Plato

Charmides, Laches, Lysis.

These are typical "dialogues of search." The question of the Charmides, which contains a par ticularly delightful picture of the way of Socrates with a promis ing lad, is what is meant by sophrosyne, the virtue which is shown alike in graceful and easy command of one's appetites and passions, in dutiful behaviour to parents, elders, official "superiors," in bal ance and sanity amid the ups and downs of fortune. We seem to be in a fair way to identify this virtue with "knowledge of self"— the self-knowledge Socrates had valued so highly—when we are confronted with an ambiguity. "Self-knowledge" might be taken to mean a knowledge which has knowledge itself for its object, in fact for "epistemology." But it is hard to be sure that there is any such science as "the knowledge of knowledge," and harder still to see how such knowledge could be directive of conduct.

In the Laches we are concerned with valour, the soldier's virtue. Here again we are on the point of defining the virtue as knowledge of what is and what is not really to be dreaded. But this is tanta mount to saying the true knowledge of evil and good, and the resultant definition, "valour is knowledge of good" would identify valour with the whole "goodness of man." That is, the definition is only possible if we can meet the popular objections to the Socratic thesis of the "unity of virtue." The Lysis examines in the same tentative way, friendship, the relation in which self-forgetting devotion most conspicuously displays itself. The crux of the problem is that after many false starts, we seem to have reached a promising result in the view that each friend is really "a part of" the other in "soul or temper or body," and yet it is hard to reconcile this position with the facts which seem to show that "unlikeness" is a potent source of attrac tion. Aristotle has taken up and discussed the issues raised in the dialogue in his own treatment of the same subject (E.N . VIII.–IX.).

Cratylus.

The question here, one much agitated in the age of Socrates, is whether names are significant by "nature" or "con vention." Is there some special appropriateness of the sounds of names to the objects called by them, or is there no bond between the thing and its name but that of the "usage of the community"? The absurdity of attempts to get metaphysics out of etymologies is humorously exposed by showing that the method can be used at pleasure to prove either that the "giver of names" agreed with Heracleitus that motion is the sole reality or that he held, with Parmenides, that motion is an illusion. Yet there are real analo gies between "vocal gestures" and the things signified by them, which are pointed out with a good deal of insight. The main purpose of Plato, however, is to dwell on the point that language is an instrument of thought ; the test of its rightness is not mere "social usage," but its capacity to express true thought ac curately.

Euthydemus.

The dialogue is, in large part, broad satire on "eristics" who misapply the logic of Zeno for the purpose of entangling anyone who commits himself to any assertion in fal lacies due to the ambiguity of language. (Aristotle has drawn

freely upon it in his own essay on Fallacies, the de Sophisticis Elenchis.) Its more serious purpose is to contrast this futile con tradiction-mongering with the "protreptic" of Socrates. The lad Clinias is simply bewildered by the questions of the two pro fessors of "eristic"; those of Socrates have the purpose of con vincing him that the happiness we all desire is not guaranteed by the possess-ion of the things the world accounts good, but depends on our making the right use of them. If we would attain happi ness we must "tend" our "souls," and that means that we must acquire the "royal" science which ensures that we shall make the right use of all the gifts of mind, body and fortune, in other words, the knowledge of true and absolute good.

Gorgias.

The Gorgias is a much greater, as well as a much longer work than any of those we have considered, and has always been a prime favourite with serious moralists. Beginning osten sibly as an enquiry into the nature and worth of "rhetoric," the art of advocacy professed by Gorgias, it develops into a plea of sustained eloquence and logical power for absolute right, as against expediency, as the sovereign rule of life private and public, and ends with an imaginative picture, on Orphic lines, of the eternal destinies of the righteous and the unrighteous soul. Literature has no more impressive presentation of the claim of conscience to unqualified obedience and the impossibility of divorcing the politically from the morally right.

Gorgias holds that "rhetoric" is an "art," the application of knowledge to practice, and the queen of all "arts," since it gives its possessor the object of man's highest ambition, power to enforce his will on society. The statesman, who is the man of men, is just a consummate advocate speaking from a brief. If he is clever enough he will, though a layman, carry the day with an audience of laymen, even against the expert specialist. To his audience he will seem, though he is not, the superior of the real expert. Socrates declares that "rhetoric" is not an "art," a matter of native principles, but a mere "empiric knack" (7,417) of humoring the prejudices and pleasing the tastes of an audience. It is a subspecies of KoXaKei.a, "parasitism." There are two genuine "arts" conducive to the health of the body, those of the trainer and the physician; each has its para sitic counterfeit, the one in the profession of the "beautifier," the other in that of the confectioner. So there are two "arts" con ducive to "health of soul," those of the legislator, who lays down the rule of morally sane life, and of the judge, who corrects moral disorders. The "sophist" counterfeits the first, as the "rhetorician" the second, by taking the "pleasant" instead of the "good" as his standard. The "rhetorician" is thus not the wise physician of the body politic but its "toady" (K6X4). This severe judgment is disputed by Polus, the ardent admirer of Gorgias, on the ground that the successful "rhetorician" is virtually the autocrat of the community; every man's life and property are at his mercy.