The Essence of Plato's Philosophy

Constantin Ritter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138919778
• eBook ISBN: 9781317418788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

This book, first published in English in 1933, provides a detailed analysis of the life and concepts of the Greek philosopher Plato. The Essence of Plato's Philosophy explores epistemology and ontology, the philosophy of nature, ethics and the philosophy of the state, and aesthetics and religion. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy.

PART ONE

THE DIALOGUES
OF
PLATO’S YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD
TO THE
SECOND SICILIAN JOURNEY
(367)

CHAPTER I

THE ETHICAL CONTENT OF THE EARLY DIALOGUES

1. First of all, we wish to discuss the ethical content of the early writings. We shall begin with the Lesser Hippias. The purpose of this peculiar dialogue is not easy to understand. In contrast to the other early dialogues which display Socrates’ ignorance and permit his every effort to determine the clear meaning of such practical and commonly used words as courage, piety, virtue, to fail, he makes very definite assertions here, which he obstinately defends to the end. But as these propositions are doubtful, it is not easy to know to what extent we are to take them and their defence seriously. They run as follows: Whoever is praised for being truthful, can also tell the biggest lies. Whoever deceives consciously and intentionally is a better man than he who falls unintentionally into error and falsehood. Voluntary and intentional activity is always better than involuntary activity, even if harm and wrong are done thereby. The average reader will, no doubt, agree with Hippias when he says: “It would be most unfortunate if those who do wrong voluntarily were better than those who do wrong involuntarily.” However, Hippias is not in a position to refute the arguments advanced in favour of this proposition. He has to admit that a runner or a fighter who lets himself be beaten voluntarily by his competitor is a better runner or fighter than he who is defeated in spite of his efforts. An instrument with which I intentionally do a piece of work badly is better than one with which I could not execute it, even though I exerted my best effort. From this the questionable conclusion seems to follow that “He who voluntarily fails and voluntarily does wrong and disgraceful things¹ is the good man.” Again the average reader will side with Hippias when he says, “No, with that I cannot agree.” Whereupon Socrates also remarks, “Nor can I agree with it myself; and yet this conclusion necessarily follows from our assumptions.”

We ask, What are these assumptions?

In this dialogue, Socrates shares the conviction¹ of the Sophists (and Plato agrees to this) that education makes a person good. This is only another way of saying that virtue consists in knowledge and that it can be taught. He is more certain of the thesis that education makes a person good than are those who are not so certain about the consequences of virtue. But since he gives more depth and inwardness to the concept of the good and the concept of virtue than do the Sophists, he understands something quite different by education, which is the condition of virtue, and by its corresponding knowledge. He is convinced that education does not consist in acquiring any kind of knowledge and skill, such as Hippias and other Sophists offered for sale, but rather that from the very beginning it has to be directed toward the goal of moral perfection. As soon as education is related to this goal of virtue, especially as virtue is understood by Socrates and Plato, the objection must disappear which, through a superficial understanding, the sound moral consciousness must bring against the proposition: the more educated a man is or becomes, the better and more virtuous he will be. If a mis-step and a crime are considered in the customary manner as being a deviation from what custom has set up as the norm, the possibility naturally arises that there can be a purposive deviation from this established norm and the following proposition is true: Whoever deviates purposely from the standard set is also able, if he so wills, to live in accordance with the standard; as a matter of fact he is able to fulfil all precepts better and more perfectly than he who vacillates uncertainly and only now and then haphazardly hits the mark. If, after a careful and independent examination, this prescribed norm proves to be wrong, then the breaking of the norm must be judged in a similar manner as Jesus judges (according to Cod. Cantabr., Luke vi. 4) the man whom He saw working on the Sabbath: “Oh man, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed; but if you do not know, you are accursed and guilty of the transgression of the laws.” On the contrary, no one would voluntarily deviate from the highest norm of action which has been set for him by education and insight, since no one harms himself voluntarily. Thus, it is impossible that the fully educated, the wise man, should do wrong voluntarily.

It is amusing to see how helpless Hippias seems and how, in spite of the fact that it was his greatest delight to harangue against the crushing force of custom and tradition and to praise the right of nature, he cannot defend himself against the uncanny conclusions which Socrates forces him to draw except by appealing to custom. Says he, “It is customary to forgive those who do wrong in ignorance. The laws also are known to be much more severe on voluntary wrongdoers and liars than on those who do wrong involuntarily.” However, it cannot be said that the main purpose of this dialogue is to make the vain Sophist appear ludicrous, although Plato with his youthful daring comes dangerously close to making him appear so. But the thoughtful reader¹ will find a serious purpose behind his extravagant raillery. He is to realize that it is necessary to arrive independently at fundamental principles of morality, that in times of upheaval it is no longer sufficient to appeal to customary morality as an adequate standard for holding old values, that even the new ideals couched in beautiful language and advocated by the Sophists are inadequate, since they entirely lack careful deliberation and confirmation.

2. In the Laches the question is asked, What is courage? It soon becomes evident that the definition that courage is endurance in battle is insufficient. The discussion leads to the more general concept of endurance; yet not all endurance is courageous. One might say that courage is reasonable endurance. But this definition needs further limitation; for after some examples are given, it again seems as if unreasonable endurance were courageous rather than endurance based on sound insight. (E.g., the untrained fighter needs more courage to enter a combat than does the trained one; and whoever has not learned how to dive must have more courage to dive into the water than the trained diver.) From another point of view, it might be said that courage consists in a sort of wisdom or knowledge, or, to be more exact, in the knowledge of what is to be feared and what is not to be feared. This definition is also inadequate, since what is to be feared falls under the general concept of the bad and what is not to be feared under that of the good. These general concepts must be included in the definition. Yet as soon as courage is defined as knowledge of good and evil, it becomes evident that all difference is removed between courage and such other virtues as temperance, justice, piety.

Plato leaves us in uncertainty, but not without hints as to how we may find our way out. If we make use of these hints, we arrive at the conclusion that every virtue consists in the certain knowledge of that which is good or bad for us. This proposition can only be true if we make the two assumptions which Plato makes in the Socratic sense. The first maintains that there is no action except that which is directed toward an end, the attainment of which appears to man as the best and the most conducive to his well-being.¹ The second affirms that the greatest happiness of man consists in his God-likeness² and in his moral communion with men. From this it naturally follows that whoever clearly understands “what makes for his peace of mind” can do no other than his duties toward God and his neighbour. With this the lines of demarcation which separate the different virtues disappear—or, at least, they lose their significance. Each virtue shows itself only in reasonable actions which are in accordance with man’s profound insight as to what is good and bad for him; these actions must be carried through against the temptation to act otherwise. In this sense each virtue is really reasonable endurance.

And yet with all this, the nature of virtue has not been fully explained. In the background are questions which must yet be answered, to wit, IN WHAT must one endure? WHAT is really the good? WHAT is the bad? WHAT makes for man’s peace and salvation so that it may become the unconditioned goal of his striving? What leads away from this goal?

3. In the Protagoras the question is asked as to the meaning and content of the term “good,” and this means nothing less than the attempt, forced upon us by the difficulties into which the Hippias brought us, to give an independent and scientific basis of morality. Socrates at first advances the proposition that the good is that which is useful to man. The Sophist is not entirely satisfied with this answer; he wants to do away with limiting himself to man. Later, Socrates declares that the good is the pleasant, or that which gives pleasure; the bad is the unpleasant, the painful. The Sophist now wishes to limit the definition as follows: Only that pleasure is good which has a worthy and honourable motive or object. Socrates replies that this limitation only obscures matters. In so far as something pleasant is joined to something disagreeable, it is neither praiseworthy nor good; but the experience of pleasure in and by itself is, nevertheless, good. Any indulgence not regarded as respectable but as disgraceful is criticized not because it arouses pleasure, but because the experience of pleasure is accompanied by disease, loss of wealth, or some other misfortune. These unpleasant or painful consequences or by-products are the sole reason for criticism. Conversely, experiences of pain (e.g., an operation) are considered as good and are recommended because pleasant and beneficial consequences follow upon them. By nature, the striving of each man is directed to the attainment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, or, as it is put later, “it is humanly impossible that anyone should strive to do that which he knows to be evil, instead of striving to do the good, and if anyone is obliged to choose between two evils, he will never choose the greater instead of the lesser evil.”¹ It is ludicrous to assert that frequently a man, led astray by the enticement of pleasures, chooses the bad, even though he clearly knows that it is bad and that he could have avoided it; or that a man does not want to do the good which he recognizes, but instead is seduced by pleasure to act otherwise. The nonsense and the contradiction are readily recognized if the term “good” is replaced by the synonymous terms “pleasant,” “gratifying,” and if the term “bad” is replaced by “unpleasant,” “painful,” or if instead of “pleasant” we use the term “good” and instead of “unpleasant,” “bad.” One of the doubtful conditions could then be described as follows: A man does the bad which he recognizes as such, because he is overpowered by the good which stimulates him to action. Or again, he does the unpleasant and painful which he recognizes as such because he is overpowered by the stimulus of the pleasant. It is clear that if this is to designate a perverse action, the mistake could only be due to the fact that he who acts in this manner misjudged the quantity and quality of the conflicting, yet fundamentally the same, stimuli. This mistake is similar to that of comparing the size of a near object with that of a distant one. Because of an illusion, the wrong choice is made. Just as we need a measuring rod to avoid error in comparing size, so we need a standard of measurement for the comparison of the values which accompany the different actions open to us. And because men are not familiar with this standard of measurement, they fail through ignorance to make the right choice between that which produces pleasure and pain or between the good and the bad. What is commonly called the weakness of yielding to the enticements of pleasure is nothing but ignorance of the most fundamental question of life.¹

We can readily see that Socrates desires to make pleasure the criterion and standard of the good. Yet pleasure, or that which gives pleasure, i.e., the pleasant (ἡδύ), is not without modification to be put on the same plane with the good. On the contrary, the opinion of the expert is needed to weigh and determine the positive and negative aspects of pleasure and pain and to determine when the pleasures outbalance the pain and when they do not. Only the excess of pleasure is then to be regarded as good.

One is in doubt whether this hedonistic doctrine¹ gives the true position of Plato. In other dialogues, e.g., the Gorgias, Plato vigorously attacks and decidedly rejects hedonism. Since there is not the faintest indication of another definition of the good, we cannot easily reject the conclusion that these answers of Socrates are in agreement with Plato’s conception of the good at the time he wrote the Protagoras, they do not, however, give a complete account of Plato’s view, and consequently do not arrive at the real basis of the matter.

Later I shall show that Plato did not change his position materially even in his later years; he merely became more careful with his terminology. With reference to the pleasures and pains which follow upon a pleasure experience, I shall limit myself for the present to the statement that the pleasant or pleasure, as a positive excess, is raised above that conception of pleasure which is subject to the fluctuation of the constantly changing sensations and which must end in nihilism.² I think that when pleasure is thus defined, its meaning becomes identical with that concept which refers to the future and which defines the pleasant as “the useful for men,” so that the two Socratic definitions in the Protagoras really mean the same thing, or rather that the second definition, whose content is supplied by our own sense experience, gives definite meaning to the first one, which was essentially formal.

At the very beginning of the dialogue, Socrates also raised the question whether virtue can be taught, since this seemed to be the assumption on which the whole activity of the Sophists was based. We do not arrive at a conclusion on this point. Protagoras does not want to admit that virtue consists in knowledge and that as such it must be teachable. At any rate, courage, which is so different from the other virtues, does not seem to depend on knowledge. Socrates, however, doubts whether virtue can be taught and in doing so he removes from his own definition the basis which he desired to give to it.

But in spite of this Socrates thinks that he can prove that courage also consists in knowledge. The courageous man differs from the coward in that he shows no fear, and from the “dare-devil,” on the other hand, in that he shows no daring intrepidity (dare-deviltry). The reason for such fear or lack of daring is always ignorance. Therefore, the nature of fear is ignorance of what is to be feared and what is not to be feared; the nature of courage is correct knowledge of these things.¹

4. The Charmides also assumes as self-evident that a virtue—the virtue here considered is temperance (σωϕροσύνη)—must be useful to the per...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Translator'S Preface
• Preface to the English Edition
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Part One the Dialogues of Plato's Youth and Early Manhood to the Second Sicilian Journey (367)
• Part Two the Dialogues of Later Years from the Second Sicilian Journey on (After 367)
• Index of Dialogues
• Index of Proper Names
• Index of Subjects