The incentive for writing this essay was Anthony Kenny's article "Mental Health in Plato's Republic". One of the theses advanced by Kenny is that Plato, by his tripartition of the soul, is the origin of the idea that moral problems are liable to medical treatment, or, more radically, that moral problems are ultimately medical ones. This medicalization of morals was advanced by Socrates in "Gorgias" as a metaphor, and was taken seriously and theorized by Plato in his later dialogues.

My essay is meant to explore and deepen Kenny's idea. Some very preliminary remarks: First, the tripartite soul is a doctrine that appears only in the Republic: in other dialogues - both prior and posterior to the Republic the soul is unitary (in the Phaedo) or dual (in the Phaidros and the Laws). It is thus expectable that Kenny's thesis be directly corroborated by the Republic only. If so, it remains to be investigated its relevance to other dialogues (including the Laws).

Second: the development of Plato's moral thought cannot be exclusively captured by the formula "from the unitary to the tripartite soul". It is known that the main theses of the Socratic dialogues are that virtue is knowledge (Intellectualism) and that the virtues are One (Unity of Virtues). On the contrary, in the Republic and in the Laws, the thesis of the Unity of Virtues seems to be abandoned. Plato's thought evolved from the doctrine of the Unity of the Virtues to the doctrine of the Separation of the Virtues as it evolved from the Unity of the Soul towards the Disunity of the Soul. Third: it commonly held, in Platonic exegesis, that the moral intellectualism of the Socratic dialogues (which holds the impossibility of doing the evil knowingly, or voluntarily) is abandoned in the later (properly-called Platonic) dialogues. Put simply, it is usual to say that the late Platonic dialogues admit the possibility of akrasia, while the Socratic dialogues deny it. My purpose is to investigate (i) whether, and to what extent, this thesis is true: and (ii) whether there is any link between this direction of evolution of Plato's thought and the two directions which I previously pointed to.

For the sake of convenience, I will use the names "Socrates" to designate the protagonist of the early Platonic dialogues and "Plato" to designate the proponent of the theses put forward in the late dialogues. This way of using the names "Socrates" and "Plato" may facilitate the coherence of the exposition (the contrast between Socrates and Plato appears more obvious) at the expense of historical accuracy.

I intend to keep the problem the akrasia, i.e. the impossibility of doing the evil knowingly, as a "red thread" of my essay. I will touch more or less parenthetically other related problems, such as the Unity versus Disunity of the Virtues or of the Soul, as well as political aspects of Plato's thought.

Logical and terminological clarifications:

First, akrasia is not to be equated with "psychical conflict". If an agent could do things which s/he knows to be evil, it does not go without saying that he does so in a state of psychic conflict. The commonest picture that "knowing something to be evil and yet doing it" evokes to a modern person is most probably cynical behavior: that of a person who explicitly (at least to himself) defies moral standards which he still recognizes; of someone who avows, at least to himself "I know I am immoral, I know that I behave unjustly, yet I want to continue to be so". This is the rhethoric of the cynic

The problem of akrasia is usually (and correctly) associated with that of psychic conflict because of Socrates' (and Plato's) attempt to explain away the problem of akrasia. Put in rough terms: Socrates and Plato believed that the akrasia is the false appearance that hides the reality of psychic conflict, of being "overpowered by pleasures", as it is put in the Protagoras. True, inner conflict is not the only factor that explans away akrasia: ignorance is the other factor. Studying the relation between inner conflict and ignorance is a topic that I will pursue in the next pages.

Secondly: akrasia is sometimes understood as meaning that "noone does the evil voluntarily". This is a rather moot point, which I am not going to explore. The reason why this is a moot point is that the concept of "will" becomes problematic when applied to Greek philosophy. (An extremist position is that of Albrecht Dihle, who holds that the Ancient Greeks had no concept of will). Without entering this problem in all its philosophical and philological complexity, I will briefly mention that (i) nowhere in Platonic dialogues is there any talk about will as a distinct faculty; (ii) the Judeo-Christian problem of determinism versus free will does not occur in Greek philosophy – the passage in the Laws about humans as gods' puppets is disappointing as a solution to this problem; (iii) despite this, the distinction of voluntary versus involuntary is abundantly mentioned in Plato's dialogues. Parenthetically: the Hippias Minor is entirely devoted to the exploration of this distinction, and Achilles is characterized as "wily" in the (Jowett translation of) same dialogue. In the light of points (i) and (ii) above, I will use akrasia as meaning that "it is possible to do the evil (or to fail) knowingly". The denial of akrasia, the oudeis akoon amartanei, I will understand as "noone does the evil (or fails) knowingly.

Thirdly: akrasia is sometimes understood as stating that noone can do the evil knowing it as evil. This is again a moot point. It is usually held that for Plato, knowledge (Episteme) and belief (Doxa) differ not only in their mental component and the truth-value, but also in respect of their objects. Appearance is the object of belief, while Reality is the object of Knowledge. (It is possible that this thesis be false , but it is widely held). A tacit assumption of Socrates and Plato seems to be that knowledge of one thing involves complete knowledge: one cannot know something and be unable to know something else. If so, then it is inappropriate to identify the unique object of knowledge that is interesting for the appearance of akrasia. The problem "whether it is possible to do something we know to be evil" invites to modern analyses in terms of de dicto and de re attitudes. (A natural thesis would be to say that we can act akratically de re, but not de dicto , which would made the problem of akrasia collapse into that of doing involuntary mistakes). Despite the intrinsic interest of such problems, Plato's dialogues do not explicitly invite them.

Fourthly: akrasia is sometimes understood as stating that noone can do what he believes to be evil. I am sensitive to the difference between "doing what one knows to be evil" and "doing what one believes to be evil"; I presume that so would have been Socrates and Plato. I presume that Plato's dialogues implicitly endorse that it is possible for one to do something that one believes to be evil, and this situation had to be explained (not explained away). The situation of psychical conflict that Socrates invokes in the Protagoras and that re-occurs in the Republic and in the Laws is one in which it one believes one should do something, yet refrain to do it.

(It is true that Protagoras looks ambiguous, since we can read at 358b that "then, if the pleasant is the good, noone who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his course when he might choose the better. To 'act beneath oneself' is the result of pure ignorance; to be your own master is wisdom. However, one can read in the Laws 863e that "each of these influences [pleasure and ignorance] often prompts a every man to take the opposite course to the one which attracts him and which he really wishes to take ".

Given the previous remarks, my assumption is that the problem of akrasia is the problem of explaining away the oudeis akoon amartanei, which I would translate by "noone does the evil knowingly ".

Thus, Socrates explained away the apparent possibility of akrasia by moral intellectualism and by postulation of psychic conflict: the famous thesis that "virtue is knowledge" and that doing evil consists in being overpowered by pleasures or pains. I see moral intellectualism as the conjunction of two theses: (1) it is impossible to be virtuous without being knowledgeable; and (2) it is impossible to be knowledgeable without being virtuous. (1) could be expressed by the well-known slogan that "virtue is knowledge"; it could be equally well expressed by a slogan such as "Noone is honest and ignorant", that Socrates does not explicitly formulate, but suggests over and over again, sometimes at the price of violating common-sense linguistic intuitions, such as that courageous people may lack knowledge . (2) is expressed by the famous "No-one can do the evil knowingly" or, in a more radical form, "It is impossible to know the Good and not to do it". (The more radical form is equivalent with the previous form if the distinction between acts and omissions is blurred, i.e. if refraining to do the good is a case of doing the evil).

With these logical preliminaries in mind, the purpose of my paper is to clarify the evolution of the problem of akrasia until the Laws

The Socratic view on akrasia

I assume that Socrates resolutely held an intellectualist position in ethics , and that this moral intellectualism entails the impossibility of akrasia, along the lines which I sketched above. The genesis of the problem of akrasia is sketched in the Hippias Minor, where we see Socrates polemize with the anti-intellectualist Hippias and still undecided on the relative merits of doing the evil voluntarily versus involuntarily. The impossibility of akrasia is held explicitly in the Gorgias and Protagoras;

Modern analyses of knowledge start from its definition as "justified true belief", which is formulated in the Theaitetos. This is, however, only a partial way of characterizing Socrates (and Plato's) concept of knowledge. What distinguishes knowledge from mere opinion is that opinions are fluctuating and mostly provisional, susceptible to being abandoned and/or reversed. On the contrary, knowledge is firm, unendangered by being reversed. Given these assumptions, it was natural for Socrates to associate lack of knowledge with psychical lability and to look at knowledge as a cure, if not a panaceum, for this condition . Thus, the problem of the akrasia and of psychical conflict appears in the more general framework of Socrates' (and Plato's) preference for the Stable, for the Fixed. (A serious consequence that follows from the Socratic thesis that knowledge is "stronger" than mere opinions and cannot be shaken or reversed is that knowledge cannot be defeated by irrational impulses: this consequence is serious insofar as it threatens to preclude not only the possibility of akrasia, but also of psychic conflict ended with the defeat of reason).

The Laws: Anti-intellectualism and the weakness of knowledge

By "anti-intellectualism" I mean the denial of the thesis that virtue is knowledge. Anti-intellectualism itself should not be confused with the thesis "pleasures are good", not even with the thesis that "reason (or knowledge) should be in harmony with pleasures". The thesis that pleasures in an appropriate amount are a good thing is not new: it is formulated in the "Protagoras", where Socrates attempts to fight hedonism with its own weapons. The same thesis re-occurs in the Laws 644c: in addition to pain and pleasure, which are two mutually antagonistic advisers , each man has opinions about the future, "whose name is 'expectations'. Specifically, the anticipation of pain is called 'fear' and the anticipation of pleasure is called 'confidence'. Over and against all these we have 'calculation', by which we judge the relative merits of pleasure and pain, and when this is expressed as a public decision of a state, it receives the title 'law'".

Anti-intellectualism is obviously related to the disunity of the virtues (which I will discuss below), as long as we continue to hold that knowledge is a virtue. Anti-intellectualism implies that someone may be knowledgeable without being virtuous or virtuous without being knowledgeable. I claim that the Laws contains strong evidence for the first thesis and weaker evidence for the second theses:

Evidence for the thesis that knowledge is possible without virtue: A first example is 639b, where the Athenian raises the problem whether a good commander of army may be capable of taking command of the army just by virtue of military skill in spite of being a coward in face of danger. The answer is obviously no: what is interesting is that Plato takes for granted the possibility that someone could be knowledgeable of military skills and be simultaneously coward; I am inclined to think that Socrates would have denied such a possibility. This is not, however, direct evidence for anti-intellectualism, since what is compatible with cowardice is not knowledge of the Good, but technical expertise. In order to prove the assertion that the Laws contain evidence of anti-intellectualism, we need to prove that Plato held that moral knowledge is incompatible with moral failure. However, one may note that Socrates tacitly held that any knowledge is a sort of expertise, as he assumes when he questions Gorgias about the specific domain of sophistic (Gorgias 448e).

Such evidence is difficult to found in the text of the Laws, since Plato has here little to say about knowledge. Relevant evidence for the thesis that knowledge does not entail virtue can be found in Plato's jurisprudence rather than in his more philosophical passages. First, the impossibility of doing the evil knowingly seems to be "gradualized" in 854e, when the Athenian says that "The judge should consider him [the temple-robber] as already beyond cure; he should bear in mind the kind of education and upbringing the man has enjoyed from his earliest years, and how after all he has still not abstained from acts of the greatest evil".

However – as I hope it will become clearer from the next sections of this essay – there is little evidence that Plato thought that knowledge (about moral matters) is possible without virtue. It would be safer to affirm that Plato was no longer interested in laying down the conditions for an individual to attain knowledge; to attain and preserve knowledge; to derive virtue from knowledge.

Evidence for the thesis that virtue is possible without knowledge is given by Plato's belief, as expressed in the Laws, that some affects are intrinsically good. This thesis appears in the Laws 647b, where Plato distinguishes between a 'good' fear (identical with shame for one's reputation, or with modesty and the opposite of insolence) and a 'bad' fear - fear of pains and pleasures. This thesis is a bold one: first, it leads to the conclusion that every individual should be both afraid and unafraid (which is explicitly endorsed in 647c); "Every individual should be both afraid and unafraid"). Second, and most important, the very fact that a special kind of fear is good and other kind of fear is bad contradicts the Socratic doctrine of the Unity of the Virtues: to paraphrase Socrates, we need to "break" fear if we are to accommodate it with morality – what is relevant for morals is not the whole Fear or the whole Courage, but only parts of them. (Parenthetically: this may be seen as an instance of Plato's appropriation of ordinary language, whose intuitions had been systematically violated by Socrates. This is another, vast theme which I am not going to explore in detail). There is no word about knowledge, or reason, destroying fear, making us realize that fear is only apparent, or even that we should allow some limited, well-calculated amounts of fear to influence us .

It should be remarked, in the present context, that the abandonment of moral intellectualism does not entail that Plato held the falsity of the (negative) thesis that “noone does the evil knowingly”. He preserved this thesis while abandoning the positive thesis of moral intellectualism, i.e. that those who do the good do so knowingly. The fact that Plato continued to hold the negative thesis of moral intellectualism is responsible for the verbal agreement between the Laws and Socratic doctrines .

If it is true that Plato abandoned Socratic moral intellectualism, it remains to investigate how should the thesis "noone is knowingly (voluntarily) evil" be accomodated in an anti-intellectualist framework. (For one matter, it is sure that Plato endorsed the denial of doing evil voluntarily:)

Abandonment of anti-intellectualism can be understood as the weakness of knowledge. The weakness of knowledge is accepted in the light of the efficacy of passions By the "weakness of knowledge", I mean the thesis that knowledge alone is not guaranteed success in the conflict with irrational elements such as pain or pleasure. (In my opinion, it is debatable whether Socrates, or Plato in the Republic, thought that knowledge is more powerful than pleasure and pain; if so, then the explanation of "doing the evil" would be that knowledge is entirely absent when people act irrationally, therefore wrongly) . What is certain, is that the Laws contain explicit evidence that knowledge itself is "fallible" in the sense that it may be corrupted by irrational impulses:
"…Even if a man did get an adequate theoretical grasp of the truth of all this [of [political science], he might then attain a position of absolute control over a state, with noone to call him into account. In this circumstances he would never have the courage of his convictions; he would never devote his life to the welfare of the community as his first concern, making his private interests take second place to the public good. Hs human nature will always drive him to look to his own advantage and the lining of his pocket….Knowledge is unsurpassed by any law or regulation; reason, if it is genuine and really enjoys its natural freedom, should have universal power; it is not right that it should be under the control of anything else, as though it should be some sort of slave. But as it is, such a character is nowhere to be found, except a hint of it here and there "
The weakness of knowledge provides for an easy solution to the problem "how to explain away the appearance of akrasia". The solution is: knowledge is not powerful or knowledge is not to be looked for. Self-control, a good balance of emotions, is all that can be hoped. In the Laws, Plato emphatically affirms that wrongdoing is ignorance and/or folly; but he is silent about "knowing the good is sufficient to practicing it". I think that we can safely deduce that he rejected the Socratic thesis that virtue entails knowledge . I noted earlier that it is unclear whether Socrates allowed for the possibility of "passions", such as pain and pleasure, defeating reason and that a serious but unwelcome consequence of his moral intellectualism is that this cannot be the case. Plato at least offered a simple solution to this difficulty of Socrates: knowledge can indeed be defeated and corrupted, that's why it needs emotional support. We are left to inquire whether this simple solution can accommodate the intuition, that Plato preserved from Socrates, that noone can do the evil knowingly.

In this context, I advance the thesis that Plato's allotting self-control the status of cardinal virtue is the basis of the Aristotelic doctrine of the means. The transition from "self-control is the cardinal virtue" to the doctrine of the means is via Plato's thesis that avoiding extreme emotions is the best profilaxy against psychic conflict. The antecedents of a doctrine of the mean are to be found, of course, in the “art of measurement of pleasures” that is advocated in the Protagoras; yet, I do not know of any passage where Socrates draws the conclusion "extreme emotions should be avoided" from the premises that "we should carefully calculate the pleasures we expect". This inference may be logical or not , however Socrates was not interested in self-control, but in wisdom (or knowledge) as the cardinal virtue . Plato however drew the conclusion that mild emotions are to be preferred to strong emotions: in the 732c of the Laws, we learn, that “excessive laughter and tears must be avoided, and this is the advice every man must give to every other; one should try to behave decently by suppressing all extremes of joy and grief”

Parenthetically: if virtue does not entail knowledge (as I hold that Plato holds in the Laws), then I may formulate the following conjecture: For Socrates, the mental states of the moral agent (beliefs and knowledge) are the bearers of moral value. For Plato, the bearer of moral value is the deed. Thus – leaving aside the intricacies of the problem of the will – one may formulate the following thesis: Socrates promoted the ethics of the intention, Plato promoted the ethics of the deed. I am not sure this thesis is correct, and I am not going to explore it in detail in this essay . Besides the problems of the (Dis)unity of the soul and of the virtues, the problem of akrasia is connected with another famous component of Plato's dialogues, namely whether anyone can be happy while being evil. Socrates vigorously denied this possibility: see, for example, the denial in the Gorgias that the cruel tyrant of Macedonia was happy; also Meno 78a, where the impossibility of akrasia is derived from the impossibility of desiring to be unhappy.
I hope to have proved that the Laws contain evidence of anti-intellectualism in the sense that virtue does not require knowledge (or wisdom) and that education should be focused on passions rather than on knowledge. But it remains to be explained why Plato operated such a departure from Socrates' intellectualism. My thesis is that the Timaeus offers a key to the solution of this problem.

Inner conflict and self-control in the Laws. Self-control as the cardinal virtue

I mentioned in the beginning of this paper how the problem of akrasia is related to that of inner conflict: inner conflict is what explains away what seems to be akratic behaviour. However, for Socrates inner conflict is interesting insofar as it leads to ignorance. For Plato, the situation was different: ignorance is only one of the sources of vice, it is one of the aspects of inner conflict
This has a bearing on the problem of akrasia. By denying the possibility of akrasia, Socrates denied intellectual akrasia: the possibility of being knowledgeable and malevolent. Plato denied the possibility of mental stability coexisting with malevolence. For Socrates, the cure to seeming-akratic behaviour was improving one’s epistemological condition and bringing him/her to a state of rational judgment – the target of the anti-akratic therapy was ignorance. For Plato, the cure to seeming-akratic behavior is a mixture of psychiatric and educational methods that should bring the person to a state of self-control: the target of the anti-akratic therapy is inner conflict.

Inner conflict is first mentioned in the Laws in connexion with the problem, already mentioned in the Protagoras of inner conflict and inner peace. (There is an obvious political analogon to this: the akratic person wages a personal civil war, and the problem of akrasia appears in the Laws in a political context: what are the conditions that ensure a state's victory over other states?):
The Athenian asks "What of a man's relation with himself - should we think of himself as his own ennemy?" and Cleinias, the Cretan, admits that "not only is everyone an enemy of everyon else in the public sphere, but each man fights a private war against himself" for then to add that "This is where a man wins the first and best of victories - over himself. Conversely, to fall a victim of oneself is the worst and most shocking thing that can be imagined. This way of speaking points to a war against ourselves within each of us." (Laws626e). How should this inner war end? Plato's initial answer is that it should end with the victory of the best part: this is not a trivial answer, since an alternative would have been that it should end in a truce. Anyway, Plato sees the analogy between the political and the psychological so natural that the answer to the question about the psychic conflict is given in political terms: Each of us is either conqueror of oneself or conquered by oneself. But since (via political analogy) it is good to conquer and not to be conquered, how can we conquer ourselves without being conquered? A solution is given by the Disunity of the Soul: Cleinias answers promptly that "Wherever the better people subdue their inferiors, the state may rightly be said to be 'conqueror of' itself, and we should be entirely justified in praising it for its victory. Where the opposite happens, we must give the opposite verdict." (Laws, 627b). It only takes a few lines until the Athenian makes Cleinias' point more vivid: "sometimes evil citizens will come together in large numbers and forcibly try to enslave the virtuous minority, although both sides are members of the same race and the same state. When they prevail, the state may properly be said to be 'inferior to' itself, and to be an evil one; but when they are defeated, we can say it is 'superior to' itself and that it is a good state." (Laws, 627c) - contrast this with the passage in the Gorgias where Socrates effectively displays of the argument that "it is by nature that the strong and few should rule, it is only by convention that the many and weak rule" by remarking that it is according to nature that the many and weak should be stronger than the strong and few. Whether Plato forgot this argument or not when writing the Laws, I don't know: he believes, however, that it is however better to subdue the evil people (and, we should assume, the inferior parts of the soul) than to eliminate them: scoundrels should go living in obedience to the virtuous (Laws 627e). This has a bearing on the problem of the place of emotions like pain and pleasure: they should be conquered - in order to conquer them one needs to be acquainted with them: Spartan citizens are acquainted with pain in order to get the courage to fight and resist it: what is the analogous for pleasures? For there should be such an analoguous, since we know that "the term 'bad' we apply, I think, to the victim of pleasures even more than to the other [to the victim of pains]. When we say that a man has been shamefully 'conquered' by himself, we are, I fancy, much more likely to mean someone defeated by pleasures than by pain" (633e). Pleasures are, of course, something bad, as dangerous as pains: a little amount of pleasures is needed in order to learn how to avoid them.
Plato seems to have oscillated between the thesis "Pleasures are entirely bad and need only to be experienced in order to be avoided" (the Vaccination thesis) and the thesis "Pleasures are good only in appropriate limits". (See 636e as textual evidence for the latter thesis: "Pleasure and pain, you see, flow like two springs released by nature. If a man draws the right amount from the right one at the right time, he lives a happy life; but if he draws unintelligently at the wrong time, his life will be rather different. State and individual and every living being are on the same footing here". The last sentence of this quotation is, in my opinion, a clue to the thesis that it is political motivations that are behind Plato's admitting a place to pleasures in the life of the happy man. As we already know from the Republic, pleasures are the analogon of the inferior citizens: "the element that experiences pleasures and pain corresponds to the most extensive part of a state, the common people" (689a). Assigning a place to pleasure makes sense in the Laws in the context of assigning a place to irrationality .

This has consequences for the status of people who are doomed to be irrational - however I am not going to explore the political consequences of Plato's doctrine of akrasia, although it is obvious that there are such consequences. Conquering oneself is self-control, as The Athenian further reminds us that self-control is good: "those who can control themselves are good, those who cannot are bad" (644b), remembering the passage in 626-627 about conquering oneself. (The discussion about "Conquering oneself", like many others in the Laws, can be traced back to doctrines professed by Socrates. For example, in the course of his demonstration that not all pleasures are good, made in the Gorgias, Socrates affirms that "ruling over oneself" is a prerequisite for happiness. This means "being temperate and having control over oneself, ruling over the pleasures and appetites one has" (Gorgias 491d). It is however ambiguous whether Plato meant that only those who can control themselves are good, which would make self-control the cardinal virtue, replacing Socratic knowledge. It is undeniable that in 688a Plato presents self-control as being one of four virtues, the other three being "judgement, wisdom, and courage"; it remains an open question whether, in the light of the discussion in 633 (where we learn that the most meritorious man is the one who conquers himself, self-control is not really the most basic virtue in Plato's system).

A further hint that self-control is indeed the cardinal virtue is given by the definition of "crass" ignorance in 689a: crass ignorance is "the kind involved when a man thinks something is fine and good, but loathes it instead of liking it, and conversely when he likes and welcomes what he believes This is not trivial: psychic conflict that explains for Socrates the appearance of akrasia is between knowledge and passions, not between belief and passions. Again: perhaps the most relevant passage is at 696c: Megillus cannot answer unambiguously the Athenian’s question, whether “if we found self-control existing in the soul, in isolation from all other virtues, should we be justified in admiring it” . Since this discussion occurs in the midst of the discussion of the relative merits of the Persian absolute monarchy, my conjecture is that Plato’s doubts about the merits of knowledge go and in hand with his doubts about the merits of absolute monarchy; in both cases, I believe that Plato would have preferred an absolute monarchy but doubted about its practical attainability; he would have preferred knowledge as a the cardinal virtue, but doubted about its practical attainability. It is nevertheless true that, for the better or for the worse, the Laws sometimes endorse a political system that is a “mean” between monarchy and democracy, other times it openly endorses dictatorship (e.g. the need for a benevolent dictator in 790 sq). It goes without saying that the dictator should be “self-controlled” Again, in 733e, in the midst of a long monologue, the Athenian identifies three types of virtuous lifes: “the life of self-control, the life of wisdom and the life of courage”, the opposite of these being “the licentious, the foolish, the cowardly”. Despite going at great lenghts to praise the life of self-control, as offering less intense pleasures and pains than the life of the profligate (734b), Plato does not have anything to say about the life of wisdom without self-control, so we cannot even find whether it is possible in principle or not…the Athenian only mentions that “it is because of ignorance, or lack of self-control, or both, that world a large live immoderately” (734b).
Another way to prove that self-control indeed became the cardinal virtue in the Laws consists in paying attention to the changes of the meaning of “wisdom” and “ignorance” that occur in the dialogue. For example, in 689a: Plato opposes wisdom to folly – and not to ignorance, as expected. The thesis of this semantic shift is Terence Irwin`s interpretation:``The remark [Laws 689d), suggests that wisdom is to be identified not with any specific cognitive condition, but with psychic harmony. Indeed, it became quite difficult to distinguish wisdom from temperance`` (Plato`s Ethics, p. 349)
The problem “whether self-control is the cardinal virtue” I take to be a relevant one for the present essay, since self-control is the opposite of psychical conflict, and we saw that psychical conflict is the reality behind the appearance of (cynical) akrasia. Therefore, if self-control were the cardinal virtue, then this would mean that knowledge itself is “inferior” to self-control – inferior either in the sense of “less worthy to be pursued” or in the sense of “less effective”, i.e. vulnerable to pleasure and pain. As we shall see below, the Laws contain only hints for the second interpretation.
This happens in the case of psychic conflict: "when the soul quarrels with knowledge or opinion and reason, its natural ruling principles, you have there what I call 'folly'. This applies both to the state in which people disobey their rulers and laws, and to the individual, when the fine principles in which he really believes prove not only ineffective but actually harmful. It's all these examples of ignorance that I should put down as the worst kind of discord in a state and an individual, not the mere professional ignorance of a workman" (689a).

A simple question could be asked in this context: Should psychic conflict end with the victory of the best part and annihilation of the worst part, or should it end in a state of harmony between the two? Plato's suggests that the “worst” part should not be eliminated, but rather put at the service of the better part, Thus, reason should be in accord with the irrational: 653b: "Virtue is the general concord between reason and emotion". The dissatisfaction with the rule of reason only is related to Plato's general tendency of rehabilitating the appearance, including the worst parts of the soul).
Plato’s late anti-intellectualism is related to his general pessimism about human condition . It is almost a cliché to say that he became less and less confident in the possibility of erecting a state based on knowledge ; that this is the motivation of his interest for dealing with a city as it can actually be; that the formula that best capture the transition from the Republic to the Laws is “from the ideal to the real”. If this is the correct interpretation, then the old Plato should have had similar doubts about the practical attainability of knowledge.
Now, mere doubts about the practical attainability of knowledge do not entail that Plato revised the Socratic maxim “virtue is knowledge” unless it be proven that similar doubts were cast on virtue. There is little evidence that he did so, at least verbally: “We do not hold the common view that a man's highest good is to survive and simply continue to exist. His highest good is to become as virtuous as possible and to continue to exist in that state as long as life lasts". (707b) (Perhaps Plato thought that knowledge alone, without self-control, is unable to preserve stable virtue ?). In this context, Plato’s anti-intellectualism and “rehabilitation of the passions” can be seen as nothing more than an attempt to make peace with the enemy: this is what even Cronos, the first – and divine – lawgiver knew.

It remains to explain and further analyze the way of Plato’s revisal of Socratic moral intellectualism; the transition from the “virtue is knowledge” and “vice is ignorance” to “virtue is self-control” and “vice is inner conflict”.
2.1.2.1. Timaeus: moral-biological psychiatry Timaeus contains a nice materialist explaining away of akrasia. What is interesting is that the appearance of akrasia is now reduced not to ignorance, but to mental illness, which is conceived on a biological model. Diseases of the soul (nosoi tees psyches) begin to be discussed in the 86b, and they are classified as ignorance and madness. They lead to excessive of pain and pleasure (idea that will re-occur in the Laws 732c sq). In the same section of the Timaeus we can learn that the man who is in great pain or great pleasure is mad, and that his reason is "darkened". This happens because "his soul is rendered foolish by his body; yet he is regarded not as one diseased, but as one who is voluntarily bad, which is a mistake." (Timaeus-86c). The typical example is sexual incontinence, caused by "moisture and fluidity which is produced in one of the elements by the loose consistency of the bones" (86d). In fairnes to the soul: the Timaeus is not a ``materialist`` dialogue in the ``philogenetic`` sense, since the soul was created prior to the body and should rule over it. (33c). Timaeus is materialistic in an ontogenetic sense: bodily conditions cause changes in the health of the soul. A way to reconcile the priority of the soul with the biological account of moral disease is this: the soul is rational and virtuous qua soul, but the soul as it actually acts in the phenomenal world is contaminated by its contact with the body .
In the Timaeus Plato continues to stick to the Socratic formula that "noone does the evil voluntarily (or knowingly)", but for him this no longer means that people who do the evil are ignorant. It rather means they are mentally unhealthy, and that lack of mental health is a biological condition:
"For no man is voluntarily bad, but the bad become bad because of an ill disposition of the body and bad education – things which are hateful to every man and happen to him against his will" (86e).
Ignorance becomes only one kind of the diseases of the soul , along with madness; however, in his discussion following the psychiatric classification, Plato takes into consideration madness, forgetting about ignorance. (My conjecture is that he tacitly considered ignorance to be reducible to madness). Socrates thought that moral problems were epistemological problems and used medical metaphors to make his point more vivid. In the hands of Plato, the medicine of the soul became a dead metaphor as it assumed a biological support. This is how moral problems became medical problems: we are not far from the rhethoric of contemporary biological psychiatry (“people are not responsible for their mental diseases, since these diseases are caused by chemical inbalance in their brains”). It should be noted, perhaps, that Plato was not much interested in heredity From here until the psychiatric control of the state, as advocated in the Laws, it will only take a step: namely, that everybody is mad, in a biological and pedagogical sense. This step is made in the Laws – as expected, in the light of old Plato's lack of confidence in the power of knowledge and in the tacit explaining away of ignorance (along with wrongdoing) by madness. The biological and educational program of the Timaeus will be pursued in detail by the Laws.
Traces of the Timaeus theory in the Laws The biological model of moral health in the Timaeus raises the obvious problem of finding the appropriate psychiatric cure. This question is raised by Plato in the Timaeus, but no convincing answer is given to it. The only thing Plato has to say there about biological psychiatric treatment is that the soul should be in harmony with the body. "…we should not move the soul without the body, or the body without the soul, and thus they will be on guard against each other and be healthy and well balanced" (Timeaus. 88c). Our contemporary intuition naturally links the materialist account of mental health (and disease) with search for effective drugs, covering both under the label "biological psychiatry". Plato did not think differently, and in the Laws 647e: "Well then, has any god given men a drug to produce fear, so that the more a man agrees to drink of it, the more the impression grows on him, after every draught, that he is assailed by misfortune? The effect would be to make him apprehensive about his present and future prospects, until finall even the boldest of men would be reduced to absolute terror; but when he had recovered from the drink and slept it off, he would be invariably be himself again". Such a drug would be particularly useful since it can enhance courage (via Plato's belief in the efficacy of vaccination). My thesis is that the wine discussed in the First and Second Book of the Laws is the answer that Plato found. If useful lies are didactic methods, why not drugs? We should not be surprised to see Plato consider wine as playing an educational role – wine is a barometer and simultaneously a medication for fear and courage.
The details that Plato gives in moulding the soul towards virtue include dancing: “exercising very young children by keeping them in motion contributes a great deal towards the perfection of one aspect of the soul’s virtue” (791b). In this materialism-friendly context, a surprising, Phaedo-reminding remark occurs in 828e: “The union of the body and of the soul can never be superior to their separation (and I mean that quite seriously)” – I personally can find no way to reconcile this remark with the repeated insistence over the effects of the wine. Thus, Plato abandoned Socrates' interest for knowledge as the cardinal virtue as he took seriously the metaphor of mental health and thought he found a biological basis of it. This transition is linked to other changes that occurred from Socrates to Plato.
From nativism to educational programs or: From rational persuasion to rhetoric Anyone who is even superficially acquainted with Plato has probably in mind the Socratic insistence that knowledge is reminiscence, with the beautiful demonstration, in Menon, that mathematical knowledge is innate and perhaps with the fact that Protagoras attributes to Socrates the denial that virtue can be taught. In the Meno, no clear answer had been given to the question whether virtue can be taught. In the Laws, an opposite picture emerges – on a ground that had already been prepared by the Timaeus and the Politicus.. Education, in its minute details, is of utmost importance for the individual’s condition: “Man is a tame animal, as we put it, and of course if he enjoys a good education and happens to have the right natural disposition, he’s apt to be a most heavenly and gentle creature; but his upbringing has only to be inadequate or misguiding and he’ll become the wildest animal on the face of the earth”. (766a) and again in 782d: “Give a man a correct education, and these instincts [alimentary, bodily and reproductive] will lead him to virtue, but educate him badly and he’ll end up at the other extreme” .
Plato discovered education as he discovered the importance of psychiatry. In the Laws¸ he envisages a vast and detailed educational program, without even seeming to raise any doubt about the possibility of virtue being taught : "I call 'education' the initial acquisition of virtue by the child, when the feelings of pleasure and affection, pain and hatred, that well up in his soul, are channelled in the right course before he can understand the reason why" (652b). What this right direction means, we learn after a few lines: Any kind of education has as its necessary component "the correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate and love what we ought to love. Call this 'education' and I, at any rate, think you would be giving it its proper name". (ibidem). Deprived of the appropriate educational training, people are bad and/or mad: mad, according to 672c "I am quite certain of this: no animal that enjoys the use of reason in its maturity is ever born with that faculty; or at any rate with it fully developed. During the time in which it has not yet attained its characteristic level of intelligence it is completely mad: it bawls uncontrollably, and as soon s it can get on its feet it jumps about with equal abandon.", and bad. Plato gave up Socratic nativism to the extent that he gave up not only the emphasis on a rational way of moral progress, but the trust in rationality itself: education is irrational and - even if it be admitted that its end is knowledge - emotions remain indispensable. A good balance of emotions allows us to forget knowledge altogether .
As education employs irrational means, so does lawgiving. Plato has no doubt that irrational tactics of achieving justice are the most effective when it comes to governing actual people. As textual evidence, I point to the discussion in 662-663, where the Athenian develops an argument that justice should appear pleasant, even if it (as we know from Socrates) it has itself nothing to do with justice. True, there is a problem of consistency between that discussion and the passages where Plato (like Socrates) accepts that pleasures pursued in a calcuated way are good. Indeed, Plato suggests that being pleasant is wholly irrelevant to being good and that it is only for the sake of efficiency on the masses that he promotes the reverse view. For example: "...we might perhaps pursue this point: 'Which category of men should we call the most blessed by heaven? Those who live the supremely just life, or the most pleasurable?' If it were answered 'Those who live the most pleasurable life', then that would be a most curious thing to say. However, I am unwilling to associate the gods with such a statement; I prefer to think of it in connexion with the forefathers and lawgivers." (662e). Promoting in practice (and in law-making) justice regardless of pleasure is doomed to failure, since "nobody would willingly agree to do something which would not bring him more pleasure than pain" (665b). We are not far from Lucretius' honey: we want to have an effect upon the masses, and in order to achieve such an effect we don't need to speak to them the moral truth. The most we can hope is that they would understand the truth disguised in its pleasant appearance: Plato actually thought he can do away even with this, since in his view a good lawmaker doesn't need even to persuade the subjects that justice is pleasant; he should only teach them how to achieve what they think to be pleasant things, himself secretely knowing they are actually just: "So the argument that does not drive a wedge between 'pleasant', on the one hand, and 'just' and 'fine' on the other, even if it achieves nothing else, will do something to persuade a man to live a just and pious life." (663b). In short, there is a problem of consistency between (i) "Pleasures are good as a faute-de-mieux: people are unable to pursue morality unless morality appears pleasant to them", (ii) "Pleasures are good insofar as we need to learn to avoid them"; and (iii) the old thesis, held by Socrates against Protagoras, that "Pleasures are good insofar as they are rationally calculated" Plato in the Laws holds all three views. (Leave aside the problem whether something may appear pleasant without actually being so, or being pleasant without appearing pleasant). What remains true, is that Plato finds no difficulty with the idea that a good lawgiver should deceive the citizens: things couldn't have been different, since "Truth is a fine thing, and it is sure to prevail but to persuade men of it certainly seems no easy task" (663e).
By following in detail the educational program envisaged by Plato in the Laws, it is easy to realize that Socratic cross-examination has entirely fallen from grace. (We are, after all, looking for the second-best possible state ). In lawgiving as in education, useful lies have their honourable place, since the citizens which are to be governed are nothing more than big children. If Plato, unlike Socrates, puts so great an emphasis on education, this serves only to make citizens' infantile condition appear more vivid. But there is more than this. As I showed in the previous section of my essay, rehabilitation of irrational means of achieving moral purposes goes hand in hand with advocacy of biological psychiatry.
From the Unity of Virtues to the Disunity of Virtues The Unity of the Virtues is a central part of the Socratic dialogues. It is arguable that Plato abdnoned it in the Laws. There is an obvious family-resemblance between psychic conflict (which we saw to be the source of evil and the explanation of apparent akrasia) and disunity of the virtues. What is important however in the present context is that the unity of virtues proves the impossibility of akrasia: if moral perfection goes hand in hand with epistemological perfection (or, as stated in the Protagoras, they are several names of one and the same thing), it is obvious that noone can be knowledgeable and evil (or coward, or dishonest) or, for that matter, virtuous and ignorant. I should add that the unity of the virtues does not preclude psychical conflict: indeed, wrongdoing will naturally be explained as being overcome by pleasures or pain, which is a case of ignorance. Unity of the (moral and epistemological) virtues precludes akrasia, but it does not preclude psychical conflict.
Disunity of the virtues is related to the problem of akrasia, but not in an obvious way. First, "disunity of the virtues" is not the same as "psychical conflict". Socrates admited psychical conflict and rejected akrasia, but Socrates held that the Virtues are One. Plato continues to reject akrasia but holds that the virtues are many.
The Laws contain, in my opinion, evidence for the disunity of the virtues. I have in mind 696c, where the example is discussed, of a person who "in spite of considerable courage is immoderate and licentious". Any reader of Plato who remembers the Protagoras will know that the problem "can courage be separated from wisdom" receives a long treatment there, and Socrates' answer is negative; it is all the more surprising that, in the Laws, Plato unproblematically implies an affirmative answer to the problem of the separation of virtues.
If the unity of the virtues precludes akrasia, the disunity of the virtues alone is not, itself, a proof of the possibility, or actual occurrence of, akrasia. It can be such a proof, if if knowledge is one of the virtues and if it could be present in circumstances where other virtues are absent. However, there is little textual evidence for such a view. I quoted the unconvincing example of the coward but skilled military commander. Another equally unconvincing example is the Plato's mention of corruption that affects knowledge. Since there is little mention of knowledge in the Laws (except for the members of the Nocturnal Council), I think the closest to the truth conclusion is that we simply don't know whether Plato accepted that someone can have the relevant moral knowledge and fail in moral respects. The disunity of the virtues has another important consequence: someone can be virtuous without being knowledgeable. In my opinion, the Laws contains some evidence for this thesis. However, even in this respect I think the best thing to say is: Plato held that the moral condition that is attainable in practice does not necessarily include knowledge. The whole insistence on education points to this fact.
2.4. From the Unity of the Soul to the Disunity of the Soul; A reason why Plato took more and more seriously the thesis of the Disunity of the Soul may be that he could not conceive of irreflexive relations: since it is good that a state should conquer other states and avoid being conquered by them, what about conquering oneself? If conquering is conceived reflexively, it leads to the paradox that the one who conquers is identical to the one who is conquered. The disunity of the soul offers a way out of this difficulty: The Laws obviously holds that the soul has more parts, as it follows from the discussion about. conquering oneself. However, it should be pointed that (a) the problem of the (dis)unity of the soul is complicated in the late Platonic dialogues by the postulation of a cosmic soul, responsible for moving the heavens; (b) the bipartition of the soul is not consistently held in the dialogue: confronted with the problem of finding the source of evil, Plato favours the "Two-souls" version in 896d, where the Athenian declares: "And surely it's necessary to assert that as soul resides and keeps control anywhere where anything is moved, it controls the heavens as well. One soul, or more than one? I'll answer for you both: more than one., At any rate, we must not assume fewer than two: that which does good, and that which has the opposite capacity".
The problem of the unity of the virtues is related to the problem of akrasia even via a different equation, namely that of virtue with happiness. This is too complex a problem to follow its evolution in the present essay; I will point that Plato continues to maintain that no vicious person can be happy in a way that reminds the famous discussion in the Gorgias: see, for example, 743a: “I’ll never concede that the rich man can become happy without being virtuous as well”.
A brief political interlude: From democracy to totalitarianism
I hope to have pointed so far to some aspects of the evolution of Plato's moral thought. There is an evolution towards irrationality, psychiatry, disunity of the virtues, anti-intellectualism, disunity of the soul, anti-nativism, educational programs. Socrates was the opposite of all these. (Psychiatrization mediates the transition from mental-health-as-a-metaphor to mental-health as a moral program). There are two general contexts, or backgrounds, in which this transition takes place. One is a logical background: it is the gradual appropriation by Plato of the world of the appearance, of the False, of the Non-being, or ordinary language.
Another is a political background: the transition from Socratic optimism and democracy to Platonic psychiatry and etatism. (Plato's organicist theory in the Republic is another illustration in micro of this transition).
It is almost a cliché to say that Plato's totalitarianism is well documented by the Republic. There is little that the Laws add to this. We learn that slaves should be subject to their masters and that the stronger should rule and the weaker should obey (690a). In fairness to Plato, I should point that he most probably thought of the "strength" and "weakness" here involved in psychological terms, rather than in those of brute force: from the passage just quoted we learn that the young should obey the old.
Plato's totalitarianism (the rule of the few) is made more moderate (see, e.g., 698a: “the [Persian] empire is badly run at the moment because the people are kept in undue subjection and the rulers excessively authoritarian” much in the way that the rational part is made to coexist peacefully with the pleasurable-and-sensitive-to-pain part: since the enemy cannot be destroyed, we should try to convert him to our purposes, even if this is not intelligible to him.
Beyond his preference for the rule of the few, Plato shares another consequence of totalitarianism: his preference that all the members of the state should behave, more or less, uniformly: this was the ideal of the Republic which is regretted in the Laws: in 739c the Athenian tells his interlocutors that “the laws in force impose the greatest possible unity on the state” since “Everybody feels pleasure and pain at the same things, so that they all praise and blame with complete unanimity” (739c). Plato’s desire for the abolition of private property can be best understood in the context of his love of uniformity. This preference for uniformity leads, via his well-known organicism, to a picture of the state which is the purpose of the individual’s life: marriages, for example, are to be made in the interest of the state: “One general rule should apply to marriage: we should seek to contract the alliance that will benefit the state, not the one that we personally find most alluring”. (773b).
A naive question would be: if Plato, unlike Socrates, rehabilitated the appearance, how come Socrates was a democrat and Plato a totalitarian? A simple answer is: Socrates was an epistemological and moral optimist. He believed that any person can attain knowledge and virtue. Consequently, he did not reserve any special place to the "inferior" persons. Inferior persons can relatively unproblematically improve themselves. Inferior persons and inferior parts of the soul, can be done without qua inferior, as they are inferior. Plato - I mean old Plato - was, on the contrary, a moral and epistemological pessimist. Inferior people cannot be done without. They should be assigned inferior places and inferior tasks.

MEDICAL PUNISHMENT 1. Socratic moral medicine: As it is known , Socrates uses in the Gorgiasing in the Gorgias however suggests that for Socrates morality as mental health was more than an instrumental metaphor. Likewise, nothing in the Protagoras suggests that "prudent hedonism" was more than a means to convince his audience that pleasures are morally irrelevant (as is consistent with the Phaedon). Socrates compared justice with medicine, and punishment with administering medication, but he never forgot the analogical character of this model. This means that the justice cannot be properly said to be a branch of medicine (or viceversa); that the concern of justice and punishment is to make explicit a state of knowledge-as-virtue that is inherent in the evildoer.
For Plato, things turned out to be different. The purpose of this section of my essay is to explore the way Plato's views on punishment developed from those of Socrates via the psychiatrical reading of akrasia that Plato gave to Socrates. First, a very sketchy presentation of Plato's views on punishment, as they appear in the Laws:
2. Plato's moral medicine: We saw above that people are born mad and that education, as well as lawgiving, is a corrective of an inherent pathological state; as such, it has to be accessible on mentally ill people. We saw that the most meritorious condition of a person is to conquer oneself, i.e. to avoid psychic conflict. Given all these, it remains little room for the immorality of mentally healthy people. A more important question is whether it remains any room for the morality of mentally ill people; more importantly, for true morality at all.

On the other hand, the Laws reassert some formulations familiar from the Gorgias. Injustice remains a disease: the point of view of the unjust man distorts moral reality: "Injustice looks pleasant to the enemy of justice, because he regards it from his own personal standpoint, which is unjust and evil; justice, on the other hand, looks unpleasant to him. But from the standpoint of the just man, the view gained of justice and injustice is always the opposite". (663c). Far from drawing from this remark the conclusion that the lawgiver (or the educator) should change the optics of the morally unhealthy person in order to let him see the moral truth, Plato advocates useful lies. The medical model of morality appears, in almost Socratic terms, in 720b, where legislator should be a physician who should explain to the patient the reasons for administering a certain treatment. (This passage reminds the sophist who in Gorgias claimed he is more useful than a physician, since he can convince a patient to swallow an unpleasant medicine, while the doctor cannot always).

The Laws is in many places reminiscent of the Socratic doctrine of punishment. Namely, the thesis that punishment is not to be confused with revenge, and that it is meant to improve the criminal; that punishment is good for the person who is punished and even that justice and happiness go hand in hand: “As to wisdom and true and fixed opinions, happy is the man who acquires them, even when declining in years; and we may say that he who possesses them, and the blessings which are contained in them, is a perfect man.” (653a). An obvious difficulty for the medical view on punishment is that Plato allows for the death penalty, on the grounds that the criminal is beyond any cure. The problem is discussed in a context where we find a formulation that could have well been put into Socrates’ mouth “there are some curable criminals, and the first thing to realize here is that any unjust man is unjust against his will” (731c). As for incurable criminals, rash emotional reactions are appropriate when punishing them: “And you may pity the criminal whose disease is curable, and restrain and abate your anger, instead of persisting in it with the spitefulness of a shrew; but when you have to deal with complete and unmanageably vicious corruption, you must let your anger off its leash” (ibidem). Plato is here obviously incoherent, since there is no logical reason why complete and unmanageably corrupt persons should be such according to their will; in modern legislations, acceptance of “insanity plea” is not governed by whether the criminal is complete or curable; that is, were Plato consistent, he should not deny the medical nature of the punishment that is applied to the persistent criminals; perhaps he should provide for a more elaborate treatment of them; it is however the case that Plato thought that all crimes are diseases: for textual evidence, in 853e, robbery of temples, which is the worst of all crimes, is considered a disease. Plato is moreover incoherent in that his penal code does not take seriously the notion that involuntary criminals are innocent, and thus punishment for them should have only an educational purpose: penalties for slaves are much harsher than for free citizens in the case of similar offences. Despite his theoretical program of assimilating wrongdoing to insanity, Plato preserves the intuition that there are voluntary and involuntary offences, as he preserves the intuition that there are insane innocent people . But I am not going to dwell on the practicalities of Plato's penal code, since my interest is in the theoretical bases of his ethics.

2. From humanitarianism to paternalism: I will use the term "humanitarianism" to designate, somewhat loosely, a family of views that are supported by moral optimism: negative moral predicates characterize acts rather than agents; the evil acts' being evil is due not to their being produced by an agent, but rather to accidental factors that are beyond the control of the agent; punishment has a doubtful legitimacy and, anyway, cannot be justified on retributivist grounds. I think it is obvious that Socrates' view on punishment was a humanitarian one and, moreover, that the impossibility of akrasia and his moral intellectualism offer the grounds of his humanitarianism about punishment.

However, I want to argue for the thesis that the impossibility of akrasia led Plato to conclusions that Socrates would not have endorsed. By an intelligible but invalid transition, Plato formulated paternalist conclusions starting from Socrates' humanitarianism and moral intellectualism. (By "paternalism" I mean the thesis that people can be, or are, ignorant about what is good to them, and that it is possible to do good to someone against his/her will, or – in a more Greek context – against his belief about what is best to him and that, therefore, the state should act towards his own good, in spite of his beliefs about what is best for them). Paternalism is linked to irrationalism, insofar as the person who supposedly is offered the "good" does not realize that the good s/he receives is good. My thesis is that Socrates' views on punishment were humanitarian, but that in the hands of the old Plato they had paternalist consequences.

It is true that Socrates' views on punishment leave open the possibility of paternalism. (I have specifically in mind the passages in Gorgias about the unjust person being unhappier if unpunished). It is also true that Socrates opened the way to a theory of medical punishment. Likewise, despite of his belief in democracy (explicit in the argument in the Gorgias that the rule of the "many weak" over the "few strong" is according to nature), Socrates laid down the premises of totalitarianism via his consistent usage of the sophism "what is truly good for me is identical with what is good in general". Plato was not severely wrong in using Socrates's medical analogies and humanitarianism as a basis for his psychiatric paternalism, as he was not severely wrong in using Socrates' moral realism as a basis for his totalitarianism. Nevertheless, in respect to the transition from Socratic to Platonic punishment, I want to make two points:
(i) There is no evidence that Socrates explicitly formulated the thesis that the state – or a body of moral-medical experts – should improve people's moral character against what they believe to be best for them;
(ii) Thus, Socratic humanitarianism does not logically entail paternalism. The reason why this entailment does not hold is that Plato abandoned a crucial element of Socrates' moral intellectualism, namely that it is impossible to know or "see" the Good without doing it, or without stopping to do the evil. (Socrates believed this because he was an epistemological optimist, and Plato abandoned it because of his epistemological pessimism ). Indeed, the thesis that "noone does the evil knowingly", which logically entails that "those who do the evil do so because of ignorance", has no consequence for the notion of punishment. The only evidence for Socrates' explicit views on punishment is in Gorgias and Protagoras, where he states that punishment is, or should be, good for the one who is punished. More specifically, an appropriate punishment is such that the guilty person will become happier because of being punished. (As we saw, Plato reasserts this humanitarian principle in the Laws, where he blames the distorted optic of the evildoer for rendering him unable to realize the benefits of his being punished. However, the view of punished as "good for the punished person" suggests that the one who is to be punished is in principle able to realize, to know, the goodness of the punishment he is inflicted. An appropriate punishment is good and beneficial (leading-to-happiness) to the extent at which it is intelligible.

No such requirement for the intelligibility of punishment is present in the Laws. True, the Preambles to the laws, the requirement that the guilty persons should ask, in principle, themselves to be punished and should see even death as a bliss if they are incurable ; the reassertion of the identity between virtue and happiness – all these can be found in the Laws and indicate a continuity – at least a verbal one – with Socrates' views. This continuity is more verbal than deep, insofar as Plato preserved only one of the theses of Socrates' moral intellectualism, namely that "noone does the evil knowingly", while abandoning the thesis that it is impossible to know the good and do the evil.

The consequence is the paternalistic theory of punishment that is present in the Laws: The offenders are mentally ill and, as such, basically irresponsible. Since they are mentally ill, the punisher is not obliged to convinced them that punishment is good: from here, nothing is easier than to draw the conclusion that punishment can, in some cases at least, be arbitrary: (It is always arbitrary from the point of view of the one who is punished, and it should remain so):
"We may take action, we may grant him [the criminal] pleasures, or make him suffer; we may honor him, we may disgrace him; we can fine him, or we may give him gifts. We may use absolutely any means to make him hate injustice and embrace justice – or at any rate not hate him". (862e)
Due to his epistemological pessimism, Plato is no longer interested (or confident) in intellectual ways to address mental illness. (I.e.: For Plato, it is not only the case that the malefactors are irrational – Socrates too would have accepted this idea, since he, as we saw, rejected the possibility of cynicism; it is, moreover, the case that moral-medical therapy is as irrational as the disease, at least from the point of view of the person who is to be cured; and the purpose of a successful therapy is, again, not necessarily a rational condition, the "state of knowledge"). The source of evil – which is madness rather than ignorance – is of course an irrational state, so Plato decided to fight it with its own weapons. . In order to realize that Socratic humanitarianism about punishment does not logically lead to paternalism, I will make two further points:
(a) Socrates' humanitarianism is compatible with a doctrine of internal punishment, according to which the evildoer is already punished by the very act of doing the evil. (This can be understood in the sense that "the evildoer damages his soul", or "the evildoer suffers but does not realize his sufferance", or "the evildoer will be punished in the afterlife": Socrates held, at various points, all of these theses; an obvious way of understanding the doctrine of internal punishment is that those who do the evil experience remorse, although Socrates and Plato had little to say about this). From the premises of internal punishment, Socrates (or Plato) could have drawn the conclusion that evildoers should be forgiven . This would have implied preserving the intuition that punishment is a way of inflicting sufferance to the evildoer and rejecting the intuition that authors of evil deeds should be punished; Socrates chose a different way, namely to preserve the intuition that authors of evil deeds should be punished but to reject the intuition that punishment is a form of inflicting sufferance.

(b) It may be argued a priori that Socrates saw punishment as being necessarily preceded by the convicted’s coming to know that punishment is a good thing. Indeed, if this step (the rational acceptance of the good of punishment) were skipped, then the convicted would be forced to behave against what he believes to be the best for him. Being punished would be an instance of akratic behavior or of psychical conflict – if the “rational” part of the guilty person realized that punishment is good (and beneficial) but the “pleasures and pains” overpowered him and blocked his acceptance of this truth. This is the logical consequence of inflicting punishment on the intellectualist premises of Socrates: punishment leads either to akratic behavior or to psychical conflict on the part of the convicted. But we saw that akratic behavior is impossible, while psychical conflict is the source of evil. It would be paradoxical to punish the evil by creating precisely the conditions of its appearance.
The requirement that the punished person should understand the reason of his being punished poses no serious threat to Plato, since he does not care much about knowledge or intellectual abilities; as we saw, he either believes knowledge is weak or unattainable. However, it is intuitive (and I take it intuitive for the Greeks) that punishment should not consist in the punished person’s being in the state that favors committing the offence for which he is guilty. In particular: if ignorance is the source of evil, punishment cannot consist in the enhancement of ignorance. If psychic conflict is the source of evil, then punishment cannot enhance psychic conflict. Socrates’s views on punishment meet this requirement: Plato’s views are more problematic, since his psychiatric account of morality does nothing to prevent the possibility that the punished persons should not experience psychic conflict.
True, there is no textual evidence for Socrates accepting the points (a) and (b) above. I maintain, however, that they are consistent with the views expounded by Socrates.
Paternalism about punishment easily leads to general paternalism about politics. I tried to show above how punitive humanitarianism (the thesis that punishment is beneficial for the punished) leads to paternalism (those who receive the benefits of punishment are unable to realize these benefits) via epistemological pessimism: people are generally unable to attain the epistemological state that allows their access to moral truths, including the morality of their being punished. Punitive paternalism is, however, a special case of political paternalism. The transition from punitive paternalism to political paternalism is made possible by the thesis that everyone is basically mad. Punitive paternalism holds that punishing one is a way of making him happier. Political paternalism holds that to make people happier is a way of punishing them, of acting against what they believe to be the best for them. Both punitive humanitarianism and political paternalism somehow blur the distinction between punishing and making happy, but in different ways; the transition from punitive humanitarianism to political paternalism is a sophism, but I think that Plato made it.

For further evidence that the in the Laws Plato did not verbally reject Socratis intellectualism: wrongdoing continues to be a species of ignorance: "we would be saying nothing but the truth if we named ignorance as a cause of wrong-doing" (863b). Confronted with the necessity of distinguishing, for legal purposes, between voluntary and involuntary offences, Plato explains away, in the same passage, "voluntarily (knowingly) doing the evil" as double ignorance: this commits him to the curious thesis that "simple ignorance" leads to less grave offences than "Double ignorance", i.e. one's ignorance about being ignorant.

Conclusion The Laws provide evidence for Plato's contradicting the theses characteristic to the Socratic dialogues. This departure from Socrates is real, in spite of the verbal agreement between the Socratic dialogues and the Laws. Plato's care to be in verbal agreement with Socrates resulted in incoherences of his political and moral doctrine. In some respects, Plato became more intuitive , closer to common-sense intuitions than Socrates; in most respects, Plato drew illicit conclusions from Socrates' doctrine – thus, he betrayed Socrates while using him as a source of inspiration. Plato’s departure from Socrates solved some problems and raised new ones. For example, Plato solved the problem of accounting for the appearance of akrasia by invoking the weakness of knowledge. On the other hand, Plato raised the new problem: if lack of self-control is the source of evil, how should punishment avoid creating precisely this lack of self-control?
Plato's psychiatric framework for dealing with morality and punishment is favored by Socrates' usage of an analogy between medicine and justice; Plato took seriously this analogy, to the point of identifying – at least in theory – the two.
The transition from Socrates to the later Plato is mediated by the acceptance of the disunity of the soul and of the virtues; by the acceptance of a psychiatric model of evildoing and of punishment. Plato's psychiatric doctrine is a result of the substitution of wisdom by self-control as the main virtue; by the (symmetrical) substitution of ignorance by folly as the source of vice; by the replacement of epistemological optimism with epistemological pessimism; by the preservation of the negative thesis of Socratic moral intellectualism ("noone does the evil knowingly") and the repudiation of, or at least losing interest in, the positive thesis of Socratic moral intellectualism ("virtue is knowledge").
This change led to a re-interpretation of the impossibility of akrasia: for Socrates, the impossibility of akrasia meant that everybody is, in principle able of morality and of understanding the grounds of morality; for Plato, the impossibility of akrasia meant that everybody is, in principle, mad and should be subject to educational and psychiatric control. This psychiatric picture is made more intuitive not only by the disunity of the soul, but also by the materialist explanation of moral evils (as forms of insanity) in the Timaeus.
The metamorphoses of Plato's opinions about punishment, education and the teachability of virtue are, of course, connected with the metamorphosis of his political views. In this essay, I did deal with Plato's political philosophy and only tried en passant to situate the evolution of the problem of akrasia in a political framework. It may be held, without the risk of a gross mistake, that Socrates' interest in the intellectual welfare of the individual was replaced by Plato's interest in the psychical well-functionning of the state. What the metamorphosis which I discussed suggests is rather a simple fact: mental illness is a metaphor which becomes taken seriously when materialist assumptions are placed in a political context.
Bibliography:
Plato – The Laws
-Protagoras
-Laches
- Gorgias
- Timaeus
- Hippias Minor
Gregory Vlastos – Socratic knowledge and Platonic pessimism, in Vlastos, Platonic Studies, Princeton University Press, 1981 Gregory Vlastos - Socrates Terence Irwin – Plato's ethics, Cornell University Press Harold Churnis – The sources of Evil According to Plato, quoted in Vlastos, "Plato. A Collection of Critical Essays", University of Notre Dame, 1977 Anthony Kenny – Mental health in Plato's Republic, in Kenny, The Anatomy of Soul Trevor Saunders – Plato's Penal Code W.K.C. Guthrie – A history of Ancient Philosophy, vol. V E.R. Dodds – The Greeks and the Irrational Gabriela Roxana Carone - “Akrasia in the Republic: Does Plato Change his Mind?”. in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy: Volume XX Brickhouse and Smith – Plato's Socrates , New York, Oxford University Press, 1994 NOTE No allusion to the Cynic school of philosophy. We know so little about the cynics; from all we know, the Cynics seemed to be opposed to Socratic intellectualism in the sense of believing that virtue does not presuppose knowledge. This is the reverse of what we today understand by cynicism: the cynic person, we think, is the one who holds (and proves) that knowledge does not entail virtue. The cynic, in the modern meaning, is usually contrasted with the hypocrite: the hypocrite claims to be moral, while the cynic frankly admits his immorality. It is usually admitted that the hypocrite knows and admits at least in monologue that he is immoral. Gabriela Roxana Carone holds that in the Republic Plato held that the object of belief may be identical with the object of knowledge. De re akrasa: One may choose to do A, A may be identical with B, one may know that B is wrong, but ignore that A is B. This is the trivial situation of erring unknowingly (and unvoluntarily). De dicto akrasia: Like the former situation, but one knows, or believes that A is B. Evidence that one can do something one believes to be evil can be found in the Sophist which is however a late Platonic dialogue: "Mais quoi? N'avons nous pas remarque que, dans les ames des homes, les opinions sont en opposition avec les desires, le courage avec les plaisirs, la raison avec les chagrins et toutes les choses de cette sorte les unes avec les autres? (The Sophist 228b) Of course, the distinction between knows and believes to be evil makes sense only given moral realist assumptions. For a moral relativist, no precise meaning can be attached to knowing that something is good, as opposed to believing it is good. Thus, a moral relativist's stance on the problem of akrasia would be either to deny it on a priori grounds ("people always act according to what they believe to be good, although they don't know it to be good"), or to translate it in belief-terms ("do people act contrary to what they believe to be good?") Brickhouse and Smith, in Plato's Socrates¸ hold that the Socratic doctrine of the impossibility of akrasia is nothing more than an instance of the impossibility of acting contrary to one's beliefs. This interpretation again favors the "noone does what he believes to be evil" formula for Socrates' moral intellectualism. I am not going to explore or evaluate in detail this interpretation, but will only point that its logical consequence is that belief cannot be overpowered by knowledge – a thesis which, as far as I know, Socrates (or Plato) never endorsed. Contrast with Protagoras 360c: "the ignorance of what is and what is not fearful is cowardice". Also with the demonstration, in LAches, that courage is virtue (the whole virtue) and, as such , knowledge. An early statement of moral intellectualism is in the Laches, where courage is proved to presuppose wisdom and ultimately to be identical with wisdom. Thus, Laches attributes to Socrates the thesis that "Every an is courageous in that in which he is wise and bad in which he is unwise" (Laches 194d). This leads to the conclusion that there is no such a thing as "intemperate (or foolish) courage", with the consequence that small children and animals who fear nothing because of their ignorance of dangers are not truly courageous In Hippias Minor, Hippias the sophist is convinced that evil people do what they do knowingly (365e), assumption that Socrates does not challenge. Things become strange when the discussion reaches the counter-intuitive conclusion that those who do the evil voluntarily are better than those who do the evil involuntarily- 372e, 375d. (This is an inverse gradualization of the problem of the akrasia: the more you know about the evil things you are doing, the better you are. The usual moral intuition – that Plato shares in the Laws – is the contrary of ths: the more knowledgeable about the evil things you are doing you are, the guiltier you are). The possibility of cynicism rears its ugly head again. It is intuitive for us – and perhaps for the Greeks – that someone may entertain with very strong conviction a false belief. An echo of the two horses in the Phaidros? If so, this proves that the soul in the Phaidros is not itself divided. Socrates' task, to put it simply, was to undermine this possibility. The importance that Plato gives to shame reminds me of Dodds' distinction between the moral of the shame and the moral of the guilt. Dodds' thesis is that Plato's doctrine of the soul is a synthesis of Socratic intellectualism and Orphic and Pytagorean mysticism. I cannot argue for or against this thesis, but I dare to remark that (i) Dodds' thesis implies the thesis that Plato allows for the morality of irrational factors, which were excluded by Socrates; (ii) The attribution of (positive) moral value to shame suggests a restoration by Plato of the Socratic moral revolution - if a component of the Socratic moral revolution was to change the shift from shame to guilt. These topics need a much more detailed analysis than I can afford in these pages/ Guthrie is a proponent of the thesis of the continuity between Plato and Socrates in respect to akrasia. Thus, he tells apart between a philosophic sense of ``voluntary`` (noone is voluntarily bad) and an ordinary sense. He writes that ``moral evil then, is a sickness (nosos) of the soul, contracted when it has been mastered by anger, fear, envy, pain, pleasure and desires. IT may or may not result in the commission of crimes. If it does, they will be voluntary in the ordinary sense of being committed wittingly out of anger, lust, greed and all the other impulses that commonly lead to crimes, but involuntary in the philosophic sense that noone consciously wills to have his soul corrupted and overmastered by such unhealthy impulses`` (Guthrie, vol. 5, p. 375) Thus, the ``philosophical`` sense of ``voluntary`` is actually a meta-voluntary. I.e., noone , in his rational moments, wishes to be in a state that will cause him/her to do the evil. Trevor Saunders draws the punitive consequences of this view: "[Plato's] deeper position is that punishment affect something which no man would ever choose to have: a state of injustice in his soul, which (if only he knows it) is disadvantageous to him" (Plato's Penal Code, p. 163) Or perhaps Plato put the explanation away of akrasia on more intuitive footing than Socrates did. Indeed, if Socrates is committed to the thesis that knowledge cannot be defeated by pleasure and pain (and he is, at least implicitly, committed to this thesis, since he considers attaining knowledge as the solution of all moral problems), then it is difficult to understand how wrongdoing is possible at all., The obvious explanation is that wrongdoing is a case of ignorance, i.e. of lack of knowledge, but how can knowledge be entirely lacking if – as we know from Meno – knowledge is innate? In short, Socratic explaining away of akrasia seems to be inconsistent, and Plato's explicit acceptance of the weakness of knowledge offers a more (logically) satisfactory account to this issue Further evidence for the ``political-because-epistemological pessimism`` of Plato may be found in the Politicus, 301d: ``So then we have the tyrant and the king, then oligarchy and democracy, all of which arise when men turn down the idea one true and scientific ruler In the Laws, Plato oscillated between holding the weakness of knowledge and the impossibility of attaining knowledge: evidence for the impossibility of attaining knowledge is to be found in 897e: "..we mustn’t assume that mortal eyes will ever be able to look upon treason and get to know it adequately: let's not produce darkness at noon, so to speak, by looking at the sun direct". Plato seems to have drawn the consequences of the myth of the cave in the Republic: after seeing the sun, one should take care about explaining it to those who remained inside the cave. However, he is – again – not coherent in holding the thesis of the weakness of knowledge: in the last chapter, about the Nocturnal council, we learn that "If our guardians are to be genuine guardians of the laws, they must have genuine knowledge of their real nature; they must be articulate enough to explain the real difference between good actions and bad, and capable of sticking to the difference in practice" (966c) Socratic moral intellectualism is curious ad counter-intuitive for us, moderns, in that it says that in order to be good it is enough to have knowledge of the good. Another consequence, no less perplexing but less noticed, is that in order to be knowledgeable you only need to be honest. If – as I held in this essay – Plato rejected the thesis that "virtue is impossible without knowledge", then Plato became – again – more intuitive than Socrates Better to say: "as the best denomination for virtue" – since we know that Socrates held that all virtues are one I claim in support of this thesis the following points: (a) for Socrates morality collapses into rationality, as it is pointed by Dihle: "The world as we experience through our sense is perishable, disorderly, irrational in many respects, unpredictable as to its further development and has, therefore, only a small share in reality. Knowledge, however, which the intellect acquires,can only refer to reality, to that which is lasting, unchanging and structured by reason. So knowledge which leads to action cannot be tested by any results this action may cause in the empirical world. Moral quality can only be ascertained by examining the state of mind, the consciousness of the human being who produced the action. Accordingly, the only task in moral life man has to meet is to look after his soul. Blame and praise, therefore, only refer to the question of whether a man has planned well and reasonably under the given circumstances, and according to the information available" (Dihle, p;. 42). This thesis is in conflict with (b) moral luck in the Laws at 877b, where Plato discusses the unsuccessful attempt to murder: should we punish the one who intended and failed to kill as harshly as we punish the killer? Plato hesitates and claims for clemence on grounds of luck: "But we should have respect for the luck that has saved him [the would-be perpetrator] from total ruin, and for his guardian angel too, who in pity for the attacker and the wounded man has stopped the injury of the latter from proving fatal". It is interesting to compare Plato`s views on morality with those of the Erewhonians in Samuel Butler`s novel. In Butler`s Erewhon, the bearer of moral value is luck. This leads to a partial psychiatric theory of punishment, since those who are unlucky (sick people and those afflicted by misfortune) are considered guilty, while those who have committed offences are considered diseased. Butler`s thesis seems to be that we are bound to distinguish between two sorts of offences: those that attract guilt and those than elicit compassion, even if it is not clear what kind of offences should be attributed to which category. Plato`s attitude is different, since he attempts a reduction of guilt to disease. "Socrates: Well, does anybody want to be unhappy and unfortunate? Meno: I suppose not. Socrates: Then, if not, nobody desires what is evil, for what else is unhappiness but desiring evil things and getting them? Meno: It looks as if you are right , Socrates, and nobody desires what is evil. The thesis that virtue is happiness and vice is unhappiness continues to be held in the Laws, although it is reasonable no longer to regard virtue as requiring knowledge, but rather self-control. The Vaccination thesis is corroborated by 647c: "if we want to make an individual proof against all sorts of fears, it is by exposing him to fear, in a way sanctioned by the law, that we make him unafraid" "If our citizens grow up without any experience of the keenest pleasures, and if they are not trained to stand firm when they encounter them, and to refuse to be pushed into any disgraceful action, their fondness for pleasure will bring them to the same and end as those who capitulate to fear". (635c). A simple argument against the thesis "Platonic self-control replaced Socratic knowledge as the cardinal virtue" may have the form "Plato came to the conclusion that Socratic knowledge is actually self-control". I don't know how whether this argument is valid, although I imagine that it is supported by the passages where Plato expresses the thesis of the Weakness of Knowledge: knowledge alone cannot be persistent unless it is supported by irrational factors. As it were, a master cannot govern unless it has enough slaves. Old Plato would have most probably endorsed Vauvenargues’ aphorism that “Un home sans passions est un roi sans sujets”. Nevertheless, see 697b: "the proper basis is to put spiritual goods a the top of the list and hold them – provided the soul exercised self-control – in the highest esteem”. The natural question I would like to ask Plato is: even if someone has knowledge of the good, should we test him for self-control in order to trust him morally or politically? "Give me a state under the absolute control of a dictator, and let the dictator be young, with a good memory, quick to learn, courageous and with a character of natural elevation. And if his other abilities are going to be of any use, his dictatorial soul should also possess that quality which was earlier agreed to be an essential adjunct to all the parts of virtue. Cleinias: I think the ‘essential adjunct’ our companion means, Megillus, is self-control. Athenian: Yes, but the everyday kind, not the self-control that by an exaggerated and twisted use of language can be identified with good judgement. I mean the spontaneous instinct that flowers early in life in children and animals and can in some cases succeed in imposing a certain restraint in the search for pleasure, but not in others” (Laws, 709e-710a). I quoted this passage extensively since it, in my opinion, proves Plato’s anti-intellectualism in connexion with the supremacy of self-control. This passage also proves that Plato had in mind a departure from Socrates’ equation of virtue with knowledge – self-control is not to be identified with “good judgement”. The same idea reoccurs in 712a. It is well-known that Popper differentiates between Socratic epistemologic pessimism and Platonic epistemological optimism, arguing that epistemological pessimism favours democracy, while epistemological optimism favours totalitarianism. This is however problematic. Popper's thesis is true if it is taken to mean "Socrates holds that he, himself, is fallible, while Plato considered himself infallible" But Popper's thesis is exactly the opposite of truth, if we take into account the fact that Socrates considered knowledge to be accessible, in principle, to anyone, while Plato, made reserved it to the guardians (in the Republic) and to noone except the members of the Nocturnal Council (in the Laws). Gregory Vlastos, in Socratic Knowledge and Platonic Pessimism, holds that Plato in the Laws abandoned knowledge and draws a nice parallel between Plato's doubts about his political pessimism (i.e., the abandonment of the ideal state) and his epistemological pessimism: "Those who cannot bring themselves to believe that Plato could have retained the Theory of Forms after seeing and failing to solve its logical difficulties would do well to remember how many nonlogical reasons Plato had for refusing to let it go" (p. 217) The Politicus anticipates the pessimism of the Laws, see. E.g. Politicus 309.``In the Politicus, Plato no longer requires knowledge in the rational part; stable true belief seems to be sufficient (following appropriate training of one`s tendencies) for the relevant sort of wisdom (froneesis) and justice`` (Irwin, Plato`s Ethics, p. 341) "Cronus was of course aware that human nature, as we’ve explained, is never able to take complete control of all human affairs without being filled with arrogance and injustice. Bearing this in mind, he appointed kings and rulers for our states; they were not men, but beings of a superior and more divine order – spirits” (713c) This path is pursued by Harold Churniss in The Sources of Evil According to Plato, quoted in Gregory Vlastos, "Plato. A Collection of Critical Essays", University of Notre Dame, 1977 It should be noted that the ``soul`` in the Timaeus designates not only the individual soul, but also the cosmic soul. As the source of moral evil is disorder in the individual soul, the source of natural evil is disorder in the cosmic soul: ``The cause of the random, disorderly motions must be an irrational element in the sould, according to Timaeus, pervades the Universe and moves the heavenly bodies” (Churniss, p. 250-251) “See Zola, the Preface to the Rougon-Macquarts: "Physiologically the Rougon-Macquarts represent the slow succession of accidents pertaining to the nerves or the blood, which befall a race after the first organic lesion, and, according to environment, determine in each individual member of the race those feelings, desires and passions-- briefly, all the natural and instinctive manifestations peculiar to humanity--whose outcome assumes the conventional name of virtue or vice. For further evidence of the transition from the ignorance as the source of evil to mental disease as the source of evil, see Sophist 228c: "Si nous disons donc que la mechancete est une disorder et une maladie de l'ame, nous nous exprimons exactement". Mental disease is not, in the Sophist, a genus of the species Ignorance, as it was in the Timaeus: they are rather identical, since the passage from which I just quoted continues: "Mais nous savons que , toutes les fois que l'ame ignore quelque chose, c'est contre sa volonte" "Nativism" can be a misleading term, since Socrates did not hold that we have knowledge, or the possibility of attaining knowledge, as a natural disposition, in virtue of our biological constitution. Rather, Socrates held that we learnt knowledge in an anterior life Legislation and the preservation of laws depend on the way children play: the Athenian informs us that “I maintain that no one in any state has really grasped that children’s games affect legislation so crucially as to determine whether the laws that are passed will survive or not. If you control the way children play, and the same children always play the same games under the same rules and in the same conditions, and get pleasure from the same toys, you’ll find that the convetions of adult life too are left in peace without alteration” (797b); innovations in children’s games will lead to changes in adult life and “revolutionary” demands for new institutions (798d). Plato's confidence in the possibility (and necessity) of virtue's being taught invites a paradoxical question: whether Plato himself (or the Athenian in the Laws, for that matter) was actually taught himself. Socrates consistently denied he had a teacher of virtue: see, e.g., Laches 186 b-c: "I am the first to confess that I have never had a teacher of the art of virtue, although I have always , from my earliest, youth, desired to have one. But I am too poor to give money to the Sophists, who are the only professors of moral improvement, and to this day I have never been able to discover the art of myself". it is doubtful that in the Laws Plato is interested in people's attaining knowledge Perhaps a reminiscence of the Socratic nativism is Plato's appeal to the harmony between the innate and the taught: "When a man's natural character is as it should be, but he has acquired bad habits, or conversely, when his habits are correct but his natural character is vicious, his pleasure and his approval fail to coincide" (6555e). This assertion (although formulated in the context of the appreciation of artistic performances) is prima facie unintelligible: how to understand the analogy between character-versus-habits and approval-versus-pleasure? c 853 "However, unlike the ancient legislators, we are not framing laws for heroes and sons of god In the light of this, questions of consistency may be raised about the Republic, where Plato preserves the epistemological optimism of Socrates, yet cares about irrational factors such as the equilibrium of passions and about education. The conjecture may be formulated, that the Laws is a more consistent solution of Plato’s rehabilitation of the irrational than the Republic. But I am not going to explore in detail this problem. Yet, the disunity of the virtues is a concession to common-sense parlance, as we can read in the 860b: "This is the source of the inconsistency in the language of the ordinary man: he destroys the unity of the terms 'good' and 'just' . The idea re-appears in 963c: "when we said that there four species of virtue, obviously the very fact that there were four meant that each had to be thought as somehow distinct from the others. Yet in fact we call them all by a single name. We say courage is virtue, wisdom is virtue, and the other two similarly, on the ground that really they are not several things but just one – virtue". In the same passage, the Athenian tells his Cretan interlocutor that "your job, you understand, is to tell me why the four of them nevertheless form a unity; and when you have demonstrated that unity, ask me to show you again in what sense they are four". The promise is not fulfilled in the dialogue. It is, as far as I know, a relatively unnoticed fact that Plato's late thought became programatically closer to ordinary language. See, e.g., a passage with a strange Wittgensteinian flavour: "The reason why we're now examining the usage of the common man is not to pass judgement on whether he uses language correctly or not, but on determining what is essentially right in a given law." (Laws 627c). For evidence that Socrates was a democrat, see Gorgias where Socrates effectively disposes of Callicles' argument that "the rule of the few strong is natural, while the rule of the many and weak is conventional" by remarking that it is nature gives the many and weak power over the strong and few There is a passage with an unexpected liberal flavour in the Laws at 780a: “if [the legislator] excludes private life from his legislation, and expects that the citizens will be prepared to be law-abiding in their public life as a community, he’s making a big mistake”. This should not deceive us: Plato accepts such liberal intrusions only faute de mieux, as it becomes clear in the 807a: “Our ideal is unlikely to be realized fully so long as we persist in our policy of allowing individuals to have their own private establishments, consisting of house, wife, children and so on But if could ever put into practice the second-best scheme we’re now describing, we’d have every reason to be satisfied” For more evidence of Plato's anti-liberalism, see also 875a: "…the proper object of true political skill is not the interest of private individuals but the common good" A further, indirect evidence that most people are mad is given by the remark in 689a, that "the element which experiences pleasures and pain corresponds to the most extensive part of a state, the common people" Plato distinguishes between two kinds of doctors: the doctor for slaves, who “simply prescribes what he thinks best in the light of experience, as if he had precise knowledge, and with the self-confidence of a dictator” and the doctor for free men “gives no prescription until he has somehow gained the invalid’s consent” (720c). This idea is followed in 723a: the “obtaining of the invalid’s consent” is analogous with the laws’ preamble: “The ‘dictatorial prescription, which we compared to the prescription of the ‘slavish’ doctors, is the law pure and simple; and the part that comes before it, which is essentially ‘persuasive’ , as Megillus put it, has an additional function”. This function is to make “the person to whom he promulgated his law accept his orders – the law – in a more co-operative frame of mind and with a corresponding greater readiness to learn” (ibidem). (The suggestion is enhanced by 857d: "It wasn’t a bad parallel, you know, when we compared all those for whom legislation is produced today to slaves under treatment from slave doctors") It would be wrong, in my opinion, to interpret this passage as evidence of Socratic intellectualism in the Laws: more plausible is the interpretation that Plato was only interested in securing the consent of the subjects in order to make the proposed legislation more plausible; nothing is said about the situation in which a would-be subject does not accept the law’s authority, even after listening to the preamble. See the passage about "Lunacy" At 934c It is interesting that Plato's epistemological pessimism is not doubled by a moral pessimism. See 950c: "You see, people in general do not fall so short of real goodness that they can't recognize virtue and vice when they see it in others; even wicked people have an uncanny instinct that usually enables even an absolute villain to understand and describe accurately enough what distinguishes a good man from a bad" This may be taken as evidence that virtue is possible without knowledge, since the good and the bad are identified via an instinct, not knowledge. I regret that I don’t know the Greek text so I cannot comment on the translation. "if you find that your disease abates somehow, well and good; if not, then you should look upon death as the preferable alternative, and rid yourself of life" (854 Or: if Plato in the Laws was optimist, he was optimist not about the human possibility of attaining knowledge, but about the human malleability and liability to change under educational and psychiatric guidance. The end of educational and psychiatric modeling of the individual will not be knowledge, but the appropriate dosage of emotions One of the constituent elements, whether 'part' or 'state' is not important, to be found in it [in the soul] is 'anger', and this innate impulse, unruly and difficult to fight as it is , causes a great deal of havoc by its irrational force. ..Pleasure wields her power on the basis of an opposite kind of force; she achieves whatever her will desires by persuasive deceit that is irresistibly compelling" (864b) . At least this is, I presume, the commonest modern intuition: if someone is ignorant about what s/he is doing, and a fortiori unhappy about doing it, s/he should be forgiven. Whether , and to what extent, this intuition is influenced by Christianity, it is a different matter. This intuition is, methinks, the basis of the institution of "insanity plea" in criminal law The Greeks did not have intuitions very different from ours: Socrates was aware that moral intellectualism is contrary to common-sense, since Protagoras asks him: "Are you aware that the majority of the world do not share your conviction and mine, but claim that many people know the things which are best, but do not do them when they might? And most persons whom I have asked the reason of this have said that when men act contrary to knowledge, they are overcome by pain , by pleasure, or some of the things which I was just now mentioning" (Protagoras, 352e).