Plato’s “Charmides.”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10699883 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Moore (0000-0003-3149-1140, Pennsylvania State University), Christopher C Moore (0000-0001-6027-1732, Pennsylvania State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 134 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 203-208 |
| Publication date | 2025-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8108 • E-ISSN: 1558-1470 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00318108-11676141 |
| OpenAlex | W4408888533 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Four English-language books in the past half decade have taken on Plato’s Charmides, by Raphael Woolf (2023), Voula Tsouna (2022), Inbal Cohen-Taber (2022), and by Christopher C. Raymond and the author of this review (2019). Preceding, in English, were monographs by three Thomases—Tuozzo (2011), Schmid (1998), and Tuckey (1951)—and David Levine (2016) and Drew Hyland (1981). Nevertheless, Charmides lacks a spot in the mainstream of philosophy; the Philosophical Review has apparently printed the word “Charmides” in only four articles since its founding in 1892, each a book review of a study on Plato’s “early dialogues.” Why might we expect it to have been more central to the discipline? It contains the most intense classical reflection on sôphrosunê, the virtue most closely aligned with aretê in the fifth century BCE. And it contains the most concentrated classical reflection on self-knowledge, one of the epistemic states most aligned with Socratic well-being. So why has it not been more central? Presumably because what we find in it is partially self-undermining reflection rather than confident or categorical assertion, and then because the Republic (and Aristotle) gives little prominence to sôphrosunê and self-knowledge. Further, dominant English translations have made the arguments sound exceedingly strange. The most-used academic version, from 1973, that of Rosamond Kent Sprague (found in the Hackett Plato: Complete Works [1997]), presents the big definition of “temperance” as “the science of science,” and I doubt that this absurdity—a prim nineteenth-century virtue as Fichtean philosophy?—primes the intuition pumps at all. Finally, the bare awareness that Socrates’s interlocutor Critias was spokesman of the Thirty, the democracy-toppling oligarchy of 404–403, has led many readers to treat the dialogue as an ad hominem attack, making the point only that sôphrosunê is valuable in our civic leaders.I am not sanguine that the spate of recent books will altogether improve the standing of a dialogue that I happen to find a brilliant and deep meditation on the origins of virtue ethics and on the Socratic-Platonic mode of philosophy. I unhappily include the most recent of them, Raphael Woolf’s Plato’s “Charmides” (in the Cambridge Studies in the Dialogues of Plato series), the subject of this review. The book is eloquently and cautiously written, engages more broadly and fruitfully with relevant scholarship than nearly any recent instance of Plato scholarship, and floats a number of provocative and fresh macro-level interpretations. It has led me to query, more sharply than on previous occasions, the reasons I have for my assumptions about Socrates’s conversational goals as Plato is depicting them. But, to my taste, the book lacks pace, it feels too often like a methodological study in “how to read a Platonic dialogue,” and it accordingly forgoes or delays talking about the broader ethical issues. It rarely refers outside the dialogue, to the fifth- and fourth-century philosophical or paraphilosophical discussions of virtue or ethics that presumably condition Plato’s discussion here (a glance at the index locorum [268] in effect reveals this infrequency). In other words, Woolf has written a study about the dialogue, in the first instance, from the inside, so to speak, rather than directly about the ways Plato, Socrates, Critias, or their contemporaries are doing (moral, epistemological) philosophy, where the Charmides provides the fine-grained evidence. So the volume under review principally addresses people who do Plato scholarship and who, in particular, do Charmides scholarship. It raises for them excellent, difficult, and even essential questions: about the “eroticism” of Socrates, Plato’s (dis)identification with Socrates, the (dis)advantages of conversation by contrast with written texts, and the effect on the reader that careful reading of this very dialogue can be hoped to achieve. For some—those who already value the Charmides, or who want to think piecemeal about Plato’s philosophical goals in writing dialogues—this may be enough; it certainly will be worthwhile for them. But for others I fear it may not be.One distinctive quality of Woolf’s monograph is that it seems not especially exercised by sôphrosunê as such, the virtue whose embodiment and definition provide direction to the main conversation in the Charmides. No instance of the word group from outside Plato’s dialogues is mentioned or cited (though a statement on page 233 makes one expect reference to extra-Platonic material). There is almost no discussion of sôphrosunê even within Plato’s dialogues beyond the Charmides. Accordingly, there is no discussion of ways in which the proffered definitions concentrate attention on one aspect or another of sôphrosunê, highlighting or concealing divergences in application or intimation, and thereby reveal the character, alliances, interpretative mode, or philosophical commitment of their profferers. No doubt, toning down the analytic obsession with the definitions can be salutary; but not fully developing the (historical) content of the concepts in play can impinge on assessments of conversational quality and a speaker’s intentions in saying what he does (or in not saying something else).Woolf’s disengagement from the question of sôphrosunê in ancient Greek thought has a kind of parallel in his treatment of Socrates. He claims that Socrates’s “critical enquiries into temperance [that is, sôphrosunê] do not have as their ultimate goal the discovery of truth about temperance. That goal is subordinate to his desire to attain a vision of beauty. It is because temperance is a beautiful thing that Socrates is moved to seek it in Charmides’ soul” (18). For Woolf, all Socrates’s definitional wrangling with Charmides aims at revealing Charmides’s knowledge and thus possession of the virtue, and once revealed, at admiring it in him. The definitional wrangling with Critias aims at returning Charmides, from whom Critias took over the conversation, to that sôphrosunê-conducing conversation (137). For Socrates, according to Woolf, “temperance” is a marvelous trait of character onto which his “erotic drive” (18) has attached itself; Socrates learns from Critias that everyone judges Charmides to have, during Socrates’s three-year absence at the military campaign of Potidaea, aged into a young man excelling his peers in its exemplification; and whether he really does exemplify it is to be discovered through conversational exchange.This is a bewildering view, though one I have found thrilling to confront. Is Socrates driven to converse by any beautiful trait of character? (Are all virtues unified in their beauty?) Does he find pursuit of beauty a better reason for action than pursuit of understanding? (Are these separable for him?) Is his intellectual curiosity nurtured because it makes him instrumentally better able to see or reveal what’s beautiful? What really does he mean when he asks Critias, “Don’t you think that it is pretty much a common good for everyone that the nature of each of the things that are becomes clear?” (166d; quoted by Woolf on p. 130; see also p. 171)?Woolf’s interpretation of Socrates—that he’s not principally philosophical or philanthropic but philokalic or simply erotic (though Elizabeth Belfiore’s Socrates’ Daimonic Art [2012] would have been a key foil here)—leads him to claim that Plato need neither share nor urge on his readers Socrates’s erotic drive. Plato writes his dialogues rather to encourage and enable critical inquiry. On Woolf’s reading, a distance between Socrates’s commitments and Plato’s becomes apparent to careful readers, and when it does, they gain self-knowledge and epistemic agency. More specifically, that distance causes or encourages them to wonder about the extent to which they have identified and should identify with Socrates, how they might backtrack in places where their acceptances outran their justifications, and in what respect they should pursue knowledge in the future.This is another vertigo-inducing but also highly thought-producing view. What kind of evidence supports separating Platonic from Socratic practice rather than the suspicion that I have misread Socrates’s or Plato’s purposes (and so mistakenly perceived them to be distinct)? Does my own imaginative identification with Socrates, as a character with noble principles of epistemic humility, conversational verve, and a hunger for knowledge, mean that I have misread Plato (or failed to be adequately epistemically humble, conversationally sophisticated, or curious)?Here is one case where what might be a proclivity to see Socrates as arguing tendentiously, as eager to rid himself of Critias and regain Charmides’s engagement, hinders Woolf’s argument reconstruction. Critias modifies his original definition of sôphrosunê, “doing one’s own things,” through several steps to “knowing oneself” (167d; see p. 161). After several more modifications, Critias says this: “All the other branches of knowledge are of something else, while it [sôphrosunê] alone is knowledge both of the other branches of knowledge and itself of itself” (166c, quoted at p. 168). Where other fields of knowledge have distinct subject matters, which are (so to speak) things in the world, for instance as medicine has human health and disease, or as the skill in checkers has effective moves on the game board, the knowledge of knowledge has knowledge as its distinct subject matter. Thus we can frame knowledge of knowledge positively as being a knowledge itself and negatively as not being of anything else in the world—namely, any of the subject matters of (first-order) knowledge (166b–e). Critias sees this as the truly special quality of sôphrosunê, and it evidently leads to the thought that it is the perfect managerial competence: the ability to assign tasks to knowledgeable people without oneself having to have acquired, or sullied oneself in, any of those subordinate (first-order) expertises. (Incidentally, it is here where a study of concurrent reflection on sôphrosunê would help to show on what, if anything, Critias might be drawing in this extraordinary and fascinating analysis of the virtue, and therefore how we might evaluate his proposing this definition.)This quality of sôphrosunê would indeed be very special, Socrates says, if only it were possible and beneficial—as the embodiment of sôphrosunê has always been granted to be. Let’s start with its possibility. Could there be such a knowledge that takes itself as its object and yet no other subject matter? Socrates turns Critias’s attention to possibly parallel intentional states. He gets Critias to agree that there is no sight that is of seeing but not of any color—where color is the object of every other case of seeing (167c8–d3, quoted on p. 174). Woolf takes issue with Critias’s agreement, finding it too hasty. He discusses cases of seeing seeing, on a range of formulations, even pointing to instances in the Charmides of some character’s seeing another’s seeing. Woolf thinks that these cases, which he claims show the possibility of seeing seeing, cast grave doubts on the inference drawn to the impossibility of knowing knowing, which Critias basically accepts (178–79). So, according to Woolf, we discover a severing of psychological persuasion (which exists for Critias) and logical consequence (which does not exist for us) and the intellectual value of aporia when one wonders what knowledge’s reflexivity really is (181–86).Yet it looks to me that Woolf has misconstrued or misremembered the critical feature of Critias’s definition of sôphrosunê that Socrates is testing via analogy. Socrates asks whether there is a seeing (that is, a second-order seeing) that does not see color but does see seeing. Woolf, however, provides cases of seeing that do see color: all the relevant imaginary and intra-dialogue cases he mentions are those where one is seeing something (a person with his eyes suitably aimed) that is determined by its color! Well, of course they do. But this is just Socrates’s point; it was where the elenchus, from the beginning, was going. Critias’s conception of an exclusively self-knowing knowledge seems to rob itself of too much. Second-order seeing, like first-order seeing, has to see the world, too; it can’t get free of the hassle of the eye impinged upon by fields of color. So too second-order knowing: it can’t get free of the hassle of the mind impinged upon by stuff one might learn, despite Critias’s desire to define or characterize it otherwise. To be sure, it’s easier to specify the object of sight (color) than the object of knowledge (learnables?), and so there may well be a disanalogy between sight and knowledge. Put another way, it’s an open question relevant to the Critias-Socrates debate what it is someone would know in knowing something to be knowledge. And Critias has clearly invented a cool gloss on sôphrosunê that has gotten him into deeper epistemic waters than he is prepared to swim in. But I don’t think we’re in a position to impugn Socrates’s thought experiment.So the separation of Socrates and Plato might not be so easy. Another challenge to separation comes in Woolf’s highly attractive rehabilitation of the “knowledge of knowledge” that Critias provides as a definition of sôphrosunê (210–33; I’ve taken a similar position in two of my own monographs). In brief, “insofar as one’s self consists in what one believes,” and “one discovers what one believes only by critical examination of proposals that are made by oneself or by others” (216), the “knowledge of what knowledge is” allows one “to realise oneself” (221). In a great turn of phrase, “knowledge of oneself is knowledge of how to bring oneself about, just as knowledge of health is knowledge of how to bring health about” (226). Sôphrosunê as self-realization is possible, since we can in fact come to believe and know things (and make judgments of the epistemic status of our views) through critical examination, and it is beneficial to the extent that it is better to act on well-grounded beliefs than poorly grounded ones. To me, Socrates’s lesson throughout the dialogue seems to be exactly this; everything he says, when he identifies his argumentative goals or recapitulates sequences of inferences, picking out the dubious and the less dubious ones, seems to be teaching his interlocutors about knowledge, how to know, and coming to know how to know. Woolf maybe wants to ascribe this lesson to Plato instead. Whatever. Let’s ascribe it to the Charmides, where Socrates is the conversational maestro, a dialogue that perhaps more sharply than any other classical Greek text treats of the task for the philosopher and the human: achievement of epistemic agency, the coming to have sound grounds for thinking and acting. Woolf’s monograph goes a long way to showing that the dialogue concerns this, and has its greatest value in so doing.A final thought. I still find “temperance” an unfortunate translation of sôphrosunê, and even more so when it’s vindicated as “self-realization”—the latter concept doesn’t seem somehow hidden in the former. Neither I nor my students can do conceptual analysis on the term temperance and get where we need to go—namely, where Socrates and Critias go with it. In fact, I think the use of this “default” and “most common rendition” (234) of sôphrosunê is a major obstacle to the philosophical uptake of this dialogue. Temperance is just not very important to us as ethical people in the way sôphrosunê was for the Greeks, and I think that what sôphrosunê meant to them, which is something not at all provincial or idiosyncratic, has a pretty decent English equivalent (discussed on pp. 234–36—namely, “discipline”)
Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|