Abstract
In the Minos or On Law Socrates asks a nameless companion out of the blue, “What is law for us?” knowing full well, it seems, that the companion himself will not be able to give a satisfactory answer. Why on earth, then, would Socrates bother to ask the question of the companion—a man clearly more ignorant than himself? The mystery only deepens when the companion mishears and misunderstands Socrates’ decisive contribution to the conversation and Socrates doesn’t even bother to set him straight. Rather, he uses the definition of law the companion mistakenly thinks he heard to lead him, via the companion’s own opinions, to a position that Socrates does not himself hold. In this chapter, Goldberg hopes to uncover the deep philosophical reasons for Socrates’ procedure in conducting so strange a conversation.
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Notes
- 1.
Among the other things that they appear not to have learned is what happens to us when we die (Apology 29a1–b6; cf. 39e1–41d2 and consider diamythologēsai at 39e5; cf. Republic 1, 330d4–331d3). All references to Plato are to the Oxford Classical Texts edition by John Burnet; translations are my own.
- 2.
All references to the Ethics are to the Oxford Classical Texts edition by I. Bywater; translations are my own.
- 3.
This does not mean that Xenophon’s Socrates does not converse with others on law and in this way reveal that he has indeed raised (and answered) the question of what law is; see especially Memorabilia 4.4.
- 4.
Cf. Meno 72c1–d1. Interestingly, Socrates does not ask for the eidos of law: does it have one?
- 5.
What it means to believe in a god and how one comes to do so might then be one strand of Socrates’ inquiry here.
- 6.
This is not to deny what the Athenian Stranger says of the necessity for laws—that without them, human beings would differ not at all from the most savage beasts ( Laws 9, 874e–875a).
- 7.
When the comrade gives his first definition, he may already have in mind the fact, which he will emphasize later, that Athenian laws change from one time to another, as well as the fact that laws change from one place to another.
- 8.
In the case of seeing, Socrates or the questioner speaks of its objects as things (pragmata) whereas in the case of hearing he speaks of them only as sounds. He thus suggests that seeing and not hearing discloses things that really are. One wonders whether law might not be more like hearing than seeing. The only other use of pragmata in the dialogue comes in the definition of art, which we will come to presently. In all other cases, “things” and “thing” merely translate the neuter article when added to an adjective or a participle to make it into a noun. By the way, at 315c6 the comrade will tell Socrates, “Surely you know because you yourself hear …”; the word he uses for know is the perfect tense of the verb to see. According to the comrade, then, it is possible to have seen (or to know) by hearing.
- 9.
The doubt that divining or prophecy is a genuine art is planted not by Socrates, of course, but by the unidentified questioner.
- 10.
The word “these” in Greek (tauta) can be used, as it is here, to express impatience with what it refers to as well as scorn. The comrade thus scoffs at the city’s resolutions and decrees.
- 11.
The word Socrates uses for “is coming to light” (kataphainetai) has a prefix that indicates motion downward. Perhaps by using it he means to suggest that this is a demotion of law to the status of (a) mere opinion. The same is true with the word he uses for “clear” (katadēlon) in the next clause (314e8–9).
- 12.
Cf. Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , 1129b12: “All lawful things are somehow just” (my italics).
- 13.
Euthyphro 14b2–7, with its similar wording, may offer a little help with what this might mean. See also Crito 50b3 and context.
- 14.
There are neutral words for saying and speaking that Socrates does not use here. The word he does use (phēmi) can mean “say” but is also used to mean “assert”; when negated, it means “deny.” It is not clear that the comrade hears it as “assert” rather than “say.” But Socrates (and Plato through Socrates) speaks with exquisite care.
- 15.
The words Socrates uses for worthy or decent (chrēstos) and worthless or base (ponēros) can have strong moral overtones but literally mean useful and burdensome. Although I’ve translated the words according to their less literal meanings, one should not lose sight of the more literal ones. It is left to the reader to decide what each interlocutor has in mind. It is possible that Socrates substitutes chrēstos for the “noble” together with “good” he used shortly before.
- 16.
See Harvey C. Mansfield , “On the Majesty of the Law” in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 36.1: 117–129, for a helpful account, well-informed by Plato’s Minos, of this aspect of our view of law and its importance, as well as the neglect of it in contemporary theories of law.
- 17.
The noble lie is needed to support the dogma that the happiness of the city is the necessary and sufficient condition of the happiness of the individual, a dogma in turn necessary for loving and therefore caring for one’s city (Republic 3, 412c12–e8).
- 18.
In the context, this implies of course that law wishes to be true opinion. One might define philosophy itself as true opinion with regard to that which is. In light of this, what Socrates says here may indicate the ground of the necessary conflict between philosophy and the city.
- 19.
The word for finding-out (exeuresis) is compounded of the word for finding (heuresis) and the prefix ex- (out); it can also be translated as “discovery” and even “invention.” The Greek word for “science”—epistēmē—could also be translated as “knowledge”; epistēmē is the subject matter of Plato’s Theaetetus .
- 20.
Note that here the comrade also turns the singular Socrates used into a plural. What he might have in mind he doesn’t say and Socrates doesn’t ask. In the Apology , when interrogating Meletus , Socrates clarifies one of his questions by explaining that he’s asking “what human being it is who first knows this thing itself—the laws” (24e); Socrates speaks as though (genuine) laws are not man-made but exist independently.
- 21.
Consider in this regard Laws 1, 632b7–c4, and 12, 958c7ff.
- 22.
If so, does he mean that what is holy or pious is therefore also lawful, or that what is lawful is therefore also holy or pious? Near the end of his speech (315d4–5) the comrade uses a phrase whose meaning is uncertain (kata t’auta nomizomen). The usual way of understanding it would have it saying something like “neither do we always have [or use] the same laws …”; the italicized portion translates the phrase in question, construing it as the direct object of the verb. But kata t’auta would normally mean “according to [or based on] the same things.” The comrade might be saying, then, something more like “neither do we always base what we recognize as law on the same things ….” In that case, he could mean that we don’t base our laws on the same considerations or beings, or, given the context, on the same gods or teachings about the gods. Thomas Pangle also appears to take kata t’auta as the direct object but has “neither do we … at all times lawfully accept the same things” (The Roots of Political Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987, 57); cf. Leo Strauss (in Roots 70, bottom). Consider Laws 12, 948d1–3.
- 23.
The word for “say the same thing” is homologeō; the word for “think the same thing” or “to be of one mind” would be homonoeō.
- 24.
In the Gorgias , a dialogue that treats Socratic dialectic and rhetoric (see, e.g., 474a4–6, 517a4–5, and 521d6–e1), Socrates tells Polus that he will try to make him say the same things that he himself says (473a2–3).
- 25.
Note that Socrates has suggested in passing that even the view that the things which are, (simply) are, and the things which are not, (simply) are not, is the product of law or is something that is merely held (nomizō; cf. Sophist 240e10–241a1). The world as we believe we know it is constituted by law or by what in us makes us receptive to law.
- 26.
Even in the Minos passage we’re looking at, Socrates gave an indication of his disagreement. He did so by inserting—between the just and the unjust on the one hand and the noble and the shameful on the other—the heavier and the lighter. Perhaps just as what is heavier from one point of view is lighter from another, what is just from one point of view is unjust from another. Cf. Republic 5, 479b6–8 and context.
- 27.
The word for “expert knowers” (epistēmones) comes from the word I’ve translated as “science” and could be translated as “scientific knowers.” In this section, then, Socrates seems to combine what he had formerly distinguished—science and art.
- 28.
The word for “know” (eidenai) that Socrates uses here and the word that the comrade uses for “knowers” (eidotes) in his reply (316d5) come not from the word for “science” but from the word for “to have seen” (the word needn’t mean “know” literally through having seen, with one’s eyes; it is related to eidos and to idea—the words for the Platonic “form” and “idea”). I distinguish between the two terms for knowing by always translating words that derive from “science” by the relevant form of the verb “to know” together with the word “expert.” See notes 19 and 27.
- 29.
If we take these as analogies to law in the ordinary sense, and not simply as the so-called laws of arts, then they point in different directions for what the city’s laws, the laws that govern our lives, might aim at: medicine, for instance, at healing us; gardening, perhaps, at producing citizens of some beauty or nobility. It could be that all four examples Socrates uses should be taken as analogies collectively pointing to various aims of law.
- 30.
On the basis of the Gorgias, at least, we would infer that the city’s laws—if they spring from a spurious art like cookery—would be a means of flattery, aiming not at what is good but at what is pleasant (463a–b, 464c–d), perhaps flattering in the sense that the laws appeal to, rather than correcting or educating, citizens’ presuppositions with regard to justice and the pleasant hopes that attend them (cf. Republic 331a).
- 31.
Is law perhaps the art of divining the gods’ thoughts about the just and the unjust—that is, the art of divining what qualities and actions would be deserving of either reward or punishment by gods if they existed? As Strauss notes, the difference between Socrates and the comrade with regard to cookery “comes to light in the very center of the dialogue” (Roots 72, bottom).
- 32.
Cf. Laws 10, 885b4–c8. Note that the first word of the Minos (the introduction to the Laws) is Law; the first word of the Laws, on the other hand, is God.
- 33.
Here and elsewhere in this chapter, I use “expert,” when not paired with some form of the word “to know,” to translate the Greek adjective ending (-ikos) that implies the presence of an art (or science). The Greek word for statesman, politikos, always has this ending (and can mean merely “having to do with the city” or “politician”); the Greek word for king (basileus) does not. But Socrates here (317a6) uses instead a word (basilikos) that does imply the presence of an art—the royal art. It is not clear that one has to be an actual statesman or king to possess the art of one or that those who are practicing statesman (i.e., politicians) and kings therefore possess an art. Cf. Gorgias 521d6–e1 and Statesman 259a–b.
- 34.
Socrates uses an emphatic word that means manly men (andres); what a good man, in this sense, might be he doesn’t say. For some help, consider Plato’s Apology 20b–c and Meno 71e1–5 as well as Aristotle’s Politics 3.4–5.
- 35.
This reads more like a description of Plato’s Laws and Republic than of any code of law.
- 36.
This phrase could also be translated “that which is resolved.” The word for “seems” here (dokei) is the word from which words for “opinion” (doxa) and resolution (dogma) come. Resolutions of the Athenian assembly begin with dokei: “It is resolved that….”
- 37.
The word for “agreed” is again homologeō (see note 23). Perhaps, then, what he’d set out to do after the comrade’s long speech—to come to terms or to agree (cf. 317d1 with 315e1–2)—has now been accomplished.
- 38.
Cf. Phaedrus 276a1–c9.
- 39.
At 320e2–3, Socrates mentions in passing that the comrade is a manly man (anēr) concerned with having a good reputation (eudokimos). On the manly man, see note 34.
- 40.
Socrates does not use the term “expert king” here (cf. note 33).
- 41.
In addition to Crete, Socrates mentions Sparta as happy. He had earlier said or suggested that the best Spartan laws come from Crete (318c6–d2). In the Laws , the Athenian Stranger will converse with and examine two men—one from Crete, the other from Sparta.
- 42.
See Crito 54d2–e2, where Socrates, calling Crito “dear comrade,” likens the speeches the Laws have made to the sound of flutes and likens himself listening to them to the Corybantes, frenzied worshipers of the goddess Cybele. See also Laws 7, 790d2–791b2 (as for the terror mentioned there, cf. Republic 1, 330d–e, and 3, 386a6–b3).
- 43.
See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 140.
- 44.
Using the language of the cave image, perhaps we may call laws “the shadows of the just” or the “statues of which they are the shadows” ( Republic 7, 517d; cf. 532b6–c3 with 4, 443c4–5). The word Socrates chooses here for statues (agalmata) is used in particular of statues of gods (see, for instance, Thucydides 2.13.5); Justice (Dikē), herself a goddess, is mentioned by Socrates later in book 7 (536b3; cf. Laws 4, 716a).
- 45.
It thus appears that the comrade is about the same age as Socrates.
- 46.
Having raised the comrade’s hopes for laws he could have faith in for guiding his life correctly, Socrates went on to answer those hopes.
- 47.
At one point Socrates uses the odd phrase, “the human herd of the body” (318a1–2); he never speaks of “the human herd of the soul.” Perhaps when it comes to their bodies, but certainly not when it comes to their souls, human beings or citizens do make up something like a herd. Cf. Laws 2, 666d11–667a5.
- 48.
With this thought, the full meaning of Socrates’ “definition” of law may have finally come to light. For a powerful statement of the inferiority of law to science or knowledge (epistēmē) and a genuinely free mind, see Laws 9, 875c6–d2 and context.
- 49.
If Socrates does think or suspect that law is the dogma of the city, he would appear to agree with the Athenian Stranger (see Laws 1, 644d2–3 and context). So sure (or perhaps unsure) was Athens that its laws were “the finding-out of that which is” that it put Socrates on trial for disobeying them and then killed him for it.
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Goldberg, R. (2019). The Strange Conversation of Plato’s Minos. In: Diduch, P., Harding, M. (eds) Socrates in the Cave. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76831-1_2
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