The elenctic dialogues, therefore, distinguish three, or possibly four, cognitive states. At one extreme there is ignorance; at the other there is knowledge, and intermediate between them is opinion, one species of which is true opinion. The “middle” dialogues, and in particular the Republic, develop these distinctions and add to their number, in light of the ontology of two worlds, the world of phenomena and the world of the Forms. In Republic V Socrates distinguishes between philosophers and “lovers of sights and sounds” (476b). The lovers of sights and sounds love all sorts of beautiful sounds, colors, and shapes, but they are unable “to see and embrace the nature of the beautiful itself” (ibid.). The beautiful itself is a unity, “and the same account is true of the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, and all the forms. Each of them is itself one, but because they manifest themselves everywhere in association with actions, bodies and one another, each of them appears to be many” (476a). Those who believe in beautiful things, but not in the beautiful itself, are living in a dream: they mistake the likeness of a thing for the thing itself. The person who can see both the beautiful and the things that participate in it is, by contrast, awake. This person has knowledge; the lover of sights and sounds has only opinion. Knowledge has for its object reality, in this case the beautiful itself. The opposite of knowledge is ignorance, which has the opposite of reality, not-being, as its object. In between these two opposite states is opinion, which has as its object something intermediate between reality and complete unreality. Knowledge is of what is real, and is infallible. Opinion is of this intermediate something, and is fallible. What is this intermediate something? It is the sensible participant in the intelligible Form. Here we see the same distinctions as were made in the elenctic dialogues at work: knowledge, ignorance, and, intermediate between them, belief or opinion.
What Socrates tells us in this passage is that, because opinion is fallible, it cannot have the same object as knowledge, which is infallible. Knowledge is of intelligible Forms; opinion is of sensible particulars and their qualities. Let me give an example. I have a favorite symphony: Shostakovich's Fifth. I have a favorite recording of this symphony: the 1959 Bernstein recording, with the fourth movement taken at a breakneck pace. When I listen to this recording, or in fact to any performance of the Shostakovich Fifth, I would say that I can hear beauty. But it is beauty embodied in a particular work. What can I say to someone who does not hear what I hear? Suppose this person has a different conception of beauty than I do. Suppose he or she does not appreciate classical music, or Shostakovich. How could I prove to such a person that this work is a manifestation of pure beauty? I might want to argue with this person, but in the end I must admit that I am only defending my opinion about the work. Socrates imagines someone with genuine expertise, someone who knows what beauty is apart from its participants. Such a person would have knowledge, not opinion. Such a person would say that if one is trying to define beauty by means of an example, whether it be Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony or the Parthenon or something else, one is making a mistake, the same kind of mistake that Euthyphro, Laches, and Meno make when they first attempt to define a term.
The distinction between knowledge and opinion is in fact rooted in that Socratic criticism of definitions of the sort that Euthyphro and others make. Euthyphro, Laches, and Meno begin their attempts at definition with an example. The example may not be a particular thing; it may be a universal, but one that is too narrow to capture the complete nature of the term. Euthyphro is of the opinion that prosecuting his father on a charge of murder is pious and just, but because he does not know the definition of piety he cannot know that for a fact. So the distinction drawn by Socrates in Republic V between knowledge and opinion has its origin in the elenctic dialogues. And yet … Socrates does not explicitly say that Euthyphro has only opinion. The contrast he draws here and in most of the elenctic dialogues is between knowledge and ignorance. That is the distinction he draws in the Apology when he limits knowledge of the nature of virtue to the gods. In the Protagoras he virtually equates ignorance with false belief. It is in the Gorgias and Meno that he introduces the concept of an intermediate state between knowledge and ignorance. Socrates in the Republic does something different with the knowledge/belief distinction than he does in the elenctic dialogues. For Socrates in Republic V, one cannot have knowledge and opinion about the same objects. Knowledge is reserved for the Forms; opinion is reserved for their sensible participants.
In the divided line (VI, 509d–511e), the second of three analogies Socrates uses to explain the nature of the good, he distinguishes four cognitive states. The lowest state, imagination, is concerned with images of objects, “first, shadows, then reflections in water … and everything of that sort” (509e–510a). The second level, belief, is concerned with “the originals of these images, namely, the animals around us, all the plants, and the whole class of manufactured things” (510a). The third level, the first part of the intelligible world, uses objects in the sensible world as images of the Forms. Geometers, says Socrates in a passage that evokes the examination of the slave in the Meno, “make their claims for the sake of the square itself and the diagonal itself, not the diagonal they draw” (510d). They use hypotheses to explain things (think here of the definitions, axioms and postulates of Euclidean geometry), but they leave the hypotheses unexplained. Socrates calls this stage “thought.” The highest stage, understanding, dispenses with visual images altogether and ascends from hypotheses to “the unhypothetical first principle of everything,” the good (511b). The method the soul uses is dialectic, which, he explains later in Book VII, enables the philosopher to give an account of the nature of the good that can withstand all criticism (534b–d).
Plato does not in general make use of all of these cognitive divisions: usually he focuses on the basic distinctions between knowledge, belief, and ignorance. Knowledge is cognition of Forms, and ultimately of the Form of the good; belief is cognition of phenomena, the sensible images of the Forms; and ignorance is false belief. These distinctions, as noted above, can all be found in the elenctic dialogues. What is new in the “middle” dialogues is the correlation of the cognitive states with the two-worlds ontology of separate Forms. Plato makes his epistemology congruent with his ontology. I suspect that he developed his ontology of separate Forms first, and then adapted the epistemology of the elenctic dialogues to fit it; but conceivably it might have been the other way around.
Psychology
“Psychology” literally means “account” (logos) of the “soul” (psychē). For Socrates, this account had two aspects: the immortality of the soul and the structure of the soul. The first aspect bears primarily on Plato's metaphysics and epistemology; the second aspect bears primarily on his moral theory (though it has an impact on his metaphysics and epistemology as well). Let us consider the question of immortality first. It is sometimes said that Socrates had little interest in this question.14 That is not so. Perhaps the earliest mention of the question of immortality is found in Plato's Apology. At the end of the Apology Socrates offers two alternative accounts of the fate of the soul after death. On one alternative, the soul enters a state of perpetual unconsciousness. This state is described as akin to a long, sound sleep, but it is also described as extinction. On the other alternative, the soul is transferred to another location, which resembles the after-life as described by Homer in Odyssey 11, with one important difference. Socrates’ inhabitants of the underworld retain their rational faculties. Socrates can converse with them, which he describes as “extraordinary happiness” (41c). The first possibility, that of everlasting loss of consciousness, is dropped in the Crito. There Socrates mentions a dream he has had in which “a beautiful and comely woman dressed in white” comes to him and, quoting Homer, says, “may you arrive at fertile Phthia on the third day” (44a–b) which he takes to be a reference to his death and transfer to the underworld. At the end of the dialogue the laws refer to “our brothers, the laws of the underworld” (54c),
who, it is said, “will not receive you [Socrates] kindly” when he arrives there if he violates his social contract with the laws of Athens. At the end of the Gorgias, as noted in Chapter 6, Socrates describes in a myth the judgment of souls after death in the underworld. This myth connects the Gorgias with the Apology, which also refers to a judgment of souls, and even names several of the same judges (Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus). Similar references to post-mortem judgment occur in the myths at the end of the Phaedo (107e) and Republic (X, 615a–616b).
Neither the Apology nor the Gorgias refers to reincarnation, though both refer to immortality. When reincarnation is introduced, in the Meno, it is not in the form of a myth, but the context is definitely religious in nature: it is attributed to certain “priests and priestesses” and to “the divine among our poets” (81a–b). When recollection is mentioned in the Phaedo it is as part of a rational argument for the immortality of the soul, not as part of a myth. In the Phaedrus it is introduced as part of a myth that explains the cognition of general terms: “a human being must understand speech in terms of general forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into a reasoned unity. That process is the recollection of the things our soul saw when it was traveling with god, when it disregarded the things we now call real and lifted up its head to what is truly real instead” (249b–c). According to the scheme described in the Phaedrus, knowledge is concerned with Forms. According to the doctrine of recollection, we do not experience Forms directly when we are incarnate; we must recollect a previous experience. This requires that the soul exist before it is incarnated. Socrates connects this requirement with other arguments for the immortality of the soul to produce a cycle of reincarnation. Once the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is introduced in the Apology and Crito it recurs in the Gorgias, Meno, Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Laws. Likewise, once the doctrine of reincarnation is introduced it becomes a regular feature of Plato's thought. Reincarnation might be considered a Platonic doctrine, but the immortality of the soul is a doctrine that links the elenctic and later dialogues. Socrates introduces new proofs for the immortality of the soul in the Republic (X, 608d–611b) and Phaedrus (245c–e), and he develops a theory of the complexity of the soul in the Republic, but the doctrine of immortality is a recurring feature of Plato's work from the early dialogues to the latest.
Let us consider next the structure of the soul. In the elenctic dialogues, as we have previously seen, there is a hint at the complexity of the soul in the Gorgias, at 493a–b, where Socrates introduces the idea that the soul has parts, specifically reason and appetite, and that it is the task of reason to exercise control over the appetites, a view that gets developed in Republic IV, 435d–441c. For the most part, however, Socrates in the elenctic dialogues treats the soul as if it were a single, simple entity, consisting solely of the faculty of reason. He may allow in the Protagoras that there are irrational forces – pleasure and pain, love, anger and fear – that conflict with reason (352b–c), but it may be that he regards this as the mistaken view of the many. Socrates does not assert that the soul is simple in the elenctic dialogues, or that it is equivalent to reason, but he does treat it in that way. Once the soul is divided into parts, however, that changes. He must consider whether the entire soul is immortal or just the rational part. Plato may not have reached a settled opinion on this matter until the late Timaeus, if then. (Timaeus 69c–72d talks about a mortal part of the soul. 90a–d suggests that the rational part of the soul is, or can be, immortal; but the passage is not altogether clear.)
Moral Theory
It has been argued15 that Socratic intellectualism, discussed in Chapter 5, is in conflict with the moral psychology of Republic IV. According to intellectualism, all of the virtues are actually knowledge or wisdom; according to Republic IV wisdom is distinct from the other virtues. According to intellectualism, all desire is for the good; according to Republic IV there are irrational desires. This seems to be correct. Socrates does defend intellectualism in the dialogues we discussed in Chapter 5 and he does appear to reject it in Republic IV. This is a genuine conflict, an incompatibility. Plato did retain the Socratic claim that no one does wrong willingly even in his late work (see in particular Laws V, 731c and IX, 860d), but in the Republic he accepts the existence of irrational desires. If intellectualism were the only moral theory contained in the elenctic dialogues, the contrast between Socratic ethics and Platonic ethics would be clear. It is not, however, the only moral theory present in the elenctic dialogues.
In the Crito, as we discussed in Chapter 6, Socrates presents the analogy between physical and psychological health, and argues that the good life, which is the just life, is the life of psychological health. In the Gorgias he develops and defends these claims against the objections and the alternative views of his interlocutors. In the Gorgias psychological health is defined as proper order in the soul. As we have seen, this notion of order requires the concept of parts of the soul, which is hinted at in the Gorgias, at 493a–b. In the Gorgias only two parts of the soul are distinguished, reason and appetite; in Republic IV Socrates adds spirit. The Gorgias emphasizes the importance of self-control, rational control over the appetites, as the central virtue. In Republic IV the virtue responsible for self-control is justice, which is the proper order among the parts of the soul. The difference between these two claims is slight, since justice and self-control or temperance are very closely related to each other in the Republic. Justice is proper order of the parts of the state and soul; temperance is harmony between the parts. If the theory of intellectualism contrasts sharply with the theory of Republic IV, the theory of happiness as psychic order in the Gorgias leads directly to it. The seeds of the Republic theory of the virtuous life are present in the elenctic dialogues.
Political Theory
In Chapter 7 we discussed two aspects of Socratic political theory. The first aspect was Socrates’ desire to create a republic of moral inquiry. Socrates wanted the Athenians to stop pursuing wealth, reputation, and honors and to start pursuing wisdom, truth, and the best state of their souls. The way to pursue these goals was through elenctic argument: as Socrates says at Apology 38a, the greatest good for a human being is “to discuss virtue every day … for the unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates exemplified the life he thought all Athenians should lead by examining others; as he stated at Gorgias 521d, he thought he was the only Athenian of his day who practiced the true art of politics. Socrates was aware that the Athenian people were unlikely to abandon their current pursuits and convert to a life of philosophy, but he thought of that as an ideal. The second aspect of Socratic political theory was his search for a moral expert. Socrates believed that what qualified someone to rule was not citizenship, wealth, or heredity but knowledge. He searched for someone who had knowledge of the first principles of ethics. He believed that, if such a person could be found, that person ought to be the ruler in the city. If a knowledgeable person or persons could be discovered, any government other than rule by that person would be undesirable, perhaps illegitimate.
In the Republic Plato reconceives Socrates’ idea of a republic of moral inquiry, but he does not modify his view that the moral expert should rule. He apparently realized that a state in which everyone was engaged in the search for virtue would be impractical. Someone, in fact most people in the city, would need to grow the food for the city, house its inhabitants, clothe them, and provide shoes for them. Because he accepted a principle that labor should be carried out by specialists who did only one job, this required farmers, carpenters, tailors, and shoemakers. Eventually other specialists were added to the workforce, including a military class, from which a class of rulers was drawn. Plato envisioned a class society. Each class practiced the virtues of justice and temperance, but the military class was distinguished for its courage and the ruling class for its wisdom. It was to the ruling class that the task of investigating the nature of virtue fell. Though Plato modified the conception of a republic
of moral inquiry, he retained the Socratic idea that it was knowledge that qualified a ruler to rule. The rulers of Plato's state were characterized not by their active pursuit of virtue, but by their actual possession of knowledge of virtue and the good. They were to be the moral experts for which Socrates searched, but never claimed that he had found. The philosopher rulers of the Republic were the descendants of the moral experts Socrates sought in all of the elenctic dialogues. The Socratic search for moral wisdom culminated in the philosopher-king. To become a philosopher-king one would have to take a rigorous ten year sequence of courses in mathematics, followed by five years of dialectic, and no one would qualify as philosopher-king until he or she could offer a definition of the good that could withstand all possible criticism, so the likelihood of a philosopher-king just “popping up” would seem to be extremely small. On the other hand, Plato's Academy, with its emphasis on mathematical learning, may have been, at least in aspiration, a training-ground for potential philosopher-kings. The political ideal of the Republic was a republic of virtue in the sense that every member of the society possessed at least some virtue and contributed to the proper functioning of the state and to the well-being of the whole, but it would be a republic of moral inquiry only in the sense that the philosopher-kings in training would actively seek knowledge of virtue and the good, not in the Socratic sense that every member of society actively sought moral wisdom. It was based on the Socratic idea that the wise should rule, but not on the Socratic idea that everyone in the state might, theoretically, become wise.
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