Euthydemus

Summary

Euthydemus is Plato's broadest comedy of argument. Socrates tells his old friend Crito about a scene at the Lyceum the day before, where two elderly brothers from Chios by way of Thurii, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, had put on a public exhibition. They once taught fighting in armour and courtroom pleading; now, they announce, they teach virtue, faster and better than anyone. Socrates asks them to prove it on Cleinias, a handsome boy of the family of Alcibiades, by persuading him to love wisdom. What follows alternates between two ways of talking to the young. The brothers ask Cleinias whether those who learn are the wise or the ignorant, and refute him whichever way he answers, while their disciples laugh and cheer like a trained chorus. Socrates steps in to explain the trick (the word 'learn' has two senses) and then shows what an exhortation to philosophy should look like. Everyone wants to fare well; we think that wealth, health, beauty, birth, power and the virtues make us happy; but such goods help only when used, and used rightly, and right use comes from knowledge. Wisdom, he concludes with the boy, is the only good and ignorance the only evil, and so a young man should seek wisdom from anyone who can give it. The brothers resume, and the sophisms grow wilder. To wish Cleinias to become wise is to wish him to be what he is not, and so to perish. Falsehood is impossible, since to speak is to say what is. Contradiction is impossible. Socrates' father is not a father, Ctesippus' dog is his father, and a sick man should drink a cartload of hellebore if medicine is good. Ctesippus, Cleinias' hot-tempered admirer, begins by protesting and ends by beating the brothers at their own game. In a second protreptic Socrates and Cleinias look for the knowledge that both makes and uses its products and find themselves in a labyrinth when they reach the kingly art: it is supposed to make men good, yet they cannot say good at what. Socrates closes the exhibition with ironic praise of an art that sews up every mouth, its own included. In the frame, Crito reports a speech-writer who scorned the whole business and philosophy with it. Socrates answers that such men, standing between philosophy and politics, fall short of both, and he urges Crito not to judge philosophy by its worst practitioners but to examine philosophy herself. Many readers have taken the unnamed critic as a glance at Isocrates, though the text does not name him. The dialogue is often called the oldest treatise on logic in comic dress, and several of its fallacies reappear in Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations. Its deeper contrast is moral. The brothers treat the boy as material for a performance; Socrates treats him as a soul to be turned toward wisdom, and he does so with patience, humour and visible affection.

Top Lessons

• Naming the trick: ambiguity and equivocation

  The brothers' first argument depends on two senses of 'learn': acquiring knowledge one lacks, and understanding what one already knows. Socrates explains the trick to Cleinias in plain terms. Students who can identify the shifting word in each sophism (learn, know, father, good, is) are practising the first discipline of logic, which is attention to what words mean in each premise.

• Wisdom as the right use of every other good

  Socrates' first exhortation (278e-282d) argues that wealth, health, beauty and power are not good in themselves but become a benefit or an injury depending on whether wisdom directs their use. Under ignorance they are greater evils than their opposites. The argument reorders a young person's ambitions: before asking how to get more goods, ask how to become someone who can use them well.

• Refuting to win, questioning to teach

  Both the brothers and Socrates ask questions, and both lead Cleinias to admit things he had not expected. The difference lies in purpose and manner. The brothers want applause and pupils; they do not care whether their conclusions are true. Socrates encourages the boy, explains his errors, and aims at his good. The dialogue invites students to examine their own motives in debate.

• The kingly art and the puzzle of political goodness

  Socrates and Cleinias decide that the knowledge they want must both make and use, and they settle on the kingly or political art. But if that art makes citizens good only so that they may make others good, the search runs in a circle. The dialogue leaves the puzzle unsolved, which is itself instructive: it shows that political power cannot be justified without some account of what goodness is.

• Judge philosophy by its best, not its worst

  Crito is ready to give up on philosophy because its teachers seem absurd. Socrates replies that in every art, from gymnastics to generalship, the incompetent outnumber the good, and no one abandons medicine because of bad doctors. The closing exhortation asks Crito to examine philosophy herself and to follow her with his household if she proves to be what Socrates believes.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine appears in the Euthydemus as an example rather than a subject. Socrates uses the wise physician to show that knowledge, not luck, brings good fortune in danger (279e-280a), and he lists medicine among the arts that make something without knowing how to use it (289a), as well as citing health as the product of medicine when asking what the kingly art produces (291e). The brothers' sophism that a sick man should drink as much medicine as possible, a cartload of hellebore (299b), is a joke that depends on the Greek knowledge that hellebore, a standard purgative also used against madness, was dangerous in excess; the dialogue does not describe its effects. Socrates' playful offer to let the brothers boil him like Medea's victims (285c) alludes to a myth of rejuvenation, not to medical practice.

• 279e-280a

  Cleinias agrees that in dangerous illness one would rather have a wise physician than an ignorant one, as part of the argument that wisdom is good fortune.

• 289a

  Medicine is listed with money-making among arts that know how to make but not how to use their product.

• 299a-c

  Euthydemus argues that if medicine is good, a sick man should drink as much as possible, a cartload of hellebore; Ctesippus mocks the idea.