Doing one's own business

Use in the book

Charmides offers the formula as something he has heard, rather than his next inward discovery (161b). Socrates suspects Critias is its author but agrees that the truth of the statement, not its source, is what must be tested (161c). The origin nevertheless matters dramatically: Charmides eventually prods the older man into defending his own words.

Socrates first interprets the formula through ordinary making and performing. Schoolboys write friends' and enemies' names without becoming meddlesome; a teacher does not write only his own name. Nor would a city be well managed if everyone were required to weave and wash his own cloak, cobble his own shoes and manufacture his own exercise equipment (161d–162a). The result expressly concerns doing one's own things “of this kind and in this way” (162a), a qualification often lost in accounts that say the phrase itself is simply disproved. Socrates concludes that it must be a riddle requiring interpretation.

Critias provides one by separating making from doing and by treating only good and beneficial things as genuinely one's own (163a–d2). The own/other distinction is no longer primarily about whose name is written or who owns a shoe. Good production counts as appropriate activity, while harmful production counts as alien. Socrates accepts a clear stipulation of vocabulary for purposes of discussion and reformulates the answer as doing good things (163e). The next objection concerns the agent's knowledge of that goodness, not whether all cooperative work is meddling.

The theme returns without the exact slogan in the imagined knowledgeable city (171d–172a): each person does what he understands and entrusts other matters to competent people. This resembles a division of tasks rather than isolated self-sufficiency. It too must meet the final question of whether technically correct activity ensures benefit and happiness. The dialogue therefore both rejects a crude proprietary reading and tests a more promising account of proper action; it does not hand the reader an uncomplicated political rule.

The same formula is central to justice in Republic IV. That parallel is illuminating precisely because the Charmides has not identified it with justice here, nor supplied the Republic's account of different functions within city and soul. Importing that later context would answer a question this dialogue deliberately leaves open.

Places to read

1. 161b–cCharmides offers the borrowed formula and its truth is distinguished from its authorship
2. 161d–162aSchooling and manufacture expose the inadequacy of a literal self-sufficiency reading
3. 162a–e2The formula becomes a riddle and Critias assumes its defence
4. 163a–e2Critias redefines doing and one’s own in terms of good production
5. 171d–172d2The ideal of assigning tasks by knowledge is itself subjected to the benefit test

Translation in this edition

“Doing one's own business” gives the phrase its ordinary idiomatic force. The edition then preserves “do” where Socrates broadens the verb's application, and “working and doing his own” at 162a for ἐργάζεσθαί τε καὶ πράττειν. Readers should not silently replace that second pair with “making and doing,” since Critias' subsequent distinction depends on which verbs have been introduced.

τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν

Attested: τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν (ta hautou prattein). Do one’s own things or business; the contracted reflexive wording of the third proposed definition. References: 162a. Lexical identification: expression / normalized lookup: τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν. The contracted reflexive αὑτοῦ and the full reflexive ἑαυτοῦ give two attested wordings of the same expression. See Doing one's own business.

τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν

Attested: τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν (ta heautou prattein). Do one’s own things or business; the uncontracted reflexive wording of the same proposed definition. References: 161b. Lexical identification: expression / normalized lookup: τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν. See Doing one's own business.

ὑφαίνω

Attested: ὑφαίνειν (hyphainein). To weave; the city's absurd rule would require each person to weave his own cloak. References: 161e. Lexical identification: lemma: ὑφαίνω. See Doing one's own business.

λήκυθον (lēkython)

An oil flask; one of the everyday objects that the absurd self-production rule would require each citizen to make. References: 161e. Lemma: λήκυθος. See Doing one's own business.

πλύνειν (plynein)

Wash; alongside weaving one’s own cloak, illustrates the burdens of doing every task oneself. References: 161e. Lemma: πλύνω. See Doing one's own business.

στλεγγίδα (stlengida)

A strigil, the scraper used after exercise; paired with the oil flask in the self-production counterexample. References: 161e. Lemma: στλεγγίς. See Doing one's own business.

Use in the book

The phrase first enters the political inquiry at 127a, in Socrates' analysis of household expertise. A husband and wife need not share knowledge of wool-working or hoplite fighting. If concord requires shared knowledge and friendship is concord, they lack friendship in the very respects in which each performs the work assigned to him or her. Socrates describes that performance as doing their own business. The phrase therefore initially labels a specialization whose consequences create trouble for Alcibiades' definition of friendship.

At 127b Alcibiades makes a positive claim in precisely the same vocabulary: cities are well ordered and friendship comes to be because each does his or her own business. At 127c he agrees that these actions are just, and that citizens acting justly must become friends. These propositions conflict with his prior identification of friendship with expert concord. Socrates does not pronounce that specialization is unjust. He asks what friendship could be if Alcibiades' account makes it both present and absent among the same people.

The source's note appropriately compares the formula's appearance in Charmides and Republic, but the local argumentative status must govern interpretation. Here no successful definition of temperance or justice is established through it. Alcibiades defends its civic value while unable to reconcile that value with his other answers. Reading “doing one's own business” as the Republic's completed account of justice would conceal the actual aporia. Conversely, treating this passage as a simple rejection of every division of labor would go beyond the premises tested.

At 131c Socrates makes a different use of the expression. The preceding inquiry has distinguished the person, the person's body, and the body's possessions or provisions. Whoever tends money tends something still further removed from himself than his body. The money-maker, Socrates concludes, is no longer doing his own business. Ordinary usage would regard attending to one's property as an especially clear case of minding one's business; the revised account of what the person is makes that usage questionable.

The point is not that earning money is somebody else's assigned occupation or that money never belongs legally to its owner. It is that exclusive care for possessions fails to reach the person whose good is supposed to justify the activity. The phrase moves from the allocation of functions within a household or city to the identification of the proper object of personal care. Those are different arguments, linked by the ambiguity of “own.”

The later correction at 133d–e further cautions against a rigid division of knowledges. The speakers reconsider their earlier concession that someone can know the body's affairs without knowing himself: discerning oneself, one's own, and what belongs to one's own now appears to belong to one person and one craft. This revisits the cognitive relation between the levels without cancelling the difference between tending shoes and tending a foot. Properly doing one's own business cannot be settled by pointing to an object under one's control; it requires an account of the agent and of the relation between the activity and that agent's good.

Places to read

1. 127a–127d2Separate household tasks are called one’s own business; Alcibiades claims such conduct is just and friendship-producing, leaving a contradiction with his definition of concord
2. 131b–131c2The money-maker is said not to be doing his own business because money lies beyond the immediate care of the self
3. 133d–133eThe prior separation of what people can know at the different levels is explicitly reconsidered

Translation in this edition

The edition keeps “what is one’s own” stable so that the practical phrase’s connection with the later self/own distinction remains visible. The money-maker at 131c is described in terms of tending money; the text does not there say that he knows the distant objects he tends.

τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν

Attested: τὰ αὑτῶν πράττουσιν (ta hautōn prattousin; 127a); τὰ αὑτοῦ (ta hautou; 131c). At 127a: Doing assigned household work, which separates spouses’ expertise. At 131c: One’s own business, provocatively denied of the money-maker whose care concerns possessions. Lexical identification: phrase label: τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν. See Doing one’s own business.