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ABSTRACT
M.M. McCabe’s rich paper makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of the Euthydemus. However, the account of saying [legein] that McCabe attributes to Socrates requires modification. Although McCabe insists that saying—like the learning process, on which her account of saying is based—is a teleological process, she claims that truth is the end of saying because Socrates aims at truth while speaking. I argue that careful attention to Socrates’ discussion of the technai reveals that teleological processes have ends distinct from the psychological goals of those who employ them. If saying is indeed a teleological process and not merely a process used teleologically, it must have a unique end independent of Socrates’ own idiosyncratic goals. By overlooking this fact, McCabe overlooks a source of normativity prominent in the Ethuydemus and important for Plato’s philosophy more generally. Her account of saying can, however, be modified so as to preserve the central insights of her thoughtful paper. I end by making the speculative suggestion that there is a teleological process superordinate to saying which uses saying in the pursuit of truth.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Thanks to Daniel Kranzelbinder for pressing me to think more about this possibility.
2 Consider Gorg. 502c, where Socrates suggests that what remains when any piece of poetry is stripped of rhythm and meter are logoi. Because Greek poetry frequently included questions, demands, and cries of emotion, it seems to follow that each of these qualify as genuine logoi.
3 McCabe is not as clear about this as one might hope, but a number of passages seem to imply that Socrates’ own aims determine the end of his saying. She says, for example, that ‘Socrates offers us truth-directedness,’ and he allows ‘saying to be an aspiration towards a body of truth’ [McCabe 2021: 146]. Earlier she says the normativity of saying ‘is underwritten by the aims and aspirations of the subject who says’ [ibid.: 144].
4 To keep things tidy I use the term ‘goal’ to refer to that at which an agent aims and ‘end’ to refer to that at which a process aims.
5 It is often assumed that Socrates’ many statements expressing a desire to learn from the brothers must be completely ironic, but this cannot be correct. Socrates makes most of these statements to Crito and Socrates has no reason to be ironical about this issue with his good friend.
6 Other dialogues discuss the nature of the crafts and their ends as well: see the lengthy discussion at Rep. 342c-e and 345e-347a; Gorg. 449c-453a; and Charm. 165c-166c.
7 Οὐδεμία, ἔϕη, τῆς θηρευτικῆς αὐτῆς ἐπὶ πλέον ἐστὶν ἢ ὅσον θηρεῦσαι καὶ χειρώσασθαι. Throughout the Greek is Burnet’s [Citation1903]. The translation is my own.
8 This point about motivation is made more explicitly in Republic I and II. In his discussion with Thrasymachus, Socrates explains that the craft of medicine has no other end but the health of the patient, and he further implies that a true doctor might pursue this end because it is good for the patient [342d]. However, Glaucon later makes clear that many doctors in fact practice medicine in order to make money [357c-d]. Those doctors who seek to profit from medicine still produce health in their patient; though their own personal goal does not coincide with the end of the teleological process of medicine, the Republic does not deny that they practice medicine.
9 There is one unique end of learning towards which one must actually progress in order to learn. We would not claim that Cleinias was genuinely learning if his responses to Socrates’ questions were jokes or witty remarks that in no way contributed to the acquisition of knowledge, however earnestly Socrates was trying to teach him. For other teleological processes with a determinate end: Socrates gives the example of the knowledge and practice of finding gold [288e] as well as the knowledge and practice of making humans immortal [289a].
10 See, for example, Isocrates’ famous hymn logos at Nicocles 5-9 and Antidosis 253-257.
11 I use this word in a technical sense, as it is sometimes used in Plato’s dialogues and very frequently used by scholars in the secondary literature. Sometimes the Greek word διαλέγεσθαι just means to converse with another person [cf. Euthyd. 284e5]. In these cases, it is not being used in my technical sense.