Plato on Non-Harming: 1

 7 October 2024

Plato on Non-Harming: 1

“Socrates:  Come then, what of statements such as this: Should a man professionally engaged in physical training pay attention to the praise and blame and opinion of any man, or to those of one man only, namely a doctor or trainer?

“Crito:  To those of one only.

“Socrates:  He should therefore fear the blame and welcome the praise of that one man, and not those of the many?

“Crito:  Obviously.

“Socrates:  He must then act and exercise, eat and drink in the way the one, the trainer and the one who knows, thinks right, not all the others?

“Crito:  That is so.

“Socrates:  Very well.  And if he disobeys the one, disregards his opinion and his praises while valuing those of the many who have no knowledge, will he not suffer harm?

“Crito:  Of course.

“Socrates:  What is that harm, where does it tend, and what part of the man who disobeys does it affect?

“Crito:  Obviously the harm is to his body, which it ruins.

“Socrates:  Well said.  So with other matters, not to enumerate them all, and certainly with actions just and unjust, shameful and beautiful, good and bad, about which we are now deliberating, should we follow the opinion of the many and fear it, or that of the one, if there is one who has knowledge of these things and before whom we feel fear and shame more than before all the others.  If we do not follow his directions, we shall harm and corrupt that part of ourselves that is improved by just actions and destroyed by unjust actions.  Or is there nothing in this?

“Crito:  I think there certainly is, Socrates.

“Socrates:  Come now, if we ruin that which is improved by health and corrupted by disease by not following the opinions of those who know, is life worth living for us when that is ruined?  And that is the body, is it not?

“Crito:  Yes.

“Socrates:  And is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in bad condition?

“Crito:  In no way.

“Socrates:  And is life worth living for us with that part of us corrupted that unjust action harms and just action benefits?  Or do we think that part of us, whatever it is, that is concerned with justice and injustice, is inferior to that of the body?

“Crito:  Not at all.

“Socrates:  It is more valuable?

“Crito:  Much more.”

(Plato, Crito, translated by G. M. A. Grube, Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1997, pages 41 and 42, 47b-48a, ISBN: 9780872203495)

1.  I think I posted before regarding non-harming, but I have been thinking about it a lot in the context of Plato’s Dialogues and feel called to share some of my thoughts.  First, I get the overall impression that non-harming is not given enough attention; at least that seems to be the case in the secondary literature I have read.  I can understand that; the passages in which Plato explicitly discusses non-harming are not numerous when compared to something like the Forms, or the topic of beauty, and so forth.  Yet I have come to regard the teachings on non-harming as foundational for an understanding of Platonic ethics and virtues; I mean that to understand what Plato means by justice, courage, and so forth, it is necessary to understand how Plato understands non-harming.  I think Platonic ethics is built on that foundation.

2.  I would also suggest that purification in Platonism derives from Platonism’s view of non-harming.  An obvious example would be vegetarianism which is undertaken, among other reasons, to refrain from harming living beings and causing animals harm.  I think this kind of reason applies to the other practices of purification as well.

3.  The ascetic teachings found in Platonism are applications of the principle of non-harming to specific situations.  Non-harming is a type of restraint, that is to say refraining from harming one’s self or others.  That idea of restraint is what all ascetic disciplines, the asceses, have in common.  We restrain ourselves from eating animal flesh; we restrain ourselves from indulging in alcohol or recreational drugs; we restrain ourselves from indulging in material goods, sexual indulgence, and so forth.  All of this is grounded in restraining ourselves from harming others.

4.  In a sense I would say that non-harming is another name for wisdom and that what wisdom means, among other things, is understanding the necessity of a life based on non-harming.  When I say non-harming is another name for wisdom, I mean that one of the tasks of wisdom is to make clear distinctions between things; in this case it would be distinguishing causing harm and not causing harm.  Another aspect of wisdom is to see the underlying unity of disparate things which leads to empathy and compassion.  We do not want to be harmed and others also feel the same way.

5.  And I would also add that contemplation has as its basis non-harming because it is during contemplation that the practitioner is refraining from harming himself and others as well.  No other activity instantiates non-harming more purely than contemplation.

6.  For these reasons I hope to post a series on non-harming, highlighting where non-harming is explicitly mentioned and seeing how these passages work, and what they imply for Platonic practice.

7.  The quoted passage opens with a discussion about whom we should trust when inquiring about what non-harming means.  Should we trust popular opinion?  Or should we trust a single, knowledgeable, person?  

In the case of non-harming this is a significant question.  First because, for the most part, people do not know what it means, or what non-harming refers to.  Second, opinions that are offered about non-harming, in ordinary conversation, are often offered as if they are obvious when they are not; but people resist investigation.  Third, because the idea of non-harming, especially if taken as foundational for an ethical life, is very remote from the considerations that most people think of when trying to form their own ethical norms; thus the idea of non-harming will feel intrusive.

8.  Socrates uses physical training as his analogy to non-harming.  I think that is constructive.  It implies that non-harming is a practice that grows in strength over time.  Just as lifting weights will slowly result in muscular development, so also the practice of non-harming strengthens a person’s soul and their ability to ascend to higher levels of reality (hypostases.)  

Physical training has its equipment and its programs.  But it is not clear what kind of equipment someone who is training in non-harming should use, or which equipment should be used.  That’s because in the case of non-harming we are talking about spiritual training rather than physical training and we are not used to thinking of spirituality as a type of training or exercise.

I think the answer, or part of the answer, is to internalize the understanding of non-harming and to examine non-harming dialectically.  This is done by application to various situations (actual or hypothetical) and bringing non-harming into more and more aspects of one’s life.

For example, non-harming would reject the idea of randomly killing every single person on a city block or in a designated area.  I got this idea from a Discourse of the Buddha (I don’t remember which one) where he refers to someone so far removed from non-harming that they go up one bank of a river, and then down the opposite bank, killing everyone they see.  Restraining such an impulse would be acting on the basis of non-harming.  (As an aside, if the reader thinks this example is too extreme, I think history shows, including contemporary history, that this kind of inclination is common; which in turn shows how remote non-harming is from motivating many people’s ethical behavior.)

The procedure is to apply non-harming to more and more areas of one’s life; this spreads the reality of non-harming into even very simple interactions.

9.  Crito is a very close friend of Socrates.  In Phaedo, it is Crito who takes on the task of caring for Socrates’s family at the request of Socrates.  And the last words of Socrates are spoken to Crito.  This means that there is an intimacy and trust in this dialogue; this sense of trust isn’t always present in the dialogues, but it is strong here.

Crito wants to rescue his friend from his execution which Crito regards as harming Socrates.  But Socrates does not see it that way.  Socrates sees the situation from the perspective of the soul, whereas Crito sees the situation from the perspective of the body.  Socrates thinks that not going through with the execution would harm his soul on several levels.  First, it would show that he lacked courage, one of the primary virtues.  Second, it would undermine Socrates’s teachings on Civics and the Ethics associated with Civic Duty.  Socrates sees that if he were to escape from jail and avoid the death penalty, this would harm the teachings he has given his students; it would suggest that Socrates didn’t really believe in soul, in Civic Duty, and that he lacked the courage to face what the world had handed to him.  This, in turn, could easily lead to his students abandoning philosophy altogether which, from the perspective of Socrates, would be a great harm.

10.  This is a fairly subtle discussion of harm and the avoidance of harm.  I don’t think it is the kind of discussion that a beginner would be able to grasp.  It is good to begin the practice of non-harming with simpler things and situations.  But the understanding of non-harming deepens over time and its application becomes easier to see.  This nourishes our soul and allows us to access noetic reality.  This practice allows us to access noetic reality because in the noetic realm there is no harm.  The realities of the noetic realm are transparent to each other, at ease with each other.  Non-harming is the soul’s connection to the transcendent.