Reading Plato's Euthyphro: What a Failed Definition Teaches

The Euthyphro takes perhaps twenty minutes to read and concludes with a man making his excuses. "Another time, Socrates; for I am in a hurry, and must go now," says Euthyphro, and Socrates calls after him: "Alas! my companion, and will you leave me in despair?"¹ The question they had been pursuing, what piety is, has not been answered. Several attempted answers have been knocked down, and the last one has circled back to an earlier one already rejected.

A reader is entitled to ask what the point was. Plato wrote a number of dialogues that end this way, in what scholars call aporia, a Greek word meaning an impasse or lack of passage. The difficulty worth holding on to while reading this one is: how does a conversation that reaches no conclusion manage to teach anything? The Euthyphro is a good place to work that out, because it is short, the stakes are vivid, and its central argument has been debated ever since.

Two Men Outside a Courthouse

The setting matters more than it first appears. The two meet at the Porch of the King Archon, the Athenian magistrate responsible for religious cases, in the weeks before Socrates' trial in 399 BC.² Socrates is there because a young man named Meletus has indicted him. In Socrates' own summary of the charge: "He says that I am a poet or maker of gods, and that I invent new gods and deny the existence of old ones."¹ He is, in other words, about to be tried for impiety, and will be executed for it.

Euthyphro is there as a prosecutor, and the defendant is his own father. The facts, as he tells them, are murky. A field labourer on the family's farm on Naxos, "in a fit of drunken passion," quarrelled with one of the household servants and killed him. Euthyphro's father tied the man up and, in Euthyphro's words, "bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, and then sent to Athens to ask of a diviner what he should do with him." Before the answer came back, "such was the effect of cold and hunger and chains upon him" that the man was dead.¹

Euthyphro's relatives are appalled at the prosecution. They say, he reports, "that a son is impious who prosecutes a father." His reply is magnificent in its confidence: "Which shows, Socrates, how little they know what the gods think about piety and impiety."¹

So Plato has arranged a meeting between a man accused of impiety and a man so sure what piety is that he will take his father to court over it. Socrates' request follows naturally, and with some irony: if Euthyphro really possesses this knowledge, he should share it, since Socrates could use it in his defence. Notice that the case itself is never simple. A reader can feel that the dead labourer deserved justice and also that there is something disturbing in Euthyphro's certainty. Plato does not tell us which to feel.

What Counts as An Answer

A word on terms. The Greek adjective under discussion is hosion, which Benjamin Jowett, whose Victorian translation is quoted here, renders sometimes as "pious" and sometimes as "holy." It covers right conduct in relation to the gods: what religious duty requires.

Euthyphro's first attempt is this: "Piety is doing as I am doing; that is to say, prosecuting any one who is guilty of murder, sacrilege, or of any similar crime."¹ Socrates' objection sets the rule for the rest of the conversation: "I did not ask you to give me two or three examples of piety, but to explain the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious."¹

This is the first lesson of the dialogue, and it is about method. An example is not a definition. Socrates wants the feature that all pious acts share and that makes them pious, so that it can be used as a standard for judging hard cases such as, precisely, Euthyphro's lawsuit.

The second attempt has the right form: "Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them."¹ But Euthyphro believes the traditional stories in which the gods quarrel, so Socrates points out that on this account "the same things are hated by the gods and loved by the gods, and are both hateful and dear to them."¹ The definition is patched: "what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious."¹

The Question at the Centre

Now comes the passage for which the dialogue is famous (Stephanus page 10a, in the standard reference system for Plato). Socrates asks "whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods."¹

The argument that follows is compressed, and Euthyphro himself says he cannot follow it at first, so it is worth slowing down. Socrates begins with ordinary cases: "a thing is not seen because it is visible, but conversely, visible because it is seen; nor is a thing led because it is in the state of being led, or carried because it is in the state of being carried, but the converse of this."¹ Put plainly, something is "a carried thing" because someone is carrying it. The activity explains the state, never the reverse.

Apply this to the gods. A thing is "god-beloved" because the gods love it; their loving explains its being in that state. But why do they love it? Euthyphro agrees that they love the holy because it is holy. It would be strange, on his view, to say that the gods love things for no reason.

Once he grants that, the definition collapses. Being holy is the reason for the gods' love. Being god-beloved is the result of it. One thing cannot be both the cause of the loving and the product of the loving, so "holy" and "loved by all the gods" cannot mean the same. Socrates states the conclusion: "The holy has been acknowledge by us to be loved of God because it is holy, not to be holy because it is loved."¹ And he names the error: "when I ask you what is the essence of holiness, to offer an attribute only, and not the essence."¹ That all the gods love it may be true of the holy. It does not tell us what the holy is.

A tempting oversimplification is to say that Socrates here proves morality to be independent of religion. The text does not go that far. The argument depends on a premise Euthyphro accepts, that the gods love the holy because it is holy, and someone could refuse that premise and say that the gods' love is what makes things holy. Later thinkers took up exactly this possibility; the problem was revived by philosophers such as Ralph Cudworth and Samuel Clarke in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and under the name "the Euthyphro dilemma" it remains a standard topic in discussions of whether right and wrong depend on divine command.² What the dialogue itself shows is narrower and still considerable: that Euthyphro, the self-declared expert, has never asked the question.

How the Conversation Is Written

Pay attention to form as well as argument. After the central refutation Euthyphro complains that "somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us." Socrates answers with a joke about his own legendary ancestor, the craftsman whose statues were said to move: "Your words, Euthyphro, are like the handiwork of my ancestor Daedalus."¹ The arguments run off because they were never fastened down by understanding.

Two further attempts follow. Piety is "that part of justice which attends to the gods"; pressed on what such attention accomplishes, since gods presumably need nothing, Euthyphro falls back on sacrifice and prayer, giving and asking. Socrates' summary is deflating: "Then piety, Euthyphro, is an art which gods and men have of doing business with one another?"¹ And what do the gods get from the trade? What pleases them. At which point Socrates observes that they have been here before: "Were we not saying that the holy or pious was not the same with that which is loved of the gods?"¹ The dialogue has gone in a circle, and Euthyphro remembers an appointment.

It would be a mistake to assume that Socrates simply speaks for Plato, or that the character's professions of ignorance are either wholly sincere or wholly a pose. Plato wrote both parts. He chose to show a confident man and a questioning one, and to end with the confident one leaving and the questioner asking to continue.

What to Take From a Failure

Return to the opening difficulty. The Euthyphro does not tell us what piety is. It does establish several things along the way: that examples are not definitions; that a feature which always accompanies something may still not be what it is; that a claim about what the gods love presupposes some view about why they love it. And it shows, without saying so, the distance between being certain and knowing. Euthyphro is prosecuting his father on the strength of a concept he cannot explain. Socrates is about to be condemned by a city equally sure of itself. Whether Plato intends that parallel as a reproach to Athens is an interpretation, though not a strained one.

For further reading, the natural next step is the Apology, Plato's version of Socrates' defence speech at the trial for which he is waiting here. Read the Euthyphro first, and read pages 9e to 11b twice. When you reach the end, it is worth asking not only what piety is, but which of the five answers came closest, and why Socrates, late in the conversation, complains that Euthyphro turned aside just when they had reached the point: "Had you only answered me I should have truly learned of you by this time the nature of piety."¹