Laches

This is another early Socratic dialog that attempts to define what courage is.   It shares the same structure as Euthyphro and Charmides.  We start with some literary scene setting.  In this case, Lysimachus and Melesias invite Nicias and Laches to talk with them about the appropriate subjects for their four similarly aged sons to begin studying.  Since they're watching some armed warrior give a demonstration of his prowess, they begin by wondering whether the boys should study fighting in armor.  They can't decide, so they pull Socrates out from behind a sign to join them in their debate.  As usual, Socrates doesn't have an opinion about the particular question, and instead shifts the dialog up a level to ask how we would even go about figuring out which subjects are the most important ones to teach our kids.  And, as in the other cases, his first follow up question is whether we are ourselves experts in the matter at hand, or whether we know some expert who it would be better to defer to.  Since here we're dealing with how to educate the young in general, in this case it becomes a question of whether anyone can claim expertise in adding virtue to their souls, since this must be the ultimate goal of any education.  Before we can find out who is an expert in instilling virtue though, we better figure out what it is.  Unfortunately, this is much too big a question.  In view of this, and considering the setting, Socrates settles for asking the group to define courage, which surely is one part of virtue as a whole.  Predictably, Nicias and Laches spend the rest of the dialog failing to define courage, and when the curtain drops we once again only know that we know nothing.

There's a clear pattern to these dialogs that reflects a successive transformation of an initial question.  

1) The fairly realistic preamble and setting that leads to a practical question.  Should we teach our kids to fight in armor?

2) The realization that to answer the specific practical question, we are forced to confront a more general abstract one.  How do we decide whether our kids should learn to fight in armor?  How do we know what to teach them to make them good?

3) The deconstruction of the more abstract question till it reveals that we are really being asked about what we think is valuable in life.  How do we know which good things we should aim for our kids to learn?  What is the good?

Laches actually contains an explicit allusion to this pattern.

You don't appear to me to know that whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and associates with him in conversation must necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something quite different in the first place, keep on being led about by the man's arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. (187e)

Ultimately all of Socrates' questions lead back to the question of whether we're living the good life.

It's also becoming clear that there are a couple of argumentative tropes Socrates uses repeatedly. 

 

1)  Since he knows nothing himself, his first question is always to ask whether anybody is an expert or knows an expert.  Alongside this, he always brings up a question of lineage.  An expert must have studied under a prior expert and must teach later experts.  Laches is explicit that this question is not democratic in the least.  Socrates is asked to break a tie between Nicias and Laches over whether their sons should study fighting in armor.  But he points out that since neither he nor the other two gentleman have any expertise in the matter, majority rule would here be a stupid prodecure for deciding something as important as how to educate our kids.

2)  Socrates will never let anyone get away with just giving examples of what he wants them to define.  They have to define what the thing is abstractly and in itself.  For example, Laches says that someone who doesn't run away from his post when the enemy attacks is courageous.  Socrates doesn't disagree, but points out that one might also retreat courageously, and even courageously face dangers or temptations that have nothing to do with a battlefield.  He always demands one definition to fit all these cases. 

3)  Socrates' preferred method for revealing the inadequacy of a definition is to show how it implies that something we all agree is a good thing -- courage, temperance, piety -- might in some cases turn out to be bad for us.  In this instance, Laches, thinking of his man at the post, tries to define courage in general as "a sort of endurance of the soul" (192c).  Socrates points out that it wouldn't be courageous to endure in doing the same foolish thing long after it makes sense.  So endurance is not always a good thing.  Since we're seeking a definition of courage in itself, and we know this is a good thing, a correct definition will never leave it good at some times and bad at others.  Implicit here is the idea that qualities in themselves are either good or bad.  When a thing appears good in some cases and bad in others, this must be because we're mixing together more than one thing-in-itself.  In this case, we're in danger of mixing courage with wisdom or intelligence (or really their opposite I suppose).  

There's also a fourth trope (or maybe meta-trope) that is coming into view but which I don't understand clearly.  The dialogs tend to end just at the point where we discover something like a circularity or overreach of some sort in the definition.  In Euthyphro every definition of piety was reduced to simply "whatever the gods like".  But without another way of knowing what acts are pious, this definition is tautological.  In Charmides, the good ship Temperance sank on the iceberg of a "science of science", a thing which might not exist and seemed like it would be content-free and unhelpful even if it did.  In Laches we find something a little similar.  

After Laches' definition of courage is shot down, Nicias proposes a more sophisticated one.  He claims that courage is, "knowledge of the fearful and the hopeful in war and every other situation" (195a).  While it starts off as a bit obscure, Nicias is trying to get at the way that courage can't be totally independent of our knowledge or wisdom.  For example, if we have no understanding of what bad thing might happen to us, we can't be courageously facing it down.  We can't overcome our fears or persevere in our faith if we don't know what despair is threatened or hope promised.  In other words, courage seems to require consciousness of what good and bad things might happen in the future.  Accordingly, animals and children and fools never have enough knowledge or wisdom to show courage.  

At first it seems Nicias' definition has taken the opposite approach to Laches'.  Laches defined courage too broadly as endurance of the soul in the face of difficulties.  This opened the door to ignorance or foolishness increasing our courage insofar as they increase our difficulties.  The definition captured more than just courage.  Nicias' definition, on the other hand, seems to make courage too small.  It eliminates the rash action of someone who doesn't know any better, but it seems to simultaneously eliminate all action, and reduce courage to just knowledge of what to fear or hope for.  Socrates quickly points out that such knowledge  depends entirely on knowing what is good and bad for us to begin with, and just applying this to the future.  Which means that Nicias' narrowing of the definition has actually taken us back to the starting point -- knowledge of what's good and bad for us is not mere courage but the whole of virtue itself.  Since we thought courage was only one part of virtue, something must be wrong with this definition as well.  The more narrow definition paradoxically turns the part it sought to define into the whole -- courage dissolves into something indistinguishable from virtue.  

There's a circle at work here that seems similar to the earlier dialogs.  The final definitions aren't working because in their groping towards generality, their search for the truly in itself, they overshoot the mark.  We thought we were discussing one specific good thing, but we end up trying to define the good as a whole.  It seems that to know "what is X?" we would have to answer "what is the good?".  But this is exactly the question we posed at the outset, which has circulated around and come back to us.  I'll have to think more about how exactly this works and what it means as I continue reading.  I don't feel like I'm describing it adequately yet.