–9a)

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Note that what Glaucon says, according to this theory, is that the essence (ousia) of justice is just what, on the basis of a kind of social contract, they agree to call “justice.” So, on this view, justice has a nominal essence, but no real essence. Glaucon does not offer any evidence that there has ever been any social assembly that agreed to call “justice” the mean between doing injustice without paying the penalty and suffering it without being able to take revenge. What he wants to do is to make plausible the idea that there is such a social compact implicit in society. He tries to do this by telling the story of the magic ring of Gyges, which, I suspect is familiar to you all. At the end of that story he asks us to suppose that there are two magic rings, one worn by a supposedly just person and one by an unjust person. With both able to commit injustice with impunity, there would be, according to Glaucon, no difference between the actions of the supposedly just person and the supposedly unjust person. Glaucon thinks that if we agree with his claim, then we should find plausible his account of the conventional notion of justice as not acting unjustly in exchange for not having to suffer injustice. I am not going to follow the discussion of Book II any further, or assess the plausibility of Glaucon’s Neo-Thrasymachan theory of justice. What I want to do instead is to reflect on why Plato had his character present such a theory and what his doing so says about Plato’s assessment of the Socratic elenchus.

Plato’s Change of Focus It seems clear to me that, when Plato wrote the Republic, he had lost interest in the elenctic project of his teacher, Socrates. I think that there are several reasons why Plato had turned away from the elenchus. Doubtless some have to do with the challenge posed by the Paradox of Inquiry in the dialogue, Meno. That is a rich topic, but one I am not going to take up here. In any case, the Republic presents a new reason for abandoning the elenchus. Socrates had wanted to challenge Athenians to give a satisfactory analysis of the virtues. He thought it was important to do that both because knowing what the virtues are is important to leading a virtuous life and

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also because his fellow Athenians failed to realize that they would not be able to give satisfactory accounts of the virtues. “It is the most blameworthy ignorance,” he is made to say in the Apology, “to believe that one knows what one does not know” (29ab). The early dialogues suggest that we cannot know that a given action is just, or pious, or whatever, unless we have in mind, or have somehow available to us on reflection, an analysis of the relevant virtue that would satisfy the stringent requirements of Socrates. By the time he wrote his Republic, Plato seems to have dropped the suggestion of any such requirement. In any case, he seems to have lost interest in establishing that no ordinary citizen could satisfy it. Instead of focusing on whether philosophically naïve citizens of Athens can supply satisfactory analyses of the virtues, Plato in the Republic is much more interested in responding to the philosophical theories of the sophists. There was, of course, a real sophist named “Thrasymachus.” But we have very little writing from the historical Thrasymachus. We do have this relevant fragment from the sophist, Antiphon: “Justice, therefore, is not violating the laws (nomima) of the cities in which one is a citizen.” But, whether Plato had Antiphon or Thrasymachus or some other sophist in mind when he had Glaucon develop his Neo-Thrasymachan theory of justice at the beginning of Republic II, it seems clear that he now wanted to address a well-worked out philosophical theory of justice, rather than simply deal with the untutored reflections of philosophical neophytes. The message of Book I is that, even if a Socratic elenchus can convince a thoughtful and good-natured interlocutor like Polemarchus that he doesn’t have a satisfactory analysis of justice, it will not work on a crafty sophist like Thrasymachus. And the message of the beginning of Book II is that, to answer the challenge of a well-thought-out conventionalist theory like the one that Glaucon presents, Socrates is going to have to develop a philosophical theory of his own. It will not do anymore to let Socrates say simply that he doesn’t know what justice is. As we know from the rest of the Republic, the Socrates figure there rises fully to Glaucon’s challenge. In doing so he develops some of the most influential philosophical theories of all time, including a theory of

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the ideal city-state, an account of the human soul, and perhaps the boldest metaphysical theory in our whole philosophical tradition, the Theory of Forms.2

2  As a coda to his turning away from the elenchus at the beginning of Book II, Plato even has Socrates, in Book VII, deplore the practice of introducing young people to the Socratic elenchus. Here is part of the passage:

[Socrates:] We hold from childhood certain convictions about just and fine things (ta kala); we’re brought up with them as with our parents, we obey and honor them …. There are other ways of living, however, opposite to these and full of pleasures that flatter the soul and attract it to themselves but which don’t persuade sensible people, who continue to honor and obey the convictions of their fathers. … And then a questioner comes along and asks someone of this sort, “What is the fine?” And when he answers what he has learned from the traditional lawgiver, the [questioner’s] argument refutes him, and by refuting him often and in many places shakes him from his convictions, and makes him believe that the noble is no more fine than shameful, and the same with justice, goodness, and the things he honored most. (538ce) A few lines later Socrates suggests putting off philosophy until one is fifty years old. But the main point of this section is that engaging in a Socratic elenchus without necessary training and without maturity may actually be detrimental to young people.

CHAPTER 9

Farewell to the Elenchus: Theaetetus

Abstract  Although the Theaetetus is cast in the form of a Socratic elenchus, it also incorporates Plato’s assessment of the elenchus. His message seems to be that, although the elenctic method can refute philosophical theses, it cannot produce philosophically interesting theses—it cannot provide philosophical enlightenment. Keywords  Socratic method • Theaetetus • Knowledge As we have already noted, one of the puzzles about why Plato turned away from the Socratic elenchus in his middle and late dialogues concerns Republic I and the dialogue, Theaetetus. If Plato lost interest in the elenchus after his dialogue, Meno, why did he return to that form of inquiry in Republic I and in the Theaetetus? In the last chapter I argued that the point of the attempted elenchus in Republic I is to show the inadequacy of this form of inquiry, especially when one’s interlocutor, like Thrasymachus, disdains the form, refuses to assume that justice has an essential nature, and fails to share in the background assumptions that Socrates relies on in examining suggested analyses of justice. What now about the Theaetetus? If Plato had truly lost interest in the Socratic method, why did he cast the Theaetetus in the form of an elenchus? The Theaetetus was certainly written much later than the Republic. It counts as either a late middle or early late dialogue. Like me, other © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0_9

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commentators have viewed the Theaetetus as Plato’s farewell to the elenchus. In at least a minimal sense, that is bound to be right. The Theaetetus does have an elenctic form and Plato wrote no elenctic dialogues after he wrote the Theaetetus. But I now think that there is more to viewing this dialogue as a “farewell” than seeing it is the last dialogue in the elenctic form. It also incorporates, I shall try to argue, Plato’s assessment of the Socratic elenchus. Of course, there are important differences between the Theaetetus and the early elenctic dialogues. For one thing, the F-ness in the “What is F-ness?” question is not, this time, either virtue itself, or one of the individual virtues. Instead, it is knowledge. For another—and this is a crucial point—Socrates fills out each of the three suggested analyses of knowledge with very complex and philosophically sophisticated reasoning. His interlocutor, the brilliant boy mathematician, Theaetetus, may or may not have been able to follow all the Socratic reasoning; but, in any case, the reasoning is mostly supplied by Socrates, not by Theaetetus. Thus the Theaetetus, although in the form of an elenchus, does not have the characteristic purpose of an elenchus. To appreciate this point we need to recall what happens in the early dialogues of Plato. In the Laches Socrates examines two generals about the nature of bravery, or courage. Since the interlocutors in that dialogue, Laches and Nicias, are professional soldiers, they certainly ought to know what bravery is. Moreover, Laches and Nicias are initially confident that they do know what bravery is. But, through elenctic examination, Socrates convinces them that they do not really know. In the Euthyphro we find Socrates’s interlocutor going off to court to charge his father with impiety. To be doing that he really ought to know what piety is. In fact, Euthyphro is indignant at the suggestion that he might not know. But by examining him elenctically, Socrates shows him that he does not know. The Charmides is somewhat different in that the interlocutor this time, the boy, Charmides, does not himself claim to know what the F-ness under discussion (sôphrosunê) is; however, Socrates is told that the boy certainly has this virtue and Socrates reasons that one who has it ought to know what it is. But, by elenctic examination, Socrates shows that he does not know what it is. In the Apology Socrates says that it is the most blameworthy ignorance to think one knows what one does not know. We may extrapolate from this that Socrates engages in elenctic examination of interlocutors to

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disabuse them any belief they might have that they know what they do not, in fact, know. The elenchus in the Theaetetus does not seem to have this purpose. For one thing, Socrates begins his elenchus with this admission: “I have a small difficulty [or: a small perplexity, aporia], which I think ought to be investigated, with your help and that of the rest of the company” (146d). He amplifies the point: Now this is just where my difficulty comes in. I can’t get a proper grasp of what on earth knowledge really is. (145e–6a)

Of course the understatement, “I have a small difficulty,” is a characteristically wily way of drawing Theaetetus into the discussion. As we know, or will soon find out, the difficulty is hardly small. But the point to emphasize is that Socrates is not motivated to show Theaetetus that, although he thinks he knows what knowledge is, his belief is false—or even, as in the Charmides, that, although Theaetetus has knowledge and therefore should know what it is, he does not in fact know what it is. Rather, the motivation for the discussion comes from Socrates’s own puzzlement about what knowledge is. Ostensibly, Socrates wants help from Theaetetus and other members of the company in resolving his puzzlement over what knowledge is. After a lengthy explanation of the kind of answer he is looking for, Socrates explains what his role in this investigation will be. He does that by casting himself as a philosophical midwife, someone who is good at assisting in the birth of philosophical babies in someone who is genuinely (philosophically) pregnant, but who is himself philosophically barren. Socrates’s self-proclaimed barrenness is, apparently, a variation on the theme of Socratic ignorance. Once again, the elenchus is to be seen as a purely rational inquiry in which the investigator is to take an uncommitted stance. One thing different about the Theaetetus is that Socrates’s focus is not on his interlocutor, and what his interlocutor is able to say about the nature of the F-ness under discussion. Rather the focus is on what a professional philosopher has said. Thus, when Theaetetus suggests that knowledge is simply perception (151c), Socrates responds this way: But look here, this is no ordinary account of knowledge you’ve come out with; it’s what Protagoras used to maintain. He said the very same thing,

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only he put it in rather a different way. For he says, you know, that ‘Man is the measure of all things: of the things which are, that they are, and of the things which are not, that they are not’. You have read this, of course? (151e–2a)

Theaetetus replies, meekly: “Yes, often.” And Socrates then begins to examine the relativism of Protagoras, not what Theaetetus can come up with in defense of his claim that knowledge is perception. What are we to make of this? Again, as in Republic I–II, Plato shows that he has lost interest in what a philosophically untutored interlocutor can have to say about his “What is F-ness?” question. He is most interested in showing that anti-realism is philosophically untenable. The relevant form of anti-realism he focuses on is the epistemological relativism of Protagoras. Are we meant to suppose that Theaetetus is in a special position to know what knowledge is? This is not an easy question to answer. As a precocious young mathematician, Theaetetus can be plausibly thought to have considerable mathematical knowledge. Perhaps being a precocious mathematician means that he is especially good at proving mathematical theorems and at testing whether suggested proofs are sound. But it is not at all clear that being a precocious mathematician requires that he be good at determining whether, say, a given proof, or the ability to come up with a proof, constitutes knowledge. It is indeed plausible to think the generals in the Laches ought to know and be able to explain what bravery is. It is also plausible to maintain that a theologian, as in the Euthyphro, should know and be able to explain what piety is. Finally, one might also maintain (although this is the most questionable case) that a person who has the virtue of self-mastery (sôphrosunê), as in the Charmides, should know and be able to explain what self-mastery is. But it would be far less plausible to assume that a precocious young mathematician, just by being very good at mathematics, should know and be able to explain what knowledge is. It is doubtless significant that Theaetetus is, in fact, quite modest about his accomplishments. In any case, it is not plausible to think that, in conducting an elenctic examination of Theaetetus, Socrates aims to show him that he does not know something he thought he knew. Then there is something very odd about the relationship between (i) the way Socrates fills out each of the three analyses and (ii) the consideration he uses to defeat each of the analyses. To show what I mean I will start with an outline of the dialogue that brings out its elenctic form:

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Reading the Theaetetus as an Elenchus Prologue (I) Socrates asks Theaetetus what knowledge is. (II) Theaetetus first responds by giving examples. (III) Socrates explains that this is the wrong kind of answer. Section I (IV) Theaetetus then responds with this answer: (A1) Knowledge is perception, that is sense perception. (V) After a lengthy discussion of perception, Socrates refutes (A1) by pointing out that having knowledge requires that one grasp being and truth, but the grasp of being and truth is not acquired through sense perception; so (A1) is false. Section II (VI) Then Theaetetus proposes: (A2) Knowledge is true judgment (or belief). (VII) After a lengthy discussion of how false belief is even possible, Socrates finally refutes (A2) by pointing out that a good orator may convince a jury to accept what is, in fact, a true belief that p, when only an eye-witness could actually have knowledge that p. So (A2) is false. Section III (VIII) Finally, Theaetetus recalls that someone had once said this: (A3) Knowledge is true judgment (or belief) with an account. (IX) After an intriguing discussion of what we might call logical atomism, Socrates finally refutes (A3) by pointing out that simply having an account and not knowing that the account is correct would not be enough to turn true belief into knowledge. So (A3) is false. (X) The dialogue ends in perplexity.

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Section 1, which is the longest of the three sections, includes a complex and very sophisticated discussion of the views of, not only Protagoras, but also Heraclitus and Parmenides. But the thesis that knowledge is perception, which is the subject of discussion in this section, is refuted by a consideration that makes no special appeal to the views of either Protagoras, Heraclitus, or Parmenides. All Socrates has to do to refute the claim that knowledge is perception is to point out that having knowledge requires that one grasp being and truth and the grasp of being and truth does not come through sense perception. So knowledge cannot be simply (sense) perception. Something equally odd happens in Section II. Most of that section is taken up with the effort to understand how false belief is even possible. Socrates’s idea is that we cannot understand knowledge as true belief, the suggestion under discussion in this section, unless we can understand how there can be such a thing as false belief. But the thesis that knowledge is true belief is finally defeated in Section 2 by appeal to a consideration that seems unrelated to the puzzle over how there can be such a thing as false belief. It is defeated by appeal to the example of a court jury, in which, we are to imagine, the jury comes to have a true belief about what happened in the case before it, but only an eye-witness could be said to have knowledge that what the court correctly concludes had happened is actually what happened. Finally, in Section III Socrates offers his famous dream, which has been taken by recent philosophers to be an idea of something like the logical atomism of Russell and early Wittgenstein. But Socrates refutes the thesis under consideration in this section, namely, the thesis that knowledge is true belief with an account, by arguing that having an account as to why it is true that p would not be enough to turn true belief into knowledge; one would also need to know that the account is correct. But that point could have been made without any need to go into logical atomism. So why did Plato embark on sophisticated philosophical explorations in the Theaetetus, when he could have dispatched each of the three suggested analyses of knowledge without even introducing those philosophical explorations? I think the point is this. In each case, the philosophical exploration is arrived at by non-elenctic means. Yet it is primarily these explorations that make the dialogue so fascinating. Plato’s message seems to be that, although the elenctic method can refute philosophical theses, it cannot produce philosophically interesting theses or show how the philosophically problematic character of something like knowledge (or, one

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could add, justice or piety or bravery) invites such explorations. The elenctic method cannot by itself give us a philosophically worthwhile theory of knowledge, or of justice, or of anything else that Socrates was interested in. At most, the elenctic method can refute a philosophically interesting theory. That is the point Socrates tries to make in the Theaetetus by declaring himself to be a philosophical midwife. He says he has been forbidden by god from procreating—that is, from producing any philosophical babies. But, as a philosophical midwife, he can assist others in philosophical childbirth. And he can identify false pregnancies and phantom births. I take this to mean that the Socratic elenchus cannot, by itself, produce any philosophically interesting theses. What it can do is to examine philosophically interesting theses conceived by other means, and examine philosophers who are possibly pregnant with philosophically interesting theories, determine whether their pregnancy is genuine, and, later on, whether an apparent birth is viable. Even though the critical assessment of the Socratic elenchus I am drawing from Plato’s Theaetetus is not identical with the one I have drawn from Republic I and II, it fits together very well with that earlier assessment. In Republic I–II Plato wanted us to see that the elenchus cannot be used successfully against a sophisticated philosopher who does not share one’s basic philosophical assumptions; to respond adequately to such a philosopher one must develop one’s own philosophical theory. In the Theaetetus Plato seems to have wanted us to see, among other things, that the elenchus, by itself, cannot produce any philosophical theories, let alone establish their truth. What it can do is perhaps detect defective theories and perhaps show them to be inconsistent in themselves, or else inconsistent with relevant background beliefs. The general conclusion from both these critiques is that, especially in the face of skepticism, an adequate account of a philosophically problematic F-ness, such as justice or knowledge, requires something rather different from asking intelligent “lay” people persistent questions about what justice is, or what knowledge is. What it requires is the development of a rich philosophical theory. To judge from the early dialogues of Plato, the historical Socrates may have had as his life mission to convince people that they do not know things they think they know, such as what piety, or bravery, or justice is. “It is the most blameworthy ignorance,” Socrates is made to say in the Apology, “to believe that one knows what one does not know” (29b). But by the time Plato came to write the Republic, and perhaps much earlier, he seems to have become far more invested in showing for himself, and for

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others, what those great F-nesses are, and in showing that—despite the claims of the sophists—those great F-nesses have real natures of their own, quite independent of human conventions. Preoccupied with this new mission, he lost interest in demonstrating that the philosophically untutored do not know, and cannot say, what some F-ness is. And so he lost interest in the Socratic method. Even in the Theaetetus, which admittedly marks a somewhat nostalgic return to the elenchus, Plato shows that he does not expect to gain philosophical enlightenment from the elenctic examination of a philosophical naïf. Rather, it is the examination of genuinely philosophical theories, theories that the boy, Theaetetus, would have been incapable of providing on his own behalf, that make this dialogue such a great and memorable work of philosophy. Plato’s loss of interest in the Socratic method has implications, I think, for the use we might want to make of philosophical analysis today. One implication is that neither the nature and objective value of justice nor the proper analysis of knowledge can be established merely by asking astute questions of the philosophically untutored. Philosophical theory will be required—particularly in the face of philosophically sophisticated skepticism.

CHAPTER 10

Philosophy Professionalized: Sophist

Abstract  By the time he wrote the Sophist, Plato had abandoned the elenctic method in favor of a new approach, the method of dichotomous division. Unlike the elenchus, which is a method for refuting an analysis proposed by an interlocutor, the method of division is supposed to actually produce an analysis on its own. This new method also seems to provide Plato with a response to the Targeting Requirement that has so far been lacking. And it leads to the consideration of some fundamental questions in the philosophy of language, and hence to the professionalization of philosophy. Keywords  Socratic method • Sophist • Dichotomous division • Method of Division The Theaetetus ends as Socrates says, “Let us meet here again in the morning, Theodorus” (210d). The Sophist begins as Theodorus says, “We’ve come at the proper time by yesterday’s agreement, Socrates” (216a). And so the Sophist is meant to be a dramatic sequel to the Theaetetus. In this chapter I shall argue that it is also meant to be a philosophical sequel to the Theaetetus. A reader may be surprised to discover that Socrates in the Sophist does not continue to play his accustomed role as lead questioner. In fact, by the

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third page of text Socrates has given up that role altogether and turned it over to a newcomer, someone called the “Eleatic Stranger” (or “Eleatic Visitor”). Commentators have speculated about why Socrates is made to take a back seat in the Sophist. Gilbert Ryle, in his Plato’s Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), offers this explanation: On the theory that dialogues were recited to audiences, coupled with the rider that normally Plato himself took the speaking parts of his Socrates, a plausible explanation suggests itself of the replacement of Socrates by the Eleatic Stranger. The hypothesis is this. Plato, now pretty aged, was smitten by an illness which disabled him from discoursing to audiences. Dramatically, Socrates could no longer lead discussions. … What was to be done, given that no one else could be allowed to take over Plato’s long-standing role as Socrates? … Plato was deputized for, in the new role of the Eleatic Stranger, by a friend or an actor, as Isocrates’ public orations were delivered from a substitute-throat. (28)

I used to think that Ryle’s rather fanciful explanation was, at worst, completely harmless and, at best, laudably imaginative. I now think it is harmfully misdirected. Consider these points. First, although the Theaetetus is elenctic in form, it is not really elenctic in purpose. We saw in the last chapter that, even though Socrates does ask Theaetetus what knowledge is, he is not interested in finding out, as one would expect from a standard elenctic dialogue, whether Theaetetus really knows what knowledge is or only thinks he knows. The substantive material Socrates cross-examines in Part One does not come from the mouth of Theaetetus; rather, it is taken from what, according to Socrates, is a theory of Protagoras, as well as what Socrates attributes to the followers of Heraclitus and Parmenides. The material he ruminates on in Part Two is a perplexity he draws from Theaetetus, but one he confesses to be preoccupied with himself, namely, how false belief is even possible. And the theory he examines and defeats in Part Three is the analysis of knowledge as true belief with an account—an analysis he himself had offered in the Meno at 98a. Second, the Theaetetus really is, as I argued in the last chapter, Plato’s farewell to the elenchus as a philosophical method. However, we shouldn’t think that Plato was just saying goodbye to the elenchus because he was tired of the form. Socrates explains that “God compels me to attend the travail of others, but has forbidden me to procreate” (Theaetetus 150c).

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This seems to be Plato’s way of telling us that the Socratic elenchus, though it can test the philosophical “babies” given birth by other means, cannot itself produce any philosophical truths. As we shall see, that message is repeated, even more explicitly, in the Sophist. Third, whereas in the Theaetetus we are given no help in figuring out how to generate philosophically interesting truths, in the Sophist that lacuna is filled in by a method that the Eleatic Stranger explains and illustrates. In fact, we are made to realize on the very first page of the dialogue that there will be a new philosophical method in the offing. Thus, being told by Theodorus of the Eleatic Stranger’s presence, Socrates says, “So your visitor might be a greater power following along with you, a sort of god of refutation to keep watch on us and show how bad we are at speaking—and to refute us” (216b). The words translated as “refutation” and “refute” are forms of “elenchus.” So Socrates is made to anticipate that the Eleatic Stranger will engage in an elenchus, but Theodorus disabuses him of this anticipation. He makes clear that the Eleatic Stranger will not be using the elenctic method at all. “That is not our visitor’s style, Socrates,” says Theodorus, and adds: “He’s more moderate than the enthusiasts for debating are” (216b), where the “enthusiasts for debating” are presumably those who follow the elenctic method. A little later on the Eleatic Stranger suggests that, before they try out his philosophical method to determine what a sophist is, they first use his method on something simpler, namely, on the question of what a fisherman, or angler, is. “We ought to practice our method of hunting on something easier first” (218d), he adds, which “ will provide an appropriate method of hunting and way of talking for what we want” (219a). The Eleatic Stranger’s method, as it turns out, is analysis by dichotomous division. If we want to know what an F is, we first think of a broad classification under which F’s fall. Let’s suppose that all F’s are A’s. Then we divide A’s into two subordinate classifications, let’s say B’s and C’s. We then ask whether F’s are A’s that are BA’s or A’s that are CA’s, If F’s are CA’s and not BA’s, then we proceed to divide CA’s into two subordinate classifications, let’s say CA’s that are D’s and CA’s that are E’s. If F’s are CA’s that are E’s, but not D’s, then we can conclude that F’s are ECA’s. And so we have an analysis of what an F is. For angler, the Eleatic Stranger begins with the general classification, art (or skill, technê), and first divides that classification into productive and acquisitive sorts of art or skill. Angler clearly belongs to the acquisitive sort, which is further dichotomously divided into acquisition by exchange

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and by force (or capture). Angling is clearly acquisition by force, or capture, and then that branch of the tree is dichotomously divided further, and so on until we reach what seems to be the final dichotomous division. The analysis can be read off this classification tree by summing the divisions under which angler falls. The method of dichotomous division is clearly meant to be a method for actually producing an analysis of, for example, what a sophist is, not, like the elenctic method, a method for refuting an analysis proposed by an interlocutor. The Sophist is thus a philosophical, and not just a dramatic, sequel to the Theaetetus. It is thus meant to get beyond the philosopher-­ midwife—the character who is expert at cross-examining candidates for philosophical analysis offered by others, but has forsworn producing any philosophical babies himself. There is another methodological doubt in the Sophist that merits special mention. The Eleatic Stranger begins his investigation of what a sophist is by responding to the Targeting Requirement of the Paradox of Inquiry. We saw in Chap. 6 that the Doctrine of Recollection can be plausibly supposed to be a reply to the Recognition Requirement of the Paradox. “As the soul is immortal,” Plato has Socrates say in the Meno, “has been born often and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things” (81c). But neither in the Meno nor in any of the middle dialogues does Plato present a good response to the Targeting Requirement. In the Sophist Plato finally presents a good response. It is that we begin with a name, a word (onoma). If it were virtue we were seeking an analysis of, as in the Meno, we should begin with the word, “virtue” (aretê). In the Sophist we are seeking an analysis of sophistry, that is, what it is to be a sophist. So we should begin with the word, “sophist.” Here, in an early passage from the Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger makes just that move: T1. I think you need to begin the investigation [of] the sophist—by searching for him and giving a clear account of what he is. Now in this case you and I only have the name (onoma) in common, and maybe we’ve each used it for a different thing. In every case, though, we always need to be in agreement about the thing itself (peri to pragma auto) by means of a verbal explanation [that is, an analysis], rather than doing without any such explanation and merely agreeing about the name. (218bc)

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The Eleatic Stranger then proceeds to come up with no fewer than six different “guises” under which the sophist is said to appear. These can be thought of as six different accounts of the meaning of the word “sophist.” The project of the investigation is to determine whether there is a real kind lurking under these various guises, that is, pointed to by the different meanings of the word “sophist.” It may be hard to appreciate how significant this methodological decision to start with our language competence really is. We may have assumed all along that when Plato had Socrates ask his interlocutors in the early dialogues what bravery or piety is, he was asking for the meaning of their word for “bravery” or “piety.” But that would be wrong. Plato had Socrates assume that the virtues are moral kinds, objective realities that can be investigated and analyzed. In the middle dialogues these moral kinds were said to be eternal forms. And Plato had Socrates develop a whole metaphysical theory of these forms. To be sure, Plato thought that there is a connection between, say, the words, “bravery” and “justice,” and the moral kinds, bravery and justice. In fact, he was inclined to suppose that the connection is too close. Thus, in a famous passage in Book X of the Republic, he has Socrates say this: T2. Do you want us to begin our examination, then, by adopting our usual procedure [or: usual method]? As you know, we customarily hypothesize a single form in connection with each of the many things to which we apply the same name. (Republic 596a)

Plato was, of course, aware that words have different senses. But it was methodologically convenient for him to ignore this fact and assume that each general term, and specifically, each term for one of the virtues, as well as for virtue itself, picks out a single moral kind. Part of the price for assuming that each moral term has a single meaning is that it is hard to see how the Targeting Requirement of the Paradox of Inquiry can be satisfied. But if, as in the passage above from the Sophist, we recognize, on the one hand that we have a certain language competence that enables us to communicate reasonably effectively with each other but, on the other, we may not know whether our moral terms pick out real kinds, rather than merely conventional kinds, we have a response to the Targeting Requirement. We can start with our understanding of a relevant term, such as “justice” or “sophist,” and then, perhaps using the Eleatic Stranger’s method of dichotomous division, seek to determine

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whether there is some real kind, sophist, more or less well picked out by one of the meanings we assign to the word “sophist.” That brings us to Plato’s selection of sophist as a topic for philosophical analysis. A reader might not immediately understand what is so philosophical about the question, “What is a sophist?” However, as we soon learn in the dialogue, sophist is a good target for philosophical analysis because giving a satisfactory analysis of sophist requires being able to understand what a statement is, what negation is, and how there can be such a thing as a false belief—the last being, of course, Plato’s preoccupation in Part Two of the Theaetetus, as well as in other Platonic dialogues. Is there any further indication, within the dialogue, that Plato wants us to understand that he has lost significant interest in the Socratic elenchus? Here is a further indication. The Eleatic Stranger produces, by the method of dichotomous division, six different “guises” under which the sophist might appear. Those “guises,” I suggest, are meant to be six different meanings one might attach to the word, “sophist.” Surprisingly, the sixth meaning seems to apply most directly to Socrates and his elenctic cross-examinations.1 [In spelling out the sixth meaning of the word “sophist,” Plato has the Eleatic Stranger say this: T3. So let it be the cleansing part of the expertise of discriminating things … the part of that which concerns souls; and within that it’s teaching; and within teaching it’s education. … [and] within education … the refutation (elenchos) of the empty belief in one’s own wisdom is nothing other than our noble sophistry. (231b)

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Plato has here classified the practice of the Socratic elenchus as a form of sophistry. We have now arrived at Plato’s harshest judgment yet of the Socratic method—it is a kind of sophistry.] In the Sophist Plato also finds a new placement for perplexity (aporia) in philosophical inquiry. In the elenctic dialogues, perplexity is typically a state we arrive at when the elenctic examination has reached an impasse. In the Sophist perplexities are stated early on as, not only a motivation for 1  [At this point, Matthews entered the reminder to himself to “fill out” the text, but never did so. The bracketed paragraph that follows is my conjecture about how he might have done that.—Ed.]

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investigation, but also as something that needs to be resolved for the investigation to have been a success. This way of regarding perplexity is, of course, already prominent in Section 2 of the Theaetetus. The perplexity that occupies most of that section is this: “How is false belief even possible?” But that feature of the Theaetetus is one of several features that make the Theaetetus a non-standard elenchus. The overriding perplexity of the Sophist is an expanded version of the one from the Theaetetus about how false belief is possible. But in the Sophist the perplexity about false belief is seen to fall under more general perplexities, including a perplexity about why a statement is not simply a collection of terms, such as “walks runs sleeps” or “lion stag horse” (262b). A statement, Plato has the Eleatic Stranger insist, rightly, must say something about something. So the simplest statement will have a noun and a verb—a noun to refer to something the statement is about, and a verb to say something about….2 [… that thing. Clearly, the perplexity here is not about how to define any of the great F-nesses, or even about the effort to nail down what a sophist is. Rather, the topic has changed to a fundamental question in the philosophy of language: how do we succeed in using language to say something about the world? This departure is a striking example of the emerging professionalization of Plato’s enterprise. It hardly needs to be pointed out that Plato’s perplexity here leads directly into Aristotle’s analysis of statements in the Categories, and anticipates the fundamental rule of contemporary phrase-structure grammars: S → NP + VP—a sentence consists of a noun phrase plus a verb phrase. The Socratic elenchus has little relevance for a philosopher whose interests have transformed in this way. The professional philosopher requires tools that are beyond the scope of the Socratic elenchus.]

2  [The chapter ends abruptly at this point. In the bracketed text that follows, I have entered a conjecture as to how Matthews might have completed the chapter.—Ed.]

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion

Abstract  Plato still believes that the elenchus is valuable as a method for cleansing one’s mind of the belief that one knows things one does not know. But there are both internal and external limitations in what the elenchus can be reasonably expected to accomplish. And Plato also thought that philosophy can do more to get beyond those limitations. Only by going beyond the elenctic method will we be able to adequately address the foundational questions of philosophy. Keywords  Socratic method • Limitations of elenchus So why did Plato lose interest in the Socratic method? He never explains, at least not explicitly. But then almost all his writings are in dialogue form. Even to conclude that he did lose interest in the elenchus, let alone to explain why he lost interest, we need to interpret the significance of what Plato has his characters say in his various dialogues. There certainly are passages that offer reasons Plato might have had for turning to another methodology. Consider this passage from the Sophist. The Eleatic Stranger is talking about people who engage in the elenctic examination of others. We are clearly to recognize that Socrates is the main practitioner of the Socratic elenchus. Ironically, Plato has put Socrates in the audience to whom the Stranger is addressing these remarks. But he is allowed no response to the Stranger’s remarks. The Stranger says: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0_11

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T1. They cross-examine someone [i.e., the interlocutor] when he thinks he’s saying something though he’s saying nothing. Then, since his opinions will vary inconsistently, these people will easily scrutinize them. They collect his opinions together during the discussion, put them side by side, and show that they conflict with each other at the same time on the same subjects in relation to the same things and in the same respects. The people who are being examined see this, get angry at themselves, and become calmer toward others. They lose their inflated and rigid beliefs about themselves that way, and no loss is pleasanter to hear or has a more lasting effect on them. Doctors who work on the body think it can’t benefit from any food that is offered to it until what’s interfering with it from inside is removed. The people who cleanse the soul, my young friend, likewise think the soul, too, won’t get any advantage from any learning that’s offered to it until someone shames it by refuting it, removes the opinions that interfere with learning, and exhibits it cleansed, believing that it knows only those things that it does know, and nothing more. (230bd)

Anyone familiar with the early dialogues of Plato can be expected to see in this passage a relatively optimistic assessment of the value of elenctic examination. Consider Euthyphro, in the dialogue named after him. He does seem very confident at the beginning of the dialogue, if not outright arrogant. And he is certainly drawn into contradiction. But his soul does not seem to be cleansed by the exercise. When, at the end of the dialogue, Socrates suggests they begin again their effort to determine what piety is, Euthyphro says, “Some other time, Socrates, for I am in a hurry now, and it is time for me to go” (15e). So, in the Euthyphro anyway, elenctic examination does not seem to have the cleansing effect advertised by T1. Perhaps we should view T1 as an idealized characterization of a Socratic elenchus. Perhaps Plato’s idea is that this would be the best outcome we can hope for in an elenctic examination: The interlocutor comes to realize that he has contradictory beliefs and that he doesn’t know what he thinks he knows. In the Theaetetus Socrates seems to hope that the elenctic examination of the mathematical prodigy, Theaetetus, will tell us what knowledge is. But, of course, it produces no such result. Socrates offers his interlocutor this consolation: T2. your companions will find you gentler and less tiresome; you will be modest and not think you know what you don’t know. (210c)

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Thus both the Theaetetus and the Sophist echo a motivation for philosophical cross-examination that, according to Plato’s record of the trial of Socrates, the Apology, had been important to Socrates in his real life, namely, to show people that they do not know things they think they know. Is that all philosophy can promise? The Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist certainly does not think so. And we may reasonably suppose that Plato does not either. The Stranger, in fact, counts the practitioner of a Socratic elenchus, and therefore presumably Socrates himself, as a sophist, even though he expresses trepidation at doing so, lest he award the other sophists “too high an honor” (231a). I suggest that this is Plato’s own mature assessment of the Socratic elenchus: It is valuable as a method for cleansing one’s mind of the belief that one knows things one does not know. But philosophy, Plato clearly also thought, can do more. Perhaps it would be helpful to group the limitations of the elenchus, as revealed in the dialogues of Plato, in two categories. First, there are internal limitations in what the elenchus can be reasonably expected to accomplish. Second, there are external limitations in what it is reasonable to expect that one might accomplish with an elenchus.

Internal Limitations By the time Plato wrote his dialogue, Meno, and perhaps much earlier, it had become clear to him that the Socratic elenchus has serious internal limitations. Some of these limitations arise from the Socratic profession of ignorance. When the lead investigator into what F-ness is honestly confesses that he does not know what F-ness is, the investigation promises to have a basic character of impartiality and fairness. It will not, it seems, be unduly influenced by Socrates’s pre-analytic intuitions about F-ness. But especially if the professed ignorance is total—as when Socrates says at the beginning of the Meno, and even repeats—“I do not even have any knowledge of what virtue itself is” (Meno 71a), this profession of ignorance invites the Paradox of Inquiry. As we saw in Chap. 6, Socrates in the Meno eventually backtracks and admits to having latent or innate knowledge of what virtue is. As T21 in that chapter makes clear, what people call searching and learning actually involve recollection of something previously known, but subsequently forgotten.

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So the claim of complete ignorance of what virtue is, is abandoned in favor of a claim that one does not remember what one came to know in a previous life. And so the Recognition Requirement of the Paradox of Inquiry has apparently been satisfied. But the Targeting Requirement is not. I have suggested that that requirement is not properly addressed until the Eleatic Stranger, in the Sophist suggests that the investigation begin with the word for “sophist.” But, of course, you and I may assign different meanings to the word. Moreover, to proceed with the investigation we will need a method to determine whether there is a real kind, and not merely a conventional kind hiding under the guises of our various word meanings. If there is a real kind denoted by the general term we began with, our (non-elenctic) method must provide a way of analyzing that kind. This passage from the Statesman, which is a sequel to the Sophist, brings out one aspect of the targeting problem with an arresting example. The Eleatic Stranger is speaking: T3. All right, here’s an analogy. …What most Greeks do is make the division by separating Greeks from all the rest: they use the single term, ‘barbarian’ (barbaros), for all the other categories of people, despite the fact that there are countless races who never communicate [with one another] and are incompatible with one another, and then expect there to be a single category, too, just because they’ve used a single term. (262cd)

Barbaros (“barbarian”) was used by Greeks for anyone who did not speak their language. The Stranger is here pointing out that barbarian is not a real kind. In a satisfactory analysis one needs a method for determining which general terms pick out real kinds. One message of the Statesman is that we need a proper method of division to assure that the distinctions we draw mirror the important differences in nature: T4. let’s treat them as a sacrificial carcass and carve them at their joints. (Statesman 287c)

One may well wonder whether Plato succeeded in either the Sophist or the Statesman or elsewhere in delineating a method that could be counted on to carve nature at its joints. But having a lead investigator questioning a philosophical novice on the assumption of the questioner’s ignorance was obviously not a promising way to proceed.

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Another Internal Limitation The elenchus gets started with the presumption that the interlocutor knows what F-ness is. This presumption may be based on the interlocutor’s role in life. Thus generals ought to know what bravery is. Or it may be based on a claim the interlocutor makes or implies. Thus Euthyphro casts himself as an expert on piety. Or it may be based on some other consideration. Socrates says that Charmides, since he has the virtue of self-­ mastery, should know what it is. However, it does not belong to the elenchus to suggest any method by which an interlocutor could determine what F-ness is, or make sure that he knows what it is. Moreover, the only way the questioner has of determining whether what he says is correct is to try to catch the interlocutor in contradiction. The questioner may suggest a counterexample. The interlocutor may or may not concede that the suggested counterexample is genuine. Thus Nicias denies that the Crommyon sow is a counterexample to the suggestion that bravery is a kind of knowledge by denying that a beast is capable of being brave (Laches 197a). Alternatively, the questioner may get the interlocutor to agree to something that contradicts the suggested analysis of F-ness. Thus Socrates gets Euthyphro to agree that the gods love the pious because it is pious but to deny that they love the pious because it is god-loved. Socrates then tries to get him to see that these two admissions contradict his suggestion that the god-loved and the pious are analytically equivalent. However, there is nothing about the method to help an interlocutor arrive at a good answer or to help a questioner find fault with a suggested analysis. Things are quite different in the Sophist. The Eleatic Stranger has an analytic method. It is the method of dichotomous division. Then there is the nagging suspicion that the Socratic elenchus cannot, of itself, lead to any positive conclusions. Plato has Socrates describe himself in the Theaetetus as a philosophical midwife who has forsworn for himself all procreation. His job is to examine others to determine whether they are philosophically pregnant, or carry only “wind-eggs.” As we saw above, Plato, in the Sophist, has the Eleatic Stranger recognize the benefit of elenctic examination. He views it as a method of cleansing a person of false beliefs and thus the “blameworthy ignorance” of thinking one knows something that one doesn’t know.

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External Reasons The elenchus is primarily directed at the great “What is F-ness?” questions. Those questions can seem foundational to philosophy, if virtue is foundational to ethics.1 [If it is, then the question “What is virtue?” is foundational to philosophy, since ethics is a part of philosophy. Similarly, the question “What is knowledge?” is foundational to philosophy, since knowledge is foundational to epistemology. But if it turns out that the elenchus can only rule out faulty or problematic answers to any of the great “What is F-ness?” questions, and is unable to provide any answers of its own, then the elenctic method is unable to adequately address any of the foundational questions of philosophy. With the elenchus as her only philosophical tool, the philosopher will never be able to answer the discipline’s foundational questions. Philosophical progress would be incremental at best, as unsuccessful answers to the “What is F-ness?” question are proposed and then refuted. A philosopher with grander ambitions will have to transcend the elenctic method. And it can hardly be disputed that Plato was a philosopher with grander ambitions. Beginning with the Phaedo and the Republic, we have seen, Plato began to chafe at the narrowness and sterility of the elenchus. His greatest contributions to the Western philosophical tradition were achieved only after he realized how much the constraints of the Socratic method limited philosophical progress. And that is ultimately why he lost interest in it.]

1  [The chapter ends abruptly at this point. In the bracketed text that follows, I have entered a conjecture as to how Matthews might have completed the chapter.—Ed.]

Bibliography

Allen, R.E. 1970. Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’ and the Earlier Theory of Forms. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Benson, Hugh H. 1990. Misunderstanding the ‘What is F-ness?’ Question. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 72: 125–142. ———., ed. 1992. Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Socratic Wisdom: The Model of Knowledge in Plato’s Early Dialogues. New York: Oxford University Press. ———., ed. 2006. A Companion to Plato. Oxford: Blackwell. Beversluis, John. 1987. Does Socrates Commit the Socratic Fallacy? American Philosophical Quarterly 24: 211–223; also in Benson [1992] 107–122. Brickhouse, Thomas C., and Nicholas D. Smith. 1984. Vlastos on the Elenchus. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2: 185–195. ———. 1994. Plato’s Socrates. New York: Oxford University Press. Fine, Gail. 1992. Inquiry in the Meno. In The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut, 200–226. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Theory of Forms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. Plato on Knowledge and Forms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. Knowledge and True Belief in the Meno. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 27: 41–81. Geach, P.T. 1966. Plato’s Euthyphro: An Analysis and Commentary. The Monist 50: 369–382. Gulley, Norman. 1968. The Philosophy of Socrates. London: Macmillan. Irwin, Terence. 1977. Plato’s Moral Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0

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———. 1990. Socratic Puzzles. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 10: 24–66. ———. 1995. Plato’s Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Kraut, Richard. 1983. Comments on Gregory Vlastos’s ‘The Socratic Elenchus’. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1: 59–70. Lesher, James H. 1987. Socrates’ Disavowal of Knowledge. Journal of the History of Philosophy 25: 275–288. Matthews, Gareth B. 1972. Senses and Kinds. The Journal of Philosophy 69: 44–57. ———. 1999. Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. Socratic Ignorance. In Benson [2006], 103–118. Matthews, Gareth B., and Thomas A.  Blackson. 1989. Causes in the Phaedo. Synthese 79: 581–591. McPherran, Mark L. 1996. The Religion of Socrates. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Nehamas, Alexander. 1975. Confusing Universals and Particulars in Plato’s Early Dialogues. Review of Metaphysics 29: 287–306. ———. 1986. Socratic Intellectualism. Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 2: 275–316. Penner, Terry. 1973. The Unity of Virtue. Philosophical Review 82: 35–68; also in Benson [1992], 162–184. Polansky, Ronald M. 1985. Professor Vlastos’s Analysis of Socratic Elenchus. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 3: 247–259. Prior, William J. 2004. Socrates Metaphysician. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 27: 1–14. Reeve, C.D.C. 1989. Socrates in the Apology. Indianapolis: Hackett. Scott, Dominic. 2006. Plato’s Meno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C.C.W. 1998. Socrates: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vlastos, Gregory. 1965. Anamnesis in the Meno. Dialogue 4: 143–167; reprinted in Vlastos [1995], 147–165. ———. 1983. The Socratic Elenchus. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1: 27–58. ———. 1990. Is the ‘Socratic Fallacy’ Socratic? Ancient Philosophy 10: 1–16. ———. 1991. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1994. Socratic Studies. Ed. Myles Burnyeat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995. Studies in Greek Philosophy. Vol. II.  Princeton: Princeton University Press. Woodruff, Paul. 1990. Plato’s Early Epistemology. In Epistemology, ed. S. Everson, 60–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; also in Benson [1992], 86–106.

Index1

A Antiphon, 91 Apology, vii, 1, 35–43, 37n2, 59, 91, 94, 99, 111 Aristotle, 15, 48, 60, 107 B Benson, Hugh, 8n7 Bravery, 6, 8, 14, 15, 22, 35, 36, 39, 50, 66, 94, 96, 99, 105, 113 C Cebes, 70, 75 Cephalus, 81–83 Charmides, 8, 45–55, 46n1, 57, 59, 94–96, 113 Clifford, W.K., 42n3 Clinias, 47 Courage, 7n4, 13–24, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 74, 94

Critias, 45–48, 51, 52, 54, 55 Crommyon sow, 19, 22, 113 D Definition, Priority of, 8, 72 Delphic oracle, 37–38, 53 Descartes, René, 42 Dichotomous division, 103–106, 113 E Eleatic Stranger, 102–107, 109, 111–113 Euthyphro, vii, 1, 6, 7n5, 7n6, 8, 23–33, 28n2, 36, 38, 39, 57, 59, 61, 94, 96, 110, 113 F Forster, Michael N., 6n3

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. B. Matthews, Why Plato Lost Interest in the Socratic Method, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13690-0

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INDEX

G Geach, Peter, 8n8, 72, 72n2 Glaucon, 86, 88–91 Grube, G.M.A, 26

N Nicias, 12, 17–20, 22, 24, 35, 36, 94, 113 Nicomachean Ethics, 15, 48n2

H Heraclitus, 98, 102 Hippias Major, 73, 74 Hypothesis, Method of, 3, 76, 79

P Paradeigma, 8, 26, 33, 36, 72 Parmenides, 71, 98, 102 Perplexity, 2, 9, 17, 20, 21, 30, 32, 33, 36–37, 53, 63–64, 74, 79, 82, 95, 97, 102, 106, 107 Phaedo, vii, 69–78, 80, 114 Phronêsis, 7n4, 39, 47 Piety, 6, 7n6, 8, 23–33, 28n3, 36, 38, 39, 50, 61, 66, 74, 94, 96, 99, 105, 110, 113 Polemarchus, 81–83, 85, 88, 91 Protagoras, 95, 96, 98, 102 Putnam, Hilary, 8n8

I Inquiry, Paradox of, 3, 64–67, 74, 78, 79, 90, 104, 105, 111, 112 Irwin, Terence, 36n1 J James, William, 42n3 K Kripke, Saul, 8n8 L Laches, 1, 6, 7, 7n4, 11–24, 12n1, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 49, 57, 94, 96, 113 Laws, The, 47 Lysimachus, 12, 20 M Matthews, G. B., v, 52n3, 72n3, 77n4, 106n1, 107n2 Menn, Stephen, 6n2 Meno, 2–4, 6n2, 30, 57–67, 75, 76, 79, 90, 93, 102, 104, 111

R Recognition Requirement, 65, 67, 80, 104, 112 Recollection, Doctrine of, 65–67, 75, 76, 78, 80, 104 Republic, vii, 2–3, 6n3, 46, 50, 52, 71n1, 79–93, 80n1, 96, 99, 105, 114 Rosch, Eleanor, 8n9 Russell, Bertrand, 98 Ryle, Gilbert, 102 S Sachs, David, 6n3 Self-mastery, 46–52, 46n1, 54, 55, 74, 96, 113 Self-predication assumption, 71

 INDEX 

Socratic elenchus, 6, 9, 12, 20, 21, 32, 33, 36, 38–40, 43, 50, 51, 64, 67, 69, 72, 78–82, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92n2, 93, 94, 99, 103, 106, 107, 109–111, 113 Socratic Fallacy, 72 Socratic ignorance, 4, 8, 17, 20, 21, 59, 64, 67, 82, 95 Socratic method, viii, 1–9, 59, 80, 81, 83, 93, 100, 106, 109, 114 Sophist, The, 91, 100–107, 109, 111–113 Sôphrosunê, 8, 45–47, 51, 52, 60, 94, 96 Statesman, The, 112 T Targeting Requirement, 65, 67, 80, 104, 105, 112 Theaetetus, 2–3, 80, 93–104, 106, 107, 110, 111, 113

Theodorus, 101, 103 Theological voluntarism, 28 Third Man Argument, 71 Thrasymachus, 80–89, 91, 93 U Unity of the virtues, 21 V Virtue, 2, 4, 6–8, 6n3, 12–14, 18–24, 32, 39, 43, 45–53, 58–67, 74, 76, 82, 83, 86, 88, 90, 91, 94, 96, 104, 105, 111–114 Vlastos, Gregory, 80n1 W Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 98

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