Sophroniscus’ Son is Coming to My House

Henry Curcio

My introduction to Plato was unwanted. Like many philosophy undergraduates, I needed to take a course on ancient philosophy to satisfy major requirements. I very much resented this obligation and could not understand why it was necessary for anyone to learn what various old guys thought, all of which we now think is wrong. Reading Plato, however, I’d quickly come to realize I was wrong. While reading the dialogues, Sophroniscus’ son had come to my house and put my beliefs under abuse. 

Achieving self-knowledge is an exceedingly difficult task. Many of our beliefs are inherited and often accepted with little thought or judgment. The result is a set of beliefs that are haphazardly collected rather than carefully considered and self-determined. The nature of this epistemological process entails that because we are the final authority of what it is we believe, we do not have to confront our moral or logical short comings.  And, as a result, we might lose out on a distinct part of the human experience: fundamental self-improvement. 

I am far from achieving a full sense of self-knowledge, and it’s even plausible Socrates never achieved it. After all, in the Theaetetus, Socrates describes himself as “utterly strange [átopos]” (149a). Here, átopos can take on stronger connotations of being unclassifiable or even alien. That Socrates suggests he himself is alien is telling insofar as the perplexity others feel around him is something Socrates experiences as well. A passage of the Hippias Major makes this apparent. There, Socrates speaks of an interlocutor, Sophroniscus’ son, who is always putting him and his beliefs under constant abuse (kakós). The abuse is constant because Socrates lives in the same house as Sophroniscus’ son (304e). But it is here when it becomes clear that Sophroniscus’ son is none other than Socrates himself. Maybe this is what self-knowledge takes, what authenticity takes. That is, a willingness to put oneself and their beliefs under constant scrutiny. I take the importance of this characteristic to be a central value in many of the conversations Socrates has in Plato’s early dialogues, and it forced me to wrestle with things I valued unreflectively. 

One thing Plato is acutely aware of in the Republic is just how malleable we are when young. He goes so far as to say that children are liable to take “any pattern one wishes to impress” on them (II.377b). I believe he hits the nail on its malleable head because it appears, at least from personal experience, that this is indeed how beliefs are formed. My cultural backdrop and early childhood carved deep psychological dispositions that colored, and continue to color, much of my thinking. That is to say, they were not my beliefs at all. They were my parents or someone else’s. I never played an agential role in coming to these beliefs for myself, I was merely the subject they inhered in. 

The theme of inherited beliefs runs consistently throughout Plato’s dialogues (especially the early dialogues). In those dialogues of definition, when Socrates asks for what one believes F to be, he is met with conventional Greek wisdom. Be it Charmides on temperance (sōphrosúnē, Charmides 159d and 160e) or Cephalus and Polemarchus on justice (díkaios, Republic I.331b and I.332d), interlocutors are far too willing to unreflectively appeal to conventional Greek wisdom. This parroting typically reveals the way in which one has not seriously thought for themself. They have not determined what they believe and instead appeal to what others think. As for me, it was an inherited belief of mine that what was old was not worthwhile, or worthy of serious consideration. My logic was that there was a reason that we, as a social formation, have clearly moved past it. And I never questioned that until, well, Plato.

Before I had read Plato, I had been going through a sort of crisis of the self, as perhaps many reflective undergrads are wont to be undergoing. It was not really clear to me what I believed, what I thought, or what I was committed to (besides, apparently, thinking that what had passed was unimportant). But in reading Plato over the past years, I’ve come to think that the reason for this is that I had not properly acted in determining for myself what I believed about things. It was easier to recall old adages or parrot others in an attempt at finding what felt authentic to me. We can liken this sort of shape shifting to Proteus, as Socrates does (Ion 541e). It’s as if this shape shifting servant of Poseidon has no stable identity underneath him. Similarly, without acting in determining my own beliefs for myself, I had little by way of a stable self, let alone any knowledge of myself.

I learned this from Plato, along with the humility to admit that I knew very little of what I thought I knew, so I thank Sophroniscus’ son for his visit.