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In those early dialogues, that still, for the moment, we are confining ourselves to,
one thing what Socrates keeps saying is that he has no positive doctrine on his own to teach, ...
that all he is doing is asking people questions.
There seems to me something disingeneous about this claim of Socrates:
I think that, in fact, there are certain and acknowledge doctrines laying under the surface of these dialogues. Would you agree with that?
Well, there are some doctrines that emerge, not very many.
There is a group od ideas, which comes out in the Apology, for instance,
when he says that to a good man no harm can come either during his life or after his death;
and which comes down in the Gorgias when he argues at great length that injustice harms the doer and justice benefits the doer.
It's the idea that there is no real harm that can come to you
if you lose your money, striken by, paralyzed by disease.
None of that really counts as harm. Only the loss of your virtue would count as,
only going into that practices like injustice they would be the only real harm,
cause the only real harm is harm of the soul.
There's a group of ideas which he's very emphatic about
when he sometimes even claims to have knowledge
and it's also a group of ideas where Plato never reneges on Socrates.
He remains convinced of the truth of the propositions that injustice harms the doer and justice benefits him.
And it's provided your soul remains untouched. Worldly misfortunes don't do you any harm of really deep significance
- That's right. - Yes
There's another group of ideas where Socrates does not claim knowledge
and where Plato eventually is going to renege on Socrates
And that's the group of ideas summed up in the statment that virtue is knowledge.
In these dialogues, when somebody's asked "What's courage?", "What's friendship?", "What's justice?",
sooner or later the discussion proceeds, the idea emerges that this virtue,
courage or piety, should be regarded as a kind of knowledge.
And that's just as strong and paradoxical statement as the first group of ideas
because common sense -and I mean common sense then as now- ordinarily stated that
it's one thing to have the wisdom to know what the best thing to do in a given situation is,
but another thing which you also need the courage to carry it out if it's difficult,
or the temperance to resist any zero option instead.
Wisdom is one virtue, one quality to admire in a person, courage is another,
and a man may have one and not the other, or each of them to different degrees.
But if courage just is this knowledge then that kind of contrast can't arise.
If I don't do the right thing it can't be that I knew what I should do but lack the courage to carry it out.
I just, if I lack the courage, I lack the knowledge and I didn't know what the right thing to do was.
So, any wrong doing that I do is done in ignorance because I didn't know it wasn't the best thing to do.
And if it's done in ignorance, it's done involuntary.
So "no one does wrong willingly" is the famous way, summed up.
Doesn't the unvarying dialogue form that Plato writes in gives rise to two rather important and also, really, unnecessary problems?
First, to what extent is this the historical Socrates whose views are being put before us?
And to what extent is he a kind of fictional character created by Plato?
Because, after all, all these dialogues were written after Socrates's death.
And the other question, perhaps related to that, is, what are the author's own views?
Because again, since these are all dialogues, it means that all opinions are put into the mouths of other characters
and that sometimes, at least, leaves us feeling that we're not quite sure what Plato, himself, actually thinks.
Well I think there's a sense in which we need to worry about this question and a sense in which we don't.
The sense in which we don't, is that Plato's portrait of Socrates makes the claim:
here is a man who thought for himself and would overthrow long-cherished conclusions
if it turned out he thought they were wrong, and he taught others to do the same.
So, if Plato comes to think that there is more to virtue than knowledge,
the knowledge remains the most important factor, -and he does come to think this -
then it's only inkeeping with the Socratic spirit to throw over the doctrine that virtue is knowledge
and produce a better view of his own.
The other side of the coin is, of course, it's most important that we notice
what's happening when Socrates in the Republic says something incompatible
with what Socrates said in the Protagoras.
Notice that we're getting a new view and how it connects with all the other concerns of the Republic,
and how it makes a much more complicated picture of moral education
and how it makes possible a new vision of a political idea of society.
The important thing is the search and the inquiry,
but it's got to be inquiry, search with understanding of where we got to from where.
Yes, in other words, because our assumptions and beliefs, and so on, are open to perpetual questioning,
conclusions is in quotation marks don't have any special status.
They are themselves staging posts on the road to further inquiry.
That's, I think, what Plato believed very strongly, yes.
So, in a way demonstrating to us by his practice.
That's, and I think he would claim, that was, what it was to keep the Socratic spirit alive.
Yeah, perpetual questioning. It's usual, isn't it?, to divide Plato's output into three periods.
It happens so often with writers and even creative artists -the early, the middle and the later-
and so far in this discussion we've been confining ourselves to consideration of the early dialogues.
When you move to the middle period Plato dialogues,
you find Plato for the first time beginning to put forward positive ideas of his own,
not Socrates's but Plato's own ideas and to argue for those ideas.
Which would you say are the most important of Plato's positive doctrines?
I think one has to single out two above all: The Theory of Forms,
and the doctrine that learning is recollection, the idea that to learn something is to recover
from within your mind recesses of knowledge that you had before you were born.
Let me take that one. First ... of the two.
I think lot of people would think when they first hear this
that they are born knowing things that might sound a bit bizarre.
But, at least, very closely related ideas to that have been permanent in our Western culture.
I mean, idealist philosophers have thought that there was innate knowledge or innate ideas.
Most of the religions, I think, believe something of the sort
and we have had eminent contemporary thinkers like Chomsky
believing that you are born with the whole grammar programmed into your mind.
And what was Plato's version of this belief?
Plato's versión was that this knowledge was part of the essential nature of the soul,
which the soul possessed before you were born,
obviously he believes of this period in the soul existing before it's embodied in this world.
And I think that to understand this theory, one has to go back to those early Socratic discussions
If you look at one this early discussions, somebody is asked for a definition,
of let's say courage, and Laches who is the personage asked that, says at one point courage is endurance.
Socrates then asks him some further questions, as he always does when he has been given a definition.
He says, 'Is courage invariably a fine and admirable quality?'
'Yes,' says Laches.
Ahd then Sócrates takes him through a number of examples of endurance
where endurance is not admirable at all, maybe very foolhardy
Pig-headedness,
Pig-headedness, or it may just be morally neutral as when a financier keeps on spending money,
enduring the losses because he knows he's going to get a profit in the end.
So, if endurance is morally neutral or bad, courage isn't, courage is always good,
then courage can't be endurance. That's a typical pattern of Socratic discussion.
Logically, all that has actually happened is that Laches has been shown that his beliefs are inconsistent.
If we take all his answers together, they can't all be right because they contradict each other.
But Socrates always presents the situation as one in which that definition, courage as endurance, as being refuted.
So, that he is in practice taking Laches' secondary answers as either true or somehow nearer the truth than the definition
and hence available as a basis for refuting the definition and saying that's the one that's got to go.
Can I just stop you there cause I think you've said something is of great importance to us all today.
I think we all tend to have this assumption that by discussion we can get at the truth.
Whereas almost by definition discussion can't necessarily do that,
all it can show, the most that it can show you that your conclusions are consonant with your premises.
And, of course, if there's something wrong with the premises then there's something wrong with the conclusion.