ABSTRACT
The chapter begins by outlining how technē, and particularly Plato’s deployment of it, goes against modern expectations. First, it has a wider extension than any cognate English concept (craft, skill, art); second, Plato subordinates it to an ethical project – namely, discovering the nature of virtue. Next, the author explores why Plato is attracted to technē as an ethical heuristic, and identify five reasons. It promises to professionalise the ethical life, to render it rationally perspicuous, to subject it to mastery or control, to make it teachable and to rid the practical life of disagreement. The chapter then discusses two dialogues that develop potential virtue-crafts: first, the Protagoras, with its hedonistic ‘measuring technē’, and the Republic, with its architectonic craft of justice (namely, the ruling expertise of the city’s guardians). It argues that the former fails, owing to its hedonism and its position on akrasia or weakness of will, while the latter fails owing to its political nature, its reliance on non-cognitive abilities and its restricted scope (it treats not virtue as such but rather justice). The final section of the chapter expounds why virtue is fundamentally resistant to being construed as (even akin to) a technē. The author uncovers five reasons for this, and ends by suggesting that – notwithstanding the essential estrangement between virtue and technē – there may be a Platonic way of understanding virtue which prescinds from the crafts altogether. This way is to be found in the Symposium, where Socrates investigates an eminently non-technical power – the power of eros.
