Reckless Speech: On Plato’s Theory of Lies in the Hippias Minor

We ourselves do not conduct our discussion more geometrico. Instead, we move within the live play of risking assertions, of taking back what we have said, of assuming and rejecting, all the while proceeding on our way to reaching an understanding.

Gadamer 1980.5

Plato’s Hippias Minor stages a competition between two Homeric heroes: Achilles and Odysseus. Who, Plato asks, is the morally superior liar? His concern is not whether these heroes lie or not. He expects—and an entire literary tradition supports him in this—that a hero, like poets and Muses, would lie. Plato’s interest, rather, is to understand the psychological and epistemological conditions necessary for telling a virtuous lie. He states the criteria quite clearly in the Hippias Minor, despite the philosophical quandaries, inconsistencies, and paradoxes they provoke. A certain state of mind is required: one must lie voluntarily. To know that one utters a false-hood is to understand simultaneously that there exists a truth and that one willfully denies it. Plato’s liar, in other words, is a highly self-conscious being who avoids the pitfalls of self-deception. He knows that he knows that he is telling an untruth. The voluntary liar chooses deliberately to satisfy his own desires and aspirations, whether they are in his own self-interest or for the sake of the community’s welfare. Plato recognizes the Iliad’s Odysseus as just such a liar. In contrast to the involuntary liar that is Achilles in the Hippias Minor, Odysseus wins the contest: he can lie virtuously. However, he also embodies in his very speech and person a disturbing paradox that undermines the Socratic commitment to the inextricable link between moral knowledge and moral character: in committing an injustice, Odysseus does no harm either to himself or to others. Achilles’ involuntary lies, we learn in the course of the dialogue, do harm. Achilles neither knows that he does not know nor does he desire to know—especially when the stakes of his decisions and indecisions are high. He seems to prefer, or so Plato leads us to believe, to remain ignorant. This is not a blissful or healthy ignorance: it destroys self-integrity, compromises heroic and military valor, and sacrifices political concern for friends.

Plato’s reading of Homer is not wholly the product of an overly active philosophical imagination. Although Plato seems to engage in a culturally validated form of literary criticism that ignores context and selectively analyzes only citations supporting his own thesis, he provides a convincing and coherent reading of one of the most difficult books of the Iliad, Book 9, while at the same time developing his own ethical code. In Book 9’s Embassy Scene, Achilles appears as a morally dubious character whose ambivalence about participating in the war nearly results in disastrous consequences for the rest of the army. Using Achilles’ own explication of his ethics of lying to condemn him, Plato’s Socrates (hereafter Socrates) needs only to demonstrate how ambivalence, self-contradiction, and psychological conflict are themselves forms of lying—and of involuntary lying in particular. It is these very characteristics of “involuntary lying,” as I will argue, that are anathemas. A good deal of the dialogue is spent in deciphering those behaviors and affects of Achilles—and his outrageousness is certainly not self-evident.

The actions and reactions of the strategically persuasive and manipulative Odysseus of the Hippias Minor are far less problematic, as is his heroic status. In other words, to justify the Homeric epitaph of Odysseus as polytropic is far less controversial than reclaiming that of Achilles as aristos, “the noblest” (364c). It is only when Plato reveals the provocative paradox associated with Odysseus’s form of lying that he becomes a more complicated and unsettling character in philosophical terms: how can Odysseus, the voluntary liar, be the wrongdoer, but also the good man (if, as Socrates qualifies, “such a man exists,” 376b)?¹ How can Odysseus, the voluntary liar and wrongdoer, be the good and better Homeric hero?

Is such a reading of Achilles’ and Odysseus’s...