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Why Eudaimonia Is Better Than Happiness

A concert pianist performs rapturously
It’s about what we do, not what we feel.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We all say we want to be happy, yet the pursuit of happiness often seems like a wild goose chase.

Perhaps the problem is not so much with us, or the world we live in, but with the very concept of happiness.

The ancient Greeks had a better idea. They called it eudaimonia, literally, ‘good soul’, ‘good spirit’, or ‘good god’. Although Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle each understood eudaimonia in somewhat different ways, they all regarded it as the highest good, often even as the very aim and purpose of philosophy.

What Is Eudaimonia?

Eudaimonia is often translated simply as ‘happiness’—but that can be misleading.

The word happy, which is related to happen and perhaps, derives from the Norse happ for ‘chance’, ‘fortune’, or ‘luck’. From Irish to Greek, most European words for ‘happy’ originally meant something like ‘lucky’—one exception being Welsh, in which it originally meant ‘wise’. Another Old English word for ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ was gesælig, which, over the centuries, morphed into our ‘silly’.

Eudaimonia, by contrast, is anything but silly. It has nothing to do with chance or fortune and everything to do with thought and design—with how we choose to live. Compared with happiness, it is a much deeper, fuller, and richer idea, often articulated in terms of flourishing or living a life that is worthwhile, fulfilling, and elevating.

All the major philosophical schools of antiquity, including even the Epicureans, regarded eudaimonia as the highest good. Like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, they differed over how it was to be achieved, but they all agreed that the aim of human life must be something higher or fuller than simple happiness.

Unlike happiness, eudaimonia is not an emotion but a state of being—or, especially for Aristotle, a state of doing. As such, it is more deeply rooted than happiness, and more stable and reliable. Although it leads to pleasure or satisfaction of the highest kind, it does not arise from pleasure, but from higher values and principles that transcend the here and now. The people of Athens put Socrates in prison, they even put him to death, but they did not and could not take away his eudaimonia.

Socrates on Eudaimonia

Socrates, it seems, equated eudaimonia with wisdom and virtue. In the Greater Alcibiades, he says that he who is not wise cannot be happy; in the Gorgias, that nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man; and in the Meno, that everything the soul endeavours or endures under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness.

At his trial, Socrates gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honour as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul. ‘Wealth,’ he said, ‘does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.’

Socrates supplied the supreme proof that nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man, for when the jurors condemned him to death, they only made him and his ideas as immortal as can be—and rather than appease them, which he could easily have done, he chose instead, very cannily, to abet them.

Plato on Eudaimonia

Plato broadly agreed with his teacher Socrates, and sought to answer an obvious objection: If virtue is the path to a flourishing life, why does injustice so often seem the easy shortcut?

In the Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon argues that most people are venal, but maintain a reputation for virtue and justice to evade the social costs of being or seeming unjust. But if a man could get hold of the fabled Ring of Gyges and make himself invisible, he would behave without restraint:

No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.

According to Glaucon, we behave justly not because we value justice, but because we are weak and fearful; while the unjust man who is cunning enough to seem just will get the better of everyone and everything.

In his magisterial reply to Glaucon, Plato famously conjures an idealised Republic to help him ‘locate’ (define) justice, first in the state, where it is larger and easier to pin down, and then in the individual. He argues that justice and injustice are to the soul as health and disease are to the body: if health in the body is intrinsically desirable, then so too is justice in the soul. For Plato, an unjust man cannot be happy because he is not in rational and ordered control of himself.

Aristotle on Eudaimonia

It is with Plato’s one-time student Aristotle, and his Nicomachean Ethics, that the concept of eudaimonia is most closely associated.

For Aristotle, a thing is best understood by looking at its end, purpose, or goal (Greek, telos—as in ‘teleology’ and ‘telomere’). The purpose of a knife is to cut, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what a knife is. The goal of medicine is good health, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what medicine is, or should be. If this is true of knives and medicine, might it also be true of us? Might we also have an ergon, or ‘distinctive function’?

Maybe we’ll come back to that.

If one follows Aristotle’s line of thought, it soon becomes apparent that some goals are subordinate to other goals, which are themselves subordinate to yet other goals. A medical student’s goal may be to qualify as a doctor, but this is subordinate to her goal of healing the sick, which is itself subordinate to her goal of making a living by doing something useful. This could go on and on, but unless the medical student has a goal that is an end-in-itself, nothing that she does is actually worth doing.

What, asks Aristotle, is this end-in-itself? This ‘supreme good’, he replies, is eudaimonia, and eudaimonia alone.

Eudaimonia, notice, is not just ‘happiness’, it’s salvation—the thing that prevents life from being an infinite regress of ends, as it so often seems. Only in eudaimonia does life become worth living in and of itself.

So, given its importance, what exactly did Aristotle understand by eudaimonia?

Whereas human beings need nourishment like plants, and have sentience like animals, our ergon—the thing that most makes us not something else, like an oak, a dolphin, or a baboon—says Aristotle, is our unique and god-like capacity to reason. Aristippus of Cyrene made much the same point when he chided a champion swimmer: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of boasting about what a fish or dolphin could better do?’ Thus, our supreme good is to lead a life that enables us to use and develop our reason, and that is in accordance with rational principles.

By living our life to the full according to our essential nature as rational beings, we are bound to flourish, that is, to develop and express our full human potential, regardless of the ebb and flow of our good or bad fortune.

To put this in modern terms, if we develop our thinking and imagining skills, if we guard against lies and self-deception, if we refine and master our emotions, we will, over the years, make better and better choices, do more and more meaningful things, and derive ever-increasing satisfaction from all that we have become and all that we have achieved, and are yet able to achieve.

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Plato’s Apology: Why the Father of Philosophy Refused to Save His Own Life

The Hemlock Cup
The Hemlock Cup

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

An outline and summary of Plato’s Apology, explaining why Socrates chose death rather than abandon philosophy.

At his famous trial, Socrates could almost certainly have saved his life.

He could have appealed to the jury’s emotions, begged for mercy, proposed exile, or simply promised to stop practising philosophy. Instead, he did none of these things. He was found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth, and sentenced to death by hemlock.

His defence speech, preserved by his student Plato in the Apology, is one of the founding texts of Western philosophy—not because it saved Socrates’ life, but because it illuminates why he refused to save himself.

The Official Charges—and the Real Charge

Plato’s Apology consists of three speeches delivered by Socrates before the supreme court of Athens (heliaea): the first in reply to the charges, the second concerning the appropriate penalty, and the third in response to the passing of the death sentence.

Three Athenians, Meletus, Anythus, and Lycon, had charged Socrates with refusing to recognise the Olympian gods and introducing different gods, and, relatedly, with corrupting the youth. Seeming to associate or confuse him with Anaxagoras and the sophists, they accused him of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching those same things to others’.

Although Socrates had been charged with the crime of impiety (asebeia), the underlying reason for his indictment may have been his anti-democratic leanings and close association with aristocrats such as Charmides and especially Critias, the leader of the Thirty Tyrants. Both Critias and Charmides died in 403, fighting against the exiled democratic forces. Although Socrates had refused to be tainted by the tyranny, he had remained in the city throughout, and, for all his moralising, had done little to actively oppose the regime. To many democrats, Socrates no longer seemed like the harmless eccentric of old, but like a dangerous and corrupting influence, a breeder of tyrants and the enemy of the common man. In the febrile atmosphere that had taken hold over the city, any accusation, however false or fanciful, could be seized upon as a pretext to punish him and scapegoat him for sufferings of the tyranny.

At his trial, before replying to Meletus and the other prosecutors, Socrates first answered what he called his ‘older accusers’: the rumours and prejudices that had dogged him for decades. These anonymous but far more dangerous enemies had turned many Athenians against him. Even the comic playwright Aristophanes had mocked and misrepresented him on the stage. But as many of the jurors could attest, he had never pronounced himself on divine matters, nor, like the sophists, pretended to understand virtue or taken money from his students. What, then, had given rise to the accusations against him?

The Oracle of Delphi and Socrates’ Lifelong Mission

Over the years, he says, he acquired a certain reputation for wisdom—not the superhuman wisdom of the sophists, but the sort of wisdom which is within our ken. When he learnt that the Oracle of Delphi had pronounced him the wisest of all men, he did not know what to make of it. So he questioned a politician with a reputation for wisdom and cross-examined his words to reveal their inconsistencies and contradictions. But the result was that the politician, instead of thanking him, hated him. Whereas both he and the politician knew nothing, he at least knew that he knew nothing, and, in that much, was wiser than the politician.

After that, he went from one man to another, first the politicians, then the poets, and then the craftsmen, and found that those with the greatest reputation for wisdom were, in fact, the most foolish of them all. By this exercise, he came to understand the oracle’s meaning: that the wisdom of men is little or nothing, and those who know this are as wise as any man can be. Inspired by this revelation, he entered the service of the god of the oracle, seeking out anyone who laid claim to wisdom and putting his wisdom to the test. Over the years, he made many friends, but also made many enemies, people who got angry at him rather than at themselves and who, not knowing why they were angry, made up all sorts of charges against him.

Now, at the age of seventy, that lifelong mission had finally landed him before the courts of Athens.

Cross-Examining his Principal Accuser

Having addressed his older accusers, Socrates turns to Meletus and reproaches him for being too eager to prosecute men for matters in which he takes no interest. To prove his point, he asks Meletus to name the improver of the youth. After some hesitation, Meletus replies, ‘the law’. ‘Who,’ asks Socrates, ‘knows the laws?’ ‘The judges, Socrates, who are present in court.’ Under questioning by Socrates, and forced to follow his own logic, Meletus blurts out that every enfranchised Athenian improves the youth except for Socrates.

Having proven his point out of Meletus’ own mouth and, by the same token, made a demonstration of the method which landed him in court, Socrates puts it to Meletus that, when it comes to horses, it is not the case that everyone does them good except for one man who does them harm, but rather that no one does them good except for one man, namely, the horse trainer.

Socrates now sets out to show that, if he did corrupt the youth, he could not have done so intentionally:

S: Do not the good do their neighbours good, and the bad do them evil?

M: Certainly.

S: And is there anyone who would rather be injured than benefited by those who live with him?

M: Certainly not.

S: And when you accuse me of corrupting and deteriorating the youth, do you allege that I corrupt them intentionally or unintentionally?

M: Intentionally I say.

Hereupon, Socrates argues that he could not have corrupted the youth intentionally because he would have known that doing so would have amounted to injuring himself. Thus, if he did corrupt the youth, he must have done so unintentionally, and ought to be educated rather than punished.

This argument reflects his general outlook that people only do wrong because, in the moment, they think that it is the right thing to do. To put this differently, all people incline towards goodness, but are waylaid by their foolishness or narrowness.

Finally, Socrates asks Meletus what he meant when he accused him of teaching the youth to acknowledge gods other than those acknowledged by the state: did he mean that he believed in some gods but not in the right ones, or that he did not believe in any gods at all? The latter, says Meletus, ‘since you believe the sun to be stone and the moon to be earth.’ Socrates points out that these are in fact the beliefs of Anaxagoras. But as for himself, he would not have introduced different gods, as charged, if he had not believed in at least some gods.

The Gadfly of Athens

Having done with Meletus, Socrates turns back to address the jurors.

Despite its dangers, he had chosen the life of a philosopher because it seemed like the right and best thing to do. Had he chosen safety over philosophy, he would have been pretending to a wisdom which he did not possess, for no one knows whether death is the greatest evil or, in fact, the greatest good. It is not death that Achilles feared, but living in dishonour by failing to avenge the death of Patroclus. ‘Let me die at once’ he said, ‘…rather than remain here, a laughingstock by the curved ships, a burden upon the earth.’

Just as he had not abandoned his post in battle, so he would not now abandon the life of philosophy.

Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practise philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wealth and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honours as possible, whilst you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?

By exhorting men to excellence, he had brought the greatest good to the state. Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else that is good for men. Such is the core of his teaching: if it is held to corrupt the youth, then so be it. By condemning him to death, the jurors would be doing themselves a far greater harm than they would be doing him, since putting an innocent man to death is much worse than dying oneself. Besides, they would struggle to replace him. In homage to the god, he had attached himself to Athens like a gadfly to a noble but listless horse, and his poverty was proof enough that he had never taken payment for his service.

He had at one time considered going into politics but his daimonion (inner voice, or guardian spirit) had dissuaded him from doing so on the grounds that a dead man is of no use to anyone. Nevertheless, he had behaved in the private sphere with the same integrity as in the public sphere, and it is a matter of public record that he opposed the collective prosecution of the generals at the Battle of Arginusæ and disobeyed the Thirty Tyrants when they sought to implicate him in the execution of Leon of Salamis.

Although he had freely conversed with rich and poor alike, he had never taught anyone anything, and could be neither praised nor blamed for their subsequent actions. If he did indeed corrupt the youth, why had their fathers and brothers not come forth to accuse him? And why had Meletus not called upon them as witnesses?

This is all the defence that he has to offer. Some of the jurors may take offence that he did not shed tears, resort to prayers and supplications, or bring forth his young children, but such bathetic scenes would hardly have been worthy of him, or them, or Athens, or philosophy.

The jury pronounced him guilty by a margin of sixty votes.

Proposing a Penalty

Under Athenian law, once a defendant had been convicted, both prosecution and defence proposed an appropriate penalty, and the jury chose between them. Socrates might have proposed exile. He might have asked for imprisonment. He might have offered to pay a substantial fine. Instead, he courted the death sentence by asking for what he truly deserved: free meals in the Prytaneion, or town hall.

He had never wronged anyone and was not going to start now by asking the jury for a penalty that he did not deserve. He could ill afford a fine, and imprisonment would turn him into a slave. Exile could be tolerable, but only if he were willing to hold his tongue:

For if I tell you this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still less likely to believe.

Only upon the insistence of his friends did he reluctantly propose a fine of thirty minæ (half a talent, or around 13kg of pure silver). But it was too late. In the second ballot, eighty more jurors voted for the death sentence than had voted for the guilty verdict, a split, this time, of 360 to 141.

The Final Address

After the death sentence had been passed, Socrates addressed the jurors one last time.

To those who had voted to acquit him, he offered a remarkable reflection. Throughout his life, his daimonion had often intervened to restrain him from making some momentous mistake. Yet throughout the trial—even when he had refused to flatter the jury or propose a more acceptable punishment—it had remained completely silent. This could only mean that what had happened was not, after all, an evil. 

Death, he argued, must be one of two things. If it is a state of unconsciousness, there is nothing to be feared. But if it is a journey to a land inhabited by great men such as Homer and Hesiod, he would take infinite delight in conversing with them.

For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not… Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth—that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

Having concluded that it would be better to die than to live, he was not in the least angry with those who had accused and condemned him. For although they had not meant to do him any good, neither had they done him any harm.

He asks only that his friends take good care of his three sons:

When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing… The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

Why Socrates Chose to Die

On the force of the arguments alone, Socrates had produced a brilliant defence. But instead of behaving with the customary humility and contrition, he turned the tables round and made himself judge and jury, cross-examining all of Athens before his court of philosophy. For the first and last time, he let drop his ironic mask, and his unapologetic apology turned many a juror against him. After being found guilty, his arrogance in suggesting a punishment of free meals and insolence in proposing a paltry one-mina fine only hardened hearts.

But this, from such a fine psychologist, may well have been the intention. Socrates knew that his best years lay behind him, and that a timely death could be a blessing as much as a curse. Moreover, by martyrizing him, the Athenians promised to preserve his memory, and, more importantly, the memory of his method and philosophy. Had the Athenians acquitted Socrates, you would not have read this book, and I would not have written it. 

For Socrates, the hemlock was never a deadly poison, but the very elixir of life.

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Plato’s Euthyphro, the Euthyphro Dilemma, and Why They’ll Never Leave You

Socrates in conversation with Euthyphro, with Meletus standing in the shadows.
Socrates questions Euthyphro outside the Stoa Basileios, or Porch of the King Archon, in Athens.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The Euthyphro is one of Plato’s shortest dialogues—and one of his finest. It is funny, dramatic, and unexpectedly modern. What begins as a chance encounter outside an Athenian courthouse turns into one of the most profound and celebrated conversations in the history of philosophy.

On his way to answer a charge of impiety, Socrates meets the self-professed religious expert Euthyphro, who has decided to prosecute his own father for the manslaghter of a servant. Intrigued by his resolve, Socrates asks him an apparently simple question: What is piety? The answer proves far more elusive than either man expects. The problem has exercised philosophers ever since—not least the ‘last universal genius’ Gottfried Leibniz.

The core of the dialogue is the so-called Euthyphro dilemma: is something pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious? In modern terms, are things like justice, virtue, and beauty merely matters of authority, or are they woven into the very fabric of reality? Does God, or anyone else, decide what is good, or is there an independent standard?

Outline and Summary of Plato’s Euthyphro

Socrates is on his way to answer a charge of impiety for ‘corrupting young men’ and ‘creating new gods and not believing in the old ones’. The charge is being pressed by a certain Meletus, a little-known young man with a beak-like nose, long straight hair, and a sparse beard.

In the agora (market or central square), Socrates runs into the dogmatically religious Euthyphro. Following the death of a servant, Euthyphro has pressed a charge of manslaughter against his own father. Euthyphro tells Socrates that he is prosecuting his father for inadvertently killing a servant who, in a drunken rage, murdered one of the household slaves. After binding the servant and throwing him into a ditch, Euthyphro’s father sent a messenger to a priest to enquire what ought to be done. Unfortunately, the servant died of hunger and cold before the messenger could return.

Socrates flatters Euthyphro, saying that he must be far advanced in wisdom if he is willing to prosecute his own father on so questionable a charge. Euthyphro responds that his relatives are angry at him for prosecuting his father on behalf of a murderer whom he did not deliberately kill. Although they would say that he is behaving impiously, he himself thinks that he is behaving piously—and that he has knowledge of the pious and impious.

Posing as ignorant, Socrates asks Euthyphro to define the pious and impious. Euthyphro replies that the pious is to prosecute a wrongdoer regardless of who he is, and the impious not to prosecute him. He cites the example of Zeus, ‘the best and most just of gods’, who bound his father Cronus for unjustly swallowing his children.

Socrates says that many actions can be pious: but what is it that makes all pious actions pious, and all impious actions impious? What, in short, is the essence of piousness? Euthyphro offers that the pious is that which is dear to the gods. An action or man that is dear to the gods is pious, whereas an action or man that is hated by the gods is impious.

Socrates points out that the gods may be at odds, so that what is pious to one god may not be so to another. Euthyphro replies that none of the gods would be at odds on a matter such as his. Socrates argues that while both gods and men agree that whoever has killed someone unjustly ought to pay a penalty, they might disagree about who the wrongdoer is, what he did, and so on. Can Euthyphro be sure that, in his case, all the gods are in agreement? Even assuming that they are, this merely signifies that the action is hated by the gods. It does not signify that what is hated by the gods is impious, or that what is loved by them is pious. Even assuming that it does, is that which is pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? If the gods love something because it is pious, it cannot be their love that makes it pious. Whereas if something is pious because the gods love it, we still don’t know for what reason they love it.

Euthyphro complains that Socrates makes his arguments go around in circles. But Socrates points out that all he is doing is asking questions: it is Euthyphro’s answers and Euthyphro’s arguments that are going round in circles.

Socrates next argues that all that is pious is necessarily just. But whereas all that is pious is necessarily just, not all that is just is necessarily pious. Thus, where there is piety there is also justice, but where there is justice there is not necessarily piety, because piety is a part or aspect of justice. So what part of justice is piety? Euthyphro replies that piety is the part of justice that is concerned with the care of the gods, with the rest of justice being concerned with the care of men. Socrates asks Euthyphro what he means by ‘care’. In most instances, ‘to care’ means ‘to aim at the good of that which is cared for’. So does piety, which is concerned with the care of the gods, aim to make them better? Euthyphro suggests that piety, the care of the gods, is the sort of care that slaves have for their masters, and thus that it is a kind of service. If piety is a kind of service to the gods, asks Socrates, what is the goal of this service? The goal of service to doctors is health, and the goal of service to shipbuilders is the building of a ship. So what is the goal of service to the gods? Euthyphro answers that service to the gods is the knowledge of how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, for the preservation of private households and public affairs of state.

Socrates says that, if the pious is the knowledge of how to pray and sacrifice, it is the knowledge of how to beg and give to the gods. To beg correctly would be to ask from them the things that we need, whereas to give correctly would be to give to them the things that they need—so that piety would amount to a sort of trading skill between gods and men. Euthyphro says, ‘Trading yes, if you prefer to call it that’—to which Socrates replies, ‘I prefer nothing, unless it is true.’

Socrates wonders what benefit the gods might derive from the gifts that they receive from us. Or do we have such a trading advantage over them that we receive all our blessings from them and they receive nothing in return? Euthyphro now claims that we give gifts to the gods so as to honour and please them. Socrates asks whether the pious is then pleasing, rather than beneficial or dear, to the gods—to which Euthyphro replies, ‘I think it is of all things most dear to them.’ Socrates points out that they have returned to Euthyphro’s original definition of piety, namely, that piety is that which is dear to the gods.

Socrates says that Euthyphro is more skilful than Daedalus, in that Daedalus could only make arguments move whereas Euthyphro can make them go round in a circle. Socrates suggests that they begin their inquiry anew, but Euthyphro says that he is in a hurry and leaves!

Analysis and Themes of Plato’s Euthyphro

The Euthyphro is often treated as an early Platonic dialogue, interesting only insofar as it introduces the Euthyphro dilemma. But that would be to miss much of its richness. It is also a brilliant study of dogmatism, intellectual humility, and the nature of dialectic and philosophical enquiry. And, chronologically, it is the first of the four dialogues that retrace the final days of Socrates—to be followed by the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. If Plato’s internal chronology is to be relied upon, the conversation in the Euthyphro takes place on the same day as the conversation in the Theatetus, which follows the preliminary hearing (anakrisis) at the porch of the King Archon.

At no point does Euthyphro realise that he may be ignorant, or even that his knowledge of impiety may be less than complete. He confidently prosecutes his own father, without questioning whether this is what the gods would really want. When Socrates challenges the source of his self-esteem—knowledge of the gods—he finds himself unable to refute Socrates—and so simply leaves. It is a masterclass in the psychology of self-deception. The irony, too, is striking. Socrates is on his way to answer a charge of impiety, yet proves far more concerned with piety than the supposed expert on religion.

Whereas Euthyphro mistakes certainty for knowledge, Socrates is content to admit his ignorance and continue the search. It is apparent, especially in the unabridged dialogue, that Euthyphro struggles to understand what Socrates is asking of him—in other words, he struggles to understand what Socrates means by a definition. The same might be said of other so-called experts who engage with Socrates, including Laches in the Laches and Meno in the Meno. The confusion of these experts, some of whom, like Meno, were philosophically trained or at least philosophically aware, suggests that Socrates’ search for rigorous definitions was something original and radical.

For Socrates, it is not sufficient simply to define an ethical concept in terms of itself or related concepts, or by a list of its instances, or according to convention or popular opinion (‘piety is what is dear to the gods’). Instead, a rigorous definition is one which, by picking out the nature or essence of the ethical concept, applies to all its instances and no more. For example, Meno’s definition of virtue as ‘the ability to rule over people’ is both too narrow for excluding children and slaves, and too broad for including those who rule unjustly. Today, we take the search for rigorous definitions so much for granted that it is easy to forget how revolutionary it once was.

If beauty, courage, justice, and piety can have an essence that can be defined, perhaps they can also have an independent reality. In time, Socrates’ search for essences would evolve into Plato’s Theory of the Forms. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle is quite clear that Socrates did not originate the Theory of the Forms: ‘Two things may properly be ascribed to Socrates, inductive reasoning and definition by universals… But Socrates did not assign to the universal or the definitions an independent existence.’ Nonetheless, the seeds of the Theory of the Forms are already present in dialogues such as the Euthyphro.

Leibniz and the Best of All Possible Worlds

In the modern era, Leibniz (1646–1716) followed the direction of Socrates’ argument while going beyond anything that Socrates himself explicitly claimed. God does not make something good simply by willing it; rather, he wills it because it is good. Eternal or necessary truths—including the standards of the beautiful, the good, and the just—depend on God’s understanding, but not on his will.

This is no mere point of theology. It underpins Leibniz’s most famous doctrine, that this is the best of all possible worlds. If goodness depended solely on God’s will, then whatever world God chose to create would de facto have been the best, rendering the claim empty.

The very idea that God chose to create the best of all possible worlds presupposes an objective standard of goodness by which the alternatives can be judged. Notice that, in the Bible, in Genesis, as God created the world, he kept on checking that what he had done was ‘good’—and even, at the end of the sixth day, ‘very good’. Had there not been an independent standard of goodness, he would not have needed to look.

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To delve deeper into Plato, see The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Plato’s Shadow: A Primer on Plato.

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Can the Highest Forms of Human Excellence Be Taught?

A disappointed teacher and his student
If the greatest Athenians could not teach virtue to their own sons, can virtue be taught?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Can courage be taught? Can wisdom? Can goodness?

We take it for granted that mathematics can be taught, languages can be taught, and medicine can be taught. But what of the qualities that matter most? Can they, too, be passed from teacher to pupil, or picked up from a textbook?

More than two thousand years ago, Plato wrestled with exactly this question.

The First Puzzle

In one of Plato’s early dialogues, the Laches, Socrates asks two generals, Laches and Nicias, to define courage. Laches thinks the question an easy one, and asserts that courage is when a soldier is willing to remain at his post and fight against the enemy.

Socrates objects that a soldier who flees from his post can also sometimes be called courageous. He cites the example of the Scythian cavalry who combat both in pursuit and in retreat, and of the mythical hero Aeneas who, Homer says, was always fleeing on horses. Homer praised Aeneas for his knowledge of fear, and called him the ‘counsellor of fear’. When Laches protests that Socrates is speaking of horsemen and charioteers rather than hoplites (foot soldiers), Socrates layers on the example of the Spartan hoplites at the Battle of Plataea, who fled the enemy but then turned back to fight once the enemy lines had broken. 

What Socrates really wants to know is what courage is in all of its instances—not only for the hoplite, but also for the horseman, the charioteer, and every other class of warrior, as well as for those who ‘show courage in illness and poverty’, ‘are brave in the face of pain and fear’, and so on. What is it that all these instances of courage have in common? For example, quickness can be found in running, in speaking, and in playing the lyre, and in each instance, ‘quickness’ can be defined as ‘the quality that accomplishes much in a little time’. Is there a similar, single, unifying definition of ‘courage’ that can apply to all of its instances? Before reading on, think upon it for yourself… How would you define courage?

This time, Laches defines courage as ‘a sort of endurance of the soul’. But Socrates points out that endurance can be foolish as well as wise, and foolish endurance is likely to be harmful. After several more attempts, Nicias suggests that courage is some sort of knowledge or wisdom. Socrates says that, if Nicias means that courage is knowledge of the true grounds of fear and hope, then courage must be very rare among men; while animals, which want for such knowledge, could never be called ‘courageous’ but at most ‘fearless’—which, indeed, ordinary language use seems to confirm. Nicias concurs, and surmises that the same is also true of children: ‘Or do you really suppose I call all children courageous, who fear nothing because they have no sense?’

Socrates presses the argument further until he reaches a remarkable conclusion: if courage, and virtue in general, is knowledge, it cannot be separated from the rest of knowledge and wisdom. In seeking to define courage, the three of them have succeeded in defining virtue herself. Virtue is knowledge, which is why people with some measure of one virtue usually have a similar measure of the other virtues and of virtue in general—a thesis known as the Unity of the Virtues.

The First Solution

Courage, says Socrates, is knowledge or wisdom. Suppose I am walking along a beach and see someone drowning. I know that I can’t swim and that the currents are strong, but jump in anyway because a human life is at stake. Moments later, I too need rescuing. Having misjudged the situation, I have only made it worse, and acted not courageously but recklessly.

The lifeguard, in contrast, is a strong swimmer and equipped with a floater. From her years of experience and familiarity with the beach, she knows that if she dives in she stands an excellent chance of making a rescue. Of course, there is some risk involved, but the potential benefit is so large and so likely that it far outweighs the risk. If the lifeguard truly understands all this, she will ‘courageously’ dive in. If she does not dive in, she has not fully grasped the situation.

One of Socrates’ most famous arguments is that no one ever knowingly does evil. People do wrong not because their ethics are overwhelmed by a desire for pleasure, as is often believed, but because they are unable to weigh up pleasures and pains. They act with recklessness or cowardice or foolishness or vice (which are all really one and the same thing) because, from their limited perspective, it seems like the right or best thing to do. But if they knew better, they would behave differently. Virtue, then, is a form of knowledge.

The Fatal Objection

If Socrates is right in holding that courage and all of virtue is knowledge, then surely courage and the other virtues can be taught by the same methods as geometry or medicine or any other field of human knowledge. So who is wrong, Socrates in holding that courage is knowledge, or us in our common intuition that courage cannot simply be taught?

Plato returned to the problem in a later dialogue. In the Meno, Socrates observes that people with wisdom and virtue are very poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles, the great Athenian statesman and general, was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and shooting javelins, but no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.

Perhaps it was too early in 402, the dramatic date of the Meno, for Socrates to have added his own three sons to the roll of dolts and dunderheads, but Aristotle, who had the benefit of hindsight, tells us that they too grew up to be ‘fools and dullards’.

In another dialogue, the Protagoras, Socrates says that Pericles, who led Athens at the peak of its golden age, gave his sons Paralus and Xanthippus the most excellent instruction in everything that could be learnt from teachers. But when it came to wisdom, this paragon of wisdom simply left them to ‘wander at their own free will in a sort of hope that they would light upon virtue of their own accord’.

A New Answer

If virtue cannot be taught, not even by the most eminent and distinguished of Athenians, then it is not, after all, a type of knowledge.

But then how, asks Meno, did good people come into being?

Socrates replies that he and Meno have overlooked that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A man who has knowledge of the road to Larissa (a city in Thessaly) may make a good guide, but a man who has only correct opinion of the road, but has never been and does not know, may in some cases make just as good a guide. If he who thinks the truth can be just as good a guide to Larissa as he who knows the truth, then correct opinion can be just as good a guide to right action as knowledge.

If this be true, how is knowledge, which is the more highly prized, any different from correct opinion? Socrates compares correct opinions to the statues of Daedalus (a mythical architect and craftsman of unsurpassed skill), which had to be tied down to prevent them from running away. Correct opinions can be tied down with ‘an account of the reason why’, whereupon they cease to be correct opinions and petrify into knowledge.

Since courage and the other parts of virtue are not knowledge, all that remains is for them to be correct opinion. This much explains why the likes of Themistocles and Lysimachus and even the great Pericles were unable to make anything much out of their sons—and why, then as today, having children is to dice with the devil. Good people are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.

The Teachers We Remember

Courage, like all the virtues, consists not in knowledge but in correct opinion. The virtues relate to human behaviour, and in particular to good or moral behaviour—that is, to ethics. In ethics, the choice of one action over another, or others, involves a complex and indeterminate calculus that cannot be condensed into, and hence expressed as, knowledge. Whereas knowledge is concrete and exact, correct opinion is subtle and ineffable, and more the province of intuition than of reason, of art than of science. For this reason, correct opinion cannot be taught but only ever invited or inspired.

The best education consists not in being taught but in being inspired.

The teachers who we hold in our hearts, those we never forget, are not those who assiduously taught us the most facts, or fastidiously covered every bulleted point on the syllabus, but those who inspired us and opened us up to ourselves and to the world.

Unfortunately, many people are not amenable to being inspired, not even by the most charismatic teachers or greatest works of art—which is why, in the final reckoning, Socrates and Plato held virtue to be a gift of the gods.

…if we were right in the way we spoke … virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift of the gods which is not accompanied by understanding, unless there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a statesman. If there were one, he would be said to be among the living as Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, namely, that ‘he alone retained his wits while the others flitted about like shadows’. —Plato, Meno

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How the Sophists Forced Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to Rethink Truth

A sophist addresses a crowd in Ancient Athens
Protagoras’ dictum: Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things.’

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

For centuries, Greek philosophy had looked outwards. The first philosophers sought to understand the nature of the universe, inquiring into the substance, origin, and hidden principles of all things. Thales is remembered for upholding water as the fundamental substance, Heraclitus for his principle of perpetual change, Parmenides for his diametrically opposed principle of unchanging being, and Democritus for his atoms.

But by the middle of the fifth century BCE, philosophy faced an altogether different challenge. The question was no longer what the universe is made of, but whether we can know anything with certainty. Philosophy’s first great crisis arose not in a school or temple, but in the bustling streets and public squares of democratic Athens.

The Need for Sophists

By naturalising the world, the pre-Socratics had been responding and contributing to a waning of the old myths. As the world became demythologised, attention shifted from the gods to man, from the temples to the law courts, from questions about the cosmos to questions about logic, language, politics, morality, and society.

This intellectual revolution was matched by a political one. By the middle of the fifth century BCE, Athens had emerged triumphant from the Persian Wars. Enriched by empire and transformed into a radical democracy, it became a city in which political influence depended less upon noble birth than on the ability to persuade an assembly, sway a jury, or carry a crowd. In this new world, rhetoric became power.

The Sophists travelled from city to city offering public lectures and private instruction, especially to ambitious young aristocrats hoping for careers in public life. They taught rhetoric, argument, memory, and the art of persuasion. They were also handsomely rewarded. Some charged fees so enormous that Plato and Aristophanes never tired of mocking them.

Although itinerant, the Sophists naturally converged upon Athens, where they often resided at the houses of wealthy patrons such as the magnate Callias or the politician Callicles. According to Plato, Callias owned ‘the greatest and most glorious house’ in Athens and ‘spent a world of money on the sophists’. In Plato’s Greater Hippias, the Sophist Hippias tells Socrates, ‘If you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed…’

What the Sophists Taught

The Sophists were not a school in the usual sense. They had no common doctrine or shared founder, and often disagreed with one another. Some, such as Protagoras and Prodicus, were serious thinkers who won the respect even of Plato. Others became famous as intellectual entertainers, dazzling audiences with verbal tricks and paradoxes. Yet all shared a new concern with language, argument, rhetoric, politics, and practical life.

This marked a profound shift from the pre-Socratics. Rather than asking, ‘What is the universe made of?’, the Sophists asked, ‘How do we persuade others?’, ‘What is justice?’, and even, ‘Can there be any objective truth at all?’

No Sophist embodied this new outlook more fully than Protagoras. His most famous dictum, Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things’—came to epitomise the movement. In the Theaetetus, Plato argues that if each and every man truly were the measure of all things, then nothing could be inherently true or false, or right or wrong—not even the dictum itself.

Protagoras is also remembered for the remarkable opening line of his lost work, About the Gods: ‘About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life.’ Such agnosticism was startling in a deeply religious society, and only reinforced the suspicion that the Sophists were undermining traditional beliefs.

Gorgias, who lived for 108 years, pushed scepticism further still. Whether or not he believed his own arguments, he delighted in demonstrating the astonishing power of rhetoric. He boasted that he could speak on any subject at a moment’s notice and likened the effects of speech upon the soul to those of drugs upon the body. Words, like drugs, could heal, intoxicate, or poison.

Other Sophists explored different aspects of the same revolution. Prodicus became famous for distinguishing between near synonyms with pedantic precision, and for suggesting, not unlike Wittgenstein twenty-four centuries later, that philosophical progress begins with linguistic clarity. Antiphon contrasted nature (physis) with convention (nomos), raising the unsettling possibility that many of the laws and moral codes by which we live are no more than a matter of convention. The dichotomy surfaces in the Antigone of Sophocles (c. 441 BCE), when Antigone seeks to justify her attempt to bury her brother Polynices by claiming the superiority of divine over man-made law. Hippias claimed to be an authority on everything and wrote many books. He held that the purpose of life is autarkeia (self-sufficiency), and boasted of presenting himself at Olympia wearing nothing that he had not himself made, down to his girdle, sandals, seal-ring, strigil, and oil-flask.

The Sophists transformed Greek education, but they also raised an unsettling question: if every position can be defended by a sufficiently skilful speaker, what becomes of truth?

Why Socrates Objected

Socrates accepted many of the Sophists’ starting points. Like them, he turned away from cosmology to focus on ethics, politics, and the human condition. Like them, he engaged his fellow citizens in conversation. Yet there was one crucial difference.

The Sophists taught their pupils how to argue. Socrates sought to discover what was true—and never charged for it.

For Socrates, words were not instruments of persuasion but tools of inquiry. His famous method of questioning—the elenchus—served not to win debates but to expose contradictions, undermine false confidence, and inch towards genuine knowledge. He believed that careful questioning could reveal objective truths about justice, courage, friendship, and the good life.

Whereas the Sophists taught the art of persuasion, Socrates insisted that persuasion and truth were not the same thing.

This was the question at the heart of philosophy’s first great crisis: is philosophy a search for truth, or merely the art of persuasion?

Why Was Socrates Mistaken for a Sophist?

Ironically, many Athenians mistook Socrates for one of the Sophists. Like them, he challenged traditional beliefs and exposed the ignorance of prominent citizens through relentless questioning. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, he is portrayed as the head of a ‘Thinking Shop’, where students learn ingenious arguments and how to make the weaker case appear the stronger.

The caricature was unfair, but revealing. Socrates charged no fees, claimed no expertise, and repeatedly insisted that he knew nothing. Yet to many Athenians these distinctions seemed trivial. They saw only another unsettling intellectual who questioned convention and undermined established authority.

If Socrates was put on trial and, ultimately, to death, this was in part because many Athenians mistook him for a Sophist.

Plato’s Response

If Socrates sought truth through dialogue, Plato sought to explain why truth is possible in the first place.

The Sophists had shown how easily opinions differ. Plato agreed. But he refused to conclude that all opinions are therefore equally valid.

Instead, he argued that behind the changing world perceived by the senses lies a higher reality of eternal Forms: perfect Justice, Beauty, Equality, and Goodness. Our arguments may be confused and our perceptions unreliable, but these realities remain unchanged. Philosophy is therefore not merely the art of persuasion, but the search for objective truth.

Many of Plato’s greatest dialogues are shaped by this confrontation. In the Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and other dialogues, the Sophists become Plato’s principal interlocutors. Sometimes they are treated with respect, sometimes with devastating irony, but always they represent the challenge that philosophy must overcome.

Whether Plato portrayed them fairly remains an open question. Much of what we know about the Sophists comes through his writings, and he had every reason to emphasise their weaknesses while strengthening his own case. It was, perhaps, one of history’s most resounding philosophical victories—so complete that the word ‘sophist’ still carries negative connotations.

Aristotle’s Response

Aristotle inherited the same problem but answered it differently. Whereas Plato had looked beyond the visible world, Aristotle looked more closely at it.

Instead of grounding knowledge in transcendent Forms, he sought reliable methods for investigating the world itself. His answer to the Sophists lay not in another metaphysical theory, but in the careful disciplines of logic, observation, and demonstration.

Aristotle analysed arguments with a new precision, distinguishing valid reasoning from fallacy and demonstration from mere persuasion.

The Sophists had shown how arguments can mislead. Aristotle sought to show how, properly constructed, they can also lead us to truth.

Rehabilitating the Sophists

After Plato, the Sophists became the villains of Greek philosophy: eloquent teachers more interested in winning arguments and enriching themselves than discovering the truth.

Yet this judgement is probably too harsh. The Sophists helped lay the foundations of higher education. They recognised the importance of language, communication, critical thinking, and cultural difference. They questioned inherited assumptions and forced philosophy to justify itself rather than merely assert its conclusions.

Many of their questions remain alive today. Are moral values objective or culturally relative? Does language shape thought? Is law grounded in nature or merely in convention? Can rhetoric obscure truth as easily as reveal it? To these questions there are still no universally accepted answers.

The Sophists did not destroy philosophy. They transformed it—albeit, sometimes, despite themselves. By questioning truth, morality, justice, and knowledge itself, they created the first great crisis in Western philosophy. Socrates responded by seeking definitions, Plato by defending objective reality, and Aristotle by developing the tools of logic. Much of subsequent philosophy can be understood as an attempt to answer questions that the Sophists were among the first to ask.

They may have lost the argument in the eyes of Plato. But they changed philosophy forever.

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