SORIA, Kent Emmanuel || TAN, Candice || TRANGIA, Mark Jerome

PH104 - Group 9

Premise: Plato’s advocacy of epimeleisthai challenges traditional Greek conception of excellence.

How do you evaluate his view about the value of external goods to morality?

Plato’s Epimeleisthai and the value of external goods to morals

Plato’s dialogues are full of questers for excellence. Seeing their eagerness such as those

of the disciples of the sophists, Socrates cannot help but ask the more fundamental

question: what is excellence in the first place? Socrates does not imply in this question

that people do not search excellence since he believes they already do so without the

need of his urging. He is simply asking them to ‘take care’ because in their relentless

pursuit, the ambitious may not be careful enough to discriminate what is real excellence

from what is not. In the name of excellence, they may obsess with the pursuit of it, and

forget altogether the question of what excellence really is in the first place. This is what

epimeleisthai is: to ‘take care’ or ‘be careful’ in this pursuit of excellence.

There are many answers to the question of what excellence consists of. In Plato’s time,

cardinal virtues such courage and self-restraint are what consists ‘arete’, Meno answered

that excellence consists of ‘acquiring gold and silver’ or ‘ruling others’. These answers

can almost be expected back then since these questers were not after spending their

lives doing altruistic work but rather on desiring to live well. But according to Socrates,

caring for one’s state of soul is more important in the quest for excellence than ambition

and wealth. Socrates thinks that knowledge and wisdom provide everything one needs to

live well and he shows this because he thinks that all external things such as wealth, or

even virtues such as courage, can only be considered ‘good’ in the first place if one has
SORIA, Kent Emmanuel || TAN, Candice || TRANGIA, Mark Jerome

PH104 - Group 9

wisdom. One must be able to use them properly or they cannot be considered good.

External goods has no benefit to someone who has no knowledge.

But the question arises whether wisdom alone is sufficient for happiness even in the

absence of external goods. Stoicism, which flourished during hard times, affirmed this

idea greatly. One must remember that the question of what real excellence is was

addressed by Socrates to those who agreed that ‘arete’ meant enjoying privileges such

as good health. In Plato’s Republic, there is the example of Glaucon, the good person

who nevertheless experienced great suffering. This launched the question on whether the

‘person on the rack’ can thus be happy. In Apology, Socrates demonstrates that wisdom

secures people from ill fortune. Since they are inter-connected, possessing wisdom

inherently implied possessing external goods too. In Republic, Socrates says the just

person on the rack is better than the unjust rich person though he does not claim that all

just persons are happy even without external goods. Similar readings of other works of

Plato prove to be inconclusive in answering the question by just analyzing Plato’s writings.

Since this question is left as a philosophical debate for future generations, we as a group

agree with Plato that wisdom is necessary for other virtues and external goods to be

considered as ‘good’ or ‘beneficial’ in the first place. However, we also feel that since

wisdom is the necessary condition for external goods such as comfort to be beneficial,

once we have wisdom, external goods such as health can then become factors that

contributes to happiness and in furthering wisdom. We are not saying it is impossible to

be happy ‘living on a rack’, but it may be very hard to do so for most people.