Following are comments on terms, many of which appear in discussions about the Platonic dialogues discussed in class. Some of these comments argue points, others are simply technical or historical.
akrasia — Moral weakness, analyzed in the Socratic dialogues as a form of ignorance. In Plato’s view, any unjust action is done out of ignorance of one’s own best interests and contrary to one’s own well-being. If you truly know what your interests are, then you will never even be tempted to act unjustly, any more than you would be tempted to hug a cactus. Someone who lives unjustly, then, is weak in a certain way, and Plato thinks that this weakness is the weakness of ignorance: a person acting unjustly doesn’t really know what he is doing.
anamnesis — An event of recollection of a general idea, culminating in recognition. Anamnesis occurs when an idea is brought dialectically to noetic consciousness, and this idea then patterns or re-organizes one’s experience and allows one to see something clearly that was confused or disparate before. Anamnesis is the goal of elenchus.
See post on Anamnesis.
a priori ideas — Ideas that structure and organize one’s experience. These ideas are not derived from experience because they are presupposed by experience. Clear examples of a priori ideas discussed by Kant are those of space, time, and causality. Plato argued that all of our ideas are a priori. The a priori nature of ideas is probably most evident in the interpretation of ambiguous visual images and in the understanding of written language. The play of ideas brought to such visual or reading experience can reveal (or create) various meanings in the view or in the text. Not all such ideas are equal, though; some are more suited to, and productive for understanding of, the nature of the view or text.
areté — Excellence, strength, or virtue. The notion of areté centers on a concern that the eudaimonia of one’s life is a result, at least partially, of the nature of one’s character. Your potential for experiencing the fullest benefit of life is conditioned by what sort of a person you are, by the constitution of your character. Areté is that capacity of character that enables the fullest and most admirable range of human feeling, reflection, and action.
In the widest sense, areté is the excellence of things as well as persons, and is manifest in the fulfillment of function (ergon). Thus the proper function of an eye, for example, is to see, and a good eye sees well; it fulfills is purpose (telos). In the Republic, Plato argues that the function of a human being can be articulated in the notion of justice (diké). Areté is therefore not merely potential, but consists of a high degree of actualization in practice. Prudence, justice, temperance and courage are the four classical aretai. Socrates argued that these four are actually four aspects of one virtue, “practical wisdom.” The “thesis of the unity of the virtues” is therefore attributed to him. According to this thesis, virtue is knowledge (where knowledge = justified true belief, or noetic clarity of belief achieved by anamnesis). See post on Virtue and Knowledge.
argument — The basic unit of philosophical discourse. An argument consists of one or more propositions that serve as premises and which are intended to lend credence to one or more conclusions. An argument is audience-specific since it offers premises that the audience is more likely to accept as evidence for the conclusion, which is supposed to be more controversial or interesting than the premises. The discipline of logic, which is a branch of philosophy, is the study of the abstract forms of good arguments, i.e., arguments the premises of which, if true, really do lend the support of their truth to their conclusions, and the development of formal criteria to distinguish between arguments that are valid in this way and arguments that are not.
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates is shown as a keenly practical logician; he draws very interesting conclusions from propositions to which his interlocutors have already agreed, conclusions that are sometimes in direct contradiction to what these same interlocutors have previously asserted. So in Book I of the Republic, Thrasymachus agrees to the truth of certain propositions that Socrates then employs as premises to the conclusion that justice is the advantage of the weaker, exactly the contrary of what Thrasymachus first asserted. That is, Thrasymachus first asserts:
1. Justice is the advantage of the stronger.
By “justice,” it turns out that he means rulership and by “the stronger,” he means those who actually rule. After some examination, he then says that:
2. Rulership is knowledge (i.e., practical know-how, craft, art, or techné).
Then, after Socrates has examined various sorts of technae, Thrasymachus finally sees the truth of:
3. A techné benefits its objects.
Given that
4. The objects of rulership are the ruler’s subjects, the citizens of the country he rules,
it therefore follows that:
5. Justice (rulership) is the advantage of the ruled rather than the advantage of the ruler.
Given further that by “the stronger,” Thrasymachus means the rulers, and by “the weaker,” he means the ruled, it then follows that
- Justice is the advantage of the weaker.
Given this conclusion, Thrasymachus finally sees (at 350d) that he has assented to a set of inconsistent propositions. That is, propositions 1. and 2. cannot both be true. Thrasymachus has asserted both, but 2. together with 4. implies 6., which is the contradictory of 1. Thrasymachus must therefore give something up if he is to be consistent. Since 3. is a conceptual truth about the very concept of a techné, Thrasymachus has to say either that 2. is false and that rulership is not knowledge, or that 1. is false and that justice is not the advantage of the stronger. Since it seems very implausible that rulership is not a practical skill, his only real choice is to give up his original assertion. In this way, Thrasymachus’ original assertion has been refuted by the logic of Socrates’ argument which exploits an inconsistency in Thrasymachus’ belief system. One implication of this particular refutation is that Thrasymachus does not really believe what he first thought he believed.
autonomy — Literally, self-governing (auto + nomos). An autonomous person is self-controlling and so is never swayed in his thought or action by forces outside of him (including the passions). Autonomy is obedience to reason. Cf. heteronymy.
beauty — The platonic concept of beauty is indicated in discussions on love in the Symposium and the Pheadrus. Beauty is an eidos with the unique quality of luminousness, the power to shine through the visible world as a call to remembrance of the divine world of Reality. Beauty may thus be understood as the appearance of the good, for it is the sensuous representative of an otherwise invisible reality, the realm of the eidae. In the Pheadrus, Socrates claims that the apprehension of Beauty causes “divine madness,” a longing to return to the sight of reality since lost to a soul fallen from heaven.
Apprehension of beauty is thus an ecstasy that draws such a Platonic lover out of his selfish concerns and toward a higher realm. In his second speech in the Pheadrus, Socrates says that a lover begins to sprout again the wings with which, in his remembered existence, he flew in the vault of heaven. This image of flight is an image of the freedom and true power promised by the eidos of Beauty.
The power of imitative art to fake the charm of beauty, and so draw the naive ecstatically away from and not toward reality, was of deep concern to Plato in the Republic. His arguments that knowledge of the good fulfills a deep human need implies that the charms of imitative art are finally insipid and tasteless. An experienced person will be able to tell the difference. But such experience requires an adequate initial education. It is the defeat of such education by imitative art that Plato deplored.
courage — One of the four cardinal classical virtues. Counterfeits are rashness or foolhardiness. (For a linkage of the virtues of temperance and courage with a proper attitude toward death, see Phaedo, 68b-69c. Plato’s dialogue, Laches, is devoted to a discussion of the definition of courage.)
Courage is boldness motivated by reason, i.e., a knowledge of when to be bold.
One vexed question is whether one has to feel fear in order to be courageous. Socrates argued that since courage is knowledge (as is every one of the virtues), and a person is not able to act against what he clearly and steadfastly knows, it is not practicable for a person of courage to act other than courageously. To feel fear is to feel the pull of a passion that would have one do otherwise. Thus, knowledge and the practical strength of that passion are incompatible. It follows that fear signals a weakness of knowledge, a lack of a clear and true conception of what one is really doing. Courage, then, does not involve the willful overcoming of fear; it is the absence of fear in the presence of practical wisdom.
Such complete lack of fear, though, is possible only for a god. Human beings, because of their limited perspective, are continually susceptible to the moral confusion known as fear and so must continually abate their fear and straighten their conduct by reflection on the good. Lacking such reflection, a person becomes controlled by his fears and uses his intelligence only to weigh fears against one another.
cosmos — Literally, order. Specifically, the natural order displayed by an all-embracing harmony. The natural response to the awareness of cosmos is piety.
daimon — “Spirit,” “demon,” “daemon,” or “genius.” Etymologically interpreted as “he who allots.” A daimon was considered to be a divine spirit, but not equivalent to a god. The first libation at a wine-drinking was frequently made to the Good Daimon, or the daimon of the locale.
In several Platonic dialogues, Socrates refers to his “daimon,” or personal spirit, which gives him a sign whenever he is about to do something that he shouldn’t do. He always follows these signs. Socrates’ daimon may be characterized as his own deepest self that believes truly though without knowledge. (See eudaimonia.) In the Symposium, love (eros) is characterized as a kind of spirit or daimon, something neither human nor divine, but in between, and which strives for possession of the divine eidos, Beauty. Lemprière [Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984)] notes that a daemon is “a kind of spirit which, as the ancients supposed, presided over the actions of mankind, gave them their private counsels, and carefully watched over their most secret intentions…. At the moment of death, the Daemon delivered up to judgment the person with whose care he had been entrusted; and according to the evidence he delivered, sentence was passed over the body.” (See also Socrates’ mention of guardian spirits at Phaedo, 107e.) Thus, the idea of a daimon represents a concern for the effects of one’s “private counsels” and “most secret intentions” on the general character of one’s life. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature notes that “In general, daimon describes an aspect of divine power which cannot be identified with a particular god…. It is this power which gives a man good or bad fortune at any time, so that he may feel that he has the daimon on his side, or else that he is struggling against it; thus daimon approximates in meaning to irresistible fate. (Heracleitus declared in a famous utterance that an individual’s character is his daimon, thereby asserting that a person’s destiny is under his own control.)” The Socratic view is similar to that of Heracleitus; if you can control the formation of your character (i.e., achieve self-control), then you can control your destiny. (Nota bene: such control is not tyrannical control.) The Heracleitian utterance is frequently translated as: “A man’s character is his fate.”
The central Socratic concern is: how can one control the formation of one’s own character? Such formation must require practical knowledge (techné), but the practical knowledge of a cobbler who knows how to form a shoe from leather and the practical knowledge of a wise person who knows how to form a stronger character are profoundly different. Grasping this difference is perhaps the central challenge of the Platonic dialogues.
deinos — “The terrible one.” A deinos is somebody without character or integrity and who is therefore capable of doing anything. A deinos is unpredictable, manipulative, and ruthless, and is thereby outside any true community of friends. The essential idea of the term is lack of structure or character; a deinos lacks form of personality or foundation in character. That is why he is so changeable and able to become different people, as it were, depending on circumstance and desire. Nobody, including himself, knows who he really is because there is nothing solid and unchanging there to really know. He lacks the basis for self-knowledge or friendship. A related term is deinon, which means, roughly, “clever.” At the beginning of the Apology, Socrates denies that he is a clever speaker in this sense. A speaker who is deinon can practice the verbal trickery of rhetoric and so can make anything appear in any light, can even make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger.
dogmatism — See discussion under “vicious ignorance.”
ecstasis or ékstasis — Literally, a standing outside of one’s self. According to the Platonic account of beauty, the experience of beauty is ecstatic. It draws you out of yourself and into a self-forgetful state of absorption. Art, also, has the power of ecstasis and therefore, as a human endeavor, has the power either to benefit or harm its audience.
eidos — An idea, a priori in nature, that lends intelligibility to experience. To find the governing eidos of a situation is to find its essence, its reality, and thus to truly understand it. Such discovery is the aim of elenchic inquiry, and its success is anamnesis, in which the essential eidos organizes one’s understanding of its object. The Greek eidos has been variously translated. In Larson’s translation of the Republic, it is translated as “shape.” In the Hackett editions, G.M.A. Grube translates eidos as “form.” It has also been translated as “idea,” though the English “idea” carries a subjective connotation that the Greek “eidos” does not.
“Eidos” is sometimes translated as “beauty,” as in Herodotus’ story of Candaules and Gyges, the king of Lydia and his confidant. “Candaules fell in love with his own wife, so much that he supposed her to be by far the fairest woman in the world; and being thus persudaded of this, he raved of her beauty (eidos) to Gyges.”
elenchus — The careful, dialogical explication of primordial belief. See above discussion, section V. See also the entry under “argument” above.
epithymetikon — The appetitive part of psyché that, in the just psyché, is tempered by reason (logistikon) and spirit (thumoeides). Adjective form: epithymetic.
eudaimonia — Frequently translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘well-being,’ ‘eudaimonia’ is perhaps better translated as ‘flourishing,’ to emphasize that it is, on the best theories of it, an active state of realized potential. Eudaimonia flows from the practice and development of virtue and thus represents the actualization of one’s best nature. The root terms are ‘eu-‘, translated as “good,” and ‘daimon’ (see above). Thus, superficially, eudaimonia refers to being watched over by a “good spirit.” More profoundly, it refers to living in accord with one’s true self. Thus, eudaimonia has sometimes been characterized as an on-going process of “becoming who one is.” The opposite of eudaimonia is not “maldaimonia” (which might be translated as “evil spirited”), but dysdaimonia (“of two spirits”). Dysdaimonia is internal schism, a state of being divided against oneself, that is manifest in: (1) a sense of dissatisfied alienation from how one is engaged in the world through one’s various projects, and therefore in an alienation from who one is, and is becoming, because of those projects; along with (2) a lack of the personal honesty (and subsequent courage) necessary to throw down those engagements, noxious to one’s daimon, and thus to return to single-mindedness. Dysdaimonia can result in a feeling of personal weakness, of being at the mercy of forces outside of oneself. Eudaimonia, by contrast, is accompanied by a sense of fellowship and personal power.
friendship — The main antidote to the tyranny of one’s persona; presupposed by the practice of elenchus. A true friend is someone concerned about what is truly good in any serious discussion you may have with him or her. A false or counterfeit friend (a deinos) is someone who appears to be a friend but who uses this appearance to turn matters between the two of you to the service of his prior desires or projects. Only true friendship is capable of true objectivity of judgment. (The opposite of a deinos is a phronomos, someone who possesses phronesis, usually translated as practical wisdom.)
“When we wish to see our own face, we do so by looking in a mirror; when we wish to know ourselves, we can obtain that knowledge by looking at our friend, for the friend is, as we say, a second self.” –Aristotle.
hamartia — “Error.” In his Poetics, Aristotle remarks that a tragic hero ought to be a man whose downfall comes not as a result of vice or depravity, but from an error of judgment. The errors of Oedipus, for example, come of impulse and ignorance, not of obvious character flaws. Yet Oedipus is, in a profound sense, tyrannical since he aims to control his own destiny whatever the gods may say. The very purpose of his leaving Corinth was to avoid the fulfillment of a prophecy. Oedipus’s more profound hamartia may have been committed before he traveled to Thebes.
On most interpretations of tragedy, the hamartia, the crucial error, is a direct result of a “tragic flaw,” a defect of character. (Cf. the discussion of tragedy below.) Part of the message of tragedy is that human beings are filled with such flaws and so cannot control their destiny in a self-willed way as can the gods.
heteronymy — Literally, “rule by others” [hetero + nomos]. Heteronymy is a moral/psychological condition in which one is controlled by external forces and circumstances. Among these forces are the passions and other compulsions, which beset one as external forces. The contrasting concept is autonomy, “self-rule.”
hubris — “Wanton insolence.” Sometimes translated as “pride” or “arrogance,” hubris is a certain sort of conceit that, within the context of the Platonic dialogues, may be considered the ground of vicious ignorance (see below). In traditional tragic plays, hubris is a character defect that causes a character to ignore the warnings of the gods, to transgress their laws, or to attempt to circumvent their will. In Platonic moral psychology, hubris is indicated to have its subtlest manifestation in the denial of one’s own mortality and in the self-deceiving half-belief that one is somehow special and set apart from the great majority of other people and so deserving of special treatment by man and nature. To use a Freudian term, hubris is egoism that blinds one to the reality of one’s situation. In more traditional phrasing, hubris is the false pride of a human being who would be an isotheos, an equal of the gods, and who would therefore command his own destiny. This denial undermines the sense of one’s own finitude necessary for the practice of the virtues. Polus, in the Gorgias, is a good example of someone fully under the sway of hubris. Euthyphro’s, by contrast, is a rather fatuous conceit, and Thrasymachus’ dogmatic cynicism cloaks the yearning to be one of the powerful few, a privileged “insider.”
In Book II of the Republic, Glaucon’s story of the ring of Gyges is a story of a ring that appeals to the hubris in humans. The ring confers invisibility, a god-like power.
justice — dikéosyne. One of the four cardinal classical virtues. A counterfeit discussed in the Gorgias is rhetoric or oratory. The sense of justice consists of a sense of due proportion in inter-personal and political matters, so that neither too much nor too little time, energy, and attention are given to projects in our public life. Justice manifests itself in fair-dealing in one’s affairs with others, but also in a public-mindedness that is concerned with the true good of one’s community above and beyond any question of personal gain or the imposition of personal opinion.
In Book II of the Republic, Socrates initially characterizes justice as an political-economic concept; a just society is one in which everyone pursues a specialized art or craft (techné) that serves a need of society and does not meddle in the craft activities of others. True economics is the basis of justice. In Book I, Socrates contrasted such economic activity with chremististics, or money-making, in his discussion with Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus argued that the whole point of any economic activity is money-making and so that any craftsman acts only for his own benefit. It follows from this that any craftsman is a would-be tyrant, and this implication is consonant with Thrasymachus’ views. But Socrates shows that the aim of any economic activity is actually the benefit of someone else, and that money-making is an add-on discipline secondary to any professional activity. Because chremististics is therefore not part of the basic political economy, it is not part of justice. The Republic is devoted to finding a definition of justice for a political economy that is “spoiled,” in which there is demand not just for what is needed, but for things that are merely wanted. Socrates’ aim is to show that justice, as a certain organization of character, is desirable for its own sake. He argues that justice is a kind of techné that involves practical knowledge of the good for the political community (and, likewise, practical knowledge of the good for the psyché). Justice is, however, a techné for which we lack full theoretical knowledge. (See related comments about justice under ” techné” and ‘argument’.) Adjective form: dikaios.
kinship hypothesis — The hypothesis, presumed true by Socrates’ theory of knowledge, that the human soul is able to know what is real because the soul and reality are akin (of the same kind). The kinship hypothesis is an explicit statement of an article of faith central to Socratic philosophy, that the world in which we live, and in which our lives have their significance, is never an essentially unintelligible mystery to us. For if it were, then the Socratic striving for sense and definition in the effort to discover what the nature of our existence requires, would be futile.
The nature of the kinship hypothesized is indicated in the theory of forms, which posits a distinction between the constantly moving, changing stuff of physical existence and reality; existing stuff, since it is always in flux and change, is not available to our intelligence and is therefore unknowable as flux. Such things are knowable only insofar as they participate in the forms of an unchanging reality. It is through these forms that our intelligence is able to operate, and it is implied by the kinship hypothesis that the governance of intelligible forms is universal in scope: all that exists participates in reality. Another way to state this is: no situation is essentially chaotic. It could be argued that modern physics strives for the definition of a certain set of forms, the forms that govern the physical universe in micro- and macro-structure. Physics does not invent its subject matter, but seeks to discover it by means of highly abstract, mathematized theory.
nemesis — “Retribution.” In Greek literature, a nemesis is a personification of the gods’ resentment of humankind’s insolence toward them (hubris). Thus, a nemesis is a kind of divine punishment that overtakes a tragic hero. Tragic consequence.
noûs — That aspect of the mind that engages in theoretical reflection and contemplation. See discussion above, section I.
In the Timaeus, Plato identifies noûs as the principle within the world soul that is responsible for the rational order of the universe. The Stoics identified noûs with logos; logos, in the Stoic view, is both cosmic reason–the ordering principle in the universe–and the rational element in humans by which they participate in that order and are able to represent it, linguistically and practically.
Socrates always joined the clarity and playful freedom of highly general noetic reflection (sophos) with the immediacy of social and practical life. The dramatic unity of a Platonic dialogue represents the practical unity of reflection and practice. Descartes, the most influential modern proponent of the priority of noetic reflection over social practice, attempted to form his philosophy on pure noetic reflection, in the light of “reason alone,” as the Enlightenment philosophers liked to say. Descartes considered noetic clarity to be the distinctive mark of truth. See his first rule in the Discourse on Method: “The first of these [rules] was to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so: that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgments, and to accept in them nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it.” [Italics added.]
persona — A self-conception, which, when taken too seriously, tends to be sustained by, and productive of, desires and compulsions that distract one’s thought and distort the character of one’s action, rendering it disproportionate to its circumstances and to the sort of being one really is. A persona is an initial, more or less artful, social representation of the self, necessary for human life. One’s persona is, however, always susceptible to a longing to be more than merely human. Thus, the persona of a foolish person tends to become a counterfeit self.
Some of Socrates’ later Roman admirers, the Stoics, suggested that a wise person will play his or her part in life imaginatively and well, and will live passionately through that part, but will also know, like an actor on a stage, that though he may discover himself through his persona, he is yet finally distinct from it. Does an actor on a stage playing Hamlet believe that he is Hamlet? In a sense, yes. Because he forgets himself as he enters imaginatively into the character of Hamlet and feels and thinks as Hamlet feels and thinks. If he’s a good actor, he doesn’t dabble at, or play at, being Hamlet, he takes his acting seriously and puts his entire self into the role. He becomes Hamlet passionately. But in another sense, no. If the actor really believed that he was Hamlet, we would put him in an institution with other people who believe they are Napoleon. So it is, the Stoics have suggested, with one’s persona. Play it well and passionately, don’t hold back, but don’t lose perspective.
philotimia — The desire to be admired and esteemed above others. One of the common flaws of character. For an example, see Euripides’ play, Iphigeneia at Aulis.
piety — A sense of natural obligation to God, country, family, and finally to oneself, that is based in a general sense of one’s place in the world. See above discussion in section IV.
pleonexia — Pursuit of unlimited wealth. The pleonectic person is intemperate in a certain way. Pleonexia is the characteristic intemperance of the oligarch.
polis — Specifically, a Greek city-state. More generally, a community bound by ties of friendship and a sense of the common good. See above discussion in section IV. In the Apology, Socrates argues that nothing can harm a good person, but he also argues, in his examination of Meletus, that no-one knowingly corrupts members of his community (his polis), because living in association with bad people leads to one’s own harm, and no-one knowingly chooses to be harmed. This argument implies that one’s goodness at least typically depends on the goodness of one’s community, one’s polis.
primordial belief — See discussion on Anamnesis.
prudence — One of the four cardinal classical virtues. Prudence is manifest in care for the future. Prudence needs a knowledge of mortality to give it proportion. One of its counterfeits, motivated by fear of death, consists of an indulgence of compulsive measures that one secretly hopes will sustain one’s life forever. Another counterfeit, also motivated by fear, is a timidity that is unwilling to risk change. A simple lack of prudence takes a cavalier attitude to the future and attempts to adopt a mere animals’ oblivion toward it. Such attempts can be only temporarily successful, since care for the future is an essential, unavoidable aspect of what it is to be a human being.
psyché — The name of the human soul. The original Greek meaning is, literally, ‘breath’, hence ‘life.’ The Oxford English Dictionary remarks that psyché is “the animating principle in man and other living beings, the source of all vital activities, rational or irrational, the spirit or soul, in distinction from its material vehicle…or body; sometimes considered as capable of persisting in a disembodied state after separation from the body at death.” ‘Psyché’ also applies to a butterfly, which is an emblem of the soul. In Platonic thought, human psyché is considered to be manifest in a continual inner, deliberative dialogue. Private thought is a kind of talking with oneself. The quality of this inner dialogue is determined by the quality of one’s outer dialogue. (John Dewey once said, “Soliloquy is the reflex of conversation.”) And the quality of outer dialogue, in turn, is determined by the quality of one’s relations with others, especially one’s friends. You might say, then, that the quality of your friendship is the quality of your soul. De-liberation is a removal from an uncontrolled, desire-ridden state to an alignment with the character of one’s friendships, one’s polis. Psyché has its ground in community. When, in the Phaedo, Socrates contemplates the possibility of surviving death, he relishes the prospect of continuing his conversation with all the great and good men of history.
punishment — In Book I of the Republic, Polemarchus agrees with Socrates that since justice is a virtue and virtue always has good effects, the practice of justice never harms anyone. This agreement leads to the refutation of Polemarchus’s tentative definition of justice as helping friends and harming enemies. It also points to the conclusion that punishment, if just, does not harm the person punished. In fact, justice, since it is a virtue, not only does not harm, it improves those affected. Thus, someone justly punished is improved thereby. What is punishment that its justice is beneficial? To answer this question, consider a central Platonic tenet: Virtue is knowledge. It thereby follows that vice is ignorance. A wrongdoer thus always acts on a false belief about what is good (or just or right). To benefit a wrongdoer, then, it is sufficient that this false belief be at least refuted if not corrected. Thus, punishment may be considered to be the refutation of a false belief.
A criminal justice system is not the only place of such refutation. Experience can refute false beliefs, and the disappointment it administers is a kind of refutation. And, notably, conversation with Socrates can refute beliefs. To the extent that you love your own opinions, such refutation can be unpleasant. Since almost all people love their own opinions, punishment and Socratic conversation both have the reputation of being unpleasant. But after being “punished” by his conversation with Socrates, Thrasymachus is better off; if he takes heed of what the conversation has shown, he’ll have one less importantly false belief to lead him astray, and he’ll be a more just man, in the sense of “justice” defined in the Republic.
reason — logistikon. That part of the psyché, in Plato’s Republic, capable of logos in the highest degree. Reason is therefore capable of prudence and in the best position to decide policy. The function of the logistikon is to produce a common logos for psyché so that psyché is a harmonious unity with no repressions or splits. In the Republic, Socrates is the logistikon, weaving a harmony among himself, Glaucon and Adiemantus (thumoeides), Clitophon, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus (epithymetikon). He makes of them a small polis.
refutation — One stage of elenchic examination. To refute a proposition is to show that it is false, given that other accepted propositions are true. It is part of the elenchic strategy to test any given definition against other more basic beliefs. By refuting definition after definition, elenchic examiners come closer and closer to their own actual belief system, the belief system that elenchus tries, in its fashion, to remember. See the discussion under “argument”, above.
relativism — See discussion under “vicious ignorance.”
rhetoric — From the Greek, rhetor, “speaker in the assembly.” Generally, “rhetoric” refers to the art of using language to persuade. The rules of rhetoric were traditionally arranged under the headings of invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. Rhetoric became an object of study and teaching in ancient Greece and continues to the present day. Plato was suspicious of the value of rhetoric because he saw that within the context of a speech, without any dialectic restraint, language can be used to persuade its audience of almost anything. Socrates frequently says, after hearing a speech, that he was “carried away.” This is not necessarily a compliment, for rhetorical language can carry one away in almost any direction at all, good or ill, true or false. For this reason, all rhetoric lay under Plato’s suspicion of being self-serving and tending more to rationalization than reason. In one dialogue, the Gorgias, Socrates goes so far as to define rhetoric as language that counterfeits justice. Reason is dialectical and necessarily connected with knowledge of the good. But rhetoric is monological and usually serves to rationalize action for the sake of interests other than the common good. The psychological correlate of political rhetoric is self-deception, or lying to oneself, about what is just.
techné — translated both as ‘art’ and ‘craft.’ Plato did not recognize any basic difference between what we call the arts and the crafts or trades. That is, he did not use any equivalent to our concept of “fine art,” according to which such art is essentially removed from practical life and is reserved for some special realm of rarefied, non-worldly experience. All art is practical, on the Platonic view, since, as any techné, it tends to the goodness of human life. (See discussion in section VI. above.)
A techné combines:
(a) theoretical principles with
(b) practical application
(c) to promote the good of its object independently of the welfare of its practitioner.
By virtue of its theoretical principles, a techné is logical; that is, it can give an account of itself, of how it works and how it accomplishes its ends. (Thus, there are textbooks of medicine, but no textbooks of quackery.)
By virtue of its practical applicability, a techné is not merely speculative or contemplative, but is a kind of skill or “know-how.” A techné necessarily promotes the good of its object since its object can be understood only as good.
The “Simile of the Sun” in the Republic implies that the Good is not just a moral standard, but also the metaphysical standard of being. For medicine, the perfectly healthy human body is the standard not only for what such a body ought to be, but also for what such a body is; disease is understood as such only by reference to health. What a human body is can be understood only by reference to what it may ideally become or would ideally have been. Anyone who deviates from his skill to promote some purpose other than the good of his craft object (a doctor, say, who cares more about getting money from his patients than curing them) practices not a techné but some counterfeit of it. It follows that anyone engaged in a counterfeit undertaking is not acting justly; he is not doing justice to the object of his action, whether that object be patients, students, the law, or a science. In this sense, justice is a part of any real profession and is the implicit substance of all professional standards. Thus, any techné is, in its own way, a model or image of justice since it aims at a good beyond itself. In Book I of the Republic, Thrasymachus concludes that justice is a techné, counter to his original declaration and his persistent inclination. See the discussion of “argument” above.
temperance — One of the four cardinal classical virtues. Its counterfeit is reasoned licentiousness (tradecraft in pleasure; cf. Phaedo, 68b-69c). The Greek, sophrosyne, is also translated as “sound-mindedness,” “moderation,” or “self-control.” On the Platonic view, temperance is manifest in a strength of mind due to a clear vision of the good. Plato’s dialogue, Charmides, attempts to define sophrosyne. Temperance is never overcome or controlled by particular passions or desires, which are always short-sighted, but is always able to see any immediate situation within a broader perspective. Aristotle argued that temperance carries its own pleasure, a pleasure which is more gratifying because it is pure and unmixed with the pain of desire or passion. At 587e in the Republic, Socrates concludes that the life of reason is 729 times more pleasant than the tyrannical life.
thumoeides — The spirited part of psyché that, in alliance with reason, tempers the epithymetikon or appetitive part of the soul. Mostly, the motivation of the thumoeides is pride. Adjective form: thymoeidic.
tragedy — from the Greek, meaning “goat song.” (The origin of the term is unknown, but some have speculated that the term referred to a form of ritual sacrifice accompanied by choral song in honor of Dionysus, the “goat god.”) Tragedy is a form of drama, frequently permuted in human life. There seem to be four defining characteristics of tragedy:
- In the end, the hero, who is a person of exceptional talent or ability, comes to a fall, sometimes death, from what is considered by general opinion to be a high or promising position.
- The hero participates unwittingly or blindly in bringing this fall on himself.
- The hero’s participation in his own tragic fall is due to some character flaw. This flaw has its effect because the hero is not fully aware of it and so cannot control it.
- The tragic consequence of the hero’s actions is greatly out of proportion to the specific moral character of those actions; some seemingly small mistake has very large consequences.
Examples of tragic heroes that exemplify these features are Oedipus, the hero of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Creon, the hero of Antigone. Antigone, of Sophocles’ Antigone, is sometimes considered to be a tragic heroine, but she lacks almost all of the above features. As a heroine, she is more like Socrates and Jesus, pre-ordained by character and circumstance to suffer death at the hands of misguided authority for the sake of obedience to divine law. Typically, a tragic hero is someone who opposes divine will with his own and whose life therefore embodies this division and conflict. In the Apology, Socrates argues that death is nothing to be feared; he’s a sort of anti-tragic hero, an argument for the conclusion that nothing can harm a good person. He does not suffer. Antigone and Jesus suffer. They seem more human. Socrates seems almost divine.
Aristotle says that tragedy, as a dramatic form, involves incidents “arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.” Part of the point of Aristotle’s remark is that the audience of a tragedy identifies with the hero, seeing in his situation a pattern of their own, and so, as they pity the hero his fate, they fear for their own fate, though the drama brings about a purging (catharsis) of these emotions through the self-recognition it promotes. A good cry makes you feel better. But tragedy is a general human condition; our flaws get us in the end.
J.A. Cuddon remarks:
What makes [dramatic characters] tragic heroes is that they have qualities of excellence, of nobleness, of passion; they have virtues and gifts that lift them above the ordinary run of mortal men and women. In tragedy these attributes are seen to be insufficient to save them either from self-destruction or from destruction brought upon them. And there is no hope for them. There is hope, perhaps, after the tragedy, but not during it. The overwhelming part about tragedy is the element of hopelessness, of inevitability. [ J.A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd ed. (London: Blackwell, 1991), p. 985.]
The chorus at the beginning of Anouilh’s play, Antigone, express it this way:
…The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction. Death, treason and sorrow are on the march; and they move in the wake of storm, of tears, of stillness… Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless… In tragedy nothing is in doubt and everyone’s destiny is known. That makes for tranquillity. There is a sort of fellow-feeling among characters in a tragedy: he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it’s all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.
Cuddon also writes that “tragedy is a kind of protest; it is a cry of terror or complaint or rage or anguish to and against whoever or whatever is responsible for ‘this harsh rack’, for suffering, for death. Be it God, Nature, Fate, circumstance, chance or just something nameless. It is a ‘cry’ about the tragic situation in which the tragic hero or heroine find themselves.” [Ibid.]
tyranny — A certain condition of the soul that renders it unable to engage in sensible dialogue or self-reflection. Also a correlative political condition. A very tyrannical person is without true friends, a slave to his passions, heteronymous, and, for that reason, unpredictable. Tyranny is a psychological tendency to which nearly everyone is prone to some extent, and therefore a political tendency to which every nation is prone to some extent.
The word is derived from the Greek tyrannos, and is probably Lydian in origin. Gyges of Lydia was known among the Greeks as the first tyrant. (Cf. Glaucon’s story of the Ring of Gyges in Book II of the Republic.) He was also known as the inventor of money, the power to convert visibles into an invisible essence and then turn it back into visibles of different forms. A tyrannos, as opposed to an hereditary king, is someone who takes power by his own will apart from the will of custom or the gods. A tyrannos is therefore a self-made usurper of tradition and a wielder of unprincipled power.
vicious ignorance — The ignorance which does not recognize itself as ignorance and which thereby blocks the development of knowledge. Typically, this sort of ignorance is reinforced by a conceit rooted in one’s conception of oneself (what I have called one’s persona) as someone special and exceptional to the general limitations of humanity. It probably has its root in the denial of death, the implicit belief (belied by a certain anxiety) that one is immortal. Typically, this pride is expressed in hubris, which is a pride of power or knowledge that is overweening because without an effective awareness of its fallibility or limits. It is a pride that conceives of itself as in no need of greater self-knowledge. There are two main strategies of this tyrannical sort of ignorance: dogmatism and relativism.
A dogmatist thinks of himself as having the final truth and therefore an unquestionable guideline for action. For him, there is little point in thinking much about his opinions, for they are beyond question. Someone who, for this reason, is unwilling to bring his own opinions into question is a dogmatist.
A relativist is also unwilling to bring his own opinions into question, but he uses a different rationale. He thinks that any opinion is as good as any other and that, for this reason, there is little point in thinking much about what one believes.
As a type, the dogmatist sees each new situation as not really new at all, but as just another example of what he already knows in general. In this way, he is closed to anything really new; his judgment becomes blind, his friends become replaceable, and his conversation becomes cliché-ridden and boring. A person who really succumbs to dogmatism begins, over time, not to trust his own judgment and, in the end, holds no real opinions or convictions. Dogmatism, as a counterfeit of wisdom, will at last reveal itself for what it really is: a kind of spiritual emptiness themetically identical with relativism.
A relativist in theory tends to be a dogmatist in practice. What the relativist and dogmatist have in common is an inability to listen. Both dogmatism and relativism are strategies to keep one’s opinions closed and intact, safe from any real influence from others. But in this refusal of mediation is also a self-imposed blindness about the realities that would otherwise refute and improve those opinions. The refutation of an opinion is a great benefit, for new and better opinions may come in light of the refutation. The violence of some of the metaphors of argument should not be allowed to mislead; after a refutation, it is not that one is left without an opinion on the subject because, unfortunately, one’s opinion has been destroyed. Like Thrasymachus, one may be left a little numb afterwards, but thought, like life, goes on and new opinions emerge that have learned from the fate of their predecessors.
virtue — Areté. The four cardinal virtues are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Courage. A virtue, in the classical sense, is a facet of human character recognized as an excellence or strength, something that tends to make a person more admirable.
The Romans recognized twelve virtues and made a deity of each. The Roman general, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, built two temples, one to Virtue and the other to Honor. To get to the second temple, a visitor had to pass through the first. Lemprière notes: “The principal Virtues were distinguished, each by their attire. Prudence was known by her rule, and her pointing to a globe at her feet; Temperance had a bridle; Justice had an equal balance, and Fortitude leant against her sword; Honesty was clad in a transparent vest; Modesty appeared veiled; Clemency held an olive branch, and Devotion threw incense upon an alter; Tranquility was seen to lean on a column; Health was known by her serpent, Liberty by her cap, and Gaiety by her myrtle.” See Areté.
virtuous ignorance — The ignorance that realizes that it is ignorance and which thus serves the human potential for knowledge in general and self-knowledge in particular. Virtuous ignorance realizes that making sense out of one’s general situation is a continuing challenge, that meeting that challenge is a highly personal activity, and that the cultivation of friendship is a necessary part of that activity. In short, it is the reflective ignorance required for a good life. A technical expert on anything is someone who knows what questions to ask in his area of expertise. An expert, that is, is someone who knows pretty exactly what he doesn’t know, and what he needs to find out, to solve a technical problem. His ignorance is not the without-a-clue sort of ignorance. Rather, it’s the sort that comes from a trained diagnostic sense, a sense of what is questionable about a given situation and what should be followed up. It’s an ignorance that is especially perceptive of clues. Plato’s favorite model of practical expert knowledge is that of the physician. Maybe the best ordinary model of enlightened ignorance is a physician asking questions in a diagnosis that is open to the unique particularities of the case before her. It’s this sort of trained, practical, question-guiding sense of one’s ignorance that Socrates is portrayed as applying to questions of human value.
Socrates, like any good physician, is always in training, always in medical school, as it were, submitting his entire expertise to the test of the present conversation for the sake of truly understanding what it has to reveal. Understanding the present conversation as revelatory of something really new and unique, and letting that specific character guide one’s responses to it, is the only way that it may truly be understood, the only way to learn what it truly has to offer. This requires a radical non-dogmatism, a willingness to hold none of oneself aloof or compartmentalized from the encounter with the other. Socrates is always fully present to others, because he is always willing, even eager, to put himself fully into question. But for full success, such courage must be matched by his interlocutor.