Plato - Contents

Plato

1. Impiety, Ancient and Modern
   
   
2. Platonic Reincarnation
   
   
3. Plato Strikes Out on Immortality
   
   
4. More Platonic Immortality
   
   
5. The Four Causes in Plato
   
   
6. Plato's Receptacle
   
   
7. The Souls of Living Things
   
   
8. When Eros Means Man-Boy Love
   
   
9. Plato's Ladder of Love
   
   
10. Alcibiades on Socrates
    
    

Alcibiades on Socrates

When Alcibiades turns up, drunk as a skunk at Agathon's Symposium, he is startled to find himself lying next to Socrates. To Socrates annoyance, he starts making indiscreet comments about Socrates' qualities, physical, mental, and moral.

Socrates has a big head, he crows.  He's proud, because he'll grumble if he doesn't get a wreath as a man who "has never lost an argument in his life."  He has hollow legs, because he can drink all night and not get drunk.  He implies that Socrates talks rubbish ("the truth is just the opposite").

Socrates is like Silenus, i.e., ignorant, drunk, and lustful, but full of the images of the gods.  Or he is like Marsyas, also a satyr.  He's "impudent, contemptuous, and vile", a good "fluteplayer", that "possesses" people with words alone.  He's the only person that can make Alcibiades "feel shame".

Socrates is crazy about beautiful boys but not because they are beautiful.  He poses as an ironist, but inside he is godlike, "amazing".  Socrates is not really interested in carnal pleasures.  Alcibiades got alone with him and all he did was talk.  Then he got Socrates in bed with him and, in his "arrogance and pride," Socrates still wouldn't bite.

But now Alcibiades stops the clowning around and proceeds to admire Socrates' "courage and fortitude" with "strength of character and wisdom".  Money means nothing to him.  He's a hardy man, that "stood up to hunger" better than anyone in the Potidaea expedition.  He doesn't like to drink but when he does, nobody sees him get drunk.  And he's resistant to the cold.  He can focus on a problem, and he is brave, staying back to help and rescue the wounded Alcibiades and his armor, but was happy to have Alcibiades get the credit.  Even more brave was his coolness in retreat from Delium with Laches.

Socrates is unique; there is nobody like him.  You laugh at his arguments and "the same tired old words" but you come to realize that they are "worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside".  He's a deceiver, who "presents himself as your lover" but makes you fall in love with him.  Watch out, he tells Agathon.

At the end of the Symposium we see that Plato is a cunning fellow.  He knows that the best way to put across his idea of Love is not with the pedestrian mumblings of Eryximachus or the high-flown rhetoric of Agathon, or even Socrates hiding behind Diotima.  No, the best way is to bring riotous Alcibiades in and have him pretend to make a fool of Socrates, and in fact show that Socrates is the very incarnation of a man on the top rung of the ladder of love.  He is beyond loving one beautiful boy, or even several, or even learning beautiful things.  Look at him inside his armor of irony, and you see "just what it is to be beautiful."

Plato's Ladder of Love

It is telling that when Plato finally wants to get down to brass tacks in his Symposium on Love, on Eros, he finally calls in a woman, the divine Diotima.  Apparently it's all very well for the lads, from Phaedrus to Pausanias, to Eryximachus to comic playwright Aristophanes and the noble tragedian Agathon to discourse on Love, and it's all very well for Socrates to demolish Agathon's soaring prose in his usual manner.  But Diotima is needed to give Love a feminine flourish and teach Socrates a thing or two about Love.

Even the pedophiliac Greeks seem to think that a woman needs to be called in to get to the heart of Love, and so Socrates recalls a conversation on Love with Diotima of Mantinea.  And Diotima leads Socrates up the Ladder of Love.

Yes, she says, you start with your love of a single beautiful boy, on the bottom rung of the ladder, and make beautiful speeches to his beautiful body.  But you'd have to be pretty dull not to realize that if one body can be beautiful then it is a single step upwards to realize that another can also be beautiful.  And if two bodies are beautiful then it is merely a single step upwards to "become a lover of all beautiful bodies."

But if bodies are beautiful, surely beautiful souls are even more valuable, and you will step up and seek to make the souls of young men better.  To do this you will be forced to "gaze at the beauty of activities and laws" and begin to think that "the beauty of bodies is a thing of small importance."

But customs and laws are one thing; it is merely a step up to move on to appreciate the "beauty of knowledge" and learn to give "many gloriously beautiful speeches, in unstinting love of wisdom."  So here we are back at the philosophy ranch boosting the glories of philosophy and philosophers.

Then at last you can take the final step up and view the Form of beauty.  It is not beauty in contrast to ugliness, or beautiful body parts, or speeches or knowledge or indeed instantiated in any Thing, but "learning of this Beauty, so that in the end you comes to know just what it is to be beautiful."  It is to "see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality."  And thus, "looking at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen" you can give birth not to "images of virtue" but "true virtue" itself.

The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true irtue and nourished it, and if any human beling could become immortal, it would be he.

So much for that.  The next moment everything gets thrown into turmoil when the turbulent rich kid Alcibiades turns up at the gate, drunk as a lord. 

When Eros Means Man-Boy Love

I have to admit that I can't really get my arms around the idea that the noblest form of erotic love is the love of an older man for a beautiful boy.  But Socrates and his pals at the Symposium seem to think it's the most natural thing in the world.

The only question, for young Phaedrus, is what is honorable or dishonorable in man-boy love, or whether, for Pausanias, there are two kinds of eros, the common or the heavenly. The common is the one for those that care only about "completing the sexual act" and like women as well as boys.  Whereas the heavenly version...

For Eryximachus the doctor eros suffuses everything, even in the business of the physician and his patient, for "the physician's task is to effect a mutual reconciliation and establish mutual love between the most basic bodily elements."

And then there is Aristophanes, with a Platonic "likely story" about humans as "completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands".  Plus two faces, two sets of sex organs, etc., until Zeus decided to cut humans in two.  Thus cut in half, humans wanted to reunite with their lost half, and that is how you get love.

Then Agathon goes off into ecstasies about the beauty of the erotic god, his youth and delicacy.  "Love fills us with togetherness and drains all of our divisiveness away." Mildness, kindness, "comrade and savior".  Everyone should follow love.

I suppose the problem for us 21st century moderns is our attachment to the ideal of romantic love.  In that, at least, we can understand Aristophanes and Agathon.  But the curious way in which man-boy love is experienced by Greek aristocrats as a preparation for valor, and a way to socialize boys into manhood:  t's just as weird as what comes next: Plato's insistence that the highest form of love is philosophy, the love of wisdom.

Today's philosophers don't seem to be much in love with wisdom.  They just love to chop logic.

The Souls of Living Things

We moderns may think of the universe as as an unimaginable vastness, with a few rocky planets sporting a curious kind of fuzz.  But Plato in the Timaeus sees the universe as a single Living Thing "that contains within itself all living things, mortal and immortal."

Plato wanted the human living thing to have both a mortal and an immortal soul, with the immortal soul containing divineness, and the mortal part the other things, "those dreadful but necessary disturbances" such as pleasure, pain, boldness, fear, "expectation easily led astray" and "fused with unreasoning sense perception and all-venturing lust."  The immortal soul resides in the head and the mortal part in the trunk, with the neck as an isthmus to keep the two types of soul safely apart.

The mortal part of the soul, safely confined to the trunk of the body, comes in two flavors.  The part "that exhibits manliness and spirit" the gods settled in the upper trunk between the midriff and the head "so that it might listen to reason" and restrain the appetitive part.  The appetitive part they put between the midriff and the navel, tied down "like a beast, a wild one."  Plants were also created by the gods, but these living things on the ground only have souls of the appetitive kind, like the human mortal soul situated between the midriff and the navel.  The plant soul is passive, and cannot "discern and reflect upon any of its own characteristics."

Plato comes up with all kinds of inventive explanations of the the body's organs.  The lungs, for instance, are there to cool the heart.  The liver is there to receive the "force of the thoughts sent down from the mind" to help tame the wild beast below.

Natural death from old age, according to Plato, comes about in this way.  Firelike triangles (actually tetrahedrons) cut up food and send nourishment all through the body.  But as the body ages, the triangles lose their ability to cut up the food and are "destroyed by the invaders from outside."  Eventually the "interlocking bonds of the triangles around the marrow can no longer hold on" and "they let the bonds of the soul go."  The soul is then released in a natural way, and finds it pleasant to take flight."  If this comes naturally, and not through disease, it can provide a "pleasant, not a painful death."

Of course, your basic human is a man.  Women only come into existence when "male-born humans who lived lives of cowardice or injustice" are "reborn as women."  Animals are descended from less than perfect men.  Birds, for instance, are descended from simpleminded men, and land animals came from men "who had no tincture of philosophy" and followed the mortal soul in their chest rather than the immortal soul in their head.  Water animals came from the most stupid and ignorant men of all!

It's easy to sneer at the natural and biological sciences of the ancients.  But mankind demands an answer to our questions, and the ancient philosophers did the best they could.  No doubt future generations will sneer at our foolish notions of the nature of life, the universe, and everything.

Plato's Receptacle

Suppose you are Plato and you've been pushing your concept of the Forms for ages. Everything comes from these perfect ideas that can be comprehended up there in the firmament beyond the rim of heaven. Ordinary things that you and I see, the perceptions and particulars, are not reality but opinion, true belief.

But if you were Plato you might worry a bit about how you get from the perfect Forms to the everyday sensible particulars. So Plato pops behind the curtain and briefs his alter ego Timaeus on a quick and dirty fudge, a half-way house between the Forms and the particulars: The Receptacle.

You can think of this Receptacle as a kind of wetnurse. Or you can think of it like gold: Gold is gold, but you can manipulate it into all kinds of shapes. Or you could think of it as the mother, the receptacle of the father's seed or Form, which incubates the offspring. Or you could think of it as a plastic, impressionable stuff, or you could think of the receptacle as the odorless liquid that is used as the base for a fragrance.  You see the point.  Plato reckons he needs something more substantial than Forms upon which to hang the everyday impressions of moment to moment sensation.

In our modern science we have a similar concept, for we understand that the sensible particulars we detect with our eyes are in fact the result of electromagnetic radiation emitted from a lattice of atoms and molecules, which don't necessarily have sensible properties by themselves but emit signals to us that we interpret as red and yellow, hard and soft, solid and liquid.

Let us take an example: a left shoe. First of all, the left shoe comes into being in a Receptacle, as an instance of the Form of shoe in a process of shaking disordered elements into order, producing the particular instance of left shoe. On the gold analogy, it would be the combination of elements shaped and molded into a shoe. On the mother-father analogy it is the offspring of the Form of a shoe incubated by a lactating mother. On the plastic, impressionable stuff, it is the Form of shoeness impressed upon plastic stuff into the particular of a shoe. Or the receptacle is shaken and stirred, like the pieces in a kaleidoscope into the instance of a shoe from the Form of shoeness. On the reflection metaphor, the left shoe is a projection into a certain space or site of the Form shoenessness.

In part, the Receptacle is meant to represent stuffness, the place where Form is manifested into stuff; in part, according to another interpretation, the Receptacle is the space, the place, the room where an instance of a thing comes into being and then, in time goes out of being.

But what happens when the left shoe moves? Perfectly simple. We have the shaken-and-stirred analogy to account for that. The shoe is shaken from its original position and moved, for the Receptacle is not just stuff but a space, a site of stuff. Or it is gold, moved and remolded into a new shape in the Receptacle. Or it is switched from one breast of the wetnurse to the other.

There is no doubt that, the more specific you get, the more incoherent the analogies become that Plato uses to illustrate his Receptacle concept. But there is no shame in that.  Our modern science is barely free from incoherence. We have the action-at-a-distance problem with the notion that a single photon can seem to go through two slits at once and interfere with itself. And what really do we have in a solid lattice of molecules, or a soupy wetland of a liquid? We have our likely story, our true belief about what is going on that is developed by persuasion and we have our understanding, our theories of relativity and quantum mechanics that are communicated to young physicists by years of instruction.

What does it all mean? Ask Plato about that.

The Four Causes in Plato

Everyone knows that Aristotle invented the Four Causes.  In the Metaphysics he lays it out: the Material Cause, the stuff that something is made of; the Formal Cause, the form or pattern, the shape of something; the Efficient Cause, the source of the something, such as the father of a child; and of course the famous Final Cause, the purpose or "end" of something in the world.

Today of course, we often like to think that nothing has a purpose: everything just is.  But then everything in the world acts as if it had a purpose, whatever that means.

Aristotle may have been the chap to define the Four Causes, but Plato seemed to take the Four Causes for granted in his dialogues.  For instance, in the Timaeus he tells us how the world came into being.  First of call, of course, it came into being because God wanted it.

The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over all what was visible--not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion--and brought it from a state of disorder to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder. [30a]

Reads like an Aristotelian Final Cause to me, even if young Timaeus spoke it.

Having decided to bring order out of disorder the god next had to decide what the world would look like.  And so he decided to make it like "the best of the intelligible things... a single visible living thing".{31a]  But here's a puzzler.  Should there be one heaven or many?  What a modern thought: universe or multiverses?  But if it is to be One Living Thing, then obviously it must be one and not two.[31b]  Of course it ought to be shaped in a way "that embraces all the shapes there are" and that would obviously be a sphere.  And there it is, turning in a circle in a single solitary heaven.[34b]

So much for the Formal Cause of the heaven and the earth.

What of the material of the earth?  It would obviously have to be at least "fire and earth."  Now it is clear that if two bodies need to be bonded together they need a third agent, and since the world is to be a solid, it needs not one but two bonding agents: air and water.  So the universe will be composed of earth, fire, air and water, just as we would expect.  The Formal Cause of binding together the universe requires a Material Cause of the four elements.

Then there is the Efficient Cause, the designer god himself.  In his art he had to decide whether the universe needed all the appurtenances that humans need: ears, eyes, nose, hands, and feet.  It wouldn't need that, he decided, because he would build it complete and self-sufficient.  It wouldn't need to see or hear or breathe or digest, or catch or stand on anything.  It would just need to spin.  It would be complete and entire, organizing the disorganized, able to "keep its own company without requiring anything else."  There are a lot of decisions to make when you are designing and building the universe.

A rather male universe too, it seems to be.  But then Plato probably didn't ever ask his wife Xanthippe what she thought about the origin of the universe.

What About Atlantis?

When Socrates and his chums gather the day(!) after they discussed The Republic for another chat on important philosophical matters, the first thing they do is rehearse what they agreed to the day before.  How everyone should stick to one job, how the guardians were a race apart, how children should be raised in common and how "the bad ones were to be secretly handed on to another city".  But now Socrates wants to look at his ideas in motion and see his ideal city compared to other cities, and who better than Timaeus, a well-born man from Lucri in Italy, and his pals, to give a response to Socrates.

Oddly, you might think, in his review of The Republic, Socrates doesn't mention the philosopher-kings we've all grown to know and love, and that Karl Popper anathematized in his Open Society and Its Enemies.  But he doesn't really need to.  It is perfectly clear that Socrates and his young friends would form the junta in their ideal Republic: philosopher-kings in practice if not in name.

Then Critias launches into the myth of Atlantis, supposedly given by an Egyptian priest to Solon the Greek lawgiver centuries before Socrates' time.  Curiously the priest seems to intuit that Atlantis is an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and "provided passage" to other islands and "to the entire continent on the other side, which surrounds that real sea beyond."  You could take that as a description of the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas, the Pacific Ocean, and East Asia beyond.  Of course, some people now think that there was contact between the Egyptians and the early South American civilizations; there seem to be artifacts and food residues in the Americas that suggest this.  The Egyptian priest is modest about how big the continents and oceans are out there.  You can use your imagination about that.  The Atlantians, did not dwell on their Atlantic island as if in an Isle of the Blessed.  On the contrary, they tried to conquer and enslave Europe and Asia, but were stopped by the mighty Greeks.  But a short while later both Greeks and Atlantis were drownded, like Li'l Em'ly's father and many others.  It was storms that did for Li'l Em'ly's dad, but earthquakes and floods that did for the Atlantians.

Was there an Isle of Atlantis where now you will find nothing but unnavigable waters obstructed by a "layer of mud at shallow depth?"  Hardly.  But it is telling that the center of the Atlantic Ocean has an oceanic ridge, and actually rises above the watery and misty hollows up north in volcanic and glacier-covered Iceland.

More Platonic Immortality

In the Phaedo, the Socratic dialog that Plato wants us to believe took place on the day of Socrates' execution by poison, the condemned philosopher and his young friends discourse on the question of immortality.  It all revolves around the "proof" of the soul as a permanent unchanging thing.  For one thing, if you can understand geometry then it must be that your soul existed before you were born and that you are merely "recollecting" what your soul learned before birth.  We can understand concepts like Equal even though there are no two things on this Earth that are exactly equal.  So we must have learned about Equal in the underworld.

But even if our souls were born before our births, what if the soul is dissipated away in death, ask Socrates' young friends?  Well, since the soul is unchangeable and nearly fixed, and is to the body as the Forms of the Good and the Beautiful are to actual instances of goodness and beauty, then it stands to reason that the soul is as immortal as the Forms are eternal.

In the Socratic argument by analogy, it is possible to argue almost anything, as long as you choose the right analogy.  We want to believe that we, or at least our soul or spirit, will live forever, so any analogy looks good to us.  For me, though, the meaning of immortality is closer to home; it is children.  All the rest--Heaven and Hell, sitting at the right hand of God, the life eternal in the next world, divine judgment--they don't resonate for me.

Modern philosophers, chastened by the shaking of the foundations of the last century, have come to this.  As you rise in complexity, each leap seems to involve an irreducible mystery, a secret ingredient.  For instance, we are as yet unable to describe chemical reactions in terms of physics.  Chemistry is not merely a branch of physics: there is something extra at work.  So also there something irreducible in the leap from organic chemistry to biology, chemistry in the service of living things, and then in the leap from vegetable to animal.  So also in the leap from great ape to human.  It is some spark, some spirit, some irreducible something, the mystery in-between body and mind.

This mystery, this spark, is kept alive from parent to child, from the ancestors to the living generation to generations yet unborn.  It is more than the contract between generations, it is a mystery.  We only know that, when a human dies without issue, that individual human spark dies forever, the spark of immortality quenched.  But all is not lost, because other humans, other children, pick up the fallen lantern, and hold it aloft once more.

For humans, as social animals, are not just their progeny, nor yet their footnote in history, an earnest increment to knowledge, to techne, or to affect.  Humans are not just individual egos but intersubjective communicators that affect each by speech actions.  All humans affect each other all the time, and the precipitate of their communicative reactions blend into the human destiny, immortal and forever, and this seeding of the future is not just broadcast by the genius from an ivory tower, but also those "who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Today we are bidden to release our grip on all foundations, all divine props, all familiar spirits, all relationships with the divine, and all hopes for immortality.  But humans still search for meaning, live as though life could last forever, and long to find eternal bliss.  It may be that the idea of immortality, and a divine judge at the gate of Heaven, is merely a device of social control to put the fear of God into mortals here below.  Now that God is dead, the court of divine judgment has been replaced by the judgment of history.

Through all the changes in religious and secular orthodoxy and the terrible threats issued from gods to humans as from masters to slaves, most humans most of the time instinctively shrink from betraying the future to the present.  There is no more damaging judgment on a fellow human than "he has no future."  Humans live as if their lives matter, forever, and so each human contributes, in her particular life, a single spark to human immortality.

Plato Strikes Out on Immortality

When modern philosophers decided that you couldn't prove the existence of God--or the non-existence of God--they put an end to a vibrant industry.

The same thing applies to immortality.  How would we know if we are immortal?  It's a matter of faith, and properly a question for religion, the sphere of the human quest for meaning.  And everyone is on that quest, whatever they say.  Christians are on a quest to save their immortal souls by experiencing God's love.  Environmentalists are on a quest to save humanity from sudden mortality by saving the planet from humans.

Plato was no slouch in the immortality stakes; he entered at least two likely runners.  There's the proof in the Republic and the proof in the Phaedrus, for a start.

In the Republic, Socrates wants Glaucon to believe that the soul is different from the normal operation of good and bad things on the body.  If something bad "attaches itself to something... [it can] break it down completely and destroy it."[609a6]  Obviously this applies to disease of the body.  But to the disease of the soul, not so.  If you get sick, the sickness can kill you.  If you act unjustly, the injustice doesn't kill you.  A deficiency in the body can kill you, but not a deficiency in the soul.  So, if "something is not destroyed by a single bad thing--whether its own or an external one--clearly it must always exist.  And if it always exists, it is immortal."[611a1]

But why should a deficiency in the soul afflict a man in the same way as a deficiency in the body?  Maybe a deficiency in the body will kill you, but a deficiency in the soul just makes you into a monster.  And if a deficiency of the soul doesn't kill you, or sicken you, it doesn't mean that it's immortal.  It just means that the soul is different from the body.


In the Phaedrus, Socrates uses a different argument on his young friend Phaedrus.  "[W]hatever is always in motion is immortal".[245c5]   That's because something always in motion never had beginning, for if it had a beginning then it must have come from another source.  For us this is ridiculous, because we post-Newtonians believe that everything moves forever unless accelerated by something else.  But for the ancients, things sat around immobile unless they were pushed, like Eeyore.  The idea of something moving perpetually was unnatural, godlike, and therefore immortal.

But really, Socrates, how do you know?  How do you know that the "something" you see in motion was always in motion, or could have been always in motion?  You are pulling a fast one on us.  The idea of perpetual motion is not something that we humans experience.  We only experience objects that seem to have been moving before we first observed them, and that we assume will continue to move after we terminate our observations. We believe with Wittgenstein of the Tractatus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Platonic Reincarnation

In the Phaedrus Plato gets to dialog on the love for beautiful boys.  But before he does, he develops a full-scale myth on the reincarnation of souls, the so-called Chariot myth.

Souls, of course, are immortal.  There is something about a self-mover that cannot be created or destroyed, because it never starts or stops or anything like that.

But how does the soul work?   Plato conjures up the notion of a charioteer driving two horses.  That's no problem for the gods, because they have two good horses.  But everyone else has a mixture: one good horse and one bad horse.  "This means that chariot driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difficult business."  This gets ugly when the soul is in love with a beautiful boy.  That bad horse starts causing problems, big time.

Life in heaven is a parade of chariots, with Zeus first in the procession.  When he leads the procession up to the rim of heaven for a banquet, things get tricky for the folks with a bad horse.  Some few, some lucky few keep up with the gods and get a "view of Reality, just barely."  Those lucky ones get to partake in the godly feast, "seeing what is real and watching what is true" They get to see Justice as it is, and Self-control, and Knowledge.  On earth we get to see "knowledge that is close to change", the contingent knowledge that we know down on earth.

But most fail in acquiring knowledge like this. With bad horses and the incompetence of the charioteers, "the result is terribly noisy, very sweaty, and disorderly."  If you don't keep up with the gods then you shed your wings and fall to earth. Oh yes, up in heaven you have wings--with feathers.  What did you expect?

Fortunately, on this first fall from heaven, the soul is not incarnated into a wild beast, but into one of nine sorts of men, depending on the amount of Reality it got to see.  Tier One is your philosopher and lover of beauty; Tier Two is a king or general; Tier Three is a statesman, householder, or financier, and so on all the way down to Tier Nine, a tyrant.  If you live your incarnate life with justice then you get to return in heaven to a better one, to live as their manner of their human life has earned them.  Of course, you spend thousands of years in between lives, discarnate, charioteering and banqueting with the gods, or "condemned to go to places of punishment beneath the earth and pay the full penalty for their injustice."

Then, of course, you could return to earth as a wild animal.  For here is the judgment of the gods. A "soul that never saw the truth cannot take a human shape".  A human being "must understand speech in terms of general forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into a reasoned unity.  That process is the recollection of thing things our soul saw when it was traveling with god" seeing the "truly real".  A soul acquires its knowledge in heaven while traveling with the gods, and recollects it in mortal life as a soul-and-body.

You can spend a lot of time in heaven, waiting for your wings to grow, for only wings only grow for "the man who practices philosophy without guile or who loves boys philosophically.

Impiety, Ancient and Modern

In the Plato course this morning, Prof. David Keyt tried to help the modern student understand the meaning of "pious" and "impious" as used in the context of Socrates and his trial for impiety and the dialogue on the meaning of impiety in the Euthyphro.  You should think of the Greek "to hosion" as "religious" or "reverent", he said.

But he left out the most obvious way in which modern students interact with the pious.  It's pretty obvious when you think about how Socrates got into trouble with the censors.  It was because he was corrupting the minds of the youth and "creating new gods while not believing in the old."

We tend to be rather patronizing when tut-tutting about the Greeks for putting Socrates to death for meddling with the young.  But, of course, every society sanctions people that want to dissent from orthodox ideas and teach the youth something new.  Our liberal friends bend our ears endlessly about the evils of putting witches to death and of censoring the noble Galileo for the impiety of  publishing an innovative science that had the earth revolving around the sun instead of the other way around.  They are outraged that fundamentalist Christians want to hand on to pre-evolutionary ideas about human origin.

But our age is the age of liberal piety.  Today's Euthyphro would tell students that piety is action or speech pleasing to liberal professors.  Violate the canons of liberal piety and watch the gods of the university administration fall on you.

Election time is a good time to watch for the dance of the pieties, and the 2012 election is shaping up as a dandy for the piety watcher.  In just the last month we have had the indictment, the graphe, of Rush Limbaugh for the impiety of calling a middle-aged female liberal activist by the s-word.  A casual watcher of the culture might have been surprised.  Isn't casual obscenity considered rather "edgy" and anti-establishment?  Not when the liberal pieties are involved.  Defenders of public decency rushed on the air and into print.  President Obama himself called the middle-aged woman in question because, he said, he thought of his daughters.  Hemlock was not required to bring Rush Limbaugh to heel; merely the threat of advertiser defection.

After the Sandra Fluke affair about sexual impiety had died down the Trayvon Martin case reared its head.  Here we have a case of racial impiety in which a white man allegedly shot a black teenager.  The man from Mars might be excused for not getting the point here as well.  Although there were 346 white-on-black homicides in 2005 there were 945 black-on-white homicides in 2005.  So black on white homicides are a big problem, especially when you consider that there is a pool of 230 million "whites" in the US available to commit racial homicides and only 34 million "blacks."  Yet the narrative is that the homicide of a young black by a white is a national outrage, and it is impious to suggest otherwise.

In the Euthyphro Plato makes clear through Socrates' ironic questioning of the young twerp Euthyphro that the definition of impiety is arbitrary.  It is what society says it is, and what society says is what its loudest voices and sharpest elbows insist.  In America today it is our liberal friends that have the biggest megaphones because of their power in education, the media and the culture.  And so American piety today is liberal piety.

So whatever Socrates and Euthyphro might have decided in their dialogue we can say, with our modern knowledge, that humans are social animals and cannot allow people to veer too far away from generally accepted ideas and behaviors.  We have a way of describing people on the wrong side of the line: impious.

So in America you better watch how you corrupt the youth when a liberal is listening.  And you better not suggest that you think that the liberal idols: Social Security, Medicare, the "common school" are all superstitions.  You could get indicted and tried for impiety.  Hate speech, I think they call it.