Ancient Philosophy - Lecture 6 (Part One)
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Lecture 6
The Figure of Socrates
When we read the Republic and other Platonic dialogues, we repeatedly encounter a character called Socrates who is assigned a dominant role in these pieces of writing. And it is obviously open to us to discuss the views expressed by this character without worrying whether they are views held by any particular historical individual. However a well-entrenched interpretative tradition exists that maintains that we can assign some of these views to Plato himself whereas other opinions advanced by the character Socrates should be assigned to the historical Socrates rather than Plato. Moreover it is generally supposed that once we have sorted these views in this way, we find important differences between the views of Plato and those espoused by the historical Socrates.
The key starting point for this interpretative tradition derives from various observations about the historical Socrates made by Aristotle. Aristotle was one of Plato’s pupils and philosophical associates; so he seems to be in an excellent position to distinguish between those sections of Plato’s writings where Plato is developing his own views and those where Plato is making a deliberate effort to present to his readership the views and approach of the historical Socrates. One of the main claims made by Aristotle about the historical Socrates is that he asked questions only and did not offer answers because he confessed that he knew nothing. Aristotle also claims that Socrates concerned himself with ethical matters only and was not at all concerned in his mature years with the study of logic and cosmology; that he was the first to search systematically for definitions based on common properties, and that he did not ‘separate’ these common properties from particular things in the way Plato did, for Plato, unlike Socrates, supposed that as perceptible objects were constantly changing, there could be no knowledge of perceptible things but only of some other things – the so-called ‘Forms’.
It is not entirely clear how we should interpret Aristotle’s comments about ‘separation’. One possibility is that Aristotle is claiming that Socrates did not accept that terms like ‘courage’ and ‘beauty’ refer to anything that exists apart from its instantiations in particular people and objects. However it would be rash to be too definite on this matter. What we do seem to be able to infer with confidence, though, is that where we find the character Socrates characterizing entities like courage itself and beauty itself as changeless and contrasting them ever-changing perceptibles that are both F and not-F, we should suppose that this character is speaking for Plato rather than the historical Socrates. Moreover Aristotle’s other remarks about the historical Socrates indicate that we should draw a similar inference wherever we find Socrates developing detailed theories about cosmological matters (such as the existence of purposes in nature or the immortality of the soul).
These criteria for separating Platonic writings that reflect Socrates’ actual views from those writings that are primarily intended as ways of presenting Plato’s own position gain further support from stylometric analysis. Such analysis, undertaken by various scholars over a period of more than one hundred years, has allowed a fair degree of consensus to emerge over which particular dialogues are to be placed in three broad chronological groups – early, middle, and late. And it emerges that the overwhelming majority of the dialogues identified by stylometric methods as early writings meet Aristotle’s criteria for being orientated towards a presentation of Socratic rather than Platonic views. In contrast, the works that are allocated by stylometric analysis to the middle and late groupings all qualify by Aristotle’s criteria as featuring views and theses that would not have been espoused by the historical Socrates.
Another significant potential source of evidence about the historical Socrates comes from the writings of Xenophon, who associated with Socrates in his youth and later became a general and historian. However Xenophon’s writings about Socrates - the Memorabilia, Apology, and Symposium – were composed after he had gone into a lengthy period of exile from Athens, and there are definite indications that Xenophon made at least some use of Plato’s own works in constructing his own literary productions. It is also the case that Xenophon does not show any great signs of philosophical perspicuity in his writings; so it would be very unsafe to suppose that he could capture for us the complexities and subtleties of Socrates’ overall philosophical position. On the other hand, the degree of match between the rather limited information Xenophon provides about the distinctively philosophical aspects of Socrates’ views and the portrait of Socrates set out in Plato’s early dialogues does seem to offer some confirmation that Plato was, at that point, substantially engaged in reconstructing Socrates’ own position instead of simply using the character of his former teacher as a convenient peg on which to hang later Platonic doctrines.
Before we attempt a summary of the salient philosophical views of the historical Socrates, however, it is worth taking a little time to reflect on what we can infer from our sources about his character and life. After all, much of Socrates’ extraordinary influence on later philosophy seems to have stemmed not so much from his philosophical teachings as from the way in which his commitment to philosophy shaped and influenced the rest of his life. Unlike present-day philosophers who seem perfectly content with the idea that philosophical insight need have no more influence than a knowledge of astrophysics or middle-Indo-Aryan literature on a person’s day-to-day life, Socrates appears to have been passionately convinced that philosophical reflection and living well are intimately connected. And it is Socrates’ attempt to live in the light of that conviction that seems to have made the biggest impact on his contemporaries.
From the pages of Plato and Xenophon, supplemented by such later doxographical compendiums as Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, a picture emerges of a man from a relatively humble background whose extraordinary personality had a mesmerizing effect on some of the most brilliant and influential figures in Athenian society. We see his commitment to the idea that the reason has the power to transform people’s lives for the better, his addiction to engaging in detailed and close debate over ethical issues, and his belief that it was essential that he should persuade his fellow citizens to join him in using reason to scrutinize the basic presuppositions of their chosen or inherited ways of life. And, of course, he is portrayed as exposing again and again the pretensions of other people to have a satisfactory grasp on such apparently crucial normative concepts as piety, justice, beauty and the good. But alongside this commitment to rational inquiry, even about fundamental presuppositions, we also learn of repeated visitations by what he thought of as a divine sign, which told him to refrain from particular courses of action that he was contemplating and which he obeyed without question.
We also gain information about certain definitive events in his life. In particular, we learn that the oracle at Delphi asserted that no one was wiser than he, and that he concluded on the basis of his own lack of expert knowledge in important matters that this pronouncement could only mean that he was, unlike most other people, aware of his lack of genuine wisdom. We are also alerted to the fact that on at least two occasions he made politically dangerous choices rather than compromise his moral principles. One of these incidents took place under democratic rule: Socrates was the only member of the Council to oppose the presentation of a politically popular but unconstitutional motion. And the other occurred during the brief period of power exercised by the so-called Thirty Tyrants (404BC) when he refused to participate in an act of judicial murder. Moreover a striking narrative is passed on to us concerning his eventual death: he is accused before a court in Athens of dubious charges of impiety and corrupting the young; he refuses when found guilty to beg to be spared the death penalty (since in his view he deserves honour rather than leniency); he disdains to escape from prison when it is supposedly possible for him to do so; he continues to engage in philosophical discussion with his friends up to the last; and he allegedly shows no fear or anxiety when finally downing the drink of hemlock by which he is executed.
What, though, should we say about his approach to philosophy and any distinctive views he might have held?
A key aspect of that approach lies in his unwillingness to let people’s basic assumptions about what they ought to desire and seek for themselves and other people remain unexamined. To give an example from today’s society: a great deal of effort and thought goes into making money, but very little thought is given to the question of whether we ought to be so interested in making money or the meta-question of how we might set about answering this question about the relative importance of making money compared with other possible things we might be doing with our lives. In more general terms, we tend to be quite sophisticated reasoners about how to achieve given ends, but we seem very naïve about how to choose between possible ends. All too often we simply embrace the fashions of the age or appeal to a religious tradition of dubious authority. Socrates regarded his contemporaries as similarly misguided in their intellectual efforts. What is the point of being good at adapting means to ends if one has no capacity to identify the correct ends? Thus Socrates presses his fellow-citizens on such questions as ‘How should we live?, ‘What things are really seeking for their own sake?’, ‘What is genuine wisdom and how is it connected to virtue?’, and ‘How do we come to acquire such characteristics?’
Socrates seems confident too that careful and systematic discussion of such questions by people intent on uncovering the truth rather than merely winning a dialectical victory is capable of moving us closer towards appropriate answers. Even if positive answers cannot be definitively established, discussion of the type just mentioned can supposedly serve to eliminate false views. Moreover Socrates assumes that once we realize that this sort of inquiry is possible, we should be eager to have it scrutinize the principles underlying our own choices and way of life. After all, it investigates the best way for us to live, and Socrates holds that we all seek what is good for us even though we may not always be capable of successfully discriminating between what is good and what merely seems good. From his own perspective, therefore, Socrates is doing himself and others a great favour when he draws them into such discussions.
However the upshot of these discussions often seems to have been distinctly deflating for Socrates’ interlocutors. In the face of Socrates’ persistent questioning, these people discover their inability to defend a clear and consistent position on the issue under investigation. This often leads to their becoming embarrassed or even angry at being exposed in this manner. However Socrates himself seems perfectly content to affirm that he too shares their ignorance about the matter in hand. This often aroused in his audience the belief that he was disingenuously seeking to obtain some argumentative advantage by claiming not to know the answers to his own questions. But it seems more appropriate, in the majority of cases at least, to see this as another manifestation of his belief that if the Delphic oracle were right to praise him for being unusually wise, then this alleged wisdom could lie only in his recognition of his own intellectual shortcomings.
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