Plato · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
SOCRATES: Someone was telling us just now about Cleitophon, son of Aristonymus — that in conversation with Lysias he was disparaging the time spent with Socrates, and praising to the skies his sessions with Thrasymachus. CLEITOPHON: Whoever told you that, Socrates, reported the conversation I had with Lysias about you inaccurately. Some of what I said was not praise, true, but some of it was. And since it's plain that you hold this against me, while pretending not to care in the least, I'd be glad to go through it with you myself, now that we happen to be alone, so that you'll think less badly of me. Because as it stands you've probably heard a garbled version, which is why you seem to be treating me more roughly than I deserve. But if you'll let me speak freely, I'd be very glad to, and I'm willing to say it all.
SOCRATES: It would be shameful of me not to put up with it when you're eager to do me some good. Obviously, once I learn in what respects I'm worse and in what respects better, I'll practice and pursue the one and flee the other with all my strength. CLEITOPHON: Then listen. I, Socrates, in my many conversations with you, used to be astonished at what I heard, and you seemed to me to speak more beautifully than anyone else alive, whenever you rebuked people — like a god on the tragic stage's crane, chanting: 'Where are you rushing off to, men? Don't you realize you're doing none of what needs doing — you who spend all your energy making sure you'll have money, but give no thought to whether the sons you'll leave it to will know how to use it justly; you find them no teachers of justice, if indeed it can be taught — or if it's to be gained through practice and exercise, no one to train and drill them in it properly; nor, even earlier than that, did you look after yourselves in this way. Yet seeing that you and your children have learned your letters, music, and gymnastics well enough — things you consider a complete education in excellence — and then noticing that you're no less corrupt where money is concerned, why don't you hold your present education in contempt, and go looking for people who will cure you of this tastelessness? And yet it is because of this very disharmony and carelessness — not because of any mismatch between foot and lyre — that brother quarrels with brother and city with city, clashing without measure and without harmony, warring and doing and suffering the worst things. And you claim that the unjust are unjust not from lack of education or ignorance, but willingly — yet in the same breath you dare to say that injustice is shameful and hateful to the gods. How, then, could anyone willingly choose so great an evil? Whoever is worse, you say, is mastered by his pleasures. But isn't that too involuntary, if winning is voluntary? So the argument proves, every way you look at it, that doing wrong is involuntary, and that every man, privately and every city publicly together, ought to give far more attention to this than they now do. Now, Socrates, whenever I hear you saying these things often, I marvel at them and I praise them wonderfully. And likewise when you go on to say that people who train their bodies but neglect their souls are doing something similar — neglecting the ruler and fussing over the ruled. And when you say that whoever doesn't know how to use a thing is better off leaving it unused — that if someone doesn't know how to use his eyes, or his ears, or his whole body, it's better for him not to hear, not to see, not to make any other use of his body at all than to use it just any old way.
CLEITOPHON: And the same goes for a craft: whoever doesn't know how to use his own lyre obviously doesn't know how to use his neighbor's either, and whoever can't use others' tools can't use his own, nor any other instrument or possession. And this argument of yours comes to its fine conclusion: that whoever doesn't know how to use his soul is better off keeping it still and not living, than living and acting on his own initiative — and if he really must live, it's better for such a person to spend his life as a slave than as a free man, handing over the rudder of his thinking to someone else, to one who has learned the art of governing men, which you, Socrates, so often call statesmanship, saying that this very same thing is also judicial skill and justice. Now to these arguments and countless others like them, all beautifully put — that excellence can be taught, and that everyone ought to care for himself before anything else — I have pretty much never objected, and I don't think I ever will; I consider them most exhorting and most useful, truly like someone waking us from sleep. So I paid close attention to what came next, expecting to hear more — questioning, not you first, Socrates, but your age-mates, your fellow enthusiasts, your companions, or however one ought to name them to you. I questioned first those thought by you to amount to something in particular, asking what the next step in the argument was, and putting it to them in something like your own manner: 'My good friends,' I said, 'how exactly are we now to take up Socrates's exhortation to excellence? Is this all there is to it — that we can never fully pursue the matter and grasp it completely, but that this will be our task for our whole lives, to exhort those not yet exhorted, and they in turn others? Or must we, after agreeing that this is what a person should do, go on to ask Socrates and one another what comes next — how are we supposed to begin learning about justice? It's as if someone had urged us to take care of our bodies, seeing us give no thought to the matter, like children, though there is such a thing as gymnastics and medicine, and then reproached us, saying it's shameful to take every care over wheat and barley and vines, and everything else we labor for and acquire for the body's sake, yet discover no craft or device for making the body itself as good as possible, even though one exists.
CLEITOPHON: 'And if we then asked the person exhorting us this: what do you say these crafts are? — he would probably answer, gymnastics and medicine. So now what do we say is the craft concerned with excellence of the soul? Let it be named.' The one among them who seemed strongest on this point, answering, told me that this craft is the very one you speak of, Socrates — none other than justice. And when I said, 'Don't just tell me the name, explain it like this: there's a craft called medicine; it produces two results — one, it continually trains up more doctors in addition to those already there; the other is health. But only the second of these is not itself a craft — it's the product of the craft that both teaches and is taught, and that product we call health. And likewise with carpentry: a house is one thing, carpentry itself is the other — the one is the product, the other the teaching. So with justice too, in the same way: 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 — what do we call that? Tell me.' This man, I think, answered 'the advantageous'; another said 'the fitting'; another 'the beneficial'; another 'the profitable.' I came back saying that in each of the crafts too there are such names — acting correctly, profitably, beneficially, and so on — but toward what end all of these point, each craft will state its own special product: carpentry, for instance, will say the good, the fine, the fitting, resulting in wooden furniture being made, which is not itself a craft. Let the same be said, then, about justice. Finally one of your companions, Socrates — the one who seemed to me to put it most cleverly — answered that this was the special product of justice, belonging to no other craft: the creation of friendship in cities. But when asked further, he said that friendship is a good thing and never bad, and he refused to accept, when pressed, that the friendships of children or of animals — which we also call by that name — really counted as friendship; for it turned out that such friendships are mostly harmful rather than good. Fleeing that difficulty, he said such things aren't friendships at all, and that people who call them that are using the word falsely; the true and genuine friendship, he said, is most precisely concord. Asked then whether by concord he meant agreement of opinion or of knowledge, he rejected agreement of opinion as unworthy, since many harmful agreements of opinion arise among people; but since he had already agreed that friendship is entirely a good thing and the product of justice, he ended up saying that concord and knowledge are the same thing, not opinion.
CLEITOPHON: When we had reached this impasse in the argument, the others present were quick to rebuke him, saying that the argument had circled right back to where it started — for medicine, too, they said, is a kind of concord, as is every craft, and each can say what it concerns; but the justice or concord you speak of, Socrates — where it tends, has escaped us, and it's unclear what its product actually is. In the end, Socrates, I put this same question to you yourself, and 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 — that everything he does, he does for everyone's benefit. I've endured this, not once or twice but for a long time now, pressing the point, until I've given up — concluding that you, of all people, exhort men most beautifully to care for excellence, but that one of two things must be true: either you can do only this much and nothing further — the same thing that could happen with any other craft, as when someone who isn't really a pilot has rehearsed a fine speech in praise of piloting, how valuable it is to men, and the same with any other craft — someone might level the same charge at you regarding justice, that you're no more knowledgeable about justice itself just because you praise it so beautifully. That's not quite how I see it myself, though; rather, one of two things is true: either you don't know it, or you're unwilling to share it with me. For this reason I think I'll go to Thrasymachus, and anywhere else I can, still at a loss. Because if you're willing to stop giving me these exhortations and instead — just as, if you had urged someone to take care of his body and not neglect it, you would then go on, after the exhortation, to describe the particular care that body by nature required — let the same happen now. Take it that Cleitophon agrees it's ridiculous to look after everything else and neglect the soul, for whose sake we labor over all the rest; and take it that I've said everything else that follows from this, just as I went through it a moment ago. And I beg you: please don't do otherwise, so that I won't end up, as I do now, praising you to Lysias and to others in some respects and criticizing you in others. For I won't say, Socrates, that to a man not yet exhorted you're not worth everything in the world — but to one who has already been exhorted, you're very nearly an obstacle to his reaching the end of excellence and becoming happy.