The Naked Truth: Athletics, Democracy, Philosophy

You may well wonder why the Greeks thought that naked sports were a good idea in the first place. We are not sure. Literary sources claim that early Greek runners competed wearing loincloths. One day a runner’s fell off, and he just kept going. The practice went viral.³ On a practical level, anyone who has spent time in the Mediterranean in the summer will sympathize with the desire to wear as little as possible and, particularly after physical activity, to scrape the gunk off one’s skin with a stick. Whatever the origin of nude athletics, over time it became part of the Greek identity distinguishing the Greeks from those they saw as their less civilized neighbors, most notably the Persians.

On an ideological level, naked sports went hand-in-hand with democracy and philosophy. What could these possibly have to do with one another? When you have taken all your clothes off, there are no markers of rank or social status left. All you bring to a contest is your strength and skill. What is more, there are judges standing by to whip even the cities’ leading men for committing fouls. In the absence of a professional army, it was a civic duty to stay fit so as to be ready when the need arose to fight for one’s city. You could therefore also get whipped simply for being out of shape. In the same vein, Greek democracy was fully participatory. While a city’s citizens (its free, landowning men) comprised only a small slice of the overall population, anyone who made it into that elite circle could stand in the assembly and make his case on the political issues of the day.⁴ Philosophy pushed this egalitarian ideal even further. Socrates does not care about the status of his discussion partners. Plato depicts him in conversations with the young and old, generals, slaves, and everyone in between. If anything, Socrates delights in taking down politicians whom the city sees as wise, and in pointing out the wisdom of craftspeople whom the high and mighty routinely overlook.

Far from a mere cultural quirk, nudity is a central thread running through Greek sports, democracy, and philosophy. Even today, we talk about the naked truth as facts stripped of all pretense and niceties. It is in this spirit that Plato’s Charmides opens.

Getting Naked with Socrates: Charmides 153a-162b

Plato’s Charmides is set in an Athenian gym and gives us a glimpse of the antics that took place there.⁵ Having just returned from a military campaign, Socrates heads straight for the palaistra. Once he has greeted his friends and answered their questions about the battle, his first question is about the state of philosophy, young men, and whether any were outstanding for wisdom, bodily beauty, or both. Enter Charmides, Plato’s uncle, whose name shares a root with the English word charming. And charming he is. Not only the older men, but even the youngest boys are awestruck by his beauty. Unlike some gyms today, men working out at the palaistra had few inhibitions about checking each other out. In fact, the Greeks had their own version of competitive physique or male beauty contests.⁶ Socrates’s friend Chaerephon puts it bluntly: “Just wait till he strips, and you get to see him naked.” Socrates agrees that that will be lovely. But first Socrates wants Charmides to “expose” his soul. Conventions of nude exercise thus provide a springboard for looking at the naked truth of Charmides’s character (154d).

At this point, Charmides’s guardian, Critias, whips up a pretext: Charmides has had trouble with headaches, so Critias calls him over and introduces Socrates as a doctor who can help. Charmides takes a spot on the bench between them. Socrates catches a glimpse down Charmides’s robe and for once is at a loss for words.⁷ Pulling himself together, Socrates explains that he has an herb to help with headaches that can be used in conjunction with singing a charm. From here he lays out a holistic approach to medicine, saying that just as one cannot treat part of the body without treating all of the body, one cannot treat the body without also treating the soul. Therefore, before Socrates can give Charmides this charm, he must test the state of Charmides’s soul, in particular whether he possesses the virtue sōphrosunē (155d-157d).

Sōphrosunē is hard to translate into contemporary English, for the simple reason that contemporary culture rarely worries about it. “Temperance” is the normal translation. In somewhat old-fashioned English, this brings connotations of reaching a careful balance, for instance, when tuning an instrument or alloying metals. The temperance movement, however, advocated completely abstaining from alcohol, coloring the English term in ways that the Greeks would not have meant. The term prudence suffers from the same problem, as it makes us think of prudes. From the opening pages of Charmides, it is clear that Socrates is no prude. Moderation gets closer: the person who goes out and gets a good buzz but does not black out. But the Greek virtue sōphrosunē extends beyond just social drinking. We can talk about being discreet and not making a mess of a sticky situation, having your ducks in a row, or maybe even being street smart. Moore and Raymond make a case for translating sōphrosunē as “discipline.”⁸ This is somewhat problematic insofar as discipline refers both to a process of punishment (disciplining) and to the intended result of that process: what we might call being self-disciplined. On the other hand, its Latin root, disco, has to do with learning as is captured in English phrases such as interdisciplinary studies. This nicely captures the street smarts sense present in the Greek (sōphrosunē is related to sōphrōn, “being sound of mind”). In the end, “discipline” is perhaps the least problematic option, provided we keep clear that we refer to the end state, not the process of getting there. It also nicely captures the athletic resonances at play in many ancient discussions of the virtue.

However we translate the term, the fact remains that US culture is not very disciplined. If one cookie is good, then two will be great! Children are conditioned from an early age to compete for “likes.” As soon as the iPhone 18 is in your pocket, Apple is marketing the 19. Driving all of this is our free-market economy, which depends on a population that constantly spends more: buying goods and replacing them as soon as possible. One of the reasons we spend money on vacations and activities is to post pictures of ourselves having fun. If everyone in the United States suddenly started living moderately and prudently, our economy would collapse. Look at the economic havoc that arose from the COVID-19 lockdown! Yet, if we reflect on our time staying home and spending less, we might ask ourselves: Is there an alternative to the consumerist hamster wheel we are trapped on, constantly seeking more? Would we be happier simply living with enough? If so, how do we start?

These are the sorts of questions Socrates has in store for Charmides. Socrates begins by prompting Charmides to agree that if someone has discipline in his soul, then he will be able to talk about it (159a).⁹ So if Charmides can simply answer a few questions about what discipline is, then he will have shown himself to possess it. As usual, it is not the meaning of the Greek word, sōphrosunē, but the reality to which the word refers that Socrates wants.

The arena is set for the first round of questioning (159a-162b). Charmides seems to have discretion in mind, as the first definition he offers is “to do things calmly.” The Greek (hēsychaō) means both “act quietly” and “act slowly.” Socrates latches onto the second meaning and points out that there are times when we need to do things quickly. Charmides tries again: it is to do things modestly. But, as Socrates points out, there are also times when bold actions are required, such as asking for help when one would rather not have to. At this point Charmides remembers a view of discipline he has heard from someone: “minding one’s own business.” But, Socrates responds, if raising crops is a farmer’s business and making a plow is a blacksmith’s business, then a farmer and a blacksmith who minded their own business would be unable to trade crops for plows. If we expand the point, then it seems that minding one’s own business rules out transactions entirely, which would bring society to its knees. At this point, Charmides bats his lashes at Critias, who is clearly the “someone” who came up with this last definition, and passes him the baton.

Discipline and Leadership: Charmides 162c-176d

Charmides’s second round begins as Critias comes to the aid of his definition. His first attempt is to split the hair between doing, making, and working (163a-c). This is a bit hard to follow in translation, but the point seems to be distinguishing between one’s life’s work in a lofty sense and more menial, day-to-day tasks. Socrates will not have it. Critias tries again, claiming that discipline is “doing good things” (163c). But would it count, Socrates asks, if someone accomplished good things without realizing it? Can a doctor, for instance, sometimes treat people in useful ways and sometimes treat people in un-useful ways, not realizing whether he is being helpful or not? The idea here seems to be that there are times when it is appropriate to cure people and times when it is appropriate not to try—for instance, when treatment will only prolong suffering and delay inevitable death. Critias is not comfortable with the idea of a doctor who can act with discipline by accident, so he offers a revised definition: discipline is knowledge of oneself (164d). The definition picks up the famous phrase written at the entrance to Apollo’s temple at Delphi, “Know thyself” (164d-165b).¹⁰

While that sounds all well and good, Socrates asks what it actually means. Knowledge, after all, needs to have some object. Critias takes one last pass and states that discipline is “the knowledge of itself and other kinds of knowledge” (166c). It is at this point that translating sōphrosunē as “discipline” comes in handy. At Socrates’s prompting, Critias spells out his meaning: a disciplined person will know what he knows and what he does not know (167a).¹¹

Let us pause for a second. Imagine a person who knows what she knows and what she does not know. How would such a person act? To be honest, she might act like Socrates. At Apology 20d-21d, as we will see, Socrates claims a kind of “human wisdom,” which amounts merely to “I do not think I know what I do not know.” In practice, such a person would be confident when she knows what she is doing, and cautious when she does not. Would not such a person show discretion and street smarts? As with any promising idea, Socrates proceeds to shoot this one down too. His argument comes in three waves.

Socrates’s first and least impressive wave of argument is that discipline is odd (167c-168e). After all, if we think about other things that take objects—vision, hearing, desire, wish, love, fear—we do not find things that take themselves and other things as their objects. It is perhaps true that we cannot see vision or hear hearing. But it seems simply false that we cannot fear fearing. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” Likewise, many of us have looked forward to a day when we could look forward to leg day at the gym. In any event, Socrates grants, by way of hypothesis, that such self-reflective acts are possible, and he moves on to his more substantial arguments.

Socrates’s second and more serious critique of discipline is that it is useless (169d-172d). His argument turns on what we now refer to as first- and second-order knowledge. First-order knowledge takes something out in the world as its object. The doctor, as Socrates puts it, knows health. Second-order knowledge takes another body of knowledge as its object. Socrates’s example is medicine. Knowledge of medicine as a body of knowledge seems to amount to knowing the medical field’s foundational principles, general criteria for knowledge, structuring norms, and so on. In our terms, this is philosophy of science. The trouble is that first-order and second-order knowledge can pull apart. You could have a doctor who knows health but not medicine, and a disciplined person who knows medicine but not health. (This may seem counterintuitive, yet I have met plenty of scientists who know their subject matter intimately but get annoyed when asked about how they know whether they can trust observations, or whether the causal explanations they posit capture the world as it actually is.) If we grant this distinction, Socrates argues, then doctors will be able to judge other doctors, while disciplined people cannot. A doctor who also happens to be disciplined would be best of all. But what about all those other bodies of knowledge outside of medicine: navigation, farming, and so on? For society to function, experts in several different fields are needed. At some point, the person calling the shots will not be able to know all the first-order content of these various fields. The more complex the group, the more often people in charge will have to delegate responsibilities. With modern corporations and nations, the range of specialized first-order knowledge is dizzying. There is too much knowledge in the world today for any one person to master. But if that is right, and leaders must still delegate tasks, how can any individual possibly know everything necessary? Critias held out discipline as the key to this, but, given the current line of argument, his understanding of discipline is simply not up to the task.

At this point, Socrates lends Critias a hand: perhaps the point of Critias’s definition is that a person with discipline will do everything with knowledge (172a-175a). Here Socrates entertains the possibility that a person with discipline can spot someone pretending to be a pilot, a doctor, and so on. (We might again find a model for this in Socrates himself. Even if he lacks first-order knowledge of navigation or medicine, he is able, by questioning alleged experts, to expose those who lack the knowledge they claim.) Socrates and Critias agree that a person with this capacity to sniff out frauds would live a happy life. But what kind of knowledge would make that person happy? Critias is forced to say, “Knowledge of good and evil.” With that, however, they all have simply looped back to an idea they already rejected (163e).

The upshot is that this discussion is a total mess. If Charmides, Critias, and Socrates all show themselves incapable of saying what discipline is, it must be that none of them actually possesses it (159a). Charmides concludes—perhaps playfully, perhaps ominously—that he will force Socrates to “charm” him every day (175b-176d).

Education for the Twenty-First Century

What should we make of Charmides today? To those working on modern college campuses, Greek gyms can come across as one big Title IX violation. Still, Socrates’s attempts to “expose” Charmides’s and then Critias’s souls raise central questions about the relationship of school and society. Those questions are just as pressing today as they were in Athens’s fledgling democracy. I will close by drawing out the current implications of two of them.

First, in challenging Critias’s idea of discipline as knowledge of knowledge, Socrates raises serious concerns about the possibility of leaders delegating responsibilities. Such worries motivate the standard US undergraduate curriculum, which combines deep knowledge of a major discipline with the broad knowledge of a general-education curriculum. In the US system, if you want to be a doctor, you should focus on science but know enough about computers to talk with IT personnel and enough about human beings to talk with your patients. That is why we make science students take literature courses, and humanities students take math. The end result is not so much a hierarchy with one person at the top, as a cluster with enough overlap between individuals to hold things together. As the world becomes more interconnected, the tasks we all face become more complex, and the need to talk across disciplinary boundaries becomes all the more pressing. It is ironic that as colleges across the world are coming to see the value of the US approach to education for the twenty-first-century economy, the United States itself is busily abandoning it for more narrowly focused job training.¹²

Second, among the reasons the United States is walking away from its signature mode of education is that students themselves often have trouble articulating this system’s value. In my past teaching experience, I took part in designing general-education curricula for a college’s traditional, residential students and its program for nontraditional, adult learners. Faculty worked across disciplinary lines to produce beautifully structured curricula that integrate transferable skills, broad knowledge bases, disciplinary focus, and project-based, real-world learning. Yet, when asked to talk about ways this education might apply to potential jobs, students often fumbled. What was missing was the ability to articulate all of this learning. As a result, the faculty built a Capstone Seminar into the one general-education curriculum and an Intro to the Pragmatic Liberal Arts into the other, forcing students to talk about the structure of their education.¹³ Scientists and educators today refer to this as metacognition. In Socrates’s terms, these students needed a bit more knowledge of knowledge. Apart from merely getting ahead in interviews, the ability to articulate how one fits into a larger scheme and how skills developed in one context can translate into another has been shown to improve the learning process itself.¹⁴ For these reasons, the American Association of Colleges and Universities has led the charge to restructure curricula around learning outcomes such as critical thinking, information literacy, written expression, and ethical reasoning. If school is practice for life, then focusing on these outcomes helps us connect the dots.¹⁵ Students who do this throughout their studies will find more meaning in their schoolwork and draw more use from it after they graduate. While Critias’s knowledge of knowledge may not have held up as a formal definition of discipline, his discussion with Socrates raises issues that we would do well to think through today.