The Politics of Plato’s Charmides: Socratic Self-Knowledge for You and Me

Plato’s Charmides is both a usual and an unusual work. It is usual because it exemplifies many features of Plato’s “early” or “Socratic” dialogues. It is a short work that takes up the search for a particular virtue as its central task. On this occasion, Socrates and his interlocutors, Charmides and Critias, are after sōphrosunē (temperance, moderation, self-restraint, discipline)—a nuanced Greek ideal carrying cognitive, ethical, and political dimensions. After much toil, the dialogue concludes in aporia, having failed to arrive at a satisfactory account of sōphrosunē (176a6–end). And as is so characteristic of this genre, we are left with no clear answers in sight. Despite these quintessential features, the Charmides is also unusual because it is methodologically complex, philosophically ambitious, and at times, frustratingly obscure. The dialogue tackles traditional notions of sōphrosunē as quietness (hēsuchia, 159b3–5), shame (aidōs, 160e2–5), doing one’s own things (161b6), and doing good things (163e10–11). The latter two formulations reflect Critias’ own sophistical take on Hesiod’s Works and Days. The dialogue’s most sustained examination of the virtue focuses on the proposal that sōphrosunē is, as the Delphic dictum instructs: Know Thyself (164d4–5)—in other words, self-knowledge.

The central problem facing ancient scholarship on this dialogue is, as Voula Tsouna puts it in her most recent commentary, its “enigmatic” and “deliberately ambiguous” quality (Tsouna 2022, 2). The main argument exhibits numerous different conceptions of self-knowledge under a single and unified account of sōphrosunē without commentary. And this ambiguity has generated plenty of scholarly attention spanning diverse interpretative traditions and philosophical objectives. Scholars in the twentieth century were gripped by the dialogue’s obscure treatment of sōphrosunē as both knowledge of the self (epistēmē eautou) (165c4–7) and knowledge of itself (epistēmē eautēs) (166c2–3). The former is developed as resembling Socratic self-knowledge: the ability to know what one knows and does not know. The latter is defined as a singular science or knowledge that has as its subject matter “all other kinds of knowledge and of itself” (166c2-3). These two senses of sōphrosunē are “one of the features that makes the Charmides such a puzzling work” (Kahn 1996, 194). The transition from knowledge of the personal self to its abstract formulation as knowledge of knowledge “has always been a crux” (Annas 1985, 134, emphasis in the original) and “the central problem of interpretation” (Tuckey 1951, 33).

In recent years, the Charmides has enjoyed renewed scholarly interest, including a new translation and commentary by Moore and Raymond (2019), monographs by Woolf (2023), Tsouna (2022), and Tuozzo (2011), and numerous other studies on Socratic self-knowledge that devote significant attention to the dialogue (Moore 2015; Kamtekar 2017; Kosman 2014, 2020; McCabe 2011; Leigh 2020). Yet this resurgence has only given rise to more disagreements, further complicating the dialogue’s account of sōphrosunē. We find radically different accounts of self-knowledge, competing views on the ultimate lesson Plato intends us to draw, and, indeed, even questions of how to read the philosopher altogether.

My project at the Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) in Washington, DC, began with the aim of revisiting the puzzle of the two senses of sōphrosunē that had preoccupied earlier scholars. My intent was to show that recent scholarship had missed something important by treating the ambiguity of sōphrosunē as tangential to understanding the central arguments of the Charmides. This puzzle is not only a genuine difficulty that deserves renewed attention but also one that can in fact be solved in a way that illuminates the dialogue’s complexity and richness. Over the course of my summer residency, what began as a project aimed at an article-length paper emerged as a book-length project. This major development is motivated by the idea that in order to understand the unity of sōphrosunē, a more comprehensive interpretation is needed to accommodate Plato’s overarching philosophical project in the Charmides. Given the diversity of interpretative strategies in contemporary scholarship, the first phase of my residency involved discerning the different conceptions of sōphrosunē as self-knowledge at work in the main stretch (164c–174b) of the dialogue.

I propose that we find at least seven formulations of sōphrosunē as (or related to) self-knowledge: (1) the Delphic inscription “Know Thyself;” (2) a knowledge or science (epistēmē) of the personal self (165c5–7); (3) a unique science of itself and of all other sciences (166e5–6); (4) an allusion to Socratic self-knowledge (167a1–5); (5) a second-order propositional knowledge that helps us learn more easily (170b6–10, 172b1–4); (6) an allusion to a method of dividing (diairein) knowledge from the absence of knowledge (170a6–8); (7) an attractive knowledge for political rule where everything is done according to science (171d1–172a5). These formulations, as we can see, are not obviously disconnected and exhibit some threads of conceptual unity. But how precisely they are intended to be unified and to what extent each of these formulations can be rendered coherent under a single account of sōphrosunē will prove to be a challenge.

The most meaningful development that took place during my time at the CHS was to think of Plato’s project in the Charmides as a serious and positive attempt to work out a science (epistēmē) of Socratic self-knowledge for the purpose of political flourishing. This thesis involves developing two ideas that are central to understanding the unity of sōphrosunē. First, I argue that it is fruitful to remind ourselves of the singularity of Socrates. Whatever one’s commitments are about the historical Socrates, he is at least portrayed in the Platonic corpus as an unparalleled figure, occasionally offering us hope that others might one day turn out like him (Grg. 521d6–e2; Ap. 21a6, 23b2–4, 31a2–3; Symp. 221d1–6; Phd. 118a15–17). Plato’s portrayal of his teacher paints a picture of someone who was devoted and ultimately gave his life to his deeply committed moral ideals. One of the things that makes Socrates unique is precisely his ability to examine what he knows and does not know, and to turn this self-knowledge into a mission of leading others towards the same ethical life. But as the array of passages in the corpus illustrates, there is no one (or at least very few) like him. The rest of us are not Socrates, and so where do we go from here?

From this point of view, the central question posed by the dialogue is this: how is it possible to translate Socrates’ unique ability to examine what one knows and does not know, both in himself and in others, into a branch of learning or a system of understanding (to mathēma) that can be acquired, taught, transmitted, and ultimately used to form the basis of a well-governed city? In other words, how can self-knowledge become something communal, not just for Socrates, but for you and me? This reading allows us to make sense of the dialogue’s intense preoccupation with reflexivity and its general epistemic focus. If we want to translate Socratic self-knowledge into something that can be learned and taught, then Plato must contend with the nature of epistēmē as such. What is reflexive knowledge? How is it similar to or different from other recognized branches of learning? How is reflexivity possible? These questions also extend to stretches of the dialogue that investigate the nature of other modes of cognition (e.g., perception, hearing, desire, pleasure, love, fear, belief) (167c8–168a4). If we want to work out a theory of knowledge, then we must ask the even more fundamental question: what is the nature of the power (dunamis) that enables one to perform general cognitive activities?

The second idea is to see this epistemic project as subordinated to the dialogue’s political aim. Though recognized, it has not been fully appreciated that sōphrosunē is investigated much earlier as a feature of well-governed households and cities (162a4–5). This political dimension will play a significant role in Socrates’ investigation of the benefit of sōphrosunē in the concluding sections of the dialogue. Thus, Plato signals to the reader that whatever account of sōphrosunē we produce, it ought to function not only as an ideal for individuals, but also for households and cities. The emphasis on the political dimension also accords with the literary elements of the work. As many commentators have highlighted, the choice of Charmides and Critias (relatives of Plato who were known for their notorious involvement with the Thirty Tyrants) unmistakably communicates political subtext.

Accordingly, the project of translating Socratic self-knowledge is aimed towards developing an attractive candidate for political rule. On this picture, political rule emerges as the kind of knowledge capable of organizing households and cities according to expertise, where everyone does their proper work according to what they know. In areas where one lacks understanding, sōphrosunē would allow each to defer epistemic authority to other experts. This kind of society might be able to flourish because deception is ruled out and correctness reigns (171d1–172a5, 173a7–d5). However, as the final aporia of the dialogue indicates, this kind of error-free society is insufficient unless we have knowledge of the good and bad. The final picture combines both the epistemic and ethical orientation of Socratic self-knowledge, but gestures towards something much more all-encompassing.