For all his help during the last four years, thank you very much to my supervisor, Chris Megone.

For various reasons, but very much in each case, thanks also to Claire Barraclough, Mike Beaney, Piers Benn, Céline Bergès, Christian Bergès, Lesley Brown, Anne-Marie Chaput, Rob Davies, John Divers, Fred and Marianne Gobé, Noreen Humble, Jennifer Jackson, Christine Jacobsen, Chris Janaway, Matthew Kieran, Jonathan Knowles, Warren Malone, Gideon Marcus, Cath Morgan, Seiriol Morgan, Mark Nelson, Jim Parry, Rebecca Roache, Bernhard Weiss, David Wiggins, Bill Wringe and Charlotte Wringe.

In the Crito, Socrates' refusal to escape from his death sentence is based on a certain account of what justice requires, distinct from the view that he owes unconditional obedience to the laws. This position is defended by Plato in later dialogues. The resulting account has famously been supposed to be one of the main targets of Nietzsche's critique of morality. I argue that on a proper understanding of the account of justice proposed in the Crito, and of Nietzsche's critique, it is not the case that Nietzsche rejects Socrates' position. In Part One I offer a novel interpretation of the Crito, and show how the assertions made in that dialogue are defended later by Plato. Socrates, I argue, refuses to escape because by doing so he would injure his fellow citizens, and thereby risk developing character traits which would eventually threaten to ruin his psychic health, but also, he would have to give up philosophy which is essential for producing and maintaining psychic health. In Part Two, I show that Nietzsche's critique is not targetted at Plato's account of justice thus understood, but that the positions of the two philosophers regarding the just life are in fact very close. In particular, I argue that the apparent resemblance between Nietzsche and Callicles vanishes when we look at their very different conceptions of power and the human good. I argue also that, contrary to traditional views of Nietzsche, he is not an anti-rationalist, and thus does not oppose Plato's view that reason plays an important role in the good life. Lastly, I compare Nietzsche' s concept of self-overcoming and Plato's psychic harmony, and show that the two resemble each other closely. I conclude that there is no substance to the claim that Nietzsche rejects Plato's account of justice, when this account is understood as an elaboration of the view put forward in the Crito.

My thesis is as follows. In the Crito, Socrates's refusal to escape from his death sentence is based on a certain account of what justice requires, distinct from the view that he owes unconditional obedience to the laws. This position is defended by Plato in later dialogues. The resulting account of justice has famously been supposed to be one of the main targets of Nietzsche's critique of morality. I argue that on a proper understanding of the account of justice proposed in the Crito and of Nietzsche's critique, it is not the case that Nietzsche rejects Socrates' position. In order to argue this I propose in the first part of my dissertation a novel interpretation of the assertions in the Crito which I suggest are developed in later dialogues. In a second part I show that Nietzsche's critique is not targetted at Plato's account of justice thus understood, but that the positions of the two philosophers regarding the just life are in fact very close.

Socrates' reasons for refusing to leave Athens and escape from his death sentence have been much debated, and the consensus seems to be that Socrates did not escape because he held the authoritarian belief that he owed unconditional obedience to the laws. In Chapter One I propose a different interpretation of the Crito on which my understanding of Plato's account of justice is based. Socrates, I argue, refuses to escape, not because he believes he owes unconditional obedience to the laws, but for the following, more complicated reason. Socrates believes that by escaping he would not only injure his fellow citizens, and thereby risk developing character traits which would eventually threaten to ruin his psychic health, but he would also be forced to give up the practice of philosophy, which he believes is necessary for producing and maintaining psychic health. The loss of psychic health, he claims, would render his life both unjust and not worth living.

In Chapters Two and Three I show how Socrates' position, which is merely asserted in the Crito, is defended in later dialogues. In Chapter Two I show how Plato develops and defends the views that (i) there is a certain healthy state of the soul which, like bodily health, can be explained in terms of functional analysis; and (ii) that the elenchos, central to the practice of philosophy according to Plato, is necessary and largely sufficient for achieving and maintaining psychic health. In Chapter Three I show how Plato defends the view that justice is psychic health in the Republic, and that the elenchos can produce psychic health understood as consisting of knowledge of the forms.

Nietzsche is often portrayed as rejecting everything Plato' Socrates stands for, and especially his belief that the good life is the just life. I explain briefly why I believe that this interpretation of Nietzsche's general attitude to Socrates is mistaken in the first part of my conclusion. In the last three chapters of this thesis, I show that it is not the case that Nietzsche rejects Socrates' beliefs about the just life as they are presented in the Crito, and as discussed in the first part of this thesis. In Chapter Four I investigate the claim that Nietzsche is restating Callicles's arguments in the Gorgias, to the effect that justice is a virtue suited for the weak, and that the virtue needed for the good life is in fact power. I argue that there is only a superficial similarity between Callicles' and Nietzsche's arguments, as Nietzsche's conception of power and the human good differ fundamentally from Callicles', and resemble more closely Plato's conception of self-mastery.

Chapters Five and Six investigate two other aspects of Nietzsche's supposed rejection of Plato's account of justice: Nietzsche's supposed anti-rationalism and rejection of asceticism. I argue that once again, in each case, the alleged critique is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Nietzsche's views, in that he rejects neither the claim that reason has an important role to play in the good life, nor that some kind of control need to be exercised over one's appetites.

At the end of Part Two I will have shown that there is no substance to the claim that Nietzsche rejects Plato's account of justice, an account which is the elaboration of Socrates' position in the Crito. On the contrary, it will emerge that Nietzsche's and Plato's positions are surprisingly close.

In the passage which probably earns him the qualification of being 'free speaking', Callicles tells Socrates what he thinks of philosophy, and how he thinks Socrates will end up if he does not give up the practice for something more profitable.

Callicles's words summarise, albeit before its actual occurrence, Socrates' predicament as it is related in the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. Socrates is arrested because he is a philosopher. He is unjustly condemned to die, and he is unable to defend himself against his accusers.

Does Socrates then recall Callicles's advice? Does he realise that Callicles was right when he said that philosophy was really 'a craft which takes a man of good nature and makes him worse' by rendering him incapable of defending himself against injustice, and of preserving his own life? Does Socrates still believe that philosophy is a 'wise' craft, useful in the pursuit of justice and happiness?

Socrates no doubt recognises his situation as that once prophesised by the young orator. He knows he had been condemned unjustly, and he knows philosophy is the cause of his predicament. But recognising that Callicles was right would mean that he was ready to prevent the situation from continuing if it were in his power to do so. It is puzzling then that Socrates did not make a greater effort to convince the jury to let him go, did not offer to pay a suitable fine, and last, refused to escape from prison when his friends had arranged for him to do so.

By rejecting these alternatives to some extent, Socrates chose his predicament. He chose it believing that suffering an injustice was far less harmful to him than committing an injustice himself, or than giving up the practice of philosophy even though that practice was responsible for putting him in prison in the first place. Socrates, then, persisted in his disagreement with Callicles to the very end by placing justice and the practice of philosophy above any of the considerations Callicles took to determine the good life, including life itself.

The aim of the first part of my thesis is to build up an account of Plato's defence of justice as psychic health which explains Socrates' choice in the Crito, to clarify that concept of psychic health, and the role played by reason, and in particular philosophy in bringing about both justice and psychic health. In order to do this I place an unusual emphasis on the importance of the Crito in the development of Plato's moral and political philosophy. I claim that this dialogue offers an embryonic sketch of Plato's defence of justice as psychic health, even though it lacks the clarifications and arguments needed to make sense of this defence. I believe that this approach not only helps build a stronger case for Plato's arguments about justice, but also serves to compare these arguments to Nietzschean views - the object of the second part of my thesis - more fruitfully, by emphasising the importance for Plato of psychic health as opposed to adherence to any particular moral system. The interpretation I draw from the study of the Crito and which is backed up by a reading of the early and middle dialogues, highlights the central role of health and flourishing of the soul in Plato's moral philosophy. This emphasis on moral psychology makes Plato a virtue ethicist. My interpretation of Nietzsche's moral philosophy also leads to the conclusion that he is (some kind of) a virtue ethicist. This is not the most obvious way of understanding Plato if one does not read the dialogues as being part of the same project. Hence by choosing to begin my thesis with a study of the Crito, I effectively determine what kind of interpretation of Plato's defence I will put forward, and what I will have to say with respect to Nietzschean attacks on Plato's defence.

The Crito is an important dialogue, and especially relevant to my project, in that it introduces the two central tenets of Plato's defence, i.e. that justice is psychic health, and that philosophical examination is essential for the latter. The dialogue offers no clarification of these claims - it will be our task to seek such clarifications in the arguments of the later dialogues Gorgias and Republic in the next two chapters. Instead the Crito shows that Socrates (and probably Plato) did believe such principles to be true, and moreover was prepared at least to attempt to apply them to a practical situation. I will argue that Socrates based his decision to obey the law and to drink the hemlock on his beliefs about justice.

If my interpretation of the argument of the dialogue is correct, then it must exclude another line of interpretation which has been adopted by several commentators, amongst them Bostock, to some extent Vlastos, and in a modified version, Kraut. This reading holds that Socrates decides to obey the laws and refuses to escape because he believes it is just to obey the laws no matter what. This means that Socrates' argument is in fact identical to that presented by the personified Laws of Athens at the end of the dialogue, i.e. that Socrates agrees with all their premises and has nothing to add to their argument.

Part of my task in defending my interpretation of the dialogue and setting up Plato's defence of justice as psychic health will be to argue that the interpretation outlined above is mistaken. I will show that it is by recalling Socrates' attitude to the opinions of 'the many' - voiced in the Crito and elsewhere. Since Socrates believes 'the many' are not trustworthy guides when it comes to matters of justice, the laws of Athens (democratic, hence the laws of 'the many') cannot be infallibly just. It follows that, Socrates cannot believe that it is always just to obey the laws in question.

I will need to address the following challenge to my argument. The opinions of 'the many' play an important role in the elenchos. This is exemplified in several dialogues in which Socrates appeals to 'the many' as a whole, or to individuals whom he considers to be part of 'the many'. Hence Socrates cannot be dismissing altogether the opinions of 'the many', nor can he be dismissing their laws which are the expression of those opinions.

My answer to this challenge will focus on the actual use which Socrates puts the opinions of the many to in his elenctic examinations. I will show that these appeals are never decisive, and that they certainly do not entail that the many are suitable guides in matters or justice, this because they do not submit their beliefs to the elenchos on a regular basis. Thus their beliefs remain at best true beliefs and cannot be knowledge.

I will also need to address, briefly, the problem of expertise. Socrates claims that the judgments of the many are not reliable guides in moral matters, and that we must turn to experts instead. But no experts appear in the Crito, and there seems to be grounds for saying that Plato did not believe there could be any moral experts. I will point to a solution to these problems.

Having refuted this conflicting interpretation of the argument of the Crito, I will show, through a study of the argument, that my proposed interpretation is correct. I will argue that the following claims play a major, if not always obvious role in Socrates' decision to obey the laws. Socrates believes both that the health of his soul depends on his not committing injustice, and that his life will not be worth living if he stops practicing philosophy. These claims, together with some (but not all, and only those which Socrates can independently verify) of the Laws' claims, lead Socrates to the conclusion that he must not escape. These claims need clarifying as well as defending, in particular it is a mystery how Socrates knows (or even how he has true beliefs) that injuring others and breaking agreements will harm his soul, or that practicing philosophy is beneficial. I conclude by proposing a programme which will achieve this clarification for the next two chapters.

That Socrates in the Crito acts from a belief that he owes obedience to the laws no matter what conflicts with my thesis that Plato believes justice is some kind of psychic health promoted by the philosophical life. My thesis entails that the moral character of actions is dependent on their consequences for the agent's soul. Just actions are those actions which promote psychic health (48b). As he believes that life with an unhealthy soul is not worth living (48b), Socrates is unwilling to act in a manner that will harm his soul: 'Then in no circumstances one must do wrong' (49b). But because Socrates knows that the laws will sometimes require one to act unjustly, as they did in the case of Leon and the Thirty (Apology, 30d), he cannot believe that he should obey them no matter what.

Thus I interpret Plato's defence of justice as agent-based or at least agent-prior, which entails that actions are just, not because they accord with rules, but because they contribute to psychic health. Hence for Plato, adherence to rules - and in this case laws - and justice are not necessarily co-extensive. He would not believe that his being just depended every time on his obeying the laws of Athens; as indeed it did not in the case of Leon and the Thirty, and would not in the hypothetical case of the jury ordering him to give up philosophy. This potential gap between what is just and what the laws order means that on each occasion where Socrates doubted whether obeying the law was the just thing to do, he would have to ascertain that it was through independent means. (We yet have to establish what these means are). He cannot rely on the assumption that if an action is in accordance with the laws, then it is just.

I will show that Socrates in the Crito does not in fact agree that he owes the laws of Athens unconditional obedience, because these laws are democratic, i.e. the laws of the many. Unconditional obedience would entail obeying even when it required him to act unjustly, and would conflict with my thesis. It would also in some way violate the principle stated at 48a that we should not 'consider popular opinion in questions of what is right, honourable and good, or the opposite'. Showing that this authoritarian interpretation of the Crito fails through a misunderstanding of Plato's attitude to the beliefs of the many, will be my first step towards a vindication of my thesis.

The principle which I believe is significant when trying to understand Socrates' attitude to the laws of Athens is stated at the very beginning of his argument. Socrates explains to Crito that where justice is concerned,

This could amount to no more than a rejection of ad populum inferences. Whether or not what they believe is right, the fact that 'most people' believe a proposition to be true is not sufficient reason to infer that this proposition is true. So the arguments put forward by Crito for Socrates' escape which appeal to what 'most people' will think (44c) are bad arguments.

This interpretation takes us no further than the recognition that Crito, if he is to convince Socrates, has to appeal to valid arguments. But it is tempting to read a stronger statement in Socrates' claim that we should not 'consider popular opinion in questions of what is right, honourable and good, or the opposite' - a statement that is not merely a rejection of ad populum argument forms, but of the content of Crito's arguments.

Whereas some forms of argument ad populum are acceptable, those that are not (most of them) are not because we do not believe that 'most people' are in a position to form correct judgments in the field which determines the content of the argument. For instance 'everyone says the summer of 1976 was very hot' is sufficient to infer that the summer of 1976 was hot. This is because no expertise or special shrewdness is required to determine that a summer was particularly hot. On the other hand, Socrates says that we should turn to experts in right and wrong, rather than popular opinion (48a). Clearly this implies he does not believe that 'the many' are experts in right and wrong, or that just anyone is in a position to form correct moral judgments. (This presupposes that Socrates believes there are experts in right and wrong, and it means that we must explain why no experts appear in the Crito. I will address these issues briefly in §2.4.)

This interpretation, of course, needs supporting and justifying, and I will devote a part of this section to explaining why Socrates believes the many lack moral expertise (in the sense that they cannot reliably tell right from wrong), as well as providing more textual evidence that he holds such a belief. I will finish by answering an objection in §2.3. to the effect that Socrates does respect the opinion of the many as he uses it in the elenchos, and in §2.4., by addressing some of the issues relating to the problem of expertise, and in particular, who the expert appealed to by Socrates at 48a may be.

The passage says that the many are not in a position to form correct judgments about right and wrong. It follows that as Athens is a democracy, and its laws are the laws of the many, Socrates has reason not to accept the laws' advice blindly in deciding what it is just for him to do. Hence it follows from that passage that Socrates does not believe it would be just for him to obey the laws no matter what. He would have to ascertain that what they did order him to do was just. As they are the laws of the many, he cannot be certain that they are just without pondering the question himself or turning to an expert. This is why I take this passage to refute the challenge presented by Bostock and Vlastos to my thesis. I will show that Socrates says plenty elsewhere which agrees with the passage at 48a, and confirms the thought that it is because they are not trained dialectically that the many are not reliable.

The following passage from the Apology expresses Socrates' mistrust of the many's fitness to form correct judgments about justice:

The content of this passage is clearly that Socrates finds it impossible to do politics with the Athenians. They will commit injustices, and they will not let any one correct them or tell them otherwise. The Athenians are not fit to govern themselves in a just manner, and if they have any authority, they will prevent any one from imposing justice in their city. This implies further that, unless it goes hand in hand with training in dialectic, there can be no such thing as a just democracy: the untrained many, when they are in charge, will not listen to justice.

Vlastos, in "The Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy" disagrees with this interpretation of the passage:

Vlastos' argument may be right as far as the distinction between the laws and their application by the citizens are concerned. Even then, one might say that good laws make good citizens - and Socrates does say, in the Euthydemus that the point of politics is to make citizens wiser - in which case it would be unfair to blame the people of Athens entirely for their political life.

Moreover, Vlastos' argument cannot be applied to the passage from the Apology quoted above. It cannot be applied for the simple reason that if Socrates blames the Athenians, he does not stop at that. His words are 'you or any other multitude'. The blame is spread a lot farther, and we have to ask whether it can really refer to the bad character of particular populations, and their disrespect for the law. If we separate people's ability to make good laws from their ability to respect them, and attribute the latter to bad character, then the claim that any people is incapable of respecting laws amounts to 'misodemia', the dislike of the many. Whereas such a dislike could possibly be taken to a particular population, say that of Athens, it seems far more unlikely that it could be applied in general, to any multitude.

This unlikelihood means that we may have to look differently at Socrates' statement. Could he not mean, rather, that he believes that the many, whichever city they are from, are not capable of governing themselves, in the sense that if left to themselves, they will fail to see what is just and what is not? This would imply, not that they are fundamentally incapable of being good citizens, but that they lack the necessary expertise for founding and maintaining a just constitution. Also it might suggest that what the many lack is a method for sorting out their true from their false beliefs about justice, and, as we saw earlier, this could be remedied by their being taught to inquire elenctically.

In support of this conclusion I would like to point out a passage in the Gorgias in which Socrates is pointing to the evils of rhetoric by drawing an analogy between cookery and medicine on the one hand, and rhetoric and politics on the other:

Children are not fit to decide which foods are best for them, and without proper supervision, they would fall prey to the flatteries of cooks telling them that the cakes and sweets they sell are really the best foods for their bodies. Between the cook's cakes and the doctor's medicines, they would choose what pleased their appetites most: the cakes. If the comparison holds, and Socrates seems to believe it does, grown citizens are no more capable when it comes to choosing between the true politician who prescribes justice, and the rhetorician, who prescribes whatever is in his interest, by flattering the citizens' not so noble ambitions.

Later in the same dialogue, Socrates returns to this analogy to answer Callicles' accusation that he would not be able to defend himself in court, if he came to be wrongly accused: "For I will be judged as a doctor might be judged by a jury of children with a cook as prosecutor". This reiterates the idea at Apology 31d-e that it is not possible to engage in real political debate with 'the many'. It also adds to it the thought that this is due to the fact that the Athenian jury is not qualified to form correct judgments about justice, just as children are not qualified to form correct judgments about medicine. These texts support the conclusion of this sub-section: Socrates does not believe that moral decisions should be influenced by popular opinion. This is because many lack the training necessary for reliability in making correct moral judgements.

To understand the role of popular opinion in the Socratic elenchos, one has first to understand the elenchos. This is by no means an easy task and I can only pretend to touch on it in a later chapter. For the present we will assume that the elenchos is either one of two things. It is (a) either a method for refuting all claims to knowledge, or (b) a method for finding out the truth. Both interpretations find support in the texts.

The mechanisms of the elenchos can be summarised thus. Socrates commonly starts off by asking a definition (p) of his interlocutor. The interlocutor is then led on to make other related assertions (q&r). Socrates examines these and finds that the latter assertions contradict the original proposal. If (a) above is the right description of the Socratic method then Socrates has simply shown that his interlocutors held a set of inconsistent beliefs: if q&r are true, then p must be false, and vice-versa. The interlocutor turns out to be ignorant when he thought he had some knowledge. In this case, although the elenchos cannot work without appealing to the interlocutor's opinion, in no way does it compel us, or Socrates, to suppose that these opinions are trustworthy. Not only has nothing been said about their truth or falsity, but it has been found that they were held inconsistently.

If we accept (b) as the correct description of the elenchos, then Socrates is able to show that a given interlocutor holds some false beliefs and some which are true. I will not discuss here the assumptions which must be necessary if Socrates is to be able to tell which beliefs are true and which are not. Suffice it to say that there must be such assumptions. The elenchos, in this case, can only work if the interlocutor has some true beliefs with which he is able to refute his false beliefs.

If we accept that this is how the elenchos works, then we accept that it cannot function unless Socrates is assuming that popular opinion is partly constituted by true beliefs. The question then is why one should shun popular opinion if it is the case that it must sometimes be true. Is it because it is not always true? This surely must be rejected: we do not seek advice only from those persons we know are infallible sources of knowledge - that cannot be expected from anyone. Whereas on many points 'the many' may be entirely right, what matters here is that they do not know, and have no method for finding out which of their beliefs are true and which are not. Until, that is, they are subjected to the elenchos, the method for sorting out true from false beliefs. As the interview of the slave boy in the Meno is meant to suggest, there is no reason in principle why the elenctic method of inquiry shouldn't be accessible to the many.

I have tried to show that the importance placed on the opinions of the many in the practice of the elenchos in no way entailed that these opinions were reliable guides to just actions. The many cannot discriminate between their true and false beliefs, not unless, that is, they are subjected to the elenchos on a regular basis.

It seems right to infer, then, that if Socrates' reluctance to be guided solely by 'the many' holds one way, when they tell him he should escape, a priori it must also hold the other way, when they tell him, via their laws, that he should die. Whenever considering what the just thing to do is, one should not let oneself be guided solely by the advice of 'the many'. This is what Socrates implies at 48a.

This conclusion needs qualifying in two ways. First, it is not the case that the laws of the many are necessarily unjust, but that they are not reliably just. 'The many' would not know if their laws happened to be unjust, as they would not know if their beliefs about justice were false. In order to be credited with counter-factual reliability, according to Socrates, 'the many' must practice the elenchos. This is confirmed by his rejection of Crito's appeal to 'the many' in favour of an elenctic examination of his situation at 48c-d.

Secondly, it is not qua democratic laws that the laws are not reliably just; my conclusion takes it for granted that they are the laws of people who do not submit themselves to the elenchos. If every one in a democracy practiced elenctic examinations, then presumably they would be more reliable as far as justice is concerned.

The argument that the citizens of Athens cannot make just laws because they lack political or moral expertise, if we are to attribute it to Socrates, requires an explanation of its premise; i.e. what exactly is moral expertise, and does Socrates believe that there are moral experts, or at least that there could be? It is not the purpose of this thesis to explore the problem of moral experts in any detail. However, for the sake of clarification, I propose to try and answer at least the question who the expert appealed to at 48a is supposed to be.

My answer, that Socrates himself, as an elenctic teacher, is the expert he appeals to in the Crito, will detach the idea of a moral expert from its obvious interpretation as someone who simply knows what is just and what is not, and is able to teach it, while on the other hand it will link it to the practice of the elenchos. I will try to show that what Socrates means by a moral expert is someone who is able to inquire methodically into what is just and what is not, and who can help others engage in the same inquiry. In these terms, I will argue, Socrates himself is a moral expert.

Socrates appeals to experts in a way which seems to show that he believes they exist in at least two dialogues: the Crito, 47c-48a, and the Laches, 184e-185e. But in neither of these passages is the expert called by name, nor seen to arrive on the scene. Bostock suggests that in the Crito, the personified Laws of Athens are the expert: they arrive after Socrates has called an expert, and when they leave, Socrates claims that he has heard a message from the gods (54d). Allen on the other hand, believes that the expert appealed to is none other than the 'truth itself'.

Both suggestions have in common that they make out the expert to be an abstract entity, rather than an actual person. In the first case, it is Socrates himself who gives birth to these entities, the Laws, through his elenctic reasoning. The Laws' speech is a product of his imagination, and insofar as they express the truth, they do so only as the result of Socrates' thought processes. 'Truth itself' on the other hand exists whether Socrates looks for it or not, and the expert would be more likely to stand for a metaphor of truth itself if it was not for Socrates' claim that the expert represents the truth: clearly the expert is a mediator and not truth itself.

Might such a mediator be an elenctic teacher, someone who shows others how to find out what is true and what is not in moral matters? For this is exactly what Socrates is doing every time he engages in a dialogue with someone, when he is, according to his own description "practising philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet"(Apology 29d) Is Socrates the expert he invokes in the Crito? This again will not be easily conceded as the expert in question is spoken of quite clearly as someone other than Socrates or Crito.

In the Apology, Socrates, calling himself "the true champion of justice" (32a) defines his god-assigned role amongst the Athenians as follows: to make them understand that it is wrong that they should "give no attention or thought to truth, understanding, and the perfection of your soul" (29e), and "urging you to set your thoughts on goodness" (31b). One way to interpret these passages would be to note their focus on 'thinking' about virtue and say that the role of the teacher is not so much to teach the citizens how to become virtuous, i.e. how to get them to find out what is just and what is not, but to get them thinking about virtue.

My immediate concern at this point, in order to show that we can take the appeal to experts at 48a seriously, is to determine whether elenctic teachers can or could be what Socrates calls experts in right and wrong. If we find that they could, then we must depart from the traditional image of the Socratic experts, the one that we (and no doubt Socrates' interlocutors also) picture when Socrates appeals to them, i.e. someone who will decide one way or the other on a moral question. Instead, our expert will be no more than someone who facilitates the search for truth by teaching a method and helping in the practice of it.

Irwin in Plato's Moral Theory argues that elenctic teaching does not constitute moral expertise:

This assessment obviously depends on Irwin's understanding of the terms 'expert procedure'. Irwin's account of Socrates' definition of experts is as follows:

"The expert in a particular craft offers authoritative guidance, supported by a rational account".

Irwin gives no textual evidence for this definition. We can however recover the definition by putting together passages from several dialogues. That an expert offers authoritative guidance is evident from the Crito (47c-48a) and the Laches (184e-185e) (Irwin quotes these passages with reference to moral expertise). That an expert must offer a rational account can be seen from Socrates' claim in the Gorgias (464e-465a) that rhetoric is not a craft because it can give no rational account of itself; and obviously, if one is not even a craftsman, one cannot be an expert.

Whereas there is no question that Socrates believes the elenchos can give a rational account of itself (it is the elenchos which he contrasts to rhetoric in the Gorgias), we might question whether the elenchos is in any way authoritative. If authoritative means to have infallible knowledge, then Socrates is not authoritative. Even if we discount his claims that he knows nothing, we are left with the fact that he believes he must constantly examine himself as well as others (28e). Someone whose beliefs are always up for revision cannot be said to have infallible knowledge. But authoritative need not mean anything more than being dependable. Socrates' authority as a teacher does not lie in his ability to transmit knowledge about virtue, but to provide a reliable method for sorting out true from false beliefs about virtue, and hence, for becoming a virtuous person.

I suggest that the expert in right and wrong appealed to in the Crito is no more nor less than someone who teaches using the elenchos, i.e. Socrates himself. I find that this suggestion - it can be no more than a suggestion - is the more sensible one, as it is the only one which makes sense of Socrates' several appeals to experts who seem never to appear. It also confirms the idea discussed in §2.2. that what the citizens of Athens lack is 'elenchein', and that this is why their laws are unlikely to be just laws.

In this section I have argued that if Socrates decides to obey the laws' order, it is in spite of his belief that the Laws of Athens are not to be relied on where justice is concerned. He will obey a law only if it does not require him to commit an injustice. This belief, I argued, stems from Socrates' conviction that we should not take the advice of the many blindly - when these are not trained elenctically.

In §2 I ruled out the interpretation of Socrates' behaviour in the Crito as based on a principle of unconditional obedience to the laws. I will now defend an alternative interpretation by arguing that Socrates' decision to obey the laws and drink the hemlock is grounded in his acceptance of two principles introduced in that dialogue. The principles are (i) that unjust behaviour harms the soul and just behaviour benefits it, and (ii) that the practice of philosophy is a necessary element of the good life. I will show that these two principles occupy a salient place in Socrates' argument and thereby justify my decision to focus on them in Chapters II and III.

In order to make clear the role played by the two principles in question, I will analyse the dialogue and show that it contains not one but two arguments put forward by Socrates for the conclusion that on this occasion, he should not disobey the laws. Both arguments are distinct from the argument of the Personified Laws of Athens.

The first argument runs from 48a to 51e, and comprises part of the Laws' speech. The Laws, however, contribute only two of the ten premises, and the main part of the argument is contained in Socrates' dialogue with Crito. This argument depends on an understanding of justice in terms of psychic health - the first principle. The relation between unjust actions and harm to the soul and just actions and benefit to the soul, however, is assumed rather than argued or explained. Thus the argument remains largely mysterious.

The second argument is offered in the last part of the Laws' speech at 53c-54c, and must be read together with part of the first argument (48b-49a). It is independent from the Laws' main argument, and is attributed by Socrates to the Laws as an afterthought, as it were. This argument depends on the premise that if he must give up philosophy, Socrates' life will not be worth living. This, in turn, must be understood in relation to a tacit premise (which is made explicit in the Apology) that the non-philosophical life is not worth living. This second principle, like the linking of justice and psychic health, is neither explained nor defended. So again, we don't seem to be offered much of a reason why we should accept Socrates' argument.

It will have become apparent, in the course of this section that the principles which constitute the major premises of Socrates' two arguments for the conclusion that he must do as the Laws order and drink the hemlock, are not in any way defended further in the Crito. Accordingly, I will conclude this Chapter by outlining a plan for Chapters II and III, the aim of which will be to explain the relations between psychic health, philosophy and justice, and thereby dispel these mysteries.

The first and most important step of Socrates' first argument is expressed in the following passages at 47e-49a:

To say that life is not worth living with an unhealthy soul (48a) is to say that one cannot live well in those circumstances. As it is of first importance that one should live well, then it is equally important that one should have a healthy soul. In order to have a healthy soul, one must avoid wrong actions and perform right ones (47e). This entails that in order to live well one must live 'rightly or honourably' (48b), and that one must avoid doing wrong (49b).

Although this part of the argument is set out fairly clearly, it is probably the one which provokes the most questions. What is it for the soul to be healthy? Why is psychic health a desirable state, so desirable that one may not want to live without it? How can a state of the soul be linked to moral behaviour? There is no attempt on Socrates' part to answer any of these questions in this dialogue. In fact, the rest of the argument raises more questions of a related nature, and it will become clearer as we progress in the analysis of the argument, that these questions must be answered if we are to make sense of Plato's defence of justice.

The claim that one must never do an injury to someone else, is in itself problematic. What can Socrates mean by 'injury'? Surely he does not mean 'to inflict something unpleasant on someone else'. Socrates has been to war, and there he considered it his duty to kill as many enemies as he could. Following Socrates' belief that the only real injury one can sustain is injury to one's soul, it would seem that to injure others is to harm their souls. But is this what Socrates means? If so, it would follow that to steal, kill, etc. does not by itself constitute an injury. As long as one can perform those acts without harming anybody's soul, then one is not acting wrongly. We can rule out this interpretation of 'injury', both from the point of view of common sense, and because the rest of the text does not warrant it. Socrates believes that to undermine the laws' authority would constitute an injury to the state (50ab). In saying so he does not mention harm to any souls. However, the following weaker claim is plausible, i.e. that Socrates understands by injury much the same thing as every one else (physical harm, loss of property, harm to one's relatives and friends, etc.), but believes that the worst kind of injury is harm to one's soul. This follows from his claims at 48a that the soul is much more precious than the body, and that life is not worth living if the soul is ruined.

In an attempt to answer the first of these questions Kraut points out that there are two ways in which an agreement may be unjust. An agreement may be unjust at the outset, i.e. someone may be coerced into an agreement, or badly enlightened as to its implications. Or an agreement may be unjust in that it requires one to do something wrong. This last category is somehow dubious: although in some cases it is clear that an agreement demands that a party does something unjust (e.g. a contract killer's agreement to kill somebody in exchange for money), in many cases the consequences of an agreement are unknown at the time the agreement is made. How, in this case, is one supposed to know whether an agreement is just before entering into it? If one cannot, then it must be the case that agreements can become unjust after they have been entered into, i.e. even if they were just at the outset.

The following example from Book I of the Republic illustrates the problem just outlined. If, Socrates claims, one has borrowed weapons from a friend who has subsequently become mad, then it would not be just to return these weapons, even if one had promised to do so (331c). But how could one know that the friend from whom one had borrowed weapons would subsequently become mad?

Given an identical agreement, it will sometimes be right to abide by it, as it turns out to be in the Crito, and sometimes wrong, as it was in the case of Socrates' involvement with Leon and the Thirty. Socrates' agreement with the Laws is the same agreement on each occasion, i.e. that he will obey them, when the Laws ask him to co-operate against Leon, in the hypothetical situation when they ask to give up philosophy, and when they ask him to die. But only in one case does Socrates deem it just to abide by his agreement. What makes the difference is an evaluation of the justice or injustice inherent in the situation. The implications of the agreement turn out to be unjust in two of the situations refered to above, and it is Socrates' perception of the injustice inherent in them which dictates to him his behaviour. However, Socrates, as in the case of his injunction that we should not inflict injury, elaborates neither on the reasons for that 'rule', nor on its implications. It is by reading between the lines that we are able to propose the following: an agreement is a just agreement only if it does not require one to commit an injustice. In the case of Leon and the Thirty, Socrates' agreement with the City of Athens clearly did require him to commit an injustice. Hence it ceased to be, on that occasion, a just agreement.

In the third step of the argument, Socrates attempts to deduce a conclusion about his particular situation from the moral guidelines he has established. This is where the Personified Laws of Athens come in. They argue that by escaping, Socrates will be both injuring them (50a-b) and breaking a just agreement he entered with them (51d-e). Together with the conclusions of the first and the second step of the argument, this means that Socrates must not escape.

The Laws' speech, then, plays the following role: if confirms that escaping would constitute an injustice on Socrates' part according to the principles established earlier in the dialogue, i.e. that it is unjust to injure people and to break just agreements. So what the Laws' speech is supposed to establish is that by escaping, Socrates would either injure them, or break a just agreement, or both. The Laws do in fact establish this, as I will show. But they claim to establish more. According to them, they are offering Socrates three self-standing reasons why he should not escape : "because he disobeys us and we gave him birth, because he disobeys us and we nurtured him; because he agreed to obey us and neither obeys nor persuades us that we are doing something incorrect" (51e-52a). The Laws' claims re the wrongness of disobeying parents and nurturers plays no role in Socrates' argument. The claim that Socrates neither persuades nor obeys the Laws goes some way towards explaining why he would be breaking a just agreement by escaping, but is not complete. Socrates believes that it is only on condition that the Laws do not bid him to commit an injustice that he is bound to persuade or obey them. In what follows I show how on the one hand some of the Laws' speech completes Socrates' argument for the conclusion that he should not escape, and how on the other the Laws make claims which do not and could not feature in Socrates' argument.

At the very beginning of their speech, the Laws claim that Socrates, by escaping will invalidate the law which states that judgments, once rendered, must be authoritative, and that by doing this, he will attempt 'as far as he has the power' to destroy the Laws (50a-b). Socrates' escape would constitute an attempt to destroy the Laws, presumably because it would undermine their authority in the eyes of the Athenians, and open the door to further acts of disobedience. The Laws have grounds for worry, because if an influential citizen - such as Socrates - were to defy the system, it may well be perceived by others as an example to follow. And by taking part in the destruction of the Laws, Socrates would be injuring his fellow citizens, who are undoubtedly better off with a less than perfect legal system than in a state of chaos such as would be brought about by the disintegration of that system. After all, Socrates' escape would engender destruction, not reform.

Although Crito does not recognise it, it is clear that to attempt to destroy the Laws because they have attempted to destroy Socrates would be to render injury for injury. According to Socrates' principles, this alone would be grounds for not acting, for remaining in jail, and the Laws need go no further in their argument. We must presume that if they do, it is at least partly because Crito is not yet ready to accept Socrates' argument; he needs further persuasion.

At 50c the notion of an agreement between Socrates and the Laws is introduced. This, however, is not developed in the following part of the speech. Instead the Laws refer to Socrates' relationship to them, comparing it with that of a child to its parents. It is this part of their speech, the Laws' second claim, which may most rightly be called 'offensively authoritarian'. The Laws declare that obedience and respect is due to them as from a child to its parents, or worse, as from a slave to his master. From the point of view of Socrates' principles it would appear that this argument, appealing to Socrates' special relationship to his country, is somewhat redundant: if it is wrong to return injury for injury, it is no more wrong to do so when one has a particular relationship to the person one intends to injure. Or at least, even if there is a difference in degree between injuring one's father and injuring one's cousin, or a stranger, it nonetheless remains that injuring a stranger is an injustice, i.e. something that Socrates would commit on no account.

It is also in this passage that the Laws introduce the 'persuade or obey' principle: "you must do whatever your city and your country command, or else persuade them in accordance with universal justice" (51c). It is slightly odd that this point should be made here, amongst the arguments for comparing the citizen/city relationship to the child/parent one. A child on a properly authoritarian regime, that is in most traditional families, is certainly not given the alternative to persuade her parents. 'Obey' is the only option, on the grounds, not only that the parents know better, but also that it is this kind of authority which is required to sustain the authoritarian family unit. Of course, this objection does not apply, and the analogy does hold, in the case of an older child, say twenty, who is expected both to respect parents' decisions, and engage in rational dialogue with them when he or she disagrees. That this particular kind of child parent relationship is what we should be concerned with here is confirmed by what follows.

The function of the 'persuade or obey' principle becomes clear when we put it together with another of the Laws' statements, their third claim, at 51d-e. The Laws point out to Socrates that he was given the choice, when he became an adult and could observe for himself the legal system of the city, to remain and obey the laws as a citizen, or to emigrate. Together with the 'persuade' clause, this amounts to saying that the agreement between Socrates and the Laws was a fair one.

The agreement, they claim, was just on two accounts. First, because Socrates was not coerced into it, he was given the chance to leave Athens; secondly because the persuade clause meant that there was always an alternative to obeying, if for some reason he did not want to obey. But even though this limits the possibility of someone being bound by the agreement to commit an injustice, it in no ways guarantees that this will never happen: a citizen may fail to persuade the Laws that what they order is unjust. Nonetheless, according to Socrates' argument, the agreement is just enough to be binding on this particular occasion if it does not require Socrates to commit an injustice. As it only requires him to die, and not to harm his soul in any way, (which means he injures himself less than if he were to live but harm his soul by committing an injustice), nor injure anyone else, then the agreement must be binding.

Socrates, the Laws go on to argue, did enter into such an agreement with them by not leaving Athens when he had the chance. If he were to leave now, he would be breaking this agreement. This then, is the second way in which Socrates, from his own point of view, would be committing an injustice if he escaped: by breaking a just agreement. The first way, we saw, would be by attempting to destroy the Laws, an act which would amount to rendering injury for injury.

Let us recapitulate briefly the three steps of Socrates' argument for the conclusion that on this occasion he must obey the laws, and the questions which have emerged from the discussion. This is the argument:

P1: The most important thing is to live well 48b

P2: One cannot live well with an unhealthy soul 48a

C1/P3: The most important thing is to have a healthy soul (P1,P2)

P4: Wrong actions harm the soul 48a

C2/P5: One must avoid doing wrong in any circumstances 49b (P3, P4)

C3/P6: One must not inflict injury 49c (P5)

C4/P7: One must not break agreements when they are just 49e (P5)

(both would constitute an injustice)

C5/P8: If escaping means inflicting injury or breaking a just agreement, then Socrates must not escape 50a (P6,P7)

P9: Escaping injures the state 50a-b

P10: Escaping breaks just agreement with the state 51d-e

Socrates must not escape (P8,P9,P10).

It seems clear from this summary that when Socrates agrees with the Laws' conclusion that he should not escape, it is for different reasons from these the Laws themselves rely on, which are furnished by his moral perspective on action, not by the Laws' claims to absolute authority. He does not therefore, agree with the Laws' stronger implicit conclusion (as identified by Bostock) that it would always be wrong for any citizen to disobey any law. He agrees merely with their weaker conclusion that it would be wrong for him on this occasion to disobey the law that once judgments are rendered they are authoritative.

As to the moral perspective which dictates Socrates' behaviour, we are left very much in the dark. We know that the most important criterion in deciding on a course of action is whether it is right or wrong, and that this is the case because being right or wrong is linked very closely with the effect actions have on the soul. But we do not know what the desirable state of psychic health consists in, nor how it is linked to moral behaviour. We cannot understand Socrates' decision to drink the hemlock until we can answer these questions.

The second argument offered by Socrates in the Crito is important for the role played in it by Socrates' second principle, i.e. that the practice of philosophy is a necessary element of the good life. This argument is interpreted by Colson in "Crito 54a-c: to what does Socrates owe obedience?". Colson notices that in their speech, the Laws do not exclusively present Socrates with arguments on the nature of his duty to the Laws. In fact, he says referring to the last part of their speech which deals with what Socrates' situation would be if he chose to disobey, "I would even go so far as to say that the most important reasons have been saved for last". The passage Colson refers to, 53a-54c, starts with the following claim: "We invite you to consider what good you will do to yourself or your friends if you commit this breach of faith and stain your conscience".

The Laws then go on to enunciate what will become of Socrates if he escapes from his sentence. First, if he goes to a well-governed state, he will not be well-received, since he will have the reputation of a law-breaker. More importantly, with such a reputation, his discussions about justice will be ill-received. Secondly, if Socrates escapes to a not so well-governed city, then in an atmosphere of 'indiscipline and laxity' there will be no occasion for him to discuss philosophy, and no one to talk with. Thirdly and lastly, his friends and children will suffer if he escapes, since they will either have to answer to the law for aiding him to do so, or else they will have to go into exile with him. From these considerations, the Laws go on to say that

thereby showing that they believe Socrates will be the first to suffer from his decision. It is worth noting here that it does not follow from this that it would always be wrong for anyone to disobey: the conclusion is contingent on this particular situation. Had Socrates been condemned in a Barbarian country, and had he been welcome as an exile in Athens, it might have been right then for him to escape.

Colson links the Laws' comment at 53c "And if you do this [go to places where he cannot talk about virtue], will your life be worth living?" to Socrates' claim in the Apology at 38a that "the unexamined life is not worth living", and in the Crito at 48b that "it is not living, but living well which we ought to consider most important". Thus, the Laws are telling Socrates, that according to his own principles, he will be better off dead than in exile, even if he has been unjustly condemned - a claim that Socrates is too wise not to agree with.

Using the evidence put forward by Colson, it is possible to reconstruct Socrates' argument in the following way. The first premise (given by the Laws) states that if Socrates were to escape, he would have, for contingent reasons, to give up philosophy (53c). The second premise states that a life which is not at least partly devoted to philosophy is not worth living (53c, Apology 38a). This leads us to the first conclusion that by escaping Socrates will injure himself, i.e. render his life not worth living (54c). This conclusion, taken together with the further premise that it is most important to live well (48b), takes us to the conclusion that Socrates must not escape.

This second argument is strikingly different from the first one. It takes little heed of the effect of Socrates' behaviour on others, and does not mention the rightness or wrongness of his actions. In fact, it relies on a different principle from those invoked in the first argument, i.e. the principle that philosophy is necessary for the good life. Unfortunately, as was the case with the premises of the first argument, no reason is offered why we should believe that philosophy is as important as Socrates claims.

In the first part of this chapter, we saw that the reason why the many weren't experts in justice was because they did not practice philosophy, which would imply that there is a link between justice, the good life, and philosophy, just as there is a link between justice, the good life, and psychic health. This is all we have to go on, so far, to understand Socrates ' second argument. In later chapters, if we are to make sense of Socrates' claims in the Crito, we will need to investigate these links.

I argued that Socrates' beliefs about justice certainly did not include the authoritarian belief that he owes obedience to the laws no matter what, even when they condemn him to die unjustly. Therefore I had to look elsewhere for an answer, and as I did, two ideas transpired from a study of the arguments of the Crito. The first was that judgements about moral right and wrong must focus on what goes on in the agent's own soul. As just actions benefit the soul and unjust ones harm it, to know what is just amounts to knowing what makes our soul healthy.

The second idea to arise from the study of the arguments is related to the importance placed by Socrates on the practice of philosophy in relation to justice. We saw that it was at least partly because he would have to give up philosophy that he decided it would be unjust for him to escape. And it was because they had received no dialectic training that the many were deemed unfit to make reliably correct moral judgments.

We are now in a position to hazard a formulation of the reason behind Socrates' refusal to escape. If he escapes, he will be doing some things which are harmful to his soul i.e. unjust actions. In particular he will be committing two injustices, injuring the City of Athens by attempting to destroy its laws, and breaking a just agreement with the City - on Socrates' own definition of a just agreement, i.e. one which requires him to commit no injustice. He will also be giving up philosophy which would also render his life not worth living. Hence he must not escape. In order to make more sense of this, we must answer the following questions:

I will address questions 1 and 2 in the next chapter. Question 3, which requires a more involved and complex answer, will make the subject of my third chapter. When we are able to give an answer to these three questions, we will be in a position to say why Socrates decided to drink the hemlock, and we will have a more complete picture of Plato' s defence of justice to weigh against the critiques presented in Part Two.

I will argue the following:

(i) that there is a certain healthy state of the soul which is desirable, and which, like bodily health, can be explained in terms of a functional analysis;

(ii) that the elenchos, central to the practice of philosophy according to Plato, is necessary and largely sufficient for achieving and maintaining psychic health. (This argument is incomplete as I make a further point in Chapter Three).

In order to argue (i), I will turn to Plato's analysis of psychic health as harmony in a soul which is ruled by reason in the Republic. I will show that this analysis depends on a functional argument, i.e. the claim that a soul is healthy if and only if it fulfils its natural function.

I will address two objections to Plato's account. The first is that natural kinds, such as the human soul, cannot be said to have functions, as these belong specifically to designed objects. I will refute this objection by examining more closely what it is for something to have a function. Secondly, it can be objected that the concept of health serves only to evaluate bodies, and hence that it is misapplied by Plato. I will argue that in fact, we cannot evaluate bodies if we don't have a general concept of human flourishing, psychic health being a necessary part of this concept.

(ii) relates to the role played by the practice of philosophy and why it is beneficial to the extent that Plato had rather die than give it up. I will argue that the practice of philosophy, in particular of the elenchos, is held by Plato to contribute to psychic health. First, by examining the soul it ensures that it is and remains psychically healthy. As in the Republic Plato says that music, and gymnastics are also needed to create a harmonious soul, we can conclude that elenchos is largely, but not completely sufficient for psychic health. This raises the following worry: if life is only worth living when one's soul is harmonious, then it seems that not only should one prefer to die than give up philosophy, but one should also choose death rather than give up the practice of music and gymnastics. One way to resolve this is to suggest that the roles played by music and gymnastics in bringing about harmony, i.e. the training of the thumos, can be played by other practices, so that if one was for instance tone deaf one could take up some other artistic activity such as painting. Secondly, I will argue that the second way in which the elenchos contributes to psychic health is as follows: failure to submit to the elenchos leads to internal conflict and an unhealthy soul. This entails that the elenchos is necessary for psychic health.

Again there will be an objection to address. An initial objection questions the hypothesis that the elenchos examines souls, since the elenchos examines primarily propositions. The answer to this objection lies in discerning what kind of propositions the elenchos tends to concentrate on. Because it focuses on sincerely held beliefs, it is right to say, I will argue, that the elenchos in some ways examines souls.

Secondly, my defence will highlight the following problem to be taken up in Chapter Three. If, as it seems, the elenchos can only produce consistency, not truth, then there will be problems for the overall defence of justice, as psychic health will no longer be co-extensive with virtue. This worry arises because it looks as though the elenchos prevents internal conflict by bringing about consistency. I will only comment on this problem briefly here, and will address it fully in Chapter III.

By the end of this chapter, we will be in a position to understand why Socrates in the Crito will not act in a way which would harm his soul, and why this means he will not give up the practice of philosophy. We will not, however, be able to say why such behaviour as Socrates wants to avoid would in fact be unjust. This is because we'll have only elucidated part of Plato's defence. Plato says that because unjust actions harm the soul, it is in one's interest to avoid committing injustice. So far we have only focussed on the claim that it is in one's interest to avoid harming one's soul, and that this entails we ought to practice philosophy.

The full account, which we have not yet investigated, supposes that one cannot be psychically healthy and unjust. This supposition is highly contentious, however, since most of us firmly believe that some people are evil or immoral who are, in some important sense, perfectly sane (and one would be inclined to say this amounts to being psychically healthy), people to whom a psychiatrist would not hesitate to give a clean bill of health.

In Chapter Three, I will tackle this objection and answer the third of the questions I raised at the end of Chapter One by showing why, according to Plato, it is not possible to be psychically healthy, practice philosophy, and at the same time be unjust.

The concept of psychic health which we encountered at Crito 48a is recurrent throughout the early and middle dialogues (see Protagoras 313a-c, Gorgias 464a, 480a-b, Republic 444c-e), where it serves to build an account of virtue. In the Republic, for example, Plato writes that justice and injustice

In fact, not until the Republic does Plato elaborate at all on what psychic health actually consists in. In Book IV Plato tells us that for someone to be psychically healthy, he must have

This harmony is attained when each part fulfils its proper role, which means that the rational part of the soul, aided by the thumos, must rule over the entire soul 'being wise and exercising forethought in behalf' of it. (441d-e).

That this is what psychic health consists in is deduced by Plato from a consideration that health in general depends on the establishment in something of 'natural relations' amongst its parts. Just as a body becomes diseased if its parts behave 'contrary to nature', the soul will not be healthy if the rational part does not rule over the appetites and the thumos. Because of this we should understand the analysis of the soul as tripartite in Book IV as an attempt to describe the mechanics of psychic health in the same way that a treatise on anatomy can serve to explain what it is to have a healthy body. Only by understanding how the parts relate to each other can we hope to understand how the whole functions.

The constraint that a healthy soul must be ruled by its rational part in no way entails, as I will argue in Chapter Six, that reason should repress the appetites or the emotions. The necessary condition for psychic harmony is that these are 'neither starved nor indulged to repletion' (R. 572a). This means that the three parts of the soul must be organised in harmonious rule, and that the health of each part is for it to fulfil its own function.

A soul which is dominated by either the appetites or the thumos is then, according to Plato, diseased. In Books VIII and IX Plato explains the different ways in which a soul may be diseased. For example, the type Plato refers to as tyrannical, which applies to those who are ruled by their appetites, will inevitably 'always be needy and suffer from unfulfilled desire', 'be full of terrors and alarms', and be 'maddened by [...]desires and passions' (578a).

The question which concerns us here is whether Plato is in fact entitled to refer to psychic harmony as health. It is important that he should be able to identify some state of the soul as psychic health as it follows from that that this state is desirable (We can take it for granted here that health is always desirable: in Book II (357b-c) it is said to belong to the second class of goods, the 'fairest', which consists of things which are good both in themselves and for their consequences). As Plato wants to argue that psychic health is the same as virtue and that virtue is desirable, it follows that the identification of psychic health is a crucial step in his defence. In the next sub-section I will examine Plato's arguments for the identification of psychic harmony and health of the soul.

Such a claim is open to the following objection, that it is wrong to attribute a function to the human soul, as only artefacts can be said to have functions. If the objection stands, then Plato will not have grounds for arguing that psychic harmony such as he describes in Book IV is health of the soul. And if he cannot argue this, then it will be more difficult for him to sustain the claim that psychic harmony is desirable.

In what follows I will show that there is indeed a difficulty inherent to functional analyses regarding the assignment of functions to non-artificial kinds, such as bodies and souls, and I will argue that we can disperse that difficulty.

The functional argument is traditionally attributed to Aristotle. Although there are resources in Plato for a view of this sort, especially in his discussion of virtue as psychic health, there is no explicit argument such as can be found in Aristotle.

At the end of Republic I, Plato states that objects, ranging from horses, pruning knife, bodily parts, bodies, and souls all have functions (erga),and he defines these as whatever these things can perform better than something which was not designed for that purpose. Hence the function of a pruning knife is to trim vine branches. It does this better than an object which was not 'fashioned for that purpose'.

This part of the argument is unclear. What if a particular pen knife of mine was better for trimming vine branches than any pruning knife, however well made? Would that mean that the function of the pruning knife was not to trim vine branches? No, but we might be tempted to argue that pruning knives were not well designed - that some knife (like my pen knife) could be designed which would fulfil the required function better than pruning knives. So if pruning knives did not fulfil their function as well as they might, they would be abandoned and replaced. That is because they are supposed to perform their function better than anything else which is not designed for that purpose.

We expect an object such as a pruning knife to fulfil its function better than anything else which does not share that function. This is because pruning knives are designed to do just that - and a failure to do it better than something else represents a failure in the design. But what of functional objects which are not designed? How can we determine their function? And if we can't, can we say that they do have a function? Thus we observe that there will be problems to deal with in the attribution of a function to a natural kind, such as a human soul.

Everything which has a function, Plato goes on to say, must also have a corresponding virtue or excellence (arete), which enables it to fulfil its function. Thus, degrees in good performance can be measured according to the presence of the required virtue or excellence in the object observed. If the function of a knife is to cut, then one of its virtues will be sharpness. If the knife is not sharp enough, then it lacks the necessary virtue to perform its function. In other words, the good is determined by the thing's function.

The function of the soul, according to Plato, is to live well - to achieve and maintain a state of harmony which is necessary for the good life, a 'beautiful order' amongst the parts of the soul, whereby each part does its own work (fulfil its own function) and does not exceed its role. Thus, Plato argues, we have to be rational if we are to be happy or live well: just as a pruning knife must be sharp in order to cut well, a human being must be just in order to be happy.

The objection which concerns us here, namely that human life cannot have a function may strike one as obvious: an argument which applies to pruning knives may not easily be made to work for human life and happiness. This implies no derogatory view of pruning knives, no comment on the grandness and elusiveness of human life - for various reasons, human beings, or their lives, cannot be said to have functions. Human beings are natural kinds, and, unlike artificial kinds, they have not been created for a purpose, they are not the product of intentional design. But 'function' is a term which belongs with the idea of design and purpose.

In general it seems that something only has a function if it has been given one. A pruning knife, or a carpenter have functions which have been attributed to them. No such thing is true, on the other hand, of a human being. Hence, when Aristotle protests that if a carpenter has a function, then there is no reason why a man should not have one, he is mistaken. Artificial kinds, not natural ones have functions.

If this were the answer, then one might wonder at some of Plato's examples of things which have functions. Plato says an eye has a function, i.e. to see. An eye is not an artificial kind. It was not designed in the sense that a knife was. Hence, according to the above argument, it should not have a function. He also mentions that a horse has a function, although he does not specify what that function is.

Despite strong intuitions that only designed objects may have a function, it is a fact that we are ready to impose a functional analysis on bodily parts. We believe that a heart, for example, has a function, because we believe it must behave a certain way in order to be a successful member of its kind: it must pump blood through the body. We believe that there is such a function because we know how it can be realised. In fact, we know several ways in which it can be realised. A pace-maker can fulfil this function, as can a cardiomyoplasty operation, the linking of a back muscle to the heart and to a battery lodged in the stomach. It is because we can identify the function of the heart, by studying its contribution to the function of the whole organism, that we can decide when it is failing to perform, and that we can figure out how to redress this failure.

For each bodily organ we can identify what it is for it to be successful or not, and we can try to find ways in which the organ can be replaced if it fails. This means that we can identify a function for these organs - a function which determines success and failure, and a function which can be realised by substituting something else for a failing organ. In this case the objection that only artificial kinds have functions fails. There is no reason why a natural kind, including a human being as a whole, should not have a function.

Our imaginary objector might reply that the reason a heart has a function is that it is a part of a natural kind, and that it can be replaced by an artificial kind, e.g. a pace maker, without the entire body becoming an artificial kind. This is a tenuous objection as the fact that a heart can be replaced by a pace maker does not entail that it is not a natural kind itself.

Moreover, it makes no sense to say that parts of something have a function if the whole doesn't. In the case of a heart, we can only decide whether it is functioning well by referring to its contribution to the functioning of the body as a whole. We need to know whether it is better for the body to be lifeless, or for it to be alive and mobile for a period of, say, seventy years. Only then will we know what a good heart is supposed to be like. I will discuss this problem further in the next sub-section.

The fact that we are so ready to attribute functions to bodily organs means that we must revise our original assumption that bodies and souls cannot have functions because they are natural kinds, and that only artificial kinds, which are designed, can have functions. We suspected that it was wrong to attribute functions to human beings, be it their bodies or their souls. We then discovered that the source of that suspicion was the belief that only artificial kinds, because they are designed, can have functions. Now this belief has been shown to be false, we have no further reason to hold on to our suspicion, i.e. we can welcome the hypothesis (crucial for our thesis) that bodies and souls may have functions.

In order to dispel this prejudice entirely, we need to ask what it is for something to have a function. Having a function does not depend on having been designed, but on there obtaining two conditions:

1. That we can identify a set of lawlike principles which dictate its behaviour.

2. That we can identify a good member of the kind.

That the first condition must obtain is obvious as there would be no point in assigning a function to something which behaved erratically. A heart can be said to have a function because its behaviour is related in a lawlike manner to that of the other elements of the body. A carbuncle, on the other hand, does not have lawlike relations to the rest of the body (or only to a very small part of it) - if it does have a function at all, it is distinct from, and not constitutive of the function of the body as a whole.

The first condition, although it is necessary for anything to have a function is not sufficient. If all we knew about the heart was how it related to the rest of the body, we would not know enough to assign a function to it. We would not know, given the principles ruling its behaviour, whether it is supposed to sustain life in the body or not, and for how long, and under what conditions. We would not be able to distinguish between a healthy heart and a failing heart. This is why in assigning a function, we must decide what a healthy, or successful member of the kind is supposed to be like. We need to be able to say that a good heart will sustain life in the body for such or such a period of time.

It is clear that in the case of the body, at least, both conditions obtain. We are able to identify lawlike principles to describe the body's behaviour, and we have a fair idea of what a healthy body is supposed to be like. There should thus be no prejudice in favour of artificial kinds. And if it is part of Plato's analysis that he can make sense of the concept of a good soul, as well as identify the laws upon which it behaves, then a soul also may have a function. In that case the onus is on those who believe that natural kinds cannot have functions to show that it does not make sense to evaluate human lives.

There are thus no a priori reasons why a functional analysis of the the human soul, one which appeals to the concept of psychic health, cannot be supported. If then there is an objection to the postulation of a healthy state for the soul, it is not supported by a critique of the functional analysis of the soul. In the next sub-section, I will consider and reject a second objection against the application of the concept of health to the soul.

The next objection I wish to consider starts with one of the last points we made: the question whether we can evaluate human life. That we can is a necessary condition for assigning a function to the soul. Plato claims that souls can be healthy or unhealthy, just as the body can. But those who say that we cannot evaluate lives or souls will claim that the concept of health is a purely physical one, and that it can only serve to evaluate states of the body. I will argue, against this objection that we cannot make sense of bodily health if we don't also have a concept of the good life (or healthy soul).

Current debates on the philosophical problem of mental health question whether it is right to apply a medical analogy to the mental. 'Health' and its counterpart, 'illness' are perceived as medical terms, i.e. scientific terms, and it is inferred from this that they belong exclusively to the physical realm. The proposition that virtue is some form of psychic health, on the other hand, assumes that it can be enlightening to apply those terms to the psychological realm.

In what follows, I will review the argument against applying the concept of health to the mental, and show that it fails because of a misunderstanding of that concept. I will do so by showing that we cannot make sense of the concept of physical health unless we also have a concept of what it is for a human being to be healthy as a whole. For this purpose I will use an example of a medical model which relies on a functional analysis of health.

The central feature of the medical model I propose to focus on is the concept of homoeostasis. Claude Bernard, its first proponent (though it wasn't named until after his death by Walter Cannon in 1926) described it as follows:

Homoeostasis is the activity of an organism whereby it maintains a stable equilibrium in its internal environment. The mechanism of homeoestasis means that the organism is self-regulating through negative and positive feedback loops which inhibit or amplify the response of the organism to its external environment. For example, the cellular temperature of the organs has to be protected against changes in external temperature when, for instance, we have a hot bath. Homoeostasis at the cellular level helps our bodies fulfil this function.

Medical health seems to be on this interpretation a physical phenomenon related to the proper functioning of an organism. A healthy organism 'works' properly - it goes through the regular motions. If it's unhealthy, it stops working, and the malfunction is there for the physicians to examine.

The problem is, Bernard isn't particularly clear in the above quote about what the body's equilibrium in question is, how we can tell that the way it's working is the proper way for it to work. We can't, as we do in the case of machines, refer to a design which tells us that the human body is supposed to behave in certain ways until a certain age and then behave a different way, etc. How do we know that we're not 'supposed' to carry on growing all our lives, and maybe live forever? How do we know that reproduction for example isn't in fact a disease (as labour pains and over-population certainly seem to indicate it is)?

Bernard speaks of an equilibrium, and a 'social interdependence' of the organs, but this is not helpful here as the very same words would constitute an adequate description of an organism coping with disease. The heart will pump more blood in order to deal with clogged arteries (thus responding to their needs by modifying its behaviour) in order to maintain 'stability' thus realising the 'social interdependence' of the organs - but clogged arteries and high blood pressure do not make for a healthy body. Hence, stability or maintaining an 'equilibrium' cannot be the function of the healthy body, or at least, it needs to be qualified.

In order to understand why we can't get to the concept of physical health just by studying the behaviour of the organs, it will help to take a look at servo-mechanisms, i.e machines in which activity analogous to homoeostasis can be observed. A simple one would be the thermo-stat of a central heating system. The function of the thermo-stat is to control the activity of the boiler, and maintain the temperature as close as possible to the desired level of warmth. However, the control of the thermo-stat is limited in that it is not immediate, nor precise, and more importantly, won't regulate the 'desired level of warmth' according to seasons, which means that this level has to be imposed from outside.

The thermo-stat's function is determined not just by the existence of lawlike principles which dictate its behaviour but because we can identify a good state for the central heating system to be in, i.e. such that it keeps the room warm but not too warm. In the same way, unless we can say what a good state for a human being to be in would be, we will not be able to say whether a heart or a kidney is functioning properly. Criteria we will invoke to identify this state will usually comprise the ability to recover from illness, or to resist viruses, and germs, and more generally, the ability to perform the functions of a normal human life. These will include having a job, providing for oneself and one's family - probably raising a family - pursuing hobbies, physical, intellectual or artistic, etc. What this shows is that the function of health cannot be elucidated purely in physical terms, i.e. the optimum state that a healthy body must sustain has to be appraised in terms other than physical, in terms of the good life and of general human flourishing.

This explains why it is not possible to decide, purely on physiological grounds, what makes a particular state desirable. Imagine coming across an alien species which is totally different from any terrestrial species. How will you know whether the creature is in good health or not? You cannot know that without knowing how it is supposed to behave, how it prefers to behave. How do we know whether the state of its skin indicates normality or, say, a severe case of eczema (think ET)? We can't even decide by finding out whether it is in pain or not, as pain does not always indicate illness. Cancer is painless at early stages, and giving birth, which we do not consider a disease, is painful. Thus there is no purely physiological or anatomical basis for determining health and unhealth. And in order to determine whether a being is healthy or not we have to appeal to a conception of what the good life for it is.

In this section I have argued that the objection against using the concept of health in the mental domain was based on a misunderstanding of that concept. Although medical health is explained predominantly by using physical descriptions, it cannot be defined without invoking values, i.e. values which serve to decide what constitutes a desirable state for the body to be in. Medical health must, like psychic health, be defined in terms of the inner mechanisms which constitute the function of the parts, and of the function of the body as a whole, i.e. the end of human life. Hence, far from refuting the possibility that the concept of health can serve to evaluate souls, the analysis of the concept of medical health confirms that we need a concept of human flourishing, such as the one 'psychic health' partly constitutes.

We can therefore conclude this section by saying that there is such a thing as psychic health, that it is indeed determined by the function of the soul's parts in accordance with the function of the soul as a whole, and that, like bodily health, it is a desirable state to be in. We cannot conclude, however, that to be psychically healthy is the same as to be virtuous. In order to reach that conclusion, we need first to establish that the end of the soul as a whole is virtue, that its function is to be virtuous. Before we can do that, we cannot rule out certain alternatives, for example that the function of the soul is to be consistent, whether or not it is virtuous, and that one can be evil and psychically healthy at the same time provided one is consistent. The work needed to rule out these alternatives will be carried out in the next chapter.

A tempting answer to the above question is that philosophy is beneficial just for Socrates, because he is a philosopher by vocation. It would not matter for a musician if she had to give up philosophy, or indeed never take it up, but it would diminish the quality of her life (maybe even to the extent that it is not worth living any more) if she had to give up music. The assumption behind these intuitions is that any calling through which one flourishes becomes part of one's identity, and cannot be given up without influencing the quality of one's life.

Although the above position is defensible, and indeed, Socrates probably would have been reluctant to give up music on the jury's request had he been a musician, it does not apply here. For Socrates is not claiming that it is only he who must not give up philosophy, his claim is universal: "the unexamined life is not worth living' he says in the Apology, referring not just to himself, but to the whole of humankind.

We must thus explain why the practice of philosophy is bound to be beneficial for everyone, philosopher by profession, painter, or redundant factory worker. Following the other argument of the Crito, i.e. that life is not worth living if we are not psychically healthy, I wish to put forward this hypothesis: the practice of philosophy is beneficial, because it contributes to psychic health, and psychic health is beneficial. I will show that the claims put forward by Plato in the Gorgias, most of which are echoed in other dialogues, support this hypothesis.

The Gorgias, more openly that any other dialogue, focuses on the question which kind of life one ought to live (472c-d, 481c, 500c-d). It is also highly explicit in its answer. One should live a just life (527e), because only then can one live a happy life ("For I say that the fine and good man and woman is happy, and the unjust and base is wretched" 470e), and the best way to do this is to live the life of a philosopher. The choice presented by Socrates is between "doing what a real man does, speaking in the people's Assembly, practising rhetoric, conducting politics the way you [Callicles] conduct it now" or "the life spent in philosophy" (500c). And according to the final myth, it is the latter which enables one to be judged favourably in the after life (526c). The life spent philosophising, examining oneself and others (Apology 28e,38a) is a life lived in accordance with justice and virtue, and it is a happy life.

The defence of the philosophical way of life in the Gorgias either goes unnoticed - it is mentioned by neither Dodds nor Irwin- or when it is recognised, as in Monique Canto-Sperber's introduction to the dialogue, it is left unmotivated, and the link between the defence of philosophy and psychic health is not pointed out. Without claiming that this is the only or main theme of the dialogue, I wish to defend the view that the elenchos, as the main feature of the philosophical life, is held by Plato in the Gorgias to be a necessary condition for psychic health, and that as such it is beneficial and desirable.

My defence focuses on the analysis of two sets of of Platonic claims which can be summarized thus:

(1) The elenchos, by examining the soul, ensures that it is and remains healthy. This, accounting for the other forms of training prescribed in the Republic, makes it largely sufficient for psychic health.

(2) Failure to submit to the elenchos results in internal conflict and an unhealthy soul. This means that practice of the elenchos is necessary for psychic health.

Therefore, given that psychic health is desirable, practicing philosophy is desirable.

Before I can defend my first hypothesis, I shall have to address the following objection, namely that it makes no sense to talk of the elenchos as a tool for the examination of the soul, since it examines propositions. I will show that this objection is unfounded.

My defence of (2) will highlight a problem which anticipates Chapter Three. It will show that the elenchos produces consistency in the soul. But if this is its only achievement, why should it also produce justice? In other words, why can't one become, as a result of practising the elenchos, consistently evil? The answer to this question belongs with the next chapter. In preparation, however, I will suggest that the role of the elenchos is not to produce mere consistency, but true beliefs. This claim will be supported in Chapter Three.

The claim I wish to defend in this sub-section is that the purpose of the elenchos is to secure the health of the soul through examination (1). The initial problem is this: the elenchos is a dialectic method, and as such it examines propositions. Does this mean that the soul is no more than a set of propositions? If so, then it is obviously wrong. Even if there is no more to the soul than a set of mental phenomena, amongst these phenomena, there are some which are not propositional, i.e. sensations and emotions. Even Plato, while he gave the rational part of the soul, the part of propositional attitudes, the role of governing the soul, did not deny that sensations or at least emotions had a place in the soul. Hence we cannot suppose he believed the soul to be nothing over and above a set of propositional attitudes, let alone propositions.

In answer to this objection, Brickhouse and Smith have argued that the elenchos examines primarily lives, not propositions. They cite as evidence the fact that Socrates claims to examine people rather than their beliefs (i.e. Ap. 21c, 23b, 23c, 28e, 29e, 38a) and that this means examining 'the way in which they live (39c). But the elenchos is a dialectic method of refutation. How can this be reconciled with the fact that lives and people cannot be refuted?

I propose the following: although the elenchos examines propositions, it examines mostly a certain kind of proposition, and of those propositions we may say that they determine the kind of life led by the person who believes them, and the state of their soul. These propositions are (1) propositions about virtue, and about the kind of life one ought to live, and (2) propositions which the interlocutor sincerely believes. It is fair to infer that beliefs about virtue, when they are sincerely held, will determine the kind of life one leads, and the kind of person one is - hence the state of one's soul.

While the elenchos works with propositions, they are not the prime subject of the examination: the elenchos examines lives and souls. For example, Callicles is a rhetor because he believes it is a good thing to seek power, and because he thinks conventional justice goes against real, natural justice. Socrates shies away from the political and financial world because he believes the good life depends on the care of the soul rather more than it does on material goods.

Brickhouse and Smith quote the following passage from Laches in support of their claim that the elenchos examines lives rather than propositions:

This passage is slightly misleading as it gives the impression that the examination of propositions is but a facade behind which hides the examination of life. Rather, it seems to be the case that the very nature of the propositions examined means that the soul will be examined at the same time. The subject is asked to give an account of himself, that is, to list the propositions which characterise his soul. The propositions are not a pretext for what really is a study of the soul, but a useful means - possibly the only means - to such a study.

There is no reason, we have now established why the soul cannot be examined through sincerely believed propositions about virtue, propositions which truly apply to the subject's soul. So, to return to our first question, how does the elenchos secure psychic health? I will argue that it does so in three ways. First, it constitutes some kind of gymnastic of the soul, training it to think about virtue. Secondly, it tests the soundness of the soul, by testing its beliefs about virtue. Thirdly, it cures unsound souls by ridding them of false beliefs about virtue. I will proceed to give textual evidence for these three claims.

The first step towards acquiring a healthy body surely is to become what is now commonly refered to as 'health conscious'. This means being aware of what will benefit or harm the body and acquiring a set of healthy habits, including diet and exercise. If the body/soul analogy offered in the Crito and discussed in §2 is to hold, then the same must be true of psychic health. In order to acquire a healthy soul, we must first become aware of what contributes to its health, and actively seek it. In the case of bodily health, a doctor will tell us what it is we need to do in order to become healthy, and - if we're lucky - a trainer, or maybe some health institution will help us stick to it.

Are there equivalents to these for psychic health? The following passages from the Apology will show that there are and that Socrates, with the help of philosophy holds the place of psychic doctor and trainer for the entire population of Athens. Socrates freely admits to telling the Athenians what they should do in order to become psychically healthy: "I busied myself all the time on your behalf, going like a father or an elder brother to see each one of you privately, and urging you to set your thoughts on goodness" (31b). His efforts are directed towards telling them what they are doing wrong, and what they should do instead:

This is the philosopher's diagnosis: the Athenians need to stop worrying about secondary goods and get their souls into shape. But Socrates' philosophical activity does not stop at that: he has to make sure that the Athenians take notice of this diagnosis, that they are not too psychically lazy to ignore it.

This is thus the first function of the elenchos: to demonstrate to citizens that they will be better off setting their thoughts on the goodness of their souls, and ensure that they follow this advice. It encourages thought simply by virtue of encouraging debate. Socrates' first task as a 'soul doctor' to the Athenians is thus to engage them in discussions about virtue. The dialectical nature of the elenchos means that it will encourage debate.

If we follow the body/soul analogy, the second function of the elenchos has to be to test the soul in the same way that a doctor will carry out routine checks on the body to detect any illness. This will enable the person whose soul or body it is to prevent defects from developing, and to acquire peace of mind if she is healthy. This must be what Socrates has in mind when at 487d, he compares Callicles to a touchstone, one which will tell him of the state of his soul, if he engages in an elenctic dialogue with him.

Although this passage is obscured by poetic licence and rather strong irony (Callicles turns out to have neither knowledge, nor good-will nor free speaking), it none the less sheds some light on one of the purposes of the elenchos. If it turned out that an ideal interlocutor agreed with what Socrates believes about virtue, then not only would Socrates' beliefs be true, but his soul would be cared for and in good condition. Conversely, if the interlocutors disagree, then the beliefs held by them have to be further examined, for they might be false, and the soul which hosts these beliefs is unhealthy.

It is in this spirit that Socrates enjoins Polus at 473a to submit himself to the elenchos (didonai elenchon):

In this passage (473a-475d) the argument is presented as a doctor, and the elenchos as the cure. This confirms our hypothesis as to the second function of the elenchos: to test the patient's soul as a doctor would carry out a check on a patient's body. If the test shows that the soul is sound, 'well cared for', then there is nothing to worry about. If it does not, then the elenchos must perform its third function, i.e. cure the soul.

Just how the elenchos achieves this is probably what Socrates is alluding to at 458ab when he remarks to Gorgias:

Socrates seems to imply here that the disease of the soul is a sincerely held false belief , and that the elenctic cure is to get rid of it. This implication raises questions both about the function of the soul and the powers of the elenchos. First, given that the function (and hence the good) of the soul is to be ruled by its rational part, does this entail that a soul will be diseased if it contains false beliefs? Secondly, can the elenchos really discriminate between true and false beliefs, or can it only show up inconsistencies between the various beliefs of one interlocutor?

Let us address the first question. The function of the soul is to be ruled by reason. But reason can (and according to Plato, does) rule in two ways. First it can ensure the good of the soul as a whole by ordering its various goals in a rational way, so that most of them can be realised without hindrance from the others. For instance, it can insure that short term desires do not come in the way of long term ones. This is certainly what Plato seems to have in mind in the Protagoras (see especially 356b-357b). Only by being rational one can weigh and compare one's desires and reduce conflict to a minimum.

If this is what Plato believes the rule of reason to consist in, then there is no room for the claim that having false beliefs must result in a diseased soul. If reason rules in this manner and most of my desires are for an immoral life, then reason will ensure that I can lead an immoral life successfully. It will not make a difference that I falsely believe that it is good to live immorally.

It is not sufficient, however, to describe the rule of reason simply as rational co-ordination of one's various goals. For one thing, the description would be circular. Reason rules to look out for the good of the soul as a whole. But, according to Plato, the good of the soul is to be ruled by reason. Also, Plato himself actually specifies a second way in which reason must rule in a harmonious soul. Reason, he says, must provide the soul with worthwhile goals. Its rule is hence normative, as well as co-ordinating. And given that the worthwhile goal according to reason is knowledge of the Forms, and that knowledge implies having true beliefs, it does make perfect sense to claim that a soul which harbours false beliefs is not properly ruled by reason, and hence diseased.

Given that it is in accordance with the function of the soul that it should be rid of false beliefs, is this something that the elenchos can achieve? The elenchos typically refutes beliefs which conflict with previously acknowledged sincerely held beliefs. But this would seem to indicate that the role of the elenchos is to produce consistency, and consistency does not always mean truth (i.e. one can consistently hold a set of false beliefs). I will discuss this problem partly in the next sub-section, although we will not be in a position to dismiss it until Chapter Three.

I have tried to show that the elenchos functioned both as a preventive and curative care of the soul. It is that which ensures that the soul is and remains in a healthy condition. In other words, practising the elenchos is largely sufficient (together with the other forms of education specified in the Republic) for achieving psychic heath, and therefore beneficial. In the next sub-section I will attempt to show that the elenchos is also necessary for psychic health (this will explain why Socrates had rather die than give it up: his psychic health, without which life is not worth living, depends on it) by arguing the following: failure to submit to the elenchos results in internal conflict of the soul, a condition which is neither healthy nor comfortable. I will ask what the nature of this conflict is and what it tells us about the elenchos.

The second premise of the argument for the claim that elenchos is beneficial because it promotes psychic health is expressed at 482b-c where Socrates tells Callicles:

The claim made in this passage is both complex and powerful. Complex, because it makes several assumptions which we have to extricate and explain before we can make sense of the claim; and powerful because once these assumptions are accounted for, the claim can be taken to mean that one cannot achieve psychic harmony without submitting to the elenchos. Here is one suggestion as to how we might understand the passage:

If Callicles will not agree with himself, it will be because he holds inconsistent beliefs about how he should live, and cannot make any decision as to how to live his life while respecting all of those beliefs. Or at least, every time he does come to a decision, part of him will be frustrated and unhappy. Only if he examines his beliefs with the help of the elenchos, testing them and their implications against one another will he be able to notice, and solve the inconsistency.

Socrates' claim, if the above interpretation is correct, depends on the following assumption. He assumes, prior to any examination of his subject, that Callicles does have conflicting beliefs which will lead him to inner conflict.

On what grounds could Socrates rightly assume that Callicles must hold inconsistent beliefs about the good life? He may assume that anyone who does not submit regularly to the elenchos will have inconsistent beliefs. Indeed, the claim at 513c-d that it will be necessary for Callicles to engage in elenctic examinations many more times before he sees the light may suggest this. But if it does, it is far from explanatory, as the question we are asking in the first place is why, in order to avoid conflict, we must submit to the elenchos. Moreover, the claim that we are bound to have inconsistent beliefs if we do not submit to the elenchos appears intuitively false. It would seem to be the equivalent of saying that one who does not go to the dentist regularly is bound to have bad teeth - this is not true.

If we do not accept that Callicles is bound to have conflicting beliefs just because he doesn't submit to the elenchos, the remaining possibility is that Callicles has already said something which shows that he has conflicting beliefs. But as he has expressed only one claim, his disbelief in what Socrates has just convinced Polus of, it cannot be the case that he has made conflicting admissions. So if what he said is evidence of inconsistency, he must have admitted to a belief which conflicts with a belief Socrates assumes Callicles holds. A likely candidate for this is the conclusion Polus is forced to accept at 475e, that 'neither you, nor I, nor any other man would choose doing injustice over suffering it.' Clearly, it is this claim, along with what it seems to imply, i.e. that one who has committed an injustice is better off paying for it, which amazes Callicles at 481b-c. But if it is true, as Socrates says at 475e, that everyone in fact agrees with it, then Callicles' amazement conflicts with what he really believes.

The charge of inconsistency between something one has said, and something one is not even aware one believes can be read in this way: Callicles really believes that p, but is behaving as though he believed that not-p, i.e. he holds beliefs that are entailed by not-p.

This reading follows quite closely Brickhouse and Smith's analysis: Callicles' inner conflict is one between beliefs, i.e. the belief that p and beliefs entailed by not-p. This account is problematic, for if Callicles is suffering from having conflicting beliefs, then the cure is to rid himself of some of those beliefs. The elenchos will help him there. But which beliefs should he get rid of? p or the beliefs entailed by not-p? It seems to some extent to be up to him, and this means that the elenchos will have performed its task if Callicles decides to give up the belief that justice is beneficial.

The above is problematic for two reasons. First, if it is the case that the role of the elenchos is to bring about consistency, even at the cost of giving up true beliefs about virtue, then this undermines our project for Chapter Three which is to show how psychic health is co-extensive with virtue. Secondly, if Callicles needs the elenchos just because he has exhibited a particular inconsistency, then the point that Elenchos is necessary for psychic health will not generalise. It will only be true that it is necessary for the psychic health of those who happen to hold inconsistent beliefs. But it is clear from Socrates' claims in the Apology, the Gorgias and elsewhere, that he believes every one should practice the elenchos. For these reasons, I want to propose a different interpretation of the passage.

That Callicles' s soul must be diseased if he will not engage in an elenctic examination with Socrates follows from the hypotheses that the role of reason is not merely to co-ordinate, but to impose goals on the entire soul, and that one of these goals is the pursuit of truth. Assuming that to engage in elenctic examination is to pursue truth, then, by refusing to do so, Callicles shows that he lacks this particular goal, and hence that reason does not rule him properly. So the claim that elenchos is necessary for psychic health relies on the very plausible hypothesis that the only way to learn which goals are worthwhile, is to pursue truth, through the elenchos, and acquire knowledge.

If the elenchos does not merely establish consistent beliefs, but true beliefs, then it must be a method, or a craft, for finding out true beliefs. This of course remains to be argued for. At the moment it merely seems that were it to be the case, it would represent a satisfactory solution to the problems identified in this subsection.

Socrates does in fact believe that the elenchos is a method for finding moral truths, as shown by the following passages from the Gorgias:

I have chosen these three passages because they are all comments on the ongoing dialogue. In the first, Socrates criticises Polus' own method of refutation which draws on the crowd-pleasing qualities of rhetoric. This method is contrasted with elenctic refutation, which is concerned with the truth only. In the second, Socrates points out to Callicles that the aim of elenctic examination is not mere consistency, but truth. In the third, he defines the aims of the method: to find out the truth about the problems they're dealing with.

It is clear from the above passages that Socrates does believe the elenchos to be a method for finding out truths about virtue. However, it seems that the elenchos can only lead to consistency, and consistency, as pointed out by Socrates himself in quote (2), may not be the same thing as truth. This worry is captured by Terence Irwin in Plato's Moral Theory:

Irwin considers the elenchos to guide towards consistency, so that we do have good reasons for practicing it, but certainly not towards knowledge. At this stage, it is difficult to see how we might refute Irwin's argument, and if we cannot, then it will be one more difficulty for proving elenchos is necessary for psychic health, or that psychic health necessitates true beliefs. If regular practice of the elenchos can only produce consistency (including immoral consistency), then we cannot explain why it is necessary for psychic health that one should practice the elenchos.

In this section I have argued that Socrates believes the following: that the elenchos cares for the soul by bringing it and maintaining it in a healthy state. I have shown, further that in his attempt to show that elenchos is necessary for psychic health, Socrates runs into problems that threaten his claims that elenchos is necessary for psychic health. This problem may be solved if one supposes that the elenchos is a method for discovering the truth and acquiring knowledge, and not merely a method for achieving consistency. Unfortunately, we seem to have no reason to accept such a claim as yet.

(1) What is psychic health ?

(2) Why is it beneficial to practice philosophy, (what is the link between elenchos and psychic health)?

Answering these questions was to serve the dual purpose of clarifying part of Plato's defence of justice and explaining Socrates' refusal to escape from his death sentence.

I found that study of the dialogues provided answers to both questions. Plato offers a strong and plausible account of psychic health. The concept of health is functional and can only be understood within the framework of an evaluation of the good life. In order to obtain a full understanding of psychic health, we need to know what the function of the soul is, i.e. to be harmoniously ordered according to its rational part.

The answer to the second question, I found, is related to that of the first. The practice of philosophy, in particular elenchos, is beneficial because it promotes psychic health, and it does so by ensuring that reason rules the soul in the right way, i.e. by co-ordinating the goals of the three parts, and imposing worthwhile goals on the entire soul. The dialogues, and in particular the Gorgias, are fairly specific about how regular practice of the elenchos can help achieve psychic health, in the way that health consciousness, training, diet, check ups at the doctors and cures, can maintain bodily health.

For the elenchos to be necessary for psychic health, it has to be the case that it consists in the pursuit of truth and knowledge. However, all I was able to show is that it brings consistency within the soul. But if the elenchos cannot bring more than internal consistency of the soul - and we have found no reason for thinking that it does - then it is possible that it should help one become consistently evil. This supports the following conclusion, i.e. that it is possible to be psychically healthy and evil. It is imperative, if we are to argue that Plato's defence is successful, that we show this conclusion is not possible. If justice is psychic health and psychic health can be brought about by the elenchos, then it cannot be the case that the elenchos should produce consistently evil souls.

This conclusion maps the course of the following chapter, and of the end of my exposition of Plato's defence. It appears, in the light of the discoveries of this chapter that it will be difficult to vindicate Plato's claim that justice is psychic health. I believe, however, that it can be achieved, and that Plato has answers to the difficulties outlined in this conclusion.

In the previous chapters, I have argued that two of Plato's claims are at best true, and at worst, highly perceptive and coherent accounts of human psychology. These claims are (1) that there is a certain state of the soul called psychic health which is desirable and in the agent's interest to promote, and (2) that philosophy, or the practice of the elenchos promotes psychic health.

These two claims, I said in Chapter One, constitute two thirds of a position on justice which is outlined, but far from fully defended, in a plausible account of the Crito. The last third is (3) the claim that to be psychically healthy is to be just, and hence, that the practice of philosophy leads to justice. The first two claims are certainly what make that defence attractive, i.e. they provide the psychological insight which lends it plausibility, and at the same time, rebut all attempts at an egoistical moral philosophy which argues that one is better off being immoral by showing that it is in the agent's interest to be just.

But without the third claim, there is no defence of Socrates' decision that he must obey the laws because not to do so would involve a life not worth living, because unjust. All we have is a statement about the organisation of the human psyche and the effects of philosophy upon it, and this statement by itself will not be able to stand against the criticisms of Nietzsche and Callicles which seem to imply, as we will see in the next chapter, that it is not in the agent's interest to be just. Unfortunately, so far, we have found no evidence for (3) and some reasons to doubt it. In particular, we have had to consider briefly the intuitions that it is possible for someone to be psychically healthy and unjust, and that the elenchos, since it brings about consistency could have as a successful outcome a consistent villain.

These worries are brought sharply into focus if we consider the difference between the state of a person's soul, which is what psychic health is about, and a person's behaviour towards others, which is what justice is usually thought to be about. Being just is a relational property which can only be instantiated in a social environment where the agent has certain effects upon others. Psychic health, however, seems to be a psychological condition one might conceivably develop if one lived by oneself. The contrast becomes clear if we revert to last chapter's body/soul analogy. I can be perfectly physically healthy and still endanger other people's health, by dumping nuclear waste in their country, for instance, or selling substances which I know to be harmful. Similarly, it seems one could achieve and maintain psychic health while behaving unjustly towards others.

This chapter argues the following: that psychic health is justice and that elenchos can produce psychic health understood as consisting of knowledge of the forms. Section One asks whether Plato equivocates between unrelated senses of 'justice', and shows that his attempts to link psychic health and social justice through the city / soul analogy is inconclusive, but that not all hangs on the analogy as Plato has independent grounds to be found in his moral psychology, for believing that psychic harmony and justice are the same thing. Plato appears to succeed in convincing us that the identity holds but for one thing: he himself suggests that justice is distinct from psychic health in the case of the philosopher rulers. If justice is psychic health, there is a prima facie reason to believe that justice is in the agent's interest, just as psychic health is. But it seems that what is just for the philosophers, i.e. to become rulers, conflicts with what is in their interest, i.e. a life of contemplation. Section Two responds to this worry by arguing that there is some sense in which it is in the philosophers' interest to rule. In the course of the discussion I introduce an other aspect of Platonic justice, i.e. knowledge of the forms and in particular of the form of the Good, as that which makes the philosopher rulers just and psychically healthy. This consideration leads to a new problem regarding the elenchos which I discuss in Section Three. Can the elenchos produce psychic health and justice thus understood, i.e. can the elenchos produce knowledge of the forms? I shall argue that if one accepts an account proferred by Fine, one can make sense of the elenchos doing just that.

In this section I will ask what the links are between that state of the soul and the virtue of justice. More particularly, the question I will address is this: what reasons do we have to believe that an agent whose soul is healthy will also be just in the sense of the term 'just' which characterises a certain type of social behaviour? In other words, why is a healthy soul a just soul? Can psychic and social justice be the same thing? Or again, as Aristotle would have it in the Politics, we must find out "whether the virtue of a good man and a good citizen is the same or not". I will consider whether the city/soul analogy can achieve its proposed aim of linking psychic health and justice, and I will suggest that Plato does not depend on the analogy but has independent reasons for believing that there is such a link.

The problem seems to be this: that Plato equivocates between different senses of the word 'justice', and in particular, that he holds three types of uses are equivalent without giving us any compelling reason to believe him. There are three ways in which Plato seems to be using the concept of justice. First, he talks of a just city as one in which each individual, and each class of individuals fulfil their appropriate (natural) function and do not act as busybodies (433a) - let us call this social justice in the city. Secondly, Plato talks of a just individual as a person who will behave so as to promote justice in the city by playing his or her part in it. For example, the philosophers will agree to rule because that will be 'imposing just commands on men who are just' (520e). It is just for the philosopher to do that which will benefit the city. Let us call this form of justice social justice in the individual. Thirdly, he speaks of a just person as a person whose soul is healthy, or harmonious (harmony being the condition for health in the soul) (443c-444a)- let us call this psychic justice.

It is clear that the second use of 'justice' is interconnected with the first one. It would not be just for the philosophers to become rulers if it did not promote social justice in the city. But an account of justice in these terms, i.e. what benefits the city, and how it can be brought about by the behaviour of individuals, seem to leave out the concept of psychic justice. If this concept is part of the overall analysis, then it must be the case that having a harmonious soul, i.e. being psychically just is necessary and sufficient for an individual being socially just. By drawing an analogy between psychic justice and social justice in the city, Plato, it seems, is not paying enough attention to the necessity of a link between these two forms of justice on the one hand, and social justice in the individual on the other.

These reflections may lead us to believe that Plato does in fact equivocate on the concept of justice, and that he cannot support the claim that there is a link between psychic justice and social justice. As Vlastos wrote in his "Justice and Happiness in the Republic":

Vlastos seems to be suggesting that the pairing of social justice in the individual and psychic harmony is a mismatch, that in fact we have no reason to suppose that a state of our soul is going to correspond in any way to our social behaviour. Vlastos could emphasise this point by appealing to this analogy: from the fact that my physical health benefits me, it does not follow that other people's health is also in my interest. Others' health maybe of interest to me for independent reasons (because they are working for me, for instance), but not because my health is of interest to me.

Plato seeks to justify his controversial linking of the psychic and the social justice of an individual at least in part by drawing an analogy between justice in the soul and justice in the city. The analogy, as the next sub-section will show, is not sufficient to prove that there is such a link between a psychic justice and social justice of the individual. Sub-section 1.2 will present Plato's alternative grounds for the linking of psychic health and justice, and suggest a potential weakness relating to his account of the philosopher rulers. I will discuss this weakness in the following section.

The analogy is first proposed at 368d, and taken up again at 434d-435b.

The statement of the analogy is given at 435b: "Then a just man too will not differ at all from a just city in respect of the very form of justice, but will be like it". The conclusion of the analogy is that the soul, like the city, will be just "because three natural kinds existing in it performed each its own function" (435b).

If we were to analyse the analogy as an argument, it would look something like this:

Step 1 (inductive)

P1: There is such a thing as justice in the city (368e)

P2: Justice in the city consists in each part 'doing its own' (433a).

C1: Justice in anything consists in each part of that thing 'doing its own' (433b).

Step 2 (deductive)

P3: Justice in anything consists in each part of that thing 'doing its own' (= C1).

P4: There is such a thing as justice in the individual (368e).

C2: Justice in the individual consists in each part of the individual's soul 'doing its own' (444c-d).

Leaving aside Plato's analysis of what justice in the city consists in, we can see why the argument does not work. The fourth premise is at best ambiguous, at worst, it is unsupported. It is ambiguous because Plato does not attempt to distinguish between an individual who is just in the social sense, and an individual who is just in the psychic sense. So far we have been given no reason to agree that there is more to individual justice than behaving in a way which will promote justice in the city. Yet, when in Book IV Plato goes on to study individual justice, he looks for a psychological condition, not an analysis of behaviour.

Clearly, the argument does not work. But are we right to interpret Plato's analogy as a full blown argument? I will argue that we are not, and defend a different analysis of the city/soul analogy, one which is closer to the text, and which is inspired by N.P. White's study of the Republic.

It appears Plato is using the analogy to infer, from his observation that justice in the city has such and such properties, that justice in the soul must have those same properties. But if we look at the way the analogy is presented, it becomes clear that Plato is not in fact making such an inference. In a simile he explains the use he means to make of the city/soul analogy. Imagine you have to read small letters from a distance, he says, and your eyesight is not up to it. Someone then tells you that the same letters are printed on a larger, closer sign. "We should have accounted it a godsend" he says, "to be allowed to read those letters first, and then examine the smaller, if they are the same".

Let us examine this simile in order to understand Plato's proposal. If, as Vlastos' objection implies, Plato is relying on an unproven assumption that the analogy stands in order to infer that one member of the analogy has certain properties, from the observation that the other member has, then we can interpret the simile as follows. I am trying to read a small, far away inscription, but cannot make it out. Someone tells me that the same words are printed on a larger sign nearby. I look at it and read the words. If the objection holds, then I will infer that the words on the smaller sign are identical to those on the larger one, relying on the unjustified assumption that the inscriptions are in fact identical.

But this is not what Plato suggests in the simile: once I have read the larger inscription, he says, I am to go back to the smaller one. But why do that? What is the point of looking at a sign I can't read in order to confirm the inference I have made? N.P. White suggests that we actually carry out the experiment in order to understand it. If after reading the larger sign we go back to the smaller one, the letters which were once indiscernible become clear, and we can now see for ourselves both what they are, and that they are identical to those in the larger sign - try the experiment by looking at the title of a book with and without glasses (or by stepping closer the second time): it works. This is also true as far as sounds are concerned: a mumbled word in a film or a song, becomes audible when someone repeats it clearly. (It also happens that one can be misled as to what a word in a song is, but the experiment works more often than not.)

If the analogy is supposed to work in this way, then there is no inference, no argument, and thus no undue reliance on the assumption that justice in the city and justice in the soul are identical. Rather, what we have is a performance. One first fails to grasp the concept of justice in the soul, so one looks at justice in the city, and then one sees what justice in the soul is. The result of the exercise is twofold: first one has found out what justice in the soul was, and second one has confirmed the hypothesis that justice is the same in city and soul.

If the analogy is a performance, in the manner just described, then not only is Plato entitled to say that there is such a thing as justice in the individual, but he can also observe that this form of justice is like that which he found in the city. (Of course he must suppose first that there is such a thing as justice in the individual, but as this supposition is confirmed by the performance of the analogy, it is not question begging). So what exactly does he find out about justice in the individual through his study of justice in the city? Justice in the city turns out to be this:

Plato thus makes two sets of claims about justice in the city. First, justice is in general for each part to perform its natural function without encroaching on the function of another part. The members of the city must not be busy bodies, but remain within their own naturally determined domain of expertise. The natural order and harmony resulting from this is justice. Secondly, Plato claims that there are three such natural classes of society, and that each has particular characteristics, and corresponding virtues. These classes and their attributes are discussed in Books II to IV where Plato attempts to show that each of the three classes has certain natural attributes which can be developed by the right kind of education, and which make the individual in these classes especially suited for one and only one social role. All this part of the Republic is of course highly contentious and has a definite paternalistic overtone. The thought that we may be naturally suited to do productive work, and that in the ideal city, we would be compelled to do nothing else is highly repulsive, and frighteningly reminiscent of Science Fiction nightmares such as the genetic classification of infants and their subsequent placing in society in Brave New World.

In Book IV, Socrates turns his attention to Justice in the individual, attempting to discern in the just individual 'the very form of justice' (435a) which he found in the city. He comes to the following conclusion:

If we compare this long passage to the two above passages relating to justice in the City, we can see that Plato thinks he has established several things about the likeness of City and soul. First, he believes he has established that soul and city have the same function: both flourish if their parts each 'do their own' and refrain from being busy bodies, i.e. the soul and the city are just if they are harmonious.

But Plato goes further, and believes he has made another discovery about justice in the city and in the soul. Both the city and the soul, he says, have three parts, 'the higher, the lower, and the mean', and for either of them to be just, is for the higher part to rule, and the mean to assist it in controlling the lower part. Each part of the soul will display a certain virtue, and in that sense will correspond to its counterpart in the city. For instance, wisdom is the virtue of the rational part of the soul, and that displayed by the rulers of the ideal city.

The two sets of claims Plato is making about justice in the soul and the city differ greatly in the kind of claims they are. The 'discovery' that justice is 'doing one's own' is a widely held belief that Plato comes across early on in his investigations, in fact, one that he comes across when he is setting up the first city. The claim that the city has three parts, and the various 'discoveries' about each of these parts, on the other hand, is a complex - and fairly contrived - empirical hypothesis involving politics and psychology.

Given the difference of status of these two sets of claims, how much should one be prepared to accept? Certainly, because one is prepared to accept the claim about the principle of justice as specialisation of the parts, it doesn't follow that one should also accept the claims about how this principle is exemplified, or that it is exemplified in an identical way in the city and in the soul. One can stop at this: both the city and the soul have parts which must be in harmony if there is to be any justice in them. One can then choose to accept Plato's description of the parts of the city and their role, or of the parts of the soul and their role, but there certainly is no compelling reason why one should accept either, or that the parts of soul and city are alike in any way.

The analogy as a performance shows, at least, that justice in the city and in the soul is this: specialisation of the parts of the city and the soul according to their natural function. But in order to show that there is a link between justice in the soul and social justice in the individual, Plato must say something more. We know from Book II that Plato really wants to show this: that if one is psychically harmonious, then one is just. As the analogy fails to show this, is there any other way in which Plato can defend his position?

Vlastos, in his "Justice and Happiness in the Republic" notes that the elements for an alternative argument for the conclusion that a man is socially just if and only if he is psychically just are present in Plato's moral psychology. He writes that what leads a person to act in a socially unjust manner is more often than not uncontrolled appetite, the multi-headed beast of the Republic, or a thumos which is not in the service of reason. Vlastos lists 'sensuality, cupidity, vanity' as the motivators of socially unjust acts. We can add emotive states such as anger and jealousy when they are especially strong and unrestrained. This psychological fact is of great help for Plato, as someone who has achieved psychic harmony does not suffer from unruly desires or emotions. The multi- headed beast has fewer heads, and the lion reserves its energy to fight any superfluous heads on behalf of reason. So a psychically harmonious person simply lacks the normal motivations for behaving in a socially unjust manner.

To Vlastos' point, we can add the following. Plato believes and makes it explicit that psychic harmony will entail the development of certain character traits and vice-versa, and that these character traits are those we would normally attribute to a socially just individual. For example, when he describes the qualities the philosophers have as a result of having a harmonious soul at 484c-487a, Plato concludes that they are 'competent to guard the laws and pursuits of society', and that we should establish them as rulers of the city (484b-c). Their qualifications are as follows: alone are they capable of seeing the absolute truth (484c), being the only members of the city trained in knowledge of the forms, which means that they know what a just city must be like. They love truth and hate falsehood(485b) as befits those who are ruled by reason (truth is the object of reason's desires), they are 'temperate and not greedy for wealth' (485e), as their wealth loving appetites have been lulled to sleep under the control of reason and the thumos, and they are 'just and gentle', not 'unsocial and savage' (486b), i.e. their emotions also are under control, and they are capable of relating to others in a civilised way.

The sum of these character traits may seem to fall short of what we normally understand to be required for social justice. It could be objected that if this is what Plato means by justice, he is advocating an ethics of indifference: the just person according to Plato has no desire to harm others, but no desires to benefit them either. This however, is not a real objection. Justice, in the every day sense, does not require that we benefit others, but at the most, that we protect them from being harmed. But even this weaker requirement may turn out to be a problem for Plato. For some of Plato's citizens, i.e. the philosophers, more is required by justice than simply desiring not to harm others, and this seems to pose Plato a problem.

The philosophers, in order to be just, must sacrifice their life of contemplation and become rulers, because only by their ruling may the city become just. Thus, the philosophers are required to seek the benefit of others if they are just, and this is not guaranteed by their being psychically harmonious. One way to refute this objection is to argue that the philosophers rule not because they want to benefit others but because it is in their interest to do so. This line of argument is problematic, however, since Plato appears to argue specifically that ruling is not in the philosophers' interest. In the following section I will try to solve this problem by arguing that there is sense in which it is in the philosophers' interest to become rulers. When this problem is solved, we will be able to accept the argument presented in this sub-section for the linking of psychic harmony and justice.

The problem which I wish to discuss here arises within the Republic, at the heart of Plato's discourse on the Philosopher-rulers. In Book VI of the Republic Plato writes that a city will never be just unless philosophers become rulers or rulers philosophers. In his own words:

Plato believes that philosophers are best suited to enforce justice because they have reached the spiritual condition which he calls psychic harmony. The philosopher:

But despite being the only suitable rulers, and despite possessing the qualities described at 484c-487a, it is far from obvious that Plato's philosophers actually care about the city they live in to such an extent that they want to rule it. Certainly, the philosophers as Plato describe them will not want to participate in any unjust activity: they will not want to be dishonest, as they are lovers of truth, and they will not want to steal, or cheat as they are temperate. But although the philosophers will not want to harm other people, they might have no particular desire to benefit them either, hence, they might not desire to benefit the city. Indeed Plato himself seems to believe that having a harmonious soul will not necessarily make the philosophers care about justice in the city. Although the psychically just person will not be tempted by unruly desires to behave unjustly towards the city, the obvious choice for such a person is, if not the life of the hermit, at least one somewhat similar to that favoured by the Epicureans - to retire with similar minded friends and contemplate philosophy while the city gets on in its usual unjust way:

The problem of the philosopher kings is picked out by Annas in An Introduction to Plato's Republic,in which she remarks that the argument that social justice is in the agent's interest because psychic harmony is breaks down when Plato discusses the Philosopher kings. Plato describes the philosophers as those who had rather contemplate the Forms than take part in politics. Their minds 'long to remain in the realm above' (517c-d), and it will be a sacrifice for them to turn their minds to politics. Yet they must become rulers 'as a matter of necessity' (540b), for the just state Socrates describes will not be possible 'till philosophers become kings in this world,or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers (473d).

The conflict lies therein: social justice requires that philosophers quit contemplating the Forms and become politicians. If it is in the interest of the agent to be socially just, then it will be in the philosophers' interest to become rulers. Justice is in the interest of the agent only if it benefits the agent's soul. But what can benefit the soul more than, or as much as contemplation of the Form of the Good? And if nothing can, then having to turn away from it is clearly not beneficial. Thus the philosophers' being forced to become rulers is not beneficial to their souls - and it is perceived by them as a sacrifice - and if this is the case, then it cannot be in their interest to do so. Therefore, either it is not just for them to become rulers, or else, social justice of the individual is distinct from psychic harmony and self-interest. Because it has to be just for philosophers to become rulers (the just state cannot exist otherwise) then we must conclude that justice and psychic harmony are not the same thing. I propose to look at some of the responses we can offer to the problem of the philosopher-rulers, and show a way we can hope to resolve it.

In response to the problem of the philosopher kings, one might suggest that it would be better if Plato were to make some claim weaker than an identification of (social) justice and psychic harmony (psychic justice), for instance, the claim that people who are psychically healthy are more likely to behave justly - this would be compatible with the fact that the interests of psychic harmony and justice may sometimes conflict, as they may in the case of the philosopher-kings. But this would not support Plato's main claim, namely that it is always in our interest to be just. When situations arise when just behaviour would conflict with psychic harmony, then one would have no reason to choose to act justly.

Paradoxically, as well as noting in the various passages referred to that there may be a conflict of interest between doing what is socially just and doing what promotes psychic health, in one particular passage, Plato also seems to be advising the philosophers not to engage in public life, i.e. not to do what is socially just:

This passage recalls Socrates' comment in the Apology, at 31d-32a. If a philosopher were to try to become involved in politics in Socrates' Athens, Plato argues, he would fail to bring about justice, and probably lose his own life: 'The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.' (32a). It is not, then, in the philosopher's interest to attempt to make the city just. This does not contradict the claim that it is in one's interest to behave (socially) justly. The just thing to do for the philosopher is to rule the city and make it a just one. This is not possible for him in Socrates' Athens. Hence it not an option for the philosopher to behave in the best possible way.

Plato seems to believe that only in the ideal city he has described, but in no actual one, will the philosopher willingly take on the role of ruler. A political office in any actual city would threaten 'to overthrow the established habit of his soul'. This account of the difference between ideal and actual city, and of the role of the philosopher in each does not, however, throw much light on Annas's problem. The philosophers at 517c-d belong to the ideal city which Plato is in the process of describing. Hence they have no reason to suppose they will not be able to fulfil their roles as rulers. In order to address Annas' problem, we thus need to return to those passages in which Plato opposes the philosopher's social obligations to their duty to their souls.

If we study the passages in which Plato talks of the conflicting duties and inclinations of the philosophers, we soon notice that the picture he draws is rather confused, and this confusion makes us hesitate to draw any conclusion from the conflict highlighted by Annas. In this sub-section I will attempt to put together a less confused portrait of the philosophers of the Republic.

At 520e, Plato writes that the philosophers will 'assuredly approach office as an unavoidable necessity', having stated before that they must be constrained 'to take charge of other citizens and be their guardians' (520a). If not, then they will remain with their vision of the good, and 'refuse to go down again among those bondsmen and share their labors and honors, whether they are of less or greater worth.' (519d).

This portrait of the philosophers as people who would sacrifice justice in the city in favour of their own psychic justice is the one which gives rise to Annas' s paradox. Yet it is not clear that this follows from the picture offered by Plato. I will argue that there is some sense in which Plato believes it is in the philosophers' interest to become rulers. I will put forward two arguments. The first is that bringing harmony to the city should appeal to the philosophers as they are lovers of the forms. The second is that by letting others rule the philosophers risk finding themselves in an environment too unstable for contemplation to be possible at all. Hence, if they rule, they choose the lesser of two evils and make sure they can at least contemplate the forms some of the time. I now proceed to expound the first argument.

When the philosopher is compelled to take office, he has succeeded in becoming 'orderly and divine in the measure permitted to man' (500d), and the task he is asked to perform is to practise on the city and the individuals within it what he has practised on himself (500d). Plato again supposes that the philosophers will feel reluctance ('some compulsion is laid upon him' 500d), but does not elaborate on why this should be so. For when they are summoned to politics, the philosophers have done as much work on their soul as is humanly possible (500d) - they are not compelled to give up an important task, or indeed any task at all. What is offered to them on the other hand, is to carry on creating according to the Forms, but on a larger scale than what they have done before. They can now apply their skills to the city and the souls of every individual within it.

It stands to reason, one wants to say, that the philosophers should actually be quite happy to be given the opportunity to rule. They are not giving up anything for the sake of it, and it should appeal to their ambition to reproduce the harmony of the Forms on a grander scale than their own soul. If their admiration for the Forms is real, there seems to be no reason why they should want their image to be reflected in themselves only, but one imagines that they should want to see their reflection everywhere around them. And if they enjoy creating harmony, they would be more pleased to have to create it in the world than to have to stop because they have done with their own soul.

There are two points on which one might express disagreement here. First, it is not likely, one might say that the philosophers will ever be done with the task of creating harmony in their own soul, whatever Plato says at 500d. And if not, it will prove more difficult for the philosophers to want to turn their attention elsewhere. This is not an insurmountable objection however, as one can imagine that the philosophers will have got far enough ahead with making their own soul harmonious to want to devote part of their time to those of other people. Secondly, it is not obvious that one is always drawn to a more worthwhile task even if one recognises that it is more worthwhile. Michelangelo did not want to give up his work on the funerary monument to Julius II in San Pietro in Vincoli in order to start work on the Sistine Chapel, though no doubt he realised that the latter would present more of a challenge to his abilities. His attachment to his work in progress was such that he would not put it to rest for something better. But this was irrational, and the philosophers, if they have modelled their souls according to the Forms, and achieved psychic harmony, must be rational. For psychic harmony is defined as the harmonious ordering of the three parts of the soul under the rule of reason (500c).

The above argument claimed that philosophers, if they love the forms, must be attracted to the possibility of modelling souls and cities in their image. It could be argued, however, that the philosophers' love of the forms is really a love of contemplation and does not extend to the practical domain. However, if this argument is inconclusive, there is another which also leads to the conclusion that it is, after all, in the philosophers' interest to rule. This argument does not question that, in an ideal world, philosophers would prefer to do nothing but contemplate the forms. However, it appeals to the following uncontroversial truth: in order for contemplation to be a possible way of life, there needs to be a stable political environment. If they are in the mist of political upheaval of any kind, or social chaos, the philosophers will not find the peace and quiet required for contemplation. Because no less than perfect government is ever safe from upheaval of some kind, in order to guarantee that there will always be the kind of environment necessary for contemplation, the philosophers need a perfect state. As they only are capable of bringing about the perfect state, they must rule. This means that they can only devote some of their time to contemplation. But whereas they would prefer to devote all their time to it, this compromise is better than the risk they would be running of not being able to devote any time to contemplation in an unstable environment.

The premises used in the above argument are all implied by what Plato says in the Republic, i.e. he could not deny them without revising some of the things he says about contemplation and ruling. So this argument is more conclusive than the previous one. However, one problem remains: Plato still claims that the philosophers will be reluctant to become rulers. I will suggest here why this is not an objection to the arguments I have offered. It is possible that Plato wants it, or needs it to be the case that the philosophers do not want to rule, and that as a result he fails to see that they might actually enjoy some aspects of holding a political office. 521b gives us a glimpse of Plato's agenda:

Philosophers will be better rulers, he says, if ambition does not come in the way of their work. Love of rule would thwart their objectivity and their interest in making the city just. Hence, they must prefer not to rule. One might question whether this is justification enough for the proposition that they actually do not want to rule. In the context of Plato's ethics of virtue, it is. If Plato can argue that love of rule is a vicious character trait (presumably because it is contrary to temperance), then it will follow that the philosophers, who are psychically harmonious, do not possess that trait. He can then deduce from the proposition that it is best if philosophers do not want to rule, that they actually don't.

Plato's argument is contentious for a different reason. It is entirely plausible that the philosophers dislike entering the political world, but desire nonetheless to see it become just. If they are aware that they are the best people for the job, then they should be able to overcome their reluctance voluntarily, without being coerced. Thus, lack of political ambition need not come in the way of their desire to become guardians. It simply means that they will regard holding office as the means to an end only, and that their desire to see the end implemented will outweigh their distaste of the means.

Plato's conviction that the philosophers will not want to rule is thus traceable to two conditionals: 'if philosophers have political ambition they will be bad rulers' - because that would make them care less about the implementation of justice than the acquisition of power for themselves - and 'if philosophers want to rule, then they have political ambition'. I questioned the latter. It is clear that someone may want to rule without having the kind of ambition which according to Plato makes for bad rulers. Historical examples of such people are Mahatma Ghandi, and in contrast to Danton, Maximilien Robespierre. These were politicians who cared for the result of their work without being particularly fond of the process. Ruling was only valued by them instrumentally, not in itself.

Out of this discussion emerges a different picture from the one which informs the dilemma we started off with. It is no longer clear that the philosophers will see a conflict of interest between their love of philosophy, and their being required to rule. From what Plato says of them at 500c-501b, it seems that the philosophers will recognise that it is in their interest to become guardians, just as it is in their interest to philosophise. Both represent an attempt to recreate the harmony of the Forms in the world which surrounds them. That Plato fails to see this may be due to his belief that philosophers should lack political ambition. But we saw that they need only regard political employment as a means to the end they desire, and hence could perceive it as in their interest to become rulers without loving politics. We have thrown some light on the dilemma of the philosopher-rulers.

By solving the problem of the philosopher rulers, we have removed one of the most important obstacles to the linking of psychic and social justice of the individual. Both the desire to be psychically and socially just arise from the same thing: love and knowledge of the Forms. Hence the most psychically healthy people will also be the most just, and this will manifest itself in their ability for ruling, and thereby ensuring that there is as much justice as possible in the world.

This account of the philosopher rulers introduces a new dimension to our understanding of Platonic justice so far: to be just, or psychically healthy, one must know the forms. Because the defence of justice suggested in the Crito includes the claim that elenchos produces psychic harmony and justice, this raises a fresh challenge: can elenchos produce knowledge of the forms? The next section shows that it can.

In the previous section, we solved the problem of a potential conflict between social justice and psychic justice by arguing that love of justice is the result of knowing the Form of the good. When we come to know the Forms, and their harmonious order, we desire to reproduce this harmony in ourselves, and, (although Plato does not explicitly say this, it seems to follow, as we saw in the previous section) in the world around us. Hence, the same yearning which leads us to become psychically healthy also turns us into lovers of justice in general, and establishes in us the desire to help the city become just in so far as it is in our power to do so. If the argument is to have any force, then it has to be at least possible to obtain knowledge of the forms, since without that possibility, there is no chance of anyone becoming psychically healthy or just. In this section I address the problems which follow from the assumption that it is possible to know the forms.

In the Republic Plato makes the following claims: philosophers know the Forms, and philosophers are dialecticians (531e). From this it follows that knowledge of the Forms can be achieved though dialectic (533a). But this conclusion is problematic for two reasons. First, knowledge of the Forms is traditionally thought of as visionary, a kind of knowledge by acquaintance. The philosopher 'gazes' at the Form of the good, 'in true contemplation until it [has] become his own forever' he contemplates it, if not directly (for like the sun it might burn his eyes) through its instantiations in the objects of the intellect, i.e. the other forms which participate in the Form of the good. Such a form of knowledge might be thought to be incompatible with the kind of knowledge which can be achieved through dialectic, i.e. knowledge which is essentially articulate. I shall argue, following Fine, that this way of looking at knowledge of the Forms is misleading, and that the Republic gives us evidence that knowledge of the Forms is of the articulate kind which can be obtained through dialectic.

The second problem which follows from the assumption that the Forms can be known through dialectic relates to the nature of the elenchos. There are two reasons why one might think it is impossible to achieve knowledge of the Forms through elenchos. First, the elenchos is bound up to the dialectical requirement that any hypothesis should contain only terms 'with which the questioner admits he is familiar' (Meno 75d). But no one prior to Plato (or Socrates) is familiar with the theory of Forms. It is a theory which helps itself to concepts which lie beyond what most people believe or are ready to accept. Hence, postulating the existence of Forms - which is essential if one is to come to know them - is incompatible with a fundamental principle of Socratic dialectic.

Secondly, the elenchos appears to be a method for achieving consistency within one's belief system. If this is the case, the elenchos can show that one belief is consistent with a set of beliefs, but not that it is true. This is not a sufficient condition for knowledge. From this it would follow that the elenchos could not lead to knowledge of the Forms, only to consistency in one's beliefs about them.

I will argue that these problems can be solved if we take into account the development of Plato's dialectical method prior to the Republic into what is known as the hypothetical method, which allows appeal to concepts which lie outside the questioner's set of beliefs, i.e. concepts with which the interlocutor is not necessarily familiar. I will also follow Fine in arguing that Plato's conception of knowledge is coherentist rather than foundationalist, and that the hypothetical method satisfies the conditions for knowledge within a coherentist account.

To know something, according to Plato in Meno and Gorgias requires the ability to give an account. Knowledge is distinguished from true belief in the Meno as something that requires us to 'work out the reason' before it becomes 'stable'. A true belief that is not examined rationally will 'run away from a man's mind' as the statues of Daedalus escape when they are not tied down. (97e-98a). In the Gorgias, flattery is distinguished from crafts because it cannot provide a rational account of itself (465a) and this explains why rhetoric, if it is a form of flattery, can only produce belief without knowledge (454e). The elenchos is the means through which one seeks such an account, and in Book VII of the Republic, Plato claims that the ability to give an account is characteristic of the dialecticians who investigate the beautiful and the good (531e), thus implying that one comes to know the Forms through dialectic.

From the above it should follow that knowledge of the Form of the good means the ability to give an account of the good, and that this is reached through dialectic. However knowledge of the Forms is presented in the Republic as something quite different. Plato, for one thing, does not mention the ability to give an account in Book V, when he discusses knowledge of the Forms. Rather than a rational or explanatory process, obtaining knowledge of the good would seem to be the result of acquaintance, or contemplation of the Forms. This especially also seems to be what Plato has in mind in the Phaedrus when he describes the soul journeying in 'that place beyond the heavens':

This strong image gives the impression that the Forms are abstract objects that the soul can only contemplate when it is in a certain state (here free from the constraints of the body). But the knowledge obtained by the soul is of the visionary kind, it involves acquaintance with those abstract objects, not reasoning about them. Kraut agrees with this account of knowledge of the Forms:

It seems that giving an account would in many ways fall short of such a relationship with abstract objects, for this relationship, as described in the Phaedrus and analysed by Kraut, bears more resemblance to acquaintance with a work of art, which is not necessarily rationally articulate, than to the understanding of an intellectual problem. In the same way that one could argue that it is not possible to appreciate a painting or a piece of music by analysing its component parts, it seems that reasoning about the Forms would fall short of simply contemplating them.

A consideration which raises doubt about the possibility that knowledge of the Form of the good is of the non-rational contemplative kind is this. It would be a mistake, in general, to infer that the act of contemplation excludes deliberation. For although one can contemplate, say, a mathematical equation, or a philosophical theory, one cannot do so without applying some rational thought to it. So even though knowledge of the Form of the good may be portrayed as contemplation, this does not entail that it is not of a rational kind and does not require dialectic.

The Phaedrus describes the Forms as objects, and this is also how Kraut interprets them. However, this is not what Plato tells us of the Form of the good in the Republic. At 509b he says that the good is beyond being (ousia) and not a being in its own right. This suggests that the philosophers' acquaintance with the Form of the good cannot be of non-rational contemplative type. Knowledge by acquaintance requires an object, it is 'knowledge of things'. The alternative type of knowledge ('knowledge how' doesn't really apply here), is propositional knowledge, and that is knowledge of truths. Knowledge of truths, is more likely to involve deliberation than not, and so we are closer to believing that in order to have any knowledge about the Form of the good, one would need to practice dialectic.

In order to settle these issues, we need to establish what the Form of the good is, if not an ousia, and what kind of knowledge we can have of it. Fine suggests the following:

The quote should be read as follows: the world is structured according to a telos, and each thing in it has a function which is related to the function of the whole, just as the parts of the soul have functions which are related to the function of the entire soul. The Form of the good is this telos, and to understand it is to understand how each part of the world has a function which contributes to the overall telos, not as a means, but as a constituent of it. To give an answer to the 'what is it?' question about anything is to relate it to the Form of the good, i.e. to give a teleological account of it, an account hoti beltiston which explains how it fits in with the overall teleological structure of the world. Or put another way, it is to be able to explain its behaviour teleologically as well as in terms of what it brings about.

If Fine is right and the Form of the good is in fact like a blue print of the world and its teleological structure, then knowledge of it can only be of the kind that involves understanding. And understanding the Form must involve understanding its relation to everything in the world, Forms, and sensibles, and their teleological structures. This means understanding for each Form and sensible object what it is for it to be a good member of its kind, and realise its function, as Fine goes on to say:

Given that acquiring and articulating knowledge of the Form of the good is a rational process, why is it necessary to seek that knowledge in order to be just and psychically healthy? The answer should be something like this. By knowing the Form of the good one learns what it is for the soul to be just, i.e. one learns its teleological structure, and hence what it is for it to be a good member of its kind and psychically healthy. But as obtaining this knowledge involves a rational process, it is not possible that we should obtain it unless we are already on our way to fulfilling this function, i.e. reason must be given free rein to function properly. As this is not possible if reason is clouded with unruly appetites and emotions, it must be the case that the other parts of the soul are also fulfilling their function. In other words, it is not possible to know the Form of the good fully if one's soul is not at least on its way to becoming harmonious. In that sense, to be just or psychically healthy is simply to know what function one's soul is supposed to fulfil, and at the same time, to have one's soul inevitably fulfilling that function. In fact, having such knowledge is in fact identical with one's soul performing that function.

The conclusion of this sub-section is as follows. The Form of the Good is a suitable object for dialectical pursuit. Study of the teleological nature of the Form of the good reveals that acquiring knowledge of it, in spite of some of the things Plato seems to be saying, notably in the Phaedrus, is not a matter of acquaintance, but a rational process, for which the elenchos turns out to be best suited. The argument also led to the confirmation of the following. It is not possible to be psychically healthy and unjust, because justice simply is the soul's proper contribution to the teleological system of the world, i.e. the natural order of the soul, which is the same as its psychic health. Because one cannot know the good and not instantiate it at least in one's soul, knowledge of the Forms entails both love of justice and psychic harmony.

In the Meno (75d), Socrates puts forward the following condition for binding the elenctic inquiry he is engaging in:

When for example Meno attempts to define virtue as justice (78e-79a), Plato objects that if Meno does not know what virtue is, then he is not in a position to know what the parts of virtues are. Hence he cannot use justice to define virtue. Simply put, we cannot, in order to define something we don't know, appeal to something else we don't know. Two unknowns don't make up a known.

It could be argued that this is a requirement specific to the pursuit of definition, and not inquiry in general, as definition is what is sought in the Meno. The requirement would then be that all the terms of a definition must be understood. It would, in my opinion, be a mistake to conclude that the requirement is specifically about definitions for the following reasons. First, the phrase 'more conducive to discussion' suggests something more, namely, that one should avoid introducing terms with which some of the interlocutors are not familiar, in order for the discussion to be productive. It suggests a general, rather than a specific requirement, that all interlocutors should be able to follow the discussion, and this does not make sense if it applies only to those parts of the discussion where definitions are being put forward.

Secondly, it is not clear that Plato distinguishes sharply (at least in the Meno from where the quote is extracted) between the search for definitions and other means of pursuing knowledge. In this case it makes little sense for him to invoke a requirement which applies to the search for definition, but not to inquiry in general. If there is something other than the pursuit of definition going on in the elenctic dialogue in, say, the Meno, then Plato does not seem to be aware of it, or at least, does not make his awareness explicit.

The basis for the dialectical requirement (two unknowns don't make up a known) is sound, but the scope of the restriction it imposes is unclear - are there not cases where one gets to know something through something else which we didn't know previously? Are there not terms which are interdependent so that one can't understand the one without understanding the other even though both are unknown to begin with? This is the case for instance of the expressions 'synonymous' and 'analytic'. As Quine pointed out in "Two dogmas of empiricism", it is not possible to define these terms independently of each other. This he took to be a sign that the said terms were meaningless. However, as Strawson and Grice have pointed out, and as is now widely accepted, circularity is not always a vicious thing, and in many cases cannot be avoided. Coming to understand the meaning of a term is often a holistic process, which involves coming to understand the meaning of other terms.

Maybe it is in the light of considerations similar to those that Plato in the Phaedo decides to review his commitment to the dialectical requirement by postulating the Forms as an answer to the 'what is it?' question. In order to explain being, coming to be and passing, Socrates proposes to "make a fresh start from those principles of mine that you know so well - that is, I am assuming the existence of absolute beauty, and goodness, and magnitude, and all the rest of them". This violates the dialectical requirement, as the nature of the Forms is not understood, nor their existence necessarily accepted, by Socrates' interlocutors.

Socrates goes on to say in the same passage that if his interlocutors grant his assumptions about the Forms, then they will be able to understand the reason for things coming to be. He realises that it is necessary in this case to deal not with one but with two unknowns in order to come to know either - in other words, he establishes the limits of the dialectical requirement by offering a case in which it does not apply. This method, known as the hypothetical method, which postulates a hypothesis beyond what people generally believe in order to come to understand the term which is being examined, is taken up again in the Republic, when Plato appeals to knowledge of the Forms in order to define justice. It does not so much violate the dialectical requirement as establish the limits of the restrictions it imposes. Hence, appeal to the Forms in order to define justice is not incompatible with the nature of the dialectical method of inquiry.

The second problem we need to consider relating to the suitability of dialectic for obtaining knowledge of the Forms and hence becoming just is this. If justice requires knowledge of the Form of the good, and if this knowledge is obtained through dialectic, then it must be possible for the elenchos to produce truths about the Form of the good, i.e. knowledge about the teleological structure of the world. If this is not possible, then the elenchos can produce neither justice, nor psychic health, but at best consistency within the agent's belief system. The last part of this sub-section addresses these issues, and I argue that the elenchos can bring about knowledge of the Form of the good, and therefore justice.

Plato stresses, on several occasions, that knowledge of the Form of the good can only be reached through dialectic. For example:

But how can beliefs about the Form of the good, if they are obtained through elenctic examination, be justified, how can they be made 'stable'? As Irwin remarks, after all, the structure of the elenchos allows the agent to work out whether her beliefs are consistent with one another, but not whether they are actually true. For the elenchos, prior to the Phaedo tests out beliefs held by the practitioner against each other, but does not appeal to any propositions which are not part of that belief system.

We saw, however, that the dialectic method evolved before Plato wrote the Republic, into what we called the hypothetical method. According to this method, the dialectician may advance hypotheses which lie beyond what is commonly accepted by the participants. Of course, if consistency is all that can be obtained through elenctic examination, this is not really helpful, as we end up with a set of beliefs which is consistent with an unfamiliar hypothesis instead of a self-contained consistent set of beliefs - the former is no closer to truth than the latter. However, if we set aside this consideration, we will see that the hypothetical method does actually fare better than its predecessor.

At Phaedo 101b-e Plato explains and illustrates the hypothetical method:

It is not my purpose here to examine the hypothetical method in any detail - I shall concentrate on its implications for moral knowledge. The above passage shows the interplay between the initial hypothesis and the dialectic method as a means of inquiry. A hypothesis is made, that one and one is two in virtue of its participating in the Form of duality. The hypothesis is then verified by testing the consistency of its consequences - this is the role of elenchos. But to be fully substantiated, it must be tested against a higher hypothesis, and so on until an ultimate hypothesis is reached. This method is again described in the Republic:

Before we consider whether it is possible to achieve knowledge through the hypothetical method, there are questions which must be answered. First, how do we fasten on a first hypothesis such as is required? Secondly, how can there be a stronger hypothesis than that which states that things are F because they participate in the Form of F? The answer to the first question is simple enough: "This explanation pleased me" says Socrates of Anaxagoras' teleology. What this means is that there is something intuitively compelling about the hypothesis that there is a teleological structure of the world and that the Forms dictate that structure. Thus the hypotheses required by the method are not reached through elenchos, but through intuition. By 'intuition' I don't mean a special faculty of the mind which gives us reliable access to truths, but merely something entirely pre-theoretical. There is nothing more to be said about how one does fasten on a first hypothesis, but this should not come as a surprise. A look at the history of mathematics and science shows that in general there is nothing interesting to say about the source of people's ideas (at best, they have anecdotical value, e.g. Newton's apple) - what is interesting are the methods used for the justification of these ideas. Here, it is the role of the elenchos to check that the consequences which follow from our hypotheses are coherent, by testing them against one another.

Socrates says that a hypothesis must be confirmed by a stronger one. But there is no infinite regress here, as he supposes that there will be an ultimate hypothesis which will confirm all others, and presumably, itself. That it should confirm itself suggests a Cartesian kind of self-evident proposition, like the cogito. Although attractive to those who believe epistemology must be Cartesian in essence, this explanation leaves a lot to be desired on the pragmatic level. If the first principles in question put together constitute an account of the Form of the good, Plato is no where able to name them. If they are the axioms he frequently refers to in elenctic discussions, that justice must be beneficial, that whatever is fine is honourable, etc., then they are far from self-evident. But if elenctic knowledge of those principles is necessary for knowledge of the Form of the good, which is in turn necessary for justice and psychic health, then it matters a great deal that this knowledge should be possible.

Whether the hypothesis which confirms all others is self-evident or not, it is clear what that hypothesis must be about. It must be about the Form of the good which regroups all the other Forms in its teleological structure. If it can be established that everything has a function and that all functions are determined by an overall telos, then the particular hypothesis about particular functions will be confirmed. That the Form of the good should be the subject of the ultimate hypothesis according to Plato is confirmed in the Republic 510b-511b where it is called the 'starting point' and described as 'unhypothetical'. According to the passage from the Phaedo, this hypothesis does not need to be substantiated by another one (and indeed, one would be at pains to find a hypothesis which was higher in the hierarchy than the existence of the Form of the good). But how does one verify that it is true?

Because the Cartesian answer (that the hypothesis is self-evident) is unsatisfactory, we must look for a different one. Fine propose the following:

The advantage of a circular explanation is that we get a justification both ways. Coherence within the set of hypotheses and the ultimate hypothesis, as well as between the hypotheses and their consequences means not only that the consequential beliefs are justified, but also the hypothesis. Thus, the elenchos, by working its way through our intuited beliefs about the Forms and our consequential beliefs can justify all of them. The circle is not vicious because of the richness of the explanation it gives.

The account, to be a good one, must incorporate every branch of reality, relate every belief to the overall teleological system which is the Form of the good. This is born out by what Plato himself says of the kind of superior knowledge which the dialecticians achieve:

This kind of explanatory account is superior to any other because 'its coherentist explanations are fuller and richer' than any other, because it takes into account the teleological relationships of everything in the world. This richness is enough to make the circle virtuous.

Such a coherentist account also has the advantage of explaining, as Irwin points out, why Plato denies that he can appeal to knowledge of the Form of the good in order to justify his claims about virtue (506-c).

If knowledge is obtained through a coherent explanation, then it should not be possible to appeal to knowledge of the Form of the good prior to, or independently of knowledge of virtue and other goods. Similarly, it will be impossible to know what virtue is without knowledge of the Form of the good. The two must be achieved together.

In spite of these advantages, one is almost bound to object that coherence is not the same as knowledge, and that if understanding the Form of the good is being able to give a coherent explanation of the teleological relationships between things, then it cannot be superior to possessing true beliefs, as one can have coherent beliefs which are nonetheless false.

It may be, Fine suggests, that Plato is thinking in terms of a an older concept of knowledge, one which 'consists in or requires understanding'. Annas believes that the coherence criterion shows that Plato is in fact using a pre-Cartesian account of knowledge, one which does not make use of the concept of certainty or the arguments of scepticism. However, we would be mistaken if we inferred that post-Cartesian epistemology ignores coherentist accounts. Davidson, Dennett, and Rorty, for example all believe that our best hope for a theory of knowledge lies in coherence. In fact, they maintain that it makes no sense to try and get outside our belief system and language for purposes of confirmation or justification. As Rorty puts it, "nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence".

It is not the purpose of this chapter to evaluate coherence theories of knowledge, ancient or modern. It is enough that these theories are thought to be plausible by leading epistemologists, and that such a theory can make sense of Plato's claim that we can know the Form of the good through the elenchos. If that is the case, as I have argued that it is, then the objection raised at the end of Chapter Two, that the elenchos cannot produce knowledge but just consistency, has to be rejected - it fails to capture Plato's thoughts as to what knowledge of the good means, and what dialectic can achieve.

We must also reject, consequently, the worry that it is not possible to become just, as this involves knowledge of the Form of the good. Knowledge of the Form of the good can be obtained, through elenctic examination, as the same time as one inquires into the teleological structures of the virtues, the parts of the souls, and everything else. This leads the enquirer to produce a rich account of the interrelations between her soul, the world, and the Forms. So although Plato's account may be circular, the circle is virtuous.

In this chapter I have argued that despite suspicions to the contrary, Plato does have reasons to believe that social justice and psychic harmony are one and the same thing. These reasons, I argued in Section One, are to be found not so much in his soul/city analogy as in his moral psychology which makes some plausible claims about the character traits one must posses if one is psychically harmonious. In Section Two I dealt with a potential objection to the identification of justice and psychic harmony by showing that Plato can claim that it is in the philosophers interest to become rulers. In Section Three, I discussed a problem which arose in the course of Section Two: if justice consists of knowing the forms, and elenchos can bring about justice, then elenchos must be capable of producing knowledge of the forms. I showed, following Fine, that this was indeed the case.

This completes my analysis of the position adopted by Socrates in the Crito, and elaborated in later dialogues. Socrates believes it is unjust to escape because that would jeopardize his psychic health in part by harming others, and thus encouraging the development of character traits typical of a non-harmonious soul, and in part by placing himself in a position where he cannot practice the elenchos, which, by producing knowledge of the forms, is necessary, not only to bring about, but to maintain psychic health.

This analysis was necessary in order to assess the famous criticism of Plato's defence of justice attributed to Nietzsche and also to be found in the arguments of Callicles. I will show, in the second part, that the criticism becomes redundant if we read Nietzsche's arguments carefully, and if we take Plato's defence of justice to be the one outlined in the Crito and analysed here.

Discussing Nietzsche in the same breath as Plato, which is what I am about to do, presents a challenge in that the interpreters of Plato and Nietzsche start on a very unequal footing. The Plato scholar works on grounds very familiar not only to her but to her readers (this in itself leads to difficulties: it becomes increasingly hard to say anything about Plato that has not already been said many times). The student of Nietzsche, lacking the comfortable backing of centuries of scholarship has to do all the work of introducing Nietzsche to herself and her readers.

The problem is not just age related - otherwise the same complaint would be made whenever one juxtaposed an ancient and a modern or contemporary philosopher. In fact, since few of us ever consult early Christian or Medieval commentaries of Plato, it is probably fair to say that we're no more familiar with him than say Hume, Descartes, or Kant.

What makes Nietzsche's case different is the fact that no serious English language commentary was written about him before 1950 (at which date Kaufmann rescued him from obscurity). This is partly due to chance. Had Nietzsche's sister not presented parts of his work to the Nazis in a certain light, had he not been taken up by the existentialists and subsequently highjacked by popular culture, had there been any decent translations of his work before Kaufmann decided to produce them, Nietzsche might not have been plunged in obscurity.

Readers who find themselves confronted with Nietzsche's renewed fame, however, may venture that there is an altogether different set of reasons why Nietzsche did not feature in University syllabuses until now. This has to do with the manner of his writing: aphoristic, apparent absence of formal arguments, or some that end in question marks, the mixing of history, myth, art criticism, politics, science, psychology, theology, philology and philosophy - and none of these done in a usual or accepted manner. All these features of Nietzsche's style may lead the reader to the conclusion that he is a jack of all trades and master of none, and at any rate, not a master of philosophy.

In order to avoid such judgments coming in the way of this second part of my thesis, I invite the reader to consider the following: Nietzsche's writing is not much stranger, nor much less philosophically respectable than that of many other philosophers we are happy to read. The strangeness derives at least in great part from our lack of familiarity with his writings. Compare for instance the features of Nietzsche's style I have just highlighted with those of Plato's (mostly early) dialogues.

Neither Nietzsche nor the early Plato write in the treatise style favoured by most philosophers. In fact, Plato borrows from the stage at least as much as Nietzsche borrows from the poets. Both find it necessary to use a form of writing that has literary merits in order to convey philosophical ideas.

I mentioned the apparent absence of formal arguments from Nietzsche's writings (this needs qualifying: there are some, albeit not as many as the modern Anglo-American reader is used to), and the fact that where arguments are begun, they more often than not end in question marks. This really means two things. First, Nietzsche sometimes makes assertions which are not backed up by arguments. Secondly, any argument he offers is weakened by a question mark at the end. Again, these are features which fail to surprise us when we read Plato. Plato makes numerous claims in the course of the dialogues which are backed up by nothing more than the (sometimes strenuous) agreement of Socrates' interlocutors. Also, the early dialogues are famously aporetic, that is, they end with a question mark. Plato does not present the conclusions of Socrates' arguments as final, any more than Nietzsche does his own.

As far as appealing to non-philosophical knowledge is concerned, again, Plato is as guilty as Nietzsche, for he too uses history and myth, makes claim about theology and politics, engages in (sometimes ill-advised) art criticism, and backs up his moral philosophy with claims about human psychology (and even attempts to back up the latter with physiology in the Timaeus). In other words, if Nietzsche is a jack of all trades, so it seems, is Plato.

A lot more could be said to compare the styles of Plato and Nietzsche. But my aim is merely to suggest that whatever discomfort we may feel when confronted with Nietzsche's style of writing is less to do with the quality of this writing than with our unfamiliarity with it. For this purpose, I hope I have said enough.

The problem we are left with is this: how can one deal with the task of discussing the familiar with the unfamiliar in the same piece of work? Obviously, because my main purpose is to defend Plato's position, I cannot spend a large part of this thesis making the readers familiar with Nietzsche. Nor can I expect the readers to go away and familiarise themselves before turning to my work. Hence we must compromise - I must endeavour to make Nietzsche's thought at least intelligible, and the reader must accept that there will be lacunas in my presentation.

My aim in interpreting Nietzsche will be twofold: to present a reasonably clear sketch of his moral philosophy, and to extract a number of arguments which help throw light on the relationship between his moral philosophy and Plato's. This interpretation will be structured around Nietzschean themes and concepts: I will discuss will to power, self-overcoming, the slave/master and active/reactive distinctions. It is necessary to refer to these concepts in order to do any justice to Nietzsche's thought. However, it is impossible, within the scope of the present project, to give a fully illuminating discussion of each of those terms. So although I will endeavour to make it as clear as possible what these terms mean in the context of the arguments I am presenting, the reader will have to remain somewhat in the dark as to their full meaning and definitive place in Nietzsche's philosophy. The best I can do to remedy this is to refer the reader to the bibliography.

In Part One, I proposed a reading of the Crito according to which Socrates refuses to escape because it would be unjust as it would involve harming others - and thereby encouraging the development of character traits which would ultimately threaten to ruin his psychic health - and prevent his practicing the elenchos which is necessary not only to produce, but also to maintain psychic health, without which, his life is not worth living. In support of this reading I then made claims as to how Plato defends these premises in later works, premises that are only asserted in the Crito.

Part Two addresses an objection to Plato's account which is famously attributed to Nietzsche, who supposedly follows Callicles' arguments in the Gorgias. The objection claims that the good life is not the just life - that is fit only for slaves - but the life in which one is powerful, i.e. able to satisfy one's desires whatever they are, and even if they are harmful to others. Someone who wished to argue that Callicles and Nietzsche attacked Plato's defence of justice in a similar fashion would interpret their arguments as follows (crudely). They would point out that Callicles states that the law is an invention of the weak and that temperance (inseparable from justice according to Plato) prevents the flourishing of the strong. They would also claim that Nietzsche argues that morality and rationality are virtues of the slaves, and that they are incompatible with flourishing (in Nietzschean terminology 'life-denying'). My aim is to show that the two critiques are not as close as they seem, and that the one we must take most seriously - Nietzsche's - is better interpreted in a different light, and does not present a direct challenge to Plato's account of justice.

In Chapter Four I analyse Deleuze's reading of the dialogue between Callicles and Socrates as a Nietzschean attack on Plato's defence of justice. Deleuze, who claims that Callicles and Nietzsche attack justice in a similar fashion, grounds his interpretation of the dialogue on his understanding of a Nietzschean distinction between 'active' and 'reactive' traits of character, of actions, and of moral belief systems. By criticising Deleuze's interpretation of the distinction, and the use he puts it to in his reading of the dialogue, I argue the following:

- Callicles' s attack on Plato's defence is Hobbesian, it emphasises the competitive aspect of power, and defines it as the ability to satisfy one's desires, whatever they are. But Nietzsche's conception of power and the good is in fact sharply distinct from Hobbes's. It follows that there are in fact important differences between Callicles's and Nietzsche's positions, differences which become apparent once the superficial similarity of the terminology is dispelled.

- Nietzsche's critique of morality, in spite of its striking similarities to Callicles' attack, does not counter Plato's defence in any straightforward way. On the contrary, Nietzsche would appear to agree with Plato that the good life requires some amount of self-mastery, for which he invokes the concept of 'self-overcoming'. If they differ at all, it would appear to be in the role which each of them accords to reason, i.e. whether Nietzsche agrees with Plato that it is necessary for reason to rule over the soul.

Chapter Five argues that the supposed Nietzschean critique of Plato does not lie in a rejection on Nietzsche's part of the claim that reason plays an important role in the good life. I examine Nietzsche's supposed anti-rationalism in the light of his method for assessing moral values, i.e. the genealogy, and also by studying his so-called perspectival stance, i.e. the alleged thesis that there are no truths, only perspective, which I will show is a misreading of what Nietzsche actually says. I conclude that the problem is not that Nietzsche does not accord reason any role in the good life - on the contrary - but that he is wary of according it too great a role, so that it may interfere with what he calls 'self-overcoming'.

In Chapter Six, I examine this concept of self-overcoming, and ask how it differs from Plato's idea of temperance and psychic harmony. I conclude that there is no significant difference between the two accounts. Apparent differences between the two accounts, I shall argue, are due to misreadings of both Plato and Nietzsche, i.e., interpretations of Plato as advocating a strong form of asceticism through the repression of the appetites by reason, and of Nietzsche as rejecting all forms of control of the elements of one's character. I shall defend the view that the two philosophers' ideas of what a good character involves are in fact very close, and that they share a complex attitude to the question of self-control.

In concluding Chapter Six, I will have shown that Nietzsche's moral philosophy, in spite of strong appearances to the contrary, does not present a threat to Plato's defence of justice. This conclusion follows a closer study of the background of the two philosophers' claims regarding morality, and the discovery that both could be described as virtue ethicists, i.e. philosophers who place the greater emphasis on character development in relation to flourishing and happiness. Nietzsche's critique of morality, therefore, should not be read as a critique of justice as Plato understands it, but as a critique of conventional morality - i.e. a morality that describes some types of actions as good, and some as bad regardless of their effect on character development . Like Plato's rejection of many of the hoi polloi's moral beliefs, it is highly controversial, but it does not constitute a wholesale rejection of moral notions. In fact, it is dependent on his adopting a moral scheme of his own, one which has surprisingly much in common with Plato's.

This chapter introduces what is commonly interpreted as the Nietzschean attack on Plato's defence of justice. In particular, it concerns the idea that Callicles's argument in the Gorgias is closely related to Nietzsche's discussion of master/slave morality, and a Nietzschean approach to ethics in general. The two critiques apparently amount to the same thing. The good life is the life in which one is powerful, i.e. able to satisfy one's desires whatever they are, and to develop according to one's nature, so conceived, even when it is potentially harmful to others. Nietzsche, like Callicles, does indeed argue that power is good, weakness bad, and that happiness consists in 'the feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome'. He also claims that 'life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation', and that therefore none of those things should be considered bad. Morality, and laws, come in the way of this ideal, by restricting one's power to develop in this way, and hence are contrary to the good life. This again is argued by Nietzsche as well as Callicles.

I argue that these common claims do not suffice to justify the inference that Nietzsche's arguments support Callicles' attack of Plato's defence of justice. I will defend the following: although Callicles' and Nietzsche's arguments appear very close, their contents differ in important ways, the main difference lying in their understanding of the concept of power. I will argue that while Callicles's conception of power is Hobbesian, and does indeed contain the notion of being able to satisfy one's desires, whatever they might be, the Nietzschean concept is more complex, and more closely resembles Plato's self-control in that it refers to a set of non-competitive qualities.

By highlighting the difference between Nietzsche and Callicles's concepts of power, I drive the first wedge between their respective critiques of morality. At the same time, by showing that Nietzsche's concept of power is in fact quite close to what Socrates refers to as self-control or temperance, I begin to suggest a rapprochement between the two philosophers. I will continue in this direction in the next two chapters, where I shall argue that apparent Nietzschean critiques of Plato's defence of justice are in fact critiques of morality intended in quite the same spirit as Plato's own controversial defence, implicit in my view, in Socrates' approach to justice in the Crito.

I will develop my argument in this chapter as a reaction to a particular challenge, i.e. that offered by Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of the dialogue between Callicles and Socrates, an interpretation he describes as Nietzschean. I will also use Deleuze's discussion to establish an interpretation of the Nietzschean terms which I will be using throughout this second part of my thesis. These definitions, however, will not be taken as fixed or final, for even if it is possible to establish a definitive Nietzschean lexicon, which is doubtful, this cannot be done in the scope of this project.

Gilles Deleuze interprets the argument between Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias in the following way:

Deleuze believes that the conflict described by Callicles between the strong and the weak can be described in terms of a distinction he attributes to Nietzsche, that between active and reactive. The terminology must be explained for Deleuze's argument to be fully intelligible.

Nietzsche does not offer many definitions - one would be hard pressed to extract a lexicon directly from his texts. But Deleuze, for one, believes a terminology can be extracted, and a very precise one at that (p.59). We will therefore use him as a guide in trying to establish the meaning of several terms which recur in the relevant texts.

Active and reactive are qualities of forces (p.45). 'Force' is to be understood in the loosest sense, as an impetus. Nietzsche uses the term in the physical the socio-political and the psychological domains (in the latter 'force' means something like 'drive', see footnote 12), where it can take on more specific meanings, i.e. that which causes a body to move, or a (conscious or unconscious) motivator of action. Forces, in turn, are defined in terms of will to power (p.59), so this is where we should start. Will to power is that which each force interacting with another fundamentally is:

We can only understand forces and their interactions if we understand them in terms of will to power:

Will to power, according to Deleuze, determines differences of quantity between forces that interact, and it also determines the quality of each force (p.59). A force is dominant or dominated according to its relative quantity. It is active or reactive according to its quality (p.60). It can happen that the reactive comes to dominate the active - when it does, values are reversed (Deleuze, p.64, Genealogy, I, 7): the slaves command the masters.

The point Deleuze is trying to make can be illustrated as follows. In one episode of the cartoon, 'The Simpsons', Homer Simpson is diagnosed as having his brain protected by a larger than normal quantity of fluid underneath his skull. This means that he can withstand cranial shocks. A friend sees this as a financial opportunity and sets him up as a boxer. Homer fights against famous heavy weights, and wins, even though he has no strength nor skill to speak of. He wins because he never stays down, and can last until his opponent falls from sheer exhaustion. Although Homer wins the match, there is no question that he is stronger than his opponents. He wins through luck and cunning (albeit his trainer's). Homer represents the reactive force, which ends up dominating the active forces - represented by his opponents - by undermining them. Whether a force dominates is not, in the end, strictly linked to its quality: the 'better man' does not win.

The reactive is distinguished by its negativity, its tendency to impose restrictions and limitations (p.62):

The active force (be it a group of people, a morality, or as Nietzsche sometimes speaks of, a biological function) affirms itself, the reactive force negates the active one because it is different, reacts against it, sets up to destroy it. Hence the boxer displays his strength and his skill while Homer does nothing, while he waits and calculates the point at which his opponent will be sufficiently exhausted so that one little push will bring him down.

Laws, according to Nietzsche are reactive; they impose restrictions on the will to power which is the will to life, prevents it from expressing itself as struggle:

Nietzsche is not neutral in his description of the active and the reactive. If something is reactive, it is 'hostile to life', engenders the destruction of man and his future, in other words, prevents human flourishing. This is the first sign that Nietzsche's 'evaluation of values' is teleological, that is, that it is based on the belief that there is such a thing as human flourishing, and that traits of characters, and the values which prescribe or proscribe them are evaluated in terms of their effect, positive or negative, on flourishing. I intend to defend the view that Nietzsche's account is teleological more fully in the following chapters.

By this stage it should become clear what Deleuze is accusing Socrates of, and how he is interpreting Callicles's claims. Callicles is defending active morality, that which seeks to go to the extremity of power and desire, and he defends it as the morality of the most powerful. Socrates objects that if the law is the morality of the weak, then the weak have succeeded in imposing their will and they are really the strongest. Deleuze sees this as a misunderstanding in the sense that Socrates has confused quantity with quality. The morality of the weak may well be dominant, but it is reactive, and as such negative, and a threat to life, and to human flourishing.

Because of this misunderstanding, and what Deleuze interprets as 'changing the subject' Socrates is accused of dialectical ressentiment, a reactive affect (specific to philosophers).

In the next sections I will argue as follows. Section three explains how Deleuze's interpretation of the Nietzschean distinction is mistaken and how Callicles' 'morality of power' doesn't qualify as Nietzschean or as active. Section four shows how Socrates' argument for temperance as necessary for the good life is not in fact contrary to Nietzsche's view of what constitutes an active morality. In Section five, I suggest that the important difference between Nietzsche's and Socrates' arguments lies in the place both accord to reason in the good life and I lay out a plan to investigate this difference in Chapter five.

Before we go any further, we must note a peculiar aspect of Nietzsche's conception of power which Deleuze fails to highlight, but which plays a crucial role in the comparative study of Nietzsche's and Callicles's positions. It seems that Nietzsche does not understand by power something that one has over others, something which enables us to get things that others may want too. Nietzschean power does not seem to be a competitive concept. The traditional concept of power, grounded in Hobbes, places a lot of emphasis on the competitive aspect of power. One is powerful if one has power over other people, if when resources are limited, one is able to get a greater share of them than the majority of the community. This is also what Callicles understands by power. This understanding of 'power' however, is not the only one available. I want to argue that there is such a thing as non-competitive power, and that this is the kind of power Nietzsche refers to when he talks of 'the powerful and the weak'. I will bring this conception of power to light by drawing a parallel with the dual meaning of 'strength'.

Strength, like power, can refer to a competitive quality: "I'm stronger than you" may mean "I'm strong enough to kill you, or take your property from you". But when we say of a child who succumbs to illness easily that she is not very strong, we don't mean that she is unable to fight her contemporaries, or to take things from them. This can follow, of course, but it is incidental. Strength here is understood primarily as the ability to fight off disease, or to remain healthy. The same dual sense of 'strength' is recovered from the psychological domain. 'Strong-willed' or 'strong-minded' may mean that one is not easily corrupted or discouraged, or that one can resist temptation, as well as that one can impose one's wills on others and generally get one's own way.

In both the physical and the psychological instances, the first sense of the word 'strength' is akin to health. The implication of strength as relative to other people is incidental, not essential. It is also contingent: there could be a community in which everyone was equally healthy and strong-minded. The threat of weakness would exist (otherwise presumably 'strength' would have no meaning), but only as something to be fought off in oneself as part of one's upbringing.

Does the same dual meaning exist in the case of 'power'? We do say that someone has a powerful intellect, and we certainly don't refer to their ability to crush other people's intellects, but rather their aptitude at certain difficult tasks. In any case, it seems that Nietzsche is using the word 'power' in that non-competitive sense. In the Gay Science (§290), he refers to 'the weak, without power over themselves'. Clearly, in this passage, to be powerful is to be able to effect transformation on oneself, rather than on other people. This certainly explains the emphasis Nietzsche places on 'self-overcoming' when he discusses the will to power (this is to be investigated in Chapter 6). It also creates one more link between Nietzsche and Plato, at the expense of Callicles: for is not Socrates in the Gorgias urging Callicles to understand that power in the non-competitive sense is in fact more valuable than power over others?

Deleuze, bypassing the above considerations, interprets Nietzsche as follows. An active force is one which goes to the extremity of its power or of its desire, whereas a reactive force is one which tries to prevent this from happening by separating the force from its potential. This, at least in the case of his interpretation of Callicles' argument means the following: a reactive force is one which negates and restrains power and desire.

Negating power, or separating a force from its potential clearly means at least this: imposing limits on what someone is allowed to do or to be. What Deleuze does not make clear is whether it means imposing limits on anyone, including oneself, or merely on others. If imposing limits on oneself is reactive, then morality is reactive - every time I say 'I ought not', I impose a limit on myself. Generally speaking, laws impose limits and so they are reactive: this is, according to Deleuze, what Nietzsche and Callicles are commonly saying. But in fact, nowhere does Nietzsche say that active forces cannot impose limits on themselves. On the contrary, it seems that for him, power necessitates some kind of self-government which he calls self-overcoming:

The first passage makes it clear that power, in the Nietzschean sense, is not linked to hedonism, as it is for Callicles- it is not measured by the number of desires one may satisfy, or the amount of pleasure one can obtain. On the contrary, it is measured by the amount of pain one suffers. This remark prepares us for the equation presented in the second passage:

In what sense is morality the overcoming of one thing or person by itself? Walter Kaufmann explains:

Again it is clear that 'power' as Nietzsche understands it is more akin to self-control than to the ability to control others, and that Deleuze's interpretation, in terms of 'going to the extremity of desire', i.e. the failure to impose limits on what one can do or be, clearly misses the point. Self-overcoming, as I will argue in chapter 6, is the imposition of form or structure on the various drives that according to Nietzsche constitute the self. Form and structure is just another way of setting limits. When I impose form and structure on my garden, I impose limits on the growth of its elements - kill the weeds, cut back hedges, prune bushes, contain roots in beds, etc. The failure to impose limits would result in a wilderness. Nietzsche's view that an individual who lets herself grow free of constraints in the same way, is in fact weak, (GS290) is fairly uncontroversial. It is Deleuze's claim that the truly powerful do not impose limits on themselves which ought to surprise us.

If we accept the above, we could read the texts as implying merely that the active force, unlike the negative one, is not concerned with negating other forces - whenever it imposes any limits, it is only on itself. Again, it is clear that this is not a plausible interpretation. One cannot be powerful in any sense of the word without imposing limits on what others can do, or be. Power, according to Nietzsche, is struggle - struggle against oneself, no doubt, but equally struggle against others, otherwise the passage quoted in Section Two, discussing laws at Genealogy II,11, makes no sense. The enforcement of political equality is 'hostile to life', Nietzsche says, because it prevents struggle between the classes, and struggle is essential to power. Hence the powerful, who wield the active force, will not refrain from imposing limits on the power potential of others - this is not required by active morality.

The active/reactive distinction must mean something over and above the failure or otherwise to impose restrictions on forces (one's own or that of others). The following passage from the Gay Science offers a glimpse of what Nietzsche may actually mean by the distinction:

To say no is to wage war against something - in the words of Zarathustra (III, "On Passing By") to 'revile', 'despise'. But it is not merely an imposition of limits against something, it is an imposition of limits which is motivated by revenge, ressentiment: "What was it that first made you grunt? That nobody flattered you sufficiently; you sat down to this filth so as to have reason to grunt much - to have reason for much revenge".(p.290, VPN).

This then is what Nietzsche means. An accusation is reactive, if it is the product of ressentiment. 'Ressentiment' means - the angry remembrance of injuries, not just 'anger or animosity' which is the meaning of the English word 'resentment'.

Similarly, the imposition of limits and restrictions upon one's desires and character, if it comes as a response to ressentiment, i.e. if it is the product of a bad conscience, must be reactive. But the imposition of limits to one's desires and character, or indeed to the desires of others, which do not come as the result of accusations, or because they are despised, should not, it seems, carry the stigma of reactivity, or negativity.

Who then is reactive or weak? Those who accuse themselves and others and impose restraints as a result. Those whose actions are the result of a negative attitude, the imputation of wrongs, saying 'no' to something. So the difference between the weak and the strong - the slaves and the masters - is not so much to be seen in the kind of behaviour they engage in, whether they impose restraints on themselves and others, but on the motivations and attitudes at the root of their behaviour, i.e. whether they are affected by ressentiment or bad conscience, and act out of a desire for revenge.

This leaves only a negative definition of the strong or masters: those not affected by ressentiment. It may seem a little unspecific in the light of the fact that Nietzsche had so much to say about them. However, a lot of what he does say is in fact too vague to build a much clearer picture than what we have already, at least, prior to a more detailed understanding of self-overcoming (just as we cannot hope to understand what the just individual is for Plato prior to studying the concept of psychic harmony). For instance, the strong are described as 'the happy, well-constituted, powerful in soul and body', and 'the healthy' (GMIII, 14). These descriptions are vague, and, aside from the reference to health which will be taken up later in view of the interesting parallel it denotes between Plato and Nietzsche, do not bring anything new to our understanding. References to the ubermensch are not helpful, for Nietzsche did not say much that makes sense of the subject, and what he did say (especially references to 'blond beasts') has been much distorted. A negative description of the strong as those who are not motivated by ressentiment and bad conscience, if not entirely satisfactory, is better than this alternative.

Reactive cannot mean the same as imposing restraints. It is contingent that often those who impose restraints upon others are acting in a reactive manner. This is determined by the fact that their motive is ressentiment, hence the desire to diminish the power of those they perceive as stronger. Else the motive is bad conscience: the perception of one's superiority as bad, and the desire to erase it, which results in the destruction of one's own power. In either case, it is not the imposition of limits itself, but the motive behind it, which makes an action reactive.

It is not the imposing of limits and restrictions itself, which makes something reactive, but the imposing of limits and restriction in a way that separates a force from its potential, i.e. that is hostile to the flourishing of the will to power, because it cannot flourish in oneself. In this sentence one can see clearly the superficial resemblance between Nietzsche and Callicles, and that it is superficial. The very same could be said of Callicles's view, but for the exception that we would have to replace 'will to power' for 'power as the ability to satisfy competitive desires'.

What is reactive, then, is whatever comes in the way of the growth of power in the Nietzschean sense - and that involves struggle, overcoming resistance in oneself or others - whatever frustrates the essence of life, and in particular, the proper functioning of the human organism.

The above discussion casts doubt on whether Deleuze is right in describing the morality defended by Callicles as 'active'. If there is nothing more to Callicles' morality than its command to pursue desires to their extremity, i.e. the failure to impose restraints upon oneself, then it is doubtful, in the light of our earlier comments that it is active. We shall study the argument and attempt to clarify this issue: does Callicles' morality qualify as active?

First, let us review the evidence which indicates that Callicles may be using a Nietzschean distinction. Callicles distinguishes between what is just by nature, and what is just by convention. The law, he says, is just by convention but unjust by nature:

If conventional morality is born from 'the weak' then according to Nietzsche, it is bad (cf. Anti-Christ §2), and if it is bad, then it is reactive. But do 'the strong' referred to by Callicles qualify as good or active? The strong do not impose restrictions on themselves, says Callicles.

Callicles's view of human nature holds the key to his morality: the good life consists in satisfying as many desires as possible. To make this possible is good: hence intemperance is a virtue. Not to have the power to satisfy one's desires, and to seek to prevent those who have from doing so is bad. To be temperate is to be a slave - this, according to Callicles is contrary to virtue and happiness.

Before we even consider the likeness of Callicles' views to Nietzsche's one obvious comparison presents itself. Callicles' picture of human nature and happiness is essentially Hobbes' picture. In Chapter Six of the Leviathan, Hobbes writes:

As for Callicles, for Hobbes it is part of human nature to seek to satisfy one's desires, and become as powerful as is needed to achieve this:

It may look as though the comparison between Callicles and Hobbes brings the former even closer to Nietzsche. Indeed, Hobbes argues like Callicles that the good life consists in success in satisfying appetites or desires. He also argues, like Nietzsche that the virtue which makes the good life attainable is power. This may seem to bridge the gap - if there was one - between Callicles and Nietzsche. However, the comparison stops here: it does not go far enough to lead to the conclusion that Nietzsche and Callicles hold similar views on human nature and morality, and it shows that in fact there are irreconcilable differences between the two.

The main difference between Nietzsche's and Hobbes' views (and we can transfer that difference from Hobbes to Callicles) lies in their conception of power as underlying human nature. We went some way towards explaining this difference at the beginning of the present section by stating that power in the Nietzschean sense is non-competitive, does not have to do with desire satisfaction whatever desires one may have, nor with the pursuit of pleasure or the acquisition of things at the expense of other people. It has to do with the ability to 'overcome' oneself, shape one's character. For Hobbes, power is good in so far as it is a means to obtaining goods, i.e. to satisfy the desires and appetites. This highlights another important difference between Nietzsche and Hobbes's conceptions of power. Because survival is necessary to satisfy desires, and because it is indeed itself desirable, power is also a means to survival.The telos of human life, according to Hobbes, is therefore survival, and the satisfaction of one's desires. Power is a good, but an instrumental one.

Nietzsche explicitly rejects conceptions of the human telos as survival. For him, power is a good, not as a means to something else, but as an end. The telos of human nature is just that - to 'vent its strength':

The good life, the active life, is one in which the will to power expresses itself, as is the function of the human organism. But the best way to do this, according to Nietzsche, is to turn upon oneself, to shape one's character and make it strong. If survival or the satisfaction of desires are good, they are not essentially so - they are a contingent consequence of the necessity for power to vent its strength. For Nietzsche, it is lack of power in this sense, rather than poor performance in desire satisfaction or survival which is a sign of sickness, corruption, decline or decadence.

Through studying the parallels between Callicles, Hobbes and Nietzsche, it has become clear that if Callicles' views on human nature and morality are Hobbesian, they are not Nietzschean. Both Callicles and Hobbes seem to value power as a means to survival and the satisfaction of one's desires which for them is the telos of human nature, that which defines the good life. Nietzsche on the other hand claims that the function of human life is simply the expression of the will to power. By this he means that power should not be perceived as the means to survival through competition. It is that which we are by nature suited to strive for. There are therefore no grounds for arguing that Callicles is being Nietzschean, or 'active' in his attack on Plato's defence of justice. The resemblance between his and Nietzsche's argument is superficial and the comparison undermined by fundamental differences in their views of human nature and the human good.

What has also become clear is that in order to understand Nietzsche's concept of power, we need to study his concept of self-overcoming: power for Nietzsche is first and foremost power over oneself (those who lack this are weak, cf. GS290). This is defined negatively as being distinct from competitive forms of power, or power to survive, or to obtain goods. For a positive description of what is involved in Nietzschean power, we must investigate the concept of self-overcoming in Chapter 6.

We saw in §3 that Nietzsche claims that life as expression of will to power necessitates the practice of self-overcoming - the ability to exercise one' power on oneself, to overcome pain, and to do what seems difficult. We will delve deeper into Nietzche's conception of self-overcoming, and its relation to Plato's psychic harmony in Chapter VI. In this section, we will suppose that self-overcoming is not in principle incompatible with Socratic temperance, and that a lot of what Socrates says on temperance in the Gorgias is acceptable from a Nietzschean point of view. As Socrates rejects Callicles' position on the grounds that temperance plays no role in it, it becomes futile to compare Callicles' ethics to Nietzsche's. If there is no place for power over oneself in Calliclean ethics, then it cannot be Nietzschean - the central concept of Nietzschean ethics, i.e. self-overcoming, is missing.

I will argue that Socrates rejects Callicles's ethics on two related grounds. First, Callicles' s position is self-defeating: Socrates manages to show that temperance is necessary for the achievement of happiness from Callicles' s point of view. Secondly, Socrates cannot accept any ethical position in which temperance has no place, because he believes that psychic order (this is a precursor in the Gorgias of psychic harmony in the Republic) is necessary for happiness. Psychic order is not possible without temperance.

The first of Socrates' two reasons for rejecting Callicles' s position is straightforwardly acceptable from Nietzsche's point of view - it is merely a logical point. The second is also acceptable for Nietzsche in so far as we can read for temperance, self-overcoming, i.e. in so far as Nietzsche believes something akin to temperance is necessary for the good life. But we cannot infer, without further argument, that Nietzsche's reasons for claiming that self-overcoming is necessary for the good life are similar to Plato's reasons for believing that order or harmony are necessary for happiness. Temperance is said to produce happiness in the Gorgias for the following two reasons: it enables one to discriminate between one's desires, so that one can satisfy those which will lead to greater happiness; it helps order the soul, and Plato believes this is necessary for happiness. This is cashed out in the Republic in terms of psychic harmony, i.e. best order of the soul according to reason. We cannot claim here, for lack of evidence, that Nietzsche believes it is a good thing for the soul to be ruled by reason. His attitude to the role of reason in the good life will be the subject of Chapter V.

I will begin by presenting Socrates' arguments for the claim that Callicles' s position, in so far as it rejects temperance, is self-defeating. A critique of Callicles' s position must take note of its Hobbesian nature: because power is necessary for the satisfaction of one's desires and appetites, then happiness requires power as well as desire satisfaction. This means that Socrates can attack Callicles' position from two different routes. He can claim (1) that the intemperate are not truly powerful, and hence that they cannot become happy if power is the key to the good life, and (2) that the intemperate are not good at satisfying their desires and appetites, and thus, fail to become happy on the second reading of Callicles' position. I will show how Socrates in fact uses these two routes to attack Callicles' ethical position.

At 491d Socrates asks Callicles a question. He does not present any arguments, but an argument is strongly suggested to the effect that the intemperate cannot be truly powerful. He asks of the better and more powerful whether they need govern others only, or themselves as well, i.e. whether they need to exercise self-mastery or temperance:

This is a typical Socratic question, some might say a trick question, whose aim is possibly to uncover a contradiction in the interlocutor's view, or at least to indicate that the interlocutor has not thought sufficiently on the subject and needs to inquire further into the nature of power and self-mastery. In the Laches, or the Protagoras, or any other early dialogue, one imagines that Socrates' interlocutor would have questioned Socrates and generally played the game until they arrived at a demonstration that self-mastery or temperance is a necessary part of happiness, which, along with the premise of the inseparability of the virtues, would be one step towards showing that justice is necessary for happiness. But Callicles does not play the game on Socrates' terms. After he asks two questions to establish what Socrates means , Callicles accuses him of 'innocence' and goes on to expound his own view.

Had Socrates been able to lead the discussion further his argument might have been as follows: 'How could someone claim to be powerful, if he was not even capable of governing himself? Would a doctor who was not capable of looking after his own health be any good? And so, how could a man who had no power over himself be powerful at all?' Or he might have said: 'Do you agree that the most powerful is the one who has power over the greatest number? But if a man has power over every one except himself, then he does not have power over the greatest number. So one who has power over himself is more powerful than one who does not.' The issue here of course, apart from the Reduction ad Absurdum of Callicles's position (hypothesis: the powerful do not exercise self-control; conclusion: the powerful are not as powerful as those who are less powerful than them because they exercise self-control), is what is involved in being powerful. Callicles, like Hobbes, assumes that power is that which enables one to satisfy competitive desires. Socrates is asking whether power may not have other aspects. One imagines he would be quite taken with a Nietzschean account of power as self-overcoming and agree with Nietzsche's claim that those who lack power over themselves are weak.

Socrates' question, and the implied answer, together with Callicles's interruption 'By temperate you mean simpletons! [...] Why, how could a man be happy when a slave to anybody at all?' 491e, suggest that Socrates is aiming at the following conclusion: no one is truly powerful who is not master of himself or herself - and if to have power is a necessary part of happiness, then one can only be happy if one is temperate. Hence Callicles cannot argue that happiness consists in power and intemperance - if he does, then his position is self-defeating.

The second route taken by Socrates to show that Callicles' s position is untenable involves the telling of two stories at 492e-494a. The first story is this: the part of the soul in which appetites reside is like a jar, because 'it can be swayed easily', i.e. it is unreliable. In intemperate people, it is like a leaky jar which can never be filled. And in Hades, the intemperate are made to carry water from a leaky jar - the metaphor for their appetites - to a sieve - metaphor for their soul. This, of course, makes them unhappy, and even more so if happiness consists in the ability to satisfy one's desires, as Callicles claims, because the state of the intemperate, as described in the story, is permanently unsatisfied.

The second story starts with a description of two men, each possessed of three jars which are to be filled with ingredients both necessary and difficult to come by - milk, wine, and honey. The first man has solid jars which he fills up so that he can then forget about them. The second man's jars are leaky and rotten. Accordingly, he is forced to fill them day and night, as otherwise, he will 'suffer extreme distress' in the knowledge that they are empty.

Both stories suggest the following. An intemperate person can never be satisfied, as their desires will be insatiable, they will become more demanding as they are encouraged to grow, and hence, more and more difficult to satisfy, until it becomes impossible to do so. Hence, the intemperate man will be kept up night and day in order to attempt to satisfy his desires, and he will find, that the jar remains empty. Moreover, the soul of the intemperate is unreliable - like a jar it can be swayed. This could mean simply that the intemperate person will be too much taken up with the demands of their desires to keep the rest of their soul in order. A pure desire satisfier comes to be at the mercy of her desires, as she has no way of determining which to satisfy. This of course is extensively covered in the Republic. The appetitive part needs to be given order by the rational part, otherwise the agent may even fail to recognise that two desires are conflicting, that satisfying one would prevent satisfaction of the other. In other words, the problem faced by the intemperate, is that they're incapable of rational planning.

The above argument can be linked back to Plato's claim that order of the soul is necessary for rational planning. A soul that sways back and forth is the seat of internal conflict. This theme, i.e. the pairing of appetites and lack of order, and unity of purpose is developed in the Gorgias, and further in the Republic. A soul that suffers from internal conflict is clearly 'separated from its potential'. It is no more in control of its power than the 'strong and the powerful' are when the laws of the weak prevent them from accomplishing what they can. In fact, one might argue, a very good way to prevent somebody from fulfilling their potential would be to instil conflict within their soul. Someone who is being driven in conflicting directions cannot be as powerful as someone who has unity of purpose.

A similar argument to the one I have just presented can be found in Book One of the Republic. Thrasymachus has maintained that the unjust are stronger than the just. Socrates replies as follows:

Whether in a group, or in an individual, injustice, like intemperance, leads to dissension, and dissension comes in the way of concerted, purposeful action. One wonders that Callicles does not see that, and that he mistakes the prevention and control of conflict for slavery.

That Plato meant us to understand the stories of the Gorgias in this way, i.e. as a metaphor for the loss of power which follows from intemperance, is supported by yet another passage from the Republic. At 545d he writes that 'change in any society starts with civil strife among the ruling class; as long as the ruling class remains united, even if it is quite small, no change is possible". In the spirit of Books VIII and IX, he goes on to show how what is true of the state must also be true of the individual. Hence, change for the worse in an individual must be the product of internal strife. I choose to look at the example of the timocratic character:

Loss of virtue, especially loss of temperance, leads, according to Plato, to loss of unity - and loss of unity, according to Plato, is loss of strength or power. The reactive fight the active, Nietzsche says, by separating their force, by putting the law between them and their potential. Unless one exercises some form of self-control, Plato says, one puts the unreliable character of contrary desires in the way of one's potential. It is impossible not to notice the parallels between the two positions: both believe that real power is power over the self, and that without it, one loses the ability to satisfy desires effectively.

The arguments in this section have shown this: that Callicles' s position is untenable unless he grants that temperance is a necessary virtue - as it is, it is self-defeating. But we know from the first part of this thesis that Plato believes further that temperance is necessary for the good life - not just from Callicles' s point of view. His belief is supported by the claim that the good life consists in psychic order or harmony, and in order to achieve this, we need to let our soul be ruled by its rational part. Reason, in Plato's ethical theory, is not just a means to coordinate desire satisfaction, it is also a goal-setter, and it is in this capacity that it must rule the soul for harmony to be achieved.

Although we know that Nietzsche believes a certain type of self-control is necessary for the good life, and hence that he would not take Callicles' s position as it is against Socrates, we do need to ask whether his own views on self-overcoming and in particular on the role of reason are compatible with Plato's conception of psychic harmony. These questions will be addressed in Chapters Five and Six.

In this last section, I will limit my efforts to an uncritical review of the evidence that Nietzsche thought Socrates was afflicted by 'dialectical ressentiment'. I will also identify the questions which one must answer in order to address this second part of Deleuze's challenge. These questions will be addressed in the next chapters.

There are several texts the reading of which might lead one to believe that Nietzsche, like Deleuze, accuses Socrates of dialectical ressentiment. I have selected the following from The Twilight of the Idols, the section entitled "The problem of Socrates".

The content of the above passages seems to be as follows: dialectic, the use of reason as persuasion, is a form of revenge, an expression of revolt from one who is oppressed by the noble people; thus Socrates, as a dialectician, suffers from ressentiment - the instinct of revenge. The assumptions are:

that reason is the tool of the weak, and that the tool of the weak is necessarily a tool for revenge. Only the second of these seems familiar, given what we have already said about Nietzsche's moral philosophy: the weak arm themselves for revenge. When they wage war against the more powerful than them, they do not merely wish to have as much as the powerful, but they want to see the powerful humiliated, separated from their strength - in this lies the reactive. But we do not know as yet why Nietzsche should hold the first of the above assumptions true.

How does Nietzsche arrive at the conclusion that reason is a tool of self-defence and revenge? Does he rely on the plausibility of the psychological portrait of the vengeful dialectician? When he mentions Reynard the fox as an example, one is tempted to believe him. But can this portrait encompass the character of Socrates? Is the allusion to Socrates' physical inferiority ('the sarcasm of the rachitic') evidence that Socrates is weak in any way?

The point which concerns us most here, is not the attack on Socrates' character - although work has been done to show that Nietzsche never intended to 'repudiate' Socrates- but the attack on reason itself. For if it is his reliance on rational discourse which would make Socrates reactive rather than active, then, since the role of reason is one of the central elements of Plato's defence of justice, it may be the case that from a Nietzschean point of view, that defence also sides with the reactive. Thus, it is important that we address this issue: is Nietzsche questioning the value of living one's life according to reason, and how does that bear on Plato's defence of justice?

In this section and the previous one, we have identified two problems that must be studied in order to understand the full impact of Nietzsche's critique of values on Plato's defence of justice. In Section Four we concluded that Nietzsche was not a straightforward objector to Plato because both recognised the necessity of some form of self-control for human flourishing. Accordingly we need to look at the concepts of self-control and human flourishing and their roles in Nietzsche's philosophy. This will be the object of Chapter Six. In this section we followed Deleuze's suggestion that Nietzsche objects to Socrates because of his use of reason, and concluded that Nietzsche must also object to the role which Socrates accords to reason or rationality in human life. Therefore, we need to study Nietzsche's views on the role of reason. This will be addressed in the following chapter.

The first approach (§2), consists of a refutation of the claim that Nietzsche's famous perspectival stance (we can only know something from a perspective) entails that there are no truths. If Nietzsche did in fact believe that there were no truths, then he would also believe the following: reason cannot deliver truths, not even moral truths, and hence it should hold no privileged place in the good life. I argue that if we take Nietzsche's genealogical analysis of morality seriously (if there are no truths, then Nietzsche's analysis is no better than any other), and unless we believe that his epistemology is fundamentally incoherent (if perspectivism entails that there are no truths, then it is self-defeating), then perspectivism cannot entail that there are no truths.

The second approach (§3) relates to Nietzsche's genealogical method. The genealogist asks historical questions about the origins of values - in this case the origins of the belief that it is good to be ruled by reason. What is uncovered determines how we will value that which is being investigated (here rationality) in the future. If the belief that the good life is the life led in accordance with reason turns out to have originated and been sustained through its history by motivations such as ressentiment and self-deception, then the genealogist will not attach any value to rationality understood in this way, and it will be correct to describe him or her as an anti-rationalist. I will show that Nietzsche's genealogy of rationality does not give him reason not to value rationality. This is the case even though the genealogy does not uncover a thoroughly unchequered past for rationality which is, according to Nietzsche, responsible for the death of Greek tragedy. In arguing that Nietzsche is not an anti-rationalist, I will look at his genealogy of rationality as presented in particular in the Birth of Tragedy (BOT) and the Gay Science (GS).

In §4, I look at Nietzsche's comments on Socrates' rationality in order to explain how Nietzsche can express reservations about the Platonic attitude to rationality (reason must rule the soul) without rejecting the more general claim that rationality plays an important role in the good life. Nietzsche, I claim, is worried that Socrates' rationality is exercised at the expense of other instincts which make up human nature and that it prevents the process of 'self-overcoming' from taking place. Nietzsche believes that this process is necessary for human flourishing.

I conclude in §5 that in order to determine the extent of Nietzsche's critique of Plato, we need to compare Nietzsche's concept of self-overcoming and Plato's concept of psychic harmony, and ask whether the two are not in fact compatible. This will be the aim of Chapter Six.

Possibly the most important contribution to the portrait of Nietzsche as an anti-rationalist, is the fact that he is a proponent of perspectivism. Perspectivism states that we can only know something from a perspective (a cognitive perspective is a corpus of beliefs one has at a particular time, just as a visual one is a spatial point of view). It is often taken to imply that truths are in fact illusions, i.e. that there is no single truth, just different ways of seeing and interpreting the world, maybe infinitely many. Nietzsche himself, in an early unpublished essay seems to believe that relativism follows from perspectivism:

This interpretation of perspectivism is relevant to our purpose for the following reason. If there are no objective truths, one might argue, it is futile to think of reason as an instrument for the pursuit of truths. In particular, it cannot deliver moral truths, or truths about the good life. Because of this, reason cannot hold a privileged place in human life, as it does in Plato's tripartite soul. This is a poor argument for at least one reason. We saw in Chapter Three that Plato's emphasis on the rule of reason does not depend so much on reason's role as a provider of truths, but on of the position it holds in the teleological structure of human nature. The interpretation itself, from which the argument is extrapolated is also almost transparently weak. How does it follow from a theory about knowledge that there are no truths? Some reason must be offered why we can deduce the metaphysical thesis from the epistemological one.

Despite its obvious weaknesses, it is important that we take into account this interpretation of Nietzsche's perspectivism, and its alleged implications for reason, because it is adopted, in some form or other, by many of the writers who see Nietzsche as an anti-rationalist. I propose to argue that contrary to this interpretation, perspectivism does not entail that there are no knowable truths. In doing so I will follow closely Maudemarie Clark's argument as presented in her Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy.

An argument for the conclusion that perspectivism does not entail that there are no truths could take one of two forms. The first argument is as follows: If perspectivism entails that there are no truths, then it is self-defeating (in the same way that relativism is) and inconsistent with Nietzsche's position as a genealogist.

Assuming that one of the central tenets of Nietzsche's philosophy is not completely incoherent, we must conclude that it is not the case that perspectivism entails there are no truths. Danto argued for the first half of the consequent. Nietzsche must be in a position to answer the question whether perspectivism is itself a perspective. If the answer is 'yes', then we have no reason to accept the truth of the proposition 'all knowledge is perspectival'. If the answer is 'no', then there is at least one piece of knowledge which is not perspectival, and perspectivism is false. In the light of this argument, it is easy to see why perspectivism would turn out to be inconsistent with Nietzsche's overall position. Nietzsche does not content himself with presenting one perspective amongst others without attempting to show that his perspective is in some sense better (indeed who would sacrifice a life of writing to such a pointless task?). Nietzsche clearly believes, for instance, that his genealogical analysis of moral values is better than the one offered by Christianity. Even if we interpret 'better' without reference to truth, e.g. Nietzsche's analysis is more 'active' or 'life-affirming', we cannot support our claim without appealing to the truth of some proposition. Here we would have to ask: 'is it true that Nietzsche's analysis is more active? Is it true that something being more active is better?' This is one more reason to suppose that Nietzsche did not believe perspectivism entailed the rejection of truth.

The second argument appeals to the metaphysical implications of perspectivism. Perspectivism entails the rejection of the possibility (not just empirical but conceptual) of knowledge of things-in-themselves. Knowledge as pure reason, i.e. reason uninfluenced by typically human capacities and interests is considered an absurdity. Hence the perspectivist denies that there can be truths in the sense of correspondence of propositions to facts about 'things-in-themselves'. Thus perspectivism only entails that there are no truths in the sense of correspondence truths. However, there is evidence that Nietzsche, in his later writings at least, accepted a coherence theory of truth. Therefore, assuming that Nietzsche was indeed a coherentist about truth, his perspectivism is quite compatible with the belief that there are truths, and that reason can be instrumental in finding them out. In fact, the following passage from the Genealogy may lead us to wonder why anyone ever thought that perspectivism entailed the rejection of truth:

I hope I have given sufficient reasons for the claim that perspectivism entails neither the rejection of truth, nor the redundancy of reason as a tool for knowledge. What perspectivism does claim, is that we cannot hope to know anything independently of our specific human cognitive capacities. It rejects the concept of pure reason, and its capacity to know 'the thing in itself'. How we know and what we know has to be a function of what we are. This does not, however, entail that there are no truths, that we cannot know them, or that our rational capacities do not play an important part in getting this knowledge.

§3. The genealogy of rationality.

The second approach to my conclusion that Nietzsche is not an anti-rationalist proposed in Section One, is through Nietzsche's genealogical method. Nietzsche assesses moral values through their past, i.e. by looking at how they originated, and how they were sustained through their history. If Nietzsche judges that the background of a particular value shows it to undermine human flourishing, then that value ought to be rejected. However, what often turns out to be the case is that Nietzsche uncovers both positive and negative episodes in the history of a particular value, such that it is not possible to conclude that this value should be discarded. The point of the genealogy, in those cases, is simply to deepen our understanding of why we have certain values. I will show that this is the case for Nietzsche's genealogy of rationality, and in particular, that the negative comments he makes about reason have to be set against the many passages in which he praises reason. In this section, my aim is to show how the negative and the positive comments can be reconciled, in support of my conclusion that his genealogy of rationality does not compel Nietzsche to be an anti-rationalist. I focus on passages from the Birth of Tragedy (BOT) and the Gay Science(GS).

I start by quoting the negative passages from BOT, and then contrast them to a reading of GS, which seems to sing the undivided praise of reason. GS is full of passages which praise the rational life, yet, the remarks he makes regarding the genealogy of reason would seem to support the view, just as BOT does, that reason is dangerous, hostile to life, and that we should be wary of letting it rule our lives. This contradiction between these two Nietzschean attitudes to reason is especially apparent in Book V of GS, where Nietzsche praises the coming age of the 'lover of knowledge' (§343), and one section later, denounces the 'will to truth' as 'concealed will to death' (§344). I will show that to read §344 as an attack on the value of reason is to misunderstand that section.

In Nietzsche's first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, reason, embodied by Socrates, 'kills' tragedy and thus demonstrates its negative value and power to undermine life. Greek tragedy harmonises the chaotic element of human life, the Dionysian, and its form-giving one, the Apollinian. 'Socratism', according to Nietzsche, replaces this harmony with a victory of the Apollinian over the Dionysian. Because Greek tragedy, according to Nietzsche, represents the apex of human flourishing, whatever brings about its destruction must be life-denying.

Although BOT is a youthful work, and Nietzsche tempered most of the claims he made there in later works, there is no reason to believe that he did not retain some of his beliefs about reason. Especially, the belief that reason is 'life-denying' reappears in some forms in several places, and in particular, in GS §344.

The gist of the above passages seems to be that the advent of the belief that reason should rule one's life destroyed whatever harmony human beings had achieved through art. If that was all there was to say about reason, then presumably, Nietzsche would be justified in being an anti-rationalist, i.e. in believing we are better off living 'unreasonably'. However, this is not all that Nietzsche has to say on the subject of reason. In GS, he has many praises to sing, of which this is one example:

This passage seems to claim the following: it is essentially human to exercise one's reason by questioning (it is not unlikely that Nietzsche has in mind Socrates and the elenchos here). If some of us claim to dislike this use of reason, then it is because we are suffering from bad intellectual conscience. Bad conscience, we saw in Chapter Four, is the other side of the coin of ressentiment: the sufferer of bad conscience has learnt to feel guilty about whatever it is that others envy in her. Bad intellectual conscience, then, is the feeling that one has no right to exercise one's reason, caused by the perception that others envy us this capacity, and that they hate us for it. For Nietzsche, bad conscience is as much an instance of self-deception as ressentiment, and it is no more admirable. Hence, if the hatred of reason originates from bad intellectual conscience, then hatred of reason is not admirable (even if it is less despicable than indifference towards reason, as Nietzsche is claiming here).

GS2 teaches us that Nietzsche believes both that love of reason is essentially human, and that hatred of reason is the product of bad conscience. If that were the only message which GS carried, there would be no question as to whether Nietzsche was an anti-rationalist: he obviously would not be. However, GS is unfortunately much more complicated than this. In particular, Nietzsche seems to be defending, in places, a view similar to that found in BOT, i.e. that reason is hostile to life. As the contrast between these two opposite attitudes to reason is especially apparent in Book Five of GS, this is what I will examine here.

The structure of Book V is summarised by Schacht in his contribution to Solomon and Higgins (1988) Reading Nietzsche :

According to this summary, it would seem that Nietzsche is singing an undivided praise of the value of reason. At the very least he is saying that this is the way reason will be perceived in the new godless age, and we have no reason to believe Nietzsche doesn't count himself as one of the leaders or actors of this new age.

What Schacht's summary doesn't say is that in the second section of Book V, after celebrating the fact that "all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again" (343) Nietzsche describes the 'will to truth' as concealed will to death, as encouraging the postulation of another world and negating this one (344). Talk of 'negating this world', which recurs in Nietzsche's writings and invariably has connotations of the 'reactive' rather than the active, makes a lot of sense if we understand it as referring to some form of self-deception: I cannot bear to think that I will spend my entire life in a world which treats me so badly, so I make myself believe that there is another world, which I can fly to in thought, or which I will actually become part of when I die. This other world can be the abstract world of philosophers, just as it can be the after life of religions. Why am I calling this a case of self-deception, why shouldn't one sincerely believe that there is another world, better than this one in some way or other, and indeed, why shouldn't there be such a world? The point isn't that one is lying to oneself about what there is apart from this world, but that one is denying to oneself, in the process of postulating the other world, that this world matters, that it is even real. So whatever happens to me in this world, and whatever I do in this world doesn't ultimately matter (as long as I don't burn the bridges to the other world), and I don't need to do anything about it. This kind of attitude is wholly incompatible with Nietzsche's ethics of becoming, i.e. his belief that we must constantly work on our character, overcome our suffering. What Nietzsche thinks must be fought off is the ethics of avoidance which comes with the postulation of another world.

What follows is a summary of the argument of §344. The will to truth, which makes it possible for the discipline of science to begin, translates, according to Nietzsche, either as the will not to be deceived, or the will not to deceive. If it is the first, then it presupposes that we are better off not being deceived, that truth is more valuable from the point of view of utility. But, Nietzsche points out, we have no evidence that this is the case, and in fact, on many occasions one is better off being deceived. Thus, Nietzsche argues, to attach unconditional value to truth is to go beyond the principle of utility. It is to abide by the principle: I will not deceive (not even myself). This, he goes on, is a moral principle, and as such, it conflicts with the de-deified, naturalised world which is presented in §343 as the play ground of the new scientists. Therefore, by attaching unconditional value to truth, scientists go beyond their world, our world, and postulate another one:

Science, Nietzsche says, is not possible without the unconditional will to truth, but the unconditional will to truth itself is not possible without the old metaphysical faith which negates this world to postulate another one. To negate this world amounts to the worst kind of self-deception, we saw. But the concept of self-deception only makes sense if we postulate another world. The explanation is circular, but before we write it off, we must ask whether it is viciously so. Nietzsche's analysis of the will to truth, and other world aspirations, enables not only his genealogy of morality, but also his critique of metaphysics in Part One of Beyond Good and Evil. That these critiques are enlightening, that even if we disagree with them, we come out with a richer understanding of the history of Christianity and of philosophy, shows that the circle is not vicious, i.e. that it embraces enough illuminating thoughts to render its circularity virtuous.

Nietzsche's point in the passage quoted above may be that however hard we might try, we cannot break free of the circle, that we are bound by the old faith in truth, and by the knowledge of what it really amounts to, i.e. negation of this world. However, when Nietzsche talks of the unconditional will to truth as dependent on the postulation of an other world, where this is the world of the thing-in-itself, we must bear in mind that this can only be the case on a correspondence theory of truth. If Nietzsche rejects correspondence and adopts a coherence theory of truth, then it could be the case that the godless anti-metaphysicians share the unconditional will to truth with the old philosophers and at the same time that they do not share their tendency to postulate another world. A coherence theory does not necessitate an appeal to things-in-themselves, and can flourish within the boundaries of the actual world.

Because of this complexity, and whether we interpret Nietzsche as saying that we cannot break free of the circle of truth, or that we must switch from an allegiance to correspondence to coherence, we cannot say that §344 constitutes an attack on the value of truth, and consequently, as it is not possible without truth, on science. While if we read it in isolation we would be strongly tempted to say that it does constitute an attack, in the context of Book V as a whole, it is far less likely that it is so. Book V we saw celebrates science and the pursuit of knowledge in general post-de-deification of the world. It would make little sense if every thing that was said in that book was fatally undermined by the argument of its second section. I conclude, therefore, that there is no reason to doubt that Nietzsche's attitude to reason is predominantly positive, as illustrated by GS2, and the numerous other passages, in which he sings the praises of reason.

Nietzsche doesn't reject the claim that reason plays an important role in the good life - a study of his genealogy of reason shows that what he has to say about reason and its role in human history is predominantly positive. However, Nietzsche's comments about Platonic reason, what he calls Socratism in BOT, remain to be explained. In this section I address this problem and try to explain why Nietzsche can express reservations about the Platonic attitude to rationality (the belief that reason must rule the soul), without rejecting the more general claim that rationality plays an important role in the good life. I argue that Nietzsche is worried that Platonic reason will repress the instincts, and act as a tyrant in the soul. This would threaten what Nietzsche believes to be essential for the good life, i.e. the capacity to overcome oneself.

Nietzsche is concerned whether rationality enhances or limits life. Accordingly, the questions he asks concerning reason, are these: What role does reason play in (1) our fundamental nature, (2) what we have become, (3) what we have it in us to become. Because reason is shown by Nietzsche's genealogy to play a major role in each case, Nietzsche cannot be described as an anti-rationalist.

According to Nietzsche's cultural history as detailed in works such as The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, and The Genealogy of Morals, we find that the answer to the second and third question must be that reason's role is essential in determining both what we have and what we may become. We have become Christian and metaphysical by negating life and creating a set of values (GMI), and even this was only possible after reason, embodied by Socrates, vanquished the hellenic culture(BOT). Reason is also portrayed as an essential element for the coming age that will, Nietzsche hopes, 'carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.'(GSIV283).

GS2, quoted earlier, shows that Nietzsche also believes that reason plays an important role in our fundamental nature. Also, the 'one thing needful' according to Nietzsche, i.e. that which can most truly be said to constitute human flourishing is to give style to one's character, and this is to be done according to art and reason. In the light of these remarks, what Nietzsche has to say about Socrates' rationality is, to say the least, puzzling. In the Birth of Tragedy, Socrates' rationality is described as the result of an hypertrophy, an exaggerated swelling of the metaphorical logical organ. But although rationality in Socrates is exaggerated, it is not unnatural. On the contrary, Nietzsche says, "in its unbridled flood it displays a natural power such as we encounter to our awed amazement only in the very greatest instinctive forces."

Socrates' reason is a 'natural power', an instinct - it must therefore be very close to the 'naturalised' human being. This human being, Nietzsche says he is made up of drives, or instincts, which all boil down to the one fundamental instinct, the will to power. This naturalised being, in my account, represents the skeleton of the highest ranking type of human life - that which we must identify in ourselves if we are to achieve the good life.

But Socrates' reason is 'unbridled', and it is 'absolutely prevented from turning against itself' a comment which we can only understand in the light of Nietzsche's concept of 'self-overcoming'. This concept recurs again and again not only in the Gay Science but in all the following volumes. It goes hand in hand with 'the one thing needful', i.e. giving style to one's character, by turning on it and assessing every trait, shaping the whole into an 'artistic plan' (Gay Science 290). To overcome oneself is to be able to 'cut the knot' with what one cares most about, for the sake of 'independence of the soul' (Gay Science 98). The 'free thinkers' and lovers of knowledge of the future are "human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome".

The ability to overcome oneself, then, is no less an essential feature of human nature than rationality in Nietzsche's picture. But this requires that we are able to turn on ourselves, that our nature is flexible, and that we are able to direct the forces that constitute our drives. This is clearly not the case for the Socrates described in the Birth of Tragedy: his reason is 'unbridled', i.e. uncontrolled, and cannot possibly turn against itself.

The same thought is reflected in a much later work, the Twilight of the Idols, in the section entitled "The Problem of Socrates": Socrates is accused of having turned reason into a tyrant.

In Nietzsche's Socrates reason is exercised at the expense not of instinct in general, as reason itself is an instinct, but of the other instincts. Socrates is not only rational, but he is exclusively rational - excessively so. This, as it makes self-overcoming impossible, goes against human nature, it limits it. For this reason, the answer to our question must be this: yes, reason plays a fundamental in human nature, and should be cultivated to enhance life, but reason at the expense of other instincts has the opposite effect. So when Nietzsche writes that the higher type are 'more unreasonable'(GS3) than the rest he means not that they reject reason, but that they do not make a tyrant of it, that they are in control of it and can let it 'pause' to make room for other instincts when necessary.

In this section I have argued that Nietzsche's attitude to Socratic rationality was no argument against the view I have defended in this chapter that Nietzsche is not an anti-rationalist, but on the contrary, believes that reason has an important role to play in the good life. Nietzsche's attitude to Socratic rationality says something, not so much about his beliefs on the role of reason in human life, as about his belief that self-overcoming is a necessary feature of the good life, and that in the case of Socrates, this may be under threat. This is what we must investigate in the next chapter.

The problem relating to Nietzsche's view of the role of reason in the ethical life has been partly solved. The allegation that Nietzsche is an anti-rationalist in that he believes reason should not play any major role in the ethical life is wrong. Therefore if Nietzsche's critique of values constitutes an objection to Plato's defence of justice, it cannot be on these grounds. It remains possible that Nietzsche may differ from Plato about exactly how important the role of reason is, and to find out, we need to inquire further into his conception of self-overcoming.

Given the ambivalent place of reason in human nature and culture, both as a negative and a positive component, it is difficult to decide what Nietzsche's final verdict is. The case study of Nietzsche's Socrates helps find an answer. Reason is a fundamental part of human nature, but can destroy that nature if it is not combined with the capacity to turn against itself, overcome itself. Reason is a good thing, unbridled reason is not.

This conclusion leaves us with the following questions: what is this other fundamental trait of human nature, self-overcoming? Why is it so important for human flourishing? Is it something that Plato fails to take into account as a result of which he accords too much importance to reason?

These questions follow on from the second problem highlighted at the end of Chapter IV: what is the relation between Nietzsche's concept of self-overcoming and Plato's concept of temperance or self-control? Are the two close enough that they might warrant doubt as to whether Nietzsche's critique of values does constitute an objection to Plato's defence of justice? The next chapter will look at Nietzsche's concept of self-overcoming (including 'giving style'). I will argue that the problems of overcoming oneself and 'giving style' to one's character belong to the same category as achieving Platonic psychic harmony.

This chapter aims to conclude the argument of Part Two to the effect that Nietzsche's critique of values is not entirely incompatible with Plato's account of justice, and thereby to eliminate one potentially very damaging objection to that account, an objection originally attributed to both Callicles and Nietzsche, namely that justice as Plato understands it is fit only for slaves and cannot be part of the good life.

In Chapter Four we concluded that Plato and Nietzsche, but not Callicles, agreed that the good life necessitates a certain amount of self-mastery. For Plato this means that one must exercise temperance. Temperance is an aspect of psychic harmony: the appetites and the thumos agreeing with the rule of reason (442c-d). Nietzsche introduces an apparently different concept, that of self-overcoming. We now need to ask just how close these concepts are, and whether they should lead us to the conclusion that Nietzsche's critique of values does not constitute an attack on Plato's defence of justice.

In Chapter Five we saw the possibility that the following difference might exist between Nietzsche' concept of self-overcoming and Plato's temperance - namely that the former entails that reason itself should be the subject of self-mastery whereas the latter does not and therefore may leave open the possibility that reason might become a tyrant of the soul, just as the appetites or emotions can if uncontrolled. We must inquire particularly into this potential difference.

In this chapter I propose to argue that there is no important difference between Nietzsche's concept of self-overcoming, also referred to as 'giving style' where persons are concerned, and Plato's concept of temperance (here this refers specifically to the rule of the rational part of the soul over the appetites and the emotions - psychic harmony). The concept of self-overcoming has already come up several times in the previous two chapters. In section three, I will propose a full elaboration and defence of this concept as a process for harmonising the various drives which make up one's self, aided by the process of sublimation. Self overcoming is defined (under the title 'giving style') in GS 290:

The section this passage is extracted from will be analysed in detail in section three.

In order to defend the thesis that there is no important difference between Platonic temperance and Nietzsche's concept of self-overcoming, I will need to respond to two challenges. The first objection argues that Nietzsche's concept of self-overcoming must differ from Plato's concept of temperance or psychic harmony in that the latter involves asceticism, i.e. the repression of desires by reason, and that Nietzsche rejects asceticism. This is a reiteration of the worry outlined above, i.e. that reason, in the Platonic soul, might become a tyrant. This tyranny would, for Nietzsche, express itself in the repression of the other drives, i.e. appetites and emotions.The second objection argues that the overcoming of one's character, 'giving style' lacks moral direction, as it is a purely artistic, or creative process, unlike Psychic harmony. I will argue that both objections are mistaken.

In replying to the first objection, I will argue that this objection relies on a misunderstanding of both Plato and Nietzsche, in that it is true neither that Plato believes repression to be reason's main way of controlling the other parts of the soul, nor that Nietzsche rejects all forms of control over one's character. To refute the second objection I will propose two possible meanings of the concept of giving style, or self-overcoming: (1) harmonizing the constituents of one's character; (2) ordering one's soul in a healthy or 'life affirming' manner. I will show that careful study of the texts does not support the view that either (1) or (2) lend themselves to interpretations as amoral processes. I will conclude that we have no reason to believe that psychic harmony and self-overcoming are in any way incompatible.

In this section I address the first objection to my thesis that there is no insurmountable difference between Nietzsche's conception of self-overcoming and Plato's psychic harmony. The objection states that the two conceptions are irreconcilable because psychic harmony involves the repression of the appetites by reason, a form of asceticism, and because it is well known that Nietzsche rejects all forms of asceticism. I will argue that the objection fails on two counts. First, it is not true that repression of the appetites constitutes the main element of psychic harmony - by repression I mean the attempt to eliminate something altogether - and second, Nietzsche does not reject all forms of asceticism, but favours a certain kind, that which involves the sublimation, rather than the repression of the desires. I will show that psychic harmony necessitates asceticism of that kind and that there is no disagreement between Nietzsche and Plato on this point.

Although I want to show that the objection is wrong, it is important to make it clear why it arose at all, what lesser truth would make one believe that the objection is true as a whole, and that Nietzsche rejects psychic harmony because he favours asceticism. The objection is right in pointing out that Plato can be interpreted as saying that reason should repress the appetites.

The objection is also right in insisting that Nietzsche rejects moral theories which encourage such repression of the desires as unhealthy, as the following passages show:

But the objection is wrong on two counts . First, if it were true that psychic harmony had been interpreted in the past as encouraging the repression of desires, then that interpretation was false. For it is not the case that psychic harmony involves repression. The reasonable man - i.e. the man whose soul is governed by the rational part, in other words the just man - as he is portrayed in Book Nine of the Republic, does not indulge nor starve his appetitive part. This is why his sleep, unlike the tyrant's, is undisturbed by violent dreams. Plato's analysis here anticipates Freud's: if desires are suppressed they are likely to come back and disturb us, either as violent, disturbing dreams, or as pathological behaviour.

Repression, or starvation of appetites, Plato suggests, is as much the cause of tyrannical behaviour patterns as indulging desires. The 'lawless pleasures and appetites' should be not repressed, but 'controlled by the laws and the better desires in alliance with reason'. (571b)

One may ask at this point how it is possible to control without suppressing. There are, I suppose many ways of doing so (we aim to control a good proportion of criminal elements in our society without suppressing them - if only by making sure that people have access to education and employment). Plato suggests that we lull the lawless appetites to sleep, with the aid of reason, and that at least we do not stimulate them into action by starving or overfeeding them, both of which would have similar effects according to Plato. Not to encourage a particular appetite to develop unduly is not the same as repressing it. That I do not attend weekly orgies does not mean that I am repressing my sexual appetites - that would only be the case if I did not allow myself any sexual activity whatsoever. Or again, if one does not choose to let one's children develop a taste exclusively for food high in fat and sugar, one cannot be said to repress their appetites. By feeding them a balanced diet, one tries to ensure that they do not crave sweets and junk foods. As in the previous example, if we do not encourage the appetite to grow, there is nothing to repress, or at least, nothing worth repressing which would endanger one's health mental or physical. This, not repression, is the model Plato is advocating.

The second criticism the objection calls for relates to the interpretation of Nietzsche. True, he does reject repression of desires as unhealthy - as indeed does Plato. But it does not follow from that that Nietzsche does not believe some control of the desires is necessary, or that he rejects all forms of asceticism. The following passages provide evidence that he does believe some control of the desires is beneficial, at least for philosophers, and that he accepts some form of asceticism - 'cheerful asceticism'.

But what does Nietzsche mean by continence? In the section previous to the one quoted, he explains what it is which makes the philosopher continent: "he is concerned with one thing alone, and assembles and saves up everything - time, energy, love, and interest - only for that one thing." GMIII, 8, p.110. Thus, he does not suggest that one should repress one's appetites - but that one should save them up, so that one can use the energy which they would have expended for something else which matters more, i.e. in Nietzsche's case, his work. This describes an economy of sublimation. Sublimation refers to the displacement of the energy derived from an instinct, drive, or impulse which is denied gratification into a socially acceptable activity. Freud saw sublimation as civilization's means of securing instinctual renunciation without appealing to repression. For example, some people's violent impulses are sublimated through athletics. The desire to hit the man at the bar (or the tendency to have such desires) is replaced by the desire to outrun one's competitors in the race. (Here one can reflect on the dual meaning of the verb 'to beat').

Although sublimation is incompatible with repression - an impulse cannot be redirected in other channels if it is repressed (a criminal cannot be rehabilitated if he is executed) - it can be seen as some kind of control, and is thus quite compatible with the pursuit of psychic harmony as described by Plato. In particular, one passage from Daybreak shows how close the two philosophers really are regarding the treatment of appetites which threaten psychic health:

That Nietzsche mentions extinction along with sublimation or transformation, does not mean that he sees repression as a good general policy any more than Plato does. Here he is talking about the tyrannical drive of the criminal. Had that drive not been allowed to become tyrannical, (and we saw that this kind of prevention need not appeal to repression) it would not need to be extinguished.

Nietzsche also believes that sublimation is the explanation for the existence of asceticism. Cruel impulses are sublimated through ressentiment, and bad conscience and give birth to ascetic impulses. Desires to murder, arson, rape and torture are replaced by desires for self-castigation. Civilization seeks to prevent the gratification of the cruel instincts (for obvious reasons), and by introducing the ideas of responsibility for one's actions and guilt, helps to turn these instincts against themselves, i.e. transform desires to hurt others into desires to hurt oneself.

Does Plato use the vocabulary of sublimation when he defines psychic harmony? Certainly he does in the case of the thumos. The emotions which are so unruly in children ('for they are from their very birth chock-full of rage and high spirits' 441a), are brought to 'marshal themselves on the side of reason' (440e), and this through 'the blending of music and gymnastics that will render them concordant, intensifying and fostering the one [reason] with fair words and teachings, and relaxing and sobering and making gentle the other by harmony and rhythm' (441e).

The idea that the appetites should be sublimated is also present in the Republic at 485d-e:

Plato seems to accept the following: the lawless appetites should be controlled and prevented from ruling the soul, but at the same time, they should not be repressed, i.e. extinguished. Their motivational force should be redirected so that it assists the whole soul in its pursuit of the Good. More precisely, it seems that Plato is arguing that bodily impulses can be sublimated through philosophy, i.e. that sexual desires, for instance, will be replaced, to a degree at least, by desires to acquire philosophical knowledge.

This idea, as already noted in footnote 5, is also present in the Symposium, where Plato has Diotima describing a process of sublimation whereby the sexual desires are redirected towards love of the Beautiful itself, a form of intellectual knowledge.

The idea that sexual desires should be replaced by the craving for intellectual pursuits may seem somewhat far fetched - certainly less intuitively plausible than the idea that aggressive impulses are sublimated through athletic activities, or that asceticism is a sublimation of cruel impulses. However, Plato is not the only serious thinker to have suggested that there could be a link between sexuality and love of knowledge. Freud himself believed that infantile sexual curiosity (characterised by these two questions: where do babies come from? and what differentiates the sexes?), when sublimated, gave birth to love of intellectual investigations.

According to Freud, it is curiosity which forms the link between the sexual impulses and the intellectual inclinations. A similar explanation makes sense of what Plato says in the Republic. Desires which originate in the appetites learn to flow towards knowledge, because the curiosity which forms their core can thus be satisfied. In the Symposium, however, what creates the link is not curiosity but creativity: sexuality and intellectual pursuits both seek satisfaction in the creation of an object: a child, or an ideal. That Plato held this particular analogy dear is shown by his renewed appeal to it in the Theaetetus, where Socrates compares himself to a midwife, assisting the birth of ideas. By appealing either to creativity or curiosity, Plato can make sense of the idea that bodily impulses could be sublimated through learning and philosophy - in fact, there is no reason why we should have to choose between creativity and curiosity: a combination of both would render the explanation even more plausible.

We can conclude this section by answering the objection as follows. It is not the case that Psychic harmony involves the repression of a whole genus of desires, or (in Nietzschean terms) of a drive: Plato makes it clear that the appetites of the reasonable man must neither be starved nor over-indulged. He believes control is necessary, but preferably, a creative type of control, i.e. not one which seeks to extinguish appetitive or emotional drives (by which I mean groups of a certain type of desires, i.e. not the desire to eat a chocolate bar now, but a general tendency to want to eat chocolate, an impulse, or instinct), but one which sublimates them, transforms them into drives of a similar but more beneficial nature. For instance, Diotima thinks the drive to procreancy can be sublimated into procreancy of the spirit, wisdom and artistic creativity. More generally, in Republic 485d-e Plato says that the appetites can be transformed into thirst for learning, and the pleasures of the soul thereby substituted for those of the body.

Both the above examples may be taken to suggest that repression is at play after all: bodily appetites are to be transformed into qualities of the soul, and the result will be that we shall have no such appetites left. This is an unwarranted interpretation. For presumably appetites only need to be sublimated if they are troublesome, if they threaten psychic health. Plato cannot be seriously suggesting that all bodily desires should be transformed as our chances of survival would seriously be damaged as a consequence - where would we be without the drive to reproduce or feed? So again I conclude that sublimation, not repression, and the control of appetites and emotions so that they do not grow to harmful proportions is what Plato advocates as a general policy for preserving psychic health.

In this section it was also argued that Nietzsche does not reject moral theories which demand that we control our desires. What he does reject is repression qua extinction. On the contrary, he seems to believe that an ideal life would involve sublimation - a form of control - of the appetites for the benefit of the pursuit of one's ideal. It follows from these conclusions that there is in fact no significant difference between Nietzsche's and Plato's moral psychology regarding the control of the appetites: neither is in favour of repression, both advocate a certain creative control involving sublimation.

In this section I will attempt to answer the second objection cited at the beginning of this chapter, namely, that self-overcoming, cannot be like psychic harmony because it lacks moral direction. In other words, one can practice self-overcoming whatever one's moral allegiance. I will show that this objection is no more successful than the first one, i.e. that psychic health involves repressions of the instincts by reason, by analysing two possible meanings of the expression 'giving style', which both find support in Nietzsche's texts. These meanings are (1) giving style means harmonizing the constituents of one's character, and (2) giving style means ordering one's soul in a healthy and life affirming manner. I will show that Nietzsche's writings do not support the view that either (1) or (2) designates an amoral process.

When self-overcoming is applied to a person's character, as opposed to, say, a whole culture, it is called 'giving style' to it, and it is a form of self-mastery, a subsuming of one's various traits under a law, an orderly and artistic rearranging of them:

As well as questions of interpretation, which I shall address shortly, this passage raises a challenge for my thesis that there is no significant difference between psychic harmony and self-overcoming. An artistic process, we might plausibly argue, lacks moral direction. This intuition is often disputed, but only where it concerns narrative art: few people would argue that a vase, for instance, can be morally good or bad. As far as 'giving style' is concerned, Nietzsche writes that one should arrange one's character according to an artistic plan, but there is no mention of a moral plan. In the circumstances, we must at least suspect that it would be possible for giving style to be an amoral activity - for when Nietzsche writes that even 'weaknesses delight the eye', is he not saying that traits we consider vices are made acceptable? Tanner expresses this worry:

According to Tanner, whether or not giving style turns out to be an amoral activity depends on what we actually take it to mean, i.e. what it means to take all the bits of our nature - good and bad - and fit them into an artistic plan. If by an artistic plan we mean a plan that manages to make everything fit into a confined space without altering anything in the process, then Tanner's worry is justified: a violent, dishonest individual will not lose any violence or dishonesty by giving style to his or her character - he or she will learn to live with these traits and at the same time others which may be virtuous. It will be all about learning to accept one's vices, not getting rid of them.

Whether or not the process described above is an achievable one (of course Plato would say that it is not, that one cannot 'learn to live' in any desirable sense with a vicious character) it is far from clear that it captures the meaning of 'giving style'. To be in a position to understand what that means, we must elucidate the meaning of that other term, 'artistic plan'. Only when we do know what Nietzsche means by an artistic plan, will we be able to determine whether or not giving style lacks moral direction. Hence we must now turn our inquiry to the interpretation of the passage at GS290, and in particular, of the expression 'artistic plan'.

At least two answers to the question what Nietzsche means by an artistic plan present themselves. One is more or less straightforward, i.e. an attempt to say what any one would mean by 'artistic plan', and the other is tied more closely with Nietzsche's philosophy. The two answers need not be exclusive, and I suspect that on a richer account, they may in fact be complementary.

If one were to define 'artistic plan' independently of Nietzsche's terminology, one might say something like this. A group is arranged in an artistic plan if it is pleasing to the eye, and if no part of it detracts from the beauty of the whole, but all parts can be seen to participate in the result being aesthetically pleasing. In a nineteenth century restoration of the Laocoon group, Laocoon's right arm was raised straight above his head. The missing arm having been found, the statue was restored again in 1957, this time, with Laocoon's arm folded behind his neck, as if attempting to loosen the snake's hold. If we compare the group as it now stands in the Vatican museums to sketches of its nineteenth century incarnation, it is immediately apparent that the former is more aesthetically pleasing, and that it is so because the arm which used to stick out like a sore thumb is now integrated in the artistic plan of the whole.

Another way to express the difference between the two restorations of the sculpture would be to say that the earlier restoration is less harmonious than the more recent one. Indeed, the word 'harmony' commonly refers to the aesthetic arrangement of musical parts. So a first tentative definition of 'artistic' plan would be 'arrangement of all parts in a harmonious whole'. Harmony denotes an interdependence of the various parts of one's character. What each part does is decided in relation to the function of the others. For Plato, this means that the rational part must be in charge, as it is the only part which is capable of taking the whole soul into account, and hence determining its activity according to that of the other parts. The process of achieving interdependence is helped by the imposition of form or structure on the parts in question. For example, a choir will be more likely to sing in harmony if the voices which constitute it follow written parts. I believe that this is what Nietzsche means by 'giving style', i.e. the imposition of form on one's character so that the activity of each drive determines or is determined by the activity of every other drive, in such a way that all can flourish (in the same sense, harmony in music insures that all the voices sound good). For example, if my character is such that I have the making of a successful professional but suffer from laziness, then giving style will ensure that my laziness is reduced so as not to counter my other drives and prevent flourishing.

This definition isn't, of course, sufficient to dispel our worries about whether giving style could be an amoral process. We do not know that bringing harmony to one's character would necessarily suppress the evil in it. We do not know either how this harmonising is done. Does Nietzsche suggest we work on character traits, particular desires, drives? We are not in a position to answer at this point, so we cannot use this first definition of 'giving style' to determine whether it is an amoral process and therefore incompatible with psychic harmony. What we can say, however, is that on certain accounts, and in particular, Plato's, to bring harmony to a person's soul is not amoral, but on the contrary, it is the same as to render a person morally good. Thus, on this interpretation, giving style is not disqualified from being a moral process by being also an artistic one. We now turn to an interpretation of 'artistic plan' which is more specific to Nietzschean terminology.

Although one would be at a loss to find a clear definition of an artistic process anywhere in Nietzsche's work - outside, that is, his discussion of Greek Tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy - there are recurring themes which link art with health and will to power. Here I will concentrate on two expressions of these themes, and show that they are consistent with the claim that giving style to one's character is not an amoral process. The two claims I will focus on are (1) that an artistic process is 'a triumphant response to suffering' - thus linking art and health, and (2) that an artistic process is life-affirming, and that life 'simply is will to power'. I will show that the first does not contradict in any way Plato's claims re psychic harmony, but that it makes giving style quite compatible with the imposition of order on the instincts (appetites and emotions) by reason. The second claim will prove more problematic at first, due to Nietzsche's insistence that life is 'essentially tyranny'. But we will disarm the objection by proposing an alternative interpretation of Nietzsche's words to that effect, one which again, is perfectly compatible with giving style being a moral process not unlike Platonic psychic harmony. I now turn to the examination of the first theme under scrutiny, the linking of art and health.

The passage at GS290 which treats of 'giving style' concludes with the following:

The end of the passage links giving style with acceptance of oneself, and the failure to do so with the development of immoral character traits - the desire for revenge is not only 'ugly', it is also, as it is for Plato, 'bad'. Acceptance of oneself is rendered more urgently necessary because lack of it makes a human being intolerable to behold. Here we must ask what it is which is intolerable about a human character which has not been given style. Nietzsche gives us an important clue in the Genealogy of Morals when he says that "Man is ... the sick animal ... [...] the most imperiled, the most chronically and profoundly sick of all animals" GMIII, 13,121. The character of man when it has not been given a form through self-control is intolerable because it is 'profoundly sick'. This comment introduces the link between art and health. This link is in fact emphasised in the Birth of Tragedy, where, according to Kaufmann, art is represented as 'a triumphant response to suffering' (p.131). Similarly, Staten writes that "the Birth of Tragedy in fact focuses on the necessity of the Apollinian palliation of the unbearable Dionysian reality" (p.86).The Dionysian reality is characterised by nature on which no form has been imposed:

To this disorder, the Apollinian imposes the force of illusion: it gives form to suffering, makes it pleasurable to behold:

What is the impact of the illusion in question? Nietzsche's answer is largely inspired by Schopenhauer, and given his rejection of most of that philosopher's ideas later on, we need to take what he says with a pinch of salt:

The end of this passage has buddhist overtones which Nietzsche would undoubtedly reject in later works, i.e. he would deny that passive contemplation is the outcome of one's acceptance of suffering. Indeed, such behaviour would not sit well with life as will to power, and the injunction that we do not cease to overcome ourselves. An alternative resolution to the conflict between the Dionysian (the world of suffering) and the Apollinian (the pleasurable illusion) is that there is none: we must continue to give style to our characters, and if that is not possible any more, we must give style where it is needed elsewhere. (Here I take a liberty by reading a Platonic argument into Nietzsche: for when the philosophers of the Republic have done with imposing harmony to their souls, they turn to the city to perform the same task. It is not clear whether Nietzsche thought either that one can ever be done with giving style to oneself, or that if one has achieved this, then one should turn one's efforts elsewhere. It is clear however, as testified by the end of the passage GS290 that he believed giving style was an activity beneficial not only to the one who receives it, but to all those who behold the character in question.)

The imposition of form onto the world is the only response to suffering which makes the world tolerable to live in, hence the importance of Greek Tragedy, and its superiority, according to Nietzsche, as an art form. Human beings, as part of this world, are also the seat of intolerable suffering, this suffering being characterised by their profound sickness. It follows naturally that in order to render this suffering tolerable, what needs to be done, is the imposition of form. Hence, giving style achieves on a smaller scale what Tragedy does for the world in general: it controls the 'savage beasts of nature' and renders them 'most pleasurable' to behold.

The analogy between the admirable character and the work of art seems to lie in this: the reconciliation of conflicting impulses, the chaotic 'natural' impulses, and the form-giving ones. From this it would not be a very big step to infer that giving style is reconciling the appetites and emotions with the rational impulse, thereby bringing the Nietzschean concept in line with the Platonic one of psychic harmony. (Especially so since Nietzsche suggests that giving style be conducted according to art and reason.) Before we can take such a step, however, we must answer one objection. When giving style to one's character, Nietzsche says that one must not deny one's instincts, but incorporate them in one's character, so that 'even weaknesses delight the eye'. What are the weaknesses in question? And what makes us think that they rank among the immoral rather than the moral instincts? The answer to the second question can be found in the argument of the first section of my Chapter Five. Immoralism is incompatible with Nietzsche's position as a genealogist, so for him, a weak instinct must mean an immoral one. Which instincts count as immoral according to Nietzsche? Here there is no clear or straight answer, as Nietzsche's moral psychology is very much agent-based, i.e. whether something is good or bad will depend in great part on its role in the individual psychology. We can nonetheless cite a couple of examples. At GS313, cruelty is described by Nietzsche as an undesirable instinct which he wishes to avoid. And at GS290, he refers to lack of control over oneself as a weakness. So cruelty and intemperance will count as examples of what he means by weaknesses here.

Staten comments on this aspect of giving style, i.e., reshaping oneself so that even weaknesses delight the eyes:

However, Staten's analysis is vague. Granted, Nietzsche does not think so-called weaknesses should be repressed. We discussed his arguments against repression of instincts in the previous section of this chapter, and argued that they were not in fact incompatible with Plato. Both Nietzsche and Plato, we saw, advocate some form of control of the impulses which does not involve 'paring away' at them, but insofar as possible, involves their redirection towards an object more suited to the well-being of the soul or character as a whole, i.e. some form of sublimation of the instincts. Does what Nietzsche say at GS290 contradict these arguments in any way? What he suggests we actually do with the undesirable instincts is this:

I will not attempt to explain what each of the transformations described in this passage actually amounts to - unfortunately, the passage is vague and metaphorical beyond interpretation. What matters here, is that Nietzsche proposes several ways of dealing with undesirable instincts, and that whatever these ways are, they certainly do not amount to leaving them untouched. Maybe Nietzsche does not pare away at his instincts (although the phrase 'the ugly that could not be removed' may suggest that he in fact does.) But he does judge them, i.e. he has to decide whether they must be concealed, or transformed, or saved up. There is no suggestion that any instinct is as good as another and that all will hold a place of honour in the character to which style has been given. To 'style' is to constrain and control, and one cannot give style to one's character and thereby render it tolerable to behold, if one is not able to control one's instincts. As Nietzsche writes later on in that passage, 'it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style'. Weakness is equated with lack of self-control, and not, as the quote from Staten may suggest, with control of one's instincts. I conclude that on this first analysis of 'giving style' in Nietzschean terms, i.e. by linking art to health, it does indeed appear that that phenomenon is too close to Platonic psychic harmony to present an objection against it. I now turn to my second attempt at analysing the concept of 'style' in Nietzschean terms, the claim linking art and life through will to power.

Commenting on The Birth of Tragedy, in the last section of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote the following:

According to this passage, the artist accepts life and all it entails (even destruction), and accepts it actively - Nietzsche is not talking of resignation here. In Ecce Homo he describes this acceptance as 'a Yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence', and he opposes this to 'the flight from reality - as the 'ideal' is for the weak, who are inspired by weakness' (p.272). This theme is also present in the preface to The Birth of Tragedy, §5, where Nietzsche writes that

That art should reflect an acceptance of reality, even at its most unpalatable, instead of a flight from it does not imply that an artistic process such as giving style will necessarily be amoral. We saw that what Nietzsche rejects first and foremost is repression of the instincts, and a moral shaping of character, such as the one proposed by Plato, does not require that we do this. It seems that Nietzsche is doing little more than reiterating this point when he condemns flights from reality. To accept that life contains suffering does not entail that one should seek to receive or inflict pain. It means only that one should not pretend there is no suffering around us, that one should not close one's eyes to it, or alternatively, direct one's eyes towards another world in which there is no suffering.

It is when we look deeper into Nietzsche's portrait of life as will to power that we perceive there might be problems with denying that giving style, if it is a life affirming process, could be immoral:

This is probably one of the most controversial descriptions of the will to power to be found in Nietzsche's published work; it suggests a tyrannical world in which a minority is encouraged to steal, kill, exploit those weaker than they. Nietzsche goes on:

This passage discourages our purpose because it describes the social group (we can translate this to the individual) which grows according to the will to power in terms far more reminiscent of Callicles's proposals than of anything Plato ever said. It claims that this tendency to be 'will to power incarnate' is neither moral nor amoral. This implies that Nietzsche's project is entirely different from Plato's - that he truly believes the 'one thing needful' i.e. giving style to one's character to be out of the moral domain altogether.

To say 'yes' to life is no longer to accept that it may be in part suffering, but to recognise that it is always, and in all its manifestations, tyrannical. We could not infer, that acceptance of suffering meant that one should suffer or make others suffer. Suffering is part of life, but not a permanent condition of any human being. One cannot help suffering sometimes, and then one should not deny it, but there is no reason why one should seek to suffer or make others suffer all the time. It simply does not follow from saying 'yes' to life. On the other hand, if life is always tyrannical, then any attempt not to be tyrannical, or to stop others from being so, is to deny life such as it is. It is to claim that we should not be what we cannot help being, and to pretend that it is possible to be otherwise. So the imposition of morality on one's character is a lie, or a pretence that life is not what it is.

Although I believe that the above argument is valid, I will argue that its premise is based on a misreading of Nietzsche. 'Life simply is ... will to power' does not translate as 'life is tyranny', despite the fact that Nietzsche seems to draw the conclusion that life is will to power from the imputation of impulses to life which one could only describe as tyrannical: 'appropriation, injury, etc.'. I will argue that instead, tyranny is only one expression of the will to power, that it is not more life-affirming than other expressions, not what we should aim towards when giving style to our characters, and definitely not what Nietzsche recommends.

Life, according to Nietzsche, is first and foremost the expression of the will to power, the display of power. But in GS290 we saw that, like Plato, he believes that power is closely associated with self-control. Giving style, let us not forget, is a mode of self-overcoming, and one can only overcome oneself by exercising one's power over oneself. This, of course, is closely linked to the picture of Nietzsche's moral psychology that I defended in Chapter Four. The ultimate form of power, for Nietzsche is non-competitive, it is power over oneself, or self-control. Non-competitive power is not a form of tyranny, in that it does not require that one inflicts suffering on anyone, or seek to reduce their power. And indeed, to claim that the powerful need to reduce the power of others would contradict Nietzsche's claim that such behaviour is 'reactive', in the sense discussed in Chapter Four.

On this reading of BGE259, it does not follow that to give style to one's character is to make it tyrannical. What does follow is that to give style is to exercise power on one's character, i.e. self-control. This of course is not necessarily incompatible with letting natural tyrannical instincts go unchecked. What it cannot mean is that we should disown them, pretend they are not there, or attempt to eradicate them. Instead, we may channel them towards something more pleasing to the eye, more palatable, in other words, sublimate them. This interpretation of giving style certainly accounts for the following picture of a character which has got style, as offered by Nietzsche:

The spirit that speaks softly, and avoids 'loud things' cannot be described as tyrannical in the traditional sense - it certainly has nothing in common with Callicles' s picture of a tyrant. Of course, we cannot tell from this description whether the character in question is moral or not, but that is not the point. The point is that there is no sense in which giving style is a necessarily amoral process, that it has to replicate the worst tyrannical impulses to be found in nature. The above character shows no sign of replicating them.

This section has argued the following. We have grounds to interpret 'giving style' according to an artistic plan as (1) harmonizing of all the constituents of character, and (2) ordering of the soul in a healthy and life-affirming manner. On neither of these interpretations is it right to infer that giving style needs be an amoral process. Close scrutiny of Nietzsche's texts certainly does not yield this conclusion - self-overcoming as he advocates it does not involve giving free reins to one's tyrannical instincts, but on the contrary, controlling them. I conclude that we cannot use Nietzsche's characterisation of the 'one thing needful' and oppose it to psychic harmony in order to create a divide between him and PLato.

The conclusion of this chapter is that we have no reason to believe that psychic harmony and self-overcoming are in any way incompatible. I have dealt with the two most powerful objections by showing that they were grounded in a misreading of Nietzsche's words in both cases, and of Plato's in the case of the first objection. Indeed, it is crucial to my interpretation of psychic harmony that Plato does not advocate the repression of the appetites as a general strategy for dealing with them. I have argued that there was evidence that both he and Nietzsche favoured some kind of control of the instincts which I called sublimation (after the Freudian model), and showed in the last section that this made it unlikely that Nietzsche thought 'giving style' allowed for tyrannical characters to develop.

On neither Nietzsche's nor Plato's picture, then, is reason allowed to become a tyrant of the soul. Its control over the appetites and the emotions is not exercised through repression, but sublimation. Reason does not extinguish any drives, but it redirects them so that they can participate in the harmony of the the whole soul. Thus the main potential difference between giving style or self-overcoming, and achieving psychic harmony has been shown not to exist. It does not follow, however, that Nietzsche's concept of giving style is identical to Plato's concept of psychic harmony. Some differences will have become apparent in the course of my discussion. I will now summarise them.

Although Nietzsche believes that there are general ground rules for giving style to one's character successfully - self-control, the pursuit of truth, and a continent life-style will all be beneficial, whereas lack of self-control, cruelty to others, and extreme asceticism, for example, will not - he does not believe the following: That the soul is constituted of three main drives (there are an unlimited number of manifestations of the will to power); that the harmonising of drives must be orchestrated always and mainly by the rational drive (although it plays an important part); that only a certain course of education will lead to harmony; that only philosophers can truly become harmonious (although he seems to be confident that philosophers are well placed to do so - see BGE part six.)

The upshot of the differences outlined above is that Nietzsche allows more freedom in flourishing. Although his scheme, like Plato's, is teleological, he believes that the function of a human being is set for an individual as well as for the genus human being. Hence the blue print for the harmonious human soul is far less specific than it is for Plato, allowing for individual variations, where Plato only allows for class ones. This of course makes Nietzsche's moral psychology both more vague, and more complicated. As giving style may be different for each individual, it is impossible to give an overall picture of what giving style involves, and when an attempt is made to describe the process for one individual, the absence of a model, or blue print to refer to means that the description must be lengthy and complicated, i.e. involving descriptions of that particular individual's character traits and education. So although it must be apparent that an account of Nietzschean flourishing would indeed be fascinating, it is impossible to provide one here, and my conclusion must remain within the proposed scope: that Nietzsche does not present an insurmountable objection to Plato's defence of justice, because his critique of morality is in many ways close to what Plato has to say about virtue.

This aim of this short section is to shed light on one puzzling aspect of my thesis. I have argued that Nietzsche, far from presenting strong objections to Plato's defence of justice, in fact argued along very similar lines, making the concept of self-overcoming central to his moral psychology in very much the same way that Plato uses psychic harmony. However, Nietzsche's work is peppered with unflattering references to Plato and Socrates, and, especially as far as the latter is concerned, it would seem that Nietzsche is rejecting violently not only their philosophy but also their way of life. This attitude might be taken as an objection to my thesis that Plato and Nietzsche's moral philosophies are close to one another, so I will show that it is in fact unjustified, and based on a misreading of Nietzsche's text.

Kaufmann, an advocate of the view that Nietzsche regarded Socrates as a model rather than an example of what must be avoided in philosophy, claims that a study of all the passages in which Socrates is mentioned by Nietzsche will show that Nietzsche, far from repudiating Socrates 'modelled his conception of his own task largely after Socrates' apology'. This picture of Nietzsche' s relationship with Socrates is obscured by the comments he makes in two of his works, i.e. The Birth of Tragedy, and Twilight of the Idols, where Socrates' work and character are criticized at length. However, even these comments, when read in the light of passages elsewhere, are far from being entirely negative. I have chosen to look at two of these passages which shed light on the more negative comments, and give us reason to believe that Nietzsche did not repudiate Socrates and Plato.

Both passages speak of praise and admiration for the life and thoughts of the two philosophers. They also help shed light on more negative comments. For instance, in Twilight of the Idols, Socrates is pictured as a decadent, and Nietzsche refers to Socrates' own admission that 'he harboured in himself all the bad vices and appetites'. In itself, this admission, and Nietzsche's reference to it looks bad - even more so in conjunction with the rest of section three, where Socrates' looks and descent are reviled, and with the rest of the chapter entitled "The problem of Socrates", where Socrates' rationalist outlook is criticised. However, it would be shortsighted to conclude that Nietzsche is repudiating Socrates here. First, we have no evidence that Nietzsche believed that possessing strong instincts was a bad thing. On the contrary, this seems to be an attitude which he attributes to, and criticises in Saint Paul. Secondly, the comment about Socrates' appetites looks very different if we read it in the light of BGEI,14 quoted above. In that passage, Nietzsche praises those who thought like Plato because they were possessed of stronger instincts than most, and were successful in overcoming them. As self-mastery is clearly a virtue which Socrates possessed, the fact that he had strong appetites can only be admirable: as strong as they were, he was able to overcome them. Hence Nietzsche's comments in section three of "The Problem of Socrates" is a sign of his admiration, not a criticism.

I am confident that more of Nietzsche's comments can be overturned in this manner, i.e. that more of his apparent criticisms of Socrates and Plato turn out to be praises when properly understood. There are, also, passages which denote straightforward admiration, like the beginning of GS340 quoted above. However, some passages remain in which Nietzsche is clearly not praising Socrates and Plato, but in which he describes them as diseased. In GS340, alongside his admiration for Socrates' courage and wisdom, Nietzsche expresses his puzzlement for his last words, which imply that life is a disease:

This way of thinking, he says, is passed on from Socrates to Plato, and in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil he writes:

The malady, pessimism, is what we must overcome in the Greek philosophers. This does not mean that Plato and Socrates are to be repudiated, or that our admiration must be withdrawn. Overcoming even what one is closest to is a necessity for Nietzsche, part of self-overcoming, and 'becoming what one is':

This, I believe, is why Plato, 'this loveliest product of Antiquity', and Socrates 'the wisest chatterer of all times' must be sacrificed - that Nietzsche should have the freedom and independence necessary for self-overcoming or giving style. Kaufmann claims that this apparent repudiation of Plato and Socrates is a key feature of Nietzsche's project,

I believe that Kaufmann's analysis is accurate, as it seems to be the only way to explain the ambiguous treatment Plato and Socrates receive from Nietzsche. This ambiguity means it is improbable that Nietzsche straightforwardly admired or disliked Plato and Socrates. That he admired them but sought to overcome both this admiration and the philosophy embodied by Plato and Socrates, explains why his comments should be both positive and negative. In brief, Nietzsche's negative comments about Socrates and Plato, instead of presenting an objection to my thesis that Nietzsche's moral philosophy does not contradict in any important way Plato's, confirm the closeness between the two philosophies. Plato's thought is so close to Nietzsche's that the latter feels he has to overcome it for the sake of his independence.

In this thesis I have argued that there is no substance to the claim that Nietzsche rejects Plato's account of justice, if we understand that account as an articulation of the view presented in the Crito as the reason why Socrates' shouldn't escape. I argued that the account presented in the Crito was as follows: Socrates will not escape because he believes that doing so would harm his psychic health as this is the effect unjust acts such as harming others have, and as he would have to give up philosophy, the practice of which is necessary to produce and maintain psychic health. I showed that this view was articulated in later dialogues. In particular, the role of the elenchos is spelled out in the Gorgias, as necessary and largely sufficient for psychic health, and the concept of psychic health is elaborated in the Republic, under the name of psychic harmony, as consisting in the ordering of the three parts of the soul according to reason. These arguments, taken together with the assertions of the Crito, constitute the reason why Socrates refuses to escape.

In Part Two, I argued that if properly understood, Nietzsche could in fact be seen to accept a broadly similar view to the one proposed in the Crito. I started by distinguishing Nietzsche's arguments from those offered by Callicles on the grounds that in spite of the initially striking resemblance of their arguments, their concepts of power and the human good differ drastically, and thus, so do their conclusion about justice and the good life. Some readings of Nietzsche imply that he rejects this account of justice because of its emphasis on the role of philosophy and reason, on the grounds that Nietzsche himself is an anti-rationalist. I argued that Nietzsche's view of reason, whether from the point of view of perspectivism, or of the genealogy, did not amount to a rejection of the view that reason plays an important role in the good life. I then argued that Nietzsche's concept of self-overcoming, when properly understood, does not run counter to Plato's concept of psychic harmony, but on the contrary, resembles it closely. On my account, self-overcoming, i.e. the shaping and ordering of the various components of one's character, has in common with Plato's psychic harmony that it prefers sublimation to repression as a way of controlling unruly appetites and emotions, and that its object is to create a moral self. Thus my account differs from some interpretations of Nietzsche which claim that he rejects any form of control over the appetites and emotions, and that he is an immoralist.

So does Nietzsche turn out to be one more conventional moralist of the sort he's been attacking? Some people might take a view such as mine to entail this because they see Plato as undertaking a defence of conventional morality. However, even if Plato is at pains to show that his views tie in with at least some ordinary moral beliefs, like Nietzsche, he holds these beliefs to be true for unconventional reasons. The emphasis on the care of one's soul and the importance of philosophy departs very much from the concerns of the 'conventional morality', i.e. concerns to do with rules, and the way one treats others. In fact, I see little reason to suppose that Plato would disagree with either the spirit or the content of the quotation in the epigraph. So although this thesis doesn't deny that Nietzsche's moral philosophy is highly original and challenging, it holds that the same is true of Plato's.