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Chapter 21
This webpage reproduces a chapter of
A History of Philosophy

by
Frederick Copleston, S. J.

as reprinted by
Image Books — Doubleday
New York • London • Toronto • Sydney • Auckland
1993

The text, and illustrations except as noted,
are in the public domain.

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Chapter 23

Part III: Plato

 p216  Chapter XXII
Moral Theory

1. The Summum Bonum

Plato's ethic is eudaemonistic, in the sense that it is directed towards the attainment of man's highest good, in the possession of which true his consists. This highest good of man may be said to be the true development of man's personality as a rational and moral Belgium the right cultivation of his soul, the general harmonious well-being of life. When a man's soul is in the state it ought to be in, then that man is happy. At the beginning of the Philebus two extreme positions are taken up by Protarchus and Socrates causa argumenti. Though they are both agreed that the good must be a state of soul, Protarchus is prepared to maintain that the good consists in pleasure, while Socrates will maintain that the good consists in wisdom. Socrates recess to show that pleasure as such cannot be the true and sole human good, since a life of unmixed pressure (bodily pleasure is understood), in which neither mind nor memory nor knowledge nor true opinion had any share, "would be, not a human life, but that of a pulmo marinus or an oyster."1 Not even Protarchus can think such a life desirable for a human being. On the other hand, a life of "unmixed mind," which was destitute of pleasure could not be the sole good of man; even if intellect is the highest part of man and intellectual activity (especially the contemplation of the Forms) is man's highest function, man is not pure intellect Thus the good life for man must be a "mixed" life, neither exclusively the life of the mind nor yet the life of sense-pleasure. Plato, therefore, is prepared to admit those pleasures which are not preceded by pain, » the intellectual pleasures, 2 but also pleasures which consist in the satisfaction of desire, provided that they are innocent and are enjoyed in moderation. Just as honey and water must be mixed in due proportion in order to make a pleasing drink, so pleasant feeling and intellectual activity must be mixed in due proportion in order to make the good life of man.3

First of all, Plato says, the further good life must include all knowledge  p217 of the truer type, the exact knowledge of timeless objects. But the man who was acquainted only with the exact and perfect curves and lines of geometry, and had no knowledge at all of the rough approximations to them which we Meer with in daily life, would not even know how to find his way home. So second-class knowledge, and not only the first-class variety, must be admitted into the mixture: it will do a man no harm, provided that he recognises the second-class objects for what they are, and does not mistake the rough approximations for the exact truth. In other words, a man need not turn his back completely on this mortal life and the material world in order to lead the truly good life, but he must recognise that this world is not the only world, nor yet the highest world, but a poor copy of the ideal. (Music, says Protarchus, must be admitted, "if human life is to be a life at all," in spite of the fact that it is, according to Socrates, "full of guesswork and imitation" and "wanting in purity.")4

All the "water" having thus been admitted to the mixing-bowl, the question arises, how much "honey" to put in. The deciding vote in this question, how much pleasure to admit, rests with knowledge. Now, knowledge, says Plato, would claim kinship with the class of "true" and "unmixed" pleasures; bottom as to temple, knowledge will accept only those which accompany health and a sober mind and any form of goodness. The pleasures of "folly and badness" are quite unfit to find a place in the blend.

The secret of the blend which forms the good life is thus measure or proportion: where this is neglected, there exists, not a genuine mixture, but a mess. The good is thus a form of the beauti­ful, which is constituted by measure and postpone, and συμμετρία, καλόν and ἀλήθεια will be the three forms or notes found in the good The first place goes to "seasonableness," τὸ καίριον , the second to proportion or beauty or completeness (τὸ σύμμετρον καὶ καλόν καὶ τὸ τέλεον καὶ ἱκανόν), the third to νοῦς καὶ φρόνησις, the fourth to ἐπιστῆμαι καὶ τέχναι καὶ δόξαι ὀρθαί, the fifth to the pleasures which have no pain mixed with them (whether involving actual sensation or not), and the sixth to the moderate satisfaction of appetite when, of course, this is harmless. Such, then, is man's true good, the good life, εὐδαιμονία, and the compelling motive in the search for it is Eros, the desire or longing for good or happiness.

 p218  Man's summum bonum or happiness includes, of course, knowledge of God — obviously so if the Forms are the Ideas of God; while, even if the Timaeus were taken literally and God were supposed to be apart from the Forms and to contemplate them, man's own contemplation of the Forms, which is an integral constituent of his happiness, would make him akin to God. Moreover, no man could be happy who did not recognise the Divine operation in the world. Plato can say, therefore, that the Divine happiness is the pattern of man's happiness. 5

Now, happiness must be attained by the pursuit of virtue, which means becoming as like to God as it is possible for man to become. We must become "like the divine so far as we come an, and that again is to become righteous with the help of wisdom. 6 "The gods have a care of anyone whose desire is to become just and to be like God, as far as man can attain to the divine likeness, by the pursuit of virtue."7 In the Laws Plato declares that "God is the measure of all things, in a sense far higher than any man, as they say, can ever hope to be." (He thus answers Protagoras.) "And he who would be dear to God, must as far as possible be like Him and which as He is. Wherefore the temperate man is the friend of God, for he is like Him. . . ." He goes on to say that to offer sacrifice to the gods and pray to them is "the noblest and best overall things, and also the most conductive to a happy life," but points out that the sacrifices of the wicked and impious are unacceptable to the gods.8 Worship and virtue belong therefore, to happiness, so that although the pursuit of virtue and the leading of a virtuous life is the means of attaining happiness, virtue itself is not external to happiness, but is integral to it. Man's good is a condition of soul primarily, and it is only the truly virtuous man who is a truly good man and a truly happy man.

II. Virtue

1. In general we may say that Plato accepted the Socratic identification of virtue with knowledge. In the Protagoras9 Socrates shows, as against the Sophist, that it is absurd to suggest that justice can be impious or piety unjust, so that the several virtues cannot be entirely disparate. Furthermore, the intemperate man is one who pursues what is really harmful to man while the temperate  p219 man pus what is truly good and beneficial. Now, to pursue what is truly good and beneficial is wise, while to pursue what is harmful is foolish. Hence temperance be withdrawn cannot be entirely disparate Again true valour or courage means, et standing your ground in battle when you know the risks to which you are exposed; it does not mean mere foolhardiness. Thus courage can no more be separated from wisdom than can temperance. Plato does not, of course, deny that there are distinct virtues, distinguished account their objects or the parts of the soul of which they are the habits; but all these distinct virtues form a unity, inasmuch as they are the expressions of the same knowledge of good and evil. The distinct virtues are, therefore, unified in prudence or the knowledge of what is truly good for man and of the means to attain that good. It is made clear in the Meno that if virtue is knowledge or prudence, it can be taught, and it is shown in the Republic that it is only the philosopher who has true knowledge of the good for man. It is not the Sophist, content with "popular" notions of virtue, who can teach virtue, but only he who has exact knowledge, i.e. the philosopher. The doctrine that virtue is knowledge is really an expression of the fact that goodness is not a merely relative term, but refers to something that is absolute and unchanging: otherwise it could not be the object of knowledge.

To the idea that virtue is knowledge and to the virtue is teachable, Plato seems to have clung, as also to theia that no one does evil knowingly and willingly. When a man chooses that which is de facto evil, he chooses it sub specie boni: he desires something which he imagines to be good, but which is, as a matter of fact, evil. Plato certainly allowed for the headstrong character of appetite, which strives to carry all before item, sweeping the charioteer along with it in its mad onrush to attain that which appears to it as a good; but if the mad horse overpowers the resistance of the charioteer, it can, on Plato's principles, only be because either the charioteer has no knowledge of the true good or because his knowledge of the good is occurred for the time being by the onrush of passion. It might well seem that such a doctrine, inherited from Socrates, conflicts with Plato's obvious admission of moral responsibility, but it is open to Plato to reply that a man who knows what is truly good may allow his judgment to be so obscured by passionate, at least temporarily, that the apparent good appears to him as a true good, although he is responsible  p220 for having allowed passionate so to description reason. If it be objected that a man may deliberately choose evil because it is evil, Plato could only answer that the man has said: "Evil, be thou my good." If he chooses what is really evil or harmful, knowing it to be ultimately such, that can only be because he, in spite of his knowledge, fixes his attention on an aspect of the object which appear to him as good. He may indeed be responsible for so fixing his attention, but, if he chooses, he can only choose the ratione boni. A man might very well know that to murder his enemy will be ultimately harmful to him, but he chooses to do it all the same, since he fixes his attention on what appears to be the immediate good of satisfying his desire for revenge or of obtaining some beget by the elimination of his enemy. (It might be remarked that the Greeks needed a clearer view of Good and Right and their relation one another. The murderer may know very well that murder is wrong, but he chooses to commit it as being, in some respects, a good. The murderer who knew that murder was wrong might also know, of course, that "wrong" and "ultimately harmful or evil" were inseparable, but that would not take away the aspect of "goodness" (i.e. usefulness or desirability) attaching to the act. When we use the word "evil," we often mean "wrong," but when Plato said that no one willingly chooses to do what he knows to be evil, he did not mean that no one cheeses to do what he knows to be wrong, but that no one deliberately chooses to do what he knows to be in all respects harmful to himself.)

In the Republic10 Plato considers four chief or cardinal virtues — wisdom (Σοφία), courage or fortitude (Ἀνδρεία), temperance (Σωφροσύνη) and justice (Δικαιοσύνη). Wisdom is the virtue of the rational part of the soul, courage of the spirited part, while temperance consists in the union of the spirited and appetitive parts under the rule of reason. Justice is a general virtue consisting in this, that every part of the soul performs its proper task in due harmony.

2. In the Gorgias Plato argues against the identification of good and evil with pleasure and pain, and against the "Superman" morality propounded by Callicles. Against Polus, Socrates has tried to show that to do an injustice, e.g. to play the part of the tyrant, is worse than to suffer injustice, since to do injustice makes one's soul worse, and this is the greatest evil that a man  p221 can suffer. Moreover, to do injustice and then to get off scot-free is the worst thing of all, because that only confirms the evil in the soul, whereas punishment may bring reformation. Callicles breaks in on the discussion in order to protest that Socrates is appealing "to the popular and vulgar notions of right, which are not natural, but only conventional";11 to do evil may be dgf from the conventional standpoint, but this is simply herd-morality. The weak, who are the majority, club together to restrain "the stronger sort of men," and proclaim as right the actions that suit them, i.e. the members of the herd, mean as wrong the actions that are harmful to them.12 Nature, however, shows among both men and animals that "justice consists in the superior ruling and having more than the inferior."13

Socrates thanks Callicles for his frankness in openly stating his opinion that Might is Right but he points out that if the weak majority do in fact tyrannise over the "strong," then they are actually the stronger and also are justified, on Callicles' own admission, This is not mere verbal quibble, for if Callicles persists in meeting his rejection of conventional morality, he must now show how the strong, the ruthless and unscrupulous individualist, is qualitatively "better" than the herd‑man, and so has the right to tole. The Callicles tries to do by maintaining that his individualist is wiser than "the rabble of slaves and nondescripts," and so ought to rule and have more than his subjects, Irritated by Socrates' observation that, in this case, the physician should have more to eat and drink than everybody else, and the cobbler larger shoes than anybody, Callicles affirms that justice consists in their having more than their Soviets. Goaded by Socrates' question, whether the ruler should rule himself as well, Callicles roundly asserts that the strong man should allow his desires and passions full play. This gives Socrates his chance, and he compares Callicles' ideal man to a leaky cask he is always filling himself with pleasure but never has enough: his life is the life of a cormorant not of a man. Callicles is prepared to admit that the scratcher who is constantly relieving his itch has a happy life, but he boggles at justifying the life of the  p222 catamite, and in the end is driven to admit a qualitative difference in pleasures. This leads to the conclusion that pleasure is subordinate to the good, and that reason must, therefore, be judge of pleasures and admit them only in so far as they are consonant with health and harmony and order of soul and body. It is thus not the intemperate man but the temperate man who is truly good and happy. The intemperate man does evil to himself, and Socrates drives home his point by the "Myth" of the impossibility of escaping judgment after death.14

3. Plato expressly rejects the maximum that one should do good to one's friends and evil to one's enemies. To do evil can never be good. In the first Book Polemarchus puts forward the theory that "it is just to do good to our friend if he is good man, and to hurt our enemy if he is a bad man."15 Socrates (understanding by "to hurt" to do real harm, not and not simply to punish — which he regarded as remedial) objects that to hurt is to make worse, and, in respect of human excellence, that means less just, so that, according to Polemarchus, it pertains to the just man to make the unjust man worse. But this is obviously rather the work of the unjust man than of the just man.


The Author's Notes:

1 21c1‑8.

2 Cf. 51.

3 61b4 ff.

4 62v1‑4.

5 Theaet., 176a5‑e4.

6 Theaet., 176b1‑3.

7 Rep., 613a7‑61.

8 Laws, 715e7‑717a3.

9 Protag., 330c3 ff.

10 Rep., Bk. 4.

11 Gorgias, 482e3‑5.

12 The resemblance to the opinions of Nietzsche is obvious, though Nietzsche's idea was very far from being that of the political and licentious tyrant.

13 483d5‑6.

14 Gorgias, 523 ff.

15 Rep., 335a7‑8.


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