Socrates extends the conclusion to all human activities, since these depend on the soul.
The argument starts out with the idea that there are several goods: health, strength, beauty, wealth, and various psychological traits, including moderation, justice, intelligence, memory, munificence, and the like. It ends with the conclusion that there is one good, which is knowledge or wisdom. How does this transformation take place? It results from the assumption that to be good a quality must be invariably, necessarily beneficial. The various goods mentioned initially are sometimes beneficial, sometimes harmful. So they are not genuine goods after all, but at most “goods.”4 What turns “goods” into genuine goods is the addition of knowledge or wisdom, in the role of director. Socrates does not say that knowledge alone is sufficient for a happy, successful life. Wisdom plays the role of director of natural “goods”: it turns recklessness into courage, mental quickness into knowledge; wisdom “accompanies” all human activities, turning them into virtuous activities. It is wisdom that creates virtue, but it does not create it out of nothing. Socrates had said in Plato's Apology, “Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively” (30b). There is no virtue without wisdom, but wisdom still requires a certain amount of “goods,” whether material or psychological, on which to do its work.5
Objection: Where are the Teachers?
If virtue is knowledge, then we are not good by nature, but are made good by learning. If virtue is knowledge, therefore, it can be taught. (This would seem to resolve the predicament in which Socrates found himself at the end of the Protagoras.) But this leads to a problem. If virtue can be taught, then there ought to be teachers of it. But where are the teachers of virtue? Socrates proposes to Anytus, who has just joined the conversation, that the Sophists are teachers of virtue, and he gets Anytus’ explosive dissent: any Athenian who is among those who are kalos kagathos would do a better job of educating a young man in civic virtue than a Sophist. Anytus challenges Socrates: doesn't he believe that there have many good men in the city? The problem, Socrates states, is not that there have not been good men in Athenian public life, but that they did not pass on their own virtue to their children. He cites Themistocles, Aristides, Thucydides (the grandparents of the children in the Laches), and Pericles as examples of parents who did not teach virtue to their children. His conclusion is that virtue cannot be taught. At this point Anytus leaves in a huff, warning Socrates that “it is easier to injure people than to benefit them” (94e).
Reply: Virtue as Right Opinion
Unable to find teachers of virtue, and yet with several examples of virtuous Athenian leaders, Socrates revisits his previous argument to see if there is a flaw in it. He discovers one, in the claim that only knowledge guides one correctly. Right opinion is as good a practical guide as knowledge. If someone has right opinion concerning the road to Larissa he or she will guide people to Larissa as successfully as one who has knowledge. The problem with right opinion is that it is not “tied down”:
… true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why … After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down.
(97e–98a)
The person with knowledge is not merely of the opinion that something is so; he or she has an account of the reason why this particular fact is so. Knowledge, on this account, is correct opinion plus a rational explanation of the matter in question.
Since there were no teachers for the virtuous men of Athens’ past, their virtue was not acquired as knowledge. Their right opinions were akin to the sayings of soothsayers, prophets, and poets: “we should call no less divine and inspired those public men who are no less under the gods’ influence and possession, as their speeches lead to success in many important matters, though they have no knowledge of what they are saying” (99d). It seems far-fetched to us to attribute to the influence of the gods all cases of right opinion, but it may not have seemed implausible to the Athenians to attribute to divine inspiration the judgments of their leading statesmen, especially those of Themistocles, which saved Athens at the Battle of Salamis. Whether or not we attribute divine influence to all right opinions, it seems that Socrates is making a serious revision to his claim that virtue is knowledge. It looks as though he is saying that virtue is right opinion, not knowledge. The conclusion of the Meno, however, suggests another possibility:
virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift from the gods which is not accompanied by understanding, unless there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a statesman. If there were one, he could be said to be among the living as Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, namely, that “he alone retained his wits while the others flitted about like shadows.” In the same manner such a man would, as far as virtue is concerned, here also be the only true reality compared, as it were, with shadows.
(99e–100a; my italics)
Socrates does not identify the person whose virtue would be accompanied by understanding, and thus capable of being taught. Could Plato be thinking of Socrates himself as such a person? He certainly regarded Socrates as pre-eminently virtuous. It does not seem a stretch to describe the Socrates of Plato's dialogues as, “as far as virtue is concerned,” the only reality among shadows. Plato's Socrates does describe himself in the Gorgias as “one of a few Athenians – so as not to say I'm the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries – to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics” (521d). Socrates did not create another statesman like himself, but he did, in Plato and perhaps others as well, create other philosophers like himself. Perhaps the passage is not a veiled reference to Socrates but an anticipatory reference to the philosopher-king of the Republic. The ability to teach virtue to others is a mark of the philosopher-king. In either case, perhaps the correct conclusion to take from the Meno is that virtue, in its common cases, is right opinion, but in an exceptional case could still be knowledge.
Even if we take the final argument of the Meno to be a serious revision of the claim that virtue is knowledge, the resulting account of virtue is as intellectualistic as the account containing the Socratic paradoxes. Right opinion is belief, and belief is a cognitive, rational state. Even if virtue is defined as right belief, moral weakness would still be impossible, since Socrates had said in the Protagoras that no one who knows “or believes” (358c) that there is a better alternative to an action he is performing will persist in doing that action rather than perform the other possible action, and that “no one goes willingly toward the bad or what he believes to be bad; neither is it in human nature, so it seems, to want to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of to the good” (358d; my italics). If virtue is true belief, then vice is false belief, and that is still considered ignorance.
Conclusion
For the bulk of this chapter we have seen Socrates, or his surrogate Nicias, argue that virtue is knowledge. This is first defined very generally, as knowledge of good and evil. In the Protagoras it is defined more precisely as practical wisdom, knowledge of what to do in every situation. Practical wisdom has two aspects: knowledge of what is good in general, and what is good in a particular situation. The knowledge of what is good in a particular situation results from the art of measurement. But what is good in general? The answer to this question is that the good is happiness, but what is happiness? The view on offer in the Protagoras is that the good is pleasure. Interpreters have differed over whether Socrates is himself committed to this view, or whether he only attributes it to the many. We shall consider this question in the next chapter. Whatever the nat
ure of happiness, however, everyone desires to be happy. If people fail to be happy, it is either because they have an incorrect understanding of happiness or because they have failed to apply the art of measurement correctly. In either case the error is a cognitive one, an error in understanding. The correct remedy for errors of this kind is correction, the replacement of false belief or ignorance with knowledge or, as the conclusion of the Meno would have it, true belief. Socrates’ account of virtue is paradoxical. If he is correct, the common sense views of ordinary people are confused. They lack an understanding of the fundamental nature of virtue.
Notes
1 Alcibiades describes Socrates’ profession of a poor memory as a joke at 336d.
2 On this point see Terry Penner, “The Historical Socrates and Plato's Early Dialogues: Some Philosophical Questions,” in Annas and Rowe, eds. New Perspectives on Plato, Ancient and Modern (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies. Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2002), 196.
3 The argument that Socrates puts forward is similar to one in the Euthydemus (278e–282a).
4 Terence Irwin, Plato's Ethics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 56, refers to them as “assets.” The Stoics referred to them as “preferred indifferents.”
5 Irwin, Plato's Ethics, 57, distinguishes between a moderate and an extreme version of this argument. I think the moderate version is correct; he thinks Socrates is committed to the extreme version. I think the issue turns on the question whether the notion of “good” changes in the course of the argument. Wealth is a good in the sense of something that, rightly used, can be beneficial for its possessor. Wisdom is good in the sense that it is infallibly beneficial; it cannot, unlike wealth, be misused. If “good” means “infallibly beneficial,” then wisdom is the only good. If “good” means “something that, rightly used, can be beneficial,” then wealth is a good. I suggest that the sense of “good” changes from the beginning of the argument to the end.
6
Happiness
Virtue and Happiness
Socrates in Plato's elenctic dialogues is, as we have seen, a seeker of virtue. When he exhorts the Athenians to care for the best state of their souls, he is exhorting them to care for virtue rather than for wealth, reputation, and honors. The question arises, however, why seek virtue? It might seem that the answer to this question would be obvious: we seek virtue for its own sake. The life of virtue, the best state of the soul, just is preferable, for its own sake, to the life of vice. If virtue is knowledge or wisdom, as it is defined in the Laches, Protagoras, and most of the Meno, and if the alternative to virtue, vice, is ignorance, it might be thought self-evident that virtue would be preferable to vice. Who would choose to be ignorant if wisdom is possible? The key question would then become, whether wisdom or knowledge is possible. The logic of the elenchus, which leads to refutation, suggests that it is not. The Meno, however, through the introduction of the doctrine of recollection, holds out hope that wisdom may be possible. The barren Socrates denies that he has wisdom, and if Socrates lacks wisdom, where are we likely to find it? The fertile Socrates, in contrast, seems to be on a voyage of discovery that might lead in the end to wisdom, even if he is not quite there yet. There is a sense in which this answer, that the life we ought to pursue, the life devoted to the discovery of wisdom, is the only life worthy of a human being, just is the Socratic answer to the question why we ought to pursue virtue. When Socrates says in the Apology that the life without inquiry is not worth living, he is saying that the only life worth pursuing is that described in the elenctic dialogues.
For the most part, however, Socrates does not take this line in the elenctic dialogues. He argues that virtue, and in particular wisdom, is valuable for what it produces. What wisdom produces is eudaimonia, which is usually translated “happiness.” As noted in Chapter 3, this is a somewhat misleading translation, however. Our concept of happiness is complex. One aspect of happiness is that of a pleasant, subjective, and intermittent mental state. When we ask people if they are happy, we may be asking them about their current mood. We also use “happiness” to describe a longer-lasting mental state, something akin to contentment or satisfaction, applicable perhaps to an entire life. People consider whether they are happy in their jobs, or in their marriages or families, or in their lives as a whole. This is closer to eudaimonia, but it is still more subjective than the Greek term. Eudaimonia does not exclude a sense of subjective satisfaction, but it also includes a sense of objective value. A life that is eudaimōn is a life that a rational person would choose to live, containing goods that make it objectively valuable. Sometimes Socrates uses the phrase “to do well” as a synonym for eudaimonia. The term has the connotation of success. If success in life consisted in amassing great wealth, reputation, and honors, which Socrates emphatically denies, then the one who succeeded in amassing these things would be eudaimōn. Socrates believes that the defining characteristic of a life that is eudaimōn is practical wisdom, phronēsis. All other characteristics that contribute to one's well-being are valuable if accompanied and directed by wisdom, but they are apt to be harmful otherwise. We saw this argument in the Meno, in the previous chapter, and a similar argument is to be found in the Euthydemus at 278e–282d. At one point in the argument Socrates states, “since we all wish to be happy, and since we appear to become so by using things and using them rightly, and since knowledge was the source of rightness and good fortune, it seems to be necessary that every man should prepare himself by every means to become as wise as possible” (282a).
The name for someone who believes that the end sought by virtue is happiness or eudaimonia is a eudaimonist. Socrates, like other Greek ethical theorists, is a eudaimonist. Eudaimonism just is the view that the ethical end is eudaimonia. What justifies the pursuit of virtue is the contribution of virtue to the attainment of eudaimonia. Moreover, like other Greek ethical theorists, Socrates believes that the eudaimonia one aims for is one's own. He is an ethical egoist. One wants to be ethical because one wants to be eudaimōn, happy; one wants to live a good life. Ethical egoism is often associated with selfishness, however, as if one believed that one could attain the good life at the expense of others. Socrates, as we shall see, denies this. For Socrates, an essential component of a happy life is justice, and justice involves proper treatment of other persons.
The Problem: What Knowledge Produces Happiness?
What is it, though, that one needs to be wise about? What art must we learn to bring about our happiness? In the Euthydemus Socrates and his interlocutor Clinias consider several arts, and finally settle on what they call the “kingly art” (292a), but they prove to be unable to determine the nature of the wisdom with which this art is concerned, and the nature of the good that it produces. The kingly art makes people happy and it consists of a certain kind of wisdom, but what is that wisdom? The Euthydemus does not answer that question. The Protagoras offers an answer: the final argument, as we saw in the last chapter, defines happiness as pleasure, and describes the wisdom that produces a pleasant life as the art of measurement. We have reason, however, to think that this answer is not Socrates’ considered judgment about the nature of happiness. Socrates usually refers to the kind of life that is desirable as kalos kagathos, admirable and good. But what kind of life is admirable and good? The ordinary Athenian of Socrates’ time would have thought that the lives of the great Athenian political leaders – Pericles, for instance, or Themistocles – fit this description, but what made their lives admirable? They accomplished things for the apparent benefit of Athens – Themistocles, in particular, saved Athens at the battle of Salamis – but did they do so on the basis of knowledge? Socrates at the end of the Meno denies this and indicates that their achievements were based on true opinions, inspired by the gods. If true happiness results only from knowledge, these men cannot be examples of it.
There are two dialogues that offer an answer to this question, the Crito and the Gorgias. In the case of the
Crito, the answer occurs in the course of an attempt to prove something else. It is a sidelight in Socrates’ argument, though an important one. In the Gorgias the wisdom that constitutes happiness, though not the initial topic of the dialogue, turns out to be its central theme. The Gorgias defends the Socratic concern of the Apology that one ought to prefer wisdom, truth, and the best state of one's soul to the life spent in pursuit of wealth, reputation, and honors. The latter alternative, in rather cynical form, is defended by two characters in the dialogue, Polus and Callicles. Both the Crito and the Gorgias give the same answer to the question, what life should I pursue to obtain happiness? It is not the answer offered by the Protagoras.
The Problem of the Crito
The Crito is set in prison. Socrates’ execution, which has been delayed while a ship is on a sacred voyage to Delos, is imminent. The matter Crito brings to Socrates is urgent. He has arranged for Socrates to escape from prison. (This was apparently something that occurred on occasion in the Athenian system of justice.) Crito and other friends of Socrates have bribed the prison guard and have enough money to deal with any informers who might turn them in. Crito suggests Thessaly as a possible destination for Socrates. He offers several reasons why Socrates should escape: he will be deprived of a friend if Socrates is executed; his friends will be thought too cheap to save him; it is unjust of Socrates not to save himself; he will be deserting his sons if he dies; he seems to be taking the easy way out, not the path of virtue. Time, however, is of the essence of Crito's plan: Socrates must escape on that very night. “Let me persuade you on every count, Socrates,” he says, “and do not act otherwise” (46a).
Socrates Page 13