Plato, Euthyphro

'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.

ἆρα τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ὅσιον ἐστιν φιλεῖται ὑπὸ τῶν θεῶν,  
ἢ ὅτι φιλεῖται ὅσιόν ἐστιν;

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. 

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:

(1) What is meant by to hosion and piety?

(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?

 

New Reading List

The plan is for us to read a series of texts. The one connecting thread that links these texts is what Montaigne called l'humaine condition, our common condition or nature. This blog serves as a focus for our discussions, both before and after they take place. It will also provide us with a record of sorts of what we have covered. 

 

(1) Our first reading consists of two relatively early texts by Plato. These are Euthyphro and Socrates' Apology, that's to say his defence speech at his trial. The recommended edition is: Plato: Five Dialogues, translated by G.M.A. Grube. It is available at Amazon for £4.67. (All the prices are taken from the Amazon site, but you should check to make sure that they are up-to-date). Some introductory notes on these will be published in due course before we meet. The other texts are listed in reading order, but in summary fashion.

(2) Thucydides: Pericles’ Speech on the War Dead and The Melian Dialogue. The recommended edition is On Justice, Power and Human Nature, edited by Paul Woodruff at £5.45

(3) Michel de Montaigne: On Repenting, On Cannibals and On Experience

Selected Essays, edited by John Cohen at £5.84

(4) Henri Bergson: Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, published as On Laughter, edited by Cloudesley Brereton at £3.99. A second text is G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, Penguin at £4.74.

 

(5) Immanuel Kant: Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Lewis White Beck (2nd edition) at £7.99.

(6) J.J. Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Oxford World Classics, edited by Donald A.Cress at £5.95.

 

(7) Arthur Schopenhauer: On the Suffering of the World, Penguin Great Ideas, at £3.99.

(8) Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, Penguin Classics at £5.49.

Each of these eight selections represents one month’s reading assignment. The total outlay for this selection of texts would amount to £38.32. People would be able to buy each book one at a time so they would not be committed to the whole series of meetings if they wished to drop out. There is nothing fixed ort unalterable about this list with the exception perhaps of the Plato and Montaigne texts, which provide a kind of leitmotif for the series.

Starting out...

Justinian closed Plato's Academy in 529 AD

Why 'Plato's Shadows'? Why the quotation from Montaigne's Essays? The answer, I suppose, is that each points in a somewhat different way to the uncertainties that are the stuff of our lives. In Book VII of the Republic (514a–520a), Plato uses shadows as an image for the illusions and false beliefs about the world and ourselves as part of that world. In this famous allegory, ordinary folk - that's you and me as well as military opportunists like Justinian - are pictured as bound in chains facing the wall on which shadows are cast by people and objects passing behind them. We are prisoners to what we believe about the world and what we believe is, says Plato, false or inadequate or at best unexamined and we have a great resistance to acknowledging what we are really like. We live in self-deception like fish in the sea, knowing there's a world of light and clarity above but seldom even attempting to reach it. In fact Plato thinks our situation is worse than this for we think we know what is better but in practice fail to live by these lights. 'As Plato has Socrates argue throughout the early dialogues, there is no such thing as knowing the better and doing the worse: there is only ignorance of the better.' (Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living, p. 43). Plato takes a dark, disdainful view of human nature.

Plato's doubts about the human condition may be well-founded, but in terms of the philosophical theory he builds upon this conviction, he has rather loaded the dice; for in the Allegory of the Cave, Plato claims that what we are seeing as we stare at the images on the back of the cave are the shadows of those real things which we do not and cannot see in terms of the story he presents. The imagery implies not just that our view of the world is wrong-headed in every way, but also that there is a single, right and true way of viewing the world. Each of us has his own mistaken and skewed view of the world, but there is implicitly in the way Plato presents his picture, a one, true right way to understand things and he holds out the hope that we might by examining our lives bring what we know and what we are closer together. Well, maybe, might be our answer. One thing is certain and that is that our beliefs about ourselves and the world are in something of a mess. We feel instinctively that this is true. We are always trying to get to see the world and ourselves aright. And Plato would certainly agree with this.

How would you be different if you got out there?

Shadows get a bad press and always have had even before Plato. We are afraid of the shadows because we don't know who or what may be lurking there. The darkness is a place of threats. The real world is a place of danger and we are vulnerable creatures. Once we are away from the security of our homes and away from the city lights it doesn't take much to awaken our elemental fears of the world around us. Hoodlums and rapists, bacteria and crocodiles, unshaven policemen and airplanes falling out of the sky people our imaginations and the books we take on holiday to the beach. Perhaps part of the reason our beliefs and understanding are in such a mess is that we are such vulnerable creatures. We are constantly on the lookout for things that might threaten our lives. We take our inner Darwin with us everywhere.

Of course we have ways of dealing with these threats. We have policemen and judges and gaols and armies to protect us from some of the most present dangers that come from others of our kind. The search to make these defences cast-iron-strong continues month by month in our courts and parliaments. And we have much older technologies to protect us from the threats to our survival - housebuilding skills, agriculture instead of relying on what we find the way worms and birds do, shipbuilding and navigation to help us to get hold of the sort of goods that will enhance our lives with things we don't have in our own country. The list is endless as a moment's reflection will convince you and all of these things are prompted ultimately by our search for safety and survival. They are our answers to our vulnerability. We are easily damaged creatures. The fear of death is never very far from our minds.

But let's look for a moment in a more dispassionate way at shadows, the real shadows that are an integral part of the world. You do not need a brightly shining sun to get shadows. Shadows are everywhere all the time as long at least as there is some light. In fact the only times there are no shadows are when the world is either completely dark or when it is completely white with light. We are either plunged into fearful darkness or immobilised by blinding unintelligible light. (It's surely not an accident that the first is the traditional image of Hell and the other of Heaven). The world only makes visual sense in between these extremes.

The strange thing about the digital image above is not just that some parts look like solid protruding spheres and others like hollow concave bowls; it's also the fact that if you turn the image upside down, the two sorts of images change places. In fact these two images are one and the same: it is the shadow effect that leads us to see them differently. Shadow is ambiguous and requires the interpreting mind. According to Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus (550-480BC) claimed that celestial bodies are bowls with their concave sides towards us and that in this concavity they hold a flame whose light streams down to people on earth. It's easy to mistake one shape for the other. The point however remains - it is the shadows that lead us to make inferences about objects or rather it is the mixture of shadows and light that gives us clues as to what we are seeing. Sometimes, in some tricky situations, we might have to conduct a few checks to discover how things really stand in the world. Everyday life is just the same, only murkier and less easy to ascertain in the time available to us. Imagine looking at the dense thicket. A slight movement might mean a breeze or it might mean a predator bearing down on us. We have to make the right interpretation and make it fast.

What's the point of all this? Well, the point is, I think, that our judgements about things out there in the world are uncertain. Sure, we have ways of checking up to see if we got it right. We can do astronomy for a couple of thousand years and then feel fairly confident that we understand the basics about celestial bodies and we can walk into the forest to see if it really is a leopard waiting there for us in the branches. But even though we feel that we've got things right we know that we must remain aware that we might be getting them wrong, and that this could be shown to us either now or in the future. There are no ultimate certainties, but experience, science and technology make us feel less fear when faced with threats to our lives. We feel that someone can do something to fix it, whatever 'it' is - a triple by-pass operation or the failure of fish stocks in the seas. Plato, however, did want to assert that there are certainties, that we could know the world and our own characters and qualities. He started with the idea of real objects that the dull souls in the back of the cave - hoi polloi - just didn't quite see. They saw only the shadows of those real things. Those real things were the constituents of the intelligible world and were somehow more real than the imperfectly edited torrent of experience, which is what passes for life in the lives of us ordinary cave-dwelling folk. Today, people for the most part reject Plato's notion of an impersonal Good towards which we all should aim, but on the other had, we have almost unlimited confidence in science and technology, in what Plato saw as just a set of ad hoc technai and procedures that help to protect and enhance our lives. We tend to think that everything is ultimately just a matter of medical or some other kind of engineering.

"...an appendage without influence..."

Plato may think little of our average attempts to make sense of our lives, but he does believe that this is a real possibility and that a noble destiny awaits the supreme philosopher, that lover of wisdom who ventures out beyond the cave and into the light of ultimate reality. (It is no wonder that Nietzsche called Christianity Platonism for the masses!) Montaigne takes a very different view. Here is how Hugo Friedrich characterizes Montaigne: 'One can open the Essais at any random passage, they are always concerned with man: "...the study I am making, the subject of which is man..(II,17, 481 A). Montaigne stresses his predominant theme in this and similar wording often and almost extraneously. Whether nature, being or God is discussed, it is always for the purposes of characterizing man. These are forces to which man must submit, dark areas over which the fantasy lights of human opinion play, restlessly and incompetently. And this book, which displays all moral, physical, political, intimate characteristics of man like an inexhaustible landscape, pushes him all the way to the edge of the cosmos: an appendage without influence, uncertain in his sense of rank, unclear in his driving forces, incalculable in his reactions to destiny, much more likely to be related to the animal than to the divine, and then again capable of finding happiness and peace in the midst of his ignorance and abasement, creating the art of social intercourse, attaining the summit of friendship, poor and rich alike, a surprise with which one never fully comes to terms - "so deep a labyrinth..." (II, 17 481 A).' (Montaigne, by Hugo Friedrich, UCP, 1991).

There is nothing in the Essais of the Christian doctrine of man's esential dignity. The Christian concept of a conditio humana gives way to a recognition of our confused all-too-human condition. His picture of man acknowledges no robed destinies for kings or parliamentarians or peasants. We are all the same, riding the uncertain waves of experience, buffeted this way and that. The emperor and the shoemaker are cast in the same mold, their lives not all that different from each other. A prince waging war or a neighbour negotiating privately with a neighbour, beating a servant in one's household or ravaging a province: do not these stem from one and the same root? (II, 12, 350 A). We are all subject to the same accidents. It was Shakespeare - a very keen student of Montaigne - who with his History plays brought this notion of the common humanity of kings and peasants vividly before his Elisabethan audiences. (One might think for example of the scene where the young Henry V tours the English camp on the night before the battle of Agincourt talking anonymously to the ordinary soldiers or of Hamlet's rebuke to Claudius where he tells him 'how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar', reminding the king of our common nature in an abrupt and brutal manner). Our limitations are more real than our pretences, but on the other hand, our common humanity is something to be affirmed. Montaigne's essential scepticism about higher destinies and the like leads him not to despair but towards affirmation of our imperfect nature and from there towards advocating toleration in what was a dangerously intolerant age. 

CLOV:  Do you believe in life to come?
HAMM:  Mine was always that.    

Lines from Samuel Beckett's Endgame