“Gorgias” by Plato (translated by Donald J. Zeyl)

On the surface, this dialogue deals with the merits of oratory, but, more deeply, it also delves into how a man should live and what role justness plays in this good life. Through the course of this dialogue Socrates deals with three sophist interlocutors in succession, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. In turn, they make the case that the powerful live the good life. These sophists argue, particularly, that it is the successful politicians, rulers, and tyrants who truly live well. Socrates disagrees. He states, “Doing what’s unjust is actually the worst thing there is…. I wouldn’t want either, but if had to be one or the other, I would choose suffering over doing what’s unjust…. I say that the admirable and good person, man or woman, is happy, but that the one who’s unjust and wicked is miserable.” Socrates will not be swayed by the consensus of the crowd. “Nevertheless, though I’m only one person, I don’t agree with you. You don’t compel me; instead you produce many false witnesses against me and try to banish me from my property, the truth…. I disregard the things held in honor by the majority of people, and by practicing truth I really try, to the best of my ability, to be and to live as a very good man, and when I die, to die like that…. Choose the orderly life, the life that is adequate to and satisfied with its circumstances at any given time instead of the insatiable, undisciplined life.” 

Callicles denigrates philosophers as skilled in practicing an art only fit for children. For him, greatness lies in the oratory of politicians, skilled in the practice of persuading the masses. Socrates, in turn, questions how Callicles judges what makes a life worthy of being deemed good. “Do you also think as we [philosophers] do that the end of all action is what’s good, and that we should do all other things for its sake, but not it for their sake?… So we should do the other things, including pleasant things, for the sake of good things, and not good things for the sake of pleasant things…. As long as [the soul is] corrupt, in that it’s foolish, undisciplined, unjust and impious, it should be kept away from its appetites and not be permitted to do anything other than what will make it better…. So to be disciplined is better for the soul than lack of discipline.”

Finally, Socrates tries to get at the purpose of oratory, its uses, and how it jives with both the truth and the good. Socrates is particularly concerned with the effect of politician’s speeches on the mass of citizens and on the good of the city as a whole. “Do you think that orators always speak with regard to what’s best? Do they always set their sights on making the citizens as good as possible through their speeches? Or are they, too, bent upon the gratification of the citizens, and, slighting the common good for the sake of their own private good, do they treat the people like children, their sole attempt being to gratify them?” Socrates makes the distinction between the common will and the common weal. For Socrates, it is a great stain on even those Athenian politicians deemed great by posterity, such as Pericles and Cimon, that they left the citizenry in poorer shape than how they found them. “Shouldn’t he [the politician], according to what we agreed just now, have turned [the citizens] out more just instead of more unjust?… I’m not criticizing these men either, insofar as they were servants to the city. I think rather that they proved to be better servants than the men of today, and more capable of satisfying the city’s appetites. But the truth is that in redirecting its appetites and not giving in to them, using persuasion or constraint to get the citizens to become better, they were really not much different from our contemporaries.” Socrates contrasts the purpose of his own speeches with those of all these politicians. “I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians—so as not to say I’m the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries—to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics. This is because the speeches I make on each occasion do not aim at gratification but at what’s best.”

Socrates ends by recapping his view on the just and noble life. “For it’s a difficult thing, Callicles, and one that merits much praise, to live your whole life justly when you’ve found yourself having ample freedom to do what’s unjust…. Doing what’s unjust is more to be guarded against than suffering it, and that it’s not seeming to be good but being good that a man should take care of more than anything, both in his public and his private life.” For Socrates, these are the skills that all men must aspire to before they even contemplate a life concerned with politics. A citizenry composed of men unconcerned with justice is bound to be rotten, no matter their political system. Each man should first concern himself with his own soul, before trying to persuade others. “Nothing terrible will happen to you if you really are an admirable and good man, one who practices excellence. And then, after we’ve practiced it together, then at last, if we think we should, we’ll turn to politics, or then we’ll deliberate about whatever subject we please, when we’re better at deliberating than we are now. For it’s a shameful thing for us, being in the condition we appear to be in at present—when we never think the same about the same subjects, the most important ones at that—to sound off as though we’re somebodies. That’s how far behind in education we’ve fallen.”

“Timaeus” by Plato (translated by Donald J. Zeyl)

This is not a dialogue, but mainly a long speech delivered by Timaeus, an Italian philosopher, likely invented by Plato. Timaeus attempts to explain the creation of the Universe, followed by the creation of Man. He begins by describing the nature of the universe. “Since the god wanted nothing more than to make the world like the best of the intelligible things, complete in every way, he made it a single visible living thing, which contains within itself all the living things whose nature it is to share its kind.”

After the god formed the lesser gods, the daemons, and the four main elements, next humans were formed. “The first innate capacity they would of necessity come to have would be sense perception, which arises out of forceful disturbances. This they all will have. The second would be love, mingled with pleasure and pain. And they would come to have fear and spiritedness as well, plus whatever goes with having these emotions, as well as their natural opposites. And if they could master these emotions, their lives would be just, whereas if they were mastered by them, they would be unjust. And if a person lived a good life throughout the due course of his time, he would at the end return to his dwelling place in his companion star, to live a life of happiness that agreed with his character.”

Timaeus next speaks of the Soul. “We must pronounce the soul to be the only thing there is that properly possesses understanding. The soul is an invisible thing, whereas fire, water, earth, and air have all come to be as visible bodies. So anyone who is a lover of understanding and knowledge must of necessity pursue as primary causes those that belong to intelligent nature, and as secondary all those belonging to things that are moved by others and that set still others in motion by necessity…. These pursuits have given us philosophy, a gift from the gods to the mortal race whose value neither has been nor ever will be surpassed.” However, Timaeus also speaks of a second Soul housed within man. “And within the body they [the gods] built another kind of soul as well, the mortal kind, which contains within it those dreadful but necessary disturbances: pleasure, first of all, evil’s most powerful lure; then pains, that make us run away from what is good; besides these, boldness also and fear, foolish counselors both; then also the spirit of anger hard to assuage, and expectation easily led astray. These they fused with unreasoning sense perception and all-venturing lust, and so, as was necessary, they constructed the mortal type of soul.”

Timaeus speaks of the dichotomy between the Necessary and the Intellect. “For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of this universe.” Next, Timaeus speaks of the nature of evil. He states, “no one is willfully evil. A man becomes evil, rather, as a result of one or another corrupt condition of his body and an uneducated upbringing. No one who incurs these pernicious conditions would will to have them.”

Timaeus goes on to relate the nature of Forms and detail the difference between Understanding and Belief. “If understanding and true opinion are distinct, then these “by themselves” things definitely exist—these Forms, the objects not of our sense perception, but of our understanding only. But if—as some people think—true opinion does not differ in any way from understanding, then all the things we perceive through our bodily senses must be assumed to be the most stable things there are. But we do have to speak of understanding and true opinion as distinct, of course, because we can come to have one without the other, and the one is not like the other. It is through instruction that we come to have understanding, and through persuasion that we come to have true belief. Understanding always involves a true account while true belief lacks any account. And while understanding remains unmoved by persuasion, true belief gives in to persuasion. And of true belief it must be said, all men have a share, but of understanding, only the gods and a small group of people do.” Timaeus goes into more detail on the nature of Forms. “That which keeps its own form unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed, which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, nor itself enters into anything else anywhere, is one thing. It is invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all—and it is the role of understanding to study it.” Finally, he states, “There are being, space, and becoming, three distinct things which existed even before the universe came to be.”

Finally, Timaeus speaks about the necessity of proportion in the well-ordered life. “Now all that is good is beautiful, and what is beautiful is not ill-proportioned. Hence we must take it that if a living thing is to be in good condition, it will be well-proportioned…. In determining health and disease or virtue and vice no proportion or lack of it is more important than between body and soul…. There is in fact one way to preserve oneself, and that is not to exercise the soul without exercising the body, nor the body without the soul, so that each may be balanced by the other and so be sound.” Timaeus ends by going back to philosophy and the search for the higher truths. “If a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his grasp.” However, we must remember that we cannot ever be sure how much Plato, himself, agreed with this account of Creation, which he has sketched out through the imaginary voice of Timaeus.