Lesser Hippias

Name: Lesser Hippias
Author: Plato

Lesser Hippias is a work by Plato (-395).

Core claims

The Lesser Hippias is not a failed argument about lying but a surgical exposure of the psyche’s dependence on the fiction of moral competence — Socrates demonstrates that the person who lies deliberately possesses the same technē as the person who tells the truth, collapsing the ego’s most cherished distinction between its virtuous and shadow identities.
Plato uses Odysseus and Achilles not as literary examples but as archetypal polarities of consciousness — the polytropos (many-turning) man and the haplous (simple, single) man — to stage the discovery that psychological wholeness requires integrating the capacity for deception rather than splitting it off into a demonized Other.
The dialogue’s deliberately aporetic ending, where Socrates appears to argue that the person who does wrong voluntarily is “better” than the one who does so involuntarily, is not a logical error but a confrontation with the shadow that prefigures Jung’s insistence that moral completeness, not moral perfection, is the aim of individuation.

How does Socrates’ identification of the truthful person and the capable liar in the Lesser Hippias compare to Edinger’s account of the inferior function as “always tinged with evil” in The Psyche in Antiquity, and what does this convergence reveal about the relationship between Platonic technē and Jungian shadow integration?
In what ways does Hillman’s critique of “monotheistic consciousness” in Re-Visioning Psychology illuminate the Lesser Hippias’ dramatic opposition between Hippias’ Achilles-worship and Socrates’ defense of Odyssean multiplicity — and does Hillman’s polytheistic psychology ultimately go further than Plato dared?
Murray Stein argues in Transformation that Jung’s depth psychology is “a psychologically based version of Plato’s philosophical vision”; does the Lesser Hippias’ paradox about voluntary wrongdoing map more precisely onto Jung’s concept of wholeness versus perfection than the Republic’s philosopher-king ideal does?