Reading Plato’s Phaedo
I felt compelled to re-read Plato’s Phaedo after reading Montaigne’s “To philosophize is to learn to die.” Montaigne has a very different view of death than Plato’s Socrates, though both advocated meditating on death as a way to overcome the fear of it. For Montaigne, death is pure nothingness, which makes life significant completely unto itself insofar as life is all that we have, and we will have quite literally nothing after we are dead. If we think of death as a complete absence of experience, then we should no longer fear it. Montaigne is clearly an Epicurean in this and many other regards. I find this version of death comforting because it does away with imagining death as an eternal experience, which is what I’m actually afraid of. Thinking about living on forever with no prospect of a end, or even a break, terrifies me. If I just think of death as being the same lack of experience that I had before birth, which seems the most likely scenario, it becomes nothing at all to fear. Strangely, it also makes the life I’m living more meaningful within itself and as life itself. There is no need to reach beyond life to find meaning. Nor is the opposite true: life is not a hollowed out shell to be filled up with meaning. I’m not “condemned to be free” if by that phrase we want to mean that there is an emptiness at the center of human life that needs to be filled up with “meaning” as a product of “free will.”
I struggle with thinking about life as a search for (or creation of) meaning. I think this struggle has to do with the high stakes involved in what I think we mean when we say life needs to have a meaning. Put another way, why do we need to say that the meaning of an individual life is to have meaning? It amounts to saying that your life needs to “add up” to something in the end — something that can be totalized and described in terms of its value to others. What if you get it wrong? Was everything just an enormous waste of time and life? I struggle also with this latest trend that would see us involved in a “crisis of meaning.” It’s only a crisis if you think that there is a lack that should be filled up.
Maybe this is why Montaigne struck me as comforting. For him, life isn’t about a search for meaning. It is about an art of living that takes place in a finite period of time bounded by birth on one side and death on the other. We are thrown into something we didn’t ask for, and all that we know for sure is that we will exit and return from whence we came — a total and complete lack of experience. God, or any other source of meaning you choose, has no purchase on death conceived in this way. Unless there is an eternal experience that is somehow linked to how you live, God has no lasting meaning. For Montaigne, therefore, how we spend our moments is key. Each moment is valuable unto itself. We are under no obligation to strive to find the meaning of each moment elsewhere — neither in our ability to conform to a religious doctrine, nor to create an overarching narrative that would make each moment meaningful only insofar as it conforms to that long-term narrative. To choose to see the time allotted to us as having to add up to something in the end is unnecessarily burdensome.
Plato’s Phaedo offers nearly the opposite view of death in almost every conceivable way. Plato envisions death as eternal experience on either side of birth and death, and in this way is the opposite of Montaigne. Yet both of them see death as something that philosophy takes head on such that fear of it is defeated by the practice of philosophy: “In fact, Simmias, he said, those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men” (67e). For Plato’s Socrates, death is a kind of “purification” — a term used often in the Phaedo. This kind of purifying death can also happen in life through the practice of philosophy:
And does purification not turn out to be what we mentioned in our argument some time ago, namely, to separate the soul as far as possible from the body and accustom it to gather itself and collect itself out of every part of the body and to dwell by itself as far as it can both now and in the future, freed, as it were, from the bonds of the body? (67c-d)
We can easily read Plato’s Socrates as advocating a mind-body dualism as a Truth that he is offering us. But I think that what he’s actually describing is the philosophical contemplation of death as a practice of askesis — the self-conscious ability to retrain how we think about ourselves and our place in the world, and therefore to retrain how we act toward ourselves and others. I want to spend this meditation understanding what Plato’s Socrates means by this purifying askesis because I don’t think that he means to advocate a strict mind-body dualism. Rather, I think that he is portraying and defining a technique of askesis that allows us to break free of the bad habits and false beliefs that are ingrained in us during the course of our lives. This purifying separation from our false beliefs and bad habits seems to be what Socrates thinks death is, which means that it can be attained in life, however imperfectly. Death is therefore only partially a physiological event. More importantly, it is a “spiritual exercise” (as Pierre Hadot imagined that phrase) that can be attained in the here and now, but only by “practicing philosophy in the right way,” which is a recurring phrase in the Phaedo.
Reading the Phaedo as primarily a lesson in askesis forces me to see Socrates’ epistemological and metaphysical arguments in a different way. I cannot read this work as a veiled attempt to reveal the Truth of the Forms; nor is it ultimately about an ontological separation of mind from body; nor is it about the immortality of the soul. Like the other Socratic dialogs, it is about learning to abstract ourselves from our present situation and to retrain ourselves to think and act differently. This requires a new skill — the ability to concentrate our attention on our ingrained beliefs to understand where they come from and how to undo and remake them for the better. In the Meno, this is described through the metaphor of “tying down” the statues of Daedalus where the statues represent our true and false beliefs. In the Phaedo, this is enacted in the contemplation of death and its relationship to the Forms and “recollection.” None of this requires a firm commitment to the epistemological or metaphysical assertions of the Meno and the Phaedo. All that is required is that we understand these propositions as practical techniques within the practice of askesis. All that is required, in other words, is a pragmatic commitment that makes it possible to put your attention on your beliefs and to verbalize them to yourself and to others.
Let me take the mind-body dualism argument first. The “separation” of mind from body is something to be achieved through philosophical practice. Socrates is explicit about this:
[Socrates:] It is only those who practice philosophy in the right way, we say, who always most want to free the soul; and this release and separation of the soul from the body is the preoccupation of the philosophers?
[Simmias:] So it appears.
[Socrates:] Therefore, as I said at the beginning, it would be ridiculous for a man to train himself in life to live in a state as close to death as possible, and then to resent it when it comes?
[Simmias:] Ridiculous, of course (67d).
The “release and separation of the soul from the body” is something to be achieved while one is alive through the “practice of philosophy in the right way.” By framing release and separation as an outcome of a practice is to subordinate the metaphysical pronouncement to the demands of the practice, which is here a kind of “training.” The only lasting value of the metaphysical statements is their ability to enable and support the training — the askesis — that Plato’s Socrates is advocating as the life of philosophy.
Here we might benefit from a little William James where he cautions us, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, not to subordinate the “spiritual value” of the work to the “existential facts and errors” that may be contained in the work. Our present habit of reading is to do just that — to look for the philosophical system lurking behind the text and expose it to the light of day. Of course, such a reading will find the theory lacking and the value of the text devalued accordingly and worthy of being read only by historians of philosophy. For me, one of the values of Plato’s Socratic dialogs is as an expression of religious experience: the value of these works have to do with their usefulness to the reader and what the reader is going through morally. (James essentially argues this about Plato in his third lecture.) If you find it useful in helping with the problems you are wrestling with, then it is of spiritual value “in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition” (5). We must judge these works based on our own experience and what “we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true” (18).
In this sense, the Phaedo’s meditation on death is of important spiritual value to me because it describes a practical technique of askesis that involves the ability to concentrate our attention on our beliefs. This is a complex argument, and I’m sure it will take more than a single meditation to make the technique my own. At the heart of this technique, I think, is the use of universalizing abstractions to force concentration on our particular opinions and beliefs. What are these universalizing abstractions? Questions like “what is arete?” “what is courage?” “what is the Good?” “what is the Beautiful?” are posed as impossible questions to answer because the answers are supposed to be so universal and so abstract that it is impossible to fit all conceivable examples now and for all time into a successful definition. Nonetheless, by attempting answers, Socrates’ sincere interlocutors (and there are plenty of insincere ones) end up better people though they fail miserably at the exercise. We must, therefore, read the Phaedo and other Socratic dialogs as primarily demonstrations of askesis and only secondarily as pronouncements of metaphysical Truths. This is not to say that the metaphysics are unimportant, they are just subordinated to practical beliefs that enable a certain practice of turning our attention to our beliefs and verbalizing them for evaluation. The Forms and other techniques of universalized abstraction are part of the exercise and training of self-attention.
An exercise (“practicing philosophy in the right way”) is just what is being demonstrated in these dialogs. To return to the mind-body dualism problem, Socrates does assert a hard dualism prior to birth and after death, but his ultimate purpose is to make an agument about how we should “care for our souls” while we are alive. The most that Socrates can say about believing in the Forms and in the immortality of the soul is that they are “assumptions” and “hypotheses” (see 100a for these exact terms), not irrefutable Truths.
The mind-body dualism argument is directly related to the argument about Forms. Understanding this connection is crucial to understanding the askesis value of the Phaedo because it is one of Plato’s Socrates clearest statements of the human condition. Prior to birth, the soul had direct knowledge of the Forms. At the moment of birth, the soul and the body are fused together, and the soul’s direct experience of the Forms is obfuscated because of the biases and distortions of the living body. The embodied soul can only access the Forms through “recollection,” which is imperfect at best. How the human being can reconnect with this lost knowledge is the heart of the Phaedo. It is not, I believe, a systematic philosophical treatise on the nature of Reality and our ability to know about Reality. It is “philosophy,” however, in so far as this “release and separation” (which is sometimes translated as “deliverance”) is something to be achieved in life by “practicing philosophy in the right way.” As such, the Forms and “recollection as learning” and the “immortality of the soul” are there merely to support our belief that this purification can be achieved: “Such are the things, Simmias, that all those who love learning in the proper manner must say to one another and believe” (67a).
In this seemingly throwaway comment, we have one of the most important of Socrates many insistences that we find throughout the Phaedo. It is one of the many places that Plato signals to his readers that he is not writing a systematic treatise on the nature of Reality. Socrates is not insisting that these arguments are True; he is insisting that we need to believe that they are true so that we can get on with the work of purification, release and self-transformation. In other words, underwriting all of this talk about training for death is Socrates’ insistence that we believe that the ontological, metaphysical and epistemological arguments he is making are true, not because they are True, but because believing in them is part of the philosophical practice of “caring for our souls.” Taking care of ourselves and one another through philosophical activity is, in fact, the last piece of advice he gives to his entourage at the end of his life. He famously exits on this note.
In the Meno, Plato offered us the distincti0n between “true and false beliefs.” But what we have in the Phaedo is a type of belief that does not easily fit into the true and false beliefs that we find in the Meno and to a lesser extent in the Protagoras. This appears to be a third-type of belief that gets its value not from its relationship to Truth, but from its practical ethical effects on the believer. They are assumptions and hypotheses that are ethically beneficial because they enable askesis as a stepping back from ourselves to examine and investigate the beliefs and values we live by. This third type of belief, therefore, is part of philosophical practice conceived of as askesis.
Again, William James is helpful here. In his lecture, “The Reality of the Unseen,” he points out that Kant, Emerson, and Plato all relied on universalizing abstractions as spiritual exercise, as part of a “practice” of religious experience:
… as the words ‘soul,’ ‘God,’ ‘immortality,’ cover no distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. (55; emphasis in source)
We find this type of practical ethical belief throughout Plato’s Socratic dialogs, especially when he insists on things like “saying what you think” (parrhesia), dialectical conversation (the elenchus), the value of philosophical inquiry in the “care of our souls,” meditating on death as “practicing philosophy in the right way,” and embracing perplexity (aporia). These insistences cannot easily be classified as true or false in themselves. They don’t neatly fit into Plato’s concept of Reality as stable Forms. In fact, nowhere do I find Plato’s Socrates trying to define the Form of aporia or the Form of parrhesia or the Form of the elenchus. These insistences are not strictly True for Plato because they don’t have a corresponding Reality. He insists on them because they are ethically beneficial if we commit ourselves to them.
An ethical belief goes by different names in the Socratic dialogs. It is often translated with terms like “commitment” or “conviction” as in this passage from the Phaedo where Socrates is insistent on “misology” as one of our greatest evils:
This then is the first thing we should guard against, he said. We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole lives still to come, and I for the sake of death itself. (90e-91a; emphasis added)
Reading this passage with an eye toward askesis, the terms “conviction” and “should believe” signal a type of belief that is not easily classified as true nor false. They are practical convictions that one must adhere to in order to achieve the “soundness” of one’s soul that Socrates is driving toward in the entire dialog. (Foucault, in his Courage of Truth lectures, emphasized this passage and the term translated here as “soundness” as “healing.” See page 107 in the English translation.)
We get the clearest statement of the moral value of these ethical beliefs at the end of the Phaedo (114b) where Socrates is finally trying to convince Cebes that the soul lives on after the death of one’s body. Socrates, just before undertaking his long rebuttal to Cebes, who has objected that just because Socrates has been able to adequately show that the soul existed before taking up residence in a body doesn’t necessarily mean that the soul lives on after the death of the body. Socrates’ rebuttal starts with “a thorough investigation of the cause of generation and destruction” (96a). After Socrates’ account of his disillusionment with the works of Anaxagoras (where we learn that Socrates is truly a “close reader” and that close reading is a technique of askesis), we find Socrates making this statement about the Forms to Cebes:
I assume the existence of a Beautiful, itself by itself, of a Good and a Great and all the rest. If you grant me these and agree that they exist, I hope to show you the cause as a result, and to find the soul to be immortal. (100b)
The Forms are assumptions that must be granted by the interlocutor in order to show that the soul is immortal. But the only reason Socrates is arguing for the soul’s immortality is to insist on the practical ethical effects of believing so. In fact, in what immediately follows, Plato backs off any assertion that he is articulating a fully baked metaphysics:
I no longer understand or recognize those other sophisticated causes, and if someone tells me that a thing is beautiful because it has a bright color or shape or any such thing, I ignore these other reasons — for all these confuse me — but I simply, naively, and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful that we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of that relationship, but that all things are beautiful by the Beautiful. That, I think, is the safest answer I can give myself or anyone else. And if I stick to this I shall never fall into error. This is the safest answer for me or anyone else to give, namely, that it is through Beauty that beautiful things are made beautiful. (100d-e; emphasis added)
My emphasis of certain phrases in this passage is to point out that Plato is not firmly committed to the Forms as a hard and fast Truth — at least not in the Phaedo. If he is trying to assert a metaphysics and an associated epistemology, he’s not doing a very good job of it. If he were, then why is he insisting that this belief is “the safe answer for me or anyone else to give”? What makes it a safe answer? (“Safe” can also be translated as “secure” or “not liable to fail” — see Geoffrey Steadman’s Plato’s Phaedo.) We get the answer at 114d where Plato wraps up his proof of the soul’s immortality:
No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief — for the risk is a noble one — that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul evidently is immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation, which is why I have been prolonging my tale. (114d; emphasis added)
Believing in the Forms is thus a “safe answer” because it is a “noble risk” to believe that there is a Truth beyond the here and now that we can contemplate, and in doing so, we free ourselves from the prejudices of our bodies and their “ingrained habits” (81c). To repeat this belief to oneself and to others “as if it were an incantation” is itself a philosophical practice that enables “release and separation” of the soul from the body and its prejudices.
The body, for Plato, is not simply a physical entity like it would be for Montaigne some 1900 years later, or even Epicurus just a couple of generations after Plato. Rather, Plato’s body is the source of our false beliefs and the bad habits that we need to break in order to achieve philosophical death to ourselves:
Because every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is. As it shares the beliefs and delights of the body, I think it inevitably comes to share its ways and manner of life and is unable ever to reach Hades in a pure state; it is always full of body when it departs, so that it soon falls back into another body and grows with it as if it had been sewn into it. Because of this, it can have no part in the company of the divine, the pure and uniform. (83d-c; emphasis added)
The body is the source of our false beliefs, and the work of philosophy is to investigate, examine and undo those false beliefs that drive a misguided and unreflective “manner of life.” In other words, we are achieving a separation from our false beliefs, not from the body as a physical entity, when we seek this separation. The physical separation would be suicide, which Socrates is adamantly against as he says at the beginning of the dialog. Thus, to believe in Forms is safe because this belief creates just enough critical distance from ourselves so that we can doubt our false confidences and our knee-jerk beliefs. It is safe because it enables a stepping back from these confidences so that they can be examined, questioned and corrected.
How exactly does this technique of askesis work? Clearly it doesn’t work by revealing the right answers to questions like “what is arete?” “what is the Good?” and “what is the Pious?” If this is success, then Plato would presumably give us the answers to these questions, which he doesn’t. This form of askesis does not require the right answers in order to be morally and ethically beneficial. Rather, it is successful when its practitioners use it to step back from what they believe they know for certain and begin the authentic process of questioning their certainties. If “separation” and “purification” have any practical meaning and effects, it is this distancing of ourselves from our beliefs — especially the ones we are certain about — so that we can rethink them and therefore reimagine our “manner of living.”
The Forms merely provide a framework to start the questioning, but they never provide the answer. As such, the Forms have a practical use within a spiritual exercise (using Hadot’s phrase) of focusing attention on ourselves and our beliefs. It works like this. If I think something is good, then I ought to be able to say why it is good. Saying why it is good forces my attention on my beliefs as I try to explain them. This is what Socrates means whenever he says that philosophy “bids the soul to gather itself together by itself” (83a and throughout the text). He is talking about a special kind of attention that makes our unconscious, knee-jerk sensibilities available to words. This verbalization — “saying what you think” (parrhesia) — is crucial to the practice of the elenchus. Just a couple of generations later, the Stoics would codify this form of attention in their term lekta — the ability to verbalize feelings. Even Freud, centuries later, relies on a form of lekta as part of the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis. It is essentially the same technique except that his concept of the unconscious makes it far more difficult to “say what you think” with any level of transparency. This doesn’t invalidate the technique; it just makes it harder, and often requires the help of a professional therapist.
This ability to gather our attention on our thoughts and feelings so that we can articulate them is so fundamental to our modern concepts of the self that it can easily go unnoticed. For many of Socrates’ interlocutors, this skill is wholly new and among the hardest to achieve. But it is the skill that Plato’s Socrates insists that we cultivate because to do so is the care of our souls. For this reason, the function of words is crucial to Socrates. Words allow us to verbalize beliefs and to separate those beliefs from our unreliable senses, which are the source of those beliefs. Words thus have a special power over our souls. By saying what we believe, we expose our beliefs to scrutiny — by ourselves and others who are conversing with us. This is why the Phaedo includes the famous discussion of misology that I cited earlier in this meditation. But we also have a discussion of the importance of words at the end of the section where Socrates talks about his disillusionment with Anaxagoras’ work:
…I feared that my soul would be altogether blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with each of my senses. So I thought I must take refuge in discussions and investigate the truth of things by means of words. (99e)
Combining this with the misology discussion, we have a relatively clear understanding of the power of verbalization to modify our “manner of life.” When questioned about our beliefs, we should be able to muster a form of self-attention that focuses on our beliefs and creates the critical distance we need to separate ourselves from them in order to evaluate them honestly and dispassionately. Our beliefs, by being put into words, are abstracted from ourselves so that they can hang in the air and be turned around and around for examination in the elenchus. Because the beliefs reside in our souls that are “riveted” and “sewn” to our bodies through habituation (81a and following), this abstraction can be disorienting to the interlocutor as he discovers that his beliefs, false confidences and certainties are not only flawed but are embedded in his very soul. Verbalizing becomes the first step in the soul being able to “rid itself of confusion, ignorance, fear, violent desires, and the other human ills…” (81a).
Seen in this light — as a technique of askesis — the belief in the Forms (and especially their abstract nature) has a practical use for Plato’s Socrates because it allows for the verbalized abstraction that is fundamental to caring for our souls. The Forms, therefore, give structure to the kind of questioning that Socrates undertakes. For the rest of this meditation, I want to focus on how this abstraction works to expose false beliefs and false confidence by looking closely at the opening section of the Laches — up to 190e. While the Forms are not an explicit part of the Laches, the technique that the Forms enable as described in the Phaedo is demonstrated in the Laches. One could argue that the Forms emerge in Plato’s thought from within the broader problematic of askesis that he is taking on in the early dialogs. To make such an argument is beyond my depth — I am not a scholar of these matters, and I certainly don’t read Ancient Greek. However, I do think that pondering the Forms as a technique within philosophical practice can be illuminating for one, such as me, who is interested in this angle in Plato’s work. It certainly seems plausible to say that Plato’s use of the Forms is a later codification of his belief in the power of universalizing abstraction as a form of self-attention.
The first thing that I want to point out in this dialog is that Socrates demures from starting the conversation. At 181d where he utters his first words of the dialog, Socrates explicitly puts himself in the position to respond to what the others have to say. This is important because, I think, Plato is not interested in laying out a complete theoretical system. He is interested in positioning philosophical conversation as a practical undertaking, which means that it starts as a response to a particular situation. This is typical of his Socratic dialogs. In the Crito, Socrates is responding to his friends’ desire to break him out of prison. In the Euthyphro, Socrates is responding to Euthyphro’s self-confident prosecution of his father. In the Protagoras, Socrates is responding to Hipocrates’ self-confident desire to seek the teaching of Protagoras though he can’t state exactly and precisely what he will learn. Even the Meno starts with Meno posing a question to Socrates: “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is something teachable?” In all these cases, Socrates is in a position of a respondent to a situation or a question posed by another. He is not a lecturer who has defined the topic and terms of the discussion. Yet, he will always do so, but only after the context of the discussion has been set by others.
Seen in this light, the relentless drive toward universalizing abstraction must be seen as a practical technique for responding to a particular question or situation that starts the dialogs. If Plato was interested in clearly articulating a theoretical system founded on the Forms, why start with particular situations? And why use Socrates as a foil? Why not just write a treatise articulating the system? We miss the point, I believe, if we try to read the dialogs as a treatise. We miss the important role of the specific situation and the crucial role of the interlocutors in the ethical power of “learning to dialog” as Hadot put it: “The dimension of the interlocutor is, as we can see, of capital importance. It is what prevents the dialog from becoming a theoretical, dogmatic expose, and forces it to be a concrete, practical exercise (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 91; emphasis added). Holding my attention on the dialog as concrete, practical exercise allows me to foreground the techniques enacted in the dialog, of which the Forms is a crucial one. In other words, the relentless drive to universalizing abstraction is a technique Plato is teaching us and not a Truth he is revealing. As attentive readers, we are, along with Laches and the others, “learning to dialog.”
As a technique, this universalizing abstraction is one way of responding to a given situation by making someone verbalize their beliefs. To focus the rest of this meditation, I want to start with a key moment in the early pages of the Laches, where Socrates has worked hard to re-oriented the discussion from whether or not teaching hand-to-hand combat is good for young men to “what is arete?” and “can it be taught?” At this moment in the dialog, Socrates asks a crucial question of Laches:
And what we know, we must, I suppose, be able to state? (190c)
We don’t need to read this as Plato’s theory of knowledge. If this were Plato’s point here, the Laches would have become the Cratylus at this moment. But it doesn’t. Rather, we clearly have a practical conversational technique that forces the interlocutor’s attention on what he believes he knows for certain and to put that certainty into words. The effect will be to expose his beliefs to the scrutiny of himself and others in the dialog.
This is not the first moment where words are positioned as crucial to the dialog. The Laches starts with a “pact of parrhesia” (to use Foucault’s phrase) that insists that everyone in the dialog “say what they think.” Also the connection between words and deeds are crucial to the opening pages. Laches grants Socrates the authority to lead the questioning about teaching courage not because of Socrates’ reputation as a philosopher, but because of his reputation on the battlefield of which Laches has direct experience. Socrates’ authority to say what he thinks about teaching courage is granted by Laches because he assumes that the deeds are underwritten by knowledge and therefore can be articulated by Socrates in his own words:
Now I have no acquaintance with the words of Socrates, but before now, I believe, I have had experience of his deeds, and there I found him a person privileged to speak fair words and to indulge in every kind of frankness. (188e)
This is an important statement for Laches to make at this stage of the dialog because, I believe, Plato is positioning Laches as a representative of traditional Athenian values. He recognizes Socrates’ authority to speak on this topic because of past deeds that he personally knows of and others know of by reputation (see 181b). Lysimachus backs up Laches’ assertions of Socrates’ qualifications by insisting he join the conversation as a matter of familial, friendship, and regional (they are from the same demes) obligations: “You yourself ought to have visited us long before and considered us your friends — that would have been the right things to do” (181c).
So what we have is Socrates being invited into the conversation based on the authority of others (Laches’ experience with him on the battlefield) and long-standing “close ties between [Socrates’] family and mine [Lysimachus’]” that must be “renewed” (181a). This is the granted authority that qualifies him to speak. The words he is asked to speak get their legitimacy from his deeds, reputation, family ties and the obligations of Athenian friendship. All of this feels very much like Plato is emphasizing traditional Athenian values as the context in which this dialog is going to occur. The fact that both Nicias and Laches are recognizably flawed examples of courage and that Lysimachus and Melesias’ fathers have failed to teach them properly further emphasizes Athenian traditions as the defining context of the dialog. We are not, in other words, on neutral ground where philosophical treatises can be offered. Rather, we are starting from the practical and concrete situation of educating boys to be citizens, and thus must take seriously the context within which the discussion emerges.
It is, therefore, of great importance that, when asked to lead the conversation by Lysimachus at 181c, Socrates opts not to speak but to first listen to what others have to say and to respond to them. After hearing both Nicias and Laches provide conflicting opinions on the value of teaching hand-to-hand combat, Lysimachus asks Socrates to “cast the deciding vote” (184d). Here we have another example of Athenian tradition, and the echos of the Apology are noticeable as it was a narrow vote that condemned Socrates to death.
So what we have in the opening of the Laches is a relentless attempt by Plato to set the context of the conversation within a deeply flawed set of Athenian values. The right to speak with authority is based on reputation, which is established by others of similar reputation. The obligation to speak is based on family ties and bonds of friendship spanning generations. And the entire framing of the dialog starts with the failure of the society to effectively pass on its values (flawed though they are) to its future leaders.
If the Laches is a theoretical treatise veiled as dialog, then why spend all this time establishing this framework? And why is it titled Laches, who is only one of the important characters? Why not call it “The Teaching of Courage”? I believe it’s called so because it is fundamentally about Laches’ transformation from a representative of flawed Athenian values to a new model of citizenship based on a new set of values. We are thus being shown, by Plato, how “learning to dialog” is a form of self-transformation (askesis) that is also potentially the transformation of Athenian citizenship.
How does this transformation occur? We’ve already seen that Laches is a representative of the traditional value of courage. It is equally important that Laches is established as one who is new to the experience of Socrates. Nicias’ famous description of the effects of the Socratic elenchus at 187e is actually a statement to Laches about what is going to happen to him over the course of the conversation. Laches, importantly, recognizes what Nicias is saying and formally “submits to being examined” by Socrates:
To you then, Socrates, I present myself as someone to teach and refute in whatever manner you please, and, on the other hand, you are welcome to any knowledge I have myself. Because this has been my opinion of your character since that day on which we shared a common danger and you gave me a sample of your valor — the sort a man must give if he is to render a good account of himself. So say whatever you like and don’t let the difference in our ages concern you at all. (189b)
Here Laches, in presenting himself to Socrates for examination, is explicitly invoking and setting aside his Athenian values. He invokes both his experience of Socrates on the battlefield and their differing ages — where youth should defer to age. In doing so, he allows the situation to be reversed such that the younger is able to teach the older through a form of honest and relentless questioning that Laches now knows will lead to a questioning of his very manner of living.
This is a key moment in Laches’ askesis as “learning to dialog.” He is established as a representative of an essential Athenian value (military courage) and is willing to be a spokesperson for that value. To be sure, he is confident at this point that he will not be undone as Nicias has promised will happen. Nonetheless, he has agreed to the pact of parhessia and to “submit” to the examination, which requires him to answer questions about what he thinks he knows.
Laches’ self confidence is the first thing to be taken down in the process. His first answer to Socrates’ initial question (“Let us undertake first of all, Laches, to say what courage is”) is given without hesitation and is as much about his self-confidence as it is about the content of the answer:
Good heavens, Socrates, there is no difficulty in that: if a man is willing to remain at his post and to defend himself against the enemy without running away, then you may rest assured that he is a man of courage. (190e)
It is the breaking down of Laches’ self-confidence that is the driving force of the rest of the dialog and not the actual definition of courage. The relentless piling on of different examples of courage that don’t fit Laches’ definitions is a demonstration of how Socrates’ use of universalizing abstraction is not simply a search for the truth about courage, but a technique for exposing our false confidence in what we think we know. By the time we get to the end of the dialog, Laches is the one to declare that he and Nicias are unfit teachers of the boys:
You are a clever man, Nicias, I know. All the same, I advise Lysimchus here and Melesias to say good-bye to you and me as teachers of the young men and to retain the services of this man Socrates, as I said in the beginning. If my boys were the same age, this is what I would do. (200c)
Laches transformation from a representative of traditional (and flawed) Athenian values is complete, but what is on the other side of this transformation? What we have is a new kind of citizenship that is committed to “learning to dialog” as its fundamental value. We definitely don’t have a new definition of courage, though we do have a commitment to arete as having to do with the education of the whole person. We just don’t know what it is and how it can be taught. We do, however, have a commitment on the part of everyone in the dialog to carry on with the obligation to teach future citizens. All we are left with, to use another phrase from Hadot about Socrates, is “the absolute value of moral intent”:
To a certain extent, we can say that what interests Socrates is not to define the theoretical or objective contents of morality — that is, what we ought to do — but to know if we really, concretely want to do what we consider just and good — in other words, how we must act. (What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 35)
This describes very well what we are left with at the end of the Laches — an intent to carry on though we don’t know the basis on which we will proceed. We never get the answer to “what is courage?” But we do have a happy ending, if only because of the firm commitment to regroup and undertake the education of themselves and then of the boys.
This is Plato’s Socrates’ vision of a new form of citizenship that is dedicated to questioning its values as a form of teaching:
… what I say we ought to do, my friends — since this is just between ourselves — is to join in searching for the best possible teacher, first for ourselves — we really need one — and then for the young men, sparing neither money nor anything else. What I don’t advise is that we remain as we are…. let us join together in looking after both our own interests and those of the boys. (201a-b; emphasis added)
What does Socrates mean by saying, “What I don’t advise is that we remain as we are”? I believe he is making a pragmatist’s point. Yes, we don’t know what arete is, and therefore we don’t know how to find the right teachers of it. But we do agree that it is valuable and can be taught. As long as we come to the problem with the best of intentions, we will end up being the best teachers and the best citizens. In other words, we can presume that they will not find those teachers, and that the right teachers will end up being themselves with their intention to do the job well. This is the model of Athenian citizenship that Plato saw in Socrates.