we still love medicine if all disease and illness as such disappeared from the world?
What would then be the function of medicine?) Would there be anything dear (to us)
left if the bad disappeared? With needs based on deficiencies, this is something one
may well ask; but there are also other desires, in themselves neither good nor bad, for
the good. But as the effect disappears if the cause disappears, the bad cannot be the
cause of these desires, if they continue to exist once the bad has disappeared. There
must thus be another cause and explanation for liking and being liked, loving and
being loved.
Where this argument is taken in the dialogue is not important here. The possibility
it opens up, though, is this: by posing the question of what a world without the bad
would look like, Plato lays the seed for an explanation of the cosmos in which what is
bad is not cause of or reason for anything. If the bad is not, we would still do things
for the sake of the good. This position is explicated atPhaedo95–107. There, Plato
does not speak of ‘‘the first dear thing’’ which is good and dear by itself and not for
the sake of something else, but rather simply of the good itself and the beautiful itself.
And the good itself and the beautiful itself are said to be cause-and-reason not only
for our desiring what is good and what is beautiful, but for everything good and
beautiful, all the good and beautiful things we see around us. Plato combines the
notion of aition, a notion perhaps first introduced into natural philosophy by
the atomist Democritus, whom Plato saw as a main opponent throughout his life,
with that ofarche ̄, the beginning of everything that was the stuff of the Presocratics.
Everything in this world of becoming has a beginning, and everything has a cause: for
Plato, beginning and cause are not water or fire or ‘‘the infinite,’’ but the beautiful
and the good.
This explanation is stated in more or less this form in thePhaedo, theSymposium,
and theRepublic, and rephrased in theTimaeusas the conviction that order is more
beautiful and better than disorder. But while this explanation may satisfy the mind,
it does not satisfy popular imagination and belief. Any explanation of the world which
did not take account of the gods of tradition was in danger of being equated with the
doctrine of Protagoras, who had claimed, about the gods, not to know whether they
existed or not (D-K 80 B 4), or the doctrine attributed to Critias, that the gods were
invented by clever people for political reasons (D-K 88 B 25), or those doctrines of
others again who claimed that there were either no gods at all, or if there were gods,
they did not care for us. Already in theRepublicPlato therefore deals with the role of
traditional, popular mythology and poetry in society (Republic2–3, esp. 377–83).
Socrates declares that, in the city he envisages, stories about gods must present them
as not causing harm, not doing anything bad, not being the cause-and-reason,aition,
of anything bad, but being good and beneficent, being the cause-and-reason of
what is good only. In addition, god as good does not change his form, being perfectly
self-sufficient and not in need of change (379–80), concepts prefigured in a non-
theological context in theLysis, where they were attributes of the perfectly good man.
This conception of god as good is then introduced into an explanation of the world
at large. The link is the notion ofaition, which is applied both to actions, decisions,
responsibilities, and culpabilities of human beings and to natural science, since in the
natural world of change too nothing happens without a cause. But while causality in
thePhaedodoes not go beyond positing the form of the good, the form of the
beautiful, etc., and while theRepublic(6.503–11) sees the form of the good as a
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