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The Inverted Nature of Plato's Euthyphro

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

James Brouwer
James Brouwer
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , Winter 2002 , pp. 45 - 70
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Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2002

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References

Notes

1 Garrett, Roland, “The Structure of Plato's Euthyphro,” in Southern Journal of Philosophy, 12, 2 (1974): 165–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 165.

3 A major question concerning the issue of piety in the dialogue is whether the Euthyphro provides a definition of piety at all. There are those who hold, usually by a thorough undertaking of what Plato has written on the subject in other dialogues, that a somewhat indirect definition of piety can be “constructed” from the dialogue after all (see, for example, Bonitz, H., Platonische Studien [Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1968];Google ScholarHeidel, W. A., “On Plato's Euthyphro” TAPA, 31 [1900]: 173ff.;Google Scholar or Burnet, J., Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates and Crito [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924]).Google Scholar There are others, however, who argue that no definition of piety can be made from the dialogue whatsoever (for a good example of the “anticonstructivist” position see Versenyi, Laszlo, Holiness and Justice: An Interpretation of Plato's Euthyphro [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982], pp. 105–11).Google Scholar Though this debate is not the focus of the present essay, my position is somewhere between the two extremes: there is indeed a philosophical aporia that ultimately dismantles any ultimate definition of piety in the Euthyphro, but it is one that—in its very negativity—becomes integral to how piety must be understood.

4 All references to Plato's Euthyphro are taken from the Grube, G. M. A. translation in Plato: Complete Works, edited by Cooper, John M. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).Google Scholar All references to Plato's Apology are taken from Tredneck, Hugh's translation in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Hamilton, Edith, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

5 In a dialogue replete with switchings-of-place, it is worth noting that its very beginning illustrates the same. For Socrates is here not in his usual locale, i.e., no longer down in the Lyceum, he is here up in the courts. Indeed, the entire dialogue is circumscribed by the courts; it begins with a reference back to Socrates's indictment, and it ends with a reference forward to the trial itself.

6 This is partly suggested in the very inception of the dialogue. Throughout 2 and 2b Socrates gives deliberately general answers which force Euthyphro into questioning for greater specificity. He need not be so indirect, but he is nonetheless. Plato's exact reasons for this are unclear—it may be nothing more than a dramatic device—and aspects of it can be found in other dialogues as well. But it is worth noting that it inverts the usual roles: Euthyphro is here the questioner, Socrates the questioned. Yet at 3e through to 4a the positions are reversed once again: here it is Euthyphro being evasive in regard to his legal situation, with Socrates forced to question for greater specificity. But this reversal ought not to surprise us. My thesis is that the dialogue is, in great measure, about getting things backwards, about the inversion of what ought to be the case, and here that is itself hinted at by the switching of the questioner/questioned roles.

7 Adam, J., in his Platonis Euthyphro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890)Google Scholar, gives an able elaboration of this polarity. Adam points out that Euthyphro, more than perhaps any other Athenian citizen, stands furthest apart from Socrates. For the legends cited early on in the dialogue (6a) would appear to be literally true to Euthyphro (Adam, Platonis Euthyphro, p. xviii), even though Athens itself had by that time outgrown a naive faith in their orthodoxy (Ibid., p. xix). Socrates as the questioner of religious orthodoxy finds its converse in the figure of Euthyphro who retains the religious orthodoxy of Athens's past. Lewis, Mario Jr., “An Interpretation of Plato's Euthyphro,” Part 1 in Interpretation, 12 (1984), pp. 225–59Google Scholar, similarly argues that the Euthyphro presents a conflict between the practice of philosophy and the adherence to civic piety: “Ancient civic piety and philosophy are fundamentally different and opposed ways of life. The former is the archetype and limit of man's reliance on divinity for the ordering of public and private affairs” (Ibid., p. 227).

8 This is in no way accidental. If we read the dialogue with the idea that Plato includes what he does for a purpose, then we must ask what purpose Euthyphro's legal situation serves in a dialogue supposedly about the question of “piety.” The answer here cannot be simply that it serves as an easy way to introduce the concept of piety itself, for any number of scenarios could do that. We have to attend to what is specific here and in this sense it makes far more sense to say that the dialogue is deliberately using the nature of Euthyphro's legal situation to contrast that of Socrates's.

9 Of course, there is a sense in which Socrates too is a type of father-figure (to the young he supposedly corrupts, to the Athenian citizenry, etc.) and yet he finds himself condemned by this “youth” Meletus. Socrates, as well, alludes to his patriarch status in Apology, where he describes himself as “busying himself all the time” on the Athenian citizenry, “going like a father or an elder brother to see each one of you privately, and urging you to set your thoughts on goodness” (31b).

10 This structure is embedded in the trial of Socrates himself. It is worth remembering that, in Apology, Socrates claims that he is there only defending himself against his apparent opponent, that Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon are only the effect of the years of general slander and envy of the Athenians that went on before them. So, again, everything is backwards: the “more formidable” (Apology 18b) danger to Socrates is this “earlier,” “invisible opponent” (Apology, 18d) that is not present in the court, rather than the secondary and immediate opponents that are.

11 Apology makes the irony of this clearer in that it holds little such optimism for the future. Socrates states that both Meletus and Anytus are products of the “slander and jealousy of a great many people” and that these “have been fatal to a great many other innocent men, and I suppose will continue to be so; there is no likelihood that they will stop at me” (28b). And as to the claim of Meletus's “benefit to the state,” this is again contradicted in the Apology, where Socrates describes him as “a thoroughly selfish bully, [who] has brought this action against me out of sheer wanton aggressiveness and self-assertion” (26e).

12 The irony is that Euthyphro, believing he alone divines the truth of ancestral gods, effectively sets out to destroy his immediate ancestor: his father. Euthyphro severs himself from his very real familial past through the naive belief that a legendary past speaks through him.

13 For that matter, it is no accident that this is one of the few Platonic dialogues limited to two characters alone, for a great deal of it focuses on binary relations (father/son, prosecuted/prosecutor, younger generation/elder generation, definition/defined, etc.) and their apparent inversion.

14 Between Euthyphro and Socrates there is an inverse relation in terms of thinking. Socrates's thought is dynamic and forward, Euthyphro's immobile and backwards. Socrates pursues the dialectic wherever it leads, but Euthyphro only follows the strictures of ancestral law and custom. So rooted is he in the religious orthodoxy of Athens that he thoroughly believes himself to voice divine truths. It is because, for Euthyphro, truth is either to be mouthed in a prophecy or left unquestioned as orthodoxy that he is also serves as Plato's hint as to how not to read Euthyphro. In an oblique sense, Euthyphro is the very inverse of Euthyphro, for, as Lewis rightly notes, the aim of the Platonic dialogue is “to enable thoughtful readers to come to their own independent insights, and to help them acquire something of Socrates's openness, precision and speculative daring” (Lewis, Jr., “An Interpretation,” p. 230). The Platonic dialogue is not itself a teaching so much as it is the basis for a thinking the reader engages in reflexively. Euthyphro, in contrast, embodies the simple reception of what is handed down from ancestry and custom. Whereas the Platonic dialogue is essentially an indirect and relational process of thought, Euthyphro is direct and singular, an adherent to religious dogma and a painfully literal person; he misses all of Socrates's irony and offers none of it himself. It should come as no surprise, then, that Euthyphro's very name means “straight” (euthy) “thought” (phrōn). Euthyphro's adherence to the obvious and literal is punned in his very name, though, of course, he would be the last to ever see it.

15 It has also been suggested by Lewis that Socrates is in fact describing Euthyphro under the guise of describing himself: when Socrates states at 3d that they think “that I pour out to anybody, anything I have to say” even to the point of paying the listener to endure it, he is really describing Euthyphro. For Lewis, Socrates's poverty could never allow him to pay his listeners, and more importantly “putting on a display, teaching his wisdom, pouring out whatever is in his mind—these are the very things Euthyphro does whenever he prophesies in the assembly” (Lewis, Jr., “An Interpretation,” p. 243). But to really succeed this interpretation would have to show that the first part of the comparison, in which he speaks of Euthyphro as being “rarely available” and “unwilling to teach his own wisdom,” is really a veiled description of Socrates; otherwise both sides of the comparison would seem to be about Euthyphro, even though they speak of opposed qualities. It is interesting, further, to note that the opposition of these qualities is ultimately one of hiding and showing, making manifest and making invisible. Euthyphro shows too little of himself or his knowledge; Socrates too much. But of course, much of what we know of Socrates suggests the reverse: Socrates is not ostentatious; he does not teach, he questions. Nor does he impart his wisdom, for his sole wisdom is that he lacks the wisdom others believe themselves to possess. It may be, then, that the negative or non-apparent traits Socrates attributes to Euthyphro are an indirect description of himself, and the positive or ostentatious traits he attributes to himself are really a description of Euthyphro. Again, the places are switched. To Meletus and others like him—for in truth, Socrates is not describing himself, but is describing how he is described in the eyes of his persecutors—their roles are inverted.

16 The dialogue does a wonderful job of showing how these supposed “powers” such as Euthyphro's almost arrogant claims to know the holy from the unholy amount to very little. In what must be either shallow words of comfort or one of the more obviously misguided prophecies ever uttered, Euthyphro states—at Socrates's prompting—”Perhaps it will come to nothing, Socrates, and you will fight your case as you think best, as I think I will mine” (3e). One would never call Euthyphro the sharpest of Socrates's interlocutors, and more often than not he comes across as misguided and conceited.

17 Euthyphro's supposed difference from the common man is indicated throughout. He considers himself extraordinary, a point Socrates himself notes with irony at being told that Euthyphro is charging his father with murder: “Good heavens! Certainly, Euthyphro, most men would not know how they could do this and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this but of one who is far advanced in wisdom” (4a-b). Later, Euthyphro replies that, if he did not have accurate knowledge of the holy and unholy, “I should be of no use, Socrates, and Euthyphro would not be superior to the majority of men” (4e-5). Of course, Euthyphro again has it backwards, for the gist of the dialogue is that Euthyphro is indeed just like the general run of men in knowing not what he claims to know, he is extraordinary only in the sense that he has fooled himself into thinking that he is superior, when in reality he is the dead opposite.

18 Allen, R. E., Plato's Euthyphro and the Earlier Theory of Forms (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).Google Scholar

19 Ibid., pp. 20–21.

20 It is a matter of dispute, however, whether this conflict between Euthyphro and his family is due to a tension between his duties as a citizen and his duties as a son, or whether it is due to the unprecedented nature of the actual crime. According to Lewis, for instance, Euthyphro's situation confronts us with the “contradictory demands” of family and state. Because “divine law commands citizens to honour their parents, but also to oppose injustice and avenge its victims,” Euthyphro “cannot fulfill one commandment without breaking another” (Lewis, Jr. “An Interpretation,” p. 248). This is due, according to Lewis, to a conflict between justice and piety “potentially present within piety itself “(Ibid.). I am inclined to say, however, that the conflict present in Euthyphro's situation is less rooted in the concept of piety and far more rooted in the legal ambiguities of the particular homicide Plato portrays. Lewis tends to overlook just how unique and peculiar the circumstances of this particular crime are. For one thing, it is not clear that Euthyphro's father ever intended to murder the labourer, or whether an accidental letting-die is a murder. However, intention played a crucial role for the ancient Greeks in deciding whether a killing was homicide or not. (For more on this see MacDowell, Douglas M., The Law in Classical Athens [London: Thames & Hudson, 1978], pp. 114–15.Google Scholar) Furthermore, it is questionable whether the killing of one who is himself a murderer constitutes religious pollution at all. For instance, Blits, Jan H.'s “The Holy and the Human: An Interpretation of Plato's Euthyphro” (Apeiron, 14 [1980]: 19–40)CrossRefGoogle Scholar holds that “since the man was a murderer, Euthyphro should be no more concerned about his life than his father had been … since the killing was not unjust, there can be no pollution and hence no need to prosecute”( Ibid., p. 22). Lastly, Macdowell makes clear that it is the duty of the victim's family to effect prosecution and so rid the pollution. “If the victim was a slave, it fell to the owner to take action. It is less clear what happened if the victim was free but had no relatives in Athens, as could be the situation of a former slave who had been freed”(MacDowell, The Law in Classical Athens, p. 111). Macdowell goes on to cite Euthyphro as containing an example of just such a case, and argues that in such an instance “the law did not forbid, though it did not require, non-relatives to bring a case of homicide”(Ibid.). But as MacDowell himself attests, “this interpretation remains both disputed and supported” and “remains one of the most controversial questions in the study of Athenian Law” (Ibid.). For more on the legal system in Athens, see Harrison, A. R. W., The Law of Athens: The Family and Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).Google Scholar

21 I am siding with Allen's account of Euthyphro's intentions though fully aware that it is a matter of debate. Against those who had argued that Euthyphro expected the charges to be dismissed—see Taylor, A. E., Plato: The Man and His Work, 2nd ed. (New York: Dial Press, 1927), p. 147Google Scholar—Allen argues that Euthyphro fully expected his father's conviction and that such was necessary for the removal of pollution tainting the entire family. Weiss, Roslyn's “Euthyphro's Failure” (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 24 [1986]: 437–53)CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues that Allen is right in thinking that Euthyphro believed the prosecution of his father to be the proper outcome of his indictment against him, but she holds that “there are no grounds, however, for his view that Euthyphro acted out of concern for his father. As far as one can tell from the dialogue, any interest that his father be cleansed stemmed immediately from his desire to remove the pollution” (Ibid., p. 439). Though it is hardly crucial, Weiss's response does not override Allen's; the desire to remove pollution need not be a selfish desire, nor could it be since it is a pollution shared by the family, Euthyphro and his father included. But the crucial point is not so much whether Euthyphro's motives were selfish or familial, but that they were based on the presupposition of a pollution that had yet to be proven.

22 Allen notes something similar here: “a sensible man, before proceeding in such a cause, might be expected to have acquired clear knowledge that pollution existed—that is, that under the given circumstances, Euthyphro's father's action was homicide. That question, which under Greek law was open to reasonable doubt, is one which Euthyphro settles by appeal to special authority—namely, his own as an expert in religious matters” (Allen, Plato's Euthyphro, p. 23).

23 Euthyphro's quarrel is that since mortals believe Zeus to be the greatest of gods even though he justly overthrew his father, they ought not take him to task for doing the same. Note the lines of relation here: Euthyphro claims to be acting as Zeus had in overthrowing his father Cronos, and Zeus himself acted as Cronos had in castrating his father Uranos. So, Euthyphro, in effect, finds justice in imitating an act that was itself an imitation. But, as Lewis points out, Euthyphro's situation is entirely disanalogous to that which he compares it (Lewis, Jr., “An Interpretation,” p. 254). Uranos hid his children in the earth and Cronos swallowed his; in each case the son overthrew the father because the father first sought to overthrow the son. Yet, no such threat was imposed on Euthyphro by his father and so his imitation can hardly be believed. The myth relates a reciprocating violence between father and son; Euthyphro, however, does violence to his father on behalf of a violence imposed indirectly on a stranger who was himself a murderer. He has, in a sense, put things back to front once again: his imitation of the gods is here only the imitation of an effect (the overthrow of the father) and misinterprets entirely the prior basis by which that effect was realized (the attempted overthrow of the son).

24 Or, conversely, if the two were in fact the same, as Euthyphro imagines, then we could not maintain the order already agreed upon; we would have to say either that what is pleasing to the gods is such by virtue of being pleasing to the gods, or that the pious is pious by virtue of being loved, both of which have been explicitly denied (lOd-e).

25 The Greek for “care” or “service” here is therapeia, a word whose varying connotations are subtly drawn out by Socrates at this point in the dialogue. It is worth noting that two of these connotations pertain to the service that the derivative or secondary owes to what is prior or primary: “the service” a servant owes to his or her master, and “the service” that offspring owe to their parents. This latter is a “service” made all the more complicated by Euthyphro's own prosecution of his father: the aim of service, as he admits, is to improve the served, but here Euthyphro seeks to “serve” his father by prosecuting him in the courts on a question-begging charge of a questionable crime. But the “genealogical” aspects of therepeia are further evinced in the fact that it means also “the service” a breeder gives to the animals so bred, to “care for their young” (think of Socrates's description of Meletus at 2d). (The “genealogical” references at work in the Euthyphro [father/son, elder/youth, etc.] are continued in Socrates's description of himself as a midwife for philosophical “births,” and to some extent even in Plato's theory of recollected knowledge, which seeks to preserve an inherited lineage of thought itself.) Therapeia, as a word, is used only briefly, however, for at 13d Socrates suggests that, by therapeia, Euthyphro really means a type of skilled service (hupéretiké) which is bound to divine work.

26 Versenyi says as much when he asks how Euthyphro, in ignorance of the divine ergon, “could claim to know what is and is not holy.” How, he asks, could Euthyphro “know what hupéretiké might consist in, and being ignorant of this how could anyone intelligently engage in hupéretiké?” (Versenyi, Holiness and Justice, p. 105). Furthermore, if the ergon of the gods cannot be known, then Euthyphro cannot know with certainty what the nature of his service to that ergon would be, and so he could not know that his prosecution of his father is a holy action. The hupéretiké notion, then, is not so much a definition of piety but another sort of reversal, for while it appears to proceed to the essence of piety, it ultimately only brings us back to the initial question of what it is in essence.

27 The fact that Euthyphro himself leaves unstated the ergon of the gods may not, according to some, entail that Plato meant to deny it. Bonitz has argued that the Euthyphro—by relation to other Platonic works—nonetheless implies an ergon of the gods that Euthyphro leaves unstated, namely, the Good. Piety, on this account, is our service to the gods in their achievement of the Good. But Versenyi, for one, has done an able job of showing the problems inherent in constructivist positions of this sort. Methodologically, it requires extensive appeal to later Platonic dialogues incongruent with the Euthyphro (Versenyi, Holiness and Justice, p. 107). It also leads to substantive problems in the context of the Euthyphro itself. For if we assume that the essential work of the gods consists in realizing the Good in the world, our proper service (hupéretiké) to the gods could only be our work in realizing the Good on human terms—improvement of the soul, and the exercise of philosophy chief among them. But then part of the problem, according to Versenyi, is (a) that this definition fails to distinguish virtue from piety, since the latter basically amounts to the work of human excellence (Ibid., p. 106), and (b) it makes any appeal to the gods redundant since the only service we could effect in realizing the Good would be the Good in the human realm (Ibid., p. 108).

28 It is crucial to note that the dialogue does not go on to refute Euthyphro's claim that piety is a type of service (hupéretiké) of men to the gods. McPherran, M. L.'s “Socratic Piety in the Euthyphro” (in Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates, edited by Benson, Hugh H. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], pp. 220–41)Google Scholar sees this as at least supporting the notion that the Euthyphro yields a “partial” definition of piety—”partial” because the dialogue goes on to show that the nature of this divine work cannot ever be known by us mortals and that it is ultimately the activity of philosophy which reveals and retains the unknowable nature of piety, thus preventing our impiety of presuming we have infallible knowledge.

But while the dialogue may, as McPherran holds, establish the Socratic belief that piety is that part of justice which is a service (hupéretiké) of men to the gods in their work (ergon), it does a remarkably poor job as a definition. In effect it merely reproduces the initial question on another level: the notion that piety is our service (hupéretiké) to the divine work (ergon) only leads us to ask what this divine work is unto which piety is bound as an active part—and that, the dialogue reveals, cannot be answered. For this reason, what McPherran sees as an “incomplete” definition might just as easily be described as being no definition at all.

29 Euthyphro's earlier position at 13d, in which piety is called a service to the gods of the sort slaves give their masters, has now effectively been inverted in the suggestion of a one-sided “commerce.” Socrates's questioning suggests that, far from being slaves to the gods, Euthyphro's reasoning implies that it is we ourselves who have advantage (pleonektein) over them. Slave and master switch places. For while we derive all from the gods, Euthyphro holds that the gods derive only honour, respect, and gratitude from us, acts which have their worth and meaning only as far as the gods find them dear. Because Euthyphro cannot give these acts any intrinsic piety, we are brought back to the initial question concerning the nature of the pious itself.

30 According to Plato, the movement of these statues is circular. But Daedalus, it will be remembered, is a figure associated with circularity all along; he is famous for creating a labyrinth often described as being circular and serpentine in design, and he is further famous for solving the problem of how to thread a spiral shell by attaching a thread to an ant. The circular descriptions Plato associates with him are not novel, but ingrained. Here, though, they suit the dialogue perfectly. Furthermore, quite independently of any discussion of the Euthyphro's own aporetic structure, Bonnefoy, Yves (in Mythologies, Vol. 1, translated by Doniger, Wendy [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981])Google Scholar holds that the circular labyrinth “is a spatial representation of the notion of aporia, a problem that is unsolvable or that contains its solution within itself” (Ibid., p. 389).

31 Ibid., p. 389.

32 Specifically, at 6e, 9a, 1 lb, 12e, 14c, and 15e.

33 And it is to be remembered that Euthyphro was written by Plato in the context of Socrates's execution, from the vantage point of the future. That is why what is here presented as a type of “pre-trial” trial of “piety” is more accurately seen as a “post-trial” trial of that supposed “knowledge” of piety which allowed Socrates's execution. “Before” and “after” ought to exchange places. The dialogue is not, therefore, a record of what Socrates said to Euthyphro before his death so much as it is a re-creation of Socrates after—and from the perspective of—his recent demise. (The Daedalus reference perhaps carries connotations with Plato himself in that they both, by their very artfulness, breathe life into what ought to be seen as dead.)

34 Recall too that Euthyphro at last takes leave of Socrates by referring to the future: “Some other time, Socrates, for I am in a hurry now, and it is time for me to go” (15e), and Socrates's very last words to him are “I would be better for the rest of my life” were Euthyphro to succeed. But, whereas Euthyphro again shows his blindness as a “seer” (there is not going to be “some other time”), Socrates shows his skills as an ironist (he has already lived the better life). In neither case is the actual future being referred to, and so the dialogue retains its temporal immobility.

35 It helps to see that the theory of forms (to speak in rudimentary terms) is itself a type of inversionary process, for it is about removing what is only apparently primary—namely, the appearance of the thing to sense—and replacing that with the form by which there is the appearance of the thing at all. It is a matter of turning the apparent order of things on its head such that the form by which the thing is seen is revealed to be first of all.