A short, unresolved Socratic dialogue in which Cleitophon praises Socrates's exhortations to virtue but complains Socrates never explains what justice actually produces or how to practice it.
Cleitophon is one of Plato's shortest and strangest dialogues, often bundled with the Republic because it dramatizes the very question Book I of the Republic leaves hanging: what is justice, and what does it actually do? Socrates opens by confronting Cleitophon about a rumor that he has been praising Thrasymachus over Socrates in conversation with Lysias. Cleitophon admits the report was garbled and asks to explain himself directly.
What follows is almost entirely Cleitophon's speech. He recounts, at length and with evident admiration, Socrates's famous exhortations to care for the soul before the body, to seek out teachers of justice the way one seeks teachers of medicine or carpentry, and his warning that neglecting one's soul while polishing one's body is backwards. Cleitophon says he found these speeches thrilling, like being woken from sleep. But when he pressed Socrates's own companions and finally Socrates himself for the next step -- what exactly justice produces, the way medicine produces health or carpentry produces furniture -- he got a series of unsatisfying answers: 'the advantageous,' 'the beneficial,' 'friendship,' 'concord,' each of which collapsed under questioning or turned out to describe every craft equally, not justice specifically. Socrates's own answer, that justice means harming enemies and helping friends, was later contradicted by the claim that the just man harms no one at all.
Cleitophon concludes that Socrates is unmatched at exhorting people toward virtue but either doesn't know, or won't say, what virtue actually consists of in practice -- leaving him stuck, and threatening (not entirely seriously) to go study with Thrasymachus instead. The dialogue ends abruptly with no reply from Socrates, which is itself the point: ancient and modern readers alike have debated whether this is a genuine, deliberately incomplete criticism Plato aimed at his own earlier work, a satire of glib imitators of Socrates, or a fragment meant to set up the fuller argument of the Republic.
“It would be shameful of me not to put up with it when you're eager to do me some good.”
— Cleitophon · read this chapter →
“why don't you hold your present education in contempt, and go looking for people who will cure you of this tastelessness?”
— Cleitophon · read this chapter →
“one thing is to make people just, as in that case the craft makes craftsmen; but the other thing, the product the just man is able to produce for us”
— Cleitophon · read this chapter →
“you told me that the work of justice is to harm one's enemies and benefit one's friends. But later it turned out that the just man never harms anyone at all”
— Cleitophon · read this chapter →
“you're very nearly an obstacle to his reaching the end of excellence and becoming happy.”
— Cleitophon · read this chapter →
It is a very short dialogue in which the character Cleitophon explains to Socrates why he has been praising Thrasymachus over him: Socrates is brilliant at exhorting people to care about justice, but when pressed for a concrete account of what justice actually produces, his answers keep collapsing. The dialogue ends without Socrates replying.
Cleitophon is an Athenian associate of Socrates who also appears briefly in Plato's Republic Book I. In this dialogue he narrates, in his own voice, a series of exchanges he had with Socrates's followers and with Socrates himself trying to pin down a definition of justice.
He says Socrates is unrivaled at rousing people to care for their souls and pursue excellence, comparing it to being woken from sleep, but that Socrates never goes on to specify what the craft of justice actually is or what result it produces, the way medicine produces health or carpentry produces furniture.
It ends mid-argument with Cleitophon's closing complaint that Socrates is, to someone already exhorted, 'very nearly an obstacle to his reaching the end of excellence and becoming happy.' Socrates never responds, and the dialogue simply stops there.
Its authenticity has been disputed since antiquity; some scholars read it as a genuine, deliberately unfinished Platonic sketch meant to motivate the fuller inquiry into justice in the Republic, others as a later imitation.
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