Counsel

Use in the book

The expression is Alcibiades' answer at 125e to the question what knowledge enables one to rule people who share in political life. It arrives only after less precise descriptions have failed. Being good at affairs does not distinguish politics from riding or seafaring; ruling men who use other men does not distinguish it from controlling a ship's coordinated crew or a chorus. Good counsel is intended to identify the specifically civic competence missing from those answers.

Socrates immediately refuses to let the name settle the matter. Pilots' knowledge is not want of counsel; it too is good counsel, Alcibiades agrees, with respect to keeping people safe at sea. The counterexample shows that the positive prefix in εὐβουλία supplies an evaluation, not yet a distinct subject matter. Political counsel must have a purpose and a beneficial condition it brings about.

Alcibiades says its purpose is to order the city better and keep it safe. Socrates asks what comes to be present or absent when this occurs, comparing bodily health and disease, eyes' sight and blindness, ears' hearing and deafness (126a–b). The question is about the city-improving state the craft would procure, not just about the craft's title or the leader's prestige. Alcibiades proposes friendship among citizens together with the removal of hatred and faction. He identifies that friendship with concord.

The resulting problem belongs to good counsel itself. If concord means agreement grounded in shared expertise, different household specialists need not have it about each other's work. Yet Alcibiades also believes their doing their respective work is just and creates friendship. At 127d Socrates can identify neither what the required friendship or concord is nor in whom it occurs. He explicitly reconnects the impasse with being wise and of good counsel: those are the qualifications they wanted in order to become good men.

Thus εὐβουλία is a proposed name whose content remains under examination. It is not a settled definition of political knowledge supplied by Socrates. The subsequent turn to care and self-knowledge responds to this failure to identify the expertise Alcibiades needs. The dialogue does not return with a technical civic science called euboulia and a fully enumerated product. It does insist later that a ruler must first acquire virtue and be capable of sharing it with citizens (134b–c). That demand clarifies the educational burden that the appealing name “good counsel” had concealed.

The shift from public deliberation to shared inquiry also matters. Alcibiades asks to deliberate together at 119b; Socrates returns that invitation at 124b. Their actual good use of counsel begins in examining what they lack. The linguistic family therefore links the Assembly's decisions, the search for a ruler's competence, and the intimate conversation that unsettles a would-be ruler's certainty.

Places to read

1. 125d–126a2Alcibiades proposes good counsel as political knowledge; piloting proves that the name is not uniquely political
2. 126a–126c2The desired civic result is specified as friendship without hatred and faction
3. 126c–127d23Concord and differentiated expertise lead to aporia about the content of good counsel
4. 119bAlcibiades asks for joint deliberation
5. 124bSocrates repeats the invitation to deliberate together about becoming better

Translation in this edition

The edition keeps “good counsel” distinct from “wisdom,” “intelligence,” and ordinary “advice.” At 125e1 the printed τις is unaccented, while the translation reads an interrogative question about the knowledge of chorus-training; the question answered with Εὐβουλίαν follows at 125e4–6. Political good counsel should not be located in the earlier misaccented question.

ἀβουλία

Attested: ἀβουλία (aboulia; 125e). Lack of counsel or poor deliberation; piloting is not bad counsel simply because Alcibiades reserves good counsel as a name for civic knowledge. Lexical identification: lemma: ἀβουλία. See Good counsel.

εὐβουλία / εὔβουλος

Attested: Εὐβουλίαν (euboulian; 125e); εὐβούλους (euboulous; 127d). At 125e: Alcibiades’ proposed name for knowledge of ruling citizens. At 127d: Of good counsel, the qualification whose content remains uncertain at the friendship impasse. Lexical identification: family label: εὐβουλία / εὔβουλος. See Good counsel.

Use in the book

God is to be loved in His counsels as well as His works, because the intentions behind gifts reveal the giver. The story of Pyrrhus and Cineas supplies a human counterexample: wise advice exposes the needless circuit by which conquest seeks a peace already available, but the prince refuses it. IV.42 then speaks of a creature left in the hand of his own counsel, able to direct himself freely. Good counsel cannot substitute for the recipient's willing use of it. The term thus joins intention, judgment, and freedom: plans are valuable according to the ends they serve, and advice becomes fruitful only through response.

Places to read

1. I.20Love of God extends to His counsels and the works in which He appears.
2. I.22Cineas’s advice discloses the needless detour of Pyrrhus’s ambition.
3. IV.42A free agent is left in the hand of his own counsel for greater dignity.

In this edition

Distinguish “counsel,” advice or purpose, from “council,” an assembly. The presence of both vocabularies elsewhere should not lead to automatic normalization.