Acceptance and taking over

Use in the book

Acceptance first lets Socrates go on with the charm. He had lost his nerve when Charmides sat down beside him (155c–d), and now he explains the charm by what good doctors say, "that to imagine one could ever treat the head on its own, apart from the whole body, is sheer folly" (156c). "And you think it well said, and you accept the principle?" he asks; "Absolutely," Charmides answers (156c), and his approval gives Socrates back his nerve (156d). The Thracian doctor who taught Socrates the charm carried the principle further, in the name of Zalmoxis, king and god of the Thracians: one must not try to cure the body without the soul either, and "it is the soul that must be treated first and foremost" (156d–157a). In accepting the doctors' principle, Charmides has accepted the ground of the charm.

The other compound marks the change of answerer. When Charmides offered his third definition, doing one's own business, Socrates said at once that he had heard it from Critias, his cousin and guardian, or from one of the other wise men, and Critias denied it: "Certainly not from me" (161b–c). Now Charmides cannot say what it means and looks slyly across at Critias (162b), and, wanting Critias to answer for it, he "kept prodding him, and made out that he had been refuted" (162c–d). Socrates, who now thinks his first suspicion entirely right (162c), turns to Critias: "So if you agree that temperance is what this young man says, and take the argument over, I would much rather look into it with you, to see whether what was said is true or not." "I agree entirely," Critias answers, "and I take it over" (162e). To agree to the definition is to assent to a claim (see Agreement and concession); to take the argument over is to become the one who answers for it, as Critias does until the end of the inquiry.

Critias' own acceptance prepares a demand that he refuses. If Critias were to ask what medicine produces, Socrates says, he would answer, "No small benefit: it produces health, a fine work for us," and he adds, "if you accept that." "I do," says Critias (165d). House-building, Socrates goes on, produces houses; so Critias, who says that temperance is knowledge of oneself, ought to be able to say what fine work it produces (165d–e). Critias accepts what was said of medicine but refuses the likeness: "you are not inquiring correctly. This knowledge is not by nature like the other kinds of knowledge" (165e). Calculation and geometry, he points out, have no such work either, and Socrates grants it (165e–166a). To accept a premise is not to accept every likeness drawn from it.

Only once does Socrates speak of his own acceptance, and then he withholds it: "I can neither say with confidence whether it is possible for this to come about, for there to be knowledge of knowledge, nor, even if it most certainly exists, accept that it is temperance, until I have looked into whether a thing of that kind would benefit us or not" (169a–b2). He has "a prophetic hunch that temperance is something beneficial and good" (169b), and asks Critias to show first that such a knowledge is possible and then that it is beneficial (169b–c), the two questions he first put at 167b. Critias cannot show the first, and Socrates grants it for the argument's sake (169d; see Agreement and concession). The second is the test the definition fails: temperance, as knowledge only of knowledge, proves to be "the craftsman of no benefit" (175a).

Places to read

1. 156b–157a2Charmides accepts the good doctors' principle of treating the part with the whole, and the Thracian doctor carries it on to the soul.
2. 162b–eCharmides wants Critias to answer for the definition, and Critias agrees to it and takes the argument over.
3. 165c–166aCritias accepts that medicine produces health, and refuses the likeness for temperance.
4. 169a–c2Socrates will not accept knowledge of knowledge as temperance before he has looked into whether it would benefit us.

Translation in this edition

Ἀποδέχεσθαι is "accept" at 156c, in Socrates' "if you accept that" at 165d, and at 169b; Critias' reply, the one word Ἀποδέχομαι (apodechomai), "I accept", is "I do" (165d). Παραδέχεσθαι is "take over", in Socrates' "take the argument over" and Critias' "I take it over" (162e). The "agree" of the same exchange renders another verb, συγχωρεῖν, and the "approval" of Charmides in Socrates' narration at 156d renders ἐπαινεῖν (epainein), "to praise". The λόγος (logos) that Charmides accepts at 156c is "the principle", and the λόγος that Critias takes over at 162e "the argument". The simple verb δέχεσθαι, which the Philebus uses for the same act, does not occur in the Charmides.

ἀποδέχομαι

Attested: ἀποδέχῃ (apodechēi; 156c, 165d), ἀποδέχομαι (apodechomai; 165d, 169b). To accept, to receive with approval. Charmides accepts the good doctors' principle that the part must be treated with the whole (156c); Critias accepts that medicine produces health, answering with the verb itself, which the edition renders "I do" (165d); Socrates will not accept that knowledge of knowledge is temperance until he has looked into whether it would benefit us (169b). Lemma: ἀποδέχομαι.

παραδέχομαι

Attested: παραδέχῃ (paradechēi; 162e), παραδέχομαι (paradechomai; 162e). To take over what another hands on. Socrates asks Critias to take the argument over from Charmides, and Critias answers, "I take it over" (162e). Lemma: παραδέχομαι.

Elsewhere in Plato

Twice elsewhere Plato stages a change of answerer as a handing over of the argument and a taking of it. In the Republic Cephalus, Polemarchus' aged father, called away to his sacrifices, says that he hands the argument over to the others, and his son Polemarchus asks whether he is not, then, his father's heir; Cephalus laughs, agrees and goes off, and Socrates addresses Polemarchus as "the heir of the argument" (331d–e). In the Philebus, where Philebus holds that pleasure is the good, Socrates asks the young Protarchus whether he accepts the argument now being given him, using the simple verb δέχεσθαι, and Protarchus answers that he must, since Philebus has given up (11c); and when Philebus still insists that pleasure will win, Protarchus tells him that, having handed the argument over, he no longer has any say over the agreement with Socrates, or over its opposite (12a). In both, the argument passes to a new answerer, who answers for it from then on. In the Charmides it goes the other way, back to the man Socrates takes to be its author (162c–e).

Later readings

Aristotle, Plato's pupil, setting out the answerer's part in dialectical exercises, takes the case of a man defending someone else's opinion: he must grant or refuse each point by looking to that person's mind. Thus those who put forward the view of Heraclitus of Ephesus, the philosopher of about 500 BC, that good and bad are the same, will not grant that contraries are never present in one thing at once. They hold that principle themselves; it is Heraclitus' position that obliges them to deny it. Those who receive theses from one another (δεχόμενοι, the simple verb), Aristotle adds, behave in the same way, aiming at what the thesis's author would say.¹ Charmides, defending a definition he had from someone else, can be read as the case this rule provides for: he cannot say what doing one's own business means, and suggests that perhaps even the man who said it did not know what he meant (162b).