Ep. 402: Plato Talks Homer: Hippias Minor and Ion (Part One)

Knowledge and virtue in Plato

0:00You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point said I'm doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Our questions for episode 402 are aspects of the larger question, what's the relation between knowledge and virtue? And we read two short early platonic dialogues, Hippias Minor and Ion. For more information about the texts and the podcast, please see PartiallyExaminedLife.com. This is Mark Linton-Meyer, worthy to be crowned

0:33by the sons of Homer with a golden crown in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin, best of all rap-sodes in Austin, Texas. This is Wes All-One, superior because I do inferior things on purpose, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Very nice. Very nice one. You guys both chose the Ion. It was a little more sprightly. Inspiring. I just like the word rap-sode. Both of these have something to do with Homer. I mean, I guess probably there's Homer in most of

1:06the platonic dialogues. At some point he quotes Homer, but in this case, both the people prompting, Hippias and Ion, respectively, have some knowledge, have said something with regard to Homer that gets this discussion going. And I'm really glad that this morning I actually, I was reviewing the Protagoras and some other, the Gorgias and other things in this area because these two dialogues, like if you introduce somebody to Plato with these, this would not be good. They would not know what

1:37Plato's, Socrates' view is on anything. They're both very short and they kind of establish, I don't know, they're very easy to summarize, I feel. But Wes, you seem more excited about Hippias Minor. You're the one that suggested this in the first place. Do you want to say why?

The Odyssey and the enlightenment

1:53Well, how did it come up? I had suggested Hippias Minor because we were talking about Habermas, who was talking about Adorno and Horkheimer, who were talking about the Odyssey and Odysseus as representative of the man of the Enlightenment. They were trying to make the argument that really the Enlightenment could be represented by this stage of a transition in ancient Greece. So Odysseus is living in this mythological world. In a sense, he's playing by its rules, but he's also subverting

2:27it and he's the isolated, alienated subject and all that good stuff. Do you remember I suggested the Hippias maybe as something that would come after that or was it supposed to complement another reading? I mean, it's Odyssey Fever. I don't know if the movie had not come out yet when you brought this up and when we started covering it, but we knew it was coming out. We knew this was going to be a craze. And that Ion, so I, after reading the Hippias and it was so short that I insisted that we added Ion because our translator in the Hippias said Ion paired well with it. He was a sommelier

2:59of platonic dialogues. Claude said it was the best pairing as well. Right. And Ion is a rhapsode who's just gaga for Homer, but he can't listen when anybody talks about anything else besides Homer. They're all gaga for Homer. Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey are like their Bible essentially at that time, even though hundreds of years have passed. Everyone's quoting Homer, even Socrates can do it at length. You wouldn't think necessarily he was that interested in the poets,

3:31right? Because he has a lot of critical things to say about them. But what was interesting to me, I just glanced at the ancient Greek because Mark, you gave us a text which had both the ancient Greek and English, but you can't fault me for looking at a little bit of the Greek. But a lot of this centers on the question of whether Odysseus is a liar and whether he is quote unquote wily. And the word wily translates palutropon or palutropos,

4:02but in the Odyssey, that's the word that all the translators get hung up on. It's translated sometimes as many weighed or Emily Wilson, who we had on at one point translated as complicated. It means many turns or many ways. It means a lot of different things. And it's supposed to capture a lot of different aspect of Odysseus's character, including the fact that he's just been run off course, right? Man of many turns, like he's lost. So yeah, that's really nice that you just, but at this point in Greek history, it is just unequivocally become he was wily.

4:35There wasn't any, I don't think ambiguity about that word. It just means something like wily. And then the question is, well, how does that relate to falsehood? I guess then they don't spend a lot of time on that, but wily and falseness get equated. But anyway, I thought it was interesting because I spent a lot of time. I translated most of the first book of the Odyssey after I got back from vacation, had a manic spell and translated it. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that

5:06word, but also I got really burned out of it by the end of the first book. And I thought, I'm not sure that Homer is that great, actually. Maybe this isn't because people were talking about whether the movie was good. And I was thinking, well, maybe the, maybe the book itself is not that great after just trying to get through a speech by Telemachus, one of his lame speeches. So, and then I thought, wow, isn't it interesting that these guys, it's like the Bible to them. And they just think it's so great because it, in many ways, it just feels patched together and primitive and all these other

5:40things. I guess that's not a real, real intro. Seth's turned and I didn't really give a real one. Well, if Seth didn't jump in, I'll say one more thing. So I'm glad that this morning I thought about this, you know, unifying knowledge and virtue thing, which is very central to all of, you know, if we're going to analyze what Plato has to say about ethics, this is really key. And we talked about a lot in our discussion, the Protagoras, which was another, you know, mid period dialogue around the same time or earlier, a little earlier than the Republic. We think where, you know, Republic, we sort of get the clearest idea of, you know, what this ruler class, how they would be

6:12the best, how they would be in touch with virtue. But I was being very literal before that. And like, you know, we're going to consider the perennial questions of, is it better to knowingly do evil than to unknowingly do evil? And are the poets knowledgeable about the things they talk about, or are they just divinely inspired? Those questions, which are the literal things that are discussed in these two dialogues, do not sound like they would reverberate through the ages. But I think seen as aspects of this larger question, not a doctrine necessarily, because

6:45we're talking, you know, these are probably really early. These are probably Socrates' actual views. If you're playing that game of, oh yeah, when they, when Plato gets later, then it's Plato's view, it's earlier. It's just, he's representing things that he knew Socrates talked about and Socrates never reaches any positive conclusions about anything. Well, he's, Socrates is representing the opposite of his view in the hippias, right? He's, it's a reductio ad absurdum. Right. Which is why I thought this must be an opening salvo. And then he's going to say something positive, but no, it just stops. Yeah. Yeah. Truly aporetic leaves us with a puzzle at the end of it.

Knowledge as virtue

7:20All right, Seth, you're on. Well, these are pretty short. They're short and they're relatively simple as far as the line of argument goes and carrying the analogy piece. You know, it's like, isn't it the same in archery? Isn't it the same in horseback riding? Isn't it the same in baking bread? Why, yes. Why, yes. You know, that format that, but I think actually if we don't try to get caught up in, is this ironic? Is this not ironic? Is the Socrates character trying to take this guy down or is he trying to like, I think we can have an interesting conversation about, you know,

7:53there's two things that one is the idea of knowledge as virtue, because it does seem to directly contradict, not contradict, but yeah, whatever the idea that knowledge is virtue, but also the idea of willing. So, you know, I've been thinking a lot about that episode we did with Ava Bran and that the Greeks didn't have a concept of will and that the knowledge is virtue and the idea of will as a disposition to do one thing or another, but it's very present right here. If this is like a literal translation, the concept that you could know the right, know the wrong, and willingly

8:30choose to do the wrong, and that that demonstrates a superiority in some respect of at least the structure of your soul or the capacity of your soul is kind of puts the lie to the idea that the will wasn't invented until Augustine and the middle. He just, anyway, it's very, I think we can have some fun with this. Yeah. Aristotle says that virtue is the disposition to choose in certain ways, which seems to imply the will. And it's the alternative account to what's being given ironically here.

9:02And it's given right through one fallacy after another. It's just one blatantly illogical thing after another. And I find it very complicated to parse out all those argumentative steps. And of course, again, Socrates is doing this intentionally to prove what he really wants to prove, which is that no human being can knowingly do evil. But the overall conflation that's happening in the dialogue is between capacity or power, which is this word dunamis, which is also potentiality, right? In

9:34Aristotle, this power to do something and the disposition to do it, which is kind of left out of this. So just because someone has the capacity to lie, which is they would have to have that capacity if they have the capacity to tell the truth, because they would have to be able to tell truth from lie doesn't mean that they are disposed to do it doesn't mean that they become a liar. And that's the fundamental conflation that's happening here. But there's a lot of other little interesting,

10:06intricate, tricky, illogical moves. Well, I'm glad you saw those. And clearly, so our translator is actually somebody we went to grad school with, at least of the main one that we started with. Ravi Sharma went to UT. What? Did you not notice this? Yeah, I didn't notice. He graduated and got his PhD in 2001. So he was completely overlapped our time there. I only vaguely remember him. No, I know Ravi. I remember Ravi, but I didn't realize he did this translation. Yeah, he's one of the reasons I dropped out, because he's always saying none of us are going to find a job.

10:36Yeah. And I took him seriously. So he's now at Clark University, and he wrote this 285-page PDF, at least this book, that for whatever reason was free online, even though it's an Oxford University press. I'm sure it was not legally free. Anyway, I found it with a web search when I was looking for versions of this. And it has, yes, as you said, Wes, the Greek. And of course it has, right, 285 pages, given that this is really a 20-page dialogue. A lot of commentary, a lot of- Welcome to ancient Greek philosophy.

11:07Yes. And a lot about the translation and the place of this, and what do we know about Hippias as a person? Not very much. And actually, most of what he said in the intro was in the dialogue itself, because that's the source we have to pull from. There's a few other things, references, but not too much, that this was a sophist. But Socrates doesn't really criticize him qua sophist, you know, like he does with Gorgias and Protagorist and like associate him with the other. The issue is not that he sells his professed knowledge of virtue, as was the case with

11:41Gorgias. But here, he's just somebody that is very widely skilled in various techniques, right? So he can do all these different things, including make his own clothes, make his own shoes and things like this. And this is what he teaches. He's a renaissance man. Yes. If you become a widely competent person, then this will, you know, presumably, though this is not spelled out, you will also know virtue. But like, this is what you, you want to get along in the world. You want to be sort of an independent person. You want to be able to do things for

12:12yourself, intellectually, practically, in every sense. And one of the things that he thinks he knows about is Homer. And so he puts this thesis forward. He's just given this big speech to a large group that we don't get to see. This is sort of after the group has broken up, where he has said that Achilles is a superior figure to Odysseus, because Achilles is a basically honest person. I'm thinking of sort of Nietzsche's, like Achilles was an honest soul, somebody who needs to lie,

12:42to prevaricate. There's something weaselly about them. They are inferior. So that's the setup. As usual, virtue is something that the sophists treat as if it could be taught. It's a skill. And I think we tend to treat it that way these days, right? If I just buy the right self-help book, if I just train myself in this way or that way, if I just have the skill to do the virtuous thing, then I'll become virtuous. But as we know, having the skill doesn't mean we'll have the

13:15disposition to use the skill. But yeah, as you point out, Mark, the Odyssey and the Iliad are the points of departure for this. And the question is about the contrast between Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles is simple, or I think in this translation, straightforward, but the ancient Greek word is simple, haplous, and truthful. And Odysseus is wily and a liar. And Socrates wants to make this absurd claim that no, no, it's the opposite. Odysseus was always telling the truth, and Achilles was the

13:51one who lied. Okay, so I'm just talking at the level of summary, because we are about to disappear into the text, which is great. Let's do that very soon. But- Oh, I thought you were saying this was the setup. Yeah. Yeah, this was the setup. I think I didn't remember Socrates just saying, no, it's the opposite. But he sort of raises the question. I mean, but he points out, look, Achilles doesn't always tell the truth. Here's, you know, he says, I'm going to, I'm going to take my ships and go. And then he doesn't take his ships and go. Oh, well, you know, Hippias responds that that was just a mistake.

14:21Well, he was either changing his mind or it was unintentional. Yeah. So- Right? He says untrue things unintentionally. Odysseus says true things intentionally. And then they just get on this thing. Well, you know, if you say true things intentionally, then you have to know what the truth is. To lie effectively. If you just don't care about the truth and you say, you know, whatever, you might actually be telling the truth, but to lie intentionally, you have to know better. And so isn't it better to know better than to just make acts to be incompetent, to make

14:56accidentally say untrue things. And it just, right. It's this conflation of general competence with moral goodness, which sort of goes in line with Hippias's overall project. I'll train you to be competent in all these things. And that will add up to somehow goodness. Well, to be a truly effective, and there's again, we go through all the different professions as Seth was mentioning, but like, if you want to poison somebody being a qualified doctor, really knowing in and out what will hurt a person as well

15:26as help a person, you can most effectively do that. If you try to write people who try to kill themselves by taking pills, they never, you know, it doesn't work very well. They don't take the right amount. It'll really hurt. But, you know, intentional evil seems like it is in a certain sense better than mere incompetence. But then there's an equivocation. Oh, so aren't you saying that, you know, somebody who intentionally does evil is a better person than someone who unintentionally does evil and, and Hippias just, he can't get his head around that. And he can't, rather than just

15:56pointing out the equivocation to say, well, no, more competent is not the same as morally better. Haven't you read your Kant that a knave is a, this is probably in Plato itself in the Republic, you know, that somebody who is a wily knave, a wily thief is worse morally than somebody who is less competent at those things. So I think we had a, like you said, it's an equivocation, right? Because we're talking about moral virtue and capability in Socrates, but let's look. I'll defer to Wes.

16:27Start at the beginning.

Achilles versus Odysseus

16:28Start at the beginning. I'll defer to Wes on the Greek, but at the beginning of the Hippias. 363a slash PDF 115. Yeah, I think we're still in. Slash. Yeah, it's both PDF and book 115. Yeah, I have it around 364 or something, but whatever. The point is, it says Hippias claims, I say that Homer depicts Achilles as the best of men who made the expedition to Troy, Nestor as the wisest, and Odysseus as the wiliest. And what Socrates is going to go on to say is,

17:00he's going to go on to question him and say, ah, so you're saying that a wily person is a liar. Yeah. So that's the first conflation. Yeah. That's the first conflation, right? And ultimately that means, well, if you're wily and you're a liar, it means you're intelligent and shrewd because you know how to speak truthfully, but you choose to speak falsely. You're saying wily introduces the concept of intention. Is that the idea? I do say that, but I am also talking here when it says Achilles is best, Nestor is wisest,

17:35and Odysseus is the wiliest. When he says Achilles is the best of men, he's not saying Achilles is the most truthful or honest of men. We're not starting from a position of opposition where there's an additional step that virtuous virtue would include not lying or not being wily, presumably. So really, this is about Odysseus being wily and Achilles being forthright or upstanding or something like that.

18:08A well-made human being who would therefore have a certain integrity of character. It's Socrates who introduces this idea of simplicity or straightforwardness and truth, right? As you point out, Seth, Hippias had just said best, but Hippias takes the bait and goes with that. So, you know, there's an implicit contrast in what Hippias initially says about, you know, Odysseus being wily and Achilles being the best, but he doesn't call Odysseus a liar and he

18:44doesn't call Achilles truthful. So, Socrates introduces this idea and that forms the dilemma that's going to allow him to get to this idea that the truthful one, the first step of this is that the same person is both true and false. If you're honest, you have to be a liar. And if you're a liar, you have to be honest in some sense. But it starts with him saying, because he wants to set up a contradiction, that the liar and the truthful person in a way is like a character type and

19:20they're mutually exclusive. You couldn't be both at once. I was going to say in the beginning, you can't be both at once. And at the end of it, you have to be both at once. But I think neither are true, right? We are in a sense, both at once because we're complex, right? Unlike Achilles, we're not simple. We, there's a little bit of implied ontology in here where he's being Parmenidean and saying complexity is impossible with this identification. But I think we should keep in mind that at a psychological level, we're complicated and sometimes we lie and sometimes we

19:52don't. And sometimes what we're saying is a bit in between. So it's not this simple exclusion that Socrates starts us with. Sorry, I'm not remembering where Socrates says that we're anybody is both at once. Where is there a particular line you can read? Well, he's going to end it. The whole point is that the man who's true must be the man who's the liar. That's the whole point of this first section here. So this is the section I'm using Ravi's sections, the 365 D to 369 B is the argument that

20:26the same man must be both true and false. So, right. The next step is that liars are capable of telling falsehoods intentionally, but to do that, they must be, I think you already gave a little bit of summary of this Mark, but to do that, they must like truth tellers be capable of telling truths intentionally because otherwise they would be ignorant. They wouldn't be able to tell truth from falsehood consistently if they were just ignorant of what the truth is. So they have to know the truth, which means they have to be able to tell the truth intentionally as well. So liars are

21:02truth tellers or the true man, the man who tells the truth must be the same as the man who lies. Are you looking for an exact page reference there? I mean, I got that liars are, have to be truth knowers, but that's not the same that say they're truth tellers. So yes, I was. No, it's right there in the dial. I mean, that's why it's so absurd. I mean, it's purposefully absurd. So let me, let me find the exact end point here. He goes through this example of calculations, right? And the point here

21:35is that the truth telling or lying happens within some domain of knowledge or with some, within some art, the art of calculation. Okay. So this is at 367 D on page 127. Socrates will say, do you see that the same person is a liar and is truthful about such matters and that the truthful person is no better than the liar. He's the same. It turns out he's not as opposed as can be as you were thinking just

22:06now. Now it's worth pointing out. Socrates is the one who started this by saying, I suppose this could be not hippias, but at this point in the dialogue at the end of his section, he's going to get to the

Truth and the liar

22:18contradiction. The truthful person is the same as the liar. Now we know this is a little trick to say, yeah, they have the same capacity in a sense, but they don't have the same disposition. And being a liar is not just about knowing the true from the false. And it's not just about the capacity to say what is true or what is false. Being a liar involves a lot of other skills, at least if you're going to do it successfully, but even apart from the skills involved in lying and doing it persuasively,

22:49for instance, and being a rhetorician, there has to be a disposition for you to be a liar, right? And just because you have the capacity to lie doesn't mean you're actually going to do it, doesn't mean you're going to want to do it. So the liar and the truth teller, the difference between them is they want different things. So it just seems in the quote you read, there's an equivocation on same, right? He does say in the next page here, the same person will be a liar and truthful also in astronomy. So that, right, numerically the same. But what really, you know, why you would assent to

23:24that is because it sounds like the same in that they have a similar character, a similar quality, not that it is the same one in the same person that lies and tells the truth. It is that the liar and the truth teller have a property in common, which is the capacity, the knowledge, the competence. You're reading out the contradiction, but I think he intends the contradiction because he wants to say the truthful person is no better than the liar. That's what he says at D here. And if the truthful

23:54person just had the capacity as, you know, the common, this is the common sense view, they both have the capacity. If that were true, we would understand, you're right, the truthful person is telling the truth and liar is telling lies. And we would understand that the liar is better than the truthful person. But he set this up by making the absurd claim that Achilles is deceitful and Odysseus is not. And by the way, he does explicitly say that. Yeah. This is why I thought that there was going to be a secret second half of this in which even in the sense of competence, because I do believe that, you know, he's not just making the point that I was

24:27attributing to Kant that to be a very competent knave is the worst possible person. He's not saying that it's to be truly competent to know your technique is to understand the underlying principles, not just of the particular art, but how all the arts convene and how the form of the good looms over all of them. So you would never be an evil shoemaker. If you, if you, you really know how to make shoes, then you know how to make, as Steve Martin would say, the cruel shoes. You know how to make the shoes that most

25:02effectively destroy your feet because, you know, you would understand how shoemaking, how the value of shoes fits in with the value of a good life and the value of living in a society. And so politics, I'm just saying this is in the overall platonic corpus. This is how the, I'm looking through this through the lens of the Republic that clearly this, you know, jokey part just has to be as if, you know, the early parts of the Republic, when they're playing around with the obviously bad

25:32descriptions of justice to say, okay, now we have to get rid of this and say, again, to be really knowledgeable, competent in any field is to ultimately, you have to be a philosopher. You have to, the philosopher rules over the shoemaker because they have that central grasp of the good that to even be a really good shoemaker, you would need to have. Yeah. But in the real world, I forget, I don't, you know, remember the Republic well enough to understand the point of that, but in the real world, right, to have the technical ability is not

26:02to be virtuous and right. To be a good cobbler or a good calculator is not to be, is not to have virtue because virtue must involve dispositions over and above capacities or powers. As Aristotle says, Aristotle critiqued this section explicitly in the metaphysics, he draws on this to talk about dispositions, but yeah, for Plato, no person can knowingly do evil. So yeah, if you did know everything that you had to know about virtue at the very least, then you would be disposed.

26:37Knowledge would lead to disposition. As we saw in the Nicomachean ethics, Aristotle doesn't completely deny that, but he says, well, it's a bit complicated because we can know and not know at the same time. We know the cake is bad for us and so that we shouldn't eat it. And when we do eat it, that some deep level, maybe we don't know. We do know, and we don't know at the same time. So Aristotle introduces this possibility of psychological conflict and complexity that I was getting at in the beginning, because I do think there's a little ironic jab at the idea that there can't be anything

27:10such as complexity at the beginning of the dialogue. It seemed like this was pretty repetitive in just the, you know, the normal way that Seth was referring to in pointing out all these different arts. Is there anything additional? Usually when somebody introduces more and more examples, then like, well, they're getting at a slightly different aspect of it. I'm thinking, you know, UT Place's successive analogies, oh, let's consider the rain cloud. Let's consider, but here it just seems like it's more the same. But Seth, are you seeing something else?

27:41There was one thing that struck me. And now, unfortunately, I don't remember if it's an ion or an hippias. Where's the example where he talks about mathematics and calculation? Is that, that's hippias. That's just where I was. It's just right before 127D. If you scroll up a little bit, he was using that as an example of the domain, what I'm calling the domain, each truth teller and, and falsity teller has a domain with, in which they're doing that, which is a domain of expertise

28:12or art or knowledge. So there was something that struck me about this, that that's a, an odd example to give because let's use the case of there's so many different domains. I think the domains are so different, but they're using them analogously that it's kind of a gloss. But like, if I was an astronomer, Wes, and you were ignorant about the constellations in the sky, and I said, oh, that's a ludicrous. That's the constellation ludicrous represents the Southern rap genre.

28:43And you were like, oh, okay, cool. Right. But I knew it wasn't ludicrous. I knew that there was no such thing. And I was using parts of several other constellations to do it. That's in some way different to me than saying, Wes, two plus two equals five. And you going, there's a no circumstance under which you should be like, oh, okay. Like you have access to domain knowledge there that it's a different sort of thing. And then it's also different with, of me being an archer and intentionally missing a target and just saying, geez, I just can't seem to hit the center of the

29:16target, even though I could. So in the world of this dialogue, those are all intentional. Those are all examples of the kind of intentionality, like intentional deceiving, so to speak, but they feel different to me. Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, generally we make this distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. And it's right here in the dialogue in the beginning. I mean, in the beginning of this particular section, when he says that liars are capable of lying and they are capable of that out of what he calls scheming and out of what he calls

29:53intelligence, or it's, that's translated here as intelligence, but it's phronesis. It's what Aristotle, right. It's the same word that Aristotle uses for prudence. In other words, this is prudential and these prudential decisions are decisions about what we're going to do based on the goals that we have, what's going to best serve our goals. We do a little bit of hypothetical reasoning and figure out what we're going to do. And when we deceive people, we have to do that in a complicated way because we have to have a theory of mind and we have to know about their intentions and what they want. If we're going to do more, you know, there's lying, right? There's just like straight up lying,

30:28but then there's what Odysseus does. He has to be able to manipulate people into certain behaviors. So yes, I think Seth, you're right to point out that this movement, this is another illegitimate move or questionable move from the prudential to something that's purely theoretical. We're talking about calculation. We do calculate, right? When we're going to figure out what we're going to do, but there's also this connection to intention and goals and things like that.

Theoretical and practical knowledge

30:54And the knowledge that and knowledge how, right? We made a big deal about this in our discussion of the Protagoras because that in that discussion, the question was, is virtue teachable? And it did seem like Socrates was moving toward all the virtues are one thing and they're all under the aegis of knowledge. So that seems like that would make it teachable. But if, you know, as Aristotle later elaborated, it is a matter of conditioning more than downloading knowledge into you, then it still might

31:27be teachable, but it's teachable in a different way. Here, you know, I was thinking who's best able to sing out of tune? Is it the person who's tone deaf or is it the person who has the perfect sense of pitch? And actually I think it's a skill for someone who's a good singer, right? Sometime recently I saw on TV, some actor that I know could sing very well intentionally, you know, singing poorly because that was what the character was supposed to do. But I feel like that is probably not something that came naturally or certainly wouldn't come naturally to all good singers that like you

31:59wouldn't convincingly sing out of tune. If you have a really good sense of pitch, it's a separate skill. And that is an example of a knowing how rather than a knowing that, like I can tell that that is in tune versus I can't tell that that isn't in tune is a different skill, but actually being able to sing in tune, flying people can hear pitch well enough, but they don't have enough control of their voice to consistently sing in tune. Yeah. So you're saying that, so maybe I'm not understanding you, but so if a person knows how to play tennis and they throw a game, they do it in a

32:30way that's very different than someone who just can't play tennis. Yes. Right. You can tell that they're skilled, but that they're just throwing the game because they can't. Yeah. That skill is procedural knowledge and it's right there in their bodies. They can lose the game and they can do stupid things and do all the things that to imitate the person who can't play tennis, but we would still know the difference because they could never convincingly do completely do it. Or maybe they could, but they would have to work at it. They would have to work at it as a separate

33:00skill. Okay. Now we're going to train you to fail convincingly. Now, you know how to do it for real. I'm also thinking about the, uh, like it's okay to break artistic rules, but you have to know and be able to, so all these, you know, it's okay to be an abstract painter whose drawings look like they were done by a three-year-old. If you can, you know, just do the conventional photographic style with detail, and then you've earned the right to, to fail creatively. That's actually a really interesting example, Mark, that being a great abstract artist in a lot of ways is about

33:33unlearning all of the things that count as capability and expertise in that field in order to be able to replicate quote unquote, you know, the ignorant or unskilled. Like in, in that case, I, I would agree with Socrates, like the skilled person who can, who can act like the unskilled person when it comes to something like child, like that type of painting or capture that sort of thing is actually, anyway. Well, we want them to fail in an interesting way. We don't, the person trying to convince you that he

34:04just lost the tennis match because he sucks, but he's actually a really good tennis player. I think, you know, Wes is, you're probably right that you're going to be able to tell, whereas you want to be able to tell with the artist. Like I don't want to actually, and that's how, you know, you're a good art critic because you can tell when it's somebody really skilled, you know, trying to get at their childlike essence versus a child. In the case of lying and truth-telling, you might think it's probably different because the liar to be an effective liar must have a really good theory of

34:34mind. They can't just be completely unempathetic and not tuned to social cues and all the things that people are going to be tuned to if they have to be deceptive and manipulative. But you might also say, bringing again in this complexity thing, that they would be better liars if they were convinced of what they were saying, even though they're not true. But then you might say, well, the person who's convinced isn't a liar anymore. But if we introduce psychological complexity, we might say people can deceive themselves and they might buy into their own bullshit and maybe they can be liars

35:08and truth-tellers at the same time. But in the sense in which Socrates is introducing it here, it's just a straight contradiction. And part of the way he gets there in this section, which kind of concludes at 127D at that point where he says the same, is he does bring up the question of intention and he brings it up with respect to capacity. To have a capacity means you can do whatever you want, whatever you wish, whenever you wish. So, and in this case, you can, for the purposes of

35:44calculation, you can say true things about the calculations whenever you want, if you wish to do that. And then you can say false things about calculations. And then the whole question of wishing kind of falls away. Like what if the person doesn't wish to say anything, falls about calculations? Well, the implication is that they wouldn't have the capacity if they didn't wish to do it, which of course is absurd. Having a capacity doesn't mean we always wish to do the thing that we're capable of. But the fallacy here points to the importance of intention.

36:18So it was 367D, 127 is the page. 367D, yeah, one page 127. And then the next step, there's a little mini step before he moves on to the interlude of just getting into a fight about the Odyssey. A little bit more of a delving into the Odyssey. But before that, which I think is important, he wants to say that the person who's best at calculation and the one who's most capable of telling the truth is also good at

36:52calculation. Because this question of the good is going to come up later, right? Whether the just man or the good man is the one who does evil intentionally. And we think we're meant to pay attention here to the fact that you could be good at something without being a good person. You could be good in one domain and that doesn't expand to all domains. So this is a page 129-ish where he gets into, you know, he does give another list there, the geometer, the astronomer, all that stuff.

37:25And then you said you once arrived at Olympia, outfitted with what was entirely of your own making. First, the ring you wore, the signet, that was your work too. And on your own, you had made your own, your oil flask and scraper. You had yourself had cut and stitched the sandals you wore and had woven your cloak and your tunic. And then we get a repetition on page 131. Tell me whether there's anywhere you find. He's really just hammering this in, where there's on the basis of what you and I have agreed, that the truthful

37:55person is of one sort and the lie are another. The two being distinct and not the same. And he's hippie. It says, I can't find one. It's so, as with many things in philosophy, I can't tell if there's something profound or like a confusion or a profound point. But so if the truthful person is one sort and the liar is another. So if that premise holds, then the virtue can't be a disposition. But if they're the same type of person, then it's just a question of capability. It's a techne.

38:35Yeah. Disposition is how you would have to separate them. So when Hippias is talking about the liar,

Capacity versus disposition

38:41he's talking about it in a dispositional sense. Socrates just substitutes in capacity. And this is Aristotle's critique in Metaphysics Delta 29, where Aristotle would just say, look, what it's doing is it's taking liar and falseness as a dunamis, as a power, as a capacity, like knowledge. But the one who's a liar is that way dispositionally. They have a disposition to choose proe racis, to choose falsehoods.

39:12And Socrates' argument, Aristotle says, is assuming that whoever is able to be false is false or is disposed to be false. But we know that, of course, that's not the case. To be able to do something is not to be disposed to do it. And disposition, right, that's a hexis, Aristotle will say here. We're not dealing with dunamis. We're dealing with hexis when it comes to virtue, right? Hexis is just the word that's often translated as virtue. It's about habit. But that's an important distinction,

39:43again, because to know that something is right and to have the capacity to do the right thing is not to have the virtue of doing it. It's not to be disposed to doing it. And in some sense, maybe we can't do it, right? Maybe I'm a good tennis player. I'm perfectly capable of playing good tennis in one sense. But psychologically, I've been so crushed by the parental pressure that was put on me that I get to the point where I can't play tennis even more. I'm perfectly capable if I could

40:15get over my hangups, but there's complexity here and the hangups overwhelm me. Or I just don't want to play tennis. Well, I'm wondering if there is maybe something in the shared culture here that we're missing that would equate the capacity with the disposition. And I'm just thinking, again, sort of along Aristotelian lines of the telos, that there is a certain good. And if you have the capacity to aim at that good, then you do aim at that good. Is that just Plato's theory, right?

40:51Everybody aims at the good. Or was that something that was baked in enough that this is the source, that hippias is not just being an idiot in agreeing to this, that this might have just been, of course, if you can, you do. Well, it's the model of the sophists, right? And it's the model of the self-help book or the cognitive as opposed to the therapeutic approach to things, right? The therapeutic is trying to get deep. You know, you lie down on a couch. Are you done these days for

41:21the most part? But if you do traditional psychoanalysis, you might lie down on the couch and let someone try to get their tentacles right into your soul and massage it a little bit and create new habits of thinking, new habits of feeling. And we say in that sense, yeah, just knowing it, I know that I might cognitively or consciously know something, but that's not going to change me as a person. That's not going to change the way I'm disposed to behave. But the sophists are out there with their whiteboards and their paid little symposia, teaching people, teaching the rich youth

41:55of Athens how to be virtuous. And to teach them how to be virtuous is to have a PowerPoint and do skills sessions with them, trainings. That's what Socrates is objecting to. So yeah, I think you're right. Hippias may, I think he's just kind of being tripped up here by all the equivocations that Socrates is making, but you might think this is kind of the thing that Socrates is objecting to. And even the larger thing of the equation that we see in the Republic of justice with power, right? I think there's a kind of impulse in all of us to equate power or capacity or prudential

42:31ability with a kind of virtue or with virtue more broadly. I almost think that this, you know, I've been so pressured to play tennis that I'm finding myself really unable to play tennis that that is an Augustinian, that you're not playing tennis out of a sense of rebellion. And this was exactly right. Augustine's complaint about Plato was that nobody, you know, Plato says nobody does wrong intentionally. And Augustine says, no, actually that is what sin is and is a huge part

43:03of our makeup that we intentionally do what we see to be wrong in part because we can. And because that is, I just want to go against the expectations that are upon me. I want to rebel against God is the way Augustine puts it, but we would put it just in terms of, you know, it's almost like if you point out that saying everybody does what is in their good is tantamount to saying that psychological determinism is true. And we don't like that. We existentially, this is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife and want to break out of whatever mode people have set us in

43:36perversely. Yeah. We want to rebel against God and the good because we envy the good. We, and as outside of us, we don't have to depend on an externality, something beyond us. We want to be free of that and all ties. So I think psychologically, Augustine is spot on. Well, the other thing though to note is that just in this case, if you're talking about capability or capacity and disposition, they're hierarchical, like, and what I mean by that is one requires the other, but the other does not

44:06require the one. If you don't have the capability to do something well and poorly or virtuously and unvirtuously, then it doesn't matter what you want to do. So in a certain sense, virtue requires the capability to act one way or another in any particular circumstance. Ought implies can. Yes. Yeah. That's leaving me sort of with the Kantian counter of, oh, it's always just the, uh, the intention that counts the goodwill, but how much do we admire the truly

44:39impotent good? Or we might even doubt that they really do have the goodness that they, the goodwill that they claim if they just really can't affect anything at all with this good intention. Right. You can, I think you're right, Mark, in a modern sense, right? Like if I stepped in front of somebody, you know, to take a bullet or somebody was attacking somebody else and I attacked them, but I'm so weak. I can't really do anything. I can't accomplish anything. And I get beat up or killed myself. Right. The bullet goes through you and kills them anyway, because you're so,

45:13such a thin person, such a flimsy paper, like. Because I haven't been developing my rock hard abs at the gym, but you know, just the idea that like we would say, oh, well, even though there was nothing he could do, the fact that he tried is somehow there's a virtue, there's a nobility and a virtue in that sacrifice. But I don't think the Greeks would necessarily see it the same way because they did have, I mean, obviously we haven't really mentioned this on this episode, but it is definitely the background. Homeric virtues are not Greek virtues, which are not

45:49modern American virtues, very different sort of thing. Yes. I think that supports the hippias was reflecting his culture in agreeing to this, that, you know, competence and morality amount to the same thing. And this was in fact, what Socrates, you know, with platonic innovation to say, you know, I was trying to argue that, well, are you really competent? Because you really don't understand the internal secret workings of shoemaking to know that you have to be a good person to be a good shoemaker. But that's a stretch and it's much easier to make the point of, you know, morally good is not the same as generally

46:22competent. But that seemed like it was a revolutionary thing to say at the time.

Wrap up and patron support

46:26Let's wrap up part one here. I'm sure we have a few more things to say about hippias, and then we'll move on to ION in our second half. If you are a Partially Examined Life supporter, which we are encouraging people to do that through our Patreon now. So if you go to partiallyexaminedlife.com slash support, it will still explain the various options and why we are sending you to Patreon, I believe now. If you're already on through our website, you can continue to do that. That's fine. But in any case, otherwise you're going to have to wait until next week. Thank you. Thank you.