CHRONOS, PSUCHĒ AND LOGOS IN PLATO’S EUTHYDEMUS

Andy German
Ben Gurion University

That Plato invested great effort in distinguishing philosophy and Socrates from

sophistry and the sophists is, by now, a truth universally acknowledged. It is another, and

altogether more difficult task, to understand Plato’s precise assessment of the significance of

sophistry and what finally separates it from philosophy. My goal is to show how the

Euthydemus sheds some unexpected light on this question.

It would be false, though, to claim that this dialogue exhibits the whole phenomenon of

sophistry. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are eristic masters and hence rhetoricians of a

distinct kind. But the Socrates of this dialogue, too, is distinctive in his behavior, more fawning

groupie than scourge. For example, rather than protect Cleinias and Crito, he actively tries to

make them join him as pupils of the brothers (for good measure, he encourages Crito to bring

his sons along as bait (272d2-3, 304b4–5). 1 Cleinias is indeed the object of two Socratic

exhortations to virtue, but apart from the acute question of whether, upon closer analysis, these

are actually convincing to anyone not already committed to philosophy,2 Socrates seems to go

out of his way to muddy the waters. He expresses his desire to master eristic (295d5, 301e1–2)

and shows he can imitate the brothers at will (296e4, 301b1–2). Socrates never attacks them, nor

does he lift a finger when they make a hash out of philosophical teachings associated with him,

such as anamnēsis or the “Beautiful Itself”.

Now, even if Socrates’s irony is for the reader’s benefit and was intended to go right

over the heads of his interlocutors, this leaves us with the question of why Plato has him act so

that those he is supposed to be educating and protecting do not get the joke. In fact, the only

person in the dialogue who launches an unambiguous attack on eristic is the anonymous

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Andy German
Ben Gurion University
auditor (perhaps Isocrates) whom Crito mentions near the end of the dialogue (305a2–4), who

lambasts Socrates’s “shameful” behavior in submitting himself to such scandalous men.

Socrates, however, does not agree with this critique. It has, he says, more of seemliness

(euprepeian) about it than truth (305e5–306a1; a most interesting rebuttal, since the focus on

seeming at the expense of being was part of the sophistic stock-in-trade. Yet, Socrates applies it

not to the sophists themselves, but to the attack on them in the name of traditional Athenian

virtue).3 Socrates leaves untouched Crito’s assumption that the brothers are engaged in

philosophy (304e6-7) and makes no effort to help him clarify what distinguishes the worthy

(chrēstoi) philosophers from the corrupted (ponēroi) sort (307b7-8).4

Our hermeneutical predicament, then, is as follows: we have here a Socrates who

behaves sophistically to those who do not know how to distinguish philosophy from sophistry

but is insufficiently philosophical for readers who think they do. To say the least, the

Euthydemus stands at a certain, idiosyncratic angle to the phenomenon of sophistry.

Now, the mechanics of fallacious argument in the Euthydemus have been subjected to

exhaustive analyses (by Julia Annas and Thomas Chance, for example), so I do not propose to

repeat them. In addition, it is a well-established scholarly consensus that the Euthydemus is an

anti-sophistic polemic. But the Euthydemus is so truly odd (and in so many ways), that a fuller

grasp of what is at stake in it requires a temporary suspension of our anti-sophistic ire and of

the consensus omnium according to which the dialogue is an exposé of linguistic legerdemain

and its pernicious effects.5 It is surely also those things, but I want to suggest that the

Euthydemus is best seen as a kind of diagnosis. The patient, however, is not eristic and not even

primarily sophistry. It is the soul. In other words, sophistry and eristic are symptoms. Their

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Andy German
Ben Gurion University
decisive importance lies in what they reveal about the relationship between chronos, logos and

psuchē. That is, in reflecting on the sophists, Plato is reflecting on what, we are repeatedly

assured, the Greeks were not yet able to make explicit – the ambiguous nature of our interiority.

I. ARETĒ and ERISTIKĒ

Practically the first words out of Euthydemus’ mouth are: “Virtue, Socrates . . . we

believe that the pair of us can impart it to human beings most beautifully and quickly” (273d8–

9). The claim to teach virtue was the most famous and dramatic sophistic boast, so it is natural

to find it, in some form or another, at the heart of any dialogue where sophistry is a topic.

Nevertheless, it is somewhat less obvious what it is doing in the Euthydemus. Despite Socrates’s

repeated entreaties, the brothers make no pretense of actually exhorting anyone to virtue, which

is not even central to most of their arguments. For that matter, Socrates also departs radically

from standard operating procedure. Faced with the brothers’ conceit, he does not bother to seek

an agreed-upon definition of virtue or knowledge (as he did in the Meno), nor does he pause to

ask for proof that it really is teachable (as in the Protagoras). He simply accepts that the brothers

possess the art of teaching virtue as a kind of godsend (hermaion)(273e2).6 Socrates does give two

examples of the kind of protreptic he seeks, but each time the brothers as much as sail right past

him, so that no direct confrontation over education or virtue ever occurs.

We might argue that the confrontation is the contrast between the brothers’ galling

buffoonery and Socrates’s true dialectic, a contrast that sets the latter in the best possible light.

But this is unconvincing, even apart from the question of whether the dialogues make it

possible to know in sufficient detail what Plato meant by dialectic. At 290c5, young Cleinias

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Andy German
Ben Gurion University
gives a highly promising definition of dialectic as the art that knows how to “use” ta onta, but

Socrates does not elaborate on it in any detail. In fact, an opportunity arises to display dialectic

in actu when Dionysodorus makes a mockery out of Socrates’s statement that beautiful things

(kala pragmata) differ from the beautiful, though there is a “certain beauty present in each of

them.” Dionysodorus follows up with: “So if a cow comes into your presence, you’re a cow. .

.and because I am present with you now, you’re Dionysodorus?” (301a5-6). This is precisely the

kind of “barbaric bog” from which, according to the Republic, only dialectic can save us.7

Socrates could have paused to show how dialectic, grasping the logon hekastou ousias, the logos

of the being of each thing (R, 534b3–4), leads to correct discernment and conceptualization of

the way different beings—empirical or noetic—can be “present.” In the Euthydemus, however,

we are left to lie where we fall.8

It is clear from the outset that this was not meant to be a standard sophistic epideixis.

While everyone present urges the brothers to display “the power of their wisdom” (274d3),

Socrates qualifies this: they are to put off the “fullest display” (274d6–7) and answer his more

limited question. Is their purported technē—the ability to make someone good—efficacious only

for someone already convinced that virtue is teachable or can it also persuade the as-yet

unconvinced? Subsequent to this, Socrates narrows the scope further: he does not ask the

brothers to give an account of how they do this but only to display its efficacy with regard to a

specific person, Cleinias (275a5). What exactly has happened here?

In one sense, Socrates is simply drawing out an implication of the brothers’ own claim to

teach aretē. Teaching implies persuading, since an education to virtue must make certain ends

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Ben Gurion University
become normative for a student, when they were not before. That is, the claim to teach virtue

implies a whole series of claims to knowledge about moral psychology—the sources of and

obstacles to moral motivation. It implies knowledge of the soul: what its mode of being is so

that things can appear to it, and what the means are for altering these appearances. In focusing

on the protreptic element of the brothers’ “wisdom,” Socrates is interested in that knowledge. 9

In addition, just as Aristotle reminds us that no doctor cures man in general, but rather

“this Socrates” or “this Callias”, no one has ever persuaded human nature. 10 One persuades a

particular person, with a particular character and motivational structure, having a particular

history of opinions. The ability to teach virtue is a kind of empeireia: a tailoring of speech to a

particular soul. Socrates also remarks that that the two brothers have arrived “eis kalliston,” with

beautiful timing (275b4), thus noting another critical aspect of protreptikē—the kairos, or

opportune moment. One must know when to persuade.11 Cleinias, for example, may only now

have arrived at that delicate age where he is old enough to listen to reason but not yet so

corrupted or set in his ways as to be beyond instruction. If the brothers can teach and persuade,

we ought to witness their knack for identifying correctly the particularities of personality and

opportunity.12

It is therefore a massive hermeneutical error to move directly to argumentative analyses

without noticing how the opening exchange has placed those arguments into a double frame:

the brothers are making a display of their eristic logoi, but the dialogue is not merely a

regurgitation of logoi. It places them within a broader thematic context, the guiding question of

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Andy German
Ben Gurion University
which is: “How is a certain art of logos related to a soul of a particular kind and at a particular

point in time?”

II. CHRONOS

I want to approach the first salient characteristic of the Euthydemus by way of the

Theaetetus. In the “digression” passage of that dialogue, Socrates distinguishes philosophers by

the leisurely pace in which they exchange logoi with one another in their search for tou ontos.

Unlike the litigator, the philosopher does not speak under the pressure of the water-clock. 13 The

Euthydemus, by contrast, is distinctive in its unmistakable emphasis on speed. After Euthydemus

has refuted Cleinias’s first answer and “before the young boy had a chance to well and truly

catch his breath” (276c2), Dionysodorus steps in to lay a new trap. He is at it again at 277b3,

with Euthydemus having hardly finished his second refutation. Euthydemus returns the favor

at 277d1, “rushing in” to throw the young man for another fall, just as Socrates intervenes to

enforce a time-out. The drill repeats itself at 297b2 when Dionysodorus “quickly (tachu)

interrupts” an argument to rescue Euthydemus from falling into self-refutation and at 298e6

where he quickly interrupts so “that Ctesippus would have no chance to say anything.” 14 The

brothers switch gears and positions with breathtaking rapidity in order to prevent their

interlocutors from catching their breath, from noticing fatal logical slips, from being able to see

where an argument is leading. Indeed, whole stretches of the dialogue read as if fired from a

logical machine gun.15 Now, in the Sophistici Elenchi Aristotle does note the importance of speed

in the mechanics of refutation, and there is no doubt a great deal of that at work here.

Nevertheless, speed has a significance in the Euthydemus that goes beyond tripping up a victim

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Ben Gurion University
within any given argumentative chain. This significance becomes explicit in an exchange

between Socrates and Dionysodorus at 286b7ff.

Just prior to this passage, Dionysodorus had forced young Ctesippus, Cleinias’ chief

admirer, to admit that contradiction (antilegein) is impossible. Socrates wants to understand this

Protagorean argument (286c7) and in doing so, he links it to Euthydemus’ earlier, basically

Eleatic, demonstration that speaking falsehood is impossible since all “saying” says something

that is, and hence no one can say what is not.16 He makes Dionysodorus agree that if falsehood is

impossible, then so is opining falsely (pseudē doxazein). But then, it is certainly impossible for

anyone to do wrong or act incorrectly (oud’ examartanein estin) either, since deliberate action is

articulate action; that is, it issues from judgments about how things stand. Socrates then asks:

If we can’t miss the mark (mē hamartanomen) when we act or speak or think, then before
Zeus…what is it that you have come here as teachers of? Weren’t you just now ( arti)
claiming you could impart virtue most beautifully to any human being who’s willing to
learn?17

This is something of a turning point in the dialogue. Up to this point, Socrates had been

primarily an enabler or bystander of the conversation (with the exception of his protreptic

exchange with Cleinias). This is his first direct confrontation with eristic method, and it elicits

the following rebuke from Dionysodorus:

Socrates, are you such a Kronos that now (nun) you’re recollecting (anamimnēiskēi) what
we said at first (to prōton), and if there’s something I said last year (perusin) are you going
to recollect that now (nun), while you have no clue how to cope with the things being
said at the present moment (en tōi paronti)?18

Socrates’ question embodies two assumptions: First, that the entire conversation with

the brothers is a unity constituted by the overriding purpose established at its beginning –

namely, to observe how the brothers make good on their claim to persuade Cleinias to

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Ben Gurion University
19
philosophize and care for virtue. The second assumption has to do with how Socrates

understands the present and what it means to be “in” the present. For him recollecting prior

arguments is inseparable from understanding where the interlocutors are “now”; that is,

recollective access to the past is constitutive of the present. While for Dionysodorus, too,

recollection is necessarily “about the past,” 20 it is his understanding of the present that is

radically different. He reveals something of it by tarring Socrates with the epithet “Kronos”, the

Titan who reigned before his son Zeus but who “now”, in the present Olympian age, is

“history” (in the American sense of that word): 21 i.e. Socrates is a relic, “finished”. As we will

see, there is a direct confrontation here between two approaches to the relationship between

time and logos.22 These approaches can be examined in the brothers’ first eristic set piece

(beginning at 275d), which turns on two questions: (i) “Who are those who learn? The wise or

the ignorant?” and (ii) “Do those who learn, learn what they know, or what they don’t know?” 23

Euthydemus builds his refutation of Cleinias’ first answer (=the wise learn) around the

central premise that teachers teach something they already know to students who learn what

they don’t yet know (276a8), from which it follows that the ignorant learn, not the wise. In

answering the second question, Cleinias no doubt assumed that since Euthydemus had been

concerned to establish that the ignorant learn, then this same Euthydemus must also be

committed to the claim that they learn something unknown. But now Euthydemus executes a

quick volte face by means of the example of being literate and learning dictation. Someone who

learns dictation must already know the letters that make up the words dictated, which entails

that he learns what he already knows, not what he doesn’t.24 I leave aside all other considerations

about equivocations on the meaning of manthanein and fallacies a dicto secundum to point out the

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Ben Gurion University
obvious: The conclusion of Euthydemus’ second refutation directly contradicts the central

premise of his first.25

For the brothers, these contradictions serve no pedagogic purpose. They are merely

trigger-switches for the next refutation. There could have been a different, pedagogic, use for

them, however, which swims into view if we remember that this, after all, was supposed to be

the first step in convincing Cleinias to philosophize. 26 Namely, pointing out such contradictions

and thinking them through could have done for Cleinias what Socrates did for Glaucon in

Republic VII with his example of the three fingers: contradictory logoi, like contradictory sense-

perceptions, awaken the intellectual faculties of the soul to investigate, distinguish, count. 27

Showing Cleinias that the everyday concept of manthanein is indistinct or even self-

contradictory and that he must properly distinguish its elements, would force him to use logos

as the medium for such discrimination. In the Theaetetus, for example, logos is that by which the

soul “by itself” goes through “before itself”, whatever it is examining, asking and answering in

order to conclude with a doxa.28

Such pedagogy requires that several senses of coherence be in play. First, the basic units

of meaning, the onomata, must cohere semantically into statements, by which the soul converses

with itself. The statements must then cohere into an account. In order to enable true judgment,

however, that account must “cohere” with the intelligible structure of the phenomena

themselves, in the following sense: the account of learning, for example, must be such that

Cleinias can understand it, compare it with his own experience, and then say, “Yes, now I see

it,” or “No, that’s not it at all,” etc. In other words, the logos of thinking “coheres” into true

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Ben Gurion University
judgment by becoming diaphanous to the phenomena: it must be what the Eleatic Stranger in

the Statesman calls a delōsis tōn ontōn logōi, a revealing of things in speech.29

Now, what must hold for this to be possible? Minimally, Cleinias must be able to move

back and forth between thought determinations, articulate them, compare them, revise

judgments, etc. Therefore, while we can measure time as a pure flow of indistinguishable

chronological points, the explanatory power of logos and the act of apprehension through

which we understand an explanation depend on a very different kind of temporal experience,

one in which the present has a distinct structure and priority. It is in the present that we take our

experience up into a unity, by interpreting the significance of the recollected past or the

anticipated future. Ordinary clock time, 30 for which the “now” is just another point on an

continuum, cannot make any sense of the fundamental characteristic of the present, the fact that

it is not like a point or moment at all, but more like an interpretive dimension having what

Bergson called “durée” and Heidegger “Spanne”.31 Let us call it the articulated present. We

cannot escape the distinctiveness of the present by seeing it as some number of chronological

points taken together. We would then need enumerate which points count as the present and we

could only do so by appealing again to the phenomenological characteristics which give the

present its dimensional and interpretive character. Hence, the brothers’ claims about virtue,

while much “earlier” than the current argument, are nevertheless part of the same “now” which

Socrates assumes as the basis for his question to Dionysodorus.

If, for example, someone walks up to the crowd around Socrates and Cleinias at line

277c7, just as Euthydemus has delivered his coup de grace, and asks, “What’s going on here?” we

could respond, “Cleinias has just been refuted in claiming that one learns what one knows.” But

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Ben Gurion University
this answer is obviously stilted and incomplete. A more complete answer would begin with,

“We’re trying to understand what it means to learn,” or “These men are showing us how to

convince someone to care for virtue,” and then place the refutation of Cleinias in that context.

That is, a phenomenologically satisfying account of what we are doing “now” defines it by

purposes in light of which we weave the past and future together in a coherent, experiential

web.

On the one hand, then, the soul’s temporality seems indissolubly linked to logos. We

express our temporal consciousness in speech (silent or audible) and the very character of logos

as a delōsis depends on the purposive, hermeneutical and “extended” character of the

“articulated” present. And yet, what the brothers produce is an unlimited continuum of logoi

through which we are meant to pass as if they really are discrete and unconnected points. The

arguments of the Euthydemus almost never cohere into anything; they merely accumulate. They

thus reveal the polymorphous character of logos and its ambiguous relationship to temporality:

As the entos tēs psuchēs pros autēn dialogos, the soul’s “interior dialogue with itself”, 32 logos is that

through which psuchē makes articulate its sense of its own unity and of the unity of its temporal

experience. We have seen, however, that logos, is susceptible to a radical abstraction from that

same temporality.33 Stated differently, the soul can efface its intimate, temporal character in the

very medium in which it expresses it. To understand the significance of this, we must examine

those passages where psuchē itself moves to center stage, something that occurs each time

Socrates replaces Cleinias or Ctesippus as the brothers’ primary interlocutor.

III. PSUCHE

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Ben Gurion University
At 301e1, while reacting to one of Dionysodorus’ more absurd eristic “proofs”, Socrates

wonders aloud whether wisdom such as this could ever be his very own (oikeia). Seizing upon

oikeia, Dionysodorus asks whether Socrates actually believes that he could recognize his own

things (ta sautou). Clearly, this echoes the Delphic Gnōthi Sautōn, which Socrates described in the

Phaedrus as his most pressing task.34 In Dionysodorus’ argument, however, psuchē is just a lure.

Socrates is made to admit that he has gods, that because the gods are animate (i.e. “have souls”)

they are animals, and that what makes an animal “one’s own” is one’s unlimited right of

disposition over it, including selling, giving away, sacrificing it, etc. Ergo, Socrates can sell or

sacrifice his ancestral Zeus just like his other “animals”. In this passage, the soul appears

exclusively as the principle of life: possessing a soul (psuchē echein) is what makes something an

animal (zoōn).35 It is, of course, a great question how to relate this animating power to the soul’s

perceptive and cognitive functions, but here those functions entirely disappear from view.

By contrast, when cognition becomes the theme, it is the soul’s animative powers which

become incomprehensible. At 287c1ff, just after Dionysodorus had mocked Socrates as a Kronos,

Socrates presses on: “Well, tell me, what other sense (ti soi alloi noei) can this phrase have for

you…?” This time, Dionysodorus pounces on the verb (noein):

DIO: Is it by having soul (psuchēn echonta) that things which have sense sense (noei ta
noounta), or also without souls?
SOC: Things with souls.
DIO: Do you think there is any phrase (rhēma) that has soul (psuchēn echon)?
SOC: By Zeus, I certainly don’t!
DIO: Then why did you ask me just now what sense my phrase had for me?36

The logical trick is hard to miss. An equivocation on the meaning of noein against the

background of the colloquial meaning of psuchēn echein as “being alive”, yields the result that

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Ben Gurion University
since phrases are obviously not alive, they cannot perceive or “sense” and so, in Dionysodorus’

verkehrte Welt, they can’t “have” sense either.37

This, however, elides a problem of considerable philosophical import, one that is visible

in the everyday phenomenon of speaking about perceptions, desires, intentions or

understanding. All of these are activities of those “having souls”. In speaking, we transpose the

contents of these activities into vocal units, semantic vehicles for conveying meaning from the

soul of the speaker to the soul of the listener. 38 The listener then reverses the vector, reaching

behind the vocal units to the speaker’s intended meaning. 39 In an important way, then, a phrase

“has sense” only because a whole range of cognitive and animative powers are embodied in and

instigated by its production and comprehension. That is, articulate speech is possible only

because the soul is a unity-within-difference of its powers. Dionysodorus’ conclusion that

phrases cannot “have soul” holds only because he ignores that unity. Looked at from a deeper

perspective, a “living phrase”, what, in the Phaedrus, is called a logon zōnta kai empsuchon, is the

highest possibility of speech.40

It is only during Socrates’ long exchange with Euthydemus (293b1-296d5) that psuchē as

a whole forces its way into the center of concern. After his second protreptic conversation with

Cleinias failed to identify the knowledge that guarantees happiness, Socrates ups the ante. No

longer content for the brothers merely to convince someone to care for virtue, he now asks them

to display the knowledge that is virtue.41 To this, Euthydemus responds with two sophisms.

First, if Socrates knows something, he is knowledgeable and so cannot also be “not

knowledgeable” without violating the principle of non-contradiction. 42 This quite bypasses

Socrates’ question, but in an interesting way: Socrates had asked for the specific knowledge that

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Ben Gurion University
allows one to live beautifully. Euthydemus answers that he must already have this knowledge

since he knows everything anyway. Significantly, he makes no effort to distinguish, from

among all the things Socrates knows, which one is the key to virtue.

In responding to Socrates’ incredulity, Dionysodorus states the principle underlying all

this: “Everyone…knows everything,” he says, “if [he knows] one [thing] (pantes….panta

epistantai, eiper kai hen).”43 Dionysodorus is describing a nexus of intelligibility that echoes

Socrates’ own in the recollection myth of the Meno, but with a crucial difference. While

Dionysodorus claims that knowledge of one thing is, right now, knowledge of all, Socrates had

claimed that because “all nature is akin (sungenous) and the soul has learned everything”

someone who recollects one thing alone (hen monon) can discover (aneurein) all others.44

Euthydemus, then, asserts a web of intelligible relations but is silent about the particular relata,

while Dionysodorus presents that same kosmos noētos but elides the temporal conditions under

which beings like us can possibly stand in relation to it.

At 295b2-296d4 Euthydemus intends, by similar means, to convince Socrates that he

knows everything already, beginning this time from the knowing subject, rather than the

known object. Socrates is made to confess that he is knowledgeable “by means of that by which

he has knowledge” (and not by something else). Next, he must agree that he “always” knows by

this means, and by it alone, all the things he knows. Note how Euthydemus takes excruciating

pains to suppress all qualifications about what the epistemic instrument is, what it can know and

when, thus yielding the following result: by some means, Socrates knows all things always; and

if he knows all things (hapanta) he must know everything (panta).

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Ben Gurion University
Socrates, by contrast, keeps inserting qualifiers that drag the conversation from the

general to the particular and highlight the soul. 45 When asked if he is knowledgeable “by means

of that (toutōi) by which he knows”, 46 Socrates twice identifies the “by means of” as psuchē, a

word Euthydemus absolutely refuses to countenance. When asked if he knows “always by the

same means”, Socrates qualifies “always” with “whenever I know…” 47 When asked whether, in

always knowing, he knows some things “by this means” and some “by another means”,

Socrates drives Euthydemus to distraction with: “By this means, all, at least those things which I

know”.48 Euthydemus, in a revealing fit of pique, condemns all of these qualifiers as illegitimate

“extras” (paraphthegmata). What are we to make of this entire exchange?

As regards eristic technique, the problem is obvious and Socrates notes it: his penchant

for making distinctions was gumming up the works of Euthydemus’ plan to trap him in words

(295d1-2). But why should the soul present an special problem for Euthydemus? Surely because

the soul’s mode of being scandalizes the basic Eleatic undergirding of so much of the brothers’

display. On the one hand, the soul is a power of particularization. It can perceive, feel, imagine

and know a seemingly limitless multiplicity of determinate things at different times. And yet,

no one of these moments exhausts its nature, since the soul retains a unity throughout each

moment of its activity. It is, as Aristotle says, ta onta pōs panta - “all things, somehow,”49 though

nous is also “nothing” except when thinking. In the brothers’ hands, logos loses the ability

articulate this problematic “somehow”. It becomes a tool for obscuring the problem altogether. 50

There is, then, a serious reason why Socrates is so enamored with the brothers’ patently

ridiculous antics and why Plato so carefully notes the massive impact they have on all those

present (including even the pillars of the Lyceum, which are in an uproar (ethorubēsan) of

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Ben Gurion University
pleasure at 303b6, a description unparalleled in the dialogues). The brothers’ eristic art, and the

reactions of their auditors, manifest a fundamental psychic possibility: in perverting the relation

of logos to psuchē and chronos, eristic achieves a kind of self-obfuscation in which the soul

abstracts from its own unity-within-difference. The brothers thus force the question: What is the

soul such that this self-obfuscation is possible for it? What are the psychic roots of “sophistry”

(in the derogatory sense of that word)?

Certainly, the brothers are unwilling (or unable) to discuss these roots, but Socrates does

hint at them twice. At 288b8-c1, Socrates likens the brothers to Proteus, the polymorphous sea-

god of the Odyssey.51 Later, he compares them to the hundred-headed Hydra, a “she-sophist”

(sophistria) who, “if anyone cuts of one head of her logos, has the wisdom to send up many in

place of the one.”52 What do these descriptions imply? Here, for example, is one interpretation,

by Thomas Chance:

…Plato has here juxtaposed the incongruous acts of clawing and arguing, of chopping
off the heads of a she-demon and refuting the fallacious arguments of paradox vendors,
in order to portray eristic as a violent, sophistic intrusion into speech that erupts from
the subterranean swamps to pollute…our philosophic discourse.53

But what, or rather where, is this “swamp” from which the Hydra “erupts” or

“intrudes”? Chance’s language makes it seem as if sophistry barrels into the soul from outside

like an airborne virus, but this makes no sense. If speech is the internal dialogue of the soul, and

sophistry is a possibility inherent to speech, then it cannot be an “intrusion”. It is an inflection of

our psychic nature. Perhaps, we might make more progress by remembering the Hydra’s

genealogy: she is the daughter of Typhon, the monster in reference to which Socrates framed

the problem of self-knowledge in a justly famous passage of the Phaedrus:

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Andy German
Ben Gurion University
I am not yet able to “know myself,” according to the Delphic inscription, and it seems
laughable to me to look into other things when I am still ignorant about myself...whether
I happen to be some sort of beast more tangled (poluplokōteron) and more filled with
desire (epitethumenon) than the Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, having a share
by nature of the divine and un-Typhonic.”54

The Typhon is an unnatural combination of man, beast and bird, hundred-headed and

capable of speaking in many voices, sometimes in the sounds of animals and sometimes in

languages understood by the gods.55 It is the very distillation of hubris, uprooting mountains,

destroying cities, even attacking Olympus and putting the gods to flight.

At first glance, it must seem utterly incredible that a creature like this can shed any light

on self-knowledge. Nevertheless, I think we can make some sense of it. First, let us note that the

soul Socrates describes later, in the charioteer image, is not tame and simple at all, but complex

and full of desire.56 Indeed, it is an unnatural combination of elements both natural (man,

horses, wings) and artificial (reins and a whip). The soul is ambiguous, then. If anything, it is

closer to the Typhonic end of the scale than to any natural simplicity, 57 an ambiguity which

Plato highlighted elsewhere as well. In the Symposium for example, eros is protean and

somewhat dubious: wise and ignorant, rich and poor, alive one day, dead the next, “a magician,

a druggist and a sophist.”58

Stated succinctly, the soul is exceedingly elusive because it both is and is not each of its

powers and manifestations. Incidentally, we cannot bypass this problem by invoking the

Republic’s doctrine of tri-partition. The problem is not to understand that the soul has parts, but

what constitutes their unity. Indeed, throughout the dialogues epithumia, thumos, phronēsis,

dianoia and nous taken singly are easier to discern than the way in which they form a whole, if

they in fact do at all.

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Andy German
Ben Gurion University
The eidos of psuchē, then, to the extent we can even speak of such a thing, is plasticity,

and in its complexity and potential for antinomian hybris the soul has a Typhonic aspect as

well.59 It can speak in many voices or assume many shapes and one of these is the Hydra of

sophistry. Sophistry thus has two roots. One is analyzed in the Sophist: the inseparability of non-

Being (qua thateron) from the ontological structure of Being and hence of any being, allows the

sophist to create false images. The very ontological structure of Being, in other words, makes

possible the image-original relationship, and hence the possibility of false images which appear

to be, but are not, their originals. The second root is in the soul, which partakes of both

determinacy and indeterminacy. Or – the possibility of sophistry is rooted in the fact that we

grasp determinacy and weave the unity of our experience and character in time by means of the

soul, itself a multifarious and indeterminate being.

I remarked earlier that the Statesman speaks of logos as a delōsis, a revealing of beings. As

the context there makes clear, the Stranger is describing the task or goal of logos. That logos

should strive to reveal the intelligible structure of the beings implies a gap, a distance between

logos and on, and hence the possibility that logos can fail to so reveal. 60 Just as the telos of logos

is to reveal beings, though it often does not, the soul is only imperfectly suited to the task of

seeing what is revealed. The cognitive perfection of the soul is to be transparent in the highest

degree to the intelligibility of the phenomena. For Plato, however, it is only partially so, not least

because it is far from entirely transparent to itself.

Only thus can one grasp the full significance of strange juxtaposition we noted earlier, of

the question of virtue with two eristic masters who are so obviously and completely

unconcerned with it.61 It is certainly true that eristic is presented here as a shallow imitation of

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Andy German
Ben Gurion University
dialectic, a display that can affect but not educate. Why can it not educate, however? I submit it

is because paideia, in the Platonic sense, is formation, in at least two senses. In one sense, of

course, all education requires imposing some form, qua limit or measure, on the desires of the

soul (hence the musical education of guardians in the kallipolis). In another sense, to educate the

soul means to train it to exercise its native power for eliciting form from within the multiplicity

of experience, to make form visible to itself. We must, for example, come to understand that the

desires of the soul, when properly understood, all exhibit an impetus toward the one Good. We

must learn to see the correct measure within the continuum of pleasure. And we must be made

to see the formal unity, the hen ti eidos that underlies our ordinary existence as “lovers of sights

and sounds.” Both these senses, however, require that we first look the soul’s formlessness

squarely in the face. This the brothers refuse to do, a fact which explains the mixture of

seriousness and sheer opera buffa in the Euthydemus, a mixture which is finally, deeply Platonic. 62

It is like a vaudeville act in which the Protean or Hydra-like character of the soul is constantly

parading across the stage while the brothers try to pretend it is not there. 63

In fact, it is both surprising and significant that the stars of this act are two sophists. A

distinctive feature of the sophistic moment of Greek spirit had been precisely its new emphasis

on the individual and on praxis.64 For example, while there is a venerable debate about the

precise meaning of Protagoras’ homo mensura, one thing about it must surely be clear:

Protagoras reverses the direction of the search for the grounds of judgment. The course must

now be set inward, toward the psychic functions by which we take the measure of the world and

not toward an intelligible reality that transcends and guides the activities of measure-taking. 65

Yet, in the Euthydemus two sophists with an unmistakable Protagorean tincture are made to

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Ben Gurion University
resemble sailors that have sighted a whole spiritual continent, but lack the courage to actually

disembark and explore it.66 This conveys us directly to what, I think, is the deepest stratum of

Plato’s engagement with sophistry. For him, sophistic “humanism” may have been carried

through very superficially by the sophists themselves, but this does not detract from its massive

philosophical implications. On the contrary, it falls to the philosopher to follow Protagoras

inward, and go beyond him, to uncover the origins of sophistic speech in the soul’s very mode

of being.67

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Ben Gurion University
Endnotes

21
1
Euthy. 301a1-6. All translations from Greek are my own, though I have consulted the recent translation of the dialogue in Joe
Sachs, Socrates and the Sophists: Plato’s Protagoras, Euthydemus, Hippias Major and Cratylus. (Newburyport, MA: Focus
Publishing, 2011). The edition of Plato used throughout is John Burnet, Platonis Opera, 5 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1900-1907), except for references to the Republic, which follow R.S. Slings, Platonis Rempublicam (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
2003). Unless preceded by title abbreviations, all Stephanus pages are in the Euthydemus.
2
These ambiguities are thoroughly exposed and analyzed in David Roochnik, “The Serious Play of Plato’s Euthydemus,”
Interpretation 18, no. 2 (1990–1991): 211–32. See especially 213, 220, 226–230.
3
Cf. Meno, 91c1-5.
4
For a very insightful study of the role of Crito in the Euthydemus, often with conclusions different from my own, see S.
Montgomery Ewegen, “Comic Turns in Plato’s Euthydemus,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 19, 1 (Fall 2014): 15-
32.
5
A.E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1960), 75. Taylor correctly sees that neither here, nor in the
Cratylus, “is the professed main purpose directly ethical….”
6
Cf. Chrm. 157b7. In both cases, finding a godsend releases us from the work of seeking its ti estin. Socrates, like Critias in the
Charmides, is interested not in the essence of something, but only in its effects.
7
Resp. 533d1.
8
Cf. 295e1–2: Socrates says Euthydemus knows, altogether more beautifully than he does, how to engage in dialectic.
9
Thomas Chance sees the significance of what is happening here. Thomas Chance, Plato’s Euthydemus: An Analysis of What is
and Is Not Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 25–26.
10
Arist. Metaph. I, 981a18–20.
11
Diogenes Laertius mentions that Protagoras was the first to discuss the importance of seizing the kairos (kairou dunamin
exetheto) in Vitae Philosophorum, ed. M. Marcovich (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1999), 9.52. Cf. with Dionysius Halicarnassensis, De
Compositione Verborum, 12, 68, 12–15 in Opusculua II, vol 6. Edited by H. Usener and L. Radermacher. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997,
and cf. Leg. 968d4–e2.
12
In fact, however, the brothers seem almost entirely oblivious to kairos. It is Socrates, as Marina McCoy notes, who “relies
more upon phronēsis and kairos than technē.” See Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 14-15.
13
Theae. 172d4–9.
14
See 276c2, 277b3, 277d1, 297b2 and 298e6.
15
See especially 297d6-300d2. On sophistry and speed see Jacqueline De Romilly, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, trans.
Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 35, 44 and especially Arist. Soph. el., I, 14, 174a17-20.
16
283e7-284c6.
17
287a6-b1. I largely follow Sachs’ rendering here, with slight modifications.
18
287b2-5.
19
275a6: peisaton hōs chrē philosophein kai aretēs epimeleisthai.
20
See 286a1-2.
21
See Hawtrey’s note to 287b3 in R.S.W. Hawtrey, Commentary on Plato’s Euthydemus (Philadelphia: American Philosophy
Society, 1981), 114. This same insult, with its implication that linguistic rectitude and piety are signs that someone is just
plain “out of it,” was used in the Clouds by Socrates against Strepsiades (when the latter refused to believe the naturalistic
explanation of Zeus’ thunderbolt) and by the Unjust against the Just logos. See Ar. Nub., esp. lines 398, 905 and 929. Chance,
Plato’s Euthydemus, 247, n. 64. “…Plato is considering time and its relevance to discourse.”
22
A point seen clearly by Ewegen, “Comic Turns,” 18.
23
275d2–277c7.
24
276e9-277b1.
25
The pattern repeats itself at 277c7, where Dionysodorus refutes his earlier conclusion at 276c7.
26
See Sprague’s brief comment on this in Rosamund Kent Sprague, “Plato’s Sophistry,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society (Supplementary Volumes) vol. 51 (1977): 53.
27
Carl Levenson, Socrates Among the Corybantes: Being, Reality and the Gods (Woodstock, Conn.: Spring Publications, 1999), 62-
63 sees the connection between these passages. Cf. Soph. 259b-d.
28
Theae. 189e6-190a5: logon hon autē pros autēn hē psuchē diexerchetai peri hōn an skopēi.
29
Plt. 287a3-4. The visual metaphor for explaining the role of logos is a powerful trope in Plato. Cf. the famous passage at
Phd. 99e4-6 where Socrates flees into logoi to “look” in them (en ekeinois skopein) for the truth of beings.
30
Heidegger calls this die Öffentliche Zeit. This “ordinary” (vulgäre) time-concept, which is ultimately manifest in the use of
clocks as “now-time” (Jetzt-Zeit), represents a kind of abstraction or levelling off (Nivellierung) of the deeper phenomenon of
temporality. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), 405, and 412-422.
31
See the second chapter of Henri Bergson, An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. by F.L. Pogson. (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1950), 75-139, esp. 107-108 and 125-129. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 409.
32
Soph. 263e4. Logos is the entos tēs psychēs pros autēn dialogos.
33
Hence the brothers, whose professional expertise ought to be kairos, are in fact largely oblivious to it. See McCoy, Rhetoric
of Philosophers and Sophists, 101 and 152. Cf. Phdr. 271b-272b.
34
Phdr. 229e5ff.
35
302a8, e1.
36
287d7-e1. The phrase “noun echein”, which Dionysodorus is manipulating here, can be taken in two ways: either “to have
(or make) sense” (i.e. to mean something) or to “perceive” or “intend”.
37
In his note to 287d7ff, on p. 115, Hawtrey writes, “This sophism needs no particular discussion, and it cannot have fooled
anyone.” Hawtrey does not pause to ask why, then, Plato bothered with it at all.
38
Cf. Alc I. 130e2-6.
39
Now clearly, a phrase may do this imperfectly; it may lead to a misunderstanding. But this does not change the main point,
since misunderstanding is only visible against a background of understanding.
40
Phdr. 276a8. See the contrast between spoken and written speech in Alcidamas. Soph. 27-28:“…The speech spoken from the
heart on the spur of the moment has a soul in it (empsuchos esti) and is alive (zē)…” in Alcidamas, The Works and Fragments,
ed. with an Introduction by J.V. Muir (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2001).
41
293b4-6.
42
293c8-d1: kai houtōs tunchaneis ōn autos houtos hos ei, kai au palin ouk ei, kata tauta hama.
43
294a10.
44
Men. 81c9-d3.
45
See Rosamund Kent Sprague, Plato’s Use of Fallacy: A Study of the Euthydemus and Some Other Dialogues (London: Routledge,
1962), 23 and 24. The argument, as she puts it, goes through “more or less over Socrates’ dead body.”
46
At 295b4 and e5. Hermann Keulen, Untersuchungen zu Platons Euthydem (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 197), 48 on why toutōi
here must remain empty and undetermined.
47
296a7 - aei, hotan epistamai.
48
296b5. My translation here is deliberately literal. Chance, 151 calls this qualification a hilarious joke on the sophist that
illuminates an essential ingredient in the argument. See Hawtrey, 153 on the force of ge and J.D. Denniston, The Greek
Particles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1966), 114ff on its restrictive and intensive uses.
49
Arist. De an., 431b21: hē psuchē ta onta pōs esti panta.
50
See the perceptive comment by Chance, 143: “…we can conclude that this flight behind rules is just another eristical dodge
employed ad hoc in order to avoid that awful word soul , which causes dread and anger in all eristics.”
51
Od. IV, 384-570.
52
297c1-4.
53
Chance, 157.
54
Phdr. 229e5-230a6.
55
Hes. Theog. 825-35 and Apollod. Bibliotheca. 1, vi. 3.
56
As pointed out by Charles Griswold in his extremely thorough analysis of the Typhon image. See Charles Griswold, Self-
Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1986), 36-44.
57
Cf. Resp. 588c4. Leg. 892c5 and the Athenian Stranger’s profoundly ambiguous description of the soul as diapherontōs
physei, which could be rendered as “especially” or “pre-eminently” natural, but also as “surpassingly” natural, which
suggests a sense in which it is above or different from nature.
58
Symp. 203d8.
59
Resp. 572b4-6: a savage and lawless (anomon) desire resides in everyone, even the most moderate. On “psychic excess” and
“plasticity” and the soul’s relation to nature see the very perceptive study by Sara Brill, Plato on the Limits of Human Life
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), esp. 13, and 192-208.
60
See, for example, the Seventh Letter (which I accept as authentic) where Plato remarks on the weakness (astheneia) of logos.
Ep. VII, 343a1–2.
61
Charles Kahn refers to eristic as “the very lowest form of sophistic argumentation.” See Charles Kahn, “Some Puzzles in
the Euthydemus,” in Plato: Euthydemus, Lysis, Charmides. Proceedings of the V Symposium Platonicum, ed. Thomas Robinson and
Luc Brisson, 88-97 (Sankt Augustin, Academia Verlag, 2000), 88.
62
According to Ep. VI 323d2, play (paidia) and seriousness (spoudē) are sisters.
63
Cf. De Romilly, 187, where she notes that the Socratic problematic of the internal harmony of the soul is “outside and
beyond the thinking of the Sophists.” And also, Diog. Laert. IX, 51, on Protagoras’ statement that the soul is “nothing apart
from the senses”.
64
Quod vide Protagoras’ promises to Hippocrates in his eponymous dialogue. Prot. 318a6-9 and 318d5-319a2.
65
That Plato saw this as perhaps the most significant implication of the homo mensura is clear, I believe, from a passage like
Theaetetus 166dff where Protagoras likens the sophist to a physician who can transform the soul through speeches. Things
appear to us based on the hexis of the soul. If the hexis be altered, so too will the doxa. See Tht. 166d5-167b2 and Cf. Gorgias,
In Helenam Laudatio, 14, where logoi are compared to a drug that can shape the soul of the listener. Gorgias (Leontini), Reden,
Fragmente und Testimonien, ed. Thomas Buchheim (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1989).
66
There may be two allusions to Protagoras’ treatise, Alētheia, hē Kataballontes, in the Euthydemus at 286c5 and 288a4. Cf. de
Romilly, 43 and 99 on Plato’s philosophy as a response to Protagoras. For Plato, this condemnation may be true more for
various epigones than for Protagoras himself. And cf. H.G. Gadamer, “Dialectic and Sophism in Plato’s Seventh Letter,” in
Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. with an Introduction by P. Christopher Smith (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1980), 116.
67
Samuel Scolnicov, Euthydemus: Ethics and Language, Lecturae Platonis 8, ed. Maurizio Migliori (Sankt Augustin: Academia
Verlag, 2013), 32: “In insisting on the pragmatic context, Plato is more Protagorean than they.” [the sophists – A.G.] Cf.
McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophist, 87 on how the sophists are inconsistent not only in their arguments,
but with themselves as human beings, and Gadamer, “Dialectic and Sophism”, 122 on the philosophical necessity to separate
philosophy from the sophism “within itself”.