Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 019 - Know Thyself - Two Unloved Platonic Dialogues.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Know Thyself, two unloved Platonic dialogues. Here in the UK there's this radio show called Desert Island Discs. They invite famous people on, and ask them to say which music they'd want to have with them if they knew they were going to be stranded on a desert island. At the end, the guests also get to say which book they'd want to have with them, not counting the Bible and Shakespeare. Now this is something I've never understood. Surely the answer is painfully obvious. If you were going to have only one book on a desert island, why would you consider taking anything other than the collected works of Plato? My copy of the collected dialogues is 1,745 pages long, not counting the index. That's enough to keep you company through many a lonely desert island night. If you were trapped on a desert island, and started reading Plato's dialogues one after another, I predict you'd be impressed at how deep his back catalogue is. Once you look past Plato's greatest hits, like the Republic and the Phaedo, you'd find plenty of other dialogues that are not just worth reading, but reading a few dozen times. You might as well, after all, since you're stuck on a desert island. In this episode I'm going to look at two such dialogues, the Carmadese and the Euthydemus. These aren't famous works, but they show Plato at his best, or close to his best. First then, the Carmadese. Like most of Plato's dialogues, the Carmadese is named after one of the main characters who appears in it. In the dialogue, Socrates tells the story of how he first met Carmadese, a young man of charm and devastating good looks. In fact the whole dialogue is narrated by Socrates, so that, as we read it, it's as if we were sitting around with him in the marketplace listening to the story. He tells us that, at the time of his meeting with Carmadese, he himself has just returned from a military campaign. Everyone wants to hear news of the war, but Socrates quickly shifts the conversation to his two favourite subjects. How is philosophy doing in Athens, and are there any promising young men around? One older man who is present, Critias, says that, Socrates is in luck, here comes the most beautiful youth in Athens, his cousin Carmadese. Carmadese enters, with other men fawning over him because of his good looks, a situation which Plato exploits for some slapstick comedy. Everyone wants to sit next to the enticing young Carmadese, and there's such a struggle to make space for him on a long bench that the guy at the end falls onto the floor. Socrates wins the contest for Carmadese's attention with a trick suggested by Critias. Carmadese, it would seem, has been having headaches. Socrates pretends to know the cure, a certain leaf. But to cure the headache, it turns out you need to cure the whole body, a reference to the holistic medical theories of the Hippocratic doctors we looked at a few episodes back. Not only that, but you need to make sure that the soul is healthy in order to cure the body. And we're off and running with a philosophical discussion, intended to discover whether or not Carmadese has the virtue the Greeks called sophrosune, usually translated as temperance or moderation. If so, his soul is healthy, and we can proceed to curing his body. But how can we find out whether Carmadese has this virtue without knowing its definition? Perhaps Carmadese would like to help by defining sophrosune. The attempt to find a definition occupies their attention for the rest of the dialogue. So far so typically Socratic, with a bit of slapstick thrown in. But hang on a moment, keen-eared listeners will recall that I've mentioned Critias in a previous episode. He was a relative of Plato's and a leader of the Thirty Tyrants who overthrew the Athenian democracy just at the end of the 5th century BC. And you'll never guess who was another member of the Thirty Tyrants. Yes, Carmadese. It's rather unclear what Plato himself thought about the episode of the Thirty Tyrants. As we'll see in a later episode, he was no enthusiastic supporter of the restored Athenian democracy that executed his teacher Socrates. But obviously when we read the Carmadese, we need to bear in mind the controversial histories of these two characters. What Plato has done here is a bit like an author of today, staging a philosophical conversation about say, international law, and casting George W. Bush and Tony Blair as leading characters. Immediately, we see that Plato's choice to write in dialogue gives him the opportunity to produce literary effects we don't expect from philosophy. When Socrates asks whether Carmadese is as beautiful in soul as he is in body, we are supposed to know how the real Carmadese turned out, and that affects the way we read the arguments. Of course, within the dramatic setting, Socrates doesn't know what will become of either Critias or Carmadese. Plato does have Critias behave in a rather bad-tempered way throughout the dialogue. But Carmadese is as charming as he is beautiful. For instance, Socrates asks him point blank whether he has this virtue of temperance, and Carmadese replies that it would be boastful to say yes, but he would bring shame on himself if he said no. This shows quick wit, while neatly sidestepping the question of his virtue. We readers, however, know how Carmadese will turn out. Carmadese will become the follower of the tyrant Critias, not the philosopher Socrates. And all of this is more than a literary game. It adds resonance to the dialogue's fundamental question, which is not so much what is temperance, but how can we know whether someone is temperate, and how can we know whether we ourselves are temperate. Here we arrive at one of Plato's favorite themes, knowledge of others and knowledge of ourselves. The theme becomes explicit after some more Platonic theatre. Young Carmadese suggests that temperance is doing one's own business. Socrates finds this perplexing. Is he saying that everyone should make their own shoes? No no, says Carmadese, that's not what he means. But on the other hand, he isn't quite sure what he does mean. It emerges that this is a definition of temperance he heard from his older relative Critias, who was annoyed at having his cherished definition refuted by Socrates. Taking over the conversation, Critias says that obviously, the definition means that temperance is doing one's business in the sense of doing what one should, in other words doing good things. Knowingly, or unknowingly, asks Socrates. For instance, if I help a man without knowing whether it will benefit him, is this temperance? No no, says Critias, that's not what I mean. Really what I mean is the same thing as a famous slogan that appeared as an inscription at the Oracle of Delphi, and yes, that is the same Oracle that proclaimed the wisdom of Socrates. You've all heard the oracular inscription, even if you don't know where it comes from. It read, gnothi sei a ton, know thyself. So there's my definition, announces Critias, temperance is self-knowledge. He exudes confidence throughout all this, acting as if it's Socrates who is fumbling along, even though it's he, Critias, who leaps from one attempted definition to another, as if they were all obviously the same. As ever, Socrates is patient and calm, albeit perplexed. He just wants to understand, if only there is something worth understanding. He doesn't quite get what it would mean to have self-knowledge. Medicine is knowledge of health, and house-building is knowledge of building houses. What is self-knowledge knowledge of? Here Critias makes a surprising move. He says that temperance, or self-knowledge, is knowledge of knowledge. This leaves Socrates more confused than ever. There's no such thing as vision which sees vision, or hearing that hears hearing. How could there be knowledge that knows knowledge? At this point, Critias is ready to admit that he, too, is perplexed. Plato gives us a nice image for this perplexity. He has Socrates say that just as a man who yawns tends to make everyone else around him yawn, so one man's confusion tends to infect others with confusion. As always with Plato, there's more here than literary bi-play. With the surprising shifts in discussion, he's managed to transform the dialogue from a jocular discussion of temperance into something rather different. The dialogue now becomes an inquiry into the nature and usefulness of knowledge. Nowadays we would say that the dialogue has gone from dealing with ethics to dealing with epistemology, the study of knowledge. In particular, we're now wondering what it means to have knowledge of knowledge. What would this amount to? On the one hand, as Socrates points out, it seems that if I know something, I should know that I know it. For instance, if I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4, I must also know that I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4. In fact, you might even suspect this is a good test of whether I know something. If I'm not sure whether or not I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4, isn't that enough reason to say that I don't know that 2 plus 2 equals 4? On the other hand, as Socrates also points out, it's hard to see what good it does to know that I know. If I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4, that's good enough for all practical purposes. When would I ever need to know that I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4? Thus we have something of a paradox. On the one hand, knowledge of knowledge seems to be absolutely essential. On the other hand, knowledge of knowledge seems empty and useless. If this all seems too abstract, consider instead the case where I am trying to figure out whether somebody else has knowledge. Suppose for instance I'm trying to decide whether to let someone give me open heart surgery. Suddenly, it's looking pretty urgent to decide whether the would-be surgeon knows what he's doing. If at all possible, I'd like to know for sure whether or not he knows. So now, knowledge of knowledge looks vital. But to know for sure whether or not the would-be surgeon is qualified, I need to have some grasp of medicine myself. Really, I need to be a qualified surgeon. Otherwise, I'll have to take other people's advice to find out whether the would-be surgeon knows what he's doing. I might get lucky and get good advice, but I won't know that the would-be surgeon is knowledgeable. To know that, I would need the same kind of knowledge the surgeon hopefully has. I need to know about surgery. What I don't need is some further knowledge which is about knowledge. So from this perspective too, knowledge of knowledge looks essential and useless, but from different points of view. Once Socrates and Critias have banged their head against this problem for a while, the dialogue ends in a stalemate without any agreement as to what temperance, or for that matter self-knowledge, really is. But it would be wrong to say that they and we have learned nothing. At the very least, we've been presented with numerous possible routes for further inquiry. Some of what has been said looks extremely Socratic. In particular, Socrates might agree with Critias that temperance, and all the other virtues, are kinds of knowledge. This allows Plato to use one of his favourite tricks. He diverts the discussion away from virtue toward a more general inquiry into the nature of knowledge. As I said, we go from talking ethics to talking epistemology. On the other hand, Socrates thinks that virtue is the same thing as knowledge, so perhaps this is no diversion at all. Plato is simply working through the implications of this Socratic thesis. If virtue is knowledge, then discussion of virtue and discussion of knowledge are one and the same. Socratician ethics are nowadays taught and studied as separate parts of philosophy, but if Socrates is right and virtue is knowledge, then this firm separation is a big mistake. We can find similar ideas in another unloved Platonic dialogue, the Euthydemus. As with the Carmades, the dialogue is narrated by Socrates. This time we know who he's telling the story to, his good friend Crito, who in another dialogue named after him, is shown trying to persuade Socrates to flee Athens before he is executed. In that dialogue, Socrates refuses to escape, saying that he has a duty to obey the laws even when they put him to death unjustly. Are we meant to think about this episode when we read the Euthydemus? Should we think perhaps about Socrates's trial, and the charge against him that he corrupted the youth? This would be appropriate because as in the Carmades, the Euthydemus shows Socrates struggling to exert influence over a young man. In this case, the beautiful young man Socrates speaks to is named Clinius. In the Carmades, Socrates seemed to be competing with Critias to see who would manage to exert influence over the young Carmades. The same sort of thing happens here in the Euthydemus, but this time Socrates's opponents are more fearsome than the rather doltish Critias. They are two Sophists, brothers named Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. The two brothers it emerges used to make a living as experts in the martial arts. They could teach you to fight wearing armor, to lead men into battle, to devise strategies in war. But they've diversified since then and become specialists in verbal instead of physical violence. They boast that they can teach wisdom and virtue, but what they actually do is bamboozle people with their bewildering wordplay and arguments. Socrates asks for a demonstration. He wants them to use their amazing wisdom to persuade Clinius to become a philosopher and a seeker of virtue. No problem, they say, and then the Sophistical fireworks begin. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take it in turns to refute poor Clinius. They ask him questions and show that whichever answer Clinius gives, he will wind up contradicting himself. For instance, who is it who learns, wise people or ignorant people? Presumably wise people, and Clinius says so. But the brothers point out that wise people already have knowledge, so they don't need to learn. So, it must be the ignorant people, Clinius says. Wrong again. The ignorant students in any group are precisely the ones who don't learn, otherwise they would hardly be ignorant. Socrates takes all this to be mere tomfoolery, and chastises the brothers for not being serious. He offers to show what he means by persuading Clinius to develop an interest in philosophy. He questions Clinius in such a way as to lead him to the classic Socratic conclusion that anything that seems to be good—money, food, power, health—turns out to be good only if you use it with knowledge. You remember this point, money is useful, but only if you use it on things that will be good for you, and this requires knowledge. Socrates hopes that with this good example, the sophistical brothers will buckle down and lead Clinius to wisdom rather than to bewilderment. Instead, they reach back into their bag of tricks. A typical argument goes like this. The brothers ask you whether you know anything at all. Sure, you say, there are some things I know. So if you're knowing, say, the brothers, then you must know everything, otherwise you'd be knowing and not knowing at the same time, which is a contradiction. Now, I know what you're thinking. This is a stupid argument. It's perfectly possible to know one thing, for instance, how to tie your shoes, while not knowing another thing, for instance, how to look after a giraffe. But the brothers insist on leaving out these qualifications. That's cheating, they complain, and they ought to know, because they put themselves in charge of setting the rules of debate. And so it goes. For instance, the brothers argue that if you have a dog, then the dog is yours. If the dog has puppies, then he's a father, and if the dog is yours and he's a father, then the dog is your father. Again, it isn't terribly difficult to see that this is a bad argument, though spelling out in detail where the mistakes are made would require some subtlety. Perhaps Plato's goal here is partly to train the reader to see what goes wrong in such fallacious arguments. But that isn't the only fish he's out to fry. Some of the arguments made by the brothers have deep philosophical implications. This is a dialogue in which fundamental questions of metaphysics and epistemology underlie apparent silliness. To give just one example, the brothers argue that it's impossible for two people to contradict one another. If you say that the horse is white, and I say that the horse is black, then we can only be talking about two different things. You're talking about a white horse, and I'm talking about a black horse. If you're right and there is no black horse, then I'm not talking about anything at all, so I'm saying nothing. And how can I contradict you without saying anything? This argument too seems trivial and silly at first, until we reflect that the brothers sound a lot like Parmenides. If you remember, he too said that it is impossible to think about or speak of that which does not exist. The Sophists are exploiting this thought for their own nefarious purposes, to show that it is impossible even to disagree. The Euthydemist, then, does have a serious philosophical bite. To a large extent it is a reflection on the nature of knowledge just like the Carmedes. Indeed, many of the puzzles that arise here in an apparently frivolous way return in other dialogues and are considered at greater length. One example is the question about whether it is the wise or the ignorant who learn. This is remarkably similar to Minos' paradox, a staple of every undergraduate course on Plato. Equally fundamental to the Euthydemus is the question of how we should treat other people in philosophical argument. The point of philosophical argument is not winning at all costs, like these verbally pugilistic Sophists do, it is to seek wisdom. This makes the dialogue another attempt to show us that Aristophanes was wrong. Socrates is no Sophist. He wants to lead young men like Clanius to virtue and wisdom rather than to perplexity. On the other hand Plato's Socrates leads young men into perplexity too. Of course Socrates looks good compared to the Sophist brothers, but don't the Carmedes and the Euthydemus also shed light on the limitations of Socrates? In both dialogues, Socrates has a chance to influence a young man and make him virtuous. We know he fails with Carmedes, and things don't go very well with Clanius either. This leads us to wonder, can talking to Socrates really make a young man virtuous? That is a question to which Plato returns again and again, and never more so than in the dialogues we'll discuss in the next two episodes. In two weeks we'll get to that staple of every undergraduate course, Minos' paradox, and discuss Plato's most famous contribution to epistemology, the theory of recollection. But first we'll turn to one of my favorite dialogues, the Gorgias, in which Socrates takes on an opponent even more disturbing than the paradox-mongers of the Euthydemus. Next week it's a battle of the heavyweights, Socrates versus Calicles, on the history of philosophy without any gaps.