Sokratic spirit of the dialogue — confessed ignorance applying the Elenchus to false persuasion of knowledge.
So Plato breaks off the dialogue. It is conceived in the truly Sokratic spirit:—an Elenchus applied to implicit and unexamined faith, even though that faith be accredited among the public as orthodoxy: warfare against the confident persuasion of knowledge, upon topics familiar to every one, and on which deep sentiments and confused notions have grown up by association in every one’s mind, without deliberate study, systematic teaching, or testing cross-examination. Euthyphron is a man who feels unshaken confidence in his own knowledge, and still more in his own correct religious belief. Sokrates appears in his received character as confessing ignorance, soliciting instruction, and exposing inconsistencies and contradiction in that which is given to him for instruction.
The questions always difficult, often impossible to answer. Sokrates is unable to answer them, though he exposes the bad answers of others.
We must (as I have before remarked) take this ignorance on the part of the Platonic Sokrates not as assumed, but as very real. In no part of the Platonic writings do we find any tenable definition of the Holy and the Unholy, such as is here demanded from Euthyphron. The talent of Sokrates consists in exposing bad definitions, not in providing good ones. This negative function is all that he claims for himself — with deep regret that he can do no more. “Sokrates” (says Aristotle[34]) “put questions, but gave no answers: for he professed not to know.” In those dialogues where Plato makes him attempt more (there also, against his own will and protest, as in the Philêbus and Republic), the affirmative Sokrates will be found only to stand his ground because no negative Sokrates is allowed to attack him. I insist upon this the rather, because the Platonic commentators usually present the dialogues in a different light, as if such modesty on the part of Sokrates was altogether simulated: as if he was himself,[35] from the beginning, aware of the proper answer to his own questions, but refrained designedly from announcing it: nay, sometimes, as if the answers were in themselves easy, and as if the respondents who failed must be below par in respect of intelligence. This is an erroneous conception. The questions put by Sokrates, though relating to familiar topics, are always difficult: they are often even impossible to answer, because they postulate and require to be assigned a common objective concept which is not to be found. They only appear easy to one who has never attempted the task of answering under the pressure of cross-examination. Most persons indeed never make any such trial, but go on affirming confidently as if they knew, without trial. It is exactly against such illusory confidence of knowledge that Sokrates directs his questions: the fact belongs to our days no less than to his.[36]
[34] Aristotel. Sophist. Elench. p. 183, b. 7. ἐπεὶ καὶ διὰ τοῦτο Σωκράτης ἠρώτα καὶ οὐκ ἀπεκρίνετο· ὡμολόγει γὰρ οὐκ εἰδέναι.
[35] See Stallbaum, Prolegg. ad Euthyphron. p. 140.
[36] Adam Smith observes, in his Essay on the Formation of Languages (p. 20 of the fifth volume of his collected Works), “Ask a man what relation is expressed by the preposition of: and if he has not beforehand employed his thoughts a good deal upon these subjects, you may safely allow him a week to consider of his answer.”
The Platonic problem assumes, not only that he shall give an answer, but that it shall be an answer which he can maintain against the Elenchus of Sokrates.
Objections of Theopompus to the Platonic procedure.
The assumptions of some Platonic commentators — that Sokrates and Plato of course knew the answers to their own questions — that an honest and pious man, of ordinary intelligence, has the answer to the question in his heart, though he cannot put it in words — these assumptions were also made by many of Plato’s contemporaries, who depreciated his questions as frivolous and unprofitable. The rhetor and historian Theopompus (one of the most eminent among the numerous pupils of Isokrates, and at the same time unfriendly to Plato, though younger in age), thus criticised Plato’s requirement, that these familiar terms should be defined: “What! (said he) have none of us before your time talked about the Good and the Just? Or do you suppose that we cannot follow out what each of them is, and that we pronounce the words as empty and unmeaning sounds?”[37] Theopompus was the scholar of Isokrates, and both of them probably took the same view, as to the uselessness of that colloquial analysis which aims at determining the definition of familiar ethical or political words.[38] They considered that Plato and Sokrates, instead of clearing up what was confused, wasted their ingenuity in perplexing what was already clear. They preferred the rhetorical handling (such as we noticed in the Kriton) which works upon ready-made pre-established sentiments, and impresses a strong emotional conviction, but presumes that all the intellectual problems have already been solved.