Meno

With Meno we're returning to the middle period dialogs that I started skipping over when I caught a glimpse of their complexity in Phaedo.  Of course, the separation of early from middle is also a bit fuzzy.  Officially, Gorgias and Clitophon are all early Socratic dialogs, but they are clear borderline cases either in terms of content or complexity.  Meno is also a borderline case, though from the opposite direction -- officially classified as a middle period dialog, it still features Socrates as the main character and still ends in an aporia of sorts.  Like Gorgias and Clitophon, it also foreshadows the trial of Socrates.  Here Anytus, one of Scorates' accusers in the Apology, issues a not-so-veiled warning that Socrates' habit of going around uncovering that nobody knows anything is earning him powerful enemies.  By ordering and comparing these dialogs I think we can venture a hypothesis about Plato's literary and philosophical development.  

A beginning point might be a classic early dialog like Laches.  There, as Plato's main character, Socrates' schtick is entirely that he only knows he knows nothing.  The dialog is supposedly searching for the definition of courage, but under Socrates relentless questioning we discover that to understand a part of virtue like courage we really have to define all of virtue as a whole.  Since Socrates does not claim to know what virtue itself is, the dialog ends with no firm conclusion.  We might situate Protagoras as the next step beyond Laches.  This is another aporetic dialog starring Socrates, but his interlocutor is much more sophisticated in this one.  It also introduces three central themes -- the importance of knowledge of what's good and bad for us, the question of whether virtue can be taught, and the problem of style in philosophy (long speeches versus short questions and answers) .  Socrates tries to argue that virtue is simply a matter of knowing what will bring us pleasure and pain now and in the future, since everyone wants the good, people only do themselves harm through ignorance of what's good for them, and particularly through ignorance of their ignorance.  Unfortunately, if virtue is a type of knowledge, then it should be teachable, which contradicts Socrates' earlier argument that there are no teachers of virtue.  We still end in confusion, but Socrates is offering a little more positive philosophical content.  Together, I think these two dialogs give us the best and most interesting look at 'early Socrates' as a character in Plato's development (though you could easily substitute Euthyphro or Charmides for Laches since they're built on the same model).

Clitophon might reflect the first short but sweet critique of 'early Socrates'.  Socrates eloquently convinces you that virtue is important and that you don't know what it is, but he doesn't really point you in any specific direction.  You leave him almost exactly where you began -- ignorant.  He inspires an urgent question without telling you how to find the answer. 

Gorgias would then be the next step, which begins to answer the charges brought in Clitophon and brings us to the hinge I'm imaging between early and middle period Plato.  Since it's nominally about oratory, this dialog more explicitly takes up the question of philosophical style we saw alluded to in Protagoras.  It also extends the question of knowing what's good for us by introducing an appearance versus reality distinction.  The good is no longer simply the (net) pleasurable, but is something qualitatively distinct from pleasure.  'Knowledge' will then be a term reserved for finding this deeper good, one which cannot be calculated, whereas we merely have a 'knack' for finding pleasure, without fully understanding what causes something to be pleasurable.  Socrates still insists that he doesn't know what the good is, nor does he claim to teach it, but now he seems more certain that it has something to do with understanding the causes of things.  Socrates' questions always aim for this underlying understanding; he doesn't give a damn if his speeches are pleasurable or not for the audience, and people who do are just shameless flatterers.  Cue the lynch mob.  Finally, Gorgias ends with a short version of the same myth of metempsychosis that appears in Phaedo.  By now we're seeing a lot of positive philosophical content, some direct meta-reflection on the method of philosophy and how this differs from oratory, and the first glimmer of the appearance reality distinction that Plato is so famous for.  

Meno is I think the last step in this transition in several ways.  First off, it makes clear that the Socratic method has pissed off a lot of people, especially famous and powerful people who are used to being respected for how much they know.  The trial and death are even more clearly foreshadowed by Anytus' threat.  So if we read the Apology followed by Phaedo (skipping over Euthyphro and Crito as contiguous in dramatic setting but not philosophical content) right after finishing Meno, we could easily get the impression that the character 'early Socrates' has been killed off only to be reborn in substantially different form as the Socrates of Phaedo.  I mean, we've known for a while it had to happen, right?  From Plato the author's point of view, this may be an appealing way to step into his own voice while preserving what's useful about the dialog format, as well as some nominal role for his franchise superhero.  Since it's clear Plato's already started having ideas that go beyond knowing that he knows nothing, the master's death may have been foreordained by his student's development.  Naturally, I'm just goofing, and have no reason to believe that this is the order they were written in.  But they make sense that way, and if you want an order selection of early dialogs, these are the ones I would choose.  Laches, Protagoras, Clitophon, Gorgias, Meno, Apology, Phaedo.

Meno also reads as a transition point in terms of its philosophical content.  On the one hand, you could read it as another aporetic dialog where Socrates again fails to give a definition of virtue, the ultimate question in all the Socratic dialogs.  On the other hand, the question itself is starting to shift a little bit and become more concrete.  Without any preamble Meno jumps right in with its namesakes' question.

MENO: Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way? (70a)

Notice that Meno has not asked what virtue (or temperance or courage or piety or oratory or the fine) is, but whether it can be taught.  Now, Socrates will spend the first part of the dialog backing up from this question and arguing that we cannot know whether virture can be taught until we know what it is.  Meno tries to offer a quick definition to get the main conversation started, but we already know how this is going to go.  This first section reads exactly like all the early dialogs we've read and repeats the same arguments.  We cannot define virtue itself simply by talking about all the different virtues that different people have at different times of their lives.  We also cannot define virtue as simply the ability to rule justly, because while being just is a virtue, there are many other virtues like temperance and courage.  So saying that virtue is justice is like saying that shape is round; you're only giving an example, not a definition.  And if we say that virtue is the desire and ability to acquire good stuff, we also run into problems we've seen before.  The first criteria is empty -- everyone wants the things they think are good, no one actively desires the bad for themselves.  The second criteria is not specific enough -- only the ability to justly acquire good things would be a virtue.  But then we've again reduced virtue to justice, whole to part.  In which case, 

I think you must face the same question from the beginning, my dear Meno, namely, what is virtue, if every action performed with a part of virtue is virtue? (79c)

 Plato had obviously not heard of the concept of a fractal.  

As I said, we've seen all these arguments before.  In fact, this is the point where we would expect an early Socratic dialog to end.  Meno even gives a little speech about how confused he is, how Socrates has so numbed his mind that he has nothing more to say.

MENO: Socrates, before I even met you I used to hear that you are always in a state of perplexity and that you bring others to the same state, and now I think you are bewitching and beguiling me, simply putting me under a spell, so that I am quite perplexed. Indeed, if a joke is in order, you seem, in appearance and in every other way, to be like the broad torpedo fish, for it too makes anyone who comes close and touches it feel numb, and you now seem to have had that kind of effect on me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you. Yet I have made many speeches about virtue before large audiences on a thousand occasions, very good speeches as I thought, but now I cannot even say what it is. I think you are wise not to sail away from Athens to go and stay elsewhere, for if you were to behave like this as a stranger in another city, you would be driven away for practising sorcery. (80a)

Meno, however, is just getting started.  Because while Socrates still doesn't know what virtue is, he's now going to point us in the right direction of how to search for it.   Offering this more positive content is meant to overcome the objection we first saw in Clitophon, a version of which is repeated here.  Socrates has convinced us of the importance of virtue, but since he himself doesn't know what it is, how can he help us find it?  In fact, how can we ever find something if we don't know what we're looking for?  How can we ever learn something new?

SOCRATES: I know what you want to say, Meno. Do you realize what a debater's argument you are bringing up, that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for. (80e)

This problem of learning about something you don't know is inherent to Socrates central claim.  We've seen that none of the early dialogs tackle this question of what to do after you urgently realize you know nothing.  Gorgias at least brought the question to a head by distinguishing the appearance of knowing -- a knack for producing effects -- from the reality of knowledge -- understanding of causes.  So at least we know what knowledge is not.  But Meno goes a step further and proposes the idea that the only way we acquire knowledge is through recollection.  The dialog illustrates this with a simple mathematical example.  Socrates 'teaches' one of Meno's slaves how to find the length of a side of a square with twice the area of a square with a given side length.  I won't bore you with the details (draw a diagonal) because the point is not the conclusion, but the way he goes about producing it.   He merely asks the slave questions and lets him come to his own conclusions, correcting his errors only by asking him more questions to verify that what he's said actually leads him to those conclusions.  Since the guy has never studied mathematics, and Socrates teaches him nothing but merely questions him, we conclude that he can only be remembering something he knew from before he was born.  Which takes us straight to the myth of metempsychosis that we have already seen in Gorgias and which will be expanded in Phaedo.  So while we still don't know what virtue is, we now at least know that searching for it will be like remembering something our soul had forgotten before it came to inhabit this body.

Clearly, metempsychosis and the idea that learning is just remembering sound a little kooky to the modern mind.  But you have to understand these in the context of the problem that Plato has posed.  Socrates never denies the fact that there are virtuous people.  But he never finds anyone who knows about virtue well enough to teach it.  In fact, even famously virtuous men can't manage to teach it to their own sons, which also suggests that you can't simply inherit it.  Nor are people randomly born with it, because it's impossible to predict which children will grow into wise and virtuous adults.  So virtue is the knowledge of what's good for us, but we have to learn it without having a teacher and without knowing exactly what it is we're looking for.  Kooky as it sounds, recalling a virtue you've inherently forgotten solves the problem pretty well.  

[Actually though, if you strip away the mythic element, I don't think the idea of learning as recollection should seem that unpalatable to us.  Mathematicians regularly claim to be discovering things, not inventing them.  This is a substantially similar idea.  The main difference would be that the mathematician doesn't claim to have forgotten the idea but to be learning about it for the first time.  Yet these ideas are still felt to have some sort of pre-existence, if not temporally, then metaphysically.  By learning about them mathematicians are in a sense reincarnating them in their minds.  And if these mathematical ideas don't live in an abstract realm beyond human experience, then where do they live?  I'm not endorsing this as a philosophy of mathematics.  I'm merely suggesting that if we take metempsychosis to be a metaphor for how abstract entities -- like ideas or souls -- circulate through concrete entities, it feels less silly.  In fact, if we push this metaphor further and ask how ideas or souls get individuated through reincarnation and whether learning could be a type of simulation, rather than a literal repetition of the same -- questions that Plato seems to leave implicit in his myths so far -- we are already treading close Difference & Repetition.]

I see the concept of remembering as a key bridge between the initial appearance-reality distinction we find in Gorgias, and the full blown theory of Forms as it appears in Phaedo.  Knowledge of reality is something we remember.  We don't possess this knowledge and so cannot give it to anyone else in the form of a teaching.  Nevertheless, it is still within us.  Socrates' knowing he knows nothing begins to take on a different sense in this light.  It is no longer merely critical.  Instead, his admission that he knows nothing, and his questions that demonstrate no one else does either, cohere into a method for producing knowledge.  His style is exactly the prompt we need for the first stage of remembering, to remember that we have forgotten.  

Meno perfectly illustrates this new perspective on the Socratic method.  Socrates' conversation with the slave reaches an impasse when his questions lead the man to understand that a square with double the side length (his first guess) will have four times the area, and one with 1.5 times the length (his second guess) will have 2.25 times the area.  Finally, the slave sees that he doesn't know how to find a square with exactly twice the area.  This is precisely the moment Socrates has been waiting for.  

SOCRATES: You realize, Meno, what point he has reached in his recollection. At first he did not know what the basic line of the eight-foot square was; even now he does not yet know, but then he thought he knew, and answered confidently as if he did know, and he did not think himself at a loss, but now he does think himself at a loss, and as he does not know, b neither does he think he knows.
MENO: That is true.
SOCRATES: So he is now in a better position with regard to the matter he does not know?
MENO: I agree with that too.
SOCRATES: Have we done him any harm by making him perplexed and numb as the torpedo fish does?
MENO: I do not think so.
SOCRATES: Indeed, we have probably achieved something relevant to finding out how matters stand, for now, as he does not know, he would be glad to find out, whereas before he thought he could easily make many fine speeches to large audiences about the square of double size and said that it must have a base twice as long. (84a)

Socrates's numbing questions bring about our confusion.  He torpedos all the things we thought we knew and were prepared to repeat out of unthinking habit.  Now we know that we don't know, we remember that we have forgotten.  Here the question of philosophical style, its distinction from oratory or others arts that involve speaking, is given a proper ground.  We saw Socrates' preference for short questions and answers over long speeches in many of the early dialogs and it was most clearly expressed in Gorgias.  But now we have a method to the madness.  Socrates' questions are meant to interrupt our train of thought (an idea which Eric Havelock fully develops here).  They enable confusion.  In fact, Socrates even admits that part of his reason for giving us the myth of metempsychosis and the theory of learning as remembering is because it bring us to that state of confusion where we actually ask questions of ourselves, while simultaneously suggesting to us that the answers are within.

SOCRATES: Then if the truth about reality is always in our soul, the soul would be immortal so that you should always confidently try to seek out and recollect what you do not know at present—that is, what you do not recollect?
MENO: Somehow, Socrates, I think that what you say is right.
SOCRATES: I think so too, Meno. I do not insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but I would contend at all costs both in word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it. (86b)

In other words there is an immanent reason for believing that we have forgotten these transcendental ideas.  It empowers our curiosity.  And the unfolding of our curiosity is meant to lead us in the direction of these ideas.

Finally, Meno sets up the theory of Forms in Phaedo in one more way.  Where Gorgias distinguished the knack for producing pleasure from the knowledge of causes that led to being good, Meno again goes a step further.  At the very end Socrates introduces a distinction between knowledge and correct opinion.  Of course we'd like to truly know what virtue is.   But in fact, Socrates observes that as long as we happen to a correct opinion about it, we will achieve exactly the same results.  He likens it to asking for directions.  If I'm from Seattle and have been there many times, I know exactly how to get there.  However, I could also form an opinion about the best route by looking at a map or hearing someone else talk about it.  In that case I wouldn't know how to get there, but I could still give you directions that will get you there.  The image may conjure a distinction between first-hand knowledge and hearsay or inference, but this is not quite what Plato has in mind.  Opinions are not distinguished so much by a lack of direct experience as by the fact that they are variable, changeable, ephemeral.  After all, the abstract questions we're interested in aren't approachable by experience at all, direct or otherwise.  Philosophical and mathematical ideas lie outside of experience by their very nature; no one has experience with virtue itself or a perfect circle.  Knowledge of these ideas is less about a first hand subjective empiricism than about finding something which would keep us in touch with them on a permanent and ongoing basis.  In modern language we'd say that we want our beliefs to track the truth.  Socrates illustrates the distinction by referring to the statues sculpted by Daedalus, which were so lifelike that they had to be tied down lest they run off!

SOCRATES: To acquire an untied work of Daedalus is not worth much, like acquiring a runaway slave, for it does not remain, but it is worth much if tied down, for his works are very beautiful. What am I thinking of when I say this? True opinions. For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. And that, Meno, my friend, is recollection, as we previously agreed. After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down. (97e)

In other words, to know is precisely to remember that we've forgotten the reasons why we have certain opinions.  If we can recollect the causes of things, we can use these as a steadfast guide to judging actions.  These causes are like the underlying reality to which we can tie our opinions of appearances.  And they are things we can try to learn and know through recollection, but cannot be taught.   Again, it bears mentioning that these aren't the physical and empirical causes we tend to think of today, but the things which cause some act to possess virtue or courage or wisdom.  At this point we've elaborated the appearance-reality distinction in Gorgias and we're a stone's throw from the two part explanation of the theory of Forms as laid out in Phaedo.  

In this context, I think it's significant that Socrates goes on to say that maybe the only thing he really knows is that opinion and knowledge are distinct.  

SOCRATES: Indeed, I too speak as one who does not have knowledge but is guessing. However, I certainly do not think I am guessing that right opinion is a different thing from knowledge. If I claim to know anything else—and I would make that claim about few things—I would put this down as one of the things I know. (98b)

This comment is particularly interesting given the way Meno ends.  Socrates claims that correct opinion, insofar as it is correct, is just as useful as knowledge as a guide to action.  Which turns out to explain why people like statesmen can learn virtue but be unable to teach it.  They have acquired correct opinions about what is virtuous, but they don't really understand the causes of virtue.  Socrates says they are divinely inspired in this respect.  

... virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift from the gods which is not accompanied by understanding, unless there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a statesman. If there were one, he could be said to be among the living as Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, namely, that "he alone retained his wits while the others flitted about like shadows." In the same manner such a man would, as far as virtue is concerned, here also be the only true reality compared, as it were, with shadows. (100a)

With this foreshadowing of the cave allegory, I think we see the Socratic method reach its apotheosis.  It's almost as if the method of inquiry directly gives birth to the theory that would satisfy it, as if the medium were the message.  Socrates does not know what virtue is.  But he does know (and not merely opine) that correct opinion differs from knowledge.  He knows that because he can teach you to see this distinction for yourself by employing his method of inquiry.  He has even found the cause of why we do not know -- we forgot.  All our opinions try to cover over this forgetting.  Socrates can't teach us about virtue, but he can teach us to see our ignorance for what it is.   He can teach us questions but not answers.  He can make us a lover of wisdom but he cannot makes us wise.  That, we have to remember for ourselves.  Now we have a whole theory of why the Socratic method actually succeeds just exactly when Clitophon and Meno think it is failing.  Plato himself perhaps forgot this idea on his way to the cave.

Clitophon

Whether or not Plato himself wrote this one, it's fitting that Clitophon is our final early Socratic dialog.  This shortest dialog acts like a summary of what Socrates has offered us in the aporetic dialogs, and as a transition to what comes next in Plato's philosophy.  It's another unusual dialog in that Socrates barely gets to speak at all.  Clitophon is a former student of his who summarizes what Socrates has taught him by quoting one of Socrates characteristic paens to the pursuit of the virtue of one's soul above all else.  But this secondhand recitation is really all Socrates get to say.  Clitophon then goes on to criticize his former teacher, applying Socrates' own method against him and asking what exactly we should expect to get out of studying virtue.

In other words, the dialog asks the clear question of how we develop Socrates' endless inquiry into a fully formed philosophy.  Clitophon agrees that inquiring into our lives and our selves is a necessary starting point.  But he is unwilling to accept that simply posing the question again and again is enough; he wants it answered.  Instead, he uses the same analogies Socrates always favors to reveal that Socrates himself knows nothing about the virtue he is constantly extolling.  "What do we say is the skill which concerns the virtue of the soul?" (409a) he asks Socrates.  If the answer to this is justice, then what does mastering the skill of justice enable us to produce?  If we were doctors, or carpenters we could produce health and houses.  And don't say we produce the beneficial, the useful, or the appropriate (the sequence from Greater Hippias) because every skill produces those things in its own way.  We want to know what particular good justice produces that distinguishes it from other knowledge.  Friendship and harmony in the city are good candidates for an answer, but then, is justice only about producing agreement among people, even if they agree on false things or things they know nothing about?  And doesn't every discipline produce agreement amongst those who learn it?  Carpenters and doctors produce agreement on what makes houses and bodies strong because they know how those work, so what is it that the study of justice knows.  Clitophon gives up on Socrates because he can't tell us how to define virtue, and can't even concretely point us towards the next step we need to take to achieve it. 

I came to the conclusion that while you're better than anyone at turning a man towards the pursuit of virtue, one of two things must be the case: either this is all you can do, nothing more—as might happen with any other skill, for example, when someone who's not a pilot rehearses a speech in praise of the pilot's skill as being something of great worth to men; the same could also be done for any other skill. And someone might accuse you of being in the same position with justice, that your ability to praise it so well does not make you any more knowledgeable about it. (410c)

It's impossible to know definitively how to interpret this criticism, especially without knowing for sure who wrote the dialog.  Is this from an outside critic of Plato's whole oeuvre?  Or is this Plato himself as Clitophon, leveling a charge at his old master and main character?  Could it be one of the last early Socratic dialogs that Plato wrote, meant to announce a new, more positive, constructive, and definitive phase in his philosophy?  Did we already glimpse the direction this takes when we saw in Phaedo how Socrates' famous ignorance could be amplified into a more elaborate theory of Forms?  Or, on the contrary, is Clitophon (or Plato or whoever) completely missing the deepest point Scorates has to offer?  We are immersed in a world with no firm transcendent markers of the good.  All we know is that there is something more to life than cocaine and hookers, my friend.  But we don't know how to define the goal, much less find the path to it.  We are on our own with an unanswerable question.  Maybe every attempt to reach for a certain conclusion is a mistake?  

 

Menexenus

This one's a true oddball. I'm not sure what to make of it.  It's not much of a dialog at all.  There's a brief frame story exchange where Menexenus asks Socrates to recite a funeral oration for some fallen soldiers.  Socrates claims he learned a beautiful one from Aspasia, the renowned lover of Pericles.  The rest is Socrates giving the speech, which is basically just a bunch of ra-ra crap about how great and brave Athenians are and how proud one should be of dying for the patria.  

While the editorial comments suggest that the speech could be a satire, I don't see much evidence of that.  Of course, I don't know the style one should expect from a speech like this, nor the detailed history of Athenian bravery in the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars that it references.  There are plenty of other occasions where Plato's jokes are obviously funny even after 2500 years, so the hypothesis seems a stretch.  

Perhaps he's trying to convey what he considers important and essential about Athenian politics?  The speech contains two main themes.  First, Athenians are the authentic and pure Greeks and they don't mix with barbarians™.  Second, Athenians love freedom and they consider themselves the guardians of freedom for all Greeks.  But given that Kagan's course seems to indicate both would have been establishment views in Athens, it's hard to figure out why Plato would bother to put othodox platitudes in Socrates' mouth.   

So basically we just don't know dude.

Ion

Ion is a rhapsode -- a professional reciter of poetry -- who specializes in Homer.  And he's portrayed as a bit dippy.  In this short dialog, Socrates doesn't engage in argument with him so much as simply tell him what to think.  Ion claims that Homer is the greatest poet.  Stop me if you've heard this question before but ... how is it that Ion is given to know that Homer is the greatest poet?  What is a rhapsode really a master of that would enable him to make this evaluation?  

The question is inconvenient for Ion because it turns out that he knows nothing about the contents of those subjects Homer discusses in the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Ion doesn't know whether Homer's description of how to drive a chariot is a good one, or whether the home remedies he shows characters taking would actually work, or whether the fishing techniques he depicts actually catch fish.  For these questions, you would need to consult a charioteer, a doctor, and a fisherman respectively.  In fact, Ion can't come up with any particular thing that the rhapsode knows.  Even his contention that, having memorized all of Homer, he at least knows how different people should speak, founders on an argument we saw in Gorgias -- to know if someone is speaking well, you have to know something of what they are speaking about.  Finally, Ion claims that since he knows so many speeches made by generals, he knows how to be a general.  Technically, this last contention goes unrefuted by Socrates, but is clearly meant as a reductio ad absurdum type of joke.

You might say that this argument seems to miss the point.  You don't need to be an expert on whales, after all, to appreciate that Moby Dick is a great novel.  So why can't we say that Ion's expertise is not related to the contents of poems, but to their forms?  The dialog doesn't really deal well with this question.  The closest it comes to explicitly treating the form of poetry is a brief early passage where we discover that while Ion recites other poetry, most of it bores him, and he only claims to really know how great Homer is.  Socrates takes this to indicate that the rhapsode is really not a master of anything like the evaluation of the form of poetry.  Have you ever heard of the master of a subject only being able to venture an opinion on one exemplar of it?  A master painter or sculptor would know whether any painting or sculpture was valuable, not just whether Picasso's qualified.  It's a fair argument, but I think we still come away from the dialog wondering if Socrates has addressed poetry itself as an art form over and above the mere contents of a poem.  

Or perhaps the lack of focus on the form of poetry is deliberate, and is meant to allow a special place for a 'formal' understanding, one that would be orthogonal to the type of argumentative understanding Socrates calls knowledge or mastery.  In a sense, this might fit with the glimpses we've seen of Plato's later works.  Phaedo and Gorgias (and I think we'll see many if not all of the later dialogs) end with a myth.  There's no myth in Ion, but perhaps Socrates is setting the stage.  Here, he says that while Ion is not a master of any profession, he can say all sorts of interesting things about Homer because he is divinely inspired.  Given how daft Ion seems, it's hard to read this as a compliment exactly, but Socrates doesn't seem to mean it in a derogatory sense either.  Divine inspiration may not be mastery, but it's not worthless either, so long as we understand what it is and is not.  Socrates illustrates his claim with a beautiful metaphor about magnets (which come from Magnesia, it turns out).

As I said earlier, that's not a subject you've mastered—speaking well about Homer; it's a divine power that moves you, as a "Magnetic" stone moves iron rings. (That's what Euripides called it; most people call it "Heraclean.") This stone not only pulls those rings, if they're iron, it also puts power in the rings, so that they in turn can do just what the stone does—pull other rings—so that there's sometimes a very long chain of iron pieces and rings hanging from one another. And the power in all of them depends on this stone. In the same way, the Muse makes some people inspired herself, and then through those who are inspired a chain of other enthusiasts is suspended. You know, none of the epic poets, if they're good, are masters of their subject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all those beautiful poems. The same goes for lyric poets if they're good: just as the Corybantes are not in their right minds when they dance, lyric poets, too, are not in their right minds when they make those beautiful lyrics, but as soon as they sail into harmony and rhythm they are possessed by Bacchic frenzy. (533d)

Greater Hippias

... a prelude to Greater Hippias?  This is clearly the longer and more complex sequel to Lesser Hippias.  However, its authorship is apparently in doubt; Plato may or may not have written it.  The philosophical content and literary setting fit pretty seamlessly with Lesser, but the style is distinctly more arch-ironical.  Socrates blows so much smoke up Hippias' ass his eyeballs is like to float.  It reminds me, in this respect, of Alcibiades, another dialog with disputed authorship.  Both take some of the stylistic elements that are certainly present in Plato to an extreme that borders on caricature.  All of which is to say that it's a little problematic to interpret Greater Hippias as Plato providing the more compelling theory of knowledge that I thought the end of Lesser Hippias was clearly begging for.  Nevertheless, from a philosophical perspective, that's how I'd like to read it.

Since last time Socrates problematized the common sense notion that the honest man is better than the liar, this time he carries the argument backwards from where Lesser Hippias began.  If Achilles isn't better than Odysseus, then maybe the Iliad isn't finer than the Odyssey, which seems to be what Hippias contended in his presentation on Homer.  So Socrates goes to find Hippias again and ask him how to define "fine".  

The translator's have a useful note on the breadth of Greek term.  

The Greek word here translated 'fine' is kalon, a widely applicable term of highly favorable evaluation, covering our 'beautiful' (in physical, aesthetic, and moral senses), 'noble,' 'admirable', 'excellent', and the like—it is the same term translated 'beautiful' in Diotima's speech about love and its object in Symposium. What Socrates is asking for, then, is a general explanation of what feature any object, or action, or person, or accomplishment of any kind, has to have in order correctly to be characterized as highly valued or worth valuing in this broad way.

So, as usual in these early dialogues, the challenge is to define something that's a major component of, perhaps even synonymous with, the good.   And, following in the footsteps of people like Charmides, Laches, and Euthyphro, Hippias makes all the same land-war-in-Asia type mistakes in his attempt to define fine.  First he says that girls are fine, then he moves on to mares, lyres, gilded things, burying your parents, the appropriate, the useful, and the beneficial, all before giving up when his final attempt, "things pleasant to sight and hearing", proves to reduce back to beneficial pleasures.  Naturally, all the initial forays are fine things, but not the fine.  The later ones are closer to the mark, but Socrates argues that they confuse the fine itself, with what causes something to be fine.  Since we've seen a lot of this argument several times before, I won't try to go through every step, but just focus on the new distinctions that make Greater Hippias employs in deconstructing its object.

To begin with there's a stylistic innovation at work here that you'll see in all the quotes I use.  The conversation only involves Socrates and Hippias; there's no audience for this one.  But Socrates pretends that he wants to get Hippias to tell him exactly what the fine is only so that he can use the definition as a comeback to an argument he previously lost.  He tells us that someone asked him how he knew could go on about which speeches were fine and which "foul" without even being able to give a definition of fine.  This, of course, is a joke.  Socrates has asked himself this question.  Nevertheless he spends the whole dialog pretending that he's not asking the questions, but that he's only trying to get Hippias to help prepare him to answer this anonymous third party.      

In terms of content, the dialog begins by adding an interesting twist to now familiar objection that you can't define something in itself by adducing mere examples of it.  After Hippias submits girls and mares as definitions of fine, Socrates adds pots and other well made utensils.  But then he wonders what happens if we say girls are fine and well made pots are also fine.  Because which of these is the fine?

HIPPIAS: But I think that's so, Socrates. Even that utensil is fine if finely made. But on the whole that's not worth judging fine, compared to a horse and a girl and all the other fine things.
SOCRATES: Very well. Then I understand how we'll have to answer him when he asks this question, here: "Don't you know that what Heraclitus said holds good—'the finest of monkeys is foul put together with another class', and the finest of pots is foul put together with the class of girls, so says Hippias the wise." Isn't that so, Hippias?
HIPPIAS: Of course, Socrates. Your answer's right.
SOCRATES: Then listen. I'm sure of what he'll say next. "What? If you put the class of girls together with the class of gods, won't the same thing happen as happened when the class of pots was put together with that of girls? Won't the finest girl be seen to be foul? And didn't Heraclitus (whom you bring in) say the same thing too, that 'the wisest of men is seen to be a monkey compared to god in wisdom and fineness and everything else?' " Should we agree, Hippias, that the finest girl is foul compared to the class of gods? (289a)

There's a distinction between relative fine and absolute fine implied here.  If you use different and incomparable types of things in the definition of fine, you can be sure you're only getting at the relatively fine.  As soon as you step back and broaden your horizon, you discover that the things you were calling fine before have changed character and don't look so fine anymore.  In this sense "the fine" is functioning like "the finest".  Comparing types of things takes us in the direction of a superlative.

The next distinction isn't exactly new -- we saw it already in Gorgias -- but it's the first time I can recall the appearance-reality distinction coming up in one of these short Socratic dialogs.  It appears just when the conversation shifts in a more abstract direction, when Socrates and Hippias examine whether the appropriate is the same as the fine.  

But see if you think this sort of answer is fine. We had a grip on it just now when we replied that gold is fine for things it's appropriate to, but not for those it's not. And anything else is fine if this has been added to it: this, the appropriate itself—the nature of the appropriate itself. See if it turns out to be the fine." (293e)

...

SOCRATES: See here, then. What do we say about the appropriate: Is it  what makes—by coming to be present—each thing to which it is present be seen to be fine, or be fine, or neither? (294a)

Socrates doesn't include the option "both" in this definition, even though that's what Hippias immediately tries to choose.  But if what made things fine and what made it apparent to us that things are fine were identical, then there would never be any dispute or ignorance possible about the fine.  So we have to make a choice between being and seeming.

Therefore, if the appropriate is what makes things fine, it would be the fine we're looking for, but it would not be what makes things be seen to be fine. Or, if the appropriate is what makes things be seen to be fine, it wouldn't be the fine we're looking for. Because that makes things be; but by itself it could not make things be seen to be and be, nor could anything else. Let's choose whether we think the appropriate is what makes things be seen to be, or be, fine. (294e)

Continuing in the same vein, Socrates distinguishes between a neutral sort of apparent power or pure ability (the useful), and the real power to do good or provide a benefit (the beneficial).  The truly fine will not be merely appropriate in any situation, or useful for just whatever, but directly beneficial for us (even if, perhaps, this isn't apparent to us).  This is the same notion he argued for at length in Gorgias, and is exactly the sort of morally active definition that we lacked in Lesser Hippias.  

SOCRATES: Then here's what got away from us: the able-and-useful without qualification is fine. And this is what our mind wanted to say, Hippias: the useful-and-able for making some good—that is the fine. (296e)

Unfortunately, just when you think we might be getting somewhere, Socrates introduces another distinction, this time between the fine itself, and the cause of the fine.  Since he claims that the beneficial makes something good, and we hypothesize that the fine is the beneficial, then it follows that the fine makes something good, or is the cause of it being good, but is not the goodness itself, so to speak.  Succinct as it is, there's a slippery obscurity to this argument.  To say the beneficial causes the good seems a bit circular -- the beneficial was defined as "the useful and able for making some good", but we know that it's good only because we are benefited by it.  Then later this same circularity is used to distinguish cause from effect as if the two were only related linearly.  

SOCRATES: The cause is not a thing that comes to be, and the thing that comes to be is not a cause.
HIPPIAS: That's true.
SOCRATES: Good god! Then the fine is not good, nor the good fine. (297c)

So we distinguish the fine from the good as cause from effect.  Though doesn't this provide a perfect definition of exactly what we were seeking though -- the fine?   We weren't trying to define the good.  But here Socrates counts it as an objection that we've only discovered the cause of the good (not the fine).  In a way, we might think of this as a version of the circularity that implodes other Socratic dialogs, though perhaps not handled as clearly.  The good appears to be the cause of itself.  I can't quite tell whether this constitutes the fulfillment of the demand in Lesser Hippias for an active (not neutral) definition of the good, or the proof that such a definition doesn't exist.  Does possessing justice force us to be just?  Or is this just the cause of our just actions, but not the being of justice itself?

Socrates introduces one final interesting distinction that we haven't seen before.  As I mentioned before, Hippias' last attempt is to define the fine as something that "is pleasant through hearing and sight".  The qualifications are meant to exclude 'base' pleasures like eating and sex.  But then, how do we know in advance which pleasures are going to be base?  Why do seeing and hearing get a privilege here?  It turns out this final definition hasn't advanced beyond the earlier attempt made with "beneficial".  What distinguishes these pleasures is that they are good for us.  In and of itself, this final argument might not deserve comment.  But in pursuing it, Socrates distinguishes what we might call continuous from discrete qualities.  

The issues arises because it seems natural that we want to characterize something that visual and auditory pleasures have in common.  In other words, we want both types of pleasure to share a characteristic that each of them also has.  You might think of this as the definition of "in common".  But Socrates points out that there are certain qualities that both together could have even if each individually did not possess that quality (and vice versa -- qualities that each individually possesses, but not both together).   For example, oneness.  A pleasure through sight could be one, and a pleasure through hearing also one.  But a pleasure through sight and hearing would be two.  Twoness, naturally, works the opposite way.  Socrates uses this distinction to refute Hippias' claim that all qualities are continuous, in the sense that they can be added together and divided without changing nature.  Some, it turns out are discrete -- individuated properties, rather than properties of individuals, if you like.  Socrates wonders aloud whether the fine belongs to the former or latter category, before agreeing it's the former, and dropping the issue.  We might wonder instead why they only discussed the conjunction "and", without inquiring into "or".  Couldn't we just say that something is fine if the pleasure it produces comes through sight or hearing?  I think the omission is explained by the fact that this definition wouldn't give us the -- one and only -- fine, but two distinct types of fine.  As we've seen, this just leaves us at the level of examples and the merely relative fine.

So, as usual, the dialog ends without a satisfactory definition of "the fine".  Hippias insists that Socrates is wasting his time with these with all these little distinctions.  But Socrates literally can't get the questions he asks himself out of his head.

You all say what you just said, that I am spending my time on things that are silly and small and worthless. But when I'm convinced by you and say what you say, that it's much the most excellent thing to be able to present a speech well and finely, and get things done in court or any other gathering, I hear every insult from that man (among others around here) who has always been refuting me. He happens to be a close relative of mine, and he lives in the same house. So when I go home to my own place and he hears me saying those things, he asks if I'm not ashamed that I dare discuss fine activities when I've been so plainly refuted about the fine, and it's clear I don't even know at all what that is itself! "Look," he'll say. "How will you know whose speech—or any other action—is finely presented or not, when you are ignorant of the fine? And when you're in a state like that, do you think it's any better for you to live than die?" (304d)

Lesser Hippias

This is a short and not very interesting dialogue that we can cover pretty quickly.  Socrates catches the famous sophist and know-it-all Hippias just after he has given a presentation on Homer.  It seems, to foreshadow the conversation in Greater Hippias, that Hippias was discussing how the Iliad is a finer poem than the Odyssey.  Socrates, has heard this argument before,  based in that case on the difference between the heroes of the two poems.

Indeed, Eudicus, there are some things in what Hippias said just now about Homer that I'd like to hear more about. For your father Apemantus used to say that the Iliad of Homer is a finer poem than the Odyssey, to just the extent that Achilles is a better man than Odysseus; for, he said, one of these poems is about Odysseus and the other about Achilles. (363b)

So he asks Hippias about why Achilles, portrayed as honest and strong, is better than Odysseseus, who is seen as a wily distorter of the truth.  Surely, 'everybody knows' that it's better to be honest than to lie, so obviously Achilles is the superior hero?  But if there's one thing that Socrates does, it's question exactly what 'everybody knows'.  

He points out that in order to lie effectively, a man like Odysseus must know the truth pretty intimately.  Odysseus doesn't lie by accident, but on purpose.  Which means that he could tell the truth, but chooses not too in some cases.  Whereas Achilles, who always tries to tell the truth, may involuntarily make mistakes.  So it seems like Odysseus actually has more power or ability than Achilles.  Achilles is limited to the truth, where Odysseus can tell the truth, but he can also do so much more.  Most of the dialog consists of Socrates forcing Hippias to agree to this position by analogy -- the faster runner could go slow, the better archer can more reliably miss the target, the mathematician who knows the true answer is in a better position to propound a false one, etc ...  This all culminates, as usual, in the question of justice.  

   SOCRATES: And if it's both? Then isn't the soul which has both—knowledge and power—more just, and the more ignorant more unjust? Isn't that necessarily so?
   HIPPIAS: It appears so.
   SOCRATES: This more powerful and wiser soul was seen to be better
and to have more power to do both fine and shameful in everything it accomplishes?
   HIPPIAS: Yes.
   SOCRATES: Whenever it accomplishes shameful results, then, it does so voluntarily, by power and craft, and these things appear to be attributes of justice, either both or one of them.
   HIPPIAS: So it seems.
   SOCRATES: And to do injustice is to do bad, whereas to refrain from injustice is to do something fine.
   HIPPIAS: Yes.
   SOCRATES: So the more powerful and better soul, when it does injustice, will do injustice voluntarily, and the worthless soul involuntarily? (376a)

...

SOCRATES: So the one who voluntarily misses the mark and does what is shameful and unjust, Hippias—that is, if there is such a person—would be no other than the good man. (376b)

 

To our modern ears filled with Christian notions of reward and punishment for acts of our free will, this argument may seem to completely miss the point.  Fine, we might say, someone who could do wrong is technically more powerful than someone incapable of it.  But truth and justice don't really lie just in what we are capable of, but in what we freely choose to do.  

Freedom, I notice at this point, is not discussed a whole lot in Plato, at least so far.  Instead, it's becoming clear that he is searching for a more compelling idea of knowledge or power.  For example, like the definition of power Socrates argues for in Gorgias -- power is the power to do good, the ability to do yourself harm isn't real power at all.  Likewise, he's not really looking for some objective knowledge of the just, at least if we take the term to refer to some neutral description of what it is, that we could choose to look at or ignore, depending on our interests.  He's searching for a notion of justice that has immediate moral consequences, so that to see the just is to do the just, without the need for some intervening choice.  Knowing true justice makes you just, which makes injustice purely a matter of ignorance.  

Lesser Hippias is perhaps designed to illustrate the confusion that happens if we don't insist on this kind of definition.  In the end, even Socrates cannot bring himself to believe the paradoxical conclusions he has argued for.  Which suggests it is meant to function as a sort of prelude ...