Before getting on to the rest of the Republic, tonight I would like to think about Plato’s Euthyphro. I want to do this because I had the opportunity to read the entire dialogue (it’s pretty short) on the bus today (I know that the reading can be done anywhere, but today it just so happened that it was on the bus from home to Pittsburgh and back).
How good of a plaintiff is Euthyphro? How good of a defendant is Socrates? What about Euthyphro as a prophet? These questions are introduced in the piece, but we would have to know about Plato’s other dialogues (most importantly the Apology and the Phaedo) to really find out about the second and third questions. However, the present dialogue suggests that Euthyphro is a decent prophet, but he gets laughed at in the assembly [3c]. In the eyes of the assembly, though, Euthyphro is not a corruptor of the young. Euthyphro does not represent a threat to the establishment in the way that Socrates represents it. How so? Say a young man (call him Meletus) with high political ambitions wants to gain the support of his older superiors in his rise to the top. How would he do such a thing? What are his resources? In political life, the main resources are people, people and their interests. Socrates likens this young politician’s occupation to the activities of a farmer. He says, “Meletus first gets rid of us [namely no good dirty atheists like Socrates] who corrupt the young shoots, as he says, and then afterwards he will obviously take care of the older ones and become a source of great blessings to the city.” This is strange for Socrates to say with any ill-will because he also says that “he [Meletus] is the only one of our public men to start out the right way…” In short Socrates really seems to hold in high regard Meletus’ efforts. Meletus may turn out to be a tyrant (as he exhibits the desire to silence innovative viewpoints), but as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This bit about the charges brought against Socrates is of relatively small importance in the dialogue. But it does have some significance in the sense that it is good to bring up the point about what is right and what is wrong, what is pious and what is impious in concrete legal matters as well as in the abstract. Unfortunately for Socrates, what is right for the city might not be right (or at least not too healthy) for his bodily existence. Socrates’ actions are impious certainly from a certain point of view, viz. the up and coming politicians and those of the conservative mindset, but are they impious from an abstract, completely objective point of view? In other words, are they impious because they are impious, or are they impious because the establishment says so. This formula is not exactly that of the “Euthyphro Dilemma,” but it is starting to go in that direction.
Euthyphro, on the other hand, is straight up charging his father with murder (hence impiety), not without entertainable grounds, and he reasons that likewise it would be impious not to bring these charges against his father. After all, it is not cool to harbor a criminal like that. In [5c-d] Socrates poses a question regarding piety in the matter at hand: “[I]s the pious not the same and alike in every action, and the impious the opposite of all that is pious and like itself, and everything that is to be impious, presents us with one form or appearance in so far as it is impious?” The pious is . . .. The impious is . . .. If it were only so easy to just give clear-cut ostensive definitions… Socrates is the absolute nit picker, however, when it comes to the “big” ones. Is it this? Is it that? Is it not this or not that? How do we know that it is so? It’s no wonder why the demagogues would charge Socrates with corrupting the young. He constantly pulls the rugs out from under their comfy little inherited prejudices. What would confer absolute knowledge that something is so and so? A fixed pattern, an unchanging model, a Form (ooh)! Of course if we ever stumbled upon something that might be a Form, by what critera would we judge that it is so? Another Form, and so on, etc. But what about the case at hand: the question of piety and “The Euthyphro Dilemma”?
First, we have to bring God or the gods into the equation. With the greek gods, it is easier to get the ball rolling because they constantly fought amongst themselves. Thus, if the pious is what the gods love, then there is a problem because different gods might love or hate the same thing. This can be rectified by the proviso that perhaps the pious is actually what all the gods love and not just what some of the gods love and others hate. Ok. We have that. What is it to be loved? Is something pious because it is loved or loved because it is pious? Here’s where things get interesting. What acts, and what is acted upon? The lover (God or the gods) acts by loving and what is loved (the pious) is acted upon by being loved. But how are love and piety really related? The gods can love things that exclude the pious. The gods can love ice cream sandwiches, but that doesn’t make the frozen treats pious. So the pious is not that which is exclusively loved by the gods. Problem: The gods don’t simply make things pious by loving them. Or do they (this is one “horn” of the dilemma)? But then are things loved by the gods because they are pious? Well. Here we have it. I think the dialogue is really meant to get us thinking about abstract notions and the notion of abstract notions, but this is just my take on it. I’m sure some agree and some don’t. I may have even presented the dilemma in a monstrous or mutilated form. Let me know if it matters to you. It sure would help me out.
-E.N.D.
I used Hackett’s Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper.
