Plato’s Theory of Forms as the Object of All “Lovers”

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Plato is a notorious indulger of etymology.  Not only in the Cratylus, the most famous and lengthy application of that science, but everywhere in the Platonic corpus there are appeals to the source and the sense of words.  Often these etymologies strike the reader as ludicrous, not necessarily because we know better through linguistic rigor, though we do, but because surely some of the explanations offered had to have been absurd to even the Greeks of the time.  It is frustrating then to determine the purpose of these etymologies: are they mini-myths guiding us to some moral end? are they jokes? are they (improbably) earnest explanations on Plato’s part, shockingly ignorant of the actual derivation of the word?

Whatever the explanation turns out to be, the most helpful method of exposition will be to unravel the etymology following Plato’s own announced method of explanation.  When we come to the Republic, Book V, we meet with one of the most famous explanations in all of Plato, etymological or otherwise (474c).  Here Socrates embarks on the task of explaining who the real philosopher is.  He begins by reminding Glaucon that it was agreed that “lovers” of something love all of it, not one part.  He continues to give examples of these lovers, literally “philo-” prefixed to an adjective or noun, coining what we can straightforwardly translate as, “lovers of X” or “X lovers.”  His examples include lovers of boys, lovers of honor, lovers of wine and lovers of food.

Socrates, I offer, is under the conviction that when we say that when someone is a lover of X, he loves each particular manifestation of that X.  If one fails to do so, he is not a lover of X.  This is odd reasoning, one might say, because if I am a car-lover, meaning that I, a rich man, collect cars, but nevertheless do not have a penchant for Chevrolets, then somehow I am disqualified from the title of car-lover.  This appears out of sorts.  However, let us look at this from another extreme.  If someone were to be a donut-lover in this sense, that he only loved sprinkled, chocolate eclairs, would we be right to call him a lover of donuts?  In this case it is much more suspect; we would prefer to call such a man a lover-of-sprinkled-chocolate-eclairs. 

It is perhaps in this later sense that Socrates is appealing to our everyday use of language.  When we say we are a lover of wine, to use one of his examples, we are implicitly going over and above a confession for any particular instance of wine.  This is simply what the term means.  If I had simply been after this or that cup of wine, why then, after having imbibed it, I should no longer have a need for that moniker.  Yet the name sticks. I say I am a wine-lover, not was a wine-lover, because there is something compelling me, a desire for wine which transcends instances of wine, and goes further yet. 

This then is what Socrates is after.  So the lover of wisdom, literally the philosophos, is he who determinately seeks after all and every kind of wisdom that there is.  Not the wisdom here or there, but the true Form of wisdom.  He seeks after that which does not pass away, and precisely because he is never satisfied having learned this or that, it is shown that this or that is not what he was looking for.  He yearns for a glimpse of what is, for he hastens after knowledge, not opinion.        

Two Sexes, True Superiority in the Republic

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At 374e Socrates narrows the scope of his inquiry for suitable guardians for the republic to what nature these candidate guardians ought to have.  In a metaphor that he is to employ at least 5 times by my count before Book 6,  Socrates says the guardians will be like good guard dogs.  His idea is explicit at 376a where he tells us that we are looking for a natural admixture, as in a good dog, that is both gentle and vicious.  Gentle towards its owners, those it knows; vicious against strangers, those it does not know.  Presumably since it is difficult and even hard to imagine how to educate people into a combination of contrary temperaments, Socrates recommends that these traits are, in our terms, “artificially selected” for, so that they are found by nature in our guardians, in the same way we would breed puppies as guard dogs.  This type of selection process, we should note, is a binary: either you have the traits in question or you do not, and selection into the guardian class requires that you do.

Later in Book 5 (454d), when Socrates introduces his radical notion that women are capable of the same achievements as men, albeit at a reduced and inferior level, there seems to be another criterion of selection utilized.  Whereas before there was a binary process, into which either one fit or did not, here Socrates acknowledges a spectrum of fitness.  In this argument, a woman is not as strong as a man; nevertheless, accommodating her weakness as one of merely degrees, she can do the same things as a guardian man.  I will call this type of selection for fitness “scope selection,” over agains the first type, “binary selection.”   

However, one can raise the objection that these two standards are at odds with each other. If, in the case of selecting the guardian men in “binary selection,” we were to make accommodations due to nature, as we do in the case of women “scope selection,” then it seems that we could introduce all kinds of cases Socrates wishes to exclude.  We could say that a man born with only one arm can do mostly everything a two-armed man can do “provided we acknowledge the reduced workload that only one arm limits him to.”  Similar things could be offered in the case of reduced mental capacity or even inferior, flabby bodies.  In fact though, at 375c traits such as keen senses, speed and strength are explicitly advocated, showing that Socrates does in fact wish to cultivate a type of guardian, one who is not the best of some particular kind of human (e.g. the best of scrawny men), but a best human in a sense meant to extend to the whole species.

It is unclear then, what prompts Socrates to have two distinct standards, one for male guardians, one for female guardians, when, perhaps ironically, Socrates is in the midst of an argument for the equality, in some sense, of the sexes.   

Codes in Aristotle’s Moral Reasoning

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“As Aristotle consistently says, the best generalizations about how one should behave hold only for the most part.  If one attempted to reduce one’s conception of what virtue requires to a set of rules, then, however subtle and thoughtful one was in drawing up the code, cases would inevitably turn up in which a mechanical application of the rules would strike one as wrong— and not necessarily because one had changed one’s mind; rather, one’s mind on the matter was not susceptible of capture in any universal formula”  -John McDowell (1)

The above viewpoint articulated by McDowell is also called by him “non-codifiability.”  That is, knowledge of ethical reasoning is non-discursive, it is irreducible to rules, precepts or other, linguistic or not, ways of conceptualization.

However, someone may object that such a view cannot be sustained, that in fact when ethical generalizations are made correctly, they are exemplars of codifiability.  In order to see why this is so, let us distinguish between two kinds of moral generalizations.

  1. Simple Generalization:
    In situation X, do Y.
  1. Sophisticated Generalization:
    In situation X, do Y most of the time.

It would be granted, I think, that moral reasoning involving type A would be problematic, for the reason that McDowell, merely echoing Aristotle, points out above.  There would be too many exceptions to this kind of rule to be productively reliable.  Furthermore, perhaps, such indeterminate applicability even undermines its status as a rule. 

Thus the Sophisticated Generalization is an improved version of the Simple Generalization, for it accommodates the “what if” scenarios implied in the Simple Generalization.  However, the Sophisticated Generalization, to return to the original objection, seems (problematically for the non-codifiabilist) to both explain moral reasoning and articulate it in a codifiable way.

However, let us see if the Sophisticated Generalization is actual codifiable.  Any statement allowing for variation or accommodation of an exception such as  “In situation X, do Y most of the time,” is really another way of saying that, “In situation X, do Y, except in case X1 do Y1, except in case X2 do Y2, etc.”  If this is the case though, this shows that the Sophisticated Generalization is not a general rule, but a set of particular rules collected into a dictum.  And if this collective of rules cannot allow for the nuance necessary in moral reasoning, for it will be hard to see at which point the exceptions will cease, then the Sophisticated Generalization falls prey to the same fault as the Simple Generalization.  Both are unable to parallel exhaustively, via a set of codes, the complexity or adaptive variation one encounters in day to day moral reasoning.    

(1) John McDowell, pg. 58, Virtue and Reason, in “Mind, Value and Reality”