Lesser Hippias

The Voluntary Liar as Shadow Integration: Plato’s Proto-Jungian Assault on Moral Splitting

The Lesser Hippias opens with a deceptively simple question about Homer: Who is the better man, Achilles or Odysseus? Hippias, the accomplished sophist, answers without hesitation — Achilles, the truthful, the straightforward, the haplous. Odysseus, the liar, the polytropos, is lesser. Socrates then proceeds to demolish this distinction with a relentless chain of analogies: the person who lies deliberately in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, or any technē is the same person who can tell the truth in that domain, because both capacities require identical knowledge. The good liar and the truthful expert are, in fact, the same person. What Plato stages here is not merely an exercise in eristic logic but a confrontation with moral splitting — the ego’s insistence that the capacity for deception belongs to someone else, to the shadow, to the “worse” man. As Edinger emphasizes in The Psyche in Antiquity, the early Greek philosophers articulated images central to the Western psyche, and here Plato isolates one of the most stubborn: the belief that virtue and vice are housed in different kinds of people rather than in different orientations of the same soul. Murray Stein’s observation that Jung created “a psychologically based version of Plato’s philosophical vision” finds its sharpest confirmation not in the well-known Republic or Symposium but in this overlooked dialogue, where the identity of the truthful person and the capable liar maps precisely onto Jung’s insistence that the shadow is not the opposite of the ego but its rejected twin.

Odysseus as Polytropos Psyche: The Archetype Plato Would Not Let Hippias Dismiss

Hippias wants to anchor moral identity in a single, fixed character trait: Achilles speaks plainly, therefore Achilles is good. Socrates attacks this by showing that Homer’s own text contradicts it — Achilles lies too, changing his stated plans multiple times in the Iliad. The difference between Achilles and Odysseus is not that one lies and the other does not, but that Odysseus knows he lies. Odysseus is polytropos — many-turning, many-minded — and this epithet, far from being a mark of moral inferiority, signals the psyche’s capacity for multiplicity. Hillman’s archetypal psychology illuminates what Plato is doing here with startling precision. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman argues against “a monotheistic model of consciousness which must be one-sided in its judgments and narrow in its vision,” insisting instead on the “wealth and variety of psychological ideas” that correspond to the plurality of archetypal persons. Hippias embodies exactly this monotheistic consciousness: one character, one virtue, one truth. Socrates, channeling the Odyssean principle, insists that the soul is irreducibly multiple. The person who can navigate all perspectives — truth and falsehood, sincerity and craft — possesses a richer, more integrated psyche than the one who can only be “simple.” Plato never endorses lying. But he forces the reader to recognize that the refusal to acknowledge one’s capacity for deception is itself a form of unconsciousness — what Hillman elsewhere calls “the innocent nymph, the virgin anima to whom nothing has happened.”

The Aporetic Ending as Coagulatio: Why Socrates Refuses to Resolve the Paradox

The dialogue culminates in a conclusion that has troubled commentators for millennia: if the person who does wrong voluntarily is better than the one who does wrong involuntarily, then the good person is the one who sins on purpose. Socrates himself says he does not believe this, yet the logic seems inescapable. Most scholars treat this as evidence that the Lesser Hippias is a minor work, a logical dead end. This reading misses the psychological function of aporia. Edinger’s discussion of the “Axiom of Maria” — the principle that wholeness arrives only through the problematic fourth element, the inferior function that “is always tinged with evil” — provides the interpretive key. Socrates’ paradox is a coagulatio: it forces the reader down into the uncomfortable recognition that moral capacity and moral action cannot be separated. The person who can do wrong deliberately and chooses not to is qualitatively different from the person who does right only because they lack the skill to do otherwise. This is the difference between unconscious innocence and conscious virtue — between perfection and wholeness. Edinger is explicit: “those who seek individuation, who really, earnestly have as their goal completeness rather than perfection, are particularly subject to shadow projections.” The Lesser Hippias subjects Hippias — and the reader — to exactly this confrontation. The dialogue does not resolve because the psyche cannot resolve its relationship to the shadow through logic alone; it requires lived encounter.

Why the Lesser Hippias Becomes the Greater Psychological Text

The dialogue’s apparent modesty conceals its radical claim: that competence is morally neutral, that knowledge of good and knowledge of evil are structurally identical, and that the soul which refuses to acknowledge this identity remains not innocent but ignorant. Plato foreshadows what Hillman calls the “Platonic soul who comes into the world filled with gifts of all the Gods” — including the dark ones. Hippias’ Achilles-worship is the ancient version of a therapeutic resistance Jungian analysts encounter daily: the client who insists they are nothing like the person they despise. Socrates’ method here is not to teach a doctrine but to destabilize a defense.

For anyone working within depth psychology today, the Lesser Hippias offers something no other Platonic dialogue provides with such economy: a pure demonstration that the soul’s integrity depends not on the exclusion of its dark capacities but on the conscious acknowledgment of them. It is the earliest text in the Western tradition to make the psychological case — not the ethical one — that knowing how to lie is a precondition for genuine truthfulness. Read alongside the Republic’s tripartite soul or the Symposium’s ladder of beauty, this dialogue supplies the missing shadow-ground without which those more famous visions remain one-sided aspirations toward a perfection the psyche was never designed to achieve.