Health and illness

Use in the book

The initial treatment promises that the remedy, with its charm, will make the patient healthy. The Thracian teaching explains why many diseases escape Greek doctors: they fail to attend adequately to the whole. Temperance generated in souls is then said to make the provision of health to head and body easier. This is a reported order of therapeutic dependence, not an identification of physical health with virtue.

The ensuing argument progressively separates health from other claims. At 164a–c2 making someone healthy is the physician's paradigmatic action, but the agent's knowledge that he has acted beneficially is not simply guaranteed. At 165c–d medicine knows the healthy and makes health. At 170e–171b2 healthy and diseased things define the material on which medical words and actions are tested. The object is thus broad enough to include recognizing disease, not merely praising the result of successful treatment.

In the dream of complete expertise, people become healthier in body. Critias at 174b grants that knowing the healthy contributes more to happiness than knowing calculation, but names knowledge of good and bad as decisive. The removal test then preserves medicine's capacity to make us healthy while removing the beneficialness of the result. The dialogue thereby resists an automatic inference from health to happiness, without asserting that health is itself an evil or that medicine has ceased to function.

That distinction reaches the final refutation. Temperance, defined as knowledge of knowledge, is not the producer of health, since that task belongs to another art. The question is whether it can nevertheless claim a distinct benefit, especially through supervision. Its failure within the argument does not rescind the ordinary difference between being ill, being treated competently, and being well.

Places to read

1. 155e–157b23Health is the treatment’s promised result and diseases occasion the whole-person critique
2. 164a–c2Making healthy and knowingly benefiting are tested for equivalence
3. 165c–dHealth as product is distinguished from the healthy as object
4. 170a–171b23Healthy and diseased things delimit medical expertise
5. 173b–174d23Improved health is granted without granting happiness from expertise alone
6. 174e–175aHealth is assigned to medicine rather than to knowledge of knowledge

Translation in this edition

The edition makes an important terminological choice by keeping “health” and “the healthy” distinct. The Greek alternates spellings ὑγίεια and related genitive forms as printed; they belong to one lexical family, not different technical conditions.

ἀσθένεια

Attested: ἀσθενείας / ἀσθένεια (astheneias / astheneia). Weakness or ailment; the bodily complaint that provides the pretext for Socrates’ medical conversation. References: 155b, 157c. Lexical identification: lemma: ἀσθένεια. See Health and disease.

νόσημα

Attested: νοσήματα (nosēmata). Diseases; the conditions said to elude Greek doctors because they fail to attend adequately to the whole person. References: 156e. Lexical identification: lemma: νόσημα. See Health and disease.

νοσώδης

Attested: νοσῶδες / νοσώδους / νοσώδεσιν (nosōdes / nosōdous / nosōdesin). Diseased or disease-related; together with the healthy, this specifies medicine’s subject matter and the field in which a doctor must be examined. References: 170e, 171a, 171b. Lexical identification: lemma: νοσώδης. See Health and disease.

ὑγιαίνω

Attested: ὑγιαίνειν (hygiainein). Be healthy; medicine retains this result in the subtraction test, although Socrates says its occurring well and beneficially would be lost without knowledge of good and bad (174c–d). References: 174c, 174e. Lexical identification: lemma: ὑγιαίνω. See Health and disease.

ὑγίεια

Attested: ὑγίειαν / ὑγιείας / ὑγίεια (hygieian / hygieias / hygieia). Health; the condition produced by medicine, distinct from the healthy as medicine’s object. References: 157a, 165d, 157b, 175a. Lexical identification: lemma: ὑγίεια. See Health and disease.

ὑγιεινός

Attested: ὑγιεινοῦ / ὑγιεινὸν / ὑγιεινόν (hygieinou / hygieinon / hygieinon). The healthy or health-related; the domain that medical knowledge recognizes, contrasted with what is diseased. References: 165c, 170a, 171a, 170b, 170c, 170e, 174b. Lexical identification: lemma: ὑγιεινός. See Health and disease.

ὑγιής

Attested: ὑγιᾶ / ὑγιέσιν (hygia / hygiesin). Healthy or sound; describes the person or body rather than medical expertise itself. References: 155e, 164a, 173b. Lexical identification: lemma: ὑγιής. See Health and disease.

ἀσθενοῖ (asthenoi)

Be unwell; Critias reports Charmides’ recent complaint as the pretext for a medical introduction. References: 155b. Lemma: ἀσθενέω. See Health and disease.

πορίζειν (porizein)

To provide or procure; health is made available after temperance has arisen in the soul. References: 157b. Lemma: πορίζω. See Health and disease.

Use in the book

The analogy begins in Alcibiades’ word “healthy” at 138c. Socrates takes it up through healthy and sick people, and then states the exhaustive alternative of being ill or not ill. This helps establish the proposed lack of an intermediate state between intelligence and unintelligence. It does not by itself prove that “not ill” and “healthy” have precisely the same content, or that every apparent opposition elsewhere must have the same logical form.

After the equation of madness with unintelligence becomes untenable, disease provides a different lesson. All ophthalmia is disease, but not all disease is ophthalmia. Fever and gout enlarge the examples; further illnesses are expressly allowed. At 140b the doctors are invoked for differences in what diseases bring about, how they act and their respective powers. The point is inclusion without identity, supported by differentiated effects rather than by a catalogue claimed to be complete.

At 146e medicine returns in another role: city and soul must hold fast to the knowledge of the best as an ill person holds fast to a doctor. The earlier patient supplied an example for classification; this patient supplies an example of dependence on guidance. Nothing in that comparison establishes that any actual doctor already possesses the comprehensive knowledge of the beneficial that the city and soul require.

Places to read

1. 138c–139a2“Healthy” moves from soundness of mind into the bodily contrast used in the first argument.
2. 139e–140aOphthalmia illustrates a one-way inclusion within disease.
3. 140bDifferent diseases have different effects and powers, according to doctors.
4. 146eThe sick person’s dependence on a doctor becomes an analogy for city and soul.

Translation in this edition

The note at 138c explicitly preserves the double sense of hygiainōn. The English distinguishes “sick”, “ill” and “disease”, while consistently calling the particular eye disease “ophthalmia”. It is the diseases, not the doctors, that differ in their operation at 140b.

Use in the book

At 231a gain is provisionally described as every possession obtained with no expenditure or with a smaller outlay than receipt. The first condition permits the disease example: a guest is entertained at a feast, spends nothing, and acquires illness. The companion refuses the label gain. Socrates then changes the outcome to health and receives the opposite verdict. The paired test shows that lack of expenditure is compatible with either an advantageous or a disadvantageous acquisition.

Socrates moves from these examples to a more general conditional: if the acquisition is good, it appears to be gain; if bad, loss (231b–c). The result returns to the earlier opposition between good gain and bad loss. The companion is brought back to the claim he had asked to retract. The bodily pair therefore performs decisive argumentative work rather than merely illustrating an already settled distinction.

The scope of that work must be kept proportionate. The case shows that some acquisitions are not gains because they are bad. It does not yet prove that every ordinary use of “gain” excludes harm in any respect. A financial gain can be accompanied by illness, shame or another cost. Socrates’ formulation encourages assessment of the acquired condition itself; the earlier complaint about gain-loving concerned character and conduct. Those perspectives need not coincide without further argument.

Nor does the passage give medical advice. It does not specify what food causes illness or what feast produces health. Its premise is an intelligible possibility, sufficient for testing the proposed definition. Treating the hypothetical health gain as a recommendation to feast, or the disease as evidence of a general condemnation of rich dining, would add content the text does not supply.

Health and disease thus anchor the distinction between having more and being better off. Their clarity makes the definition’s failure easy to see, while the move from a clear bodily case to a universal ethical conclusion remains open to scrutiny.

Places to read

1. 231bνόσον κτήσηται — Disease is acquired despite the absence of expenditure.
2. 231bὙγίειαν δὲ κτησάμενος — Health is substituted as the contrasting outcome.
3. 231bἐάν γε ἀγαθόν — The companion’s qualification makes goodness decisive.
4. 231cἡ δὲ ζημία κακόν — The bodily example returns the discussion to loss as bad.

Translation in this edition

The edition translates νόσος “disease” and ὑγίεια “health.” At 231b it gives “It appears he will, if it is good, at least,” preventing an English reader from taking the assent as a denial that acquiring a good thing is gain. The question’s negative structure makes that clarification important.

Use in the book

Illness makes the usefulness question personal. Socrates does not ask which person gives the most impressive account of medicine before an indifferent audience. He asks what the lover would do if he himself, or a friend about whom he cares greatly, fell sick. The purpose is health. The choice is between bringing in the runner-up and obtaining the doctor.

The lover first answers that he would bring both. This preserves a possibility of consultation or complementary assistance. Socrates presses him to identify whom he prefers and summons first, and the doctor wins. The case supports medical priority, but alone it does not show that the other person would contribute nothing. The distinction matters because the subsequent conclusion is absolute uselessness whenever an expert exists.

Medicine has already provided a standard for judging the proper measure of exercise and food at 134e. Its return shows that expert knowledge is useful because it is directed toward an appropriate result and can judge what serves that result. By contrast, the lover’s initial selection of studies by reputation supplies no comparable outcome.

At 138d the doctor’s speech about the sick reappears. The point is now that the philosopher should be able to follow and contribute to technical discussion, and should be no less capable when justice and rule are at issue. The dialogue neither turns the philosopher into the treating physician nor retracts the need for the medical specialist.

Places to read

1. 136cὑγείαν βουλόμενος κτήσασθαι — The desired result makes the competence relevant.
2. 136cἢ αὐτὸς ἀσθενήσας ἢ τῶν φίλων τις τῶν σῶν — The stakes include oneself or a cared-for friend.
3. 138dἰατρὸς περὶ τῶν καμνόντων τι λέγῃ — The late argument returns to understanding medical speech.

Translation in this edition

The translation’s “health” is deliberately concrete. This is an analogy for the authority and use of knowledge, not medical advice or a diagnosis. Burnet’s bracketed “the philosopher” after “that runner-up” at 136c is omitted in the English, as edition note 20 explains.

Use in the book

The early physiological report relates health to a balance of dry, moist, cold, and hot. Its historical account remains a claim in the notebook, not medical advice. A practical reflection says that changing time and health change our tasks and obligations. The entry calling an illness “great and good” records a personal evaluation with dates and an unexplained abbreviation; it does not by itself show why the illness was good. The chronically ailing are elsewhere said to preserve a sound mind despite a sick body, a generalized reflection rather than a verified clinical observation.

Places to read

1. I, p. 35–36, entry 1, ¶10Health depends upon balanced qualities in a historical physiological report.
2. I, p. 459, entry 2, ¶2Changes of health alter duties and tasks.
3. II, p. 692, entry 8, ¶1A dated illness receives the paradoxical description great and good.
4. I, p. 463, entry 3, ¶1Chronic illness is contrasted with sudden decline in old age.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains D. G. without expansion and the damaged ending after maladie. Valétudinaires is rendered “the chronically ailing,” making a useful subsidiary term without adding a specific condition.

Chronic ill health

French: valétudinaire.

The plural valétudinaires names people habitually in poor health in I.463, rather than a particular disease.

Places to read: I, p. 463, entry 3, ¶1.