Hipparchus (On the Love of Gain)

Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Nicholas D. Smith, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

A short eristic dialogue, marked † (disputed authorship): D. S. Hutchinson's editor's note judges it "probably the work of the same author" as the Minos, "writing soon after the middle of the fourth century B.C." In it Socrates and an unnamed friend ask "what is greed (to philokerdes, the love of gain)?" and are driven, step by step, to the paradox that there are no greedy people at all (226d), then that everyone is greedy (227c), and finally that to reproach anyone as greedy is to convict oneself (232c). The engine is a purely relational definition: profit (kerdos) is simply the opposite of loss; loss is bad; so profit is good; and since "everyone loves the good," everyone loves profit. The whole chain turns on an unexamined "good" — the wiki has no dedicated good page, and the move belongs to socratic-intellectualism — substituting "the good" for the determinate object the friend meant: shameless monetary gain. Read one way, this is the Socratic-intellectualist axiom all desire the good pushed to near-parody / reductio; read another, it is a staged specimen of eristic — the contentious dialectic Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations anatomises. At the moment the friend charges deception, the dialectic breaks into a literary-historical excursus on Hipparchus son of Peisistratus. Hutchinson leaves the deciding question open: the friend ends unpersuaded, "just as many modern readers of Socratic dialogues feel that the wool has somehow been pulled over their eyes. But has it?"

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: There are no greedy people. Because: the friend defines the greedy as those who knowingly profit from worthless things (225a); but no farmer plants crops he knows are worthless, and no horseman, ship's captain, general, flute- or lyre-player, archer, "or any other craftsman" expects to profit from worthless tools (225c–226d) — so no one knowingly seeks gain from the valueless, and the greedy man vanishes. Against: the craft-analogy imports the expert's knowledge; the money-grubber does not know-and-still-pursue the worthless, he overvalues it. The friend's ordinary intuition (money-grubbers manifestly exist) is run over rather than answered. Location: 225a–226d.

  2. Claim: So-called greedy people are simply ignorant of value — they think worthless things very valuable. Because: it has just been "proved" impossible to pursue the knowingly-worthless, so the fault must be cognitive, not moral (226e). Against: this dissolves a moral category (blameworthy avarice) into mere error — the friend wanted vice, not a mistake; a near-parody of "no one errs willingly." Location: 226d–227a.

  3. Claim: Everyone is greedy. Because: profit is the opposite of loss; loss is bad (it harms); so profit is good; and everyone loves the good and hates the bad — "you and me" and "all other people" alike (227b–c); therefore everyone loves profit, i.e. is greedy. Against: the step equivocates between kerdos as a determinate kind (shameless monetary gain) and kerdos as benefit-in-general; the friend keeps trying to restrict the term to "good profit," and is overruled. Location: 226e–227c.

  4. Claim: The escape "good people want only good profit, not harmful profit" collapses. Because: "harm" is "loss," and profit was defined as the opposite of loss; so "harmful profit" is a contradiction in terms, and profit qua profit is good (227c–228a). Against: definitional fiat — the friend protests that one suffers loss "from wicked profit" (227e), and Socrates simply rules the phrase out of bounds instead of answering it. Location: 227c–228a.

  5. Claim: I could not be deceiving you, because deceiving a friend is forbidden — by Hipparchus. Because: the cultivated tyrant Hipparchus inscribed "do not deceive a friend" on a roadside herm (229b); the form of the argument shifts — from dialectic to literary-historical excursus — at precisely the moment the friend accuses Socrates of trickery. Against: the protest is rhetorical deflection, not refutation; the implausibly revisionist history (Hipparchus as wise educator, his killers mere jealous lovers) substitutes an appeal to authority for argumentative fair play. Location: 228a–229d.

  6. Claim: Good and bad profit are equally profit, so the good/bad qualifier cannot rescue the friend. Because: as good and bad food are equally food, and virtuous and wicked people equally people, "neither 'more' nor 'less' is added" (230b); tracing what makes both "profit" (acquiring more than one spends → acquiring something good → valuable → beneficial → good), profit is shown good "for the third or fourth time" (232a) — "Value, then, is what brings profit" (231e). Against: the gold/silver case (231d) — "double" is not "more valuable" — forces value in, exposing that "profit-as-net-acquisition" and "profit-as-benefit" were never the same thing; the conclusion rides the slide between them. Location: 229e–232a.

  7. Claim: Reproaching anyone as greedy is self-incriminating. Because: all profits are good; all virtuous people want all good things; the wicked also love profit; so virtuous and wicked alike are greedy — "he who makes this reproach is greedy himself" (232c). Against: the friend's closing concession is explicit non-conviction — "It forces me, Socrates, rather than persuades me" (232b) — which the dialogue leaves standing. Location: 232a–c.

Argumentative Movement

The text is hybrid: dry definitional dialectic spliced with a literary-historical excursus, a combination Hutchinson identifies as a recognised Academic genre (the Timaeus–Critias Atlantis story being its classic case). The dialectic runs by a tightening series of admissions until profit is mechanically equated with the good; the friend, unable to locate the fallacy, repeatedly cries deception. At that charge (228a) the genre switches: Socrates answers not with argument but with the Hipparchus story (228b–229d), whose maxims — set up to outdo the Delphic "Know Thyself" and "Nothing in Excess" (the mean) — include the convenient "do not deceive a friend." The dialectic then resumes (229e) and grinds the same conclusion out a third and fourth time. The form enacts its own theme: an argument that "forces rather than persuades," with a digression standing in for the fair play it cannot supply.

Key Findings

  • The paradox is engineered by a relational definition. Defining profit (kerdos) purely as the opposite (enantion) of loss, with loss = bad, makes "profit is good" follow with no further premise — and "everyone loves the good" then makes everyone greedy (227b–c). Remove the relational definition and the engine stalls.
  • A moral category is dissolved into a cognitive one. "Greed" is first emptied (no one knowingly pursues the worthless), then re-described as ignorance of value (226e) — vice becomes mere error, the intellectualist signature pushed to absurdity.
  • The decisive equivocation is on "the good." The argument never examines agathon; it silently swaps "the good in general" for the friend's intended object, shameless gain. The wiki has no good page, so the move is filed under socratic-intellectualism — but it is exactly the unexamined good that makes the conclusion both valid-looking and unwelcome.
  • The editor leaves the eristic-or-sound verdict open. Hutchinson ties the dialectic to Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations yet declines to say whether the wool has been pulled over the reader's eyes — making the dialogue a test case for whether an Academic text can stage fallacy for diagnosis rather than commit it.
  • Excursus + popular-value scepticism ground the attribution. The dialectic-plus-digression form and the deflation of the tyrannicides Harmodius & Aristogiton (recast as jealous lovers, 229c–d) are what Hutchinson reads as the hand of the author of the Minos. (The editor also glosses the greedy man against Theophrastus, Characters §30, and the Republic's "money-loving" soul-part, 581a/586d — framing references, not text.)

Concepts Developed

The dialogue is primary on a small apparatus for which the wiki has no dedicated concept pages yet (flagged as a gap, like the missing good page):

  • Love of gain / to philokerdes ("greed") — the definiendum, treated as a univocal love whose object (profit) can be shown universally good, thereby dissolving the ordinary blame-laden sense.
  • Profit / kerdos — defined purely relationally as the opposite (enantion) of loss (zēmia); this opposition-definition is the engine of the whole paradox.
  • Value / axia ("valuable to possess," "beneficial") — introduced late (231d–e) as the differentia the bare "more/less" cannot supply ("Value, then, is what brings profit," 231e), then collapsed immediately into "beneficial," hence "good."

Concepts Referenced

  • socratic-intellectualism — the load-bearing axiom (all love the good; none the bad, 227b–c) is borrowed from the genuine deployments and run to reductio; also the routing-home for the unexamined "good."
  • eristic — the dialogue's texture: definitional fiat, equivocation on kerdos, and serial deception-charges; the editor ties it to the contentious dialectic of Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations.
  • socratic-definition — the inquiry is framed as a "what is greed?" definitional search (225a), but is hijacked by equivocation rather than reaching a genuine horismos.
  • self-knowledge, the-mean — referenced via the herm inscriptions, explicitly set up to compete with the Delphic "Know Thyself" and "Nothing in Excess" (228d) — minor, excursus-only.

Key Passages

"there aren't any greedy people at all, according to what you say" (226d) — the first paradox. "thinking instead that the things of no value are very valuable" (226e) — greed re-described as ignorance of value. "So profit is good?" / "Yes." (227a) "So it is those who love the good whom you call greedy" (227a) — the substitution made explicit. "everyone appears to be greedy; whereas [before] … no one was greedy" (227c) — the paradox stated. "we have already agreed that to profit is to be benefited" (227d) — the slide from net-gain to benefit. "do not deceive a friend" (herm inscription, 229b) — the excursus pivot / Socrates' alibi. "neither 'more' nor 'less' is added to either of them" (230b) — the sortal lever (food, person, profit). "Value, then, is what brings profit" (231e) — value introduced as differentia. "for the third or fourth time, come to the agreement that what's profitable is good" (232a). "It forces me, Socrates, rather than persuades me" (232b) — the signature of the open eristic-or-sound question. "he who makes this reproach is greedy himself" (232c) — the closing self-incrimination.

What's Not Obvious

  • The paradox is a single relational definition doing all the work. Because profit is defined only as not-loss (227b), and loss is bad, "profit is good" is not argued but built into the term — so "everyone loves the good" mechanically yields "everyone is greedy" and then the self-cancelling "to blame greed is to be greedy" (232c). The argument's air of inevitability is the air of a definition smuggled in as a discovery; the whole structure is socratic-intellectualism run on an unexamined good.
  • The genre switches at the exact point the argument is accused of cheating. When the friend charges deception (228a), Socrates does not refute the charge — he tells the Hipparchus story (228b–229d), whose herm inscription "do not deceive a friend" (229b) functions as his alibi. The literary-historical excursus is not ornament: it appears because dialectical fair play has run out, and its implausibly revisionist history (the tyrannicides deflated to jealous lovers, 229c–d) shares its form with the Minos, Second Alcibiades, and the Atlantis excursus of the Timaeus–Critias.
  • The editor refuses to decide whether the argument is fallacious or only seems so. Hutchinson records that the friend ends unpersuaded and that readers "feel that the wool has somehow been pulled over their eyes," then asks "But has it?" (cf. 232b, "forces me … rather than persuades me"). This is the dialogue's deepest ambiguity: whether the author commits an eristic fallacy or stages one for the reader to diagnose is left genuinely open, and a low-confidence reading should not pretend to close it.

Critique / Limitations

Disputed authorship is load-bearing. Cooper marks the dialogue † (authorship not generally agreed); Hutchinson's note attributes it to "the same author" as the Minos, writing "soon after the middle of the fourth century B.C." It is therefore a dubium of the late Academy, weak as evidence about Plato's own development, and every attribution here is hedged to "the author of the Hipparchus." It sits in a cluster of short disputed dialogues — alongside the Minos, Second Alcibiades, and Rival Lovers (the last two likewise translated for this edition by Smith) — none of which can carry a developmental claim on its own; pages derived from it run at most low confidence.

The eristic-or-sound question is unresolved by design. Whether the argument is genuinely fallacious (an equivocation on kerdos and on "good," plus the definitional fiat at 227c–228a) or only apparently so is exactly what the editor declines to settle. Treating the dialogue as a straightforward sophism, or as a straightforwardly sound proof, both overshoot the evidence: the responsible reading names the equivocation and records that the text may be exhibiting it on purpose.

The argument overrides ordinary intuition rather than answering it. The friend's commonsense data — money-grubbers exist; one suffers loss "from wicked profit" (227e) — are ruled out by craft-analogy and definitional fiat, never met. The gold/silver case (231d) shows even the text noticing that "more" and "more valuable" come apart, yet the conclusion proceeds as if they had not.

Connections

  • is a case of socratic-intellectualism — the "all love the good, none the bad" axiom (227b–c) driven to reductio / near-parody by equivocating on an unexamined "good" (the wiki has no dedicated good page); distinct from the substantive deployments below.
  • enacts eristic — the dialogue performs contentious dialectic (definitional fiat, equivocation on kerdos, repeated deception-charges) rather than merely cataloguing it; whether it endorses or stages the fallacy is left open at 232b.
  • shares mechanism with plato-minos — the same dialectic-plus-literary-historical-excursus composition and scepticism toward Athenian popular values; the basis of Hutchinson's same-author hypothesis.
  • shares mechanism with plato-alcibiades-1, plato-second-alcibiades, plato-timaeus, and plato-critias — the dialectic-interrupting literary-historical excursus as a recognised Academic genre (the Atlantis story its classic case).
  • contrasts with plato-meno, plato-protagoras, and plato-gorgias — there the "all desire the good" thesis does substantive ethical work; here the same premise yields an aporetic, self-incriminating conclusion.

Open Questions

  • Is the Hipparchus a committed sophism or a deliberate display of fallacious eristic for the reader to diagnose? The editor's "But has it?" leaves this open; resolving it would require a settled reading of how mid-fourth-century Academic dialogues used staged fallacy (cf. Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations).
  • Does the corpus warrant an excursus-as-genre motif spanning the Hipparchus, Minos, Second Alcibiades, Alcibiades I, and Timaeus–Critias? Best assessed at a motifs-delta once the Minos is ingested.
  • Should the wiki create a dedicated good (agathon) page and a love of gain / kerdos page? Both are currently silent hinges with no home; the unexamined-good gap recurs wherever the intellectualist axiom is deployed.

Sources

  • Hipparchus, trans. Nicholas D. Smith, in Plato: Complete Works (Hackett, 1997), Stephanus 225a–232c; raw file lines 17406–17751. Includes D. S. Hutchinson's editor's note (raw 17408–17412).
  • Depth layer: wiki/sources/.extraction-plato-hipparchus.md.