Laches and Charmides by Plato

Author:Plato [Sprague, Rosamond Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62466-078-8
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 1992-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Charmides

Introduction

Although the Charmides, with its inquiry into the nature of a single virtue, temperance, has obvious affinities with the Laches and with other early dialogues, the complexities of its latter pages bear more resemblance to the aridities of the Theaetetus and Parmenides than to dialogues of the early group. Nevertheless, the main theme, the connection between virtue and knowledge, is the same as that of the Laches. And, as courage in the Laches tended to remove itself from what I call the first-order level of the various arts and techniques such as flute playing or medicine, so temperance in the Charmides does the same thing. Plato has come to realize that to state this point more decisively is also to state it more subtly. By associating virtue with knowledge he has involved himself in the mechanics of the term “knowledge” as well as in the question of defining the various virtues. “Knowledge” (or “science”) is in fact a tinos-word. To use it is to raise the question “knowledge of what?” On the first-order level, the answer to this is easy—medicine is knowledge of health, and cobbling, of shoes. But it always remains possible for these techniques to be misused, or, to put it another way, efficiency is not always goodness. How is Plato, with his concern for good government, to assure that the first-order arts are regularly employed for good ends? His answer is basically simple: by having them ruled over by a second-order art that is in itself an art of goodness. (Later, in the Republic, he will express the same thought by stipulating that in the good state the philosopher shall be king.) But his way of presenting this answer is not simple. True to the Socratic procedure, he forces the reader to reach the solution himself. So he hammers away at the analogy of the art of temperance (a science of sciences, the knowledge of good and evil) with the first-order arts, in the hope that by so doing he will demonstrate both its likeness to them (both are “of” something) and its difference from them (temperance is a second-order art ruling over arts of the first order). Plato has no desire to make a total separation between the two kinds of art. Not only will there always be a close relationship between ruler and ruled, but he still cherishes the notion that somehow there should be teachers of good and evil in the same way that there are teachers of cobbling and carpentry. When Socrates went about Athens looking for someone wiser than himself, he admired the craftsmen most (Apology 22D). The method of teaching first and second-order arts cannot be the same (we can see this by imagining a University course in first-year Goodness), but he clings to the notion that any form of genuine knowledge must be teachable. If we think again of his preoccupation with good government (which is really the problem of producing good men), we can see that for him the problem becomes acute.

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