'Euthyphro' is one of Plato's early dialogues, one that shows Socrates discussing and talking through problems in what is usually regarded as a close representation of the way the historical Socrates argued. This is probably too simple an approach to this or any other of Plato's dialogues, if only because we are dealing with a carefully constructed work of literary art. That in itself doesn't make this a false picture of Socrates' activities but it should put us on our guard - we are not looking through a window straight onto the streets of ancient Athens. There may be other things going on here.
One indication of a literary perspective is the setting and date of the dialogue. It takes place in 399 BC, in the King Archon's court, just weeks before Socrates' trial and execution. The King Archon was one of nine chief magistrates in the city and was responsible for dealing with certain sorts of civil and religious cases. We are in other words meant to read this dialogue in the knowledge that Socrates was soon to face trial on a capital charge. Part of the interest then is the way he behaves at this moment in his life. He was at that time seventy years old and was a well-known character - Aristophanes had sent him up in one of his best-known comedies some years before, so clearly everyone knew who he was or this wouldn't have been possible - but he also had a distinguished military record, a reputation for singular toughness and endurance and, more tellingly, supposed leanings through earlier association with Alcibiades and other aristocratic elements who were believed to be deeply opposed to the newly-restored democracy. There is in other words a strong political dimension to this trial. The democrats are out for political revenge. Our dialogue takes place then under the shadow of what for its first readers would have been a known and terrible future.
 |
| The Stoa where trials for homicide and impiety were heard |
Euthyphro is the name of an individual. Nobody knows if he was a real person, though he may well have been. His name is composed of two elements - euthus (εὐθύς), which means straightforward in a moral sense or direct and forthright while the second element phrōn (φρων or φρην) means heart, mind, understanding, or reason. (It is the same word we see in 'diaphragm' which was the part of the body - the muscular midriff - that was regarded in earlier Homeric days as the seat of the passions or affections). The name as a whole means right-minded or sincere and seems to be intended ironically. Euthyphro is a pretty upright kind of a fellow, not to say, as we shall see, something of a prig. He is, appropriately enough for someone with this name, an expert in religious matters, an expert in other words in anything connected with where, when and how to perform prayers and sacrifices properly. The proper performance of ritual was a matter a great importance to the ancient Greeks, not something to be taken lightly. Its the nature of the case that Euthyphro is bring that leads to the discussion recreated in Plato's dialogue. It is simply, 'What is piety?' or, as we might express this today, 'What is the nature of religious or moral obligation?'. It is clearly an important philosophical topic, something in other words, that demands discussion and clarification, as far as this is possible.
The word that we translate as 'piety' has a complex meaning in Greek. Its complexities should remind us that we can never simply assume that each word in their language corresponds to a word in ours; there is , in practice, always a great deal of cultural baggage that we need to be aware of if we are to avoid naive misreadings. The Greek word here is hosios (ὅσιος), which is an adjective meaning sanctioned or approved by the law of nature, as opposed to being sanctioned by human law or convention. People often spoke of things ordained by the gods and things of human ordinance. These divine things were not negotiable, as it were, but rather matters of unalterable obligation. (There is something in this that calls to mind Kant's notion of a duty-based ethics, at least in its sense that there are some things that you really have to do). In reading this dialogue we should keep in mind that hosios refers primarily to things that we really ought to do because they are demanded by the gods.
 |
| ἆρα τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ὅσιον ἐστιν φιλεῖται ὑπὸ τῶν θεῶν, ἢ ὅτι φιλεῖται ὅσιόν ἐστιν; |
Euthyphro's account
It is ridiculous, Socrates, for you to think that it makes any difference whether the victim is a stranger or a relative. One should only watch whether the killer acted justly or not; if he acted justly, let him go, but if not, one should prosecute, if, that is to say, the killer shares your hearth and table. The pollution (miasma) is the same if you knowingly keep company with such a man and do not cleanse yourself and him by bringing him to justice. The victim was a dependent of mine, and when we were farming in Naxos he was a servant of ours. He killed one of our household slaves in drunken anger, so my father bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, then sent a man here to inquire from the priest what should be done. During the time he gave no thought or care to the bound man, as being a killer, and it was no matter if he died, which he did. Hunger and cold and his bonds caused his death before the messenger came back from the seer. Both my father and my other relatives are angry that I am prosecuting my father on behalf of a murderer when he hadn't even killed him, they say, and even if he had, the dead man does not deserve a thought, since he was a killer. For, they say, it is impious for a son to prosecute his father for murder. But their idea of the divine attitude to piety (hosion) and impiety are wrong, Socrates. (4b-e)...
Questions:
(1) What exactly is the crime that Euthyphro's father has committed?
(2) Why does Euthyphro think that he has no choice but to prosecute his father?
(3) Is he right to think this? Would you prosecute your father in a similar situation?
(4) Is there any clear way to resolve the conflict of opinion between Euthyphro on the one hand and his father and his relatives on the other?
(5) What knowledge does Euthyphro implicitly claim (in the last sentence) that he has and that others do not have?
Socrates talks about the idea that lies in or behind appearances
... So tell me now, by Zeus, what you just now maintained you clearly knew: what kind of thing do you say that godliness and ungodliness are, both as regards murder and other things; or is the pious not the same and alike in every action, and the impious the opposite of all that is pious and like itself, and everything that is to be impious presents us with one form (idea or eidos) or appearance insofar as it is impious? (5c-d)
Questions:
(1) What is Socrates saying here?
(2) What assumption lies behind this assertion?
The Key Question:
The key question in this dialogue is this one where at 10a Socrates asks what it is that makes what is holy holy? Is what is holy loved by the gods because it is holy or is it holy because it is loved? This is an alternative translation for to hosion which is perhaps better here. Does what is holy derive its character as something holy from the fact that the gods have declared it to be holy or do they love what is sacred because it is intrinsically good and demanding of our attention and compliance? Socrates wants us to come to this second conclusion. He wants us to to arrive by a process of close logical argument at a recognition of the independence of what he calls piety or holiness. The Greek text uses the word eidos, which means form or shape. We can see here in this early dialogue the first shaping of the theory that Plato later attributed to Socrates and which we know as the Theory of Forms. Plato imagines the things that give direction and significance to our lives, things like courage, piety, good judgement and the like as existing independently of humanity in some undefined place of ultimate values, a sort of values-heaven, a place where you would find the Forms of courage and piety and such mathematical entities as √2 and π, but in Euthyphro we are not so far along that line of development. One thing we probably can say is that Socrates did not himself create or share this theory, although Plato might reply that it is implicit in the sort of things that Socrates said.
The Socratic elenchus
This key question is the heart of Socrates' method, what is usually called the Socratic elenchus. This word elenchus or in Greek ἔλεγχος, means simply a cross-examination or scrutiny for the purposes of refutation. (The elenchus works by showing that some belief is incompatible with another and that therefore one of the two must be abandoned; ultimately, however, the elenchus does not and cannot demonstrate that some one position is the right and true one - that choice must be left to the participant. Notice that the elenchus rests on an assumption that all our beliefs should be consistent with one another and that reason will lead us all toward an identical conclusion). The interest here is in the logical argument that Socrates constructs, perhaps a little cruelly at Euthyphro's expense. We should, however, keep in mind Plato's larger literary objective, for it is part of Plato's purpose to show that it is Socrates who is - contrary to the claims of Meletos and his other his prosecutors - the man who genuinely cares about to hosion. We see him at the start of the dialogue that he is genuinely surprised at Euthyphro's lawsuit, and as the exchange continues we see that it is Socrates and not Euthyphro or the mass of his fellow-citizens who has thought long and hard about the nature of man's relation to the gods and what this ought to be.
 |
| Wittgenstein releasing flies |
This is the literary background for the Socratic elenchus. Euthyphro claims that he has precise knowledge about piety and impiety (4e4-5a2). Socrates takes Euthyphro at his word and proceeds by putting a series of questions to him that seem on the surface at least designed to obtain a clear statement of what Euthyphro believes piety to be. The argument proceeds by taking Euthyphro's replies one at a time with Socrates always taking care to secure agreement to his formulations before going further. The investigation looks like a cooperative venture and the final result is the mutually agreed outcome of all the steps which have preceded it. But from our point of view as readers we ca see that Socrates is leading Euthyphro into a logical trap, even if we cannot foresee exactly what shape this will take. he does this by securing agreement to statements which turn out to contradict one another. The argument continues until at least one of the statements is abandoned, usually by mutual agreement. The state of intellectual perplexity caused by the realisation that the argument has led to an untenable contradiction is called aporia or ἀπορία, a word which means that one is perplexed, at one's wits' end, not knowing how to proceed. This dialogue does not resolve our bewilderment. We are left in this state of aporia. You might recall as a kind of distant parallel Wittgenstein's reply when asked what was his aim in philosophy - To show the fly the way out of the bottle! In a sense this is Socrates' aim too.
Socrates' aim, however, goes beyond the resolution of logical difficulties for what he wants is a correct understanding that would put him closer to the right relationship to the gods. For him that relationship must be a matter of discovering the objectively right relationship for it cannot in any sense in the terms of his approach to the argument be a matter of individual choice or election. He is as Plato depicts him in this dialogue and elsewhere someone whose investigations always proceed on the basis of his claim that he knows nothing. To some degree this seems an ironical stance, but it is not insincere; he does claim or is represented as claiming that any knowledge he has is a matter of accident. he may have thought about things but he doesn't claim that he actually knows. He is like the man who staggers out of the cave towards the light. He is on the way towards the sun, but he has not yet reached that intellectual world of perfect knowledge. he is in Plato's terminology a philosophos - a lover of wisdom - and not a philotheamōn - a lover of sights, shows and distractions. Our pilgrimage is it seems for Plato either up towards or away from the light. There is no standing still.
Questions:
(2) Can you follow the steps of Socrates' argument? What is the implication of his conclusion about to hosion?
(3) Would it be reasonable to see in Socrates' and Plato's approach the influence of ecstatic religious cults that seek to transcend the human condition? Or is Socrates simply a run-of-the-mill adherent of traditional polis religion?
(4) Can there be a single objective set of values separate from anything we might want or choose? Is this view really implicit in this dialogue?
(5) Is this dialogue the creator of Socrates's character or is the dialogue ultimately his creation?
(6) Is philosophy an entirely theoretical discipline or should it be concerned with personal transformation?
(5) Is this dialogue the creator of Socrates's character or is the dialogue ultimately his creation?
(6) Is philosophy an entirely theoretical discipline or should it be concerned with personal transformation?
