retorted by Ctesippus, to the great delight of Cleinias, who is rebuked by
Socrates for laughing at such solemn and beautiful things.
'But are there any beautiful things? And if there are such, are they the
same or not the same as absolute beauty?' Socrates replies that they are
not the same, but each of them has some beauty present with it. 'And are
you an ox because you have an ox present with you?' After a few more
amphiboliae, in which Socrates, like Ctesippus, in self-defence borrows the
weapons of the brothers, they both confess that the two heroes are
invincible; and the scene concludes with a grand chorus of shouting and
laughing, and a panegyrical oration from Socrates:--
First, he praises the indifference of Dionysodorus and Euthydemus to public
opinion; for most persons would rather be refuted by such arguments than
use them in the refutation of others. Secondly, he remarks upon their
impartiality; for they stop their own mouths, as well as those of other
people. Thirdly, he notes their liberality, which makes them give away
their secret to all the world: they should be more reserved, and let no
one be present at this exhibition who does not pay them a handsome fee; or
better still they might practise on one another only. He concludes with a
respectful request that they will receive him and Cleinias among their
disciples.
Crito tells Socrates that he has heard one of the audience criticise
severely this wisdom,--not sparing Socrates himself for countenancing such
an exhibition. Socrates asks what manner of man was this censorious
critic. 'Not an orator, but a great composer of speeches.' Socrates
understands that he is an amphibious animal, half philosopher, half
politician; one of a class who have the highest opinion of themselves and a
spite against philosophers, whom they imagine to be their rivals. They are
a class who are very likely to get mauled by Euthydemus and his friends,
and have a great notion of their own wisdom; for they imagine themselves to
have all the advantages and none of the drawbacks both of politics and of
philosophy. They do not understand the principles of combination, and
hence are ignorant that the union of two good things which have different
ends produces a compound inferior to either of them taken separately.
Crito is anxious about the education of his children, one of whom is
growing up. The description of Dionysodorus and Euthydemus suggests to him
the reflection that the professors of education are strange beings.
Socrates consoles him with the remark that the good in all professions are
few, and recommends that 'he and his house' should continue to serve
philosophy, and not mind about its professors.
...
There is a stage in the history of philosophy in which the old is dying
out, and the new has not yet come into full life. Great philosophies like
the Eleatic or Heraclitean, which have enlarged the boundaries of the human
mind, begin to pass away in words. They subsist only as forms which have
rooted themselves in language--as troublesome elements of thought which
cannot be either used or explained away. The same absoluteness which was
once attributed to abstractions is now attached to the words which are the
signs of them. The philosophy which in the first and second generation was
a great and inspiring effort of reflection, in the third becomes
sophistical, verbal, eristic.
It is this stage of philosophy which Plato satirises in the Euthydemus.
The fallacies which are noted by him appear trifling to us now, but they
were not trifling in the age before logic, in the decline of the earlier
Greek philosophies, at a time when language was first beginning to perplex
human thought. Besides he is caricaturing them; they probably received
more subtle forms at the hands of those who seriously maintained them.
They are patent to us in Plato, and we are inclined to wonder how any one
could ever have been deceived by them; but we must remember also that there
was a time when the human mind was only with great difficulty disentangled
from such fallacies.
To appreciate fully the drift of the Euthydemus, we should imagine a mental
state in which not individuals only, but whole schools during more than one
generation, were animated by the desire to exclude the conception of rest,
and therefore the very word 'this' (Theaet.) from language; in which the
ideas of space, time, matter, motion, were proved to be contradictory and
imaginary; in which the nature of qualitative change was a puzzle, and even
differences of degree, when applied to abstract notions, were not
understood; in which there was no analysis of grammar, and mere puns or
plays of words received serious attention; in which contradiction itself
was denied, and, on the one hand, every predicate was affirmed to be true
of every subject, and on the other, it was held that no predicate was true
of any subject, and that nothing was, or was known, or could be spoken.
Let us imagine disputes carried on with religious earnestness and more than
scholastic subtlety, in which the catchwords of philosophy are completely
detached from their context. (Compare Theaet.) To such disputes the
humour, whether of Plato in the ancient, or of Pope and Swift in the modern
world, is the natural enemy. Nor must we forget that in modern times also
there is no fallacy so gross, no trick of language so transparent, no
abstraction so barren and unmeaning, no form of thought so contradictory to
experience, which has not been found to satisfy the minds of philosophical
enquirers at a certain stage, or when regarded from a certain point of view
only. The peculiarity of the fallacies of our own age is that we live
within them, and are therefore generally unconscious of them.
Aristotle has analysed several of the same fallacies in his book 'De
Sophisticis Elenchis,' which Plato, with equal command of their true
nature, has preferred to bring to the test of ridicule. At first we are
only struck with the broad humour of this 'reductio ad absurdum:' gradually
we perceive that some important questions begin to emerge. Here, as
everywhere else, Plato is making war against the philosophers who put words
in the place of things, who tear arguments to tatters, who deny
predication, and thus make knowledge impossible, to whom ideas and objects
of sense have no fixedness, but are in a state of perpetual oscillation and
transition. Two great truths seem to be indirectly taught through these
fallacies: (1) The uncertainty of language, which allows the same words to
be used in different meanings, or with different degrees of meaning: (2)
The necessary limitation or relative nature of all phenomena. Plato is
aware that his own doctrine of ideas, as well as the Eleatic Being and Not-
being, alike admit of being regarded as verbal fallacies. The sophism
advanced in the Meno, 'that you cannot enquire either into what you know or
do not know,' is lightly touched upon at the commencement of the Dialogue;
the thesis of Protagoras, that everything is true to him to whom it seems
to be true, is satirized. In contrast with these fallacies is maintained
the Socratic doctrine that happiness is gained by knowledge. The
grammatical puzzles with which the Dialogue concludes probably contain
allusions to tricks of language which may have been practised by the
disciples of Prodicus or Antisthenes. They would have had more point, if
we were acquainted with the writings against which Plato's humour is
directed. Most of the jests appear to have a serious meaning; but we have
lost the clue to some of them, and cannot determine whether, as in the
Cratylus, Plato has or has not mixed up purely unmeaning fun with his
satire.
The two discourses of Socrates may be contrasted in several respects with
the exhibition of the Sophists: (1) In their perfect relevancy to the
subject of discussion, whereas the Sophistical discourses are wholly
irrelevant: (2) In their enquiring sympathetic tone, which encourages the
youth, instead of 'knocking him down,' after the manner of the two
Sophists: (3) In the absence of any definite conclusion--for while
Socrates and the youth are agreed that philosophy is to be studied, they
are not able to arrive at any certain result about the art which is to
teach it. This is a question which will hereafter be answered in the
Republic; as the conception of the kingly art is more fully developed in
the Politicus, and the caricature of rhetoric in the Gorgias.
The characters of the Dialogue are easily intelligible. There is Socrates
once more in the character of an old man; and his equal in years, Crito,
the father of Critobulus, like Lysimachus in the Laches, his fellow
demesman (Apol.), to whom the scene is narrated, and who once or twice
interrupts with a remark after the manner of the interlocutor in the
Phaedo, and adds his commentary at the end; Socrates makes a playful
allusion to his money-getting habits. There is the youth Cleinias, the
grandson of Alcibiades, who may be compared with Lysis, Charmides,
Menexenus, and other ingenuous youths out of whose mouths Socrates draws
his own lessons, and to whom he always seems to stand in a kindly and
sympathetic relation. Crito will not believe that Socrates has not
improved or perhaps invented the answers of Cleinias (compare Phaedrus).
The name of the grandson of Alcibiades, who is described as long dead,
(Greek), and who died at the age of forty-four, in the year 404 B.C.,
suggests not only that the intended scene of the Euthydemus could not have
been earlier than 404, but that as a fact this Dialogue could not have been
composed before 390 at the soonest. Ctesippus, who is the lover of
Cleinias, has been already introduced to us in the Lysis, and seems there
too to deserve the character which is here given him, of a somewhat
uproarious young man. But the chief study of all is the picture of the two
brothers, who are unapproachable in their effrontery, equally careless of
what they say to others and of what is said to them, and never at a loss.
They are 'Arcades ambo et cantare pares et respondere parati.' Some
superior degree of wit or subtlety is attributed to Euthydemus, who sees
the trap in which Socrates catches Dionysodorus.
The epilogue or conclusion of the Dialogue has been criticised as
inconsistent with the general scheme. Such a criticism is like similar
criticisms on Shakespeare, and proceeds upon a narrow notion of the variety
which the Dialogue, like the drama, seems to admit. Plato in the abundance
of his dramatic power has chosen to write a play upon a play, just as he
often gives us an argument within an argument. At the same time he takes
the opportunity of assailing another class of persons who are as alien from
the spirit of philosophy as Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. The Eclectic, the
Syncretist, the Doctrinaire, have been apt to have a bad name both in
ancient and modern times. The persons whom Plato ridicules in the epilogue
to the Euthydemus are of this class. They occupy a border-ground between
philosophy and politics; they keep out of the dangers of politics, and at
the same time use philosophy as a means of serving their own interests.
Plato quaintly describes them as making two good things, philosophy and
politics, a little worse by perverting the objects of both. Men like
Antiphon or Lysias would be types of the class. Out of a regard to the
respectabilities of life, they are disposed to censure the interest which
Socrates takes in the exhibition of the two brothers. They do not
understand, any more than Crito, that he is pursuing his vocation of
detecting the follies of mankind, which he finds 'not unpleasant.'
(Compare Apol.)
Education is the common subject of all Plato's earlier Dialogues. The
concluding remark of Crito, that he has a difficulty in educating his two
sons, and the advice of Socrates to him that he should not give up
philosophy because he has no faith in philosophers, seems to be a
preparation for the more peremptory declaration of the Meno that 'Virtue
cannot be taught because there are no teachers.'
The reasons for placing the Euthydemus early in the series are: (1) the
similarity in plan and style to the Protagoras, Charmides, and Lysis;--the
relation of Socrates to the Sophists is still that of humorous antagonism,
not, as in the later Dialogues of Plato, of embittered hatred; and the
places and persons have a considerable family likeness; (2) the Euthydemus
belongs to the Socratic period in which Socrates is represented as willing
to learn, but unable to teach; and in the spirit of Xenophon's Memorabilia,
philosophy is defined as 'the knowledge which will make us happy;' (3) we
seem to have passed the stage arrived at in the Protagoras, for Socrates is
no longer discussing whether virtue can be taught--from this question he is
relieved by the ingenuous declaration of the youth Cleinias; and (4) not
yet to have reached the point at which he asserts 'that there are no
teachers.' Such grounds are precarious, as arguments from style and plan
are apt to be (Greek). But no arguments equally strong can be urged in
favour of assigning to the Euthydemus any other position in the series.
EUTHYDEMUS
by
Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE:
Socrates, who is the narrator of the Dialogue.
Crito, Cleinias, Euthydemus, Dionysodorus, Ctesippus.
SCENE: The Lyceum.
CRITO: Who was the person, Socrates, with whom you were talking yesterday
at the Lyceum? There was such a crowd around you that I could not get
within hearing, but I caught a sight of him over their heads, and I made
out, as I thought, that he was a stranger with whom you were talking: who
was he?
SOCRATES: There were two, Crito; which of them do you mean?
CRITO: The one whom I mean was seated second from you on the right-hand
side. In the middle was Cleinias the young son of Axiochus, who has
wonderfully grown; he is only about the age of my own Critobulus, but he is
