The Euthyphro revolves around the question, "What is piety?". Given that Euthyphro doesn't have the self-awareness to find a problem with prosecuting his own father, there probably isn't much hope for Euthyphro giving the answer. That he hears voices and people get sick of listening to him tells us more about his character. He's often considered to be a sort of everyman, too willing to accept convetional attitudes towards right behavious. Questioning his own actions isn't something that he avoids, its something that he doesn't even consider.
Plato doesn't want to give us an answer. The socratic methods should lead to confusion, not the repeated assertions of knowledge that Euthyphro gives us through the dialog. By the end of the dialog, Socrates has not managed to change Euthyphro at all, he doesn't have time to finish the conversation. Neither has Socrates shown that unjust prosecution is improper.
Euthyphro claims first that pious things and acts are, by definition, loved by the gods. This is a difficult position to hold for a polytheist, as different gods might love or hate different things. But Euthyphro is sure that his own actions are loved by all the gods.
But is a thing pious because the gods love it, or do the gods things because they are pious? Saying the god-loved is the pious and the pious is the god loved is a circular definition, and empty because it doesn't give us any tools to identify actual pious things.
Next, Socrates gets Euthyphro to describe piety as the part of justice that deals with the gods. But, Socrates asks, what would achieve by caring for or serving the gods. Surely, we don't hope to make the gods better. The gods can't be pleased with something because they are benefited by it, because the gods can not be benefited by human things.
This dialog is traditionally read as presenting a dichotomy, the presentation of two exclusive, exhaustice and equally unappealing options. Either the pious is determined by the whim of the gods, and can't be figured out by man, or else the gods answer to a higher law, and are thus superfluous.
I'm having you read this both as a taste of an aporetic dialog, but also because it demonstrates something about how Plato saw the search for knowledge working. Euthyphro is one of Socrates' greatest failures. Finally, there's a take away message here regarding how we should talk about proper behaviour in our own culture, but I feel the need to be properly Socratic on occassion, you need to figure this out for yourself.
1 Comments
Usually, I don't comment on blog entries that are this old. But there are too many errors/misrepresenations here, I cannot keep silent!
1) the account of definitions is incomplete and misleadingly so. The first 'definition' Euthyphro gives is "doing as I am doing". But even as an apodictic definition, it is an immediate failure, as even Euthyphro quickly admits
2) Euthyphro does deliberately evade giving answers, hemming and hawing with comments like "Many and wonderful are the
works of the gods" (13e).
Such comments are obvious evasions. Artistically, one of the most remarkable achievements of Plato's art writing this dialogue is that he depicts Socrates as eliciting responses from Euthyphro despite this obvious unwillingness, without stretching the reader's credibility too far.
The point of the above is that Euthyphro is capable of understanding the need for clear definitions, but he is deliberately evading doing it. Why does he evade it? Because then he would be forced to admit that he is wrong, that he has no right to prosecute his own father.
This point is often missed in discussions of the dialogue, especially in undergraduate courses. But it is so important to understanding the entire dialog! Athenian law allowed only an immediate relative of the deceased to prosecute for murder. Euthyphro was not related, so he had no right. He was simply being obstinate, over-confident and self-righteous, sort of like the late Jerry Falwell.
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