Philosophy in Dialogue : Plato's Many Devices

MARK MOES

defy reduction to an algorithm, in order to enable any given interlocutor
to achieve insights of his own in his own way. The guide will sometimes
have to exhort his interlocutor to engage in complex and strenuous in-
tellectual activities, sometimes involving formal or informal inference,
sometimes involving the careful consideration of jokes, stories, myths,
or whatever. Often he will have trouble getting the interlocutor to think
for himself at all.^25 In these respects, the Socratic “method” differs im-
portantly from that of Descartes and the Continental Rationalists, from
that of the British Empiricists, and from that of Kant. Seeing things
rightly, according to Socrates, does not require the having of perfectly
clear and distinct self-evident intellectual intuitions available to any ra-
tional person, or the discernment of the rules of association of incor-
rigible sense data, or the discovery of necessary conditions for human
experience in general. John Henry Newman was in unwitting agree-
ment w ith Socrates when he worked out his concept ion of an illative sense
to denote the perfection or virtue of reason, the right operation of a
complex of intellectual powers. Newman called this sense

a living organon.... [It] is not mere common sense, but the true healthy

action of our ratiocinative powers, an action more subtle and more

comprehensive than the mere application of a syllogistic argument.

(emphases mine)^26

Let us turn now to a passage in the Republic in which a surprising num-
ber of the themes we have been discussing come into play.

An Application of the Model: Socrates’
Proposals to Glaucon About Gymnastic
Education in Republic 403c– 412b

From the point of view of the medical model, many of Socrates’ conver-
sations with Glaucon in the Republic seem to be attempts to provide him
with opportunities for diagnostic self-recognition. Xenophon’s remarks
in the Memorabilia about Socrates checking a twenty-year-old Glaucon
from acting on his naive political ambitions seem to agree with such a
reading.^27 The connection drawn in the Charmides between lack of tem-
perance and the misguided political careers of Charmides and Critias
also point s in the same direction. For the future t y rannical oligarch Cri-
tias in that dialogue defi nes justice as “minding one’s own business,” the
phrase used to defi ne justice for Glaucon in book 4 of the Republic. We