Chronos, Psuche and Logos in Plato's Euthydemus

CHRONOS, PSUCHĒ AND LOGOS IN PLATO’S EUTHYDEMUSAndy German

Ben Gurion University

That Plato invested great effort in distinguishing philosophy and

Socrates from sophistry and the sophists is, by now, a truth

universally acknowledged. It is another, and altogether more difficult

task, to understand Plato’s precise assessment of the significance of

sophistry and what finally separates it from philosophy. My goal is to

show how the Euthydemus sheds some unexpected light on this question.

It would be false, though, to claim that this dialogue exhibits

the whole phenomenon of sophistry. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are

eristic masters and hence rhetoricians of a distinct kind. But the

Socrates of this dialogue, too, is distinctive in his behavior, more

fawning groupie than scourge. For example, rather than protect

Cleinias and Crito, he actively tries to make them join him as pupils

of the brothers (for good measure, he encourages Crito to bring his

sons along as bait (272d2-3, 304b4–5).1 Cleinias is indeed the object

of two Socratic exhortations to virtue, but apart from the acute

question of whether, upon closer analysis, these are actually

convincing to anyone not already committed to philosophy,2 Socrates

seems to go out of his way to muddy the waters. He expresses his

desire to master eristic (295d5, 301e1–2) and shows he can imitate the

brothers at will (296e4, 301b1–2). Socrates never attacks them, nor

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Ben Gurion Universitydoes he lift a finger when they make a hash out of philosophical

teachings associated with him, such as anamnēsis or the “Beautiful

Itself”.

Now, even if Socrates’s irony is for the reader’s benefit and was

intended to go right over the heads of his interlocutors, this leaves

us with the question of why Plato has him act so that those he is

supposed to be educating and protecting do not get the joke. In fact,

the only person in the dialogue who launches an unambiguous attack on

eristic is the anonymous auditor (perhaps Isocrates) whom Crito

mentions near the end of the dialogue (305a2–4), who lambasts

Socrates’s “shameful” behavior in submitting himself to such

scandalous men. Socrates, however, does not agree with this critique. It

has, he says, more of seemliness (euprepeian) about it than truth

(305e5–306a1; a most interesting rebuttal, since the focus on seeming

at the expense of being was part of the sophistic stock-in-trade. Yet,

Socrates applies it not to the sophists themselves, but to the attack

on them in the name of traditional Athenian virtue).3 Socrates leaves

untouched Crito’s assumption that the brothers are engaged in

philosophy (304e6-7) and makes no effort to help him clarify what

distinguishes the worthy (chrēstoi) philosophers from the corrupted

(ponēroi) sort (307b7-8).4

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Ben Gurion UniversityOur hermeneutical predicament, then, is as follows: we have here

a Socrates who behaves sophistically to those who do not know how to

distinguish philosophy from sophistry but is insufficiently

philosophical for readers who think they do. To say the least, the

Euthydemus stands at a certain, idiosyncratic angle to the phenomenon of

sophistry.

Now, the mechanics of fallacious argument in the Euthydemus have

been subjected to exhaustive analyses (by Julia Annas and Thomas

Chance, for example), so I do not propose to repeat them. In addition,

it is a well-established scholarly consensus that the Euthydemus is an

anti-sophistic polemic. But the Euthydemus is so truly odd (and in so

many ways), that a fuller grasp of what is at stake in it requires a

temporary suspension of our anti-sophistic ire and of the consensus

omnium according to which the dialogue is an exposé of linguistic

legerdemain and its pernicious effects.5 It is surely also those

things, but I want to suggest that the Euthydemus is best seen as a kind

of diagnosis. The patient, however, is not eristic and not even

primarily sophistry. It is the soul. In other words, sophistry and

eristic are symptoms. Their decisive importance lies in what they

reveal about the relationship between chronos, logos and psuchē. That is, in

reflecting on the sophists, Plato is reflecting on what, we are

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Ben Gurion Universityrepeatedly assured, the Greeks were not yet able to make explicit –

the ambiguous nature of our interiority.

I. ARETĒ and ERISTIKĒ

Practically the first words out of Euthydemus’ mouth are:

“Virtue, Socrates . . . we believe that the pair of us can impart it

to human beings most beautifully and quickly” (273d8–9). The claim to

teach virtue was the most famous and dramatic sophistic boast, so it

is natural to find it, in some form or another, at the heart of any

dialogue where sophistry is a topic. Nevertheless, it is somewhat less

obvious what it is doing in the Euthydemus. Despite Socrates’s repeated

entreaties, the brothers make no pretense of actually exhorting anyone

to virtue, which is not even central to most of their arguments. For

that matter, Socrates also departs radically from standard operating

procedure. Faced with the brothers’ conceit, he does not bother to

1Euthy. 301a1-6. All translations from Greek are my own, though I have consulted therecent translation of the dialogue in Joe Sachs, Socrates and the Sophists: Plato’s Protagoras,Euthydemus, Hippias Major and Cratylus. (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2011). The editionof Plato used throughout is John Burnet, Platonis Opera, 5 vols. (Oxford: The ClarendonPress, 1900-1907), except for references to the Republic, which follow R.S. Slings,Platonis Rempublicam (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2003). Unless preceded by titleabbreviations, all Stephanus pages are in the Euthydemus.2 These ambiguities are thoroughly exposed and analyzed in David Roochnik, “The SeriousPlay of Plato’s Euthydemus,” Interpretation 18, no. 2 (1990–1991): 211–32. See especially 213, 220, 226–230.3 Cf. Meno, 91c1-5.4 For a very insightful study of the role of Crito in the Euthydemus, often with conclusions different from my own, see S. Montgomery Ewegen, “Comic Turns in Plato’s Euthydemus,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 19, 1 (Fall 2014): 15-32. 5 A.E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1960), 75. Taylor correctlysees that neither here, nor in the Cratylus, “is the professed main purpose directlyethical….”

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Ben Gurion Universityseek an agreed-upon definition of virtue or knowledge (as he did in

the Meno), nor does he pause to ask for proof that it really is

teachable (as in the Protagoras). He simply accepts that the brothers

possess the art of teaching virtue as a kind of godsend (hermaion)

(273e2).6 Socrates does give two examples of the kind of protreptic he

seeks, but each time the brothers as much as sail right past him, so

that no direct confrontation over education or virtue ever occurs.

We might argue that the confrontation is the contrast between the

brothers’ galling buffoonery and Socrates’s true dialectic, a contrast

that sets the latter in the best possible light. But this is

unconvincing, even apart from the question of whether the dialogues

make it possible to know in sufficient detail what Plato meant by

dialectic. At 290c5, young Cleinias gives a highly promising

definition of dialectic as the art that knows how to “use” ta onta, but

Socrates does not elaborate on it in any detail. In fact, an

opportunity arises to display dialectic in actu when Dionysodorus makes a

mockery out of Socrates’s statement that beautiful things (kala

pragmata) differ from the beautiful, though there is a “certain beauty

present in each of them.” Dionysodorus follows up with: “So if a cow

comes into your presence, you’re a cow. . .and because I am present6 Cf. Chrm. 157b7. In both cases, finding a godsend releases us from the work ofseeking its ti estin. Socrates, like Critias in the Charmides, is interested not in theessence of something, but only in its effects.

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Ben Gurion Universitywith you now, you’re Dionysodorus?” (301a5-6). This is precisely the

kind of “barbaric bog” from which, according to the Republic, only

dialectic can save us.7 Socrates could have paused to show how

dialectic, grasping the logon hekastou ousias, the logos of the being of

each thing (R, 534b3–4), leads to correct discernment and

conceptualization of the way different beings—empirical or noetic—can

be “present.” In the Euthydemus, however, we are left to lie where we

fall.8

It is clear from the outset that this was not meant to be a

standard sophistic epideixis. While everyone present urges the brothers

to display “the power of their wisdom” (274d3), Socrates qualifies

this: they are to put off the “fullest display” (274d6–7) and answer

his more limited question. Is their purported technē—the ability to

make someone good—efficacious only for someone already convinced that

virtue is teachable or can it also persuade the as-yet unconvinced?

Subsequent to this, Socrates narrows the scope further: he does not

ask the brothers to give an account of how they do this but only to

display its efficacy with regard to a specific person, Cleinias

(275a5). What exactly has happened here?

7 Resp. 533d1.8 Cf. 295e1–2: Socrates says Euthydemus knows, altogether more beautifully than hedoes, how to engage in dialectic.

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Ben Gurion UniversityIn one sense, Socrates is simply drawing out an implication of

the brothers’ own claim to teach aretē. Teaching implies persuading,

since an education to virtue must make certain ends become normative

for a student, when they were not before. That is, the claim to teach

virtue implies a whole series of claims to knowledge about moral

psychology—the sources of and obstacles to moral motivation. It

implies knowledge of the soul: what its mode of being is so that

things can appear to it, and what the means are for altering these

appearances. In focusing on the protreptic element of the brothers’

“wisdom,” Socrates is interested in that knowledge.9

In addition, just as Aristotle reminds us that no doctor cures

man in general, but rather “this Socrates” or “this Callias”, no one

has ever persuaded human nature.10 One persuades a particular person,

with a particular character and motivational structure, having a

particular history of opinions. The ability to teach virtue is a kind

of empeireia: a tailoring of speech to a particular soul. Socrates also

remarks that that the two brothers have arrived “eis kalliston,” with

beautiful timing (275b4), thus noting another critical aspect of

protreptikē—the kairos, or opportune moment. One must know when to

9 Thomas Chance sees the significance of what is happening here. Thomas Chance, Plato’sEuthydemus: An Analysis of What is and Is Not Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press,1992), 25–26.

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Ben Gurion Universitypersuade.11 Cleinias, for example, may only now have arrived at that

delicate age where he is old enough to listen to reason but not yet so

corrupted or set in his ways as to be beyond instruction. If the

brothers can teach and persuade, we ought to witness their knack for

identifying correctly the particularities of personality and

opportunity.12

It is therefore a massive hermeneutical error to move directly to

argumentative analyses without noticing how the opening exchange has

placed those arguments into a double frame: the brothers are making a

display of their eristic logoi, but the dialogue is not merely a

regurgitation of logoi. It places them within a broader thematic

context, the guiding question of which is: “How is a certain art of

logos related to a soul of a particular kind and at a particular point

in time?”

II. CHRONOS

10 Arist. Metaph. I, 981a18–20. 11 Diogenes Laertius mentions that Protagoras was the first to discuss the importanceof seizing the kairos (kairou dunamin exetheto) in Vitae Philosophorum, ed. M. Marcovich(Stuttgart: Teubner, 1999), 9.52. Cf. with Dionysius Halicarnassensis, De CompositioneVerborum, 12, 68, 12–15 in Opusculua II, vol 6. Edited by H. Usener and L. Radermacher.Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997, and cf. Leg. 968d4–e2.12 In fact, however, the brothers seem almost entirely oblivious to kairos. It is Socrates, as Marina McCoy notes, who “relies more upon phronēsis and kairos than technē.” See Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 14-15.

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Ben Gurion UniversityI want to approach the first salient characteristic of the

Euthydemus by way of the Theaetetus. In the “digression” passage of that

dialogue, Socrates distinguishes philosophers by the leisurely pace in

which they exchange logoi with one another in their search for tou ontos.

Unlike the litigator, the philosopher does not speak under the

pressure of the water-clock.13 The Euthydemus, by contrast, is

distinctive in its unmistakable emphasis on speed. After Euthydemus has

refuted Cleinias’s first answer and “before the young boy had a chance

to well and truly catch his breath” (276c2), Dionysodorus steps in to

lay a new trap. He is at it again at 277b3, with Euthydemus having

hardly finished his second refutation. Euthydemus returns the favor at

277d1, “rushing in” to throw the young man for another fall, just as

Socrates intervenes to enforce a time-out. The drill repeats itself at

297b2 when Dionysodorus “quickly (tachu) interrupts” an argument to

rescue Euthydemus from falling into self-refutation and at 298e6 where

he quickly interrupts so “that Ctesippus would have no chance to say

anything.”14 The brothers switch gears and positions with breathtaking

rapidity in order to prevent their interlocutors from catching their

breath, from noticing fatal logical slips, from being able to see

where an argument is leading. Indeed, whole stretches of the dialogue

read as if fired from a logical machine gun.15 Now, in the Sophistici Elenchi

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Ben Gurion UniversityAristotle does note the importance of speed in the mechanics of

refutation, and there is no doubt a great deal of that at work here.

Nevertheless, speed has a significance in the Euthydemus that goes

beyond tripping up a victim within any given argumentative chain. This

significance becomes explicit in an exchange between Socrates and

Dionysodorus at 286b7ff.

Just prior to this passage, Dionysodorus had forced young

Ctesippus, Cleinias’ chief admirer, to admit that contradiction

(antilegein) is impossible. Socrates wants to understand this Protagorean

argument (286c7) and in doing so, he links it to Euthydemus’ earlier,

basically Eleatic, demonstration that speaking falsehood is impossible

since all “saying” says something that is, and hence no one can say

what is not.16 He makes Dionysodorus agree that if falsehood is

impossible, then so is opining falsely (pseudē doxazein). But then, it is

certainly impossible for anyone to do wrong or act incorrectly (oud’

examartanein estin) either, since deliberate action is articulate action;

that is, it issues from judgments about how things stand. Socrates

then asks:

13 Theae. 172d4–9.14 See 276c2, 277b3, 277d1, 297b2 and 298e6. 15 See especially 297d6-300d2. On sophistry and speed see Jacqueline De Romilly, TheGreat Sophists in Periclean Athens, trans. Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 35, 44and especially Arist. Soph. el., I, 14, 174a17-20.16 283e7-284c6.

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Ben Gurion UniversityIf we can’t miss the mark (mē hamartanomen) when we act or speakor think, then before Zeus…what is it that you have come here asteachers of? Weren’t you just now (arti) claiming you could impartvirtue most beautifully to any human being who’s willing tolearn?17

This is something of a turning point in the dialogue. Up to this

point, Socrates had been primarily an enabler or bystander of the

conversation (with the exception of his protreptic exchange with

Cleinias). This is his first direct confrontation with eristic method,

and it elicits the following rebuke from Dionysodorus:

Socrates, are you such a Kronos that now (nun) you’rerecollecting (anamimnēiskēi) what we said at first (to prōton), andif there’s something I said last year (perusin) are you going torecollect that now (nun), while you have no clue how to cope withthe things being said at the present moment (en tōi paronti)?18

Socrates’ question embodies two assumptions: First, that the

entire conversation with the brothers is a unity constituted by the

overriding purpose established at its beginning – namely, to observe

how the brothers make good on their claim to persuade Cleinias to

philosophize and care for virtue.19 The second assumption has to do

with how Socrates understands the present and what it means to be “in”

the present. For him recollecting prior arguments is inseparable from

understanding where the interlocutors are “now”; that is, recollective

access to the past is constitutive of the present. While for

17 287a6-b1. I largely follow Sachs’ rendering here, with slight modifications.18 287b2-5.

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Ben Gurion UniversityDionysodorus, too, recollection is necessarily “about the past,”20 it

is his understanding of the present that is radically different. He

reveals something of it by tarring Socrates with the epithet “Kronos”,

the Titan who reigned before his son Zeus but who “now”, in the

present Olympian age, is “history” (in the American sense of that

word):21 i.e. Socrates is a relic, “finished”. As we will see, there is

a direct confrontation here between two approaches to the relationship

between time and logos.22 These approaches can be examined in the

brothers’ first eristic set piece (beginning at 275d), which turns on

two questions: (i) “Who are those who learn? The wise or the

ignorant?” and (ii) “Do those who learn, learn what they know, or what

they don’t know?”23

Euthydemus builds his refutation of Cleinias’ first answer (=the

wise learn) around the central premise that teachers teach something

they already know to students who learn what they don’t yet know

(276a8), from which it follows that the ignorant learn, not the wise.

19 275a6: peisaton hōs chrē philosophein kai aretēs epimeleisthai.20 See 286a1-2.21 See Hawtrey’s note to 287b3 in R.S.W. Hawtrey, Commentary on Plato’s Euthydemus(Philadelphia: American Philosophy Society, 1981), 114. This same insult, with itsimplication that linguistic rectitude and piety are signs that someone is just plain“out of it,” was used in the Clouds by Socrates against Strepsiades (when the latterrefused to believe the naturalistic explanation of Zeus’ thunderbolt) and by theUnjust against the Just logos. See Ar. Nub., esp. lines 398, 905 and 929. Chance, Plato’sEuthydemus, 247, n. 64. “…Plato is considering time and its relevance to discourse.” 22 A point seen clearly by Ewegen, “Comic Turns,” 18.23 275d2–277c7.

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Ben Gurion UniversityIn answering the second question, Cleinias no doubt assumed that since

Euthydemus had been concerned to establish that the ignorant learn,

then this same Euthydemus must also be committed to the claim that

they learn something unknown. But now Euthydemus executes a quick volte

face by means of the example of being literate and learning dictation.

Someone who learns dictation must already know the letters that make

up the words dictated, which entails that he learns what he already

knows, not what he doesn’t.24 I leave aside all other considerations

about equivocations on the meaning of manthanein and fallacies a dicto

secundum to point out the obvious: The conclusion of Euthydemus’ second

refutation directly contradicts the central premise of his first.25

For the brothers, these contradictions serve no pedagogic

purpose. They are merely trigger-switches for the next refutation.

There could have been a different, pedagogic, use for them, however,

which swims into view if we remember that this, after all, was

supposed to be the first step in convincing Cleinias to philosophize.26

Namely, pointing out such contradictions and thinking them through

could have done for Cleinias what Socrates did for Glaucon in Republic

VII with his example of the three fingers: contradictory logoi, like

24 276e9-277b1.25 The pattern repeats itself at 277c7, where Dionysodorus refutes his earlierconclusion at 276c7. 26 See Sprague’s brief comment on this in Rosamund Kent Sprague, “Plato’s Sophistry,” inProceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volumes) vol. 51 (1977): 53.

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Ben Gurion Universitycontradictory sense-perceptions, awaken the intellectual faculties of

the soul to investigate, distinguish, count.27 Showing Cleinias that

the everyday concept of manthanein is indistinct or even self-

contradictory and that he must properly distinguish its elements,

would force him to use logos as the medium for such discrimination. In

the Theaetetus, for example, logos is that by which the soul “by itself”

goes through “before itself”, whatever it is examining, asking and

answering in order to conclude with a doxa.28

Such pedagogy requires that several senses of coherence be in

play. First, the basic units of meaning, the onomata, must cohere

semantically into statements, by which the soul converses with itself.

The statements must then cohere into an account. In order to enable

true judgment, however, that account must “cohere” with the

intelligible structure of the phenomena themselves, in the following

sense: the account of learning, for example, must be such that

Cleinias can understand it, compare it with his own experience, and

then say, “Yes, now I see it,” or “No, that’s not it at all,” etc. In

other words, the logos of thinking “coheres” into true judgment by

becoming diaphanous to the phenomena: it must be what the Eleatic

27 Carl Levenson, Socrates Among the Corybantes: Being, Reality and the Gods (Woodstock, Conn.:Spring Publications, 1999), 62-63 sees the connection between these passages. Cf.Soph. 259b-d.28 Theae. 189e6-190a5: logon hon autē pros autēn hē psuchē diexerchetai peri hōn an skopēi.

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Ben Gurion UniversityStranger in the Statesman calls a delōsis tōn ontōn logōi, a revealing of

things in speech.29

Now, what must hold for this to be possible? Minimally, Cleinias

must be able to move back and forth between thought determinations,

articulate them, compare them, revise judgments, etc. Therefore, while

we can measure time as a pure flow of indistinguishable chronological

points, the explanatory power of logos and the act of apprehension

through which we understand an explanation depend on a very different

kind of temporal experience, one in which the present has a distinct

structure and priority. It is in the present that we take our

experience up into a unity, by interpreting the significance of the

recollected past or the anticipated future. Ordinary clock time,30 for

which the “now” is just another point on an continuum, cannot make any

sense of the fundamental characteristic of the present, the fact that

it is not like a point or moment at all, but more like an interpretive

dimension having what Bergson called “durée” and Heidegger “Spanne”.31

Let us call it the articulated present. We cannot escape the

29 Plt. 287a3-4. The visual metaphor for explaining the role of logos is a powerful tropein Plato. Cf. the famous passage at Phd. 99e4-6 where Socrates flees into logoi to“look” in them (en ekeinois skopein) for the truth of beings.30 Heidegger calls this die Öffentliche Zeit. This “ordinary” (vulgäre) time-concept, which isultimately manifest in the use of clocks as “now-time” (Jetzt-Zeit), represents a kind ofabstraction or levelling off (Nivellierung) of the deeper phenomenon of temporality. SeeMartin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), 405, and 412-422.31 See the second chapter of Henri Bergson, An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness,trans. by F.L. Pogson. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1950), 75-139, esp. 107-108 and 125-129. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 409.

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Ben Gurion Universitydistinctiveness of the present by seeing it as some number of

chronological points taken together. We would then need enumerate which

points count as the present and we could only do so by appealing again

to the phenomenological characteristics which give the present its

dimensional and interpretive character. Hence, the brothers’ claims

about virtue, while much “earlier” than the current argument, are

nevertheless part of the same “now” which Socrates assumes as the

basis for his question to Dionysodorus.

If, for example, someone walks up to the crowd around Socrates

and Cleinias at line 277c7, just as Euthydemus has delivered his coup de

grace, and asks, “What’s going on here?” we could respond, “Cleinias has

just been refuted in claiming that one learns what one knows.” But

this answer is obviously stilted and incomplete. A more complete

answer would begin with, “We’re trying to understand what it means to

learn,” or “These men are showing us how to convince someone to care

for virtue,” and then place the refutation of Cleinias in that

context. That is, a phenomenologically satisfying account of what we

are doing “now” defines it by purposes in light of which we weave the

past and future together in a coherent, experiential web.

On the one hand, then, the soul’s temporality seems indissolubly

linked to logos. We express our temporal consciousness in speech

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Ben Gurion University(silent or audible) and the very character of logos as a delōsis depends

on the purposive, hermeneutical and “extended” character of the

“articulated” present. And yet, what the brothers produce is an

unlimited continuum of logoi through which we are meant to pass as if

they really are discrete and unconnected points. The arguments of the

Euthydemus almost never cohere into anything; they merely accumulate.

They thus reveal the polymorphous character of logos and its ambiguous

relationship to temporality: As the entos tēs psuchēs pros autēn dialogos, the

soul’s “interior dialogue with itself”,32 logos is that through which

psuchē makes articulate its sense of its own unity and of the unity of

its temporal experience. We have seen, however, that logos, is

susceptible to a radical abstraction from that same temporality.33

Stated differently, the soul can efface its intimate, temporal

character in the very medium in which it expresses it. To understand

the significance of this, we must examine those passages where psuchē

itself moves to center stage, something that occurs each time Socrates

replaces Cleinias or Ctesippus as the brothers’ primary interlocutor.

III. PSUCHE

32 Soph. 263e4. Logos is the entos tēs psychēs pros autēn dialogos.33 Hence the brothers, whose professional expertise ought to be kairos, are in factlargely oblivious to it. See McCoy, Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists, 101 and 152. Cf. Phdr.271b-272b.

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Ben Gurion UniversityAt 301e1, while reacting to one of Dionysodorus’ more absurd

eristic “proofs”, Socrates wonders aloud whether wisdom such as this

could ever be his very own (oikeia). Seizing upon oikeia, Dionysodorus asks

whether Socrates actually believes that he could recognize his own

things (ta sautou). Clearly, this echoes the Delphic Gnōthi Sautōn, which

Socrates described in the Phaedrus as his most pressing task.34 In

Dionysodorus’ argument, however, psuchē is just a lure. Socrates is

made to admit that he has gods, that because the gods are animate

(i.e. “have souls”) they are animals, and that what makes an animal

“one’s own” is one’s unlimited right of disposition over it, including

selling, giving away, sacrificing it, etc. Ergo, Socrates can sell or

sacrifice his ancestral Zeus just like his other “animals”. In this

passage, the soul appears exclusively as the principle of life:

possessing a soul (psuchē echein) is what makes something an animal

(zoōn).35 It is, of course, a great question how to relate this

animating power to the soul’s perceptive and cognitive functions, but

here those functions entirely disappear from view.

By contrast, when cognition becomes the theme, it is the soul’s

animative powers which become incomprehensible. At 287c1ff, just after

Dionysodorus had mocked Socrates as a Kronos, Socrates presses on:

34 Phdr. 229e5ff. 35 302a8, e1.

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Ben Gurion University“Well, tell me, what other sense (ti soi alloi noei) can this phrase have for

you…?” This time, Dionysodorus pounces on the verb (noein):

DIO: Is it by having soul (psuchēn echonta) that things which havesense sense (noei ta noounta), or also without souls?SOC: Things with souls.DIO: Do you think there is any phrase (rhēma) that has soul

(psuchēn echon)?SOC: By Zeus, I certainly don’t!DIO: Then why did you ask me just now what sense my phrase had

for me?36

The logical trick is hard to miss. An equivocation on the meaning

of noein against the background of the colloquial meaning of psuchēn

echein as “being alive”, yields the result that since phrases are

obviously not alive, they cannot perceive or “sense” and so, in

Dionysodorus’ verkehrte Welt, they can’t “have” sense either.37

This, however, elides a problem of considerable philosophical

import, one that is visible in the everyday phenomenon of speaking

about perceptions, desires, intentions or understanding. All of these

are activities of those “having souls”. In speaking, we transpose the

contents of these activities into vocal units, semantic vehicles for

conveying meaning from the soul of the speaker to the soul of the

listener.38 The listener then reverses the vector, reaching behind the

36 287d7-e1. The phrase “noun echein”, which Dionysodorus is manipulating here, can be taken in two ways: either “to have (or make) sense” (i.e. to mean something) or to “perceive” or “intend”.37 In his note to 287d7ff, on p. 115, Hawtrey writes, “This sophism needs no particulardiscussion, and it cannot have fooled anyone.” Hawtrey does not pause to ask why,then, Plato bothered with it at all.

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Ben Gurion Universityvocal units to the speaker’s intended meaning.39 In an important way,

then, a phrase “has sense” only because a whole range of cognitive and

animative powers are embodied in and instigated by its production and

comprehension. That is, articulate speech is possible only because the

soul is a unity-within-difference of its powers. Dionysodorus’

conclusion that phrases cannot “have soul” holds only because he

ignores that unity. Looked at from a deeper perspective, a “living

phrase”, what, in the Phaedrus, is called a logon zōnta kai empsuchon, is the

highest possibility of speech.40

It is only during Socrates’ long exchange with Euthydemus (293b1-

296d5) that psuchē as a whole forces its way into the center of concern.

After his second protreptic conversation with Cleinias failed to

identify the knowledge that guarantees happiness, Socrates ups the

ante. No longer content for the brothers merely to convince someone to

care for virtue, he now asks them to display the knowledge that is

virtue.41 To this, Euthydemus responds with two sophisms. First, if

Socrates knows something, he is knowledgeable and so cannot also be

38 Cf. Alc I. 130e2-6.39 Now clearly, a phrase may do this imperfectly; it may lead to a misunderstanding. But this does not change the main point, since misunderstanding is only visible against a background of understanding.40 Phdr. 276a8. See the contrast between spoken and written speech in Alcidamas. Soph.27-28:“…The speech spoken from the heart on the spur of the moment has a soul in it(empsuchos esti) and is alive (zē)…” in Alcidamas, The Works and Fragments, ed. with anIntroduction by J.V. Muir (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001).41 293b4-6.

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Ben Gurion University“not knowledgeable” without violating the principle of non-

contradiction.42 This quite bypasses Socrates’ question, but in an

interesting way: Socrates had asked for the specific knowledge that

allows one to live beautifully. Euthydemus answers that he must

already have this knowledge since he knows everything anyway.

Significantly, he makes no effort to distinguish, from among all the

things Socrates knows, which one is the key to virtue.

In responding to Socrates’ incredulity, Dionysodorus states the

principle underlying all this: “Everyone…knows everything,” he says,

“if [he knows] one [thing] (pantes….panta epistantai, eiper kai hen).”43

Dionysodorus is describing a nexus of intelligibility that echoes

Socrates’ own in the recollection myth of the Meno, but with a crucial

difference. While Dionysodorus claims that knowledge of one thing is,

right now, knowledge of all, Socrates had claimed that because “all

nature is akin (sungenous) and the soul has learned everything” someone

who recollects one thing alone (hen monon) can discover (aneurein) all

others.44 Euthydemus, then, asserts a web of intelligible relations but

is silent about the particular relata, while Dionysodorus presents that

same kosmos noētos but elides the temporal conditions under which beings

like us can possibly stand in relation to it.

42 293c8-d1: kai houtōs tunchaneis ōn autos houtos hos ei, kai au palin ouk ei, kata tauta hama.43 294a10. 44 Men. 81c9-d3.

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Ben Gurion UniversityAt 295b2-296d4 Euthydemus intends, by similar means, to convince

Socrates that he knows everything already, beginning this time from

the knowing subject, rather than the known object. Socrates is made to

confess that he is knowledgeable “by means of that by which he has

knowledge” (and not by something else). Next, he must agree that he

“always” knows by this means, and by it alone, all the things he

knows. Note how Euthydemus takes excruciating pains to suppress all

qualifications about what the epistemic instrument is, what it can know

and when, thus yielding the following result: by some means, Socrates

knows all things always; and if he knows all things (hapanta) he must

know everything (panta).

Socrates, by contrast, keeps inserting qualifiers that drag the

conversation from the general to the particular and highlight the

soul.45 When asked if he is knowledgeable “by means of that (toutōi) by

which he knows”,46 Socrates twice identifies the “by means of” as

psuchē, a word Euthydemus absolutely refuses to countenance. When asked

if he knows “always by the same means”, Socrates qualifies “always”

with “whenever I know…”47 When asked whether, in always knowing, he

knows some things “by this means” and some “by another means”,45 See Rosamund Kent Sprague, Plato’s Use of Fallacy: A Study of the Euthydemus and Some Other Dialogues(London: Routledge, 1962), 23 and 24. The argument, as she puts it, goes through “moreor less over Socrates’ dead body.”46 At 295b4 and e5. Hermann Keulen, Untersuchungen zu Platons Euthydem (Wiesbaden:Harassowitz, 197), 48 on why toutōi here must remain empty and undetermined. 47 296a7 - aei, hotan epistamai.

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Ben Gurion UniversitySocrates drives Euthydemus to distraction with: “By this means, all, at

least those things which I know”.48 Euthydemus, in a revealing fit of pique,

condemns all of these qualifiers as illegitimate “extras”

(paraphthegmata). What are we to make of this entire exchange?

As regards eristic technique, the problem is obvious and Socrates

notes it: his penchant for making distinctions was gumming up the

works of Euthydemus’ plan to trap him in words (295d1-2). But why

should the soul present an special problem for Euthydemus? Surely

because the soul’s mode of being scandalizes the basic Eleatic

undergirding of so much of the brothers’ display. On the one hand, the

soul is a power of particularization. It can perceive, feel, imagine

and know a seemingly limitless multiplicity of determinate things at

different times. And yet, no one of these moments exhausts its nature,

since the soul retains a unity throughout each moment of its activity.

It is, as Aristotle says, ta onta pōs panta - “all things, somehow,”49 though

nous is also “nothing” except when thinking. In the brothers’ hands,

logos loses the ability articulate this problematic “somehow”. It

becomes a tool for obscuring the problem altogether.50

48 296b5. My translation here is deliberately literal. Chance, 151 calls thisqualification a hilarious joke on the sophist that illuminates an essential ingredientin the argument. See Hawtrey, 153 on the force of ge and J.D. Denniston, The Greek Particles(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1966), 114ff on its restrictive and intensive uses. 49 Arist. De an., 431b21: hē psuchē ta onta pōs esti panta.50 See the perceptive comment by Chance, 143: “…we can conclude that this flight behindrules is just another eristical dodge employed ad hoc in order to avoid that awfulword soul , which causes dread and anger in all eristics.”

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Ben Gurion UniversityThere is, then, a serious reason why Socrates is so enamored with

the brothers’ patently ridiculous antics and why Plato so carefully

notes the massive impact they have on all those present (including

even the pillars of the Lyceum, which are in an uproar (ethorubēsan) of

pleasure at 303b6, a description unparalleled in the dialogues). The

brothers’ eristic art, and the reactions of their auditors, manifest a

fundamental psychic possibility: in perverting the relation of logos to

psuchē and chronos, eristic achieves a kind of self-obfuscation in which

the soul abstracts from its own unity-within-difference. The brothers

thus force the question: What is the soul such that this self-

obfuscation is possible for it? What are the psychic roots of

“sophistry” (in the derogatory sense of that word)?

Certainly, the brothers are unwilling (or unable) to discuss

these roots, but Socrates does hint at them twice. At 288b8-c1,

Socrates likens the brothers to Proteus, the polymorphous sea-god of

the Odyssey.51 Later, he compares them to the hundred-headed Hydra, a

“she-sophist” (sophistria) who, “if anyone cuts of one head of her logos,

has the wisdom to send up many in place of the one.”52 What do these

descriptions imply? Here, for example, is one interpretation, by

Thomas Chance:

51 Od. IV, 384-570.52 297c1-4.

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Ben Gurion University…Plato has here juxtaposed the incongruous acts of clawing andarguing, of chopping off the heads of a she-demon and refutingthe fallacious arguments of paradox vendors, in order to portrayeristic as a violent, sophistic intrusion into speech that eruptsfrom the subterranean swamps to pollute…our philosophicdiscourse.53

But what, or rather where, is this “swamp” from which the Hydra

“erupts” or “intrudes”? Chance’s language makes it seem as if

sophistry barrels into the soul from outside like an airborne virus,

but this makes no sense. If speech is the internal dialogue of the

soul, and sophistry is a possibility inherent to speech, then it

cannot be an “intrusion”. It is an inflection of our psychic nature.

Perhaps, we might make more progress by remembering the Hydra’s

genealogy: she is the daughter of Typhon, the monster in reference to

which Socrates framed the problem of self-knowledge in a justly famous

passage of the Phaedrus:

I am not yet able to “know myself,” according to the Delphicinscription, and it seems laughable to me to look into otherthings when I am still ignorant about myself...whether I happento be some sort of beast more tangled (poluplokōteron) and morefilled with desire (epitethumenon) than the Typhon or a gentler andsimpler creature, having a share by nature of the divine and un-Typhonic.”54

The Typhon is an unnatural combination of man, beast and bird,

hundred-headed and capable of speaking in many voices, sometimes in the

sounds of animals and sometimes in languages understood by the gods.55

53 Chance, 157.54 Phdr. 229e5-230a6.

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Ben Gurion UniversityIt is the very distillation of hubris, uprooting mountains, destroying

cities, even attacking Olympus and putting the gods to flight.

At first glance, it must seem utterly incredible that a creature

like this can shed any light on self-knowledge. Nevertheless, I think

we can make some sense of it. First, let us note that the soul

Socrates describes later, in the charioteer image, is not tame and

simple at all, but complex and full of desire.56 Indeed, it is an

unnatural combination of elements both natural (man, horses, wings)

and artificial (reins and a whip). The soul is ambiguous, then. If

anything, it is closer to the Typhonic end of the scale than to any

natural simplicity,57 an ambiguity which Plato highlighted elsewhere as

well. In the Symposium for example, eros is protean and somewhat

dubious: wise and ignorant, rich and poor, alive one day, dead the

next, “a magician, a druggist and a sophist.”58

Stated succinctly, the soul is exceedingly elusive because it

both is and is not each of its powers and manifestations.

Incidentally, we cannot bypass this problem by invoking the Republic’s

55 Hes. Theog. 825-35 and Apollod. Bibliotheca. 1, vi. 3.56 As pointed out by Charles Griswold in his extremely thorough analysis of the Typhonimage. See Charles Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (University Park, PA: PennState Press, 1986), 36-44. 57 Cf. Resp. 588c4. Leg. 892c5 and the Athenian Stranger’s profoundly ambiguousdescription of the soul as diapherontōs physei, which could be rendered as “especially” or“pre-eminently” natural, but also as “surpassingly” natural, which suggests a sense inwhich it is above or different from nature. 58 Symp. 203d8.

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Ben Gurion Universitydoctrine of tri-partition. The problem is not to understand that the

soul has parts, but what constitutes their unity. Indeed, throughout the

dialogues epithumia, thumos, phronēsis, dianoia and nous taken singly are

easier to discern than the way in which they form a whole, if they in

fact do at all.

The eidos of psuchē, then, to the extent we can even speak of such

a thing, is plasticity, and in its complexity and potential for

antinomian hybris the soul has a Typhonic aspect as well.59 It can

speak in many voices or assume many shapes and one of these is the

Hydra of sophistry. Sophistry thus has two roots. One is analyzed in

the Sophist: the inseparability of non-Being (qua thateron) from the

ontological structure of Being and hence of any being, allows the

sophist to create false images. The very ontological structure of Being,

in other words, makes possible the image-original relationship, and

hence the possibility of false images which appear to be, but are not,

their originals. The second root is in the soul, which partakes of both

determinacy and indeterminacy. Or – the possibility of sophistry is

rooted in the fact that we grasp determinacy and weave the unity of

59 Resp. 572b4-6: a savage and lawless (anomon) desire resides in everyone, even themost moderate. On “psychic excess” and “plasticity” and the soul’s relation to naturesee the very perceptive study by Sara Brill, Plato on the Limits of Human Life (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 2013), esp. 13, and 192-208.

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Ben Gurion Universityour experience and character in time by means of the soul, itself a

multifarious and indeterminate being.

I remarked earlier that the Statesman speaks of logos as a delōsis, a

revealing of beings. As the context there makes clear, the Stranger is

describing the task or goal of logos. That logos should strive to reveal

the intelligible structure of the beings implies a gap, a distance

between logos and on, and hence the possibility that logos can fail to

so reveal.60 Just as the telos of logos is to reveal beings, though it

often does not, the soul is only imperfectly suited to the task of

seeing what is revealed. The cognitive perfection of the soul is to be

transparent in the highest degree to the intelligibility of the

phenomena. For Plato, however, it is only partially so, not least

because it is far from entirely transparent to itself.

Only thus can one grasp the full significance of strange

juxtaposition we noted earlier, of the question of virtue with two

eristic masters who are so obviously and completely unconcerned with

it.61 It is certainly true that eristic is presented here as a shallow

imitation of dialectic, a display that can affect but not educate. Why

can it not educate, however? I submit it is because paideia, in the60 See, for example, the Seventh Letter (which I accept as authentic) where Platoremarks on the weakness (astheneia) of logos. Ep. VII, 343a1–2.61 Charles Kahn refers to eristic as “the very lowest form of sophistic argumentation.”See Charles Kahn, “Some Puzzles in the Euthydemus,” in Plato: Euthydemus, Lysis, Charmides. Proceedings of the V Symposium Platonicum, ed. Thomas Robinson and Luc Brisson, 88-97 (Sankt Augustin, Academia Verlag, 2000), 88.

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Ben Gurion UniversityPlatonic sense, is formation, in at least two senses. In one sense, of

course, all education requires imposing some form, qua limit or

measure, on the desires of the soul (hence the musical education of

guardians in the kallipolis). In another sense, to educate the soul means

to train it to exercise its native power for eliciting form from within

the multiplicity of experience, to make form visible to itself. We

must, for example, come to understand that the desires of the soul,

when properly understood, all exhibit an impetus toward the one Good.

We must learn to see the correct measure within the continuum of

pleasure. And we must be made to see the formal unity, the hen ti eidos

that underlies our ordinary existence as “lovers of sights and

sounds.” Both these senses, however, require that we first look the

soul’s formlessness squarely in the face. This the brothers refuse to

do, a fact which explains the mixture of seriousness and sheer opera

buffa in the Euthydemus, a mixture which is finally, deeply Platonic.62

It is like a vaudeville act in which the Protean or Hydra-like

character of the soul is constantly parading across the stage while

the brothers try to pretend it is not there. 63

62 According to Ep. VI 323d2, play (paidia) and seriousness (spoudē) are sisters.63 Cf. De Romilly, 187, where she notes that the Socratic problematic of the internalharmony of the soul is “outside and beyond the thinking of the Sophists.” And also,Diog. Laert. IX, 51, on Protagoras’ statement that the soul is “nothing apart from thesenses”.

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Ben Gurion UniversityIn fact, it is both surprising and significant that the stars of

this act are two sophists. A distinctive feature of the sophistic

moment of Greek spirit had been precisely its new emphasis on the

individual and on praxis.64 For example, while there is a venerable

debate about the precise meaning of Protagoras’ homo mensura, one thing

about it must surely be clear: Protagoras reverses the direction of

the search for the grounds of judgment. The course must now be set

inward, toward the psychic functions by which we take the measure of the

world and not toward an intelligible reality that transcends and

guides the activities of measure-taking.65 Yet, in the Euthydemus two

sophists with an unmistakable Protagorean tincture are made to

resemble sailors that have sighted a whole spiritual continent, but

lack the courage to actually disembark and explore it.66 This conveys

us directly to what, I think, is the deepest stratum of Plato’s

engagement with sophistry. For him, sophistic “humanism” may have been

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Ben Gurion Universitycarried through very superficially by the sophists themselves, but

this does not detract from its massive philosophical implications. On

the contrary, it falls to the philosopher to follow Protagoras inward,

and go beyond him, to uncover the origins of sophistic speech in the

soul’s very mode of being.67

64 Quod vide Protagoras’ promises to Hippocrates in his eponymous dialogue. Prot. 318a6-9and 318d5-319a2.65 That Plato saw this as perhaps the most significant implication of the homo mensurais clear, I believe, from a passage like Theaetetus 166dff where Protagoras likens thesophist to a physician who can transform the soul through speeches. Things appear tous based on the hexis of the soul. If the hexis be altered, so too will the doxa. SeeTht. 166d5-167b2 and Cf. Gorgias, In Helenam Laudatio, 14, where logoi are compared to a drugthat can shape the soul of the listener. Gorgias (Leontini), Reden, Fragmente undTestimonien, ed. Thomas Buchheim (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1989).66 There may be two allusions to Protagoras’ treatise, Alētheia, hē Kataballontes, in theEuthydemus at 286c5 and 288a4. Cf. de Romilly, 43 and 99 on Plato’s philosophy as aresponse to Protagoras. For Plato, this condemnation may be true more for variousepigones than for Protagoras himself. And cf. H.G. Gadamer, “Dialectic and Sophism inPlato’s Seventh Letter,” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. withan Introduction by P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 116.67 Samuel Scolnicov, Euthydemus: Ethics and Language, Lecturae Platonis 8, ed. MaurizioMigliori (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2013), 32: “In insisting on the pragmaticcontext, Plato is more Protagorean than they.” [the sophists – A.G.] Cf. McCoy, Plato onthe Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophist, 87 on how the sophists are inconsistent not only intheir arguments, but with themselves as human beings, and Gadamer, “Dialectic andSophism”, 122 on the philosophical necessity to separate philosophy from the sophism“within itself”.

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Ben Gurion University

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Ben Gurion UniversityEndnotes

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Chronos, Psuche and Logos in Plato's Euthydemus

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