Alcibiades and the Socratic Lover-Educator by Tarrant Harold. Johnson Marguerite & Harold Tarrant

Author:Tarrant, Harold.,Johnson, Marguerite & Harold Tarrant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

III. Development in Plato’s account of virtue

As we have already noted, one of the most striking assertions to be found in Plato’s early dialogues is the assertion of the unity of virtue, or more specifically, the claim that all the parts of virtue are to be understood as forms of knowledge. In connection with this assertion we find in the early dialogues the intellectualist idea that what it is to be brave or temperate or just is simply the possession of a certain kind of knowledge. There are no emotional or non-cognitive elements in virtue. In the Charmides, for example, it is suggested that temperance is ‘doing one’s own’ (161b6) and this is then interpreted as ‘knowing oneself’ (164e7). In the Laches an initial non-cognitive account of courage is rejected in favour of one that describes it as ‘wise endurance’ (192d) and ‘knowledge of the proper objects of fear and confidence’ (199d-e). As Irwin has remarked (1995, 40), in neither the Charmides nor the Laches does anyone dispute the identification of courage or temperance with ‘some kind of knowledge’.

It is not until the Protagoras, however, that the unity of virtue thesis is explicitly stated and defended. Of particular interest for our purposes is the discussion near the end of the dialogue, where Protagoras admits that four of the virtues (justice, piety, wisdom and temperance) seem to be pretty much the same, but courage and wisdom are distinct. He says:

My view is that all these are parts of virtue, and that four of them resemble each other fairly closely, but courage is very different from all the rest. The proof of what I say is that you can find many men who are quite unjust, unholy, intemperate, and ignorant, yet outstandingly courageous. (349d-e, tr. Guthrie)

It is tempting to think that Protagoras’ resistance on this point shows that courage is the most difficult of the cardinal virtues to fit into the unity thesis. Nevertheless, Socrates denies Protagoras’ claim and spends the rest of the dialogue providing a sophisticated argument to show how all the parts of virtue, including courage, are knowledge of the same kind, namely knowledge of the measure of pleasure and pain.

If courage was the last and most difficult virtue to assimilate with the others, in the middle dialogues it is soon separated from them. In the Republic Socrates explicitly distinguishes the soul into parts and treats separate virtues as related in different ways to different parts of the soul. Wisdom is specifically associated with the rational part. Courage is specifically associated with the spirited part, and temperance is specifically associated with the appetitive part. Justice turns out to be a result of a specific relation and specific action of each of the parts. In Irwin’s view, the Republic ‘presents a sharp and radical criticism’ of the intellectualism of the early dialogues, for now ‘elementary moral education … is intended to fix the right non-cognitive responses in people… The pleasures and pains of young people are to be formed so that they go in the direction reason will approve when it comes along’ (Irwin 1995, 223; cf.

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