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?