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)