Abstract
The Gorgias begins by asking who Gorgias is and means to inquire what art he practices (447C). Socrates suggests to Callicles that one will come to know himself by investigating the relations among notions such as knowledge, virtue, pleasure, the good (495D). His suggestion will be followed in this chapter; only the investigation will be directed mainly upon the relation between art and virtue. The reciprocal relation between the soul and its activity is mentioned in the Phaedrus: “We must learn the truth about the soul divine and human by observing how it acts and is acted upon.”1 That activity which, it is reasonable to suppose, would reveal the soul’s most human aspect, is the intelligent, self-controlled activity manifested in the arts. It would be possible, perhaps useful, to arrange the dialogues in an order determined by the greater or lesser explicitness with which they get the soul into the context of human needs and the arts designed to provide their satisfactions. Obviously this is a desirable context in which to study the soul, for some knowledge concerning this context is already at hand, and we are in a position to treat the analogy of the soul and its virtue to the arts and their products with some sophistication. We have already considered some aspects of this analogy (p. 24ff ) and need not repeat these considerations here but shall attend to the additions to Plato’s views to be gathered primarily from the Gorgias, Republic, and Phaedrus.
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245C. This hypothesis is accepted as a matter of course in Rep. IV 436A-437C; cf. ibid. I 335D.
E.g. I 332D “The art that renders to what things what that is due and befitting is called the culinary art?… In the same way tell me the art that renders what to whom would be denominated justice?”
A valuable summary and discussion of Plato’s views on art is to be found in Plato’s Theory of Man, by John Wild (Harvard, 1946), ch. 2.
129D-120C. Cf.. τις τέxνη βελτίω ποιεί αυτόν … (129E).
Socrates uncompromisingly rejects Thrasymachus’ interpretation of justice as the interest of the superior (τό τοṽ κρείττονος ξυμφέρον Rep. I 374E). In Laws IV 414C, however, this opinion is reinterpreted and accepted when’ superior’ refers to the laws, the dispensations of reason which are enacted in the interest of the whole state (ibid. 415B-D).
Gor. 493D-494A. Compare the Titan-like natures of Laws III (701), and the incorrigible criminals whose punishment must be death (Laws IX 845D; Rep. 410A).
Cf. Phaedr. 245E; Tim. 88E; Pol. 269E; Laws X 895; Epinomis 983B.
That we can and ought to inquire into matters of which we are ignorant is asserted by Socrates to be the point of his argument concerning recollection (Meno 86B-C), and the human soul is of a kind to follow such an inquiry. Thus, the human soul is said to be like an eye blinded by the mud of barbarism until dialectic clears and redirects it, Rep. VII 533D. Or it is like a garden in which dialectic can sow the intelligible work (Phaedr. 276Ef).
Thus, Plato, who is said to have burned the verses of his youth, seems to repudiate literature qua literature along with other fine arts. He would allow poetry to return to the Republic only were it to acquire a rational justification (Rep. X 607C, quoted on p. 000 below) in terms, no doubt, of its judgment by the standard of the Good. Without this purgation and rationalization, poetry tends to disturb the emotional balance and harmony, thus to encourage intemperance (ibid. 603C et sq.). It leads one to bear his trials with something less than courage (604D). Likewise, it is deceiving, being not careful of the truth (601A; 607A-B), and dealing in remote imitations of reality (597E). In fact, neither the poet nor the rhapsode grasps the order of battle or the art of the general, as Ion admitted. The poet does not have insight into the ends which the arts, the state, and the human being subserve (599B-D; 602A-B). In sum, he is deficient in wisdom (602A-B). Nevertheless, this famous rejection of fine art is not a condemnation of it as such, but only an indictment of it specifically considered as a mode of ethical training or as a means for communicating knowledge (706A). Considered as the teacher of Hellas, poetry is no better than sophistry. It is interesting to recall in this connection that Plato himself uses all the resources of peetry as a means of persuasion. Cf. Havelock, op. cit., chap. 2.
A History of Political Theory, N.Y. (1947) p. 49. Italics the author’s. Many popular works on philosophy offer the same interpretation,—e.g. H. H. Titus, Living Issues in Philosophy, N.Y. (1946), 336f; A. Edel, The Theory and Practice of Philosophy, N.Y. (1946) 391. Also E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (3rd éd., Univ. of Calif. Press, 1963), Chap. VII.
K. R. Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies, (London, 1947 Vol. I) has made the most detailed interpretation of the Republic along the lines which I termed quantitative. This is the interpretation which I reject. Popper regards the Republic as a “caste state” and accepts “the strict division of the classes; i.e. the ruling class, consisting of herdsmen and watchdogs, must be strictly separated from the human cattle” (p. 74). Hence, he is led to interpret the remark that “the city is just… if each of its three classes attends to its own work” as meaning that “Plato identifies justice with the principle of class rule and class privilege. For the principle that every class should attend to its own business means, briefly and bluntly, that the state is just if the ruler rules, if the worker works, and if the slave slaves.” (p. 78). It is not surprising, then, that he understands Platonic wisdom as “acquired largely for the sake of establishing a permanent political class rule,” and adds “It can be described as political ‘medicine,’ giving mystic powers to its possessors, the medicine-men” (p. 130). Thence it is but a step to seeing the philosopher-king as Plato’s own self portrait and as his covert bid for power (p. 135). In fact, the doctrine of the Republic becomes, under this interpretation, a document subtly used in a plot against human freedoms and as the prototype of totalitarianism (cf. ibid, chapter 6, and passim). These and other incredible conclusions follow from this kind of interpretation of the Republic. I take them as the argumentum ad absurdum which follows from understanding the whole of virtue to be a quantitative whole. For Plato’s defense, see John Wild, Plato’s Modern Enemies & the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago, 1953). The interpretation developed below is opposed to K. R. Popper’s
By “arbitrary” here (and analogously elsewhere) I mean that no rule follows from the nature of the line itself which would require its division at just the given point.
An illustration of a functional whole is given in Phaedrus 264C when a discourse is compared to a living organism having parts which perform fittingly with respect to each other and to the whole. Different kinds of functional wholes will be distinguished later. In Chapter IV the complex form or ideal qualitative whole will be analyzed and in Chapter V the two types of qualitative wholes which participate in an ideal whole will be discussed.
Rep. IV 428C-D; tr. Cornford (Oxford, 1945); italics mine.
Professor R. Demos is concerned with this same problem in his article “Paradoxes in Plato’s Doctrine of the Ideal State,” Clas. Quart. NS 3 (1957–1958) 164-174. Observing that the warriors and artisans seem to be deprived of reason, he asks how the state can be ideal while being composed of non-ideal citizens. He clarifies the paradox by recognizing, as I have done, that each citizen has all three parts of the soul, and he distinguishes between the specialized and general phase of each virtue. Only some specialists exercise the virtue in its special phase, but all exercise it in its general phase. This is essentially the distinction between art and moral virtue, suggested by the myth in the Protagoras, which I am making here. I also express this distinction in terms of the arts or habits of behavior which are within the technical hierarchy and the modes of behavior (the virtues) which are the conditions of this hierarchy. The present treatment of this problem was suggested in my “The Two Republics,” Education (June, 1950), 1-6; and developed further in my ‘Plato’s Movement from an Ethics of the Individual to a Science of Particulars,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy, VI (1957), 5-41. Cf. also R. Bluck, ‘Plato’s ‘Ideal’ State,” Clas. Quart. NS 9, 166-168.
E.g. in the Euthydemus “using,” which requires a knowledge of ends is distinguished from “making” which requires technical skill—“The art that makes and the art that uses are quite distinct, dealing in separation with the same thing.” (289C).
Actions are described as a mirror of the happiness or misery of a soul in Laws X 905B.
Rep. I, 351E-352A; IV 444B; 603C-D. Contrariwise, one is enjoined to be a friend to himself in Laws V 731D.
In this respect the moral “art” bears a relation to the order of specific arts which is not dissimilar to the relation of the most inclusive ideas of the Sophist (e.g. being, same, other, cf. ibid. 252E et sq.) to specific structures of ideas defined by diaeresis.
The general principle of this kind of means-end hierarchy is indicated in Lysis 219 and elsewhere in the earlier dialogues. It is reasserted more clearly, in terms of three kinds of value, in Rep. II 357, and illustrated in Rep. I 345 when Socrates undertakes to put some order in Thrysymachus’ notion of the relation between the shepherd and the butcher, and also in the relations between making and using which are exhibited as Socrates and Glaucon imagine the growth of the state in Rep. II.
Part of Heidegger’s criticism of Plato is that Plato failed to recognize explicitly the no-thing which is the ontological background of his ideal theory. But this background is expressed obscurely in some of Plato’s metaphors, e.g. as the eart0h in which the Cave is located, or as man recognized to be earthborn (Pol. 269B). The emptiness of the idea of the good, as I have interpreted it, suggests another implicit recognition of this presupposed background. Heidegger, however, does not recognize this emptiness and regards the idea of the good as the source of the thing-like character (Seienden) of the ideas, Piatons Lehre von der Wahrheit, Bern: Franke Verlag (1954), 38f.
“Mathematics and Dialectic in the Republic,” Mind XLI, 162 April 1932, pp. 177-192.
Sym. 212A, Likewise, the temperate man is said to be the friend of God in Laws IV 716D. Cf. also Rep. VI 501B; Phaedr. 248A; Theaet. 176C, also p. 61 n. 29 above on Orphism.
But cf. Euthyd. 285C-D. Also note that Socrates substitutes the music of Apollo for that of Marsyas in the purified Republic, Rep. III 399E.
“Thus equipped, the human race would indeed act and live according to knowledge, I grant you…, but that by acting according to knowledge we should do well and be happy—this is a point which as yet we are unable to make out, my dear Critias” (Charm. 173D).
Cf. Euthyd. 289B where Socrates remarks, “The sort of knowledge we require… is that in which there happens to be a union of making and knowing how to use the thing made.”
“None the less, be it declared that, if the dramatic poetry whose end is to give pleasure can show good reason why it should exist in a well-governed society, we for our part should welcome it back, being ourselves conscious of its charm” Rep. X, 6070, tr. F. M. Cornford.
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© 1965 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Ballard, E.G. (1965). The Problem of Art or Techne. In: Socratic Ignorance. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9432-7_3
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