Searching for stability: Plato and Sartre on Human Nature and Becoming God

By David Hrushovski

‘We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.’[1] Sartre’s penchant for paradox is a characteristic difficulty of his philosophical writing, and there are few better examples of it than this claim. His rejection of the law of identity—according to which anything is identical to itself, is what it is—can read nonplussing to readers eager to reproach Sartre for his enigmatic style. But to the extent that readers are caught off guard by Sartre’s flagrant rejection of human self-identity in the citation above, these surely cannot be readers who know their Plato. For to such readers, the claim that something can both be and not be what it is should ring not odd, but familiar. Do we not read, in the Republic for instance, of things ‘so conditioned so as both to be and not to be’?[2] And is there not a sense of similarity between Sartre’s claim that human reality is what it is not and Socrates’ claim (to Zeno, in the Parmenides) that ‘you and I … become both like and unlike, [… and] partake of both opposites’;[3] between Sartre’s claim that man is not self-identical and Socrates’ claim (to Cebes, in the Phaedo) that ‘men … in direct opposition to the essences … [are] never the same’?[4] This paper will explore the similarity between the above claims, and argue that their resemblance goes deeper than the surface level. I will submit that, despite important differences, there is a significant point of confluence between Plato’s and Sartre’s theories: namely, that both converge in positing a contrast between unfixed, unstable human nature and a fixed, stable class of entities. This parallel, I will argue, allows us to bring closer two philosophical worlds which are traditionally thought to be antipodally opposed—and, though I believe that either philosopher’s writing can be illuminated in light of the other’s, this paper will offer foremostly a Sartrean reading of Plato. I will propose that key Sartrean tenets—man’s desire to become God, bad faith, and, perhaps most strikingly, existence preceding essence—are already at work in some form in Plato. This will occupy me in sections III and IV of this paper. Before I can get there, though, I will spend the first two sections developing and justifying my project of wedding together Sartrean with Platonic doctrine—for there are some thoroughgoing differences between our bride and groom, and I will have to do much pleading to obtain their marriage license.

I: Predication, Stable and Unstable

Let us begin by considering the citations from Plato and Sartre quoted above. I propose that we can find a common thread uniting these claims if we consider that there is a shared contrast at work in both: namely, the contrast between things which bear some predicate stably, and things which do not stably bear their predicates.[5] What exactly this means for each philosopher will be made clear below; importantly, we will see that for both Plato and Sartre, human beings belong to the unstable category.

Plato’s contrast between stable and unstable predication is a consequence of his famous distinction between forms and particulars: roughly that, for some property F, particular F things are F because they participate in the form of the F. Thus, we find many just acts, but only one form of justice in which all these acts partake; many beautiful things, but only one form of beauty; many good deeds, but only one form of the good. Following Aristotle (Metaphysics 1.990b), we can call this the ‘one over many’ principle: one form unites its many particular instantiations. In Socrates’s words,[6] this is the principle of ‘positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name.’[7] What is crucial for Plato is that, whereas any individual instance of F might also partake in the form of not-F, the form of F itself is F unqualifiedly, and can never partake in its own opposite. Thus, the act of returning to a friend what one has borrowed from her is normally just, but also unjust when what one has borrowed is a weapon and the friend is out of her mind (Republic 331c)—the same act partakes in the form of justice as well as its opposite, the form of injustice. Four is double compared to two, but half compared to eight (Republic 479b), therefore partaking in the form of the double as well as its opposite, the form of the half. As a general principle, no particular admits of some predicate F any more than it admits of its opposite; it ‘will always hold of, partake of, both.’[8] The forms, however, will never admit of their opposites; the form of the just is just tout court, and in no way unjust; the form of the double, presumably, is unqualifiedly double. The distinction between stable and unstable predication, then, is a corollary of the distinction between forms and particulars: forms like justice bear the predicate ‘just’ stably because they can never, in any way, bear the predicate ‘unjust’; particular just acts bear the predicate ‘just’ unstably because they can also bear the opposite predicate ‘unjust’.

In light of this, we can understand Plato’s claim, quoted above, that there are things ‘so conditioned so as both to be and not to be’. The claim comes in the context of Socrates’s argument concerning knowledge and opinion: knowledge is of ‘that which entirely is,’ whereas opinion is of those things ‘so conditioned so as both to be and not to be.’[9] We can only have opinions about the many particulars, which are and are not (some predicate F), whereas knowledge is of the forms which are (F) stably.[10] What is important for our purposes is that human beings, too, belong to this class of things ‘so conditioned so as both to be and not to be’; human beings partake in opposites, too. In the Hippias Major (289a ff.), for instance, Socrates shows that a maiden is both beautiful (compared to a pot) and ugly (compared to the gods)—the predicate ‘beautiful’ holds and does not hold of her; in the Phaedo (102b), Socrates argues that Simmias is both ‘small and great’[11]—great compared to Socrates, small compared to Phaedo; the Hippias Minor shows how the same man can be both true and false about the same matters (367c); and in the Parmenides (129c), it is shown that Socrates can be ‘both one and many’[12]—many because his body contains many parts, but one for the purposes of counting how many people are present. Human beings, then, are like the many Fs: predicates do not hold of us fixedly, but we can partake in one predicate as well as its opposite. This is what is meant in saying that we are the sort of thing for which predication holds unstably.

Sartre, like Plato, draws a contrast between things which bear their predicates stably and unstably, and he also places human beings in the latter category. For Sartre, though, this contrast is not between forms and particulars, but between conscious and non-conscious beings. Sartre’s term for a non-conscious thing is ‘being-in-itself’, whereas his term for a conscious human being is ‘being-for-itself’. For Sartre, a being-in-itself bears its predicate stably, since it ‘is what it is’[13] and, in its being of ‘full positivity,’ can ‘encompass no negation.’[14] What Sartre means is that, in the world of non-conscious objects and artefacts, things simply are, and are as they are: a table is a table, or a table is round, unequivocally and without qualification. It is through the consciousness of the the for-itself that ‘Nothingness arrives in the world,’[15] since, in contrast to the ‘full positivity’ of the in-itself, a conscious for-itself can also introduce negation into the world. If this all sounds cryptic, the claim is in fact rather benign. Sartre’s point is that it requires a conscious perspective to entertain the notion that the non-conscious things which are as they are might just as well not be—in other words, to introduce the possibility of negation and nothingness into the world of pure being-in-itself. Conscious humans, unlike unconscious tables, can pose questions about the world, admitting the ‘possibility of a negative reply’;[16] we can conceive of what is not there as well as of what is there, as when we enter a café and perceive not only the being-in-itself which is—‘[the café’s] tables, its booths, its mirrors, its light, its smoky atmosphere’[17]—but also positively sense our friend’s absence, his not being there, amidst the existents. Sensing absences is something which conscious humans can do, and tables, presumably, cannot. Our consciousness enables us to effect ‘a kind of nihilating withdrawal [from the] causal order of the world,’[18] in the sense that we can nihilate the things we question by considering that they might not be as they are; only through a conscious point of view can questioning introduce into the world ‘a certain negative element,’ namely ‘the possibility of non-being.’[19]

This difference between the in-itself and the for-itself (in ordinary language, between objects and people) brings us closer to seeing why, for Sartre, human beings bear predicates unstably. The same detachment from the causal order of being-in-itself by which the for-itself can negate the objects around it is also the source of its lack of self-identity—and thus, we shall see, of the instability of its predication. For Sartre, this withdrawal from the causal order manifests itself as a ‘diasporatic’ scattering between the for-itself’s past, present, and future.[20] As a human being, I am a combination of transcendence and facticity;[21] that is, I am constituted by the conditions in which I find myself as a matter of fact, but at the same time I am free, so that I can transcend the self of my past towards a self of the future. There is a sense in which I am my past, since my present being is formed in part from those unchangeable events of the past, which I am powerless to change; but we must immediately qualify this sense, since I am free to break away from my past which I inherit, by adopting future conduct which diverges from it or by reinterpreting its meaning. There is a sense, too, in which I am my future; I live for the sake of my future, understanding my present conduct in light of future ends, so that ‘I am indeed already there’;[22] but we must caveat this, too, since my future (by definition) always lies ahead of me, so that at any given moment, though I might conceive myself in terms of this future, I am never there yet. In Sartre’s lexicon, we express this by saying that I am my future, and I am my past, but in the mode of not being them: ‘consciousness confronts its past and its future as facing a self which it is in the mode of not-being.’[23] My past is who I am (since it comprises the entire history of my character, my actions, and so on), but I am not my past (being free to transcend it); therefore I am not what I am. My future is what I am not (yet), but my self-conception depends on how I relate my present projects to my future ends; so I am what I am not. The for-itself is ‘before itself, behind itself: never itself,’[24] since its identity is scattered ‘across the temporal flux.’[25] This is what motivates Sartre’s claim that the principle of self-identity holds for in-itself, but not the for-itself. A non-conscious table is round, or is brown; it bears those predicates stably. But we speak incorrectly if we claim that a human ‘is’ some predicate F in anything like the fixed and stable sense in which a table is what it is. We speak in bad faith if we say that a waiter is a waiter in the same sense in which ‘this inkwell is an inkwell,’[26] since we fail to appreciate that this waiter is both a transcendence and a facticity; we ignore that though he ‘factically’ is a waiter, nothing separates him from the possibility of not being one.[27] Whereas an inkwell’s essence precedes its existence (it is made to be an inkwell following a prior model which defines what inkwells are), a person’s existence precedes his essence, since no prior account constricts how he must live, but he is free to mould his own existence: ‘Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.’[28] It is this difference which accounts for the fact that, whereas the in-itself bears its predicates stably (not being free to be other than it is), man’s freedom means that he bears predicates unstably, since whatever predicate he bears now might just as well not hold of him later should he choose to live his life differently.[29]

We began this paper by noting a similarity between Sartre’s claim that man is what he is not and is not what he is, and Plato’s claim that there are things which are and are not. We are now in a better position to compare these claims. As for what unites them, both Plato and Sartre offer a sharp dichotomy between those things that bear their predicates stably and those that bear them unstably.[30] In both cases, this is the corollary of an ontological dichotomy—for Plato between forms and particulars, for Sartre between being-for-itself and being-in-itself, which form ‘two radically separated regions of being.’[31] In both cases, too, human beings are the sort of thing to belong to the unstable class. But though we find the same contrast being drawn in both cases, and the same verdict concerning unstable human predication, it should not escape our notice just how dramatically the theories diverge in other respects. For whereas Plato populates his stable class with forms, Sartre populates his with existent physical objects like tables and inkwells[32]—which for Plato constitute precisely the unstable sensible particulars. The very particulars which, for Plato, are always in flux, having ‘no fixedness whatsoever,’[33] are the ones which for Sartre get the designation of stable. This is a result of the different criteria for stability employed by both. For Plato, stability holds of those objects (the forms) which transcend the fluctuating, sensible world to attain the changelessness characteristic of mathematical truths. For Sartre, stability varies with consciousness—stability is understood not as a desirable feature of the changeless forms above, but as a marker of those physical objects which, not being conscious, cannot question and have no self-conception to interpret. Accompanying the inversion in ontology, then, comes also an inversion of value, at least from Plato’s perspective; for Sartre joins Plato in postulating a stable ontological class, but depopulates it of Plato’s ‘pure and unalloyed’ forms and substitutes for them those very earthly objects which Plato does not hesitate to castigate as ‘mortal trash.’[34] Plato’s denigration of the unstable is thus also a denigration of the human; Plato paints a picture of us as lowly creatures when compared to the forms, Socrates’s frequent appeals to which serve to humble his interlocutors’s illusions of grandeur by contrasting human finitude with the forms’s fixity. The forms, for Plato, put human projects into a grander perspective, serving as an ultimate authority which can delegitimate those projects if they and the forms clash—the question of which lives are worth pursuing is not up to the humans who live them, but is settled objectively as a function of their participation in the form of the good.[35] The picture could not be more different for Sartre. For him, there is no higher reality to which human beings are answerable save the reality we create for ourselves. Rather than the marker of our lowliness, our instability is our liberation, our very freedom—it is because we lack the stability of being-in-itself that we can transcend our facticity, that we can add to the world of ‘brute existents’[36] value, purpose, and meaning. Meaning is made by us, not found by contemplating the forms. It would be too quick to say that Plato laments human instability whereas Sartre celebrates it—for Sartre brings out copious examples of humans anguished before their freedom, fleeing the weight of the responsibility it carries. More accurate would be to say that Sartre differs from Plato in providing a framework where human instability at least can be celebrated, if it is properly lived up to and understood. In the remainder of this paper, I will address this theme. I propose we ask: how is it that, on systems which differ so radically otherwise, the same result about human instability follows? What does it say about us humans that such dramatically different views of the world nevertheless produce this same result about us? And, given that human beings are in this sense unstable, do we find any difference in Plato’s and Sartre’s accounts of what, if anything, we should do about it?

Before considering these questions, though, it is important to give a final clarification to my proposed marrying-together of the Platonic and the Sartrean. There might seem to be something slightly slippery about the dialectic of the last paragraph, in which I claimed that Plato and Sartre converge in positing human instability, only to list the different ways in which they understand this to mean starkly different things. It might seem that the only real convergence concerns unstable predication, but that the respective underlying accounts of human reality are otherwise irreconcilably opposed. My task in the next section will be to develop and then assuage such worries.

II: Objection: Predication and Non-contradiction

We might imagine the objection running something like this: whereas Sartre really claims that the law of self-identity fails to hold of human beings, we find no such illogicality in Plato. Plato is making nothing more than the innocent claim that properties which hold in some context, or at some time, or in relation to some one thing, might fail to hold in another context, at another time, or in relation to some other thing.[37] But he would not dare suggest that man is what he is not, as Sartre does[38]—if only because doing so would fly in the face of the principle of non-contradiction he himself defends in book IV of the Republic.

I base this objection on Vlastos (1965 [2021]), and it calls for an important clarification of my account. Indeed, in book IV of the Republic, Socrates advances the principle on which ‘the same thing will never do or suffer opposites in the same respect in relation to the same thing and at the same time.’[39] This is the principle which forbids us, upon finding ‘a man standing still but moving his hands and head,’ to proclaim that he is both at motion and at rest; we should rather say that ‘a part of him is at rest and a part in motion.’[40] In his paper, Vlastos considers passages like those we saw in Section I, where Plato writes that somebody is and is not some predicate F (Socrates is one and many, a maiden is and is not beautiful…). Where I have given these passages starring roles in my argument in my attempt to bring Plato closer to Sartre, Vlastos appears to argue in the opposite direction—according to him, when we read of a maiden who is beautiful compared to a pot but ugly compared to the gods, or of Simmias being greater than Socrates but smaller than Phaedo (to take two of the examples given above), we should not read Plato to be doing anything so Sartrean as to posit ‘logical monstrosities, systematically violating the principle of non-contradiction.’[41] Just as we should not claim that the above-mentioned man is both at motion and at rest, so we should not claim that the maiden is beautiful and ugly at once, or that Simmias is great and small at once; and, if this is right, we must conclude that Plato does not join Sartre in claiming that man literally is what he is not. Vlastos draws our attention to Phaedo 102b–c, where Socrates seems to say as much in clarifying that ‘Simmias is not greater than Socrates by reason of being Simmias, but by reason of the greatness he happens to have’ when compared to Socrates.[42] Plato does not join Sartre in claiming that Simmias is what he is not and is not what he is; he makes nothing more than the innocent claim that a relational property holds or does not hold of its subject depending on what this subject is considered in relation to. Perhaps our bride and groom do not have as much in common as we were inclined to think.

It is important to consider this objection, because I believe we can learn something important in overcoming it. Granted, Plato and Sartre take quite distinct routes to reach their final claims that predication of humans is unstable—we find no mention of transcending one’s facticity in Plato, and Sartre is silent about the relation between the many just acts and the one form of justice.[43] I have tried to focus not on these differences between the two philosophers, but on the instability of human predication common to both. But even this must now be qualified, since Vlastos’s objection forces us to confront the fact that in this convergence, too, Plato and Sartre do not mean the same thing. For there is a difference between Plato’s claim that

1. human beings are and are not (some predicate F), because both F and not-F can hold of them in different contexts, at different times, or with respect to different things, and that

2. Sartre’s, that human beings are what they are not and are not what they are, for I am my facticity, but, being able to transcend it, I am this facticity in the mode of not being it; and I am my transcendence, but, never being my future possibilities yet, I am this transcendence in the mode of not being it.

The way to maintain the similarity—to save the marriage, as it were—is to show that there is a shared underlying principle behind (1) and (2) alike. Vlastos himself hits on this principle in his analysis of the ‘Simmias is great and small’ example. He contrasts the claim ‘Simmias is greater than Socrates’ with another claim Socrates makes in the Phaedo, that ‘the number three … may always be called by its own name and also be called odd.’[44] The difference, in Vlastos's analysis, is that whereas nothing follows necessarily from the name Simmias, oddness does follow necessarily from the concept three. The latter claim ‘takes us out of the domain of contingent truth … [and] into that of logical necessity.’[45] This is the reason for which forms bear their predicates stably, and particulars unstably: whatever predicate a form bears, it bears necessarily, whereas a particular ‘does not admit of such necessary connection with its predicates.’[46] So, whereas there is a fixed nature of three eternally linked with oddness, there is no fixed nature of Simmias to which the same predicates will always stick—unlike the eternally unchanging forms, the qualities that hold of people (including their height) do change, and Simmias might be greater than Socrates at one time, but no longer greater at another. This is what Vlastos is getting at when he writes that ‘being Simmias … is not a character.’[47]

In this, of course, Plato is in perfect agreement with Sartre. For it is one and the same principle motivating (1) and (2): the principle that human beings do not have fixed natures. It is because we do not have fixed natures, because for Plato ‘men … in direct opposition to the essences, [are] constantly changing in themselves,’[48] that both F and not-F can be predicated to us at different times. Likewise, it is because we have no fixed nature that ‘in [the for-itself] existence precedes and conditions essence’;[49] his lack of a fixed nature (an essence) is how the café waiter differs from an inkwell, and what prevents the predicate ‘is a café waiter’ from being stably and unqualifiedly applicable to him. Human beings are not the kinds of things to have fixed natures, and therefore what we predicate of them need not be predicable of them necessarily (in the sense that ‘is odd’ need necessarily be predicable of the number three). Plato and Sartre converge in saying that human existence ‘is contingent in its very being’.[50]

III: Existence Precedes Essence

In seeking rapprochement between Plato’s picture of human flux and Sartre’s ‘existence precedes essence’ slogan, we must tread carefully to keep the parallel plausible. To clarify once more: by ‘existence precedes essence’, I refer to Sartre’s doctrine that, unlike inkwells, human beings are not modelled after anything (in which case our essence would precede our existence), and have no preordained nature to live up to; who we are is not decided in advance, but is up to us, and we are free to choose what kind of life to live. I claim that Plato shares this doctrine, but only in part. He can endorse the descriptive claim that humans are ever-changing subjects, free to choose the course of their lives,[51] but must reject the normative thesis that there is no essence in us to which we must live up. For Plato, there is in some sense such an essence inside us all—the rational part of our souls—and, though most do not live up to this essence, those who live best do. This will be treated in much more detail in Section IV. The present section will focus instead on the part of Sartre’s dictum to which Plato can assent—that a human being, taken not in one of her soul’s aspects but as a living whole, is ever-changing and has no fixed essence.

It should first be noted just how striking this human essencelessness is in Plato’s philosophy. For Plato, after all, is the philosopher of essences par excellence; Socrates is obsessive about them, and his recurrent move in the dialogues is to catch off-guard those who phrase their accounts of some quality in terms of concrete existents rather than that quality’s essence, in ignorance of the forms. Socrates in Plato’s dialogues makes it his very mission to oppose accounts on which existence precedes essence; he will not accept Theaetetus’ definition of knowledge in terms of the many knowable things, nor Hippias’s definition of beauty in terms of the many beautiful things, nor Euthyphro’s definition of piety in terms of the many pious things,[52] demanding these be phrased instead in terms of the forms, or ‘absolute essences’.[53] But just as any account of knowledge, beauty, or piety will be inadequate (will not amount to knowledge) unless it goes through the forms, so too will any claim to know the nature of a person fall flat against a being of whom such qualities are predicable only unstably. If knowledge is of forms, and if human beings in their changeability stand in contrast to the forms, it seems that we cannot know ourselves.

As well as this epistemic question of what of ourselves we can know, the discovery that we lack fixed natures also raises an ethical question about how we should live. Of course, in saying that humans have no fixed essence, we do not mean that there are no features which all humans share—presumably all humans are instances of the form of the human, just as all bees are instances of the form of the bee, or beds instances of the form of the bed.[54] Still, within the basic set of human features which all humans share, there is an immense gamut of possibilities for how to live one’s life. One can live as a philosopher or a sophist; as a statesman or an artisan; as a doctor or a captain; and the list goes on and on.[55] Of course, it might be objected that one is not free to choose any of these options, neither in Plato’s Athens nor in our world today. Our freedom to shape our lives is heavily constricted by the circumstances we inherit at birth, and this plausibly does preordain our nature to a considerable extent; an Athenian slave could hardly become a leading statesman. This, of course, is entirely consistent with Sartre’s claim that our existence precedes our essence. For although we always find ourselves within a certain environment (thrown into a certain factical situation, as Sartre would put it[56]), we are free to interpret our situation and to shape our lives within it: though ‘the for-itself appears in a condition which it has not chosen,’[57] ‘this inapprehensible fact of my condition … is what causes the for-itself, while choosing the meaning of its situation and while constituting itself as the foundation of itself in situation, not to choose its position.’[58] As for Sartre, so for Plato: our lot is out of our control, but what we do with it is a matter of our own choosing. Again, when we say that Plato does not recognise a fixed human nature, we should not confuse a descriptive claim with a normative one. Plato allows that there are innumerable ways to live one’s life, but it does not follow from this that he is neutral about which we should pick. Far from it; Socrates describes the question to Thrasymachus as ‘no ordinary matter that we are discussing, but the right conduct of life’;[59] to Callicles he remarks that ‘our debate is upon a question which has the highest conceivable claims to the serious interest even of a person who has but little intelligence—namely, what course of life is best.’[60] What is Plato’s answer to this question? I will propose that Plato answers these two questions, the epistemic and the ethical, together—his answer to which is the correct choice of life is also the only choice which leaves us able to know ourselves.

IV: Becoming God

Plato’s answer is striking and unequivocal. Since ‘it is impossible that evils should be done away with’ on this earth, ‘we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible; and to become like God is to become righteous and holy and wise.’[61] What does it mean for a human being to ‘become like God, so far as this is possible’? For Plato, the way to become God is to emphasise as far as we can that within us which is already akin to the divine, and he leaves us in no doubt as to what this could mean. The soul is explicitly characterised as ‘divine’ (theîos) at Phaedo 80a, as opposed to the mortal body; and, if this was not indication enough, Plato hammers home the point a few lines down: ‘The soul is most like the divine and immortal and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and ever unchanging, and the body, on the contrary, most like the human and mortal and multiform and unintellectual and dissoluble and ever changing.’[62] Being ‘akin to [the forms],’ the soul ‘dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered’ by the body.[63] Its true nature, when it is not ‘marred by communion with the body,’ is ‘akin to the divine and the immortal and to eternal being.’[64] Since the soul is that within us which is divine, we must let it ‘rule’ the body and ‘be master’[65]—it is in this sense that we get as close as we can to being God ourselves. What does this self-deification look like in practice? Socrates gives the example of Thales, who was so busy ‘studying the stars and looking upwards [that he] fell into a pit.’ ‘The same jest,’ he continues, ‘applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy.’[66] By studying the forms, we also approximate them; for, since the soul is akin to the forms, it is the only part of us which is like those objects of which predicates hold stably. In this way, Plato simultaneously answers both our ethical and our epistemic question from before. The philosophical life which he specifies as best is also the only life in which we can hope to attain self-knowledge, for in assimilating ourselves to the soul and not the body, we get closer to that which, like the forms, has a knowable fixed nature. This is how we take ourselves from the object of flux towards the object of stable predication. For Plato, self-knowledge and self-deification are twin ideals which we approach as one. [67]

Once again, one of the most striking aspects of this account is how much it resembles Sartre’s. Sartre, too, has a story to tell about man’s drive to become God, and for him this also manifests as the desire for stable predication. Since the for-itself, as we have seen, is what it is not and is not what it is, it lacks the stable foundation of being-in-itself. Sartre agrees with Plato’s claim, in the Symposium, that ‘as a necessity … the desiring subject must have desire for something it lacks,’[68] and Sartre’s account of human desire is, like Plato’s, a desire for a fixed nature which we lack: ‘What the for-itself lacks is a self—or itself as in-itself,’[69] and thus ‘human reality is the desire [for] being-in-itself.’[70] Notice that this is exactly the logic we find in Plato: that of which predication is unstable (the embodied soul/man as for-itself) seeks that of which stable predication holds (the immortal, form-like soul/being-in-itself). Sartre also joins Plato in calling this project the desire to become God: ‘the best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God,’[71] that being which is at once free and conscious like the for-itself, and at the same time as fixed and stably-predicable as being-in-itself.

Sartre’s and Plato’s descriptions are in these ways parallel, but they differ importantly. Whereas, for Plato, becoming God represents the soul’s departure from the body, Sartre conceives of this desire as the desire for unification; we desire to unify in-itself and for-itself and become ‘the in-itself-for-itself … the Man-God.’[72] For Sartre, this means that the project of becoming God is in bad faith. To see what this means, recall that for Sartre, human reality consists in both facticity and transcendence: in facticity, since we always find ourselves with an unchangeable past and other ‘factical’ conditions of our situation, over which we have no control; and in transcendence, since through our freedom, we can reinterpret this facticity, and constantly transcend it into our future possibilities. Though the facticity and the transcendence of human reality ‘ought to be capable of a valid coordination,’ bad faith ‘seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences’;[73] to conceive of ourselves as simultaneously stably predicable (like being-in-itself), and possessing the kind of freedom (characteristic of the for-itself) which negates this stability. But such ‘contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both an idea and the negation of that idea’[74] are in their nature self-deceptive. The attempt to become ‘the Man-God’ is thus the attempt to reconcile the impossible tension of combining freedom with the possibility of objective predication which freedom nihilates. In trying to become God, we try to reconcile our freedom and consciousness with the very fixed nature that these two exclude. So, while Plato and Sartre offer similar analyses of the desire to become God as the desire to become stably predicable, they offer sharply opposed evaluations of this desire. What Plato endorses, Sartre castigates. Have we found an irreconcilable difference—an impassable conjugal disharmony?

I propose that it is in fact just the opposite: that Sartre’s condemnation of the bad-faith desire to become God finds a ready parallel in Plato’s philosophy. Recall that for Plato, becoming God is akin to becoming immortal—or, at least, assimilating ourselves as far as is possible to that part of ourselves which is immortal, namely the rational part of our soul. But we should not forget that this is just one of two senses of immortality which Plato writes about. In the Symposium, shortly after arguing that we desire what we lack, Socrates (quoting Diotima) claims that ‘the mortal nature ever seeks, as best it can, to be immortal,’[75] and distinguishes two species of this desire for immortality. The truest kind of immortality, of course, is the one which we explored above: it is the philosopher’s pursuit of the forms which makes him ‘destined to win the friendship of Heaven’ and explains why ‘he, above all men, is immortal.’[76] But though this kind of immortality is Plato’s desired one, Socrates notes that there is another: our leaving something of ourselves behind after our death, either by being survived by our offspring, or by living on in our society’s collective memory. I propose we focus on this second subtype of the non-philosophical immortality which Socrates introduces. It is, in his citation of Diotima’s words, ‘the love of winning a name, “and laying up fame immortal for all time to come”.’[77] I submit that this can be understood as Plato’s analogue to Sartre’s desire to become God in bad faith.

Those who seek to be remembered through worldly fame try to fix themselves an essence, just as philosophers do. But there is an important difference between these two quests for immortality. The philosopher’s project to become God is entirely a personal and private one; its demands on the subject are purely internal, since they concern attuning one’s own soul to elevate the rational part within it. Indeed, not only is this project private, but it often goes against the grain of public opinion; when Thales, caught in philosophical reverie, fell into the pit, his stumble was accompanied by the mocking jeers of a ‘witty Thracian servant girl.’[78] Contrastingly, seeking memory through fame is by its nature interpersonal and public; the immortality of reputation is guaranteed only in a social world, since it is constituted by being thought-of and talked-about by the next generations. Therefore, while philosophical immortality often transgresses public opinion, reputation-based immortality depends on it; becoming a true philosopher in the Platonic sense might (and, in Plato’s time, did) diverge from the accepted social code, but it is near-impossible to be positively remembered by posterity without according to it.[79] The memory of history’s great figures, continues Socrates in the Symposium, is one which ‘now we keep’[80]—it lives on only insofar as later generations continue to talk about these figures. In Sartre’s terminology, this amounts to the desire to fix a nature by being made into an in-itself in the other’s look; the for-itself tries to cease to be an unstable subject and attain stable predication by being objectified before a subject other than itself. Thus, I need ‘the Other as the subject through whom my being gets its object-state.’[81] Plato can readily embrace this analysis. Those who try to conceive of themselves in terms of how others perceive them, or in terms of how they will be remembered by others, attempt to give themselves a fixed nature all while still being alive and changing. He who tries to fix his self-conception in terms of those properties which others predicate of him fails to grasp, as we have seen above, that such properties are predicable only inessentially, and that he might as well partake in their opposites (in another context, at another time, according to revised ethical standards…). Just as, for Sartre, I am in bad faith if I say that I am a waiter in the sense that an inkwell is an inkwell (ignoring that I am free not to be a waiter), so for Plato I am in bad faith when I pretend to have any fixed and stable self-conception in terms of changeable predicates which hold of me inessentially.[82]

The self-deceptive nature of this kind of bad faith—of trying to fix ourselves an essence first, and understand ourselves in terms of it second—is illustrated elegantly in a discussion of given names in Plato’s Cratylus. Rejecting the thesis that one’s name is appropriately reflective of one’s character, Socrates considers such names as ‘Eutychides [fortunate], Sosias [saviour], [and] Theophilus [beloved of God]’,[83] remarking that in some cases ‘they are quite inappropriate’;[84] there is no prior guarantee that a Eutychides will indeed live so as to be fortunate, or a Theophilus so as to be loved by the gods. Instead, Socrates argues, we must reverse the above process, enquiring into ourselves first and deriving conclusions about our character from what we find: ‘realities … are to be learned and sought for, not from names but much better through themselves.’[85] In other words, our existence precedes our essence—our character does not follow from any preordained fixed nature which is prior to our actions, but from how as a matter of fact we choose to live. Indeed—and as is by now quite familiar—such fixed natures occur only in ‘the eternal and absolute’, and only in such things can we ‘find the correct names.’[86] Another way of putting this is that the predicates with which we name such eternal and absolute things (which are later specified to be ‘the gods’, 397c) hold of these things stably, whereas the predicates with which we name humans hold of humans unstably. The unstable ‘[cannot] be known by anyone, [for] at the moment when he who seeks to know it approaches, it becomes something else and different, so that its nature and state can no longer be known; and surely there is no knowledge which knows that which is in no state.’[87] Plato has here argued that the existence of human beings precedes our essence, that this makes predication of us unstable, and that therefore no knowledge can be had of human beings so long as they remain unstable and do not approach the eternal essences. Just as, for Sartre, ‘bad faith is a lie to oneself’[88] which pretends that one has a fixed nature, so it is for Plato when we pretend that names or predicates hold of us essentially. ‘For the worst of all deceptions,’ Socrates declares in perfect harmony with Sartre, ‘is self-deception.’[89]

On my account, Plato’s distinction between two kinds of immortality allows us to find a home in his philosophy for Sartre’s claim that the desire to become God is a desire in bad faith: Plato agrees, so long as we restrict this to the fame-based kind of immortality. Both the lovers of fame and the true philosophers try to approach that godlike fixity which is the only guarantor of stable predication; both try to attain that ‘absolute and perpetual immutability [which] is a property of only the most divine things of all’, namely the gods and forms.[90] The difference in the projects of self-deification can, then, be understood as a difference in which forms one tries to approximate; whereas philosophers approach the forms which are ‘righteous and holy and wise,’[91] the reputation-seekers would likely opt to fix their reputation in terms of those predicates which find favour in society’s eyes (perhaps strength, honour, wealth, and other markers of social status). The realm of the forms is not limited to the good forms; by the same one-over-many argument from which we derive the forms of justice and goodness, we can derive those of injustice and evil, too. Therefore the claim that Plato urges us to become like the gods, of whom stable predication holds, says too little. What he urges is not that we become like any old god in the ancient Greek pantheon (some of which were said to have done some quite wicked acts!), but to become like the gods in a stronger sense. In Plato’s sense of the gods, the true gods cannot be such that wicked predicates hold of them[92]—and it is to such true gods that the philosopher must strive to become akin. What emerges from this is that, rather than simply advocating that we become God as opposed to not, we would better conceive of Plato as making suggestions as to which god to become.[93] In the Phaedrus, Socrates describes how different lovers can model their actions after the characters of different gods: followers of Zeus ‘when seized by love can bear a heavier burden of the winged god,’ whereas the ‘servants of Ares … become murderous’ when they think they have been wronged by their beloved.[94] We can adapt this picture to describe Plato’s ethical ideal: becoming God is only worthwhile if done so as to become a true, good god, of which qualities like righteousness and wisdom hold essentially. If, like the lovers of fame, one tries to fix oneself as a god in any way which diverges from the elevation of the immortal soul, one does not become the correct god, and the project is worthless.

I hope that this has been sufficient to show that we can find in Plato an analogue to Sartre’s description of our quest to become God in bad faith. For Plato, we self-deify in bad faith when we claim that our reputation is true of us in the way that the descriptors of the gods are true of them; this cannot be, for whereas gods have fixed natures, we do not. Another way of putting this is that bad faith, for Plato, is the delusion of pretending that any predicate can hold of us stably (as predicates hold of the forms), except inasmuch as this predicate says something about the immortal and form-like soul to which we have assimilated ourselves. If this is right, then our wedding of Sartrean and Platonic doctrines has been fruitful; it has helped us to clarify exactly in what sense Plato approves of the project to become like God, and in what sense he sharply condemns it. But showing that Plato has a concept of bad faith is not the same as showing that Sartre’s concept of bad faith does not apply to him, and it remains to be asked what Sartre would make of Plato’s project of becoming God in the approved, philosophical way. Would Sartre condemn this project, too, as just another effort to impossibly reconcile transcendence and facticity? It’s tempting to think that he would not by appealing to Sartre’s claim that, opposed to bad faith, there is also available to us the project of good faith, which allows us to ‘radically escape bad faith’ through ‘a self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted.’[95] It seems that we can map this neatly onto Plato’s conviction that we can attain self-knowledge through the recovery of our soul, which was corrupted by its ‘imprisonment’ in a body.[96] If we follow this line, we will be able to draw two neat parallels between, on the one hand, Sartre’s good faith and Plato’s description of philosophical immortality, and on the other, Sartre’s bad faith and Plato’s description of the attempt to attain immortality through fame. But this conclusion is more tempting than it is accurate; for one, Sartre simply does not say enough about good faith in Being and Nothingness for us to be able to tell whether Plato’s quest for philosophical godlikeness would qualify as an instance of it, and it is likely that Plato’s uncompromising valorisation of the soul and denigration of the body would appear to Sartre as the desire, in bad faith, to ignore the sense in which ‘I am my body.’[97]

V: Conclusion

Plato and Sartre are often thought to stand at two antipodes of the Western philosophical tradition. Where Plato looks for essences, Sartre disregards them; where Sartre emphasises our freedom to shape our lives, Plato stresses the forms which dictate which life is best. I have tried to show that this chasm is perhaps not as wide as it might seem; that Plato approaches Sartre in allowing that existence precedes essence in the localised case of human beings, and in sharing a notion of becoming God in bad faith. I did this by proposing that the two converge in declaring that predicates hold unstably of human beings, a point of confluence all the more remarkable because of how few other such points we find between the philosophical thought of the two. Despite the different routes by which they arrive at their shared conclusion, both philosophers leave us with a similar picture of human beings as creatures who strive for a stability they do not have, who deceive themselves by pretending they are not constantly changing, and who comfort themselves with fixed-nature stories which are false no sooner than they are uttered. Sartre’s famous waiter who, in bad faith, tells himself that he is a waiter as fixedly as an inkwell is an inkwell finds his parallel in Socrates’s overconfident interlocutors: in Cephalus, whose self-conception as a just person crumbles once he sees that this predicate might as well not apply to him;[98] in Charmides, repeatedly assured by those around him that he is the most temperate, but found to be confused about this very predicate, confounding any stable self-conception.[99] Though our lack of stability might appear distressing at first, there is also a sense of comfort present in both philosophers which comes through being honest with ourselves about what we are and grasping our limitations. Appreciating the instability with which our predicates apply to us serves to put human self-importance into perspective; by facing up to our instability, by admitting that the stories we tell about ourselves might turn out false, men might ‘repudiate the spirit of seriousness’ and stop ‘fight[ing] one another for shadows’[100].

Bibliography

Annas, Julia. “Self-knowledge in early Plato” in Dominic J. O'Meara (ed.), Platonic Investigations. Catholic University of Amer Press. pp. 111-138 (1985).

— Platonic Ethics, Old and New. 1st ed. Ithaca ; Cornell University Press, 1999.

Fine, Gail. “Knowledge and Belief in Republic V.”, in Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie 60, no. 2 (1978): 121.

Plato, trans. Fowler, Harold North, Lamb, W. R. M., Bury, Robert Gregg, Shorey, Paul. Plato, in twelve volumes. Cambridge, Mass. : London: Harvard University Press ; W. Heinemann, 1967.

Plotinus, Ennead. Volume V, trans. A. H. Armstrong. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Rist, John M. “Forms of Individuals in Plotinus.” Classical Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1963): 223–31.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes. London; Routledge, 2003.

Gregory Vlastos, “Degrees of Reality in Plato”, in Platonic Studies, p. 58, Princeton University Press, 1965 [2021].

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In text citations

[1] Sartre op. cit. p. 81.

[2] 477a, Shorey. All citations to Plato will be taken from the Loeb Classical Library editions, op. cit., citing the Stephanus number followed by the name of the translator. The relevant dialogue will be specified, unless it is already evident from the text.

[3] Plato op. cit. 129a, Fowler.

[4] Plato op. cit. 78e, Fowler.

[5] I intend all talk of ‘bearing predicates’ in what I hope is the following, uncontroversial sense: if John is happy, John bears the predicate ‘happy’ (or ‘happy’ is predicated of John); if the table is round, the table bears the predicate ‘round’ (of ‘round’ is predicated of the table), and so on. Much more analysis of predication can be given for other philosophical purposes, but it is not needed for the purposes of this paper.

[6] I take Socrates’s words to reflect Plato’s doctrines, using ‘Socrates’ as shorthand for ‘Plato, through the character of Socrates’. (Perhaps it should also be clarified that ‘Sartre’ will refer to the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, setting his later development firmly to one side.)

[7] Plato op. cit., Republic 596a, Shorey.

[8] Plato op. cit., Republic 479b, Shorey. This can, of course, be questioned: will a round table really admit of ‘non-round’ just as much as ‘round’? (Cf. Aristotle, Categories 11a5). But in this section I am exposing Plato’s doctrine, not evaluating it.

[9] Plato op. cit., Republic 477a, Shorey.

[10] The gloss I have given of this argument enjoyed broad acceptance until Gail Fine published her 1978, op. cit. She offers an interpretation on which, rather than restricting knowledge to forms and opinion to particulars, Plato restricts knowledge to true propositions and allows opinion of true as well as false ones. Which of these (if any) Plato meant is an interesting interpretative question, but it is orthogonal to my purposes here; all I am claiming is that, when Plato speaks of things ‘so conditioned so as both to be and not to be’ at Republic 477a, he means (at least inter alia) things which do and do not bear some predicate—and there is no question from Fine that, in this quotation, Plato means ‘is’ in this predicative sense (see Fine, p. 132–3).

[11] I.e., in height or size (trans. Fowler).

[12] Trans. Fowler.

[13] Sartre op. cit. p. 21.

[14] Ibid, p. 22.

[15] Ibid, p. 47.

[16] Ibid, p. 29.

[17] Ibid, p. 33.

[18] Ibid, p. 47.

[19] Ibid. Note already the twinkle of an affinity with Plato, for whom we also discover that an object can partake in ‘its contrary’ when the thinking soul is ‘impelled to question’ about it (Republic 523c–d, trans. Shorey).

[20] Ibid, p. 159.

[21] Ibid, p. 79.

[22] Ibid, p. 55. It is in this sense that man is a being-for-itself for Sartre. Human beings relate their present to their future projects, and perceive their current engagements as being for something yet to come. Apples, tables, and other non-conscious beings presumably do not conceive of themselves as being for anything; this is why they are simply beings-in-themselves.

[23] Ibid, p. 58.

[24] Ibid, p. 164.

[25] Ibid, p. 57.

[26] Ibid, p. 83.

[27] The idea is not so much that the waiter can quit his job as that, even whilst working at it, he need not in his self-conception ‘limit himself to his [social] function’ as a waiter (ibid, p. 82).

[28] Ibid p. 588.

[29] Though this should not be misinterpreted to suggest that Sartre claims the for-itself only potentially lacks self-identity because of the possibility that it will change in the future. Sartre claims that the for-itself lacks self-identity actually and in the present; I am my past (which I am not) and am not my future (which I am). Though I have summarised Sartre’s claim with focus on the for-itself’s temporal scattering, this is but one route from which Sartre reaches this conclusion. Another route he takes is the argument, developed in the introduction to Being and Nothingness, that all consciousness is self-consciousness which, coupled with the claim that the being of consciousness is consciousness of being, allows Sartre to assert an impassable rupture at the heart of the for-itself’s being which occludes self-identity. No two-paragraph summary of Being and Nothingness could hope to be complete, and and the brief sketch I gave was meant to give the general thrust behind Sartre’s claim that the for-itself is what it is not and is not what it is, especially as it is developed in the chapter on bad faith, for the purposes of comparison with Plato. As for Sartre’s other avenues of argument, we shall content ourselves to set them aside for now, much as Glaucon was content to set aside Socrates’s ‘longer and harder way’ and stay on ‘the level of previous statements and inquiries’ (Plato, Republic, op. cit., 435d, Shorey).

[30] I opt for ‘stable/unstable’ over ‘necessary/contingent’ predication because the latter terminology is stronger, and would raise questions which we don’t need to answer to appreciate the similarities I want to bring out.

[31] Sartre op. cit. p. 23.

[32] See, e.g., Sartre op. cit. p. 90.

[33] Plato op. cit., Philebus 59b, Fowler.

[34] Plato op. cit., Symposium 211e, Fowler.

[35] That the later Sartre expressed tolerance of totalitarian political regimes which repressed this very ability for individuals to choose how to live their life is perhaps a further affinity with Plato—though we should not let Sartre’s later engagements cloud our current treatment of his earlier writing. In any case, I hope to show in this paper that there are happier philosophical convergences between Plato and Sartre than this.

[36] See, e.g., op. cit. p. 504 ff., where it is argued that objects gain value in light of their fittingness to our ends.

[37] See Vlastos op. cit. p. 66–67 for these criteria. The presently considered objection is adapted from Vlastos’s paper.

[38] And Sartre is quite explicit in this; see op. cit., p. 21: ‘the principle of identity … is also a regional synthetical principle of being’, or pp. 81–2, where he argues that the ideal of self-identity through sincerity shows that ‘the principle of identity, far from being a universal axiom universally applied, is only a synthetic principle enjoying a merely regional universality’.

[39] Plato op. cit. 436b, Shorey.

[40] Ibid, 436c–d.

[41] Vlastos op. cit. p. 72.

[42] Trans. Fowler, emphasis mine.

[43] Though there is a certain similarity between Plato’s concept of a form unifying its numerous instantiations and Sartre’s Husserlian analysis, in section I of his Introduction, of a phenomenon as the synthetic unity of the infinite series of its appearances. The difference is that Sartre discusses the relation between our conscious grasp of an object and the infinite ways in which it can appear to us, not that between many objects of some kind and the abstract quality which they all share.

[44] Plato op. cit. 104a, Fowler.

[45] Vlastos op. cit. p. 68

[46] Ibid., p. 69–70.

[47] Ibid., p. 70.

[48] Plato op. cit., Phaedo 78e, Fowler.

[49] Sartre op. cit. p. 461.

[50] Ibid., p. 106.

[51] Most vividly in Republic II, where Socrates’s task is to convince his audience to choose the life of justice over that of injustice; presumably this question comes up because it is taken for granted that we are free to choose how to live.

[52] Theaetetus 146c–d; Hippias Major 287e; Euthyphro 6d.

[53] Plato op. cit., Parmenides 133c, Fowler.

[54] In the Parmenides, Socrates confesses his uncertainty about there being ‘an abstract idea of man’. Parmenides suggests that, once philosophy ‘takes hold’ of Socrates, he will be less reluctant to accept this consequence of his theory. (Plato op. cit., Parmenides 130c, Fowler.) For the forms of the bee and the bed, see Meno 72b and Republic 597b, respectively.

[55] Plotinus was sufficiently impressed by this fact to posit a form of each individual person as well as the form of man; for surely, he thought, ‘one man will not serve as a model for several men differing from each other not only by reason of their matter but with a vast number of special differences of form.’ See Plotinus op. cit., Ennead V.7.1, p. 225. Plotinus was far from consistent on the subject, though, wavering from this thesis at V.7.1 and apparently suggesting its opposite at V.9.12. For discussion of Plotinus’s views on the matter, see Rist 1964, op. cit. In any case, the suggestion of a form of each individual (beyond the form of the human in general) is a Plotinian innovation which is absent in Plato. Cf. Symposium 207d, trans. Fowler: ‘yet though [man] is called the same he does not at any time possess the same properties’.

[56] See Sartre op. cit. p. 103.

[57] Sartre op. cit. p. 103.

[58] Ibid p. 107, Sartre’s italics. Interestingly, Sartre goes on (a few lines down) to contrast this with the closing myth of Plato’s Republic, in which departed souls pick their next incarnation from a selection of available lives. Just what we should make of this myth, and the extent to which we should take it as compatible with the Republic’s main argument, is a longstanding question too large to address in this paper. In any case, nothing prevents Plato from concurring that, once one is born, they are born into some factical situation over which they have no control (for, even if we take the myth literally, a person has no memory of the choice their soul made). For Plato’s Sartrean insistence that we can choose our lives from within an unchosen facticity, see fn. 50.

[59] Plato op. cit., Republic 352d, Shorey.

[60] Plato op. cit., Gorgias 500c, Lamb.

[61] Plato op. cit., Theaetetus 176a–b, Fowler.

[62] Plato op. cit., Phaedo 80b, Fowler.

[63] Ibid, 78e, Fowler.

[64] Plato op. cit., Republic X 611b–e, Shorey.

[65] Ibid 80a, Fowler.

[66] Plato op. cit., Theaetetus 174a, Fowler.

[67] This is argued most explicitly in the Alcibiades I, where Socrates tells Alcibiades that, as the inscription at Delphi tells us, we must know ourselves, and ‘if the soul too … is to know herself, she must surely look at a soul, and especially at that region of it in which occurs the virtue of a soul—wisdom. … [This] part of her resembles God, and whoever looks at this, and comes to know all that is divine, will gain thereby the best knowledge of himself.’ (133b–133c). I exclude this dialogue from my main argument because, ever since an 1809 challenge by Schleiermacher, there have been doubts over its authenticity; though I think there is little question that Plato would have endorsed the quoted part. For an argument that the dialogue is authentically Plato’s, see Annas 1985, op. cit.

[68] Plato op. cit., Symposium 200a–b, Fowler.

[69] Sartre op. cit. p. 113.

[70] Ibid, p. 586.

[71] Ibid, p. 587. The fundamental project, for Sartre, is a person’s underlying project of how to be, of which she is not explicitly conscious but towards which all her other projects and desires can be revealed to ultimately aim.

[72] Sartre op. cit. p. 596.

[73] Sartre op. cit. p. 79.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Plato op. cit. 207d, Fowler.

[76] Ibid, 212a.

[77] Ibid, 208c.

[78] Plato op. cit., Theaetetus 174a, Fowler.

[79] Of course, in some cases transgression against the social code rather than conformity to it is what guarantees that one will be kept alive in the collective memory; either because one is remembered as a villain, or because social mores change and one’s reputation is reevaluated (as indeed happened in the case of Socrates). What matters for my purposes is that this kind of non-philosophical immortality is socially contingent and depends on being spoken of and remembered. Plato focuses on those who seek to be remembered well (as heroes), but perhaps it’s more accurate to say that to be remembered by society one needs not be good so much as interesting.

[80] Plato op. cit., Symposium 208d, Fowler.

[81] Sartre op. cit., p. 314.

[82] Even once we die and our life becomes a matter of history, these predicates will hold unstably. I might be remembered as brave in relation to one thing but cowardly in relation to another; though my biography is fixed, its interpretation will fluctuate.

[83] Plato op. cit., 397b, Fowler.

[84] Ibid.

[85] Ibid, 439b.

[86] Ibid, 397b.

[87] Ibid, 439e–440a.

[88] Sartre op. cit. p. 71.

[89] Ibid, 428d.

[90] As the Stranger from Elea tells the Younger Socrates in Plato op. cit., Statesman 269d, Fowler. Emphasis mine.

[91] As we saw in the citation from the Theaetetus (176a–b, Fowler) with which we began this section.

[92] See Republic II 383a ff. and book III, where Plato bans poetry of the gods which ascribes to them imperfect acts.

[93] Here I diverge from Annas 1999, who argues that Plato’s notion of becoming God is ‘a conception better suited to monotheism than to polytheist religion’. Op. cit. p. 64.

[94] Plato op. cit. 252c, Fowler.

[95] Sartre op. cit. p. 94.

[96] See Phaedo 81e.

[97] Sartre op. cit. p. 350.

[98] Plato op. cit., Republic 331c ff.. Cephalus describes his life of apparent ‘justice and piety’, in which he was honest and repaid his debts. Socrates points out that ‘these very actions [may] sometimes be just and sometimes unjust’ , whereupon Cephalus conveniently withdraws to ‘attend the sacrifices’ (trans. Shorey).

[99] See Charmides 158d and passim.

[100] Sartre, op. cit., p. 646; Plato, op. cit., Republic VII, 520c–d.