Platonism on Non-Harming: 4
I switched from “Plato on Non-Harming” to “Platonism on Non-Harming” because this post refers to Oration 12 written by Maximus of Tyre who was a second century Platonist. The title of Oration 12 is “Revenge.” It refers directly, or paraphrases, Plato’s Dialogues Crito, which I have previously referred to, and The Apology.
The Oration opens with a reference to a poem by Pindar, as well as to events in the Odyssey that I think most readers are not familiar with (I don’t recall them off hand.) Maximus also takes time to assert his view that virtue is ‘inalienable’ which is a disputed position in the history of Platonism.
At paragraph 4 the Oration examines the impact of intention in cases of wrongdoing, and starting with paragraph 5 it focuses on the issues surrounding non-retaliation and continues this discussion to the conclusion. I will start my quotation with paragraph 4:
“4. We might suggest therefore that wrongdoing is to be defined not by reference to the removal of anything from the victim, but by reference to the intentions of the perpetrator. A bad man could then be wronged by another bad man, even if he does not possess the good; a good man could be wronged by a bad man even if the good he has is inalienable. I accept this account that connects wrongdoing with the moral defect shown in the intention, rather than with the success of the actual attempt; the law certainly punishes not only the man who does the deed by also the man who intends to do it: the housebreaker who attempts a burglary, even if he is discovered; the intending traitor, even if he does not act. This whole line of argument, taken together, will bring us to the required conclusion. The good man neither commits nor suffers wrong: he does not commit wrong because he lacks the desire to; he does not suffer wrong because his virtue is inalienable. The bad man, on the other hand, commits wrong but does not suffer it: he commits wrong because he is bad; <he does not suffer wrong because he is innocent> of good. Moreover, if Virtue alone and nothing else is good, the bad man’s lack of Virtue means that he has nothing to be wronged in. But if other things in addition to Virtue are also good – physical attributes and one’s external fortunes and surroundings – then in the absence of Virtue it is better for these things to be absent than for them to be present – with the result that not even thus would the bad man suffer wrong, by being deprived of any of these things he makes such ill use of. Therefore if we define wrongdoing by reference to intention, the bad man commits wrong but does not suffer it * . . . . *
“5. * . . . . * the bad man wishes to commit wrong, he is in fact not able to. His desire sets him either against a man like himself or against his better. But what is his better to do? Is he to inflict a wrong on the bad man in return? Yet the bad man has nothing to be wronged in, since it is precisely the absence of the good that makes him bad. In that case the sensible man will refrain from committing a reciprocal wrong against the bad man both in deed (the other has nothing to be wronged in), and in intention (being good, he has no more desire to do wrong than a pipe-player does to play out of tune.) And in general, if doing wrong is bad, then so too is doing wrong in return. The man who does wrong incurs no extra charge of wickedness in virtue of having acted first; instead, the man who returns the wrong puts himself on the same level of baseness by hitting back. If the man who does wrong acts badly, then the man who returns the wrong acts no less badly, even if he is taking revenge for a prior offence. Just as someone who returns a favour to his beneficiary acts no less well for the fact that he was benefited first, so the person who ensures a similar reciprocity in the sphere of harmful action acts no less badly for the fact that he was harmed first.
“6. What limits will there then be to the harm done? If the victims of wrongdoing take their revenge, the harm will for ever be transferred from one to the other and perpetuate itself, and one act of wrongdoing will follow another. The same justification by which you allow the victim to take his revenge is equally effective in allowing the right of retaliation to pass back from him to the original offender; the justification is open to both of them equally. For God’s sake, look at what you have brought about! Where will it come to rest? Don’t you realize that this is an inexhaustible source of wickedness that you are opening up, that you are laying down a law that will lead the whole earth into harm? It was just this principle that brought men the great misfortunes of days gone by, armed expeditions of foreigners and Greeks crossing to attack each other, robbing and warring and plundering, and making the preceding wrong their excuse for each new one. The Phoenicians kidnap a royal princess from Argos; the Greeks kidnap a foreign girl from Colchis; then the Phrygians strike again, taking a Spartan woman from the Peloponnese. It is obvious how ill succeeds ill, how pretexts for war arise, how wrongs multiply. This same process brought Greece into destructive conflict with herself too – self-styled victims of wrongs attacking their neighbours, in inexhaustible rage and undying anger and lust for revenge and moral ignorance.
“7. But if the victims of wrong could only understand that their own wrongdoing is the greatest of ills for the perpetrators themselves – worse than war and the razing of their fortifications and the ravaging of their territory and the imposition of tyranny - then Greece would not have been overwhelmed with such crushing misfortunes. The Athenians are laying siege to Potidaea. Leave them be, Spartan; they will repent of it soon enough! Don’t imitate them in their evil-doing, don’t lay yourself open to the same reproach! If you seize the pretext and advance against Plataea, the island of Melos, your neighbour, is done for; the island of Aegina, your friend, is done for; the city Scione, your ally, is done for. By capturing one city you will only bring about the sack of many. Just as, when people risk their lives at sea on business, they pay exorbitant interest on the money they have borrowed, so when people take revenge in anger they pay an exorbitant interest on the disasters they inflict. And to the Athenian I say: ‘You have captured Sphacteria; give Sparta back her men! See sense while your fortunes are good! If you do not you will have the men, but you won’t have your triremes.’ Lysander may score successes in the Hellespont and Sparta may wax mighty. But keep away from Thebes! If you do not, you will have a catastrophe at Leuctra and a disaster at Mantinea to weep over.
“8. What a murky and misguided style of Justice! It was for this reason that Socrates refused to grown angry with Aristophanes, or resent Meletus, or take revenge on Lycon, but instead cried out, ‘Anytus and Meletus can kill me but they cannot harm me; it is not permitted for a good man to be harmed by a villain.’ This is the true voice of Justice; if all spoke in it there would be no tragedies, no dramas on the stage, none of those many varieties of disaster. Just as in the case of bodily diseases it is the creeping varieties that are the recalcitrant ones, demanding a cure capable of halting their advance in its tracks and so saving the rest of the body; so when a first act of injustice afflicts a house or a city, the canker must be stopped if the remainder is to be saved. This is what destroyed the Pelopidae, this is what annihilated the Heracleidae and the house of Cadmus; this is what brought down Persiand, and Macedonians, and Greeks. What an unremitting disease it is, afflicting the earth in cycle after cycle down the ages.
“9. I would make so bold as to say that if it is possible for one kind of wrongdoing to surpass another, then the person who takes revenge is a worse wrongdoer than the original offender. The latter commits his wrong through ignorance and has his punishment in the censure that follows; but the retaliator, by taking an equal share of guilt, actually frees him from his liability to censure. Just as a man who becomes entangled with someone covered in soot cannot avoid staining his own body too, so anyone who sees fit to wrestle and take a fall with an unjust man cannot avoid sharing in his wickedness and becoming defiled by the same soot. When two athletes with the same training and the same ambition compete together, I am entirely happy, since I can see that their natural endowments are comparable, their exercises similar, and the desire for victory equivalent in both cases. But if a good man falls in with a villain, when the two don’t come from the same gymnasium, and haven’t been trained by the same trainer, or learned the same arts, or been taught the same throws, and don’t long for the same wreath and the same victory-proclamation, then their combat moves me to pity; it is an unequal contest. It is inevitable that the bad man will win when he is competing in a stadium where the spectators are criminals and the organizers rogues. In such a situation the good man is a layman and an ignoramus, innocent of suspicion and knavery and all the other tricks of the trade with which villainy fortifies and reinforces itself. The man who has no endowment for it in natural aptitude, in acquired skill, or in habit merely makes himself ridiculous by trying to return wrong for wrong.
“10. But, someone may say, it is because of this that the just man is slandered and brought to court and prosecuted and has his wealth confiscated and is thrown into prison and driven into exile and stripped of his citizenship and executed. What then if children, making their own laws for themselves and convening their own court, were to arraign a grown man under their legislation, and then, if he was found guilty, were to vote that he should lose his rights in the commonwealth of children and were to confiscate his childish effects, his knuckle-bones, and his toys: what is it reasonable to suppose a man would do <when condemned> by such a court? <Would he not laugh them to scorn,> votes, condemnations, and all? So Socrates laughed the Athenians to scorn, like children their votes and ordering the execution of a man who was in any case condemned to mortality. So too any good and just man will laugh with free and honest laughter as he sees wrongdoers eagerly attacking him, convinced that they are achieving something noteworthy but in reality achieving nothing. As they strip him of his rights he will cry the cry of Achilles:
‘I know that I am honoured in Zeus’ ordinance.’
“When they confiscate his wealth he will let it go as if it were his toys and knuckle-bones, and he will die as if from fever or the stone, with no resentment towards his murderers.”
(Maximus of Tyre, The Philosophical Orations, translated by M. B. Trapp, Clarendon Press, Oxford University, 1997, pages 110-115, ISBN: 0198149891)
1. Maximus lived in the second century CE and Plato died in 348 BCE so there is a gap of many centuries between the two. This means that the topic of non-harming, and particularly non-retaliation, was persistently discussed over a long period of time. In some of the quotes from Plato, Socrates indicates that this teaching existed prior to his own teaching, meaning that it was a teaching Socrates learned from his predecessors.
2. Paragraph 4 begins with a discussion of intention which adds a significant element to the quotes I have posted thus far. Maximus considers harm to be dependent upon the intention of the person doing the harm. This shifts the focus away from the act itself to the mental, or psychological state, of the one doing the harm.
Years ago when I was studying ancient Jain Sutras, there was a section in one of the Sutras (I don’t remember which one at the moment; it might have been the Akaranga Sutra) where a group of Jain Sages mock Buddhists for thinking that intention determines karma. For Jains, karma and its consequences are the result of the actions done by the doer; the act itself determines the karmic consequences and psychological states, such as intention, are not considered. The example the Jains use is that if a Buddhist picks up a gourd, not knowing there is a baby lying asleep in it, and tosses the gourd into the fire, then it follows from the Buddhist analysis of intention that the person who threw the gourd into the fire did nothing wrong; Jains find this completely unacceptable and for that reason mock Buddhist analysis.
Maximus shares the Buddhist interpretation, meaning that Maximus thinks that intention is determinative as to whether harm has happened.
3. “The good man neither commits nor suffers wrong: he does not commit wrong because he lacks the desire to; he does not suffer wrong because his virtue is inalienable.”
This is a good summation. The good man is, by definition, one who lacks the desire to harm, or do wrong to, others. The good man does not suffer wrong because of the cultivation of virtue. The cultivation of virtue leads to a sense of equanimity and acceptance. The practice of contemplation also provides the practitioner with a sense of spaciousness in the midst of the constant shifts and changes in this world. The harm directed at the good man is perceived by the good man as no different than a storm on a day which he thought would be mild. “It is what it is” is a popular saying today that I think sums up this kind of feeling.
As an aside, the opening sections of The Consolation of Philosophy deal forcefully with the erratic nature of fortune and that the virtuous man is also subject to these ups and downs.
3.1 At times Maximus offers us only two possibilities; either someone is a good man or he is a bad man. But most of us are somewhere between these two; that is to say we are a mixture of good and bad tendencies. I don’t think this damages the analysis of Maximus, but the analysis might have been more ‘realistic’ if it had explicitly included these kinds of mixed-tendency types.
4. It’s not clear to me why Maximus thinks that the bad man does not suffer from wrongdoing, or harm, directed at him. The good man does not suffer from harm directed at him because he has cultivated virtue. But the bad man has not cultivated virtue: doesn’t that imply that the bad man suffers, or feels, the harm done to him?
Another way of looking at this is that the good man who suffers harm will not use that as a justification for doing harm to others; but the bad man will do exactly that.
Perhaps I am missing something from the argument Maximus presents. In addition the text is corrupt indicated by the ellipses in brackets; it’s possible that something crucial is simply absent from the texts we have at this time.
5. “And in general, if doing wrong is bad, then so too is doing wrong in return.” This is completely in keeping with the teachings Socrates offers to Crito.
6. “The same justification by which you allow the victim to take his revenge is equally effective in allowing the right of retaliation to pass back from him to the original offender; the justification is open to both of them equally. . . Don’t you realize this is an inexhaustible source of wickedness . . . “
This is the samsaric nature of the world in which we live. This is why there is no end to the cycles of retaliation. This is why the material realm is a sea of sorrow. Only by cutting through the becoming and beginning of all things can this be brought to an end.
7. “. . . the person who takes revenge is a worse wrongdoer than the original offender.” The one who takes revenge is worse because he is setting up the conditions for the generation of endless back and forth retaliation.
8. In paragraph 10 Maximus, using a section of Gorgias as his starting point (521e), compares being wronged to a good man being dragged into a court set up by children who then find the good man guilty. The good man is punished by the children, but simply laughs at the situation rather than falling into despair.
“When they confiscate his [the good man’s] wealth he will let it go as if it were his toys and knuckle-bones, and he will die as if from fever or the stone, with no resentment towards his murderers.”
This is a result of cultivating apatheia. It is also likely based on knowledge of one’s own past lives; I mean that when negative things happen to a good man it can be seen as the karmic result of negative things he has done in the past coming to fruition. But the good man does not have to continue the karmic cycle. The good man can break the cycle and by doing so come closer to that which transcends becoming and begoning, the Good, the One, and the Beautiful.
9. The passage from Gorgias that Maximus relies on is as follows:
“Socrates: ‘. . . I’ll be judged the way a doctor would be judged by a jury of children if a pastry chef were to bring accusations against him. Think about what a man like that, taken captive among these people, could say, “Children, this man has worked many great evils on you, yes, on you. He destroys the youngest among you by cutting and burning them, and by slimming them down and choking and forces hunger and thirst on them. He doesn’t feast you on a great variety of sweets the way I do!” What do you think a doctor, caught in such an evil predicament, could say? Or if he should tell them the truth and say, “Yes, children, I was doing all those things in the interest of health,” how big an uproar do you think such “judges” would make? Wouldn’t it be a loud one?’”
(Plato, Gorgias, translated by Donald J. Zeyl, Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1997, page 864, 521e-522a, ISBN: 9780872203495)
