Plato: Charmides. Translated, with Introduction, Notes, and Analysis. PDF

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PLATO CHARMIDES DSHPC080-Charmides.indd 1 26/11/18 5:03 PM DSHPC080-Charmides.indd 2 26/11/18 5:03 PM PLATO CHARMIDES Translated, with Introduction, Notes, and Analysis by Christopher Moore and Christopher C. Raymond Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Indianapolis/Cambridge DSHPC080-Charmides.indd 3 2...

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PLATO CHARMIDES

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PLATO CHARMIDES

Translated, with Introduction, Notes, and Analysis by

Christopher Moore and Christopher C. Raymond

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Indianapolis/Cambridge

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Copyright © 2019 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19

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For further information, please address Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. P.O. Box 44937 Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937 www.hackettpublishing.com Cover design by INSERT Interior design by Elizabeth L. Wilson Composition by Aptara, Inc. Map by William Nelson, adapted for this volume. Family tree adapted from Debra Nails, The People of Plato, p. 244. Hackett Publishing 2002. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Plato, author. | Moore, Christopher, 1981– translator. Title: Charmides / Plato ; translated, with introduction, notes, and analysis by Christopher Moore and Christopher C. Raymond. Other titles: Charmides. English Description: Indianapolis : Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018038700 | ISBN 9781624667787 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781624667794 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Ethics—Early works to 1800. | Knowledge, Theory of—Early works to 1800. | Plato. Charmides. | Ethics—Early works to 1800. | Knowledge, Theory of—Early works to 1800. Classification: LCC B366.A5 M66 2019 | DDC 184—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038700 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

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Contents

Preface

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

xv

The Charmides in Context

xv

Characters

xxii

Sôphrosunê

xxviii

Self-Knowledge

xxxvii

The Reception of the Charmides A Note on the Text

Charmides Analysis

xl xlii

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The Charmides in Reflection

108

Bibliography

113

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For Elizabeth Belfiore and Paul Woodruff

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Preface

Over the nearly half century since the publication of Rosamond Kent Sprague’s 1973 translation, the Charmides has come to receive the serious and continuous attention it did not receive over the previous 2350 years. Philologists, philosophers, and historians have reflected anew on its language, arguments, purpose, and context, and have made clearer its profound contribution to our understanding of the cardinal virtue sôphrosunê, the meaning of Socratic ignorance and examination, the character of the intellectual and tyrant Critias, and the philosophy of self-knowledge. Several monograph-length studies have treated the Charmides as more than a perplexing or propaedeutic “early Socratic dialogue” and instead as a complex and fruitful meditation on a core theme of moral life and on the promise of Socrates’ epistemic self-awareness in striving for that life. We have three goals for our translation: readability, argumentative clarity, and descriptive accuracy. The Charmides’ debate about sôphrosunê and self-knowledge concerns familiar issues and confronts straightforward difficulties; we have therefore avoided abstruseness or technicality of expression, which are uncalled for and misleading. We have rendered as clearly as possible the argument’s inferential steps within the limits of fidelity to the Greek. And we have tracked the subtle dramatic play between the characters, which Socrates recreates in his mention of glances, curt words, pauses, and carefully phrased responses. Our sensibility throughout this volume counts as contextualist. We read the argumentative passages in the context of the more descriptive scenes, and vice versa. We pay close attention to the characters, dramatic setting, historical events, cultural allusions, and, in particular, the contemporary political salience of key terms. Plato in his literary work chose to put Socrates in conversation with real people, in specific locations, and at important moments in late fifth-century Athenian history. We cross-reference a broad range of texts, from Homer and Hesiod (both quoted in Charmides) to Thucydides and Herodotus, and from Aristophanes to Aristotle. We also cross-reference other works in the Platonic corpus. We do not assume anything about the order in which Plato wrote his dialogues or intended them to be read. We are convinced that they should be studied, in the first instance, as unitary literary works; but we also think that one cannot help reading them together and that overlapping discussions can illuminate each other. The most striking result of the contextualist approach is our translation of the dialogue’s key concept, sôphrosunê, as “discipline” (see Introduction, “Sôphrosunê,” vii

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viii

Charmides for discussion). We believe that this word—as opposed to “temperance,” “moderation,” “soundness of mind,” or “self-control”—is today the most accurate, meaningful, and philosophically apt translation for a dialogue set in 429 bce, at the start of the Peloponnesian War, depicting a conversation between a battletested Socrates, a Sparta-sympathizing Critias, and a modest and obedient young Charmides. “Discipline” benefits from being a word with enough contemporary salience in reflections on moral education and democratic leadership as to be apt for seminar discussion or personal reflection. If to a reader’s mind “discipline” sounds rather more like an externally imposed stricture than a cultivated virtue, however, we ask that it be considered equivalent to “self-discipline,” a more clunky but less polyvalent term. We hope this dialogue finds its way onto many ancient philosophy syllabi and reading lists. In a compact frame, it portrays an inimitable Socrates: zealous, erotic, clever, devious, thoughtful, and pedagogic. It places abstract philosophical reflection against the palpably militaristic background of the Peloponnesian War, and with deft strokes adumbrates Athens’ aristocratic self-confidence and anxiety. It takes up epistemic and political problems familiar from the Theaetetus and Republic in provocative ways, and it revels in logical puzzles later addressed by Aristotle. It makes an original contribution to theories of self-knowledge, and it meditates on a virtue, sôphrosunê, that could play a powerful role in contemporary moral reflection. A note on the use of this volume, which is in three principal parts: Many readers may wish to start with the translation and its footnotes. The Introduction provides fuller background on Plato’s authorship of the Charmides, the dialogue’s literary genre, its historical context, its characters, and the nature of sôphrosunê and our translation of it as “discipline.” The Analysis following the translation outlines the dialogue’s major narrative elements and argumentative progressions, and it suggests thematic connections, questions for investigation, and the shape that answers to some of those questions might take. None of our claims stands as decisive for any particular interpretation or use of the dialogue; our hope is simply to model the kind of reflection the Charmides promotes. We are grateful to David Murphy for sharing a draft of his critical edition of the Greek text of the Charmides. We also would like to acknowledge Bryan Van Norden, David Reeve, David Riesbeck, Debra Nails, Emilie Houssart, and participants at Vassar College, the University of Chicago, and Cornell University workshops, who generously commented on our work at various stages, but to whom no agreement with our results should be attributed. The project was supported in part by the Emily Abbey Fund and the Emily Floyd Fund at Vassar College.

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