Courage Nailed Down: Plato’s “Laches”

This is what Courage means to Socrates: It is descriptively distinct from and essentially identical with all the virtues. For us this “paradoxical” outcome sets a task—we are to figure out how it might become intelligible.

Euripides, it is reported, was “Socrato-nailed-down” (σωκρατογόμφους) – that is, patched up, bolted together, by Socrates.¹ I understand this term as a reflection of Socrates’s way, his peculiar moderation, which contained Euripides’s emotional excess to the advantage of his expressiveness. This Socratic mode appears in the dialogues as terminal definitiveness moderated by ultimate self-doubt, an uncertainty that, far from being a psychological malady, is an unperturbed unsettledness, serene wonder.

A consequence of this view of Socrates is my belief that every Socratic/Platonic dialogue contains either the answer to the question proposed or a revision of the question that is a direction to the answer. This is not the common opinion about the dialogues in general or the Laches in particular.² I mean that no dialogue is “aporetic” (from ἀπορέω) – that is, unprovided, wayless, passage-deprived – but all are “poristic” (ποριστικός) in that they provide some means to approach knowledge or even contain the thing itself.

The Laches bears, besides its main title, which is the interlocutor’s name, the subtitles “On Courage” and “Midwife-ish” (μαιευτικός), from the matter and its mode, respectively, given by one Thrasylos.³ Thus arise the questions: Why “Laches”? Why “On Courage”? Why “Obstetric”?

Even supposing this Thrasylos to have been more attached to devising categories than to thinking things out, his main titles have been generally accepted, perhaps at least partly because they were plausible. The Laches has, in fact, two main interlocutors: the two generals, Nicias and Laches. Of these, the former had by far the larger reputation. But not only had Laches and Socrates been comrades at the Delian retreat (424 BC, Laches 181b, Symposium 220e ff.), but in his own dialogue this general is, of the two soldiers, by far the more responsive to Socrates.⁴

Why the subtitle “On Courage”? That is obvious: It is the excellence Socrates himself proposes for the inquiry as “a part,” easier to survey than excellence entire. The choice is natural when three quondam warriors are in conversation. What is purposefully problematic – more so as the search proceeds – is whether excellence, virtue, effectiveness (ἀρετή) does indeed have parts or whether, to put the perplexity up front, all cardinal virtues are mutually involved, perhaps identical. That question is what shows this generally sidelined dialogue to be seriously central.

Finally, why maieutic, obstetric – a Socratic “delivery”? Whatever Thrasylos meant by the term, it does not seem very definitive. The Theaetetus, for example, is headed “testing” (πειραστικός), but in it Socrates explicitly calls his art “midwifing” (ἡ μαιευτικὴ ἡμῖν τέχνη, 210b).⁵ Its effect, however, is not to bring a solution to birth but mere “wind eggs” (ἀνεμιαῖα), vaporings. The obstetric product may thus be aporetic; the outcome may be perplexity in need of continuance. And so it would seem to be in the Laches. When the get-together breaks up, Lysimachus, one of the two undistinguished fathers who have sought the generals’ opinion concerning the best care to be given their adolescent sons’ upbringing, invites Socrates to come by his house next morning to teach them and their boys. Socrates says, “I will do so, Lysimachus, and will come to you tomorrow morning, if God wishes” (201c, my italics).

Will he go? Will his inner divinity let him? I don’t think so. We know that neither of the boys, named (as we would say, “aspirationally”) Aristides and Thucydides,⁶ seems to have achieved much; Socrates tells of Aristides that he was with him but left too soon to be delivered of the fine things he was bearing within and came to no good (Theaetetus 150e ff.). Socrates there says that many who left him too soon want to come back, but his divine sign, his δαιμόνιον, forbids it. Moreover, in the Apology he says most definitely, “I was no one’s teacher ever yet” (33a).

Why is it imaginable that Socrates won’t continue this get-together? The lesser, more circumstantial reason is that he divines that these boys aren’t his proper charges. The deeper cause is, I think, that the apparently maieutic conversation is actually complete. It contains all that is needed to think out Socrates’s view of courage and its relation to the canonical three other excellences: justice, soundmindedness, and – wisdom. I put a dash before “wisdom” because the dialogue will throw in doubt whether wisdom is one among four – since it is all of them.

My task is thus to explicate the following:

I. What, in Socrates’s understanding, courage is, presented, as Socrates’s highest thoughts always are, as conjecture and opinion – the reason why Socrates is ultimately the one with whom we live.⁷

II. How the dialectical details of the dialogue bear on this understanding, on the hypothesis that such logicistic argumentation, the notorious Socratic refutational mode, recedes, as a mere preparatory cleansing of the mind for genuine philosophy, in which knowledgeable ignorance and clear-eyed self-contradiction are the modus operandi.

III. Why the Laches seems to be in harmony with the Protagoras and The Republic, and why these can corroborate surmises about that wisdom/knowledge which unites the virtues/excellences. I make the Platonic references hesitantly, since I think that each dialogue is its own world and is not necessarily consonant with the others; however, here cautious cross-references seem to be permissible. Ultimately though, the most trustworthy references are, I think, each receptive reader’s own experience.

I. WHAT COURAGE IS IN SOCRATES’S UNDERSTANDING

The precise object of inquiry of the Laches is reached through concentric circuits of generality as delineated by Socrates:

1. We must find out who among us or anywhere is an expert (τεχνικός, 185d) in the matter under investigation, which is, What ought our children to study?

2. This study must be delineated as being for the sake of young souls (185e).

3. We can narrow the inquiry by concentrating on that which when added to souls makes them better – namely, virtue (190b).

4. And we can further focus our inquiry by concentrating on a part of virtue – namely, courage (190d).

5. So, finally, we can pinpoint our inquiry on the practical question: How can our young come by it?

A little more than half the dialogue has gone by at that point (178-90, 190-201).What has been gained?

Laches delivers the first of two comments that entitle him to give his name to this dialogue. He shows that he, much the lesser of the two participating generals, is much the better interlocutor, a “philologos” rather than a “misologos,” in his own words. He “regards the speaker and the things spoken together” (188d). That is, I think, just how Socrates himself looks at and listens to his interlocutors and how Plato, in turn, intends his readers to live with and take in his dialogues.⁸

Laches is thus the enabler of this Socratic dialogue on courage since he himself was eyewitness to Socrates’s courage during the Delian retreat (181b); he testifies to Socrates’s lived experience of the virtue. Hence courage will be the topic among two generals and one foot soldier; as ever, there is nothing “abstract” about this conversation. Moreover, because he “is inexperienced in Socrates’s arguments” (λόγων, 188e), Laches makes the usual mistake of Socrates’s new conversationalists: he gives a facile reply mentioning a particular example with its perspectival description rather than the nature common in any light to cases falling under the term that is the topic (190e). However, he holds up willingly and even happily, and with courage rather than overconfidence, under Socrates’s usual confounding refutation. In fact, Socrates, the youngest of the three main speakers, treats him with, I think, unironic deference: “I’m responsible for your not answering well, because I didn’t question well.” For he didn’t make it clear that he wanted to know what courage was, not only in all kinds of war making but in any human condition (191e, also 190e).

The conversational stretch with Laches has two serious results, which seem to exhaust his energies for the moment:

1. Courage is a certain kind of endurance (καρτερία, 192b); it is Laches’s second, more reflective definition, which Socrates thinks is persuasive “to some extent” (193e).

2. Laches modestly frames a state of mind that is crucial to a Socratic inquiry: “For though I seem to have insight into what courage is, yet I don’t know how it has escaped me just now, so that I can’t collect it into an account and say what it is” (194b). It is, I think, the pre-verbal thinking, the pre-articulated logos in the soul that Socratic questions intend to deliver as intelligible language. This report is valuable as a simple, candid man’s freshly observed self-description.⁹

Socrates now draws in Nicias, with Laches’s approval. He makes a point of declaring Laches his partner in the inquiry: “For Laches and I have the argument in common” (κοινούμεθα, 196c). Soon Nicias produces a very significant negative precondition to the understanding of courage:

3. “I surmise that the Fearless (τὸ ἂφοβον) and the Courageous (τὸ ἀνδρεῖον) are not the same” (197b). It puts Nicias, and thus Socrates, who does not seem to disapprove, into direct opposition with Aristotle, who says bluntly, “The courageous man is someone fearless.”¹⁰ I think human experience is with the soldiers: courage is being scared but undeterred.

Before that, however, Nicias reminds Socrates that he, Socrates, and, of course, Laches aren’t defining courage well. Nicias has often heard him say:

4. “Each of us is good insofar as he is wise (σόφος), and insofar as unlearned (ἀμαθής), we’re bad (191d). Socrates has indeed said this; he agrees to it in The Republic (349d), where φρόνιμος, “thoughtful,” appears instead of σόφος.

At this point the two scrappy generals go at each other, with Socrates in between, trying to persuade them to listen to each other. For, since neither quite understands what Socrates means, both the ingenuous Laches and the sophisticated Nicias can’t really come to grips with Socrates’s conversion of an ethical into a cognitive term. Nonetheless, this interlude, this friendly refutative squabble, which neither of them is quite up to, does produce, with Socrates’s help, an important refutation:

5. The wisdom in question is not (as it often is in common speech) know-how, an expertise, such as belongs to the self-proclaimed expert (τεχνικός, 185d) in the treatment of the soul for whom they were looking in the first half of the dialogue – the kind of whom sensible Laches said that some people become more expert (τεχνικωτέρους, 185e) without them as teachers than with them. This technical wisdom, cleverness, about what is to be feared, they agree, belongs to people, such as physicians and farmers, who would not, for all that, be called courageous (195b ff.). The wisdom in question is not that of one knowledgeable (ἐπιστήμων) in how to effect some result but of one who knows: Is this a condition to be feared or not? A doctor may thus know how to keep you alive, but he doesn’t, as a doctor, know whether you wouldn’t be better off dead (195d-e).¹¹

Socrates takes the inquiry back and reminds Nicias that at the beginning of the argument they had taken up courage as a “part of virtue” (μέρος ἀρετῆς, 198a). Then he names, enumerates, canonical virtues that “altogether are called ‘virtue’” (198a). He does it twice; once he says, “I mention, in addition to courage, sound-mindedness (σωφροσύνη) and justice (δικαιοσύνη) and other such.” And again, “sound-mindedness or justice, and also holiness” (199d). The so-called canonical virtues are usually taken to be the four set out in The Republic: wisdom, courage, sound-mindedness, and finally justice; these are the object of their search (427e, 434e).

Here is the crux of the Laches as I see it:

6. Consider Socrates’s second listing of the virtues: He throws in holiness(ὁσιότης), not one of the standard four, as if to mark an absence: Wisdom is absent from the set. It is, I think, the reason why Socrates will say, close to the conclusion of the conversation, “So then we have not found, Nicias, courage – what it is” (ἀνδρεία ὅ τι ἔστιν, 199e) – though it is fully there for collection, dispersed among the interlocutors and throughout the dialogue.

Socrates, now again master of the inquiry, examines Nicias, showing Laches that his friend’s views and the man himself are worthy of “consideration” (ἐπισκέψεως, 197e). Nicias has often heard from Socrates that the good are wise, and as soldiers they believe that the courageous are good. Therefore, since courage is good and goodness is wisdom, courage is wisdom (194d). Now Socrates elicits from him the admission that this wisdom is atemporal, or at least all-temporal:

7. “Courage, you say, is knowledge (ἐπιστήμην) of which things are terrifying (δεινῶν) and which are confidence inspiring (θαρραλέων, 196d)?” The former cause fear but not the latter, and fear is expectation of future bad things. Knowledge, however, is one and the same of things past, present, and future; it comprehends good and bad at all times: So courage is, Nicias agrees, not only knowledge of what is to be dreaded in the future and by what we are to be encouraged but knowledge of all good and bad things “as they always are” (πάντως ἐχόντων, 199e).

This is the moment when one of the fathers, Lysimachus, invites Socrates to become their sons’ teacher. Socrates responds that he is in the same perplexity (ἀπορία, 200e) as the other four adults, so why should he be the man for the task?

I think that Socrates’s perplexity is not that of being ignorant of the answer to the question “What is courage?” but that of knowing the limitation of mere argument, mere logos, for giving an answer, though he has shown, logicistically but sketchily, that courage as wisdom is not distinguishable from any other virtue and the wisdom that is not just expertise and know-how can’t be one of the four virtues. Moreover, he has provided, as I discern them, seven elements to hold in mind while approaching the question dialectically.¹²

So let me collect what the Laches contributes. Courage has certain salient specific features, among which is endurance, perseverance in the face of difficulty (1) and in the face of a positive affect of fear (3). Behind these psychic conditions arises a sense, formulable but not easily, of a being, Courage Itself, to be comprehended (2). Consonant with that sense is the notion that human goodness is connected to wisdom and thoughtfulness (4). This wisdom, however, is not technical know-how but envisioned finality (5). As such it stands beyond the, now three, cardinal virtues and is not listed among them (6). However we may understand this wisdom that is at once a part of and beyond the virtues, it is not attached to any time phase; it is atemporal (7).

All this is what Courage means to Socrates: it is descriptively distinct from and essentially identical with all the virtues. For us this “paradoxical” outcome sets a task: We are to figure out how it might become intelligible.

II. WHAT BEARING SOCRATES’S REFUTATIONAL LOGIC HAS ON THINKING ABOUT VIRTUE AND WHEN IT RECEDES (OR ADVANCES) INTO OTHER MODES

Socrates’s refutation, or better, his refutational maieutic, begins at 190b. By “refutational maieutic,” I mean that he elicits and “delivers” Laches of opinions that he then shows not to be quite viable. Laches agrees that if they are going to give advice on how virtue can be made “present to, added to” (παραγενομένη) Lysimachus’s and Melesias’s boys’ souls so as to make them better, they must first know “Whatever is virtue?” (ὅ τί ποτ’ ἔστιν ἀρετή;).

Socrates is subtly misleading Laches by implying that virtue is primarily a sort of effectiveness, a functionality that makes things, souls among them, work as they should.¹³ Be that as it may, he also gets Laches to agree that we could say in words what we know (εἴποιμεν, 190c). But they should hold off from the great task of saying what the whole of virtue is by seeing if they know some part of it. Socrates is once again leading Laches astray. Whether at all, or in what way, virtue truly has parts will itself be the crux of the dialogue.

Again, whatever the true case, Socrates suggests very aptly that, since three veterans of proven courage are conversing, courage should be the first focus of inquiry. As I have intimated, Socrates’s assumption here is that the parts of virtue are generally known: wisdom, courage, justice, temperance, as set out in The Republic (427e, also Symposium 196d). At least, they are probably known to Nicias, who has spent time with Socrates.¹⁴

Now Laches is bidden to answer the question “What is courage?” (τί ἐστιν ἀνδρεία; 190e). He thinks that’s easy: It’s to stay put and not to flee. Socrates readily refutes this version because it doesn’t cover all cases; it often works for foot soldiers but not for Socrates himself or for Laches, a general, a pair whose courage showed itself in retreat (181b). Nor does it always apply to cases of moral courage.

Laches tries again: Courage is a certain endurance (καρτερία τις, 192b) of the soul.¹⁵ Socrates pounces on this attempt from the other side. “Staying put” was too narrow, now endurance is too broad, for some stick-to-itiveness is plain foolish, yet more nobly courageous than a wise – that is, a calculating – endurance. Having thrown Laches into confusion, Socrates concedes that endurance might be courage after all (194a). With Laches’s agreement, they draw Nicias into the conversation, and for a moment Laches – almost – becomes his questioner (194e). Nicias has heard Socrates say things from which it follows that courage is a kind of wisdom (σοφία). What kind? For σοφία has a broad range of meanings: wisdom (see below), knowledge (ἐπιστήμη), know-how (τέχνη), mindfulness (φρόνησις).

Socrates, speaking for Laches, determines that for Nicias courage is not a technical know-how,¹⁶ but it is a knowledge, a competent comprehension – namely, of things terrifying or confidence inspiring in all contexts (195a).

Laches is taken aback: “What outlandish things (ἄτοπα) he says … . Surely wisdom is apart from courage” (195a).

This is a crucial moment. For Laches, the naïvely sensible, is quite right. We are presumably to think of him too as somehow familiar with the four virtues, of which wisdom and courage are two separate items. Nicias, on the other hand, is thinking of a wisdom quite distinct from a particular cardinal virtue, and Socrates is encouraging this view by never enumerating wisdom among the part-virtues.

Nicias opposes Laches by attributing to him a self-misunderstanding: Laches himself, without realizing it, has Nicias’s expanded view of true wisdom, that it is not a technique for operating, such as a physician’s skill in healing, but a higher judgment, such as whether the patient is better off alive or dead (195c).¹⁷ Laches doesn’t recognize himself; the wisdom Nicias is describing seems to belong to “some god” (196a).

Now Socrates takes back the argument. Nicias is brought to say that fearless folly is not courage but “mindful things are courageous” (197c).¹⁸ By “mindful” Nicias means having promethean “foresight” (προμηθίας); few people have this capacity. This view of wisdom as future directed introduces a seer-like quality into courage, which Socrates will now refute, as I have reported. Wisdom is atemporal. It thus describes not a part of virtue, the futural, “but all of it together” (199e). Here Socrates declares the inquiry a failure.

The shifting refutations have long ceased to be effective; the switch from Socrates to Laches is half-hearted, and his own refutation is soon rescinded. What has supervened is allusion – the tacit presence of the unspoken.

Here is what speaks loudly by being tacit: 1. Socrates’s omission of wisdom from the four virtues; 2. Socrates’s subversion of Nicias’s “wisdom as virtue entire” from a solution to a perplexity, with this consequence: He twists the conversation of the Laches from being within one short step, within one further thought of his answer to the question “What is courage?” into an abortion. So why, we should ask, is he here the willing midwife of a wind egg (άνεμιαῖου, Theaetetus 151e)?

I think it is because Plato through his Socrates is summoning a new mode of producing conviction: our participation, “reader response” in the language of literary criticism. The truth is to dawn on those of us who care enough. I say “care enough” because I think that this Socrates (if not Plato) is a democrat of the intellect: In The Republic, right at the introduction to the philosopher-kings’ education, he says plainly, “Our account signifies … that there is a power within the soul of each of us and the tool by which each effectively learns” (καταμανθάνει, 518c, my italics). So it is not to make invidious distinctions between those who get it and those who don’t that Socrates leaves things unsaid, but to invite us into the logos to think it out – us, the latter-day outlanders (Phaedo 78a), living to the north and west of Athens.

In this dialogue, the thought seems to me to be that there are two wisdoms: one that concerns knowing how in matters of thinking and doing; the other one concerns finalities and requires that all the part-virtues become identical – all virtue/excellence is wisdom/knowledge.

III. WHY REFERENCES TO OTHER PLATONIC DIALOGUES, PARTICULARLY THE PROTAGORAS AND THE REPUBLIC, CAN CONFIRM SURMISES ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE WISDOM/ KNOWLEDGE THAT UNIFIES THE PART-VIRTUES/EXCELLENCES¹⁹

I have misgivings about reaching into other dialogues to clarify the terms of a particular one. The reason is that each such conversation (διάλογος)²⁰ or set of exchanges delineates its own world of discourse, and in crossing into another setting there is a danger of overlooking the modulations belonging to a different scene. So I’ll proceed hesitatingly.

The problem might be put negatively by citing two well-known verses from the Christian Bible:

[T]he spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak (Matthew 26:41).

[F]or what I would, that do I not (Romans 7:15).

Both these verse snippets seem to me to say the same thing: We will or would the good but ineffectively; body or ego obstruct the execution. A psychic capability is foreshadowed here, a more explicit forerunner of which is what Aristotle calls “[rational] desire” or wishing, wanting (βούλησις), and whose full-blown faculty is the will. It was first identified – as the seat of sin – by Augustine.²¹ It is a capacity illuminatingly opposed to Socrates’s higher wisdom, which is a supervirtue, one that is itself, to use will terminology, “executive.” I mean that Socratic knowledge/wisdom goes immediately over into doing deeds, without any intervening determination to put the choice into effect. It is this wisdom, at once high-level and hands-on, that dialogues other than the Laches help me to specify.

First, an example. In the Phaedo, Socrates actually applies the instance that he gives of the wisdom in question in the Laches: A doctor knows how to cure an illness but lacks the wisdom to know whether death or life is the better choice (195c). On the day of his physical death, Socrates’s wisdom tells him that it is better to be dead than alive (Phaedo 62 a, 64a). He does not mean just the completed transition to Hades but also a death-in-life, such as one who philosophizes experiences when he puts his body in neutral with a “gain of mindfulness” (τὴν τῆς φρονήσεως κτῆσιν, 65a). Socrates is clearly courageous in the face of death, but Phaedo’s encomium omits that particular virtue; instead, he is said to have been the “most mindful and most just” of all they’ve known (118).²² Phaedo’s choice might be taken to mean that Socrates’s courage goes without saying, for he has both the best adjusted soul in life and the wisest soul timelessly, in life and death – that is to say, he has the most life-determining part-virtue and the unique philosophical excellence.²³

The Protagoras presents a very different atmosphere from the deliberately irenic, mutually respectful Laches. Its venue, the house of Callias, son of Hipponicus, is practically a house of ill repute.²⁴ A dubious lot is attendant at Socrates’s conversation with Protagoras, which is reported by Socrates himself. It is a younger Socrates than the one of Laches. He is among a whole slew of sophists whose chief is Protagoras – a self-styled sophist (317b) – so the dialogue is rightly subtitled “The Sophists.” The guests include Alcibiades, Charmides, and Critias – all traitors, subversive of the Athenian democracy.²⁵

This dialogue is far more pungent and colorful than the Laches. In particular, the younger Socrates’s relation to Protagoras is edgy; much of that is, however, worked out before they come to courage in particular (349d). Though the Protagoras is roughly twice as long as the Laches, whereas the Laches takes almost half its length to get to courage, the Protagoras takes three-quarters; clearly the main subject is not courage but rather whether virtue is one or many. Callias’s House of Hades (see note 24), and thus the Protagoras, is not, however, the right venue for forthrightly answering this question.

It is said, in Thrasylos’s scheme, to be “probative” (ἐνδεικτικός), possibly meaning “proof providing,” or, more weakly, “testing.” In any case, the Protagoras contains an implicitly definitive answer to a question preliminary to the question of what virtue might be and what its features are. That question is, “Can virtue be taught?” Socrates’s answer, delivered by him – at the end, through the voice of the logos itself going offstage, making its exit (ἔξοδος) – is that virtue is wholly knowledge (361b). But no proof is provided that it is therefore teachable; Protagoras and Socrates seem to be mixed up in a terminal muddle (361d).

Not so, however, for a little extra thought shows that virtue as knowledge may be learnable by us without being teachable by a teacher – if it is discoverable by going into one’s own soul, by mindfulness (φρόνησις).

The actual thought effort in this dialogue is made (and reported) by Socrates, so a condensed version can be given in Socratic terms. It amounts to this: Socrates raises to Protagoras, a self-denominated “wisdom monger” (σοφιστής, 317b), the question whether virtue is teachable – a politely impudent intervention, since the more famous older man claims to do exactly that. Socrates himself doesn’t believe it, since the excellent Athenians don’t make their offspring excellent. Protagoras, in reply, introduces a revealing adjective: “skill-involved wisdom” (ἔντεχνον σοφίαν, 321d). He is speaking of an excellence in the old sense: know-how, certainly teachable; technicians have apprentices. Then he sets up a nature-nurture muddle: Aside from particular skills, all human beings “somehow or other” partake of justice, a general political virtue, and rightly participate in public decision making; yet they don’t have it by nature, and so there can be and are teachers of that kind of virtue. That opinion delivered, Protagoras “ceases from arguing.”

Socrates slips in an addendum – it is his way when something significant is coming. Protagoras’s argument “lacks one little thing” (329b). He has not said precisely how virtue is one thing (ἓν τι, 329c) of which justice, temperance, and holiness are parts (μορία) – that’s what he, Socrates, is longing to know. He singles out the pair of courage and wisdom; are these parts of virtue? Yes, says Protagoras, and wisdom is the greatest (330a). Later, he will also single out courage because it alone, he opines, can appear paired with every vice (349d).

These two pinpointings of courage are not haphazard. The fact that courage, so close to overconfidence and rashness, should be a part virtue united with the others by wisdom is particularly thought provoking. The fact that it appears to go in tandem with any and all vice suggests that, if it is or has a wisdom, it would be a special skill-wisdom (ἔντεχνος σοφία, 321d) and that these wisdoms can distinguish the virtues as much as they unite them. But something more: in The Republic, Socrates says that features of courage particularly fit people for the “greatest study,” that of the Good (503e). Thus, courage as endurance is crucial to the dialectical disposition; spiritedness is a necessity in the guardian-philosophers (The Republic 410e).

Protagoras very reluctantly agrees that the parts of virtue must each be all; justice being just must be pious and the converse. After an interlude, Socrates goes into his testing/ refuting mode to nail down that all the parts are one (332ff.). As Hume so elegantly puts it, these refutations “admit no answer and produce no conviction.”²⁶ Well, they do, in fact, admit some probing questions, such as: Does each thing conceived as an opposite in fact have a one-and-only opposite? Is the only opposite to wisdom folly? Might there not be an opposite wisdom: know-how versus know-what? This is, I think, how this dialogue and its Socratic refutation might illuminate the Laches.

Protagoras being thoroughly rattled and Socrates ready to leave for his appointment (not for a moment do I believe that Socrates ever made an appointment), there ensues a long diversionary account of the poets on virtue (339-47).

Protagoras is shamed into returning to the conversation about the unity of virtue (348c). I shall summarize the elements that advance thinking about goodness, the ones that Socrates has inserted by the end of the conversation.

1. Nothing is more potent, not to be overpowered, than wisdom and knowledge. Yet people generally think that they are impotent and often worsted, especially by pleasure; they know what is best but do something else (352b-e).

2. All virtues are one, yet each has its “own beingness and matter” (ἴδιος οὐσία καὶ πρᾶγμα, 349b); “matter” here is not a thing or stuff but more like Hegel’s Sache selbst, the deed-product of the doing-action. As such, each excellence is itself that which its beingness names, the πρᾶγμα (330c) of an eidetic activity. Thus, justice is just, presumably in a superlative degree. Of course, this particularity of each virtue’s beingness is, on the face of it, blatantly at odds with any commonality of its wisdom.

3. The saving of our life depends on a skill and a knowledge that measures situations so as to nullify their confusing appearance (φάντασμα, 357a; “false impression”). But whichever skill and knowledge that is, we’ll consider hereafter (εἰσαῦθις).²⁷ Meanwhile, “courage is wisdom concerning the ‘dreadful’ and the ‘not dreadful,’ and it is the opposite of an ignorance of these” (360d).

I think each of the three results tacitly proposes questions to be pondered: 1. Are there two wisdoms – one that can be ignored, another that always rules? 2. Is there a way for each virtue to have its own mode of being, yet for all virtues to be the same? 3. Are know-how and knowledge identical or distinct?

“Hereafter” eventuates in The Republic. ²⁸ The Protagoras was the take of the σοφ-ιστής on the unity of the virtues; The Republic is that of the φιλό-σοφος, the wisdom-plyer versus the wisdom-lover; hence the one is a “testing” and the other what I might call a “poretic” dialogue. The latter offers a positive ontology that tells, as far as telling is possible and desirable, of the knowledge that is behind the Laches and the Protagoras. I mean “behind” in the sense of implied, extractable, or possessible, quite aside from Socrates’s own condition – whether in each dialogue he is to be imagined as having this knowledge as a mere intimation or as a work well in progress or as an end already achieved.²⁹

This is the relevant compositional feature of The Republic: The work moves inward through a series of topics considered from the point of view of worldly wisdom through a numerically almost exact center (473c-d), announcing the philosopher-kings and then the image-ontology that underlies their education to an anti-symmetrical second half in which these same topics are reviewed, now in the ontological light of cognitive dialectic.³⁰

The virtues/excellences thus appear in their probably commonly accepted number before the central high point: “wise, courageous, soundminded, and just” (427e). Their exposition is sensible and practical. Here courage is, in accord with the Laches, but more concisely, the defensive, conserving, enduring virtue, the one that preserves the opinions about what is to be dreaded not only in battle but in pleasures and desires, opinions that the lawgiver has called for in the civic community’s education (429b-430c, 442b-c). This courage imbues the citizens like a dye that won’t be washed out by pleasure, pain, fear, or desire, but it is vulnerable to folly, such as Nicias’s superstition (Thucydides VII 50).

Thus courage is, at first, not a wisdom, at least not the citizens’ own wisdom, but is, as the sayings go, “dyed in the wool” or “bred in the bone” or “learned by heart” – not as an articulated intellectual ethics but rather as a physically absorbed habit. You might call it somatic internality – such as Lycurgus instilled in his Spartans when he insisted that his laws were to be unwritten, learned as sayings (ῥῆτραι).³¹

Once past the center, however, courage becomes an intellectual virtue, indeed the intellectual virtue insofar as it is a disposition to submit to and persist in a lengthy path of learning. There is, however, more to it. At the culmination of this “dialectical way-tobe-pursued” (διαλεκτικὴ μέθοδος, 531d, 533b, c), the learners come within “sight” of the matter itself, the forms or “aspects”; the soul “makes its way by and through the forms/ aspects themselves” (εἴδεσι, 510b; especially 507b). Recall Socrates has already said that each being, each εἶδος, is also that of which it isthe beingness(οὐσία),so the εἶδος Courage displays courageness most clearly (Protagoras 330c).

Glaucon gets it: this is a very different work from that done by the “so-called skills,” “close to the body” and “implanted by habit and exercise” and “geared to human opinions” (The Republic 511c, 518d, 533b).

What we are tasked with is thinking this out: How can the “aspect” (εἶδος) “beheld” (θεωρούμενον) have this power, how can “the mind’s sight” (νόησις), how can wisdom₁ overcome the body’s inherent resistance to the specific good sense of all the wisdoms₂ ? How can this metaphorical sight of Being Itself in a higher realm transit immediately, unhampered by recalcitrance of the flesh or weakness of the will,³² into this world so that “we may do well-and-good” (εὖ πράττωμεν, 621d) in this world because we have transcended it?

Socrates provides quite a few features of a dialectic that raises us into this realm as a mode of mentation. They are of the “both/and” sort:

1. This dialectic is both synoptic and specific, panoramic and pinpointed (537c). The learners will have to maintain both an overview of the whole eidetic context and a concentration on the individual eidetic being. Now the dilemma of multiple part-virtues versus a single complete virtue (πάσης ἀρετῆς, Republic 585c) – namely, knowledge – is obviated. For dialectic accommodates both a “conspectus” (σύνοψσιν), a simultaneous vision, of the relationship (οἰκειότητος) that these studies, and thus their objects, the various beings, have with each other, and a concentration, a looking at and into the “nature” (φύσεως) of each “being” (τοὐ ὄντος, 537c) on its own.

2. Philosophers will therefore be at once unbudging in the way of the brave – that is, stable and patient – and they will be agile in the way of the bright – that is, eager and receptive (503c-d).

3. They will have to let go of their eyes and the other senses (537d), but – a wonderful picture of Socrates calling attention to the danger he himself poses – they will not have been untethered by too much refuting and being refuted when too young (537e-539d). In other words, the young dialecticians will be at once naïve – that is, receptive to wide nonocular vision – and articulate – that is, mentally capable of taking in the beingness of each thing and giving an account (λόγον, 534b) of it to themselves and to another.³³

4. The most remarkable dialectical ability, after the power of intellectual sight, is “image recognition” (εἰκασία 510e, 511e), meaning the recognition of an image as an image, and its recovery (534a). I say “recovery” because on the Divided Line it is the least esteemed human capacity, at the very bottom of the dialectical ascent. But even a little reflection shows that imaging, along with its recognition, is the most potent ontological activity and the most pervasive cognitive capability. Socrates intimates this situation by performing some fairly tricky, apparently frolicsome transformations on the proportions of the divisions that constitute the Divided Line.³⁴ The outcome is that the segment devoted to “thinking things through” (διάνοια) – that is, linear rationality – is now facing image recognition directly in the given ratio relation (λόγος; thinking things through: image recognition).³⁵ I take that to mean that even our most workman-like mental operation needs to be mindful of the image-cascade whose ontological descent unifies all grades of being and of the image recognition whose cognitive ascent opens up all levels of learning.

So disposed, a human being might come face to face with the – literally speaking – most highly specified beings themselves, the forms (since species is Latin for eidos). Why would the sight of these beings prompt unobstructed action? We are not told, yet that does not furnish grounds for dismission but rather a place for beginning, at least for imagining what Plato and his Socrates might not reject.

I would start with Socrates’s confident claim that the forms are themselves that of which they are the beingness – offering at once an in-sight through which to enter the meaning of courage and an at-sight by which to behold a model of bravery. They are both ideas and ideals. From the realm of beings in their beingness thus attained there follows practical wisdom in the world of appearances both of the natural world and of the civic community. Hence the question “What is to be feared?” may be definitively answered, perhaps beginning along these lines: whatever degrades these realms and our souls’ relation to them.

In particular, “at-sight” (as in Latin intuere, “to look at”) puts before our intellectual vision a model (παράδειγμα) in the light of which the desire for emulation arises: the disembodied soul’s erotic arousal, its desire to assimilate its ideal, to become brave. Dialectic, however, has two ways. Besides arousing the soul with the particularities of goodness, it instructs the soul in the coherence of all beings, with a knowledge uniting depth and breadth. Thus beauty, the uniquely attractive visibility (κάλλος…λαμπρόν, Phaedrus 250b) of the “looks” (εἴδη), is supported by truth, the meanings that these underlying beings derive from their unifying relations.

To me it is plausible that this dual mode of living in the realm of dialectic would compel courageous conduct without any mediation; thus virtue/excellence would indeed be wisdom/knowledge (Laches 194d; Protagoras 360d). And the residual perplexities left by Socrates’s refutations would, I imagine, be resolved in some such transition to an intellectual experience.

A brief conclusion will do. I have wished to portray Socrates as one who safeguards his final freedom from dogmatism while “nailing down” for Plato’s thinking, as he is said to have done for Euripides’s drama, certain doctrines, albeit implicitly. He thus incites us to be copresent at his conversations.³⁶

Republished with gracious permission from Kronos (vol. VII, 2019).

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¹ Diogenes Laertius II 18.

² For example, G. Santas, “Socrates at Work on Virtue and Knowledge in Plato’s Laches,” The Philosophy of Socrates, ed. Gregory Vlastos (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 208.

³ Diogenes Laertius III 56-59. The bestower of the titles was Thrasylos, a Neopythagorean of the reign of Tiberius (42 BC-37 CE), who, Diogenes says, used “double headings” (διπλάῖς…ἐπιγραφαῖς) besides the main title. The first of these indicated the particular topic, “Courage” for the Laches, and the second the more general area, mixing subject and approach. Thus: “tentative, ethical, logical, obstetric, refutative, critical, political,” in Diogenes’s order and Hick’s Loeb translation. The Laches has the subheading “maieutic” or “obstetric” or, as I say, “midwife-ish.” There is no heading “aporetic,” perhaps because it is a fairly common opinion that almost all dialogues end in ἀπορία. Diagones Laertius also lists a different set of classifications on his own account (49). His chief division is between dialogues of instruction and dialogues of inquiry.

⁴ Thucydides does not even report by name Laches’s death in the Battle of Mantinea (418 BC, bk. V 74), while Nicias appears in bks. III, IV, V, and particularly VI and VII of The Peloponnesian War. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in his biography Platon (1918), says that Laches was of the two generals “der bessere Menschenkenner.”

⁵ Aristotle says that “dialectic is fit for testing [the opinion of others] concerning those things about which philosophy is knowledgeable” (Metaphysics 1004b 25).

⁶ Lysimachus’s son Aristides, after his grandfather “the Just”; Melesias’s Thucydides, after his grandfather, a general, not the historian.

⁷ Example: In The Republic 517b, Socrates, telling Glaucon of the soul’s ascent to the “place of intelligibility,” interrupts his account: “God, perhaps, knows if it [my hopeful expectation, ἐλπίς] happens to be true.”

⁸ Heraclitus, when he says, “Listening not to  me but to  my λόγος” (D-K 50), seems to demand the opposite way of being heard, that of setting aside human circumstance. Not, however, to my mind. I think a good reader allows both approaches their moment – if the composer of the text seems to invite this duality. As for teaching actual students: Always make evident your full attention to their thinking; let your appreciative awareness of their persons occasionally flash out.

⁹ See Theaetetus 189e, 206d; Philebus 38e. The Philebus passage refers to a “scribe” and a “book” in the soul. It is a tricky, open problem whether this text, written in accordance with the sensations received, the memories stored, and the feelings aroused (39a) is a pre-uttered logos waiting to be voiced or silently articulated speech ready for sounding, or whether these modes are actually distinct. The Laches passage stands out for referring to pre-articulated thinking, the sense that one has something in mind that must be captured in words.

¹⁰ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1115a 17. I believe he reasons that, since courage is the mean between fear and confidence (1107b 1, 1115a 7) and the mean certainly is one negation of the extreme, courage is not-fear or fearlessness; so viewed, it is less opposed to confidence than to  fear. Aristotle prepares such reasonings in his introduction of the moral mean (N.E., bk. II vi). Socrates is, to be sure, said to face death “fearlessly” (ἀδεῶς, 58e) in the Phaedo. But that is because he is beyond courage as a part-virtue. Courage is not named in the Phaedo’s final encomium: best, most mindful, most just (118). See text, below.

¹¹ This pair, “knowledge how” and “wisdom whether,” is sometimes called “first- and second-order knowledge.” I’m not sure that is accurate, since the “second-order” judgment of the Laches is not actually piggybacked on the first-order know-how. I take “second-order” to mean just such piggybacking: If flute playing is a know-how, then knowing how to know how to play the flute is a second-order know-how – knowing the general art of having a skill.

¹² “Approaching the question dialectically” is, to me, a tautology, since dialectic may be said to be aporetic ontology, questing ascendingly. By these terms I mean that it is the inquiry into being, pursued not as constructive and comprehensive system building but out of a personal and particular perplexity, supported by hope.

¹³ This is how virtue is first presented in The Republic (352e-353e). There each thing has its proper function, its excellence, such as a pruning knife, which is better at cutting away dead branches than a whittling knife. The German Tugend supports this meaning since it is related to tüchtig, “able,” and taugen, “fit for.” Soon virtue will be said to be σοφία, “wisdom,” one of whose narrower senses is “knowing competence.”

¹⁴ Republic 427e may be the first such list, so that Plato may be attributing the canonization of the foursome to Socrates. James Adams, in The Republic of Plato, has a long note to this passage, collecting possible earlier references to the four and their variations. Among them is Aeschylus in The Seven Against Thebes, 610, who anticipates one of Socrates’s diversionary lists later on in the dialogue. Aeschylus omits wisdom and lists εὐσέβεια instead; Socrates substitutes ὁσιότης, “holiness.” The omission of wisdom will be crucial. The problem concerning the canonical parts of virtue is thus, in sum, whether they were fixed by Socrates/ Plato or derived by them from common usage and, in either case, why just these stood out. For example, my freshmen wondered why kindness was missing.

¹⁵ “Endurance,” the usual English translation for καρτερία, is misleading, since it suggests a temporal element of duration, while the Greek word, related to κράτος, “strength, power,” connotes self-control.

¹⁶ This is an inference: Nicias agrees that courage is not αὐλητική, which is usually understood to imply τέχνη, the flautist’s technique.

¹⁷ This wisdom is referred to in the scholarly literature as “secondary,” another misnomer, I think (see note 11), for this wisdom is not piggybacked on a primary know-how but lives in a different psychic mode, one I hope to delineate in section III. Such misdescriptions, arising from a latter-day vocabulary, abound – for example, “concept,” “fact-value distinction,” “Socratic paradoxes,” and “definition.” Take the last: students are apt to think of Socrates as seeking definitions in the dictionary sense – short verbal compactions. Socrates does, to be sure, speak of ὁρίζειν, “drawing a  boundary” (ὅρος), “delineating.” I  think, however, that what he means is closer to Heidegger’s use of Horizont in Being and Time (p. 1), a territory within which understanding takes place – minimally, a denotation plus its connotations. Apropos “Socratic paradoxes”: They are surely not paralogisms but rather astounding collocations.

¹⁸ This last version of courage appears here most prominently as a modifier, not as the common noun ἀνδρεία but as the neuter plural adjective ἀνδρεῖα. That serves as a  reminder that the literal translation of the virtue is manliness, from ἀνήρ, ἀνδρός. I think the apparent gendering can be discounted; there is evidence that the term is used, though differentiatedly, of women. (Examples: Aristotle, Politics 1277b 22, though Poetics 1454a 23 says that being manly does not befit a woman.) German: tapfer originally meant gedrungen (“sturdy”) and is cognate with “dapper” (“trim”) – so both stable and agile. English: courage from Latin cor, heart, so “heartiness,” “wholeheartedness.” The Greek, German, and English terms all contribute to the connotation of courage as a particular, a part-virtue.

¹⁹ A non-Platonic source is Xenophon in Memorabilia IV 6. He is giving a  sample of Socrates’s making his companions “more dialectical.” Xenophon means not the dialectic of the highest sector of the Divided Line in The Republic but skill in discussion. In the sample dialogue there is a section on courage (IV 6, 10-11). As in the Laches, Socrates holds that one who knows what each thing is, is also able to expound it to others. Courage is a fine thing; it is not fearlessness from ignorance but knowing how to deal well with terrifying and danger-attended situations. Those who can do this are good and thus courageous. Those who cannot are bad. There follows an ungrounded piece of Platonism: “Then each of these conducts himself as he thinks he must?” “What else?” “So those who are not able to conduct themselves well know how they must conduct themselves?” “Surely not.” “So those who know how to conduct themselves, these are the ones who are able to.” “Only they.” This cannot carry conviction because you can’t get from the dubious notion that all people behave as they deem they must to the conclusion that only those who know how to conduct themselves well are able to do so. Their “deeming” might be very vagrant but their deeds quite decent – within limits. The Xenophontic dialogue thus asserts but fails to explain Socrates’s identification of virtue as a whole with a wisdom that is knowledge – the very issue of this section (II).

²⁰ Often the conversation is referred to in the plural (διαλόγοι, e.g., Laches 200e).

²¹ 1. Aristotle, On the Soul: “Desire is in the rational part” (λογιστικῷ, 432b 6). 2. Augustine, On Free Will, for example: the sin of the will is the deliberate turning away from God the unchangeable to changeable gods (II 20).

²² Recall that justice is the non-preemptive, non-interfering, well-working of each part of an embodied soul (The Republic 433a-b).

²³ But, for future reference, injustice and impiety are also said to be the opposites of “political/civic” virtue; thus justice and holiness are positive political virtues (Protagoras 324a). The last line of the Phaedo also echoes what Telemachus says of Nestor: Beyond all others, “he knows judgments (δίκας) and wise thought (φρόνιν, Odyssey III 244).” This marks the difference between the poem and the dialogue: Homer speaks in particulars.

²⁴ In addition to hosting a houseful of sophists and politicians dangerous to the democracy, Callias had living with him, besides his wife, his mother-in-law, with whom he was having an affair. Hence he was called “Hades” in Athens, since Hades harbored in his underworld as consorts both Demeter and her daughter Persephone (“The Origins of Political Science and the Problem of Socrates: Six Public Lectures by Leo Strauss,” Interpretation 23, no. 2 [Winter 1996]: 177).

²⁵ “Traitors” is an opinion. Ancient references to these persons’ activities are provided in D. Nails, The People of Plato (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002).

²⁶ An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 7, pt. 1, n. 1.

²⁷ I think the sentence hints at the question of whether skill and knowledge are the same.

²⁸ The dramatic date of the Protagoras is 432 BC, that of The Republic just before 420, so “hereafter” is applicable. The Laches takes place in 424, not long before Laches will fall in the battle of Mantinea in 418; Nicias was killed by the Sicilians in 413.

²⁹ The second subtitle of The Republic is simply “political,” which is revealing though inaccurate, since, as Rousseau says in Émile, The Republic is not a work on politics “but the finest treatise on education ever written” (bk. 1, circa 8 pages in); it must serve, since none of the aporetic subtitles apply. “Possible”: Republic 506d-e; “desirable”: Seventh Letter 343a.

³⁰ E. Brann, “The Music of the Republic,” 108-245, in the book of the same name (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2004).

³¹ Plutarch, Lycurgus (13). On virtue as habit, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 2, chap. 1.

³² “Will” is anachronistic because there is no faculty of will (understood as a separable executive power adjunct to choice and liable to go feeble) that I know of in the Socratic Dialogues. There are functioning virtues rather than operable faculties.

³³ Here is an often-practiced malapropism: to credit this young dialectician’s mind with a capacity for “abstractions.” The being that is to be non-ocularly apprehended is not “an abstraction” gotten by abstraction (ἀφαίρησις), such as Aristotle proposes for understanding the mathematician’s mental mode of “drawing off” every sensory feature from an item to leave a pure mathematical monad (Metaphysics, 1061a 29 ff.). It is not a sense-deprived thing but the most substance-laden, meaning-dense object of “theory” (in the ancient sense of contemplation), and it is itself the bestower of the capacity to appear of the objects we sense.

³⁴ This ratio relation is achieved by means of the transformations of proportions set out in Euclid’s Elements, bk. 5. Three such transformations, composition, alternation, and inversion, are employed; Adams, in The Republic of Plato, gives the proof in his note to 534a. Socrates was counting on the brothers’ facility with proportions, or perhaps on their mathematical intuition: If a line is divided in a given ratio, and its subdivisions are again divided in the same ratio, then the antecedents of the subdivisions’ division will be to each other in that given ratio (as will their consequents). Whether Plato found or invented εἰκασία I  don’t know, but that he adopted its meaning to  suit his need – “image recognition” – is pretty clear.

³⁵ The colon symbolizes the ratio relation in quantities. Here it betokens one member of a notional analogy – linear thinking is to image recognition as, say, knowledge is to opinion.

³⁶ An example of such copresence: I own (don’t know how) a German high school edition of the Laches published in 1891, thus one-and-a-quarter-centuries old and as good as it gets. In his Preface to this slim volume, the editor and commentator, one Dr. Christian Cron, imagines that German youths, when reading a certain passage in the Laches (might it be 199d, the climactic paragraph on knowledge as unifying all the part-virtues?), will be reminded of a recently deceased prince, a brave leader in war and the courageous victim of a fatal illness. This hero appears to be Prince Frederick William of Prussia, later Frederick III, who died in 1888 after a very brief reign. To my mind, this Dr. Cron read dialogues as they ask to be read: for reference to the present as it includes past and future (Laches 198d). He may have seen in Frederick a Christian philosopher-king. Opinions differ on how politically effective in the long run his undoubted goodness would have been had his reign been extended. In any case, Socrates himself reserved a warm friendship for people – like Crito – of plain decency, as this Oberstudienrat evidently did. I infer this from the tone of his dedications, which include Georg Autenreith, whose Englished version of his Homeric dictionary is on my shelf. The Laches and the youngsters were in good hands with him.

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