SOCRATES TRONIST AND MORAL PHILOSOPHER GREGORY VLASTOS Emeritus Profs Phiesopes at Princeton University and at the niersty of California at Berkeiy CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge New York Port Chesur Melbourne Sydney‘This study of the most enigmatic figure of Greek philosophy reclaims Socrates’ ground-breaking originality. It argues for a Socrates who, though long overshadowed by his successors Plato and Aristotle, marked the true turning-point in Greek philosophy, religion, and echics. The quest for the historical figure focuses on the Socrates of Plato's easlier dialogues, sevting him in sharp contrast to thar other Socrates of later dialogues, where he is used as a mouthpiece for Plato's often anti-Socratie doctrine. At the heart of the book is the paradoxical nature of Socratic chought. Bur the paradoxes are explained, not explained away. The book highlights the censions in the Socratic search for the answer (0 dhe question “How should we live?" Concsived as a divine mandate, the search is eartied out through eleactic argument, and dominated by an uncompromising rationalism. The magnetic Quality of Socraces’ personalicy is allowed to emerge throughout the bookPublished hy: the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge “The Pie Bailing Trumpington Stree, Cambridge ens tn To Stamford Road, Onbleigh, Melbourne $105, Austalia © Cambridge University Pres 1908 Firat published 2998 Printed in Great Britain by the versity Pree, Catmiride Dri itor catlguing in pbiction data Nastes. Gregory G phry, ancient period. Socrates 1 Te 1 3e4 8 paperback I dedicate this book to colleagues and students whose partnership has shaped my search Berkeley (1979-8: Cambridge (1983-4 Comell (1986) Su. Andrews (1981 Toronto (1978)CONTENTS List of additional notes Introduction Socratic irony Socrates cantra Socrates in Plato The evidence of Aristotle and Nenophon Elenchus and mathematics Does Socrates cheat? Socratic piety Socrates’ rejection of retal Happiness and virtue in Socrates’ moral theory Epilogue: Felix Socrates Additional notes Bibliography Index of passages cited Index of names in Plato and Xenophon Indes af moder scholars Index of Greek words page xi 8 Bi 132 157 233 236 320 328 330 333,13 gage 32 ee 42 +3 61 6.2 ADDITIONAL NOTES “Charity” as a principle of interpretation Socrates’ complex philosophical ironies Delphic precedents pas Kaihés: its hazards for the boy Aeschines Socrasieus, fr 14 ‘The composition of Republic 1 Socratic personalia in the Platonic corpus ‘The interdict on reliance on sensory data “Separation” in Plato Forms in the Timacus ‘The meaning of xeprouds Socratic elenchus in the Theaetetus? Epagogic arguments Epistemic vs. moral certainty ‘Mathematical texts in Elenctic Dialogues Plato and Theodorus ‘The Hippias Minor ~ sophistry or honest perplexity? Socrates’ daimonion Ton 3330-5368 287Br 82 8.3 Bs 85, 86 List of additional notes The oracle story in Plato and in 3 Xenophon on sacrifice ophon 11 vs. Plato on Socrates’ speech of defense Why was Socrates condemned? Plato vs. Xenophon on Socrates’ rejection of rqgaliation Hedonism faute de mieux Eudaemonism in the Crite? ‘The gravest flaw in the instrumentalist interpretation On Gorgias 4682-¢ eure Kod" odr& dye On Ly, 2198-2208 288 289 291 293 297 300 302 302 303, 305 308, INTRODUCTIO HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE Socrates’ “strangeness” is the keynote of Alcibiades’ speech about him in the Symposium. The talk stars on that note (215); and reverts to it near the end Such is his strangeness that you will search and search among those kving now and among men of the past, arid never come clase to whiat he is himself ancl to the things he says, (2210) This book is for readers of Plato’s earlier dialogues* who have felt this strangeness, have asked themselves what to make of it, have pondered answers to its enigmas, and are willing 10 work their way through vet another. What I offer should not distract them from their encounter with the Socrates who lives in Plato's text. It should. take them back there for a closer look. The book has been a long time in the making. It started with a non-start. A stroke of luck in 1953 had assured me ofa year entirely free trom teaching. I had gone to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to work on Plato's philosophy, uncommitted as to haw 1 would proceed. Harold Cherniss, the great scholar in my field there, declined to give advice ~ how like Socrates he was in this. Left to my own devices, Fcut the project in half, allocating the whole of that year to a study of Plato's Socratic dialogues. This much at least I was determined to finish, for a somewhat ridiculous reason: so I could win at last (Twas then in mid-career) that sine gua non of fromia, The Greek sironger; “seanzencts” picks it up asthe lower end aft intensey= ange. At te Haher end "outragecusnen” or seen “stinaraisy” would be required 10 fateh itt fore: when Callces in the Gorgias 4ofo> exclsime “how GToMoy ou ate, Socrates,” how outragedus you are" “-atwund” in Waedhead and in Levin just ha hhemeansTramason of Mates disloguer to which Ureter throughs the bugk se sted Jn the Bisiography ar ahr end 2 Thee protagonist, fo all practical parpoes, she only Socrates” I shall be talking abou throughout this book. Tr dhe the red! Secratey the Socrates of history? Ves, But ne i Plato? Yer. Gan tbe boca? Ves, How 20? Reader sel get am ansver in chapter 2, they can bear the supense Ie they cave, they May sip to chapter 7 a2 Oncea Introduction respectability in American academia, a book-length work between hard covers. So I toiled and moiled and, sure enough, by that year’s end a MS of the desired length sat finished on my desk. But when 1 was about to package it and send it off I paused to take a cool, critical look at it, [went through it from start to finish as 1 would if it had been written by someone else and [ was reading it for a publisher. By the time I had got to the end a feeling jn the pit of my stomach told me that the MS was a lemon. It did give, T was satisfied, correct answers to the questions I had asked ~ much the same questions as those which specialists in the field had been addressing in the preceding half-century. And still it was wrong, Why? IFT could have given then my present verdict on it, it would, have been that the strangeness of Socrates had been missed. A vague sense of this, more instinct than reasoned judgement, left me with the conviction that the best thing I could do with that MS was to junk it. And so I did Looking back on that decision now, decades later. I sce it as one of the wisest I have ever made. IFT had put that book into print and moved into position to defend it, I would have gone further and farther into the morass. Having cut my losses, what was the result? A wasted year? Hardly. Putting into black and white that wrong account of Socrates enabled me to glimpse some of the things needed to put it right. The first of these was that his paradoses, pushed to the margins in that book. had to be brought into dead center? Even IF 1 did not succeed in cracking them, the anguished sense of their presence would have to be my companion in any writing on Socrates T would ever do. The chance of a new start on a smaller scale came immediately 1 was asked to do the Introduction to the Protagoras for the Liberal Arts Press, Its series of classics was aimed at the college audience the one Thad been addressing with relish in my undergraduate classes for over twenty years. first at Queen’s in Canada, then at Cornell and then again at Princeton. Greekless, rebuffed by techni- calities. turned off by the paraphernalia of research, but respectful of its aims, they were eagerly responsive if'one caught them where they lived. [ tied this voice in that Introduction! and T fele that it succeeded where the book had failed.’ This Socrates was alive 4-Vhae Sverates’arumgonrat i the key 19 hie pertonalisy hasbeen occasionally otc in the scholarly lneratare cog: Rabin, 19a8: 186:eF also Barabas, 9B: gf The prevent bowie EE eriuen withthe convicion thats alo the hey to hic philosophy Wastes, 1930! oie mage fone-sentence te from Robert Oppenisime, then Diretor ofthe Taitte, chat warmed my heart spore than anvshing ansone had ever side me about se Introduction 3 1 kept that voice the following year in an address co the Humanities Association of Canada, entitled, in private recollection of the aborted book, “The paradox of Socrates". Here again I was not talking to fellow-specialists. Addressing scholars hailing trom widely different bands of the academic spectrum I acknowledged the perils of decta ignorantia, never greater than in our own day of professionalized, dispersed, fragmented, minutely specialized re- search. Lamenting the scholar’s alienation from humanity, T said (1958: 497) that what T would offer in my address would not be scholarship but “humanism” on a jokey definition of the “hu- manist” as “a scholar making a strenuous effort to be human, trying, first, to find the relevance of his individual work to our common humanity; secondly to state his findings in common speech ot folksy talk, just the Queen’s English, unassisted by a suitease= ful of technical giossaries."" Is it really possible to do scholarship and that sort of “humanism,” both at once? I cannot be sure. But that is what T was trying for in that addyess. And Tam not giving up in the present book, though it will be more difficult now, for this work will have to be weighted more heavily on the side of scholarship, “There were errors in that early work which I have never tried to dig up and secant, It is boringly selFimportant to excavate the archaeology of one's mistakes.” But one of them is too big —a real whopper — and too noxious to be allowed a place in the limbo of forgettable mishaps." It concerns what T had made of Socrates’ central paradox, his profession of ignorance. He asserts that he has no knowledge, tione whatever, not a smidgin of it, “no wisdom, great or small” (ap. 218-D). But he speaks anu lives, serenely confident that he has a goodly stock of it~ sufficient for the quotidian pursu of virtue, And he rmplies as much in what he says." To keep faith with Socrates’ strangeness some way has 10 be found t save both the assertion of his ignorance and the implied negation. My mistake explicit in the Introduction to the Protagovas, implicit in “The work: “Thankyou, Gregory or he pure gold of your Socraces "Tt 01 rank boasfuess Te moe thie publi? would be tir ad comme from n fllespecal 6 Misnos tos 398-500 S But Tam rattle sce Donald Morison gf: goss) aking serous noah things Bad sod in a smlpopular omy iy seus age to think dow worth febUting Row im techies josenal, Should 1 be eproac hed fx hav wid Saracen rats te way Ieethinks aids ahink net. I eer of these he schelars Ai swrllow a erroneous ewe SE Nenophon on the srengeh of nothing beter than my 34810 vc dot they would have mle tamicvee tHe 6 Sint that work bot beng read by ellege scent here same point corecing is a To Raseon 198° 2, at gout 1 asemble seven texts in wich the implication is Unamibigacoss {shal be cing ste of them in the preset volume in due Course hT4 Introduction paradox of Socrates” ~ had been to accept the assertion and ignore the balancing reservation. I had maintained: “he has seen [1] that his investigative method's aim cannot be final demonstrative certainty, and [2] thatits practice is quite compatible with suspended Judgment as to the material truth of any of its conclusions” (Wlastos, 1956: xxxi). [1] is exactly right and it goes to the heart of what is -breakingly new in Socrates. What I had saidgo this effect — placing Socrates’ renunciation of epistemic certainty" at the core of his philosophizing ~ was one of the best things in that Introduction. But it was wrong to conjoin with it claim [2]. There is no necessary connection, John Dewey was not giving up the search for knowledge when making the quest for certainty his bee noire.!® Neither was Socrates in lis disclaimer of certainty ~ he least of all philosophers, maintaining as he did that knowledge és virtue. My error had been to saddle Socrates with [2] on the strength of nothing better than [1] Others beside myself had fallen into that tap. This is how George Grote, prince of Victorian Platonists, represents the position he thinks Socrates is holding throughout his elenctic searches: “ T have jot made up my mind... T give you the reasons for and against You must decide for yourself. ""' Invoking Cicero's authority, Grote associated Socrates with the leaders of the “New Academy, Arcesilaus and Carneades, those out-and-out skeptics, who maine tained suspended judgement (troy) about everything in: the belief that they were following in Socrates’ footsteps.” Cicero, who finds this position attractive,"* speaks of it as "propounded by Socrates. teallirmed by Arcesilaus and confirmed by Carneades, Te stiould not have taken me Gventy years to discover that this is badly out of line with what we see of Socrates in Plato's earlier dialogues, the most reliable of our sources. When told in the Gorgias 473#) that it would uot be difficult to refute his thesis, Socrates retorts: “not difficult, Polus, but impossible: for what is true is never tefuted, ” \ fitule later (4798) he asks: “Has it not been proved that what I said was true?” By no stretch of the imagination could Plato have put such words into the mouth of someone who is maintaining “suspended judgement,” has “not made up his mind.” “argues against everything and makes no positive assertions.""? No moral 10 “The Quest for Cerna had en thee of i 1 Grove tos: t 23a 12 See Chucker, 1970; ff: ch skeo Long, 1986: stl. at 440-1 15 He to falls into the trap, suocating pemcipledabmtnion fom ether assem oF disse ‘gue wtrmare pomyuans gee adensoneappterewiththe roms gaara cer dear ead fy auegh te ae required the Br Nanda Dene ss ve ‘The tat of these quotations is Ciceo’s description of she position of the New Academy tenia ona dea oulamque vom spre tea esd Cae 6 Introduction . philosopher has ever avowed more positive conviction of the truth of a risky thesis than does Socrates when he argues, for example, that he who wrongs another person always damages his own happiness more than his victim's."* How Arcesilaus and Carneades could have associated _their systematic adherence to troy with Socrates’ Finging affirmations we shall never know: our information about them is all too seant. But in Grote’s ease we do have his three-volume work on Plato (1865). When we scan it and find it ignoring texts scattered throughout Plato's carlier dialogues which repel that description of Socrates" epistemie stance, we have no choice but to say that, fine Platonist though Grote was, in this he had missed his bus and jumped on another going the opposite way. A fortiori so had Lin those early essays. “Phe wonder of it is that criticism was so slow in coming. While bucketfuls of it were being poured on a paper I had published a little carlier on Plato's metaphysies" it was to prove the most relentlessly rebutted monograph of the fifties in its field),"* not a word was raised against my skeptical Socrates until late in the sixties, except for an side in a footnote in E.R. Dodds’ commentary on the Gorgias." Extended critique was to come only nine years after that, in Norman Gulley's The Philosophy of Socrates.® the first book-length work on Socrates to appear in English since A. E. Taylot’s Socrates (1933) Gulley put his finger on various defects in my agnostic Socrates, so unlike Aristotle's and Nenophon's. I discounted that critique because it was based on the traditional view which emasculates Socrates’ profession of ignorance by reducing it to a pedagogical feint Anyhow, by that time [ was too deep im other concerns. AI managed to write about Socrates in the sixties was a short paper. “Was Polus Refuted?".!? which was on the right lines but did not get © the bottom of the problem it raised this would await Irwin and Santas in the seventies),2* a breezy essay in the Yale Review 1974) “Socrates on Political Obedience and Disobedience,” which provoked ‘and probably deserved) the withering irony in the ctle of| Dybikowski’s reburtal in the same journal (1975), "Was Socrates as Rational as Professor Viastos?”: and a longer not ensirely successful, paper entitled “Socrates on Actasia’” (1969). In none of 1G. 473A8L; sce especially chapter 5, section tbls References to Pat's dialogues wit bh ade by abbreviations ted at pp. 83-5 below, adapted ftom those i Twin, 19778), tp Manos, tape grate 18 Twentyane papers by other seiolarson the Third Man Aegument flowed (most of hens relisted in Vinson sgt gota almost oll of chem contain ect of sine 9 2a502 8, me 55. 21 T'had no ye gti shrough my heal tha a eri ho ie dead rang on me pot may be dead right on severat others 22 t967: G4 23 See section taf chapter below6 Introduction these did I undertake (o remedy, or even so much as acknowledge, the major fault in the account of Socrates’ philosophy Thad put into, those two essays in the fifties. Those T was now dismissing as the juvenilia of my middle age. ‘The stimulus for fresh thinking on Socrates came in a stunning new book, Plato's Moral Theory, by Terry Irwin.®! At Princeton I had been pro forma the supervisor of the vast thesis (the Jpngest and also the best ever written under my supervision, all of it lean, close-packed argument) of which the book was a partial result. To read it in its, final form, now organized into an outrageously bold argument, proved one of the outstanding learning experiences of my life, It did more to invigorate and decpen my understanding of its topic than anything I had yet read. Everything in Irwin's bibliography, extending to hundreds of items (books and journal articles). was well known to me, as was only to be expected: by this time I had been, teaching Plato for nearly fifty years. I had read virtually all of them; some of them T had studied in depth. But none of them had made anything like the same impact on me, For none had cut so brutally to the bone of the fundamental questions, The biggest of these is whether or not the moral philosophy in Plato’s dialogues is broadly atifitarian. This, certainly, is how it strikes, one on first encounter, since che claim persistently made there is that “justice pays” ~ pays off in happiness for the agent. This looks like saying that one's final reason for moral conduct should be that this is one’s safest guide to a non-moral end. Highly reputable books have taken this line when expounding the earlier. Socratic, part of Plato's corpus. Others merely dodged the problem, In W. K. C. Guthrie's History of Greek Philosophy certified by its Cambridge imprint as an authoritative reference work and widely used as such throughout the world) we read that “Socrates was famous for this utilitarian approach to goodness and virtue.”® The author assumes that of cowse we all know what “utilitarianism” would mean when lifted out of the works of nineteenth-century British moralists and made to categorize the very different kind of theorizing assayed by the Greek pioneers, Read the first four chapters of Irwin's book if you have the stomach for them and you may see why, when Tw, at through them, 24 lein, so7za, 35 Guthrie, 1600: 482. He would not have beea wrong if he hd sal this only ith eeference to certain passages it Nenophon ‘arin the conversations with Aristippus Monat ad Euthdemts g.jsicrs: he attributes the same view to hi thes hero, Cerues C3 98s Bur neither doer Nenophom make Socrve conten wiastan see of Mem 88.0 pone Introduction 7 I was so often reminded of the saying matheur au vague, miei vaut le faux, Irwin discards “‘uilitarianism,” finding it hopeless as the precision tool he needs to analyze what Socrates has to say about virtue and happiness, He replaces it with “instramentalism’”, the view that virtwe is only an “instrumental means” to happiness ~ entirely distinct” from happiness, only causally connected with it® The question then becomes erystal-clear: Does the relation of virtue to happiness in Socrates’ moral philosophy satisfy this specification? In his investi ation of the works of Plato's middle period Irwin's answer to this precise question is, precisely, “No.” But when discussing the Socratic dialogues of Plato's earlier years Inwin’s answer in that book is a no less precise “Yes.” Agrecing with the “No” in Irwin’s book ~ cer inntrumentalit”” 1 dhsented sharply fom fs "Y even less of that, I felt, in Socrates than in Plato. T said so in no uncertain terms in reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement? recognizing Inwin's extraordinary talene™ but arguing, hard against his view of Socrates. insisting on a diametrically opposite view which hails Socrates 2s the founder of that long line of theorizing first expounded in the Platonic corpus, reaifismed more cautiously: in Aristotle, in recklessly: extreme cerms by Antisthenes and his Cynic progeny and also by the Stoies,** which makes virtue ho mere external means to happiness but its inmost core, its sole or major component. Irwin replied, rebutting my eritique in a letter 10 the T.L.S, T replied to the reply, and so did he again and again. The merry-go-round went on for nearly six atonths® — the longest philosopincal exchange on record in the correspondence columns of TLS. ; What was it that T found unacceptable in the view that for Socrates instrumental” means to happiness? It was the claim that for Socrates happiness and virtue are “entirely distinct," so much so that the happiness desired by all human beings as the final end of all their actions is tar same for all of them, ly, Plato is no there was ue is only an * eo, 30 27 Mason, 1078 ‘See tbe spy vindicated by his bubseguene wosk on Avstede. No more Fstadies har Seen made in aw ete than ag But nt by another tener othe Soerase cite, Aristippus, founder ofthe edit line Sf moral dicors in which the eae plessare and McCue fe Salued only ass means to plemure DL. 38 age frwin's fine lever a in March, ony last ws in September. It ended when 1 announced finmy Sepucinbes fer that tis would be mylar aed Ten then, by courtesy, allseed 1 See the derption of instrumental means" ie Urwin, 19778! 300, 9.53a Introduction regardless of differences in their moral character: all of them, the noblest and the most depraved, have the same “determinate” final end; they differ only in their choice of means.” Is such a view ever stated by Socrates in our texts? Obviously not. But every philosophical interpretation of his philosophy has to go, to some degree, beyond what is said in so many words in our texts. Trwin's is no exception. Its a brilliant feat of the constructixe imagination. To decide whether or not it is true we have to ask: s it a credible account of what is taught by Socrates in the text of Plato's earlier dialogues? Here the first question has to be: Does it allow the Socrates of Plato's Apology, Crite, and Gorgias an internally consistent theory? I my July letter to T.L.S. [argued that it does not.2? Let me try to make the same point more simply: now. Here is what Plato's Socrates says when explaining, himself to the court that was to sentence him to death, Addressing an imaginary fellow-citizen who is veproaching him for having lived in a way that now puts him in peril of execution as a criminal, he retorts: alp. 28n5~a; "You don’t speak well, O man, if you believe that someone worth anything at all would give countervailing weight co danger vf life or death or give consideration (o anything but this when he acts: whether his action is just or unjust, the action of a good or exit man. "™ Andi this is how Trwin himself glosses a text in the Gorgias 5120-8 itis living well that matters, hoicever bad the consequences for the fuvure welfare may be” (1977: 240). Gould Socrates be saying this if the instrumentalist construction of his view were correct? On that construction what must determine the choice between just and unjust action would have tw be ony the consequences for something distinct from virtue. But what Socrates in face believes is that the choice should be determined by adherence to virtue regardless of the consequence for ansthing distine! from virtue. Vhe ultimate choice would be for happiness in either case, since Socrates holds that this is everyone's ultimate end, But the motivation would be radically different in the vo cases, as I emphasize in my last letter.°* $32 Abriequote from the second paragraph in my review of his book: Socrates x supposed {oho th the vreau che sot ate pursing the ve ond differing only tte hoice of means, id that the morales atk B simply co enighten tha eheice = The programme is redaction, Mora hnowlcdge bonis echnical" bnowledge = Enovledge of 43 Bucin such a Iabored way that t have only myself o blame if the point did nat get across. 34 shall be quoting thin text again and ncuming he tpcations tn chapter Band then again im te Epilogue 3p TLS. Sepn 5 1978. Introduction 9 However, the brunt of my critique does not fall on the cy between a te pursued “however bad the anything distinct from virtue, and 2) Virtue should be pursued only for its consequences for happiness, which is something distinct from virtue.®* I argue that even if Socratic instramentalism were internally consistent it would be sadly deficient in good sense.” Consider Socrates’ claim chat the just man is always happier than his unjust oppressor. In the example in my first letter March} Socrates makes the claim that the tyrant who breaks an innocent man and prospers as.a result has damaged his own happiness more than his victim's. Allow those two men sufficiently different conceptions of lnappiness and the claim, thought still very. hard to believe, could be savely held within the limits of Socrates’ strangeness, Not so on the i strumentalist hypothesis chat che tyrant and his vietim both want the same thing and the victim gets more of that same shing than does the wyrant.® Socrates would be lacking in the mest rudimentary good sense ihe had really believed such a thing. Dic I yet this point across to Irwin? In his May letter he retorts that “ philosophers [sometimes] be plausible things." True enough. But has any philosopher ever believed anything flat implausible? . Had the debate been judged by an impartial referee the decision would have undoubtedly gone to Irwin on “points”: he made dhe 58 -Thnigh wnat dr he nse he snes it viene eri tec Secl Satie mesures Stemi san ti a beet cna sonnei hasan 5 Gree ene eS fyi 25h pam would Hae ot men fh eae cea cnc a te tian The uisanay of i apart id toute tent asec Shah ete epee ta Jas pn inion nsachn: Conc tates ste so te aoe eek Seeetnalt err acratanon nga eae at pclae inne Paasche espsensponee petro Menthe rcs sae at pe Senne ee Peter rathg woul hac ung aa spect no See he ms EieeeSuRerne re mde rset ate cle it he pon tr fses Socrates inignce. ch isthe pomelates fall human beings a aniform desi fo Endod edaoeahupbincr aint sotcaame em haone arre it pepe hn oa pee i goa10 Introduction best case for the weaker thesis, He thereby confirmed himself in his adherence to the instrumentalist view of Socrates.” So the controversy in T.L.S. did not do much for him. But it did wonders for me. It marked a milestone in my own understanding of Socrates. I could now sec, more clearly than ever before, Socrates’ true place in the development of Greek thought: he is the first to establish the eudaemonist foundation of ethical theory which begomes common ground for all of the schools that spring up around him, and mores he is the founder of the non-instrumentalist form of eudaemanism held in common by Platonists, Aristotelians, Cynics, and Stoies, i.e. of all Greek moral philosophers except the Epicureans. For’ this enhanced understanding I was indebted to Inwin, and also for something else: for his deportment in the debate. He argued his case with cool composure, without the least hostility, thereby evoking from me too argument free from acrimony. So the debate put no strain on our personal relations, and did not impede the development of what was to become one of the cherished friendships of my life and one of the most productive. In subsequent exchanges by cor- respondence Irwin has given me positive help in clarifying my own view. ‘The fir T published after that debate. Contribution to the Greek Sense of Justice," had swung too far to the other extreme, taking Socrates’ view of the r to happiness to be identity, no less, -As T shall be explaining chapter 8 below, this was wrong ~ not so wrong as to degrade it to a mere instrumentality, but still wrong, and it had to be put right. Trwin had pointed out to me a mistake in logic which had facilitated that conclusion. An unexpected sequel to the controversy in T.L.S. «perhaps even a by-product of it: it had advertised the fact that my retirement fom Princeton had not proved a sentence of civil death) was the invitation to give the Gillord Lectures at St. Andrews in 1981 Considering that the roster of earlier Gifford lecturers had included awe-inspiring names ~ Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey — the invitation was intimidating. But I resisted the impulse to chicken Socrates lation of y 39, Asubscquem developmarnt af hie view losing Soe Shae sonne desi four happiness 97 1 pat This fon ike making sour grapes ‘ioral choice: Nothing remotely lke this ever said wr implied {ny suggestion af un afin beteeen Socratic and Epicurean though could ons be made in defiance af the historical face In the winge of the Epieueana "Sacraten was Portrayed asthe complete ani-Epieuress” Lane, 988; 153) fer devaled decumentaiion ee Kieve, tof Jo ection at, chapter & Pe taBo: or 42 Tracknowiedge his help when making the correction ia e984: ae chapter 8,45. 185: 85-113) seeks to take the mane fan adaptive conception ofagpiness, uamely shaconce we un outs unsesbzabie it vanishes snd then ef uit ofi bs toe Inireduction u out and the result has been the work behind this book and more: all the intellectual effort T have mustered since 1978 was elicited by the challenge of that invitation, For this I could never be grateful enough to the Giflord Trust. Years which might have slid into Vacuous tranquillity were galvanized. Nothing I had ever done before ~ neither my struggles with the Presocratics in the late forties nor with Plato's ontology in the fifties and with his moral psychology and social philosophy in the sixties and seventies ~had engaged me so totally. For a me T even dropped my research on Placo’s ontology. T returned to it only when I realized that the contrast between the metaphysical entities which Plato called “Forms” or “Ideas” and the loci of Socratic definitional inquiry which could also be called “forms” or “ideas was crucial for the right tunderstancling of the relation of the “Socrates” of Plato’s earlier dialogues 1o his namesake who expounds thereafter the Plaronie two- world view. Though [ knew that a highly Snished performance was expected at St, Andrews, the three yeazs allowed me to prepare were used up just in the preliminary task of clarifying my understanding of their theme. I pussued this by means of hand-outs on various subtopics presented for discussion in graduate and postgraduate seminars There was one at Toronto, attended by faculty and students in philosophy or classes, where I ventured, with enormous benefit, a trial run of the material 1 was working up for the St. Andrews Lectures.*® F did the same, with equally helpful results, in seminars on Socrates at Berkeley. both regular ones for the University?” and & Summer Seminar for College Teachers in Philosophy under the auspices of the National Enclow ment of the Humanities, In the latter I was privileged to share my thoughts on Socrates with younger scholars whose teaching in their own institutions abutted on Greek philosophy, and they did more for me than I for them." Helpful co 45 See chapter 2, ction cd {Uf The shi in spgegeapy foam "Forme in Plato v9forme” fn Socrates il be reminding the reader of that diference throughout the beak 45 Thin ill bea major theme is ebaprer 9 {0 Lescond with geetde ve benaht te eof eaceibarios othe discusions fn that seminar trhonc membership inated thelate Leonard Woedbury, nd David Gatihier, Ronnie de Sous, Hans Hersberger, Kennet Hmm ana Edward Halper Schnow ledge with warmest thanks Clarifeaion fm though earaugh comments sade in those eominary a0 Beriley or fuer oncr ow the sume campuy by Alan Code, A.A. Long. Benson Stacy Alan Silverman, and Stephen White 48 I derived paricular bereft fore sonvnbutions by Hugh Benson, John Beveraui, Tom Brickhouse, Daniel Graham, Davst Halper, Grant Luckharde. Stark MePherraa, Willan Prion Nicholas Sth, Roslyn Wess, and Donald Zest12 Introduction me in a different way had been special presentations I had the chance to make at the National Genter for the Humanities in North Carolina which T attended as a Senior Fellow in the Fall of 1980 and 1981, working there under ideal conditions of interaction with scholars in other humanistic fields I reached St, Andrews quaking in my shoes, my preparation of the feces T was fo give here nowhere near the point they would have had to reach before being entitled to publication. They could take my audience no further than I had yet managed to come myself ‘Their audience was town no less than gown, so once again | was challenged to speak in a voice that reached non-specialists, At the same time T had the benefit of expert criticism from scholars in the University which had enjoyed a highly distinguished tradition of Socratic scholarship. That fine Hellenist, John Burnet, with whose Osford text of Plato's works (1900) and commentaries on the Euthyphvo, Apology, Crito (1924), and on the Phaedo 1 had lived for decades, had been the Professor of Greek there in the first part of the present century. Third in succession to him had been Kenneth Dover, whose masterly essay on Socrates in the Introduction to his edition of the Clouds (1968) I had reprinted in my collection, The Philosophy of Socrates (1971). His successor was Ian Kidd, the learned editor of the definitive Posidonius* to whose article on Socrates in the Encrclopedia of Philosophy (1954) Lhad been referring my students as the best available essay-length introduction to Socrates’ character and philosophy I was very fortunate, I feel, that the terms of the appointment. though inviting publication, did nor require it, Because of this I had the chance to pursue my own understanding of Socrates’ thought while expounding it at St. Andrews and continuing to reRect on it critically thereafter. The lectures were written out, and could have been published immediately. But their thought was far from complete, To print them in that form would have been almost as much of a disaster as the publication of the aborted MS I had produced twenty-five years earlier at Prinecton, Missing from the material I had brought wo St. Andrews was what I would be learning there from audience-response. \ good example concerns the topic to which I have alluded already: the view that the relation of virtue to happiness in Socrates’ thought was identity. This interpretation had 46 Two of them contained uch ofthe sateia Iwas to publish Scenic Hlenchue™ agar 2pe38 300 71) ad Sox Bi vols: 3 40 Hi edilion of sol 1 of Posdoni’ Fragments had appeared in 2972 (cond edition in 19g) The Commentary in Voluie Wf the work appeared in 8 nde the sles of “The wowal of Knomtedge™ Introduction 3 fot been made without considerable textual support. What ele but this, Thad thought, conlé Socrates have meant it saying that stves is“*the mark ‘onorSs. 10 which one should look all actiou, one’s own or those of one’s city, directed to the end tha justice and siphrosyn shall be present in one who is to be blesed” (6, oye)? Bat ic was strongly contested in the seminar which followed the lecture where T argued for that claim. Ian Kidd pointed out thae to sive Socrates this view would be to collapse the diference between he Position and that of the Stoics, which sound historical fudigmens Could hardly allow. I recognized the justice of his eritieal ard cae so in one of the later lectures in the series, But to find the right terme in which the true relation of virtue to happiness undersoel te Plato's account of Socrates’ view was a much longer jobs Le mec nen to be until more than two years later chat | would hitom iy solution to this extremely difficult problem.§) And this isonly one of several things that needed to be put right belore the picture of Socratic philosophizing Lhad presented in thee lectures would be ready: for print. One of them as the inoue: of Socrates. Nothing about hin I felt, had been less well understood than this in the preceding literature. In a misimterprecation that ees virwally: canonical ic was even ensconced in the dictionaries. Socratic irony had been taken to mean Socratic deception, he it malicious, as Thrasymachus is made to sec it in the Republic,® or benign, as Alcibiades has ofien been undersiood to represent itin the Somposiom.} Te would be a long time bufore I could por ay hiuger oe tle this swag wrong. T did $0 40 a lecture on -"Sotratie Troy in Ganibridge.** three years after I had delivered the one on the same theme at St. Andrews which T could now see was hopelenls inaclequate:it gor no furcher than identilsing the ironical compose in Socrates’ character ‘which I described, correctly enough. ay collage of ironies". tiling to se how irony served asthe ehicle at his profession of ignorance, inclligible only ifunderstood to dclaioa one sort of knowledge, while claiming another in the same breath 1 consider this proposal s0 fundamental that Lam putting it inte the first chapter in the present book But 1 am not suggesting that ie owe stand alone. Its indispensable support is im the exeay published shortly aier, “Soeraten’ Disavowal of Knowledge” als) in evox 1 argue systematically for the claim that the disavowal wa “comples irony," a Bgure of speech in which what i said hoth is and iene ae 5 In a oar Eames caper Rafe tok 32 th in chapers below 33,18 tin he sue chapter, 34 Vlastos, 1: 96, now reprinted as chapter 1 "4 Introduction is meant. I give a brief version of that argument 1.1.00 “Sacrates’ complex philosophical ironies, ‘The other lecture at St. Andrews where the thought had failed to touch bottom was the one on the Socratic Elenchus. Not that there was anything there I would want co take back. Its claim that the clenchus is a method of philosophical investigation ~ no mere device for exposing confusions in his interlocutors, which ig what Richard Robinson had made of it in his book, Plato's Earlier Bialectc™ — was dead right. In my lecture I maintained contra Robinson that while the elenchus was adversative, pervasively negative in form, its aim was strongly positive: to discover and defend true moral doctrine.” This emphasis, I believe, was right, and so too the claim®™ that what Socrates aimed to discover by this means was knowledge, not just true belief, So too was the restricted scope J allowed it, insisting, with, Woodruff,®* that in the earlier dialogues it is used to test only moral never metaphysical or epistemological theses: contrary to what he will be doing in the dialogues of Plato’s middle period, this earlier Socrates uses the elenchus exclusively in the pursuit of moral truth, remaining from first to last a single-minded moralist, never venturing into metavelenctic argument intended to probe the validity of his investigative method or the truth of its ontological presuppositions. And so Ginally was my insistence on the importance of Socrates’ frequent injunction “Say only what you believe.” Richard Robinson had been well aware of the presence of this rule in Socratic argument.Y But neither he nor anyone else had realized the methodological implication of this rule ~ that its operative force was to exclude debate om unasserted premives, thereby distinguishing Socratic from Zenonian and, indced (so far as we know, from all earlier dialectic ‘On all these aspects of the elenchus T was entirely clear in dat lecture on it in my Gifford series at St. Andrews. But TF was still stumped on what L had been calling in seminars throughout additional note 55 Though differing ftom Rebinton on this score my debt 10 ins om other grounds is immense, The apprecision of the elenchus ans fundamental and aistinesve feature of Siriate® meshed of favesigation jr somtething for which, Robinson hed fouxhe single Tanded in mid-century How far ahd ete he wa om hie eben soe Deeemparin hicseestmnent of the eevchus with what other scholar say rather, fi ew fnimportan work sateceding the publication of Robinson's book Mair E.Taslon 19na, pans, Conford. 1932" a0! ; Shorey, 1993: parr: Hard ‘preven decades ater ts publieation ‘Reale & inhi, tga" yroies won Frits, 19707 2568 56 Ae Galley had argued before me 11968: 2 Bp See Viasiog, volgen na 3B Wooasut igier 37-8 Tsknowledge the debe ip Vlasros, rosa: 53.9. 22. Robinson’ #953: 53 ant ya: 0-8 t pain Introduction 5 preceding years “the puzzle of the elenchus,” namely, how itis that Socrates expects ta reach truth by an argumentative method which ofits very nature could only test consistency. On Donald Davidson’s theory of knowledge, consistency should suffice for truth. But no one, least of all Davidson himself, would suggest that Socrates could be regarded as a preternaturally prescient Davidsonian, wwo and a half millennia ahead of his time. In fidelity to our texts no spistemological theory at all can be ascribed to Socrates." How else then could we reasonably account for his conviction that moral truth is what he did reach by means of his elenctic arguments? Light on this, point broke when it occurred to me to ask: Is it not just possible that Socrates was making certain assumptions, without any philosophical theory to support them, which would have made it scem reasonable to believe that the clenchus did more than show the inconsistency of his interlocutors’ false belief with those other beliefs of theirs from which Socrates deduced its negation? Suppose he had believed that the moral truth for whieh he was searching was already in cach of his Inierlocutors in the form of truc beliefs, accessible to him in his clenetic encounters with them, and that he could afeays count on the presence of these belie’ in their mine! and could use them as the premises from which the negation of their false thesis could be derived. Then it seemed to me Socrates’ conviction that he could discover moral iruth by means of his elenctic arguments would not seem $0 unreasonable atter all. ‘This is the new approach to the problem I was to take in “The Socratic Elenchus” (Vlastos, 1983"? and this T reached only after had delivered that lecture on the elenchus in my Giffords in 108 Less than «wo years after my return to Berkeley, Dame Fortune unexpectedly smiled again. [ received an invitation to go to Cambridge on a visiting appointment as Distinguished Professorial Fellow at Christ’s College and Lecturer in the University’s Faculty of Classics. To Cambridge I had a long-standing personal debt, dating back to pre-war years. I had gone there in 1938 while still uncertain of my future, still in search of a vocation. Thad come, as a private scholar, unharnessed to any research project, unattached to any College, without standing in the University, my only tie to it alibrary card, What had drawn me there was Cornforé. His writings fo Davideon, 1086: 407-19. Ot GE m. 540 additional note 1.1 ard e210 cho 2 was pleated to fue sopport for A fam Davidson” As VTastos explains, the elenchus ‘sould mate forth simpy by ensuring coherence ins act of bli Tone could axeume ‘hatin cach ol urthers are akeassteue bsiefs inconsistent withthe Sse shink there te gnod reason te believe she amumption ix rse™-tre enough, smiaay, to eoure that when. tour belch re content they wil i most large matters be tue” 85: 6)16 Introduction had inspired and guided my study of Pluto and T had longed for closer contact with him. Though I had no institutional claim on him, and though he had just suffered a traumatic loss, the death of his son in Spain, he graciously aftorded me the opportunity to meet him. In the course of our discussion I voiced objection 10 his view of the creation story in the Timaeus. He encouraged me to write up my position and when I did he said: “You stil haven’s convinced me But we must get this into the C.Q,” There it appeardti in duc course to mark a new turn in my life — the end of my vocational doldrums, admission into the company of working scholars in the field of classical philosophy. It was the gift of the foremost Platonist of his day to a young unknown, My residence in Cambridge in 1983 was under the happiest of auspices. As visiting Fellow at Chris's, voting member of its governing board during that year, I had the rare privilege of an inside view of something still unknown in the United States and Canada: a distinguished institution of higher learning which was completely self-governing. Aside from a formal lecture, my statutory duties called only for one seminar ~ but what a seminar it proved to be! Its like I had never experienced in my life. Almost all of the people in it were dons, and they included some of the world’s best scholars in the field of ancient philosophy. The opportunity to place before them week by week the conclusions I had so far reached on Socrates was as rewarding a challenge as T had ever had in my life: What I had put into my St. Andrews lectures and also the highly controversial points at which my thinking now pushed further on had the benefit of critical discussions in that seminar and of spin-offs from it in private discussions. The most fruidul of these were with Myles Burnyeat, now Laurence Professor, fourth in succession to the Chair which had been established for Cornford. By the time I reached Cambridge studies of Burnyeat’s had appeared which I had recognized as the best work fon the Thrartetus produced in my lifetime ~ better than Comford’s, fully as sensitive 10 Plato’s text but distinctly stronger on the philosophical side, And I had found it entirely congenial to my own approach. Thus, to give one example, his paper on “Socratic Midwifery” had established conclusively that the metaphor is a Platonic invention, foreign to the Socrates of Plato's earlier dialogues ~a thesis T had expounded myself at Princeton and at Berkeley. albeit without the subtlety of textual analysis and power of critical argument now deployed in this paper. Tn discussion Burnyeat has that rare gift of seeing what you are driving at before you have got Introduction 0 there yourself and helping you complete your own thought without butting in. My proposed solution to the " puzzie of the elenchus had been produced with his help.** But I still don't know whether or not he agrees with it. T have learned the most about Plato through Irwin, but from Burnycat, While I was still in Cambridge came Dame Fortune's third big smile on my post-tesirement years: the invitation to give the second in the newly established series of Townsend Lectures at Cornell, This university had been a philosophical alma mater to me. Here is where Thad started teaching Greek philosophy at the graduate level ~ and concurrently had started learning modern analytical philosophy myself. [had got precious little of this in my graduate days. at Harvard, where AN, Whitehead, my supervisor, had befriended and inspired me, but taught me litle of contemporary philosophy except his own along with a powerfully Whitebeadianized Plato a heady brew from whose high I luckily sobered up soon afer leaving Harvard to start learning Plato for myself while teaching philosophy to undergraduates at Queen's in Canada, At Cornell 1 ingested great gobs of analytical epistemology in our philosophical discussion club from Norman Malcolm, Max Black, Arthur Murphy and their students. Most of what I know of contemporary philosophy T learned at Cornell, as a ated graduate student nasquerading as a professor. So the invitation to give dhe Townsends evoked a sentiment not unlike that which pulls the aging alumnus back to the haunts of his youth. And there was moze than affeeton= laced nostalgia to make that invitation compellingly attractive. I have seldom beet able to resist an opportunity to try Out tiie toce on. a new audience any substantial piece of work T have written out What made it even less resistible in this case was the chance to resume personal contact with Irwin, now on the Cornell faculty and a member of the ‘Townsend Committee. and also to make contact with Gail Fine, the other distinguished Platonist on the Cornell faculty," and with their graduate students," presenting my thoughts supers 85 C acknowledge the indebtedness ja Vaston 9830: 57 5 At his tage of is lie Whvceheae ad come under Pleo spel: Mis ents for Plato ‘ook the frst of allowing him large ais Gem fk ow philosophy. Its he was ab ed by some contemporary Plates ln AT. Taylors interprecaton afte sonmeloge oe Finer igo, there as much of Whitehead st 9fPhiioy ad sometimen ore Fortdsatets formes powedilsackote was neing prosuced be Carmien sce Corner, rays, Press 6) Mv’paper on Paton ontology Wlasas, 18sa) was praded in response toa shallenseay sontribuson she had ade’ to my Cornell seminasy which both ave and Iris eee sttending (© The mon valuable evtque of mv paper on “Sucrasicfromy” { have yet received from snvone caine from Doo Adams, den a graduate audent 3c Cornel, who attended at Seminar. Packnowledge He Ep in by at chapter18 Introduction ‘on Socrates in a setting where my audience, as at St. Andrews, would include both classicists and philosophers, with an attractive sprinkling of non-specialists as well. Here in this book are the lectures I gave dere. Chapters 1, 2, 3. 4. 5: 6, and 7 are revisions of the seven lectures I delivered at Cornell. Chapter 8 is my Cambridge paper on Socrates’ ethical theory. Itgives the posi je of my interpretation of Socrates’ mgral philosophy to round out my side of the 1978 controversy Yn T.L.S. M understanding of Socrates has now achieved considerably greate maturity than in my Gifford Lectures. But it has reached neither fixity nor completeness, Tam now working on additional essays, rewrites of Giffords. They are to go into a later volume of Socratic Studies whieh should published essays on include revised versions of the previously “The Socratic Elenchus,” on Socrates’ Disavowal of Knowledge,” and alo the paper entitled “The Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy” which 1 would pit against the picture of Socrates as a erypto-oligarchic idcologue lately given currency in Stone's popular book." Denying that Socrates attitude is anti-populist, I argue in the third of these papers that it is demophitic, though not strictly. democratic: we should not credit Socrates with a democratic political theory, for he las no political theory at all. But he does have political sentiments and loyalties. strong ones, How profoundly democratic in the broader sense of the term® diese are we can see by comparing him on this point with Plato in the Republic. To confine, as Plato does in books 1 to vit of that work, moral inquiry to a tiny elite.” is to obliterate the Socratic Vision which opens up the philosupli life wo all, If the unexamined life is not worth living by a human being” lp. 384), Plato's restriction of the examined life to an elite Socrates would haye been seen as making life not worth living for the mass of human beings, ‘Thirty years ago work on Socrates was a rarity in the scholarly Sp Stone, 1698, For what i wrong with that book ee my fetter to T.LS.. November 4-10, Sn For the sess thatthe mrve fr Soceatescomesmoaion was essentially politcal ome Could handiy do bewer than comet te ‘ays by to elghteenehsret Stamp, Prévet apd Dresg, now edited by Marto Memuari (apSrb) and the ree of SGiolaiship ssmpatheue t ahie approach by the same author i081 668 Gnths acct point T ifr from iy freed Richard Keaut sce my review of Ms Sorat tod the State isso, 1984 sig The lne Eric Havelock remarked that dhe Greeks" demtoeraine lneracy” (19765 43). thc sense of the ter Sucres democratize’ tmoral philosophy he Brought i Sithin the 70 This not made explicit until book vw 337! Joo: quoted, i part rin chapter ut ehe ground fori prepares aleadl vb inthe classtructare ofthe” pesecty food” pases wise, nil of ade "se exelusiely by the wisdom of is philwepher- Introduction 19 literature in English. Today it is appearing in abundance.” 1 feel privileged (o have had a share in this greening of Socratic studies whose beginning can be dated to the sixties, with the publication of the late Laszlo Versenyi’s Socratic Humanism (1963). Michael OvBricn’s The Socratic Paradoxes and the Greek Mind (1987), Norman Gulley’s The Philosophy of Socrates (1968), and W. K. C. Guthrie, part 2 of vol. 11 of his Hisiory of Greek Philosophy (1969). For me the wurn- around began with Santas’ paper on “The Socratic Paradox” in 1964,"% which first shed light on one of the thickets of Socratic strangeness, making good sense of a thesis which Socrates had long seemed to me to be asserting in mulish defiance of common sense.”> In this book T am toiling in the same vineyard. Many of my proposals are controversial, some of them highly so, Well aware of this, Ihave chosen not co present them in a controversial context, for then I would have had to write a very different kind of book, addressing the expert instead of the “common reader” of Plato's work. As I sald at the start, what T offer In this book is not meant (0 distract attention from Blato't story but to invite closer scrutiny of [tit docs not strike my readers, on duc consideration, as the most reasonable interpretation of our Socratic texts they should junk it Fit has ang worth at all, it is to make Plato's words, more Understandable than they svould be without it. Anything writen about them that fails in thin bs worthless. eeaders who find enough pesrlfoera: inte s]auceestonst fea trust will not deny tne their seas their critical attention I censure.* T have made mistakes inn dhe past and will doubsless wiake more in dhe future, Anyone who points them out to me is my (Fiend. PERSONAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my colleagues in the Berkeley Department of Philosophy: for giving me an academic home upon my retirement from Princeton in 1976; for affording me, with incredible generosity, optimal con- ditions for teaching and research; for keeping me as Professor 1+ More work on Socats is appearing now in a single year shania a decade during she thie foe or Bi . 12 1ghys tyyebq, Conny ignored by ecer mar atthe dime: not tinted in Gui’ ‘extensive biblgeaphy mor 361 13 See section 1 of chapeet 5 Ht Lahall expect to read it with prof, chowgh 7. may be unable to compose replies, Goniingenccs of advancing age and precariots health now conten me to comers My ‘ime an energy with penarousfrugaity for my own creative work, Fit prvoniy in hs fgenda gor the Sovraic mien which are to iow the pretent elume requenry ithe one in Gu! 1975= Introduction Emeritus in their midst upon my second retirement in 1987, an honour I had scarcely earned, since my appointment here during my working years had only been that of a Visiting Professor 0 Terry Tewin: as if all the help he has given me in the past were ot enough, he offered, entrely of hissovn accord, out of the goodness of his heart, to read through the whole ofthe present MS, find offer me numerous critical comments, some of whit have led «0 improvements ‘To my instructors in the Mackintosh, principally Alan Code, but also Steve White and Henry Mendel! for their patience with a backward pupil and their forbearance at being imporwuned by telephoned 8.0.5, at all hours ofthe day or night whet I was stuck Without a mastery of this gadget T doubt if 1 would have been Capable of the production of the MS, now oF ever SOCRATIC IRONY! “Irony,” says Quintilian, is that figure of speech or trope “in which something contrary to what is said is to be understood" contrarium ei quod dicitur intelligendum est).? is formula has stood the test of time It passes intact in Dr Johnson's dictionary. (“mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words” [1755]', and survives virtually intact in ows: “Irony is the use of words w express something other than, and especially the opposite of, [these] literal meaning” (Ibster's). Here is an example, as simple and banal as Tcan make it: a British visitor, landing in Los Angeles in the midst of a downpour, is heard to remark, “What fine weather you are having here.” The weather is foul, he calls it “fine,” and has wo trouble making himscif understood to mean the contrary of what he Why should we want to put such gists on words, making them mean something so. different from heir “literal” ie their cstablished, commonly understood ~ sense that it could even be ite opposite? For one thing, humour. For another, mockery. Or perhaps bot at once, as when Mae West explains why she is declining President Geraid Ford's invitation toa state dinner at the White House: “L's an awful long way to go for just one meal," The joke is on someone. & put-down made soctally acceptable by. being Wwreathed in a cerebral smile A third possible use of irony has been so little noticed that there is no name for it. Let me identify it by ostension. Paul, normally & Osiginatl writen for the B Chub of te Closes Pauly of Cambridge Univers, this nay has been presented an discussed ar Cornell as 4 Townuend Lecture and Comin ae Tiling Seminar. 1 thank those whose coment ave lacneed the Sanyo eat a 2 stint Grate gag. Much the ame defoition eceurs a b2r9 tat BOre 3 The samples in Muscke, fg: 15-19, several of hem pare genes inehcks no pure specimen ofthe variety. Nether tis nor iy that other exellent heat, Bee imension of from aeiced, far less enplored22 Socratic irony good student, is not doing well today. He stumbles through a tutorial, exasperating his tutor, who finally lets fly with, “Paul, you are positively brilliant today.” Paul feels he is being consigned to the outer darkness. But what for? What has he done that is so bad? Has he been rambling and disorganized, loose and sloppy in his diction, ungrammatical, unsyntactical, ill-prepared, uninformed, confused, inconsistent, incoherent? For which sub-class of they failings is he being faulted? He hasn’t been told. He has been handed a riddle and left to solve it for himself. Though certainly not universal, this form of irony is not as rare as one might think. Only from its most artless forms, as in my first example, is it entirely absent. There is a touch of it in the second. Mae West puts us off teasingly from her reasons for declining that gilt-edged invitation. She is implying: “If you are not an utter fool you'll know this isn’t my real reason. Try guessing what that might be.” When irony riddles it risks being misunderstood. At the extreme the hearer might even miss the irony altogether. If Paul had been fatuously vain, sadly deficient in self-criticism, he could have seized on that remark to preen himself on the thought that he must have said something brilliant after all. If'so, we would wane to say that the deception occurred contrary to the speaker's intent. For if the tutor had meant to speak ironically he could not have meant to deceive. ‘Those two intentions are at odds; in so far as the first is realized the second cannot be. That in fact there was no intention to deceive should be obvious in all three of my examples. And that this is not a contingent feature of these cases can be seen by referring back to the definition at the start, Just from that we can deduce that if the tor had meant to deceive someone — say, his wife back in London ~into thinking that the weather just then was fine in L.A., he could not have done it by saying to her ironically over the phone, “The weather is fine over here.” For to say this ironically is to say it intending that by “fine” she should understand the contrary; if she did, she would not be deceived : the weather in L.A, was the contrary of “fine” just then ‘This is So basic that a further example may not be amiss. A crook comes by a ring whose stone he knows to be a fake and gocs round saying to people he is trying to dupe, “Can I interest you in a diamond ring?” To call this “irony” would be to confess being all at sca about the meaning of the word. Our definition tells us why: fraud the literal sense of “diamond” has to be the one he intends to convey. To see him using the word ironically we would have to conjure up a case in which he did not have this intention — i Socratic irony 5 say, by his saying to his ten-year-old daughter with a tell-tale glint in his eve, "Law, can Timterest you inva diamond sings" Nee suppose he had said this to her without that signal. Might we still cell “irony”? We might, provided we were convinced he was not taying 10 fool her: she is ten, not five, old enough to know that if that trinket were a diamond ring it would be worth thousands and her father would not let it out of his sight, If we thought this is what he was about testing her intelligence and good sense — we could stil count it irony: a pure specimen of the riddling variety, Tt woul not be diqualifed as sch ifthe ite gil wereo lth tone oe te remark was nor made with the intention to deceive. Similarly, the tutor might have said “brilliant” well aware there was a chance Paul might miss the irony and mistake censure for praise — nosing this and for good reasons of his own willing (0 take the ‘Once this has sunk in we are in for a surprise when we go back to the Greeks and dicover thatthe imention to deceice, soon one word for irony, is normal in its Gteck ancestor vivoneia, rn sirmewonai.* The difference is apparent in the first three occurrences of the word in the surviving corpus of Attic texts, all thee of them in Aristophanes. In Hasps 174, dos eipcovixdds refers to Philocleon’s lying to get his donkey out of the family compound to make 2 dicast out of him. In Birds 21, itis applied to Iris for Iying her way into the city of the birds. In Clouds 449, elpcov, sandwiched in between two words for “slippery.” figures in “a catalogue of abusive terms against a man who is a tricky opponent in a lawsuit."® We meet more of the same in fourth-century usage. Demosthenes {1 Phil. 5} uses it of citizens who prevaricate to evade irksome civie duty. Place uses it in the Las (gore) when prescribing penalties for heretics, The hypocritical ones he calls the eirmuihon species of the class: for them he legislates death or worse; those equally wrong-headed but honestly outspoken are let off with confinement and admonition. In the Sophist, pronouncing Socrates’ dialectic a superior form of saphistike® “Plato contrasts it with the run-of-the-mill. sephivikr practiced by ordinary sophists: these are the people he puts into the dirtnikon species of the art, Not Socrates, but his arch-rivals, whom Plato thinks imposters, are the ones he calls cirmnes (2684-8), 4 On ca at term of abuse Singer in te cased . nfo) inthe classical period see the groundbreaking sperby Ribbeck, 78: sh hs net ben perscded by we laerstudey which tal tot be onderiating review ‘over 2968) ad tn. fm his valuable cition of the Clan 8 A yawn yeovaia ocoowe! the sophinry of ache Hoey aesa Socratic irony How entrenched in disingenuousness is the most ordinary use of iron we can see in the picture of the eign in Aristotle and ‘Theophrastus. Strikingly different though he is in each ~ odious in ‘Theophrastus, amiable in Aristotle’ — in one respect he is the same in both*: he willfully prevaricates in what he says about himself. Aristotle takes a lenient view of such dissembling in the case of Socrates. Casting him as an eiron Aristotle contrastsghim with his opposite, the braggart (alazm), and finds him incomparably more attractive because the qualities he disclaims are the prestigious ones and his reason for disclaiming them — "to avoid pompousness”” ~ is commendable (N.E. 1127623-6), though still, it should be noted, not admirable in Aristotle's view. When he expresses admiration for Socrates’ personal character he shifis to an entirely different trait: it is for indifference to the contingencies of fate (apatheia), not at all for cipcoveias, that he reckons Socrates “‘great-souled”” (megalopsuchos, Po, an, 9816-24; cf, D.L. 6.2). In Theophrastus the cian is flayed mercilessly,” portrayed as systematically deccitful,"” venomously double-faced,*? adept at self-serving camouflage." This is how Thrasymachus views Socrates in that famous passage which he refers to Socrates’ customary” eirineia tr R. 337A: “Heracles!” he said, “This is Socrates’ habitual shamming. cieo0v1e eipaoveia’. I had predicted to these people that you would refuse (0 answer and would sham (eipesvetcoio) and would do anything but answer if the question were put to you. Thrasymachus is charging that Socrates lies in saying that he has no answer of his own 10 the question he 1s putting to others: le most certainly has. Thrasymachus is protesting, but pretends he hasn't to keep it under wraps so he can have a field-day pouncing on ours and tearing it to shreds while his is shielded from attack. So there is no. In the references to Socrates in the NE .E. and M.A, but perhaps notin the Rit Ushere dpseia ie reckoned a "iduinal™ ait Txsvagpocnncse, 19yao42 8 The same at die core’ wpoowoinay te to Fharvor in Ariwile AE. svotse Iiposwoinod bri 70 xetaov i Theophrastis 1s ecatin gr pretense in ether eae 9 "Suen men are more to be avoided than adders” tse fu 19 “He pretends not to have bear chat he heath, not to have sen what hese. ta hase na recollection ofthe thing #0 sich he agreed 1-3 SMe will pratie to their faces thowe Se attack? etind dheie backs" (1.2). Fn i ishing thar Friedlander (19538: ¢38) should sty that Veophrastas portrays, but" does ‘dpaotia’ Could there be 2 more einphatie devaluation than she tenath {Quoted here and sn the preceding moter’ iy leeving Sesrates oat aly Theophrastus fel free to ven on the slpew the scorn he dewrves in the common view 12 Asstote too ebuerves thas your most dangerous ati are the quit, dissembling, and Snrerupulous’” fot mpbos wat elpawes nat moved i their ev nent under & co cncerior (Rie, 38ab Socratic irony 25 excuse for rendering cironeia here by “irony” (Bloom, Grube, Shorey): if that translation were correct, lying would bea standard form of irony. From the behavior of cipaveic in all of the above Attic texts from Aristophanes to Theophrastus one could easily jump to a wrong conclusion : because itis so commonly used to denote sly, intentionally deceptive speech or conduct chroughout this period, must it be alwave so used of Socrates by Plato? This is what many noced Hellenists have assumed : Burnet," Wilamowitz,** Guthrie,” among them. Let me point out how unsafe this kind of inference would be. From the fact that a word is used in a given sense in a multitude of cases it dows not follow that it cannot be used in a sharply different sense in others. Such statistical inferences are always risky. This one is certainly wrong. Consider the following : 72 G, 4890-x; [a] Socrates: “Since by ‘better’ you don't mean stronger,” tell me again what you mean. And teach me pore gently admirable man, so that T won't run away from your school.” Callicles. You are mocking me ‘eipeovein fb] Socrates: “No, by Zethus, whom yi mocking (weNAé slpcaveveu of men! 0u used cartier to do a lot of 15 Bloom (1068) and Gabe (4974) eke this v0 be che seme of eat Shores too (400° takes "toe Stnewesed below be te she sence of epee esering to Sap ste to Be shits, wishou explanation. to “diwembie™ fr ihe later] uae shout the messing of he Engh ware hone i co tm tien sed! of Socrates by his opponents, and have always an unfavourable meaning.” He ts nee inmer als'Vorwurf, auch von Albssiades, Sip. a18.° Nekher that in R. 3374 elpaov fas the same sense as at Smp. 9168 and 2160. “ “iar “inotuntan Siena t Placon]geschiet 1 nor Burnee preven: aplures ewsely theses26 Socratic irony In part [a] Callicles is protesting Socrates’ casting himseif as a pupil of his ~ a transparent irony, since Callicles no doubt feels that, on the contrary, it is Socrates who has been playing the schoolmaster right along, In [b] Socrates is retorting that Callicles had used the figure of Zethus to mock him earlier on, associating him with the latter’s brother, the pathetic Amphion, who “despite a noble nature, puts fon the semblance of a silly juvenile” (4858-4864) 4In both cases mockery ig being protested without the slightest imputation of intentional deceit. In neither case is there any question of shamming, slyness, or evasiveness — no more so than if they had resorted to crude alling each other “pig” or“ B No less instructive for my purpose is che following from the Rhetorica ad Alexandru (a tweatise of uncertain authorship, probably of the fourth century) 2” 13 Fironeia is [a] saying something while pretending not to say it or [b] calling things by contrary names. (21 At [a] we get nothing new: ciraneuein is one of the many «ricks of the trade this handbook offers the rhetorician.* Not so at [b], as becomes even clearer in his example ‘ry Evidently, chose good people (eto1 pv of xpnetat) have done much evil 10 the allies, while we, the bad ones, have caused them many benefits loc. cit.) ‘The way xpnooi is used here reminds us of the line Aristophanes gives Strepsiades in the opening monologue of the Clouds: “ this good youth” (5 xoneras abros veavias), says the old man of his good-for- Irsin's “ly will wot do: chee ie nahing parsicularls “cunning, wily or hypocrite (OLE D. fo "sg" mee tome or coment We mus ao jet Rubbechs understanding of sweat nepal ctaney dpay a e ook sone ‘gon elpeievou at (L) va form af mockery Uiough false, innccr; Prase rightly comncedng te ae dpoxsiew here with Poi 278, Tov pov foot teres wahoo. and tac allograpner Timon’ reference to Socrates e230, op. DL sig nese preopauncras oNarINDs epuvevriy. Ribbeck remarks apropes of (9) inthce the Current conception of sinovevedar must have been broader thay i usally fumed’ foe din He should Rave specified more definitely his wider" we. That Hetesat can be used wo rapres mockery pute sod spple without any insimession of Behe Ratbeck docs ov sccm to nave graoped clic why chicanery" ar che sense a (4? to Livny stnbuted to Avatotte included te Bevin eion of Artois work) U0 fate to be asrnibed to Anayimenes of Lampnacus, a contemporary of Theophraator (te the wocucion by H. Rackham in his gamsaion of in the hoc Cauteal Library ore as0#) The aseripton lar from certain, but ts date cannot be auch laser. 1 Iinguiscs and poles ambience chavo foordiecentury Athens echoing loorates Trehet IRisrite Eight tragments oft turn pin papyrus dated by i editors inthe frst hal of the third century |Grenlell & Huns, Hibet Papp pt no. 28, pp. Uri ‘a0 Cope, 19691 gore describes the form of persuasion eccommeniied by the treatie as a Sstom afresh and evadons, showing an ter inference to right ard rong roth hd falsehood.” : | Socratic irony 27 nothing son.* This is ire least intention of deceit Can we make sense of this state of affairs? In a mass of Attic texts {eight of those to which T have referred: T could have added many more of the same kind) we find eeoveia implying willful mis- representation; yet in the ninth (2) we see it standing for mockery entirely devoid of any such connotation and so to0 in part [b] of the tenth (1g), where a rhetorician who is thoroughly at home in fourth century AtGic usage gives a definition of eipaveia which anticipates, Quintilian so perfectly that the two definitions are precisely equivalent: each is a deseription of the same speech-act, viewed from the speaker's point of 13(b], from the hearer’s in Quintilian, Is this linguistic phenomenon understandable? Yes, perfectly, if we remind ourselves of the parallel behavior of eur word “ To say that a malingerer is“ pretending” to be sick and a con man “pretending” to have high connections is to say that these people are deceivers: “to allege falscly” is the basic use of to pretend, But there are contexts where “to pretend” by-passes false allegation because it by-passes falsehood, as when we say that the children are “pretending” that their coloured chips are money (*pretend- money" they call them) or that their dolls are sick or die or go 10 school. Tn just the same way we could say that the crook in the example is “ pretending” that the stone on the trinket is a diamond when he offers it to his daughter, which is as far as anything from his preending it is a diamond when putting it up to the people he is trying to hook. That the latter should be the most common (and, in point of logic. the primary’ use of “pretending” docs nothing to block a secondary use of the word, tangential to the first—a subsidiary use which is altogether innocent of intentional deceit, predicated on that “willing suspension of disbelief” by which we ‘enter the world of imaginative fiction in art or play, This is the sense of “pretending” we could invoke to elucidate ironieal diction, as in Mac West's remark: we could say she is “pretending” that the Jength of the journey is her reason for declining, which would be patently absurd if “pretending” were being used in its primary sense. There is no false allegation, because there is no allegation: she is pulling our leg y of the purest water: mockery without the 2 Should the reader he eeminded shat the occurrence af roles! speech-acs i Independent ffitie avail of 3 deverption of them at tach inte speaker's language? ‘The use of Hrony, a dinine fom teficton an fi ved a the hilt, We ean imagine a caveman fring ough pes oak tate ih he eck Try hs tender mera Ne examples ia Homer (Eumteus he" beggar: good eepte and virtue would have among men, Tere so Kil soa.” Od rgqo2: he aneans just the oppesite28 Socratic irony ‘This, I suggest, gives a good explanation of the fact that though ir, eirdneia, eirmnewmai ave commonly used w imply disingenuous ness, even so, they are capable of an alternative use which is completely free of such evocation and, pace Burnet, Wilamowitz, Guthrie,* Dover® are so used at times by Socrates in Plato. What happened, I suggest, is this: when eipcoveicx gained currency in Attic use (by the last third of the fifth century at the lates), its semantic field was as wide as is that of “pretending” in present-day English, and eiron had strongly unfavorable connotations ~ was used as a term of denigration or abuse —because the first of those two uses predominated heavily over the second; to be called an eign would be uncomplimentary at best, insulting at the worst. But turn the pages of history some three hundred years — go from Greece in the fourth century B.c. to Rome in the first ~ and you will find a change which would be startling if long familiarity had not inured us to it. The word has now lost its disagreeable overtones. When Cicero, who loves 10 make wansliterated Greek enrich his moth produces in this fashion the new Latin word, ironia, the import has an altogether different tone. Laundered and deodorized, it now betokens the height of urbanity, elegance, and good caste 15 Cicero, De Ovatore 2.67: Urbana etiam dissimulatio est, cum alia dicuntur ac sentias... Socratem opinor in hac ironia dissimulantiague longe lepore et humanitate omnibus praesttisse, Genus est perelegans et cum gravitate salsum And when Quintilian, wwo generations later, consolidating Cicero’s use of the term, encapsulates its meaning in the definition cited above, we are no longer in any doubt that ironia has shed completely its disreputable past, has already become what it will come to be in the languages and sensibility of modern Europe: speech used to express a meaning that runs contrary to what is saiel the perfect medium for mockery innocent of deceit. Subsidiary in the use of the parent word in elassical Greece, this now becomes the standard use. Eiroeia has metastasized into irony 22 See nm. 15, 16, 17 above 25 GE. hin lw on Sip. 24624: “eiptaeir unlike ‘irony is *mackemadenty’, ‘pretended Ignorance's in Rep gra "Thrarrmachin speaks inno fendi tone of Socrates customed cgavela’.” Dever is anuming that alr is sued im the same sente fa bot Pasiaxes as 'Ctoune iu eke diwimnulation when what you say ie quite other than what you ‘understand. In hut inany ae dncmulaion Sacenes, in'my opinion, far excelled all thers in charm and humanity. Most clegant ie ths orn an seasoned in seriousness ‘Translating sinimuiac here by” civerbing’” awe may, with good wartant from the ictonaries we should bear in mind thac drift concealment, normally comveved Be he English word, abyent fom the igure of speech Cicero hatin view. Decetil speech wih) nor be what he cals wane disimulation, sshere the whole tenor af your speeee shows that Sonate gravely jesting sere ludms im speaking diierenty ram what you shinier) Socratic irony 29 Exactly what made this happen we cannot say: we lack the massive linguistic data to track the upward mobility of the word What, I submit, we can say is who made it happen: Socrates, Not that he ever made an assault upon the word. There is no reason to believe he ever did. In none of our sources does he ever make eirdneia the F in his “What is the F?” question or bring it by some other means under his elenctic hammer. He changes the word not by theorizing about it but by creating something new for it to mean: a new form of life realized in himself which was the very incarnation of eipaveiar in that second of its contemporary uses, as innocent of intentional deceit as is a child’s feigning that the play chips are money, as free from shamming as are honest games, though, unlike games, serious in its mockery (cum gravitate salsum), dead earnest in its playfulness (seccre Judens), a previously unknown, unimagined type of personality, so arresting to his contemporaries and so memorable for ever after, that the time would come, centuries after his death, when educated people would hardly be able to think of ironia without its bringing Socrates to mind. And as this happened the meaning of the word altered. The image of Socrates as the paradeigmatic cir effected a change in the previous connotation of the word.” Through the eventual influence of the after-image of its Socratic incarnation, the use which had been marginal in the classical period became its central, its normal and normative use: ermea became Thaye made a large claim. What is there in our sources to show that Socrates really was the arch-ironist Cicero and Quimtilian thought him? Nothing in Aristophanes, ‘The anti-hero of the Clouds is many things to many men, but an ironist to none: too solemn by hall as natural philosopher, sage or hierophant, too knavish** as a preceptor of the young. Nor is he represented as an ironist in the sideswipe at hhim in the Frogs (14919). The portrait is now appreciably different. Outside the thinkery ~ else the question of an ordinary Athenian, 25 A change so drostc as ro eclipse the origial meaning ofthe word fem Cicero's and fav's view, The occultation seems tol: fora wna they tay about ria we would {gues that in texte they Kaew well fe Greek orginal ad been» Schnee The becomes so defaiive for Cicero that fe cstent co simply that oie found jn Socrates, mhieh he deploys the Nenophoa, and Serchines® Bast 392 And when Quintitan seme ‘hae “roma may characterize a man's whale Wife” he refers ta Socrates and only to hi Init, Or 246 28 Though he doesnot himselfincaleate crooked argument, he pandes to the demand fori. He keeps both nd is apposite the Shenoy andthe Shae Mayes the premseratd {ie Customer can have hs choice. CX. Nusbaum, 1980: 48." Threnghout the play Socrates ‘ales no attempt to seach jostce and o ange the just tae of rhetorical sll is atone ‘acest neural; at worst he condones cece.”30 Socratic irony picking a seat next to him would not arise ~ he is no longer a sinister figure, But he is still a quibbler, whose hair-splitting solemnities (ei cewvolaw Adyoiot Kai axaxpignoudTor Afipiov, 1496-7), engulf his interlocutors in tasteless triviality. No hint of irony in this pretentious idler’s chatter. We turn to Xenophon. At first it looks as though neither here shall, we find what we are looking for. Through most of the Memorabilia this tirelessly didactic, monotonously earnest, Socrates appears to have no more jesting, mocking, or riddling in his soul than the atheistic natural philosopher and “highpriest of subtlest poppy- cock” of the Aristophanic caricature. But once in a while we get a flash of something different, and then, in chapter 11 of book mr, we get a big break. Here Socrates turns skittish and goes to pay a visit to the beautifiul Theodote.*® He offers her suggestions to enlarge her clientele and she invites him to become her partner in the pursuit of philo:. He demurs, pleading much business, both private and public, and adding 16 Xenophon, Men, 3.11.16: © have my own girlftiends (philai) who won't leave me day or night, learning from me philters and enchantments Since she is meant to sec, and does see, that these ‘‘girlfriends” are hhilosophers,.” depressingly male and middle-aged, there is no Guestion other being misled into thinking that her visitor basa stable of pretty girls to whom he teaches love-potions. So here at last we do get something Cicero and Quintilian would recognize as ironia, though hardly a gem of the genre: its humor is too arch and strained. Afier the visit to Theodote, Socrates in the Memorabilia resumes his platiuudinously wholesome moraliring But he snaps out oft for ‘ood in Xenophon’s Symposium.** There we see what he might have had not toned down the hues of its Socratic portrait to shades of gray. The convivial mus-en-scine of the drinking-party prompts Xenophon to paint bright, even garish, colours into the picture. ‘Asked what is that art of his in which he takes great pride he says it is the art of the procurer (mastropos, 4.56). Challenged to a beauty- contest by the handsome Critobulus (5.11f), he pleads the superior 27 Clouds, 359, in Arrowsnich’s (C63) translation Ta Kicckegted” gts, moter Gl-9 and 6) fishes of ony fn che dialogue with Charcles 12.96 | and Hippies (45 " “ 2g Here Kierkegaard caste sally faust, deserts him. He Snds the episode "disgusting ers g0 He wares Apolledorus and Amtsthencs, bs iseparables, and ab his frequent vistors fom Theben Cebes snd Simomias (3 41) . si For svendappecajon of ny in th work edhe crmmens om he ging tthe rating park) is Hlgging, rgrt: 1-20, Fall dbcunon of the seme material ao in else, iggy: rts though curoualy enough she doesnot perceive i a3 ony Socratic irony a beauty of his own ugliest features — his snub nose, his oversized flaring nostrils ~ on the ground that useful is beautiful (5.6). Here we see a new form of irony, unprecedented in Greek literature to my knowledge, which is peculiarly Socratic. For want of a better name, Tshall call it “complex irony” to contrast it with the simple ironies Thave been dealing with in this chapter heretofore. In ‘simple” irony what is said just isn't what is meant: taken in its ordinary, commonly understood, sense the statement is simply false. In “complex” irony what is said both is and isn't what is meant: its surface content is meant to be true in one sense, false in another. ‘Thus when Socrates says he is a “‘procurer" he does not, and yet does, mean what he says. He obviously does not in the common, vulgar, sense of the word. But nonetheless he does in another sense he gives the word ad fac, making it mean someone “who makes the procured attractive to those whose company he is to keep” (4.57) Xenophon's Socrates can claim he does exactly that. Again, when he says that his flat, pushed-in nose, his protruding eyes, and his large, Aaring nostrils are beautiful, he does not, and yet does, mean what he says. In the ordinary sense of the word he would be the first to deny that they are. But if by “ beautiful” he were allowed to mean “well made for their required function” (5.4), then he would have us know that his particular sort of eyes and nose are superlatively beautiful: unlike the deep-set ones of fashion-models, his can see sideways, not merely straight ahead ; his nose is a more efficient vent than that of the currently admired profile (5.5-6) Undoubtedly then there is an authentic streak of irony in. Xenophon’s depiction of Soerates.® But for the purpose of assuring, us that it was really Socrates who played the critical role in the mutation of eirmieia into irony, what Xenophon tells us about Socrates would still be defective in important ways. Iu the first place, the ironies Xenophon puts into the portrait have litde doctrinal significance. They contribure nothing to the elucidation of Socrates’ philosophy because Xenophon system- atically ignores those very features of it which Socrates wants to be understood as “complex ironies” of the sort he illustrates in making his hero say he isa procurer and has a charming nose, I mean the 52 shall be empl this term here and tele dneghous the Sook a &quasteceal term, horeng ack t my laid veo cin Vleet go 43 Sit undervandatie that Gee ras age cm. 23 above) tel peak of Socratic iatgues of Nenopion. ‘at wel ax Anchine song ws thee of Plato Bat dhelate thet he arn to trate ann dong ot clea thas the Socrates sr (ignorant of everyting,” onniam Wnt ie cule not be te ‘enophonsc gure, thogh i eoula bee Nechncan sce ramet adie owe 4 below, snl quoted aguin a0 a" in chapter 3)""T had mo noge theo ‘shin f could bene him by teaching ite hn 232 Socratic irony great philosophical paradoxes of which we hear in Plato's carlier dialogues, like Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge and of teaching. Each of these is intelligible only as a complex irony. When he professes to hhave no knowledge he both does and does not mean what he says, He wants it to assure his hearers that in the moral domain there is not a single proposition he claims to know with certainty. But in another sense of “knowledge,” where the word refers to justified true belicf— justifiable through the peculiarly Socratic method of elenctic arguinent ~ there are many propositions he does claim to know.®® So too, I would argue, Socrates’ parallel disavowat of teaching should be understood as a’ complex irony. In the conventional sense, where to “teach” is simply to transfer knowledge from a teacher's to a learner's mind, Socrates means what he says: that sort of teaching he does not do. But in the sense which he would give to“ teaching” ~ engaging would-be learners in elenctic argument to make them aware of their own ignorance and enable them to discover for themselves the truth the teacher had held back ~ in that sense of “teaching” Socrates would want to say that he és a teacher, the only true teacher; his dialogue with his fellows is meant to have, and does have, the effect of evoking and assisting their own effort at moral selfimprovement.** In the second place. the words eiraneia, cirmn, eirmeuomai are never applied to Socrates in Nenophon’s Socratic writings either by Xenophon himself or by anyone else. If we had only Nenophon’s, picture of Socrates we would have no reason to think that Socrates contemporaries had thought of civineia as a distinctively Socratic trait, That noun and its cognate verb, sv cusspicuous in Thrasyma- chus’ attack on Socrates in T1 above, drop out when the identical reproach is ventilated by Hippias in the Memorabilia, This is how the complaint is now made to read 47 Xen Mom 44.937 “We've had enough of your ridiculing others, questioning and refuting everyone, while never willing t0 render an account yourself (0 anyone or state your own opinion about anything, The reference in 71 to Socrates’ “habitual eirzeia” has been washed 444 On these comple ironies and 9h 235 The textual Baie for thir cat 86 He savs he is “one of the few Athenians, otro say the oly ene, 9 undertake Emixeot sf, additional note #-1, 28) the tee politcal at” (Gs sero) ina content im witeh the Ccterion forthe practice ofthis arts one's eect on the moral character one's fllohe tovensmen iG. 5250). Both cents are dssseed fn aldtonal pote 1 7 Quoted more fully sa-725 in chapter 48 Nor dues anv other of Sacrates interlocutor ever say or imply in Nenophon that Socsates ivan ely. He is never represented theres» producing on fiend or foe the impression he lovey anocioted wih dhe, se sedition ote 61 fe fort in considerable detail in Vinson, (085 "at ph Socratic irony 33. Fortunately, we have Plato's Socratic dialogues where what Xenophon denies us is supplied in such abundance that 10 go through all of it would be work for a whole hook. Forced co be selective,® I shall concentrate on one piece of it the half dozen pages or s0 that make up the specch of Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. Despite the provenance of this composition from a dialogue of Plato's middle period, its Socrates is unmistakably the philosopher of the earlier one:*® he is portrayed as voicing that total disavowal of knowledge which is so striking a feature of the Socrates of the earlier period who, as I shall be arguing in chapter 2, is Plato's re-creation of the historical figure. The discourse of Diotima which Socrates professes to report in his own speech in the Simposium is as strong an affirmation of Plato's anSocratie doctrine of transcendent Forms" as is anything he ever wrote. But Aleibiades has not heard what Socrates says he learned from Diotina. He joins the drinking-party after Socrates has finished. In the speech about Socrates Alcibiades now proceeds to deliver. the last in the Sympasium. Plato brings back to life the earlier wPlatonie Socrates as surely as he does also in book 1 of the Republic. He ushers us into the Republic durough a Socratic portico and escorts us out of the Sympasium through a Socratic back-porch."* ‘The key sentence in A tacles’ speech is 18 Simp, 216r4; “He spends his entire life crmuomenos and jesting with people.” How shall we read eirdrevomenes? When Quintilian “Fast. Or. 9.2.36) remarks that jrania may: characterize not just a text or a speceh ut “an entire life” ‘vita universa’ Socrates is his only example, So we know how fe would have read cironewomenos in the text. But time and again itis read differently by scholars. Guthtie™ takes it to refer to “the way in which Socrates deceives everyone as to his real character.” Dover, assimilating it to T1 above, denying that the word means “irony” here, takes it to refer to Socrates’ “ pretended ignorance.” Suzy Groden translates, makes on Akibiades in Plato of Sing Atiells and charatsils ironical the sense of loci a 9 below, a8 Ushi we arging in sowing shat ten The peopl to whine sys in Nenophon's Sumposim’ Gat he sa procures ad has lovely fatal eavure ds derstand, of course, tat be is speaking ionically= bet they give. indecton ot cognizng this a a abitval Socratic trait 9g Bu see abso sxtion w cf chap 40 The multiple differences between these two petinis of Plates itera ouput i es portrayal of Socrates wl Se acid in chapter 2 44 £160 (115 below): "he Knows nothing and ts ignorant of everything.” 42 Tobe dscoted sm section of chupter &. See epevially she glos on 22 there 45 See additions! note a1 "The compontion of Rep 44 Similany in the Phono authentic Socratic tara ie uted wo ier (57-548) and exp "43n 10 the end) the no les authensicaly Platonic pislsophieal segunene of the iaiogue M5 Gushete, 1369" 446, 46 See n 35 alone,34 Socratic irony He pretends (my emphasis) to be ignorant and spends his whole life putting people on, and W. Hamilton, He spends his whole life pretending [my emphasis] and playing with people. If we follow Quincilian we shall understand Alcibiades to be saying that Socrates is a lifelong ironist. If we follow Guthrie ge Co. we shall understand him to be saying that Socrates is a lifelong deceiver. Since, as T explained above, the latter was the most common of the current uses of the word, the presumption should indeed be that these scholars are right, So if one believes that, on the contrary, Quintilian’s reading is the right one, one must assume the burden of proof. I gladly assume it. But I must start with another sentence in Alcibiades’ speech which is equally important for my thesis, for here again the critical word is applied not to what Socrates says in this or that passage but to his usual, characteristic, way of speakin 19 Smp. 21806-7: “He heard me out. Then, most civonikos, in his extremely characteristic and habitual" manner, hie said Here Groden and Hamilton translate, respectively, “He answered in that extremely ironical way he always uses [my emphasis}, very characteristically.” He made a thorough! emphasis). characteristic reply in his usual ironical style [my Thus of their own accord both of them give me all T want. Do they realize what they are doing? Do they see that they are welshing on their previous translation of eiraneuomenos in 18? T don’t know and 1 don’t need to know. Tt suffices that here Plato’s text allows no other choice Tet us recall the contest. 79 comes at the climax of the pitee de résistance of Alcibiades’ speech: his narration of an episode from his distant youth, when le was still in his “bloom” ~ that final phase in a boy's wansition to manhood, which in that culture marked he peak of his physical attractiveness to males older than himself. The story begins as follows ‘10 Smp. 2174: “Believing that he was seriously smitten by my bloom, T ‘hought ica windfall, a wonderful piece of luck, since by allowing him my favors T would be able t learn from him all he knew.” 17 skeen, with whieh cf atta dowels fn-rz above Socratic irony es ‘The project of swapping sex for moral wisdom may seem incredible today. It would not have seemed so in the least ta someone in Alcibiades’ circumstances at the time, Let me enumerate them: ) As we know from Pausanias’ speech in the Symposium (21806-2194), this is the norm {ramos) in the higher form of pederastic love: the boy gives “favors,” the man gives intellectual and moral improvement. (2) Alcibiades already had (and knew he had):" that asset to which he was to owe throughout his life o much of his unprincipled success: stunning beauty and grace. 3), We know from other Platonic dialogues and from Xenophon too" that Socrates has a high susceptibility to male beauty to which a sexy teenager could hardly have failed to resonate,”* 4) Socrates does not answer questions, does not expound his wisdom.” Pieces of it spill out in elenctic arguments, leay interlocutor wondering how much is being held back. 3) We know that the speaker is a highly acratic character. He starts his whole speech with a confession: the rit Smp. 21683-5:“T know that [cannot contradict hin and 1 should do as he bids, but when Iam away from him I am defeaged by the adulation of the crowd.” There is no reason to think that he was different as a teenager. Puc those five things together and it should not seem strange if a boy who longs to become a “good and noble man” (kalas kagathos should get itinto his heae that the key to what he wanted was hidden away in the vast, undisclosed store of wisdom in Socrates, who might be induced to slip him the key were he to offer as a guid pro quo something asirresistibly attractive to all the men of his acquaintance as was his own superlative “bloom.” He pursues the project methodically, going through all the ploys in the current repertoire of 744-6, “I had 2 wonderf opinion ofmy blac COME Ferguson ia Gua Combrage deci Han, © Cambridge, 035), 2635 " Arresingly Fhandscme, he eeu fom men ip Ahem te erogmton protege dinaey shea Inothereocieu to estraurdinary Deaute it women, and his nslonce ve raped uh ‘harm of manner thar, wen he showed tespect for newer gous wor eis age ot futhority, guardian nor wie, tue uteageowsem ef te act was cltem getien nt only {ie air of the actor remembered 30 Pr soya: 6. gbrbs Care tg3o-8: Men s8e1-3 51 Nen. Sup 35 Nenephon lf 3, add she precious infomation hich ne never se om Pato ‘hat Socrates salto asceptiole to (eral Geary. The ght oi the wantly clad These makes Socrates (speaking for hinazand hs companions "hing to touch mia estes Sse shall ga away excited ‘Gnonmspeos) and wih longing "mabhocue36 Socratic irony homosexual seduction.* But nothing works. Socrates remains friendly but distant, When Alcibiades wants w hear the sweet nothings of love all he gets is elenctic argument, more of the same old thing. Finally he sets Socrates up and blurts out his proposition. Here is the response he gets: 712 Smp. a1B8D6-219at: “He heard me out. ‘Then, most ciramikas, in his extremely characteristic and habicual manner," he said: “ear Alcibiades, it looks as though you are not stupid (phaulas), if what you say about me is true and there really is in me some power which could make you a better man: you must be seeing something inconceivably beautifal in me, enormously superior to your good looks. If that is what you see and you want to exchange beauty’ for beaucy, you mean to take a huge advantage ing to get true beauty in exchange for seeming beauty of me: you are t = "gold for brass Here, I submit, it is incontestably clear dhat “ironically” has to be the sense of eironikas, for the context gives no foothold to the notion of pretence or deceit. Socrates is turning down flat the proposed exchange, saying it is a swindle, He starts off with a simple irony, saying to Aleibiades, “you are not stupid,” when he elearly means “you are stupid. very stupid: what could be more stupid than to think I would fall for a barter of gold for brass?” When such a thing happens in those verses of the Iliad he echoes here~ Glaucus exchanges his golden armour for one of brass the poct explains “Zeus had taken away his wits." Socrates is saying to Alcibiades T would have to be out of my head co buy your proposal: what a fool you must th a complete ass, to think that I would let you pull it off.” He winds up with a “complex irony 11g Simp. 21981-3: “But look more closely, blessed boy, lest you have missed that T am nothing. The mind’s vision grows sharp only when the eyesight has passed its peak, and you are still far from that.” Alcibiades is told that the “gold” he has been looking for isn’t tere after all. If moral wisdom is to be understood —as Alcibiades understands it~ as the sort of thing which can be handed over in a swap, Socrates will insist that he has absolutely none: qua repository of such wisdom he is “nothing.” To say this is not to deny that he does have wisdom of another sort which Alcibiades could have for free ifhe would seek it himself, looking to Socrates not as guru but 33 Though here the roles are ceversed: the boy is chasing, aot chase. 4 has fent pace of Taz was ced ae 4g above Sr 654 38 Tp. gid shove and addional nore 1 Socratic trony 37 as a partner in the search.*” To find deception anywhere in this speech we would have to plant it there ourselves: there is not a shadow of the will 1o mislead in what Seer said to Alcibiades most eironikas, Does that settle the sense of eirdneuomenas at 18? No. But it does create a presumption that there too the sense is the same: it would be unlikely that rirmikos would be used as we have now seen it used in 79 if just two Stephanus pages earlier “he spends his entire life eirmeuomenos” had carried the thought that Socrates went through li * deceiving everyone as to his eal character. "™ So fetus look an closely into the context there ~ the paragraphs in Alcibiades’ speech sshich precede immediately the seduction story. They are pureciniy the famous simile with which the whole speech had begun 14 Smp. 215a7-n3: “I maintain chat he is very like those Silent that sit in the workshops of the staruaries...who, when opened into wo," tur out o have images of gods inside.” This is the picture of a man who lives behind a mask ~ 2 mysterious, enigmatic figure, a man nobody knows: “You should know that none of you know him” (216c-p), says Aleibjades 10 Socrates’ friends. To say this is not at all to imply that Socrates has been deceiving them: to be reserved and to be deceitful are not the same thing. All we can get from the simile is concealment," not deceit Even so, we have ( ask if Alcibiades docs not insinuate deceit in his own explication of the simile: 115 Smp, 21602-5: “You one that [a] Socrates is erotically. deposed tovarde beautifel youths, abwaya banging pound them, smiten, by then and again [b] that he knows nothing and is ignorant of everything .-. Isn't this like Silenus? Enormously so. s ae 37 Cf Socrates’ Uchavior in the Lacs. The moval whom he is aibed to supply on demand the disclaims stremolvs “he has na knowledge ef that hing, nor the ale te ee phic of you speaks truly ffi]: he ha wot een diconerr or learet af anting of kind” (1B60-E . Buc when Laches offers hirmel? to Soceates for instruction. i8ge) he is ipeleomed ~ nou to have knowicdse peared ina bio bv some ce, bat to ain Sieh Socratesin “common counsel and teurch™ gusevhnan nah vanes he peta cont eey losee over the couperstive nate af the relion 3B 50 Gurbrie tars The image of “opening up" to dela something infnisely precious, which B eonceaed From the vulgar fewstecutsat 29606, sr 42a Lars po undavon nay stakes oe for Martha Nusbaun’s noion shat the sages ae seed by Plo. sential secoal 1980! 18). There is profound evan er thot tnt sexual imacy a ot knowledge ofthe beloved perton i acquired: ia our dese lo hy se somata Sscsoe) and “cpintemolegical epsremic] need. are joined. and, appsremth, nanepoescle g8Fg0. But Plato's (ext gives no warrant fer sending this tnevght fat es al ‘sor suaesting to his feliow-aakers a 2269-4 tha the real Stace wold be seven) speed up” 10 lim orto them sarough semua isimaey (80 Cty gles in 24 above on dtvinwen in Cicero's denerption of cratic ini,38 Socratic irony The allusion to Socrates’ eroticism in part [a] of this text is amply corroborated elsewhere in Plato and in Xenophon as well." But here, after putting Socrates’ bloomechasing into the centre of the picture, Alcibiades scems to take it all back ¥16 Smp. 21607-£1: “You should know he does not eare at all if someone is beautiful: you wouldn't believe how he scorns that sort of thing.” He says the same thing no less than four times at thé climax of the attempted seduct 117 Smp. 219¢3-5: “He was so superior, so scornful and derisive of my bloom, so insuiting of So on one hand we are told that Socrates is “smitten” by male beauty, on the other, that he is utterly scornful of it, Isn't this what Guthrie might have cited as good reason for reading deceit into Firtnewomenos at TB? If Socrates is so contemptuous of such beauty, how could his pursuit of it be anything but a sham? | This is a highly pertinent question. I must meet it head-on. To do so T must say something about Socratic ers to distinguish it from Platonic eras, with which it is so often conflated ~ most recently in. Dover's Greck Homosexuality (1978) and again in volume u of Foucault's Histoire de la Sexnalité (1985). There are four differences, 1, In Platonic eras what is loved in a beautiful boy is the transcendent Form of Beauty whose image” he is. Socrates’ ontology has no transcendent Forms. So what he loves in a beautiful boy is a beautiful boy, and that is all 2. In Platonic eras passionate body-contact"® is normal: the lovers in - kiss, “lie down together,” and “sleep together 2558).! In the Socratic counterpart erotic intimacy is limited to mind- and eye-contact.4 the Phaedrus toucl 5s Cf the references in un. 50 and st above and in Dover, 1978: 155-5, 12 Or "namesake sErawouten, PRdt3g0e5) or hkenes™ (geaumotvon, hi 2514) 183 Which ir deeribed ta powerfully stounig, snaking the “intemperate horse clamor for 65 This phasieal totimacs, so esplicit im the cext of the Phardas (ef. Vastes, 1974 and trap, seldom rwtiond hn accounee of Platonic et. Ie ignored in Wilamonite Socratic irony 39 3. While both Plato and Socrates interdict terminal gratification, they do so for different reasons. In Plato's case these are strongly metaphysical, for he regards the soul's conjunction with the body as a doom calling for a life-long discipline whose aim is to detach soul from body, so far as possible, in the present life and liberate it from the wheel of reincarnation after death; sexual bliss defeats this endeavour, “nails” the soul to the body and distorts its sense of what is veal (Phd. 830).** This docerine is utterly foreign to Socrates. In none of our sources does Socrates object to orgasmic pleasure as such ~only to that form of it which is pursued in pederastic coupling, and there for moral, not metaphysical, reasons: he thinks it bad for the boy, viewing it asa form of predation in which a younger male is exploited (“devoured ™*) by his lover, used for the latter's one: sided gratifieation.”” 4. Platonic erds generates an emotion that has torrential force, matching that imputed by the poets to all forms of sexual passion pederastic, lesbian, or heterosexual. Like the poets, Plato calls era “madness” and so describes it: 118 Phir. o5t-a520; “And so between joy and anguish [the lover] is diseraught at being in such a strange condition: perplexed and frenzied with madness upon him, he can neither sleep by night nor sic still by day...mother, brother, Htiends, he forgets then all, not caring if his property is being ruined by nexlecc: those rules and graces in which he previously took pride he now scorns, welcoming a slave's estate, sleeping anywhere at all, ifonly is can he as close as possible to his darling.” For such amiable insanity Socratic «ris has no place. keeled, light: jearted. jocular, cheerfully and obstinately sane. Not nude with Alibiades happens “otten,” though omy on she Late’ inane Sn. 276 fod. there ie noting im Pato to. biggest thar Socrates wd cheourase frndearment neith any ofthe youths he Sloe" 56 Seevnn. 42 andy in ch 2 below 8; CE Xen. Mom 28.20: Socrsts counsel “those whe delight in the sen chasms of boys ‘bloom sores the atraciio "in cider 1 came tn dies to thont who thal spared ie” “58 GL addtional note 1.30 fps sor, 9 Givm. 1530-8: And thought how well Gynt werstood the weyvof ets: ging advice to someone about a beau bn, he warns at bring the lan tonite toe hee that would devour tie Mesh". and Pr 3yr041 "Ae wees ave fond tla, rons lowe boy. 7 Nen, Sip: .19: she man “reserves the pleasure fr Wise the ose sacl things for dhe boy.” 18 2 “wanaason, im part, after EC. Marchant” “the boy Goes not hare, like a woman, the deight of sex withthe man, but looks ou sole at amuier im lene’ 71 Wisse pictured ip both Plato's snd Nenoplnon’s Soratcdilogues. Nee Coes the reference 19 Socrates pa for Alcibiades Inthe cpanvmnous dialogue by Neches Socrtict ff Dittmar: to be cited info ane dhewsed in addivional tote ng tells eiferent tle40 Socratic irony that Socrates is sexually anorexic (I stressed the contrary above) or that he anticipates the Cynic and Christian determination to ‘expunge the joy of sex from the economy of happiness. The sliver of it he allows himself he pursues openly, without the least em- barrassment, and in any case without fear that it could get out of hand, for in the dynamics of his psyche it is held in the field of force ‘ofan incomparably mightier drive. When Alcibiades comes to speak of the glimpse he once got of the “images of gods" cdncealed by the satyr’s bestial exterior, his language becomes ecstatic. It dissolves in a shimmer of glittering, evocative adjectives: ‘tig Smp. a16e-217a: “I saw them once and they seemed so divine, golden, altogether beautiful, wonderful.” What is this dazzling, enchanting thing Socrates keeps hidden inside his own soul? His sophrosinz, says Alcibiades: 120 Snp. 21607-8: “But, O my fellow-drinkers, how full of saphrosmne [he would be seen to be] inside, ihe were opened up.” But it could hardly be only that, for this is in the public view. What ho one but Socrates himself can see is, I suggest, the happiness he finds in that sophrassne, whieh is so much more alluring for him than anything he could hope to get from physical beauty or any other mundane good —health, wealth, honour, life itself~ that he can enjoy each of these for what each is worth, savoring in each its own, sweet little quota of contentment or delight that, and no more, thumbing his nose at it (‘“scorning” it) when it promises more. A. maxipassion keeps all the minipassions effortlessly under control. Tt has been seccusly said,” following Foucault, that sex isa hard knot of anxiety” in all Western discourse about lave. If this is truc, then Socrates is an exception. From what we learn about Socratic era from Plato," in it there is no inguiétude at all.”! 72 Michael {gate in hiseview of M, Foucault. Mist dla Suppiement a Sept, tag. p. 1078 13 Though not rom Xeaopivon: that obicive fear of physical contact fn 64 above: weld ccttailybe symptomatic of ausiets On tai at on other pala hen Sone pons lien the Tine Len tevtimons’confies with Pist's we would be ier to peor the later shete goed Feason to believe that his persnal aequssntance with Sores had bes fr more inate than Xenophon’ +4 This fandamental Feature of Socratic Zass has becr mid in all acount at Known 2 ime, om Kierkegaard, chose. zomanic ney. seat praionate sano oie "G52 88), to Foucault, whose highly dserning diarson of "le weiste amour” in Plato reveal ts resid bindsaput i he he penated expression, “1Erersquc soxraico platonicieane” ok tof Mate de fa Serge. 1985. Ingtade ny laconic ule the Phordms: the charlster and the goad horse Steere tolled lat te bed horse Toree them to 3 morattos and forbidden aet””"23ga, Hasklonts ts they ave saved nls by the timely retuen ofthe vision of the Form of brats trons on hes chaste ora 2548) Socratic irony re Once we take this into account it becomes arbitrary to read deceit or pretence into Socrates’ dalliance with youthfial “bloom.” We ean understand Socratic «cr as a complex irony of the same sort Alcibiades allows him in part (b] of 13 above ~ that of “ knowing nothing and being ignorant of everything.” Just as when maine taining “he knows nothing” Socrates does and does not mean what he says, so too when he says he is erotically attracted to beautiful young men he both does and does not mean what he says. In the currently understood sense of pederastic love Socrates does nut love Alcibiades” or any of the other youths he pursues. But in the other sense which eran has in the doctrine and practice of Socratic era, he does love them: their physical beauty gives special relish to’ his affectionate encounters with their mind. So there is no pretence and no deceit in saying to others that he is Alcibiades’ lover (G. 3810) and saying the same thing. as he no doubt did, to Aleibiades himself “But surely, ic will be said, “to court those giddy young things, whose head is swimming with che compliments being paid to them by powerful Athenians, will deceive them, So isn’t Socrates guilty of intentional deceit afier all?” On how it was in other cases we have ho positive information. But in the case of Alcibiades we do have the data for a confident reply. Yes, Alcibiades was deceived, for otherwise he would not have hatched thac crazy scheme of swapping bloom for wisdom and would not have stuck to it for who knows how long, while Socrates kept refusing to take the bait. Deceived he was, but by whom? Not by Socrates, but by himself. He believed what he did because he wanted to believe it, We might have guessed as much But we don’t need to guess. Just from his own story we can tell that this is what happened. At Ti2 Socrates is saying “No” to the offer, doing so as emphatically as would a Zen Roshi responding to a foolish question by bringing down his staff full strength on the questioner’s head. Alcibiades could not but see that his proposition is being refused. And still he refuses to believe it. He moves into Socrates’ couch as though he had been told “Yes” or, at least, “Maybe.” And if this is what happened then, there is no reason to believe that Socrates had ever said or done anything intended to deceive Alcibiades into thinking that skin-love was what he wanted from the youth, But I may be asked: “Even so, can we not gather from the account that long before that night Socrates was aware of what was going on 75 Of Pr, gogat-ou: admitting shat he has been “chasing” Aeibindes! bloom (standard -taphor for peerasic courting , Socrates proceeds to smether i ens.42 Socratic irony in the boy’s head, and vet was willing to let his young friend wallow in selfdeception without taking any decisive action to dispel it?” To this we surely have to answer: Yes. Over and over again before that night Socrates would have had ample opportunity to explain that Alcibiades was making a fool of himself, duped by his own wishful thinking. Yet Socrates said nothing, Day after day he watched and kept still. Why so? The only reasonable answer is tpat he wanted Alcibiades to find out the truth for himself by himself. The irony in his love for Alcibiades, riddling from the start, persisted until the boy found the answer the hard way, in a long night of anguished humiliation, naked next to Socrates, and Socrates a block of ice. ‘This chapter has been an investigation of the meaning of two words, “irony” and cirmneia, a good part 6fit devoted to the meaning of just two tokens of the latter occurring in Alcibiades’ speech cirinenomenos at 18, eirdnikds av rg. It does, however, have wider implications. A word about these by way of conclu ‘A question altways hanging over our head as we work in Plato’s Socratic dialogues is whether or not their protagonist allows himself deceit as a debating tactic."* Some of Socrates’ most devoted students have taken it for granted that he does. For Kierkegaard Socrates is the anti-sophist who by ironies of sophistry: tricks sophists into wuth.”” For Paul Fricdkinder, whose three-volume work on Plato is as learned a work of scholarship as any produced in his time, Socrates is “the living witness to the fact that he who knows the truth can deceive better than he who does not, and that he who deceives voluntarily is better than he who deceives involuntarily” (1954 143 ‘This point of view has been widely intuential. One sees tt at the center of Michael O'Brien's brilliant book,"* and at the edges of much distinguished work on Plato. The obvious objection is in what Plato makes Socrates say 76 This wl be discussed more Gilly ch. 5 $> «Socrates eicks Protagoras out of ever concrete virtue: by reducing cach sre wo sit: he completely disolet ic while th sophistry Heri the power through which he sable Saccomplish this Hence we have stance an ire borne By 3 aophitie dileetic and a lephise dislectie poring in irony” e205 6 18 OFBrien, sabe, whose contribution fo ove undorsanding of Soerate i sdewacked bec the author micappising the uve trons ithe Sorat dakogues, i prepared ej itor af Secraves” most fandasnencal dortines. Tun W wake at Prabang me Conary of what isis ine mhole Socraue doctrine ofthe imporabilty of arene gos ‘Sun the desing to ste Avatotltanatestaion seals he wale ie would be met Dy Che pa Mowt recently in Charles Rak (193: 758). He speaks of the “ickere™ be which Socrates rebut Polus go". T would nor aeerpe hie dereripeion af my owe analysis ofthe Srgument ‘Wlosion tabs: gates as Socrates riche Bolus” go's T argued agave the gestion that Socrates argument intesionally fallacious rtue to this sue in fection tof chapter Socratic irony fa tat G. 4584-m: “As for me, I would be pleased to eross-question you, provided you are the same sort of human being as I; if not I would let you go. Of what sort is that? One of those who would be pleased to be refirted. if] say something untrue, and pleased 10 refute another if Ae says something, untrue, but more pleased o be refuted than to refuse ~ as much more as being rid oneself of the greatest evil is betzer chan ridding another of it; for T do not believe that anything could be as evil for a human being as 10 harbor false beliefs about the things we are now discussing, ” These words are familiar to those scholars. We ask them if they doubt their sincerity and they assure us that they don’t. Well then, we ask, if Socrates would rather lose than win the argument when the truth is on the other side, what could he stand to gain by slipping in a false premise or a sophistical inference? But this argument, which ought to be conclusive, falls flat on scholars who tell us that just in making it we are revealing that we have been reading Plato's text with a tin ear for irony. It should be obvious, they say. thae what would be out of the question in the usual made of philosophical discourse may be normal in the ironical one: that Socrates should ‘outsophist the sophists is no paradox if the sophistries with which he plies them are ironical." Tn this essay T have tried t0 nail down the mistake in the conception of irony which underlies this point of view. For this purpose [ have gone back to the primary, down-to-earth, meaning of the living word which “irony” has been in all the languages of the Western world, beginning with Cicero’s Latin. In this primary use from which all philosophically invented ones are derived ‘including the one Kierkegaard fished out of Hegel: “infinite absolute negativity”) what irony means is simply expressing what we mean by saying something contrary to it. This is something we do all the time ~ even children do it — and if we choose to do it we forfeit in that very choice the option of speaking deccitfully. To think othetwise is to mistake ironia for cirdneéa, thereby reversing the process by which the former evolved out of the latter. denying Socrates one of his chief titles to fame: his contribution to the sensibility of Western Europe, no less memorable an achievement than is his contribution to our ‘moral philosophy. But in the course of this inquiry I stumbled upon something I had 40 Cl Kierkegsard so m 77 above ‘Be Kierkegaard, 1003: 270 fotom, His ceatmens yuh Gassing mafeacion Kaede: hin in nding nthe Platonie tents he rpm to be gosing she vagaties ofa rermante novell: "the diagute dad mysceiousmen which [wong] entals. he inate pathy esac, the ease aod ineable moment a Understanding immedissiy displaced by the aunie'y of ainundesaning "et (Bs) 5 Socetic fon is hope perplened44 ‘Socratic irony not reckoned on at the start: thatin the persona of Socrates depicted by Plato there is something which helps explain what Kierkegaard’s genius and Friedkinder’s learning have read into Socrates. In that small segment of the evidence I have scrutinized we can see how Socrates could have deceived without intending to deceive. If you are young Aleibiades courted by Socrates you are left to your own devices to decide what to make of his riddling irogies. If you go wrong and he sees you have gone wrong, he may not lift a finger to dispel your error, far less feel the obligation to knock it out of your head. If this were happening over trivia no great harm would be done. But what ifit concerned the most important matters ~ whether or not he loves you? He says he does in that riddling way which Ieaves you free to take it one way though you are meant to take it in another, and when he sees you have gone wrong he lets it go. What would you say? Not, surely. that he does not care that you should know the truth, but that he cares more for something else:*? that af you are to come to the truth, it must be by yourself for yourself, ‘The concept of moral autonomy never surfaces in Plato's Socratic dialogues" ~ which does not keep it from being the deepest thing in their Socrates, the strongest of his moral concerns. What he is building on is the fact that in almost everything we say we put a burden of interpretation on our hearer. When we speak a sentence we do not add a gloss on how it should be read, We could not thus relieve the hearer of that burden, for this would be an endless business: each gloss would raise the same problem and there would have to be gloss upon gloss ad infinitum, Socratic irony is not unique in accepting the burden of freedom which is inherent in all significant communication. It is unique in playing that game for bigger stakes than anyone else ever has in the philosophy of the West Socrates doesn’t say that the knowledge by which he and we must live is utterly different from what anyone has ever understood or even imagined moral knowledge could be. He just says he has no knowledge, though without it he is damned, and lets us puzzle out for ourselves what that could mean, ‘is Tn ao earlier version of shis essay [ had offered “fhe of foe in explanation, Dow Auduns, then a member of sy seminar at Cornell, couvinced te let ui ine of fexplanacon was wrong: thar Socrates shovid want Alcibiades tof ut the rth for imate bard was i pereces compatible with Sovratc lave for the youth /rovouls is never given a moral or pollteal”appliation in anv of our Socratie souces. a 2 SOCRATES CONTRA SOCRATES IN PLATO! ‘That excellent book Gerasimos Santas contributed to the “Argue ments of the Philosophers” series in 1979 is entitled Socrates. But once inside it you discover that what it is really about is a “Socrates” in Plato, More than once since I first started working on this book I asked myself: “Why not follow that example? Why not bypass, as he did, that bugbear of Platonic stuclies, the so-called “Socratic Problem”? Why not let the historians have the Socrates of history all to themselves, keeping for myself that enchanting figure whose challenge to philosophers would be the same were he historic fact or Platonic fiction?” If my interests had been as purely philosophical as are those of Santas this, certainly, is the way I would have gone, But it so happens that my philosophical interests are impure. I cannot pass the buck to the historians without passing it to myself All ony life T have been one of their tribe and once in it no easy exit is allowed. The question “Who are you talking about ~ Socrates ar a ‘Socrates’ in Plato?” will dog your steps, barking at you, forcing you to turn and face it in selfdefense, Ifyou do mean the former, you must argue for it, You must give reasons for the claim that throwgia a “Socrates” in Plato we can come to know the Socrates of history the Socrates who made history, taught Plato and others, changed their thinking and their lives, and through them changed the course of Western thought. Ihave been speaking of a “Socrates” in Plato. There are two of 1 Much of he matrlin thi chapter and she nes was pest in Giller ecture at Se Andee cg more oft in Toxmend Levine Covgell Bb, enti eee ced i scminars a Beriees, Camndge and Toren sg76-Gy" The asner to he aeeniee Stcatic prot" presented ie thie shaper snd Stine thraght he Keak eee forth summary na lecere the Boh Academy entided “Sorat opeanog i 15 atts Prcdgs Teondon 9 4546 Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates in Plato them, In different segments of Plato’s corpus two philosophers bear that name. The individual remains the same. But in different sets of dialogues he pursues philosophies so different that they could not have been depicted as cohabiting the same brain throughout unless it had been the brain of a schizophrenic. They are so diverse in content and method that they contrast as sharply with one another as with any third philosophy you care co mention, beginning with Aristotle's. This is a large claim. I shall be arguing’ for it in. this chapter and the next. Those two groups of dialogues fall arguably’ into the earlier and middle periods of Plato's literary production. Since I shall have frequent need to refer separately to what Plato puts into the mouth of “Socrates” in cach, I shall spare the reader tedious repetition by allowing myself a bit of shorthand. To the “Socrates” of the easlier compositions I shall refer as “Socrates,” oF Sp” for short (“E” for earlier"). To the “Socrates” of the works of Plato's middle period I shall refer as “'Socratesy,”” oF “Sy.” for short (°M” for middle”) 1 itemize the dialogues which, in my judgment, make up these wo groups, and also a third, intermediate group, transitional from the Elenctic? Dialogues in Group 1 to the dialogues in Group 1. Group 1. The dialogues of Plato's earlier period (a) The Elenctic Dialogues, listed in alphabetical order * Apelog», Charmides, Crito, Euttyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, lon, Lackes, Protagoras, Republic 1° (abbreviating:* 4p., Ch, Cr, Et,, Go, HMix fon, La, Pry RA} (b) Transitional Dialogues (written after all the Elenctic Dialogues and before ail of the dialogues in Group 1), listed in alphabetical 2 For the near-consentos on tix point among Platonic cholarsin dhe pear conte an fF tome ofthe reason forsee Rom, rggt "ch. 1 The order ofthe Dialogues" greater derail in Constantin Ritter, Ygtoa: tgo-a7z “Unteessehung der aetichen Folge (der Dislogen} 1 tet ofall Brancwctod. 958 Particularly significant I regard he fat that ‘when the disloguss ste crdered only by sylaie evtera, as in Brandaroct, tbe seats “ommarized in Brandwood, 1956: itl at avi) are brosdly in agreement with these 1 reach by ordering tae ditogues ety by ter php cnet se 8 blow 53 Tao name shem because throughout these dialogues Socrater’ method of pilexophical investigation is tlenetie, which it abrupt ceases to bein the Transtonsle: see Vat, tba: 298 at 57-8, Appemdin on "Denice ofthe Elenchus in Eady dys Hilfe." More on this in chapeer 4 Because chronological order within dhe Group is unimportant x the immediate wage of my Srgument. But mos presentcday Platonint would agree thatthe Ge the last dialogue in iis Group (ste eg, Dodds, 19592 20 and Trin, 1079" 5-8) 15 See additonal pene 2 "The composition of Republic 2 6 Tallow forthe mest part the abbreviations emploved by: Lwin, Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates in Plato 7 order.’ Butiydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno (abbrev ating: Eud., HMa., Ly., Mx., M.)* Group tt, The dialogues of Plato's middle period, listed in probable chronological sequence: Cratslus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic 1-x, Phaedrus, Parmenides, Theaetetus (abbreviating: Cra., Phd, Smp., R. ux, Phdr., Prm., Tht.) For the sake of completeness I should add Group ut, The dialogues of Plato’s latest period, listed in probable chronological sequence: Timeews,” Critias, Sophitt, Politcus, Philebus, Laws (abbreviating: Ti, Crt, Sph., Pic. Phlb., Le.). How pronounced and profound are the differences between the philosophy Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates,, upon the one hand, from the philosophy he expounds through Socrates, upon the other, will be a principal topic of inquiry through much of this book 1 list programmatically ten Theses," each of which specifies in its part a a trait of Socrates, exhibited only in (one or more) dialogues in Group 1, and in its part w a trait of Socratesy exhibited auly in sone ‘or more) dialogues in Group a 14. Socratesy is eactusively a moral philosopher 7 Because hereto the chronological eer within the es highly controversial. For the Ms, swe have a firm urminus fur guen ibe eclerence a aghe-t to the ea of the ert th Corinth, 3071, whieh gives no eae to order relate tothe other Tout ales it Grosp. Branvdwood, 197: xk om. 2 above} places all of 4p. Oh Cr, Ba. HMiy Fon, Lat Pr bis Group) bere all of Gr Eady AA, Ly hha Aka, Ca Phe Sp Group" iter rom Bim keeping th Gera’ ahead of ale halos inhi Cres sth tong ofa ertvon ut ofthe lente etd, deple ed wth gent Panache in siderstandably so: he ass ay iyece cera)” But the sealing. tiferccetn thonology i no: great, since he soo holds (1976: Wi) thas the are deuce itso Group shar fall within my Group (ve. Chay PR, Sup) "were probably te leo Be rit” in hse Group: sos the Gargin wee taaered to hey Group him Group ‘ould split up into eases anc later segments andthe caer which wd then cosa Of Ef, HM. fy. AL. Mu would ceineide with ty Transitorwh ahd ne woul eet Complete agresment on the order ps Gh Cry Boe Coe HMI don Ly Pr flowed by Bel, Hider tne M1. Mu followed by Gia Pht, Sng A, Peo Pon The ‘The resis eiereace~ my siting off the at bck ofthe Relic From i other nine Looks to place it with she Elenetc Dialogues” is unimportant ‘ore aeional note 2.1) 9 Yor the Timanr ace addienal nase 26 10 I thal be refering to therm ab “The Ten These” shcoughowt the et of the book 11 With she exception ofa the epeech of Alcibiades nthe Sop. which, at explinied in chapter 1, portays the Socraer of the earlier dialogues, who "kiows noth Ignorant of eveything” {2:61 and "0: the weo hographies) passage im he. Phe (gra-tc and :1go-r18) which abe portray Soractsy "Phe near gbe-goe T take to be Platonic, ot Sacra, bigrapiny, shee stated purpose leo inttoduce the cheery Forme toa 32 Clon, 5 to addons) note 1.1. His arguments sometimes trench on other topics, but the only theses he invengateselencrically ave propositions i the moral do's, Thus the48 Socrates ‘contra? Socrates im Plato 18. Socratesy is moral philosopher and metaphysician and epistemo- logist and philosopher of science and philosopher of language and philosopher of religion and philosopher of education and philosopher of art. The whole encyclopedia of philosophical science is his domain, up. Socrates, had a grandiose metaphysical theory of “separately existing” Forms and of a separable soul which leams by “recol- lecting” pieces of its pre-natal fund of knowledge. ma. Socrates, has no such theory. ma, Socrates, seeking knowledge clenctically, keeps avowing that he has none. mn. Socrates shat he finds it seeks demonstrative knowledge and is confident ive, Socratesy has a complex, tripartite model of the soul. iva. Socrates, knows nothing of this model, which would have unsetiled his conception of moral virtue and undercut his doctrine of the impossibility of incontinence (ekrasta’ vp, Socratesy has mastered the mathematical sciences of his ime. va. Socrates, professes no interest in these sciences and gives no evidence of expertise in any of them throughout the Elenctic dialogues, via, Socratesy’s conception of philosophy is populist. vip. Socratesy’s is elitis vip. Socrates has an elaborate political theery whose ranking order of constitutions places democracy with the worst of con= temporary forms of government, lower than timocracy and oligarchy, preferable only to lawless tyranny via, Socrates has no such theory. Though harshly critical of political goings-on in Athens, he says that he prefers the city with her laws to any contemporary state. But he leaves the rationale of the preference unexplained. ya & 8. Homoecrotic atrachments figure prominently in the conception of eras in both Socrates, and Socratesy,, But in the latter they have a metaphysical grounding in lave for the transcendent Form of beauty which is wholly lacking in the former. lim that there is sich a thing as “knowledge of knowledge and not-knowledge™ he Investigates only because twas propored as ‘an unacceprabie,definiens of pry; at he gives up the search when he evomes convinced that tis ot likely ta get ayn anfesing that he has no confidence "i Si ability to clear up thew things (Ch Hoge 13 GE the analysis ofthe dierence berween Socratic und Masonic n= in chapter Socrates *contra? Socrates in Plato 49 tea, For Socrates, picty consists in service to a deity which, though fully supernatural, is rigorously ethical in its own character and in the demands it makes on men. His personal religion is pract realized in action. 1x. Socratesy«’s personal religion centers in communion with divine, but impersonal, Forms. It is mystical, realized in con- templation, XA. _In the Elenctic Dialogues Socrates,,'s method of philosophical investigation is adversative: he pursues moral truth by refuting theses defended by dissenting interlocutors. ‘This ceases in. the Transitionals: there he argues against theses proposed and opposed by himselt. xp. In the sequence of dialogues from the Meo through the Phacdius Socratesy is a didactic philosopher, expounding truth to consenting inerlocutors, Thereafter the metaphysical theory of the preceding dialogues of the middle period is subjected to searching criticism by “Parmenides” and then Socrates, assaying a fresh start shifts to a new, “maieutic,” mode of investigation in the Theaetetus, I shall present a two-part argument. Is first part, to be presented in the present chapter and in section 1 of the next, will stay completely inside the Platonie corpus, developing the claim that in Group x dialogues Plato’s Socrates exhibits distinctive waits which, in the Ten Theses listed above, set his philosophy in opposition to that of his namesake in the dialogues in Group ut. In the second part of my argument, to be laid out in section n of ehapter 3, I shall call fon evidence external to the Platonic ve pus ww suppor tie chain that fn those essential respects in which Sqr phitasophy difers from that of Sy, it 5 that of the historical Socrates, recreated by Plato in invented conversations which explore its concent and exhibit its method. [say “invented,” not “reported.” It is Xenophon who professes to be recalling Socratic conversations he had witnessed personally." Plato does no such thing. Except for the -lpotogy. where he goes out of his way (vice: 344, 388) to call attention to his presence at the tial,” 4 £3 dhe Afni esi: “To apport my opink dha he booted his comp both by actions which showed what som cs he war and bv his ducustons ode Takase torth a much an collet tae” Mem sy Ear im the decane Fis ofall {shal tate what T ence heard him say about ihe dine Fain i comessing seit Avstocemn.” Far more relerences to sk arrances9y Newophon ad fr oe Ie sey are worth ee Robin, gine 32 and 35-7 ho ns in deel el acl ‘oven cal Sfomighono,1o71: igh. who lcaes Xenophon’ work ike tat ‘ther Socratic “that sone betncen trey snd Sion whi ao bewlering tatoo Droleaional Maran 0 15 The apaogy may te ereded with the same Kind of hicorical yeraiy asthe speeches in ‘Tracydides ‘an obvious parle: recogsing hat "it wat mpessble fr Men ee ha50 Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates in Plato he leaves himself out of the Socratic dramas he creates and rigs some ‘of them so as positively to exclude his presence: in the Pr. he dramatizes a scene in which he could not have assisted because he had not yet been born; in the Cr., Ex., lon, HMa. he leaves Socrates alone with his interlocutor.”” This is only to be expected on my hypothesis that those earlier works of Plato, no less than all those he was to produce thereafter, are meant as contributions to philosophy =not to biography as such. Socratic personalia Plato brings into his dramatic creations incidentally and, for the most part, only in so far as he considers them relevant to the philosophical content.!* ‘On my hypothesis, Plato’s overriding concern, in stark contrast to Xenophon’s professed aim in his Socratic writings,” is not to preserve memories of Socratic philosophizing but to create it anew — to bring it alive in dramas whose protagonist philosophizes more Soeratico. That remembered material should be used copiously is only to be expected. But my hypothesis does not bank on that. For what it proposes is that Placo in those early works of his, sharing Socrates’ basic philosophical convietions, sets out to think through for himself their central affirmations, denials, and reasoned suspensions of belief by pitting them in elenctic encounter against the views voiced by a variety of interlocutors, In doing this Plato is producing, not reproducing, Socratic philosophizing. Employing a literary medium which allows Socrates to speak for himself, Plato makes him say whatever fe ~ Plato ~ thinks at the time of weviting would be the most reasonable thing for Socrates to be saying just then in expounding. and defending his own philosophy.” Jnformans to memorize exactly hae had heen #813” The dupiPaw Ay Taw MexBleroe Srauruovetoa, su paraphrieed iv A. Andrewn whos cefee ofthe macoral meaning of the teat [1963: By at 65-74] Lind enireconeincing). Thucydides sures ws they sichat I ehought pv tseus Wat seul be mon fing said by each opeaker particular topic coming ae ore as pombe ro the general sece of what had en Urals oad xopin 8m Cyyorara te Basra yung ey SanBe Reysernan)™ The Tn the Sear of Pa birth (427 2.2) Socrates was 42, wel past hi youth, 10 17 To maintain the hypothesis that in these dialogues Plato is “imaginatively eecaling, in fara and substance, the conversations of his master” (Guthrie, 025: 67 ove wuld have to suppore, on no evidence whatever, that Piso fora third party ho had Tosured the Tranantssion co ion, ad been given a play-by-play repore of te arguments i each of these dialogues by Socrates himec er by his tverocace. 1 Sce below, additional nore 2.2 "Socratic personals in the Platonic corpus {Cr n. ty above and the opening sentence of Xenoplon's Oecuromsear"l once heard [Socrates discuss howtehold snanagement ax follow” 420 This part of the hypothesis alera ts wo the posiblity of shi within the philosophical postion alowed Soares in Group {disloguer eg sallow him wo eftetathe Lasher the Uefinton of “courage” he had propounded inthe Pagar, and to make explicit ithe CGorgiar a presupposition of Sorate angument that the interlocutor always caries i Bs Socrates “contra” Socrates in Plato st Accordingly I can ignore che question which has bullied and befuddled many historians in the past: “Could Plato have heard what he makes Socrates say in this or that scene? If not, could he have had it on good authority?” For want of such authority the great Eduard Zeller lets fall out of his hands a crucial passage in the Crito (47cff.)" because it comes from a scene where Socrates speaks with his friend in the privacy of the prison cell and there is no indication of a line of transmission to Plato thereafter. Such scruples are obliterated by my hypothesis. Everything Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates is grist to my mill. To be sure, since the depicted character was, above any philosopher of the West, a man who lived his philosophy, the writer, deeply conscious of that fact, has reason to tell us much about the man’s life, ineluding his inner life, allowing us a fuller, more intimate, view of the man than is given us of any character, real or fictional, in the whole of ancient Greck literature. Even so, the writer's overriding concern is alway’ the philosophy — the truths affirmed by Socrates, cefenced by his arguments, realized in his life, propositions which if crue for Socrates are true for every human being If thac is Plato's primary interest, is it suzprising that he should have pursued it in the form of dialogues instead of straightforward expository prose? It would have been more surprising ithe had done the latter, For generations before him — from the first philosophers of ‘Miletus, down to Socrates’ contemporaries, Anaxagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia, and Democritus — expository prose had been the favored medium of natural investigation,"* while for moral and political reflection Grech writers Inatl regularly turned (© dialogue."* So Herodotus, for example, in passages where he focuses on moral sof bi press coaling the negation each ofhis fe theses hich hod ‘ure implit im the preceding dialogues: fia apie at Te Thoughts on the Sacra Elenchin witch 1 now fet it weed ot reion foe the inieptetation of Socrates moral theay va 1 shall se pointing aut below hapten bs sa comment oh tes quced shore ae 712.414 114. fag der scons the condi Serceen the inate mai thes i Sovereign claim uf justiee fe Plo ie could be fevolved through Socrate’ teaching in he Cre 70> that istic ee the soul whe Isat dicate would bet he bod and hence ip jae dewimesal oe agent: But Zl denies himself the resolsion because he sys “ve eaes vouch for hat ever en the Gite comes fom Socrates author not having been prewar a “he comersaion therein deserbed" 8s: 15 eG: pose oh 060. 23 Avo inthe paral ie tne Hippocratic were.” 24 Avthe lace Erie Havelock had absered, © Acted drama, cr Gramatind comerstions, as the aditional Geek medhod 3Caucosing sn analyzing oral ear” rggy. ayy The ‘sue, nowwithsanding declarative au protepie sing: gnomic prow ihe sta of the “Seven Wie Men” the Theognidet, the Hippocratic Pres ‘mapey ini te {eagment ef Heracetue ane of Demers, itme bear ia mind tat fr te oarontaton of epposing views Grek moraliing aturaly tune to ditepue32 Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates in Plato issues, When Nerses declines “through highmindedness”osetaliate for Sparta’s outrage against his ambassadors the morality tale takes the form of a mini-dialogue*" So toa when Herodotus ponders the conflicting claims of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy: he presents his meditation as a Debate an Constitutions (3.80-3). Sa too Prodicus switches from declamatory prose to dialogue to depict the choice between a life of easy gratification and one of hard, abstemious self-discipline: he stages a dialogue in which Vice ad Virtue make opposing offers to Herakles ap. Xen. Mem. 2.2133). And so toa ‘Thucydides’ reflections on the issue between power and justice produce the Melian Dialogue (5.85-112) ‘Moreover, just as Plato was about to start his work, prose dialogue had come into its own in that curious spin-afl of Socratey own refusal to write: the emergence of a new genre, the Sukratiot log, ‘hich had suddenly become a fashion, almost a craze. Besce Pla and Xenophon each of the following is credited by one or another of our sources with having produced such compositions: Aesehines of Sphettus. Antisthenes, Aristippus, Bryson, Cebes, Crito, Euclid of Megara, Phaedo.®* That Plato was not the first in the field may be inferred from two reports, both of them well attested: Aristotle names a certain Alexamens as the first writer of philosophical dialogues“? and ‘Theopompus" the historian, contemporary o! Demosthenes an Aristotle) charges that mort of Plato's had bocn plagiarized from dialogues by Aristippus, Antisthenes, and Bryson ‘Mastery of the resources of @ new literary medium which suits so well Matos dramatic lair challenges his artiste its. He ties his hand at it. produces litde masterpieces, and delight in successful not have displaced the philosopher. We must assume that philo- sophical inquiry was the prinum mobile in the composition of those 2g Ha. 196 A similar one on ihsme theme at 9-2, ot ishogus re quoted in prt ® iteclionow ofehaprer’ CL ato thesuscaoa bene Sloman Grows at Lees a Fo tree st rots! a Bee wars Sot sf PRI qucing serge hens tits hans ofS ard Soto akan cob ese of satessons Br aecepred by Glucker “1938: 164% delended by Diving, 1988: 69. and. Trauna Socrates “contra? Soorates in Plato 53 earlier dialogues no less than of any he was to write thereafter,*" and that throughout this first phase of his writing Plato remains convinced of the substantial truth of Socrates’ teaching and af the soundness of its method, But the continuing harmony of the two minds, though vital, is not rigid: the father image inspires, guides, and dominates, but does not shackle Plato's philosophical quest. Su when he finds compelling reason to strike out along new paths, he feels no need to sever the personal bond with Socrates. And whea these lead him to new, unSocratic and antiSocratic conclusions, as they visibly do by the time he comes to write the Meno, the dramatist’s attachment to his protagonist, replicating the man’s love for the friend and teacher of his youth," survives the ideological separation. And so, as Plato changes, the philosophical persona of his Socrates is made to change, absorbing the writer's new convictions, arguing for them with the same zest with which the Socrates of the previous dialogues had argued for the views the writer had shared with the original of that figure earlier on. Such is the scenario I shall be fleshing out in this chapter and the next wo. That its offered as hypothesis. not dogina or reported fact, should be plain. Such it will remain as I pursue it step by step. OF its truth the reader must be the judge 0 On the first of those Ten Theses listed above I do not need to linger Tis story will unfold ae I tell that of the rest. Su I move directly to Thesis u, the most powerful of the ten: as T shall try to show in the balance of the preseat chapter, the irreconcilable difference beteven Socrates, and Socrates could have Beem established by ths eritvion even ¢f ‘had stood alone, In the dialo, speculative mi of his middle period Plato constructs a boldly iphysical system whose usin foundations are the rating soul and its ontological correlate, the transcendent Form. We can pinpoint the entry of the former into the corpus 90 A subsidiary one would be the vert fact thatthe marker was being loded with eval accounts of Socrates” philosphizing. Plato would be ar eager to delnd Seer Dhilosopiy agsne the well-meaning hall-eath propagated by Sueraiearnae Kemet {o defend i agains the laeers i Polycraee’ cna tf Src 3+ Paws cone concace with Socrates cary in Matos youth atesed iy Nea. Mow. 6.00 Plato's elder brother, Glaucon, i ayprng co poli! adentp at the see of ec re Secrates resrans him, “taking a sendy interes in hf te sake Clascon cance, Charis ond af Bas34 Socrates ‘contra? Socrates in Plato in th tM. 81a. Thave heard men and women who are wis 2° lieve, and glorious." — divine.” ~ "Saying wha?” =""Something true, [ bel: st “What were they saying? Who were they?" ~ “Priests and priestesses who make it their business to give the reason for the rites they perform... This is what they declare: man's soul is Geathless; at times it comes to an ending called ‘death’, at times it is reborn. It is never destroyed. ‘ra AM. 81G: “As the soul is deathless and has been born many times and has seen all things both here and in Hades, there is nothing it has not earned... As all nature is akin and the soul has Jearned everything, nothing prevents us ance we have recollected one thing — whieh is what men call learning’ ~ to rediscover everything else ourselves, if we are valiant and do not give up inquiring, For all snquiring and learning 1s recollecting in any dialogue which precedes the Afeno.** And once it comes in, it (245¢-2464; 2490-D}, and is displayed in great style in Plato's late dialogue.** the Timaeus (428).” How alien this new story is to 5 He hs br hu the shoe av pans it in he thf the Duo te ‘Pt ae fal te prensa exsenee ud tacre incarnations in seta ves 8), 1 sodinary presatal cognitive powers ewe Beng the source all lea a iy af monal Beer 1. ese bw fee a 8) te exhatelogy oe © hose yin ba piney ura le, anodes one jpn bee Go wick Setar ele tn) aetrcne pseriey ay Mo ane frp ne FS BS Ggeana carer 7c TomTom 48 One Tinaras sce adciional note 28 fee 4} Sine she protagonist ofthe daloge imperonates Pat in ideale projet 25 Rav siucied he higher mince In ploy [aun conaslogy abd atronony (2h {td has alo attained the pola! sucees (19-200) to which Plato ad asited in vain = ‘Srous tines in Bi ife'cE the anepentbiste parageiph tn chaps) we ae In 8 Sse owh a he very pant ch ie rnin an Sian 0 Saas Socrates “contra” Socrates in Plato 55. 73 Gr 478: “Isle then worth living for us once we have suffered the ruin of that in us which is damaged by injustice and benefited hy justice? Or should we think inferior to the body that in ws, whatever it be (dnelvo, Bi nor" iow raw Auerépeov), that has to do with justice and injustice?” ‘That phrase, “that in us whatever it be," is symptomatic of the metaphysically reticent temper of the speaker's conception of the soul. For Socrates our soul is our self whatever that might turn out to be. It is the “I” of psychological function and moral imputation ~ the “I” in “I feel, T think, I know, I choose, Tact,” For “I believe” he says “my soul believes” (G. 486). When he says that someone's soul is wicked we know this much of what he means: that person is wicked.” How much more he means we do not know he doesn’t say: to that question he never speaks. The queries, “Ts the soul material or immaterial, mortal or immortal? Will it be annihilated when the body rots?” are never on his clenetic agenda ‘The first question he never addresses at all. He does allude to the second at the close of the gology but only to suggest that it is rationally undecidable: both options ~ total annihilation or survival in Hades — are left open. In the Grito he reveals his faith in the soul's survival.®* In the Gorgias he declares it!" Nowhere does he «ry to prove it in the earlier dialogues.* For Socratesy, on the other hand, the immateri 4 formal theorem" and its prenatal and post-mortem existence a target for demonstrative oveckill. He runs through a suring of arguments in the Phardo,'* adds a new one in the Republic (6080-6116), then still another, along quite different lines, in the Placita (245e-246a). The entity whose imperishableness Sy, is so eager to prove is an immigrant from another world conjoined 97 Burners Gaus and highly midcading cay, “The Socratic Doctine of the Sout 2916; 126) hat entered mspprchcssion, now vurtacing stecicnalle erate Ineraure cog. Havelock, tgs 2 ta hn conispion ofthe wal Ge Peake Perna i's eration of Sorat and/or Pato, Fors comectne mete Wake o4ont bre 3 4. $53, Selnven (336) cals aiemtion {2 flrences to. pice sta puclé"sa "mighs pate” 2 "iuongeinded pani sweet pach” (Sop te t34y 1901, Pian tog Eur, Medoe io ase se ea 8 ee 530 Airing that is echstologial am lity of the soul is de “erue™ 5234) and hut Callies i grievously mistaken in thiniog iam od wines 40, Bat saying nothing te indice hat ae bliin he sous survival fier deaths cence defense crater: rere _eelaration in the py (agh that he Bas no hnowiedge ofthe ia laden La eee he doesnot afer rannen far che tat ofthat bee What he cam sed oe eee Pe ‘he moral uch conveyed through de myth which he bsieves con and bas begs ee rue EoBetenrer, 708, while ie contrary canser ‘ix iuew Evoked jens 4 Le: nowhere por io the itvedustion ef the bei in reimearnaton ed Plo oes an argument forts covery, the theory a reelection: nthe Phas fp be refers to ths argument as eatabshing "se clearly" (ooplorors, he tenho, covey an Phe. 708 42 Dae 320; jae 774: TOON tO9N where56 Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates in Plato precariously to a piece of matter in this one. This conjunction is its great misfortune: corruption, exile, incarceration, entombr defilement.® The imagery is Pythagorean.** In the Phaedo we see that Sy has taken it over. He is now convinced that both intellectually and morally we would be incomparably beer olf if we had been spared incarnation, and that now, stuck inside an animal, ‘our fondest hope should be to break away, to fly off ngver to return. Only in Pythagoreanism'* do we hear of any Sich view in contemporary or earlier Greek thought. That as stark a contrast between Sy, and Sy marks their conception of what cach calls eidos, idea (“*form,” “character”)** is not nearly 80 obvious. I must argue for it at length, devoting to it all the rest of this chapter. Our best clue to what Socrates, understands by eides (or synonymously, by idea) is in the work he makes it do. This is strictly definitional work. He mentions forms only when on the track of the answer to a “What is the F?” question. In the Eutixphro he lays down two conditions the right answer to that question will have to [i] The definiens must be true of alll cases falling under the definiendum 48 For the imagery se especially Phd sm. dit, 829, 24. The in bad,” Pad Bits “combed gn i ce, ins prevent body," Chg iby ie ssotiaion with he body, R Grates ented inthe body as trom oyeeesel Phir 2yoe. "Defemens" or" piston” is pli in speaking ofthe sul a pusiied nao ars in aeparated (oom the ods, pelle” a far ait rma attaced wot Pl cx dor’. the faa gloomy ofthe iiage ee soaks “aiping aa” the oy alates ncuron, Pua tee eros! dhe bd inthe“ Pythagoream myths” to which Ariode {v8oven sn inthe sevoun of te iri of ete which $)aaye eas Prthugorean in crigin att “Greeks some catir, rome Inter" made i theirgwn. That te soul joined cote buy a2 penal aesLentombed iesneriead by Clement uf Nenandea Shei. 'y17_lo-ahe Pahagorean’ Phileas, hom CGieent represents au saving that the dovirine is asted by "ancient thealogans 20 ser” Plat aacrbes to "those ahout Orpheus” the doce thatthe body i "prison Sl gonrd-hone" of the sul Cra y's Ths isthe doctrine to whick Socratey reer Sih approval and which Gcbes amttiotes with Phillawe 2b. Greer The pecpaiite pslowplter Clearehus of Sol 2 ah. Aubenatas £570) apeibes to Basie “the “The belie in reincarnation i dhe best ateted of Pythagoras! doctrines: Nenophanes #7 op Dike Bah, Empedocles wean, up. Porphory, Tite Pikes Dicararchas. fe 20 ah Pocphyrye ita Boke And see Burkert, 2062" gi; Bare. gf: 100 48 Though eiher ofthese English words sranaats either of te Greek oney ck LSJ 22 B25, (eee inthe seane of “Kind,” asin "inprionmicne a form of puoishment” yf ts good an English counterpart of ex se of Wan But shall keep “orm” for eos, Suharactr" for fay ao thatthe reader wil know to which word tn Plas text 1 am ‘referring in canada tect, And I shall alow the ely comman' praesice capi : Character” ‘oely) in contexts in hich they ate beg use to tee tothe immatable,incorporen,"separete™ emitie which ente the Pltonie corpus Inthe mile dhoguc ct setion ao thie shaper Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates in Plate 5 Socrates brings this home by asking if the F “is not the same” in everything which i F i.e, everything which has the property named 74 Bu. 5: “Ts not the pious the same as itself in every [pious} action? And the impious, in tum. is i¢ not opposite #37, 79 and Trin, ta7sa! sobeange al nm. go-a in chapter 5 Xhist intimation of the net theory had come i the Cctlar,though heve only one ofthe ategortal properties (orm i argued for thet inearance 4390, with whic el Th Songes)- hu this done in such'a masterful defaive, fshtom as to give eamncing esidene that Plato is wel the wa to his new ontology 92 There are pointed references in she Pardo 734,780) touch inguies, but no such inquiry {e mounted #e the dislogue. Neither in this or hy suber dialogue af che side period 1 the existence of Forms used to introduce the " What fo the F?" question and control nse toil “which i thea ive made oftheir existence ip earier dalopuee Socrates ‘contra* Socrates in Plato 67 interests are exclusively cthical. There is no spill-over into epistemology in his pursuit of them to take him even so far as the elementary observation that Form-apprehension cludes the senses. And this is omly the start of it. Sy is not making just that very modest claim, that Forms like Justice, Goodness, etc. cannot be seen, heard, touched ~a claim which would be readily granted by anyone who understands the question, He goes far beyond this to reject the senses as an avenue t9 knowledge about anything whatever, maintaining that nothing worthy of the name of “knowledge” can be reached by their means and that our only hope of acquiring any knowledge at all is via the purely intellectual activity to which he refers as “reasoning” or “thinking."*"* He had said as much just a few lines before 115: 116 Phd. 65n-c: “So when does the soul grasp truth? For whenever she undertakes to investigate anything with the body itis clear that she will be thoroughly deceived by the body... Therefore it is in reasoning, if anywhere, that any reality becomes clearly revealed to the soul (earaSmaov out yiverai v1 Tay Svrev).” Here and in the immediate sequel, as well as in a shorter, but equally forceful, reiteration of its thought later on (82e-B5B), the senses arc viewed with distrust and hostility. pilloried as causes of perturbation and disorientation to the mind.** If this were being said only concerning mathematical knowledge, the interdict on. sensory evidence would be unobjcctionable; it could be taken as a salutary guide to sound thinking in geometry." But Sy is not referring to the investigation of some restricted class of Forms 117 Phd. 85012-19: “1 am speaking about all of them, e.g. greatness, health, strength - in a word about the reality which each happens to be (tis obsias 8 rwyysve eaatov 6v).” Having thus stressed that he is speaking of our knowledge of Forms generally, he declares, : 94 Reyigeota, Bossier, Boveiofa which J rama. somewhat lal hiking”) i Che te Sy aks be the insects acd compact Soon Serie in'mathematca.Eanona ish er fw sogoion inthe second sega a he Divide Line if guip-e. 330 win whick mathcrasicalinvenigcson Bile Noy Geen Plato's favourite term for moral reasoning, both im earlier snd miidle dhalowuee, aso asioiated with mathematical cetoming Ae Berne, gst cers on Pld agen he timary see ofthe word ip armed! eakslaton sc hoytbuvar tM ose quoting» simple anes! computcton, 95 “Eyes, ats in a word, the mele ofthe ty, urbe nop rrovts [ef Cépupor naniys sat raping nat brava, Gbe] ne soul ai doesnot ft hor come to poses eaih oe trsdom shen abe atocats vith the Bosh” opal “Phiaophy, dehnseing at Inquiry rough he ees fll of deck, tno sanguin eg he cas ead soe scabs persuades ut to wthdraw fom ther, except ina ot tei xe 8 unatolisoe ‘sa (6 See addidonal note 24.68 Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates én Plato 418 Pid. 632-66: “And would not one do this [ie. come closest to having knowledge of what one is thinking about)” if one approached it so far as possible by thought alone, and, not admitting sight into one's thinking nor dragging in any other sense alongside one’s reasoning, but employing pure thought itse by itself, sought to track each pure reality ieself by itself (a7 wa" a6)?” It boggles the mind that Sy should want his warning against the evidential use of sensory data to extend even to the ivestigation of things like health and strength (117 above), falling squarely in the domain of the physiological and medical sciences of the day, where sense-experience was firmly ensconced as the primary source of the data for knowledge. But there is no doubt that this is what he means. He is convinced that if knowledge is what we are after, our ‘only hope of reaching it is by “thinking” and “reasoning.” There the mind, made safe from illusion-breeding sense-experienee, can no more go wrong than it can in Descartes when inspecting “clear and distinct ideas. Ste iy slate nace aloes Reset oa second categarial property of Sy’s Forms: their absalute exemption from thange. THe holds that while all parts of the sensible world” are constantly changing, no part of the world of Forms can change at all: in their case immutability is of the very essence of their being. So much Sy could have been expected to grant. He might well have thought it a strict consequence of the assumption that every form is self-identical in cach of the distinct temporal occurrences which instantiate it. This seems to be the plain implication of such a questivn, “Ts nue the pious uke same as iGelt in every. [pious] action?” : if piety in pious action a is “the same” as in pious action 4, must it not be unaltered throughout the interval that separates @ from 5 or from any other instance of piety no matier how remote 9 The rlerent of 70770 at 656 ie yon: tear (weph oD oT SSS ypounss sino wad" aire ehupies BaaTos or Sra: ef sional not a From the earliest methodological Greek cefection in these slences semiespercen °° Seem cmecived asthe proper ture of knowledge tn in theft centay. think ofthe to the bran (Theophrastus, Dr Seu, 36120 too. non iter, for Empedocies Dicl-Rats, Dk gro sath of the wen ea “dich ndercaning Wee th pont cite fxpreaea inthe (ice) Hippocratic teste Prep which declares iat opening pe " aragraph: "Tn medial pracce one should ay the greatest autenon otto plausible ‘eating butt cxperence combined weston: Farsi efscon ea eemating ffvehat hasbeen receved through the scot. s00 The pomibily of purely Hnelesaal sor not allowed in ether ease. Decartesblacnes alletoron the will Sy on the senie. The Hove that hoyiouds may go weong at needs Sense-experience 1 Keep ion the aly eich seems so obvious tothe tees a wh teove dhe Prep, has ot occured 0 Sy Socrates “contra” Socrates in Plato 69 from either? The connection of “ the same in every F™ with “the F always F” is explicit in rig HMfa, agge6-7: “1 was asking bim about that which is beautiful for all and always... For beautiful, surely, is always beautfal. But to what purpose was Sy expressing this conviction? It was to control the definitional search in which he was engaged ~ to forestall (or refute) a definiens which holds true in the particular case the interlocutor has in view but is falsified in others, Sq did not stop to reflect that ifa form is to be selfidentical in cases spread over time it_ must be itself exempt from the change in which each of its temporal instances is enmeshed. The failure parallels the one noticed in the foregoing: that while S,’s elenctic procedures takes it for granted that forms are inaccessible to the senses, he never takes notice of this, never reflects on it, never makes the assumption explicit. Both failures evidence his one-track interest in moral questions, his indifference to the epistemological and metaphysical ismes which are precisely the ones Sy; finds exciting. The excitement infects his style 20 Phd. 7801-7: “That reality of whove essence we give account"? in asking and answering our 3 it always invariantly constant or is it difference ar different times?" Equality itself, Beauty itself, each real ‘hing itself, che reality,'** does it ever admit of any: change at all? Or does cach of those things which are real! existing always itself by itself! Unique in form, remaining invarianely constant.” never admitting of alteration whatever in any respect in any way? As a piece of philosophical prose by a fasti repeats himself without good reason'™ these jous writer who never hes are remarkable for or Reading this etenve in she same way athe terminal dause in tg UE. 505-5) above, ake the predicate apple ta each ance ofthe Fer, ttt the Fon ibed eee ‘san instance of the beat abwane ect tos etvh fois fg yor Bibouey vat oe, Tae Aayos which answers the “What ithe £2 ‘question isan arcouar of the teality voboias nated “ie F which state th tneere See ssitional nae 103 Norepov owes tl Fyn word rata hor’ SXRun: The phrase ed ‘Taine sound pleonoste ar hn slosh Why shoul the ine ofthe mariana constancy fSy's Forts? Why need he ed hat adverbs Besgaoe dhe wants ce apeciv the fal range ofivariance he has fn sit. Fo! suppose Fentale ana H. Then F wil be not op constantly F but alee consanly G ant tnt concerns F but inconstantly G or H. We weed tobe amared chat the Fail be always inv ua all the ways inwehich i pessble fori to be neta tog gine hootoy Sion, 12 05 fea. sora» iaasor 8 fon, 00 Sv ais ead cing, The impor of the undertined piiae mil be disctssed. below {0} Gosvrespxave tate fy 08 But has no objection to rpeasing hirwelf for emphasis upon occasion, lenedeangumen inthe earlier halogues abo licenses motivated sepetiion. Sadmirable ih her ene ‘iy tice and even thrice what admirable” Or gabe Bu fue nav Tate sane toll70 Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates in Plato : oo saying the same thing to and thee umes over with only verb Saat they never ado any change a al —shey eve hdimit of any alteration whatever" they are always invariandly ee hr roduced by such reiterative assertion could hardly be stronger. PRNow consider the complementary assertion ofthe instability of the es sea rat Phd. 780184: “What thea of the many beautiful [things] - men or horses or anything ele whatever ofthis sort~ or of the many equal [hinge] orofany other namesake of tein Arey alwaye inthe samestate? Ory je the oppose are they not, s0 to speak" never in any way inthe same he rc ofthe qualifcation nso to speak” Soul not be mise nmr i wou mean sri, tn ly, psp Change n every pe pest Amd hs woud betas hat Pate nan toys Forifa nl stance af give Form wer Ia bn isand oft Form’ A fe cole mac hw cul welded iat aloha we casero itanhe shang he The hypothe tht cept son tol change sl-dere te hypothenia were true it would be imposible to aver: its truth about anyihing in particular. Moreover, no sense could then be given to Plato’s doctrine that sensible things are “ namesakes” of Forms, each of them “participating”? in the particular Form whose “name- * Sgameraie” ofthe Form which it inwangte, Pa esr thi setaphor to bell a fas HE Te, Socrates ‘contra Socrates in Plato n sake” itis. Nothing contrary to this doctrine is being asserted in 731 once the qualifying phrase is taken into account: we can understand Sx 10 be asserting that no sensible thing is ever the same in all of isa properties and relations during any stretch of time, no matter how small.'! This will allow sensible things to change in some ways while remaining constant in others - innumerable changes, sublimminally minute, proceeding within every object of our perceptual experience while its gross perceptible properties remain recognizably the same “But if this is how Plato wants to be understood couldn't he have said so more explicitly?” Certainly. But why suppose he would want co? Has he any interest in making his doctrine more palatable to the soundlovers and sightlovers” ?""" He has no desire to conciliate these worldlings. Just the opposite. He wants to startle them, shock them out of the dogmatic certainties of their false ontology. His message to them: “If absolute stability is what you want, you never find it in the world of sights and sounds. You must look for in that other world in whose existence you do not believe," We can now consider a third categorial feature of S,°s Forms: their incorporeatity, How fundamental this feature of theits really is Plato comes to see best in retrospect when he views the ontology of his middle dialogues from the perspective of his latest period. In the Sophist he sees the great issue in metaphysics! as that which divides materialists, for whom body dejves reality,"*” and immaterialists,"™* "ecome sein as reepect and in 30a a (rom rx wane re0edr0v Sev fv Hew Paricipate, while thine which partcipate in Diaimlaniy tecome deta ee ‘ph Paticcae in bh neni tks say ana sats ae, 11g Plotonccer ara any hing stronger. In the Phra iseeenat he delves hg ‘a thi world "eve man ar be ov now consent Cerne mesa chat “all yrroueva are in perpecel change meeryoopet [are capis Iewin, 1976: ae pointed out) Chernin puraphrae mance he Fre se, by overstating hs hit ex conta nothing coresponng tote monde Yate ae read icy the test ase ea tore than that evehing fe mond kee eneing i one pe =a perfor weil abe, wich seek ee 1g Sy'slabet inf 473f or de unphalonopieal many the opie wie Seles ee here ‘ntnthing beuct than the allseat world ofthe sesea ef deren nee 115 R.tront"g! “hac ine low (he “ghlover, ho dotnet Gebers i Renay vel 4 cttain Form of beauty whichis aways bvaranty conus 116 He likens ita the yyevrevayia™she barle of Ue eartborn glans agaiat the Shympians ® tobrey 2a ro ony bau. This categoria property aamaibles has nove become sp much more salen in hs reueapecive ew of he ously ofr moa pone Aefiniv of thir dfecence om Form tha he ees no gress weed oo blk Seca lei atercatgorl properties, The material woskls acenbiis tobe ener for granted (chat bodys" vble and tagibie™ comes oven the Remedies enna, ‘ph: 2478s derpetun Fux appears ony in the charge of tne oman ee, ‘ponent rece teality we pure proces “yéwor avr cietorgqpieny sees sede 118 T fest the temptation tony heal” teucads agaoe Sl eetede eh as ‘mecaphysca dale, Beshleyan or Hegelian, Pat's cttoogy tema oy renee hing2 Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates in Plato the “Friends of Forms,” who would “force on us the view that true reality" consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal Forms” (246c).1¥ In the middle dialogues this dimension of the Forms had been taken for granted, necding only to be noticed, not argued for. In the Phaedo (7ga-B) it was brought up in a lemma in one of the arguments for immortality: the soul must be immortal because, as between “the two kinds of existent, ”!#! one of which js invisible and immutable, while the other is visible and ceaselessly mutable, the soul is “more alike and akin” to the former, than to the latter. That the latter is material is not mentioned as such, but itis implied in the statement that “it is more akin and more similar”? 10 our body than to our soul. In the Republic the corporeality of sensible things gets, no formal recognition, but shows up incidentally when Sy contrasts the Form of Unity ("the One itself”) with sensible instances of it, describing the latter as “numbers having visible and tangible" bodies” (525p). In the Symposium’ the Form of Beauty is set off against ‘‘a beautiful face or hands or any other thing in which body partakes.”” Thus in dialogues of the middle period the incorporeality of Form is taken for granted as one of its standard features, as well it might since it is structurally essential to those two other categorial properties of theirs which get the lion’s share of attention: it is because they have no body that Forms canmo! be accessible to our senses (which are parts of our body and can only record its interactions with other bodies) and that they can be immutable (for if they were corporeal they would be caught in the flux thar engul& the material world) 1 have lett ll last the aspect of Sy's Forms expressed by that strange phrase which may have caught the reader's eye in two of the texts cited from the Phaedo above: Form exists itself by itself (rns, 712 [= T1g]).!" What can Sy mean by the “itself-by-itself existence” of 119 thy Sdndniy obeiaw, Why “ere ality i. ie highs degre: of Vast, £81: 62,9 Tel? Tn safeguard the existential satus of the material word fn contrasting YoeoW epavieny with ola Plato dors noe deny yee one degree of reali: c Th 500, 120 This dviion berseer materiale and smarts lato Bow ses at x0 far-reaching aerate fe they wil ave "ter contempt arya, they wl Sp 2450). tay Blo dn 7av Berson, Ch avg abe. 222, Suoibrpov._ eal ouyyeieresoy, Tube {24 The tangbity of body was to be wven pride of place in Plato's fetospetic ew af he ontology of hin middle por: in lensing the bos ith the rel the "pans alls ‘eal only to "hat hich hat impact snd an be touched.” Inthe Phd ee me Conspicuous feature ef ody iis visa seu above med again at Jaca hese the Ste binds of Being’? ave diingsished ss “visible” and“ invaible™ respective tag attace (= 122 below.” 1a5 On dhe beta sense of the phase see 5 above, Socrates ‘contra’ Snevates in Plato 3 the entities he calls e¥S0s, 16éa?"** Since he never speaks to this question directly we must ferret out an answer from its use in context. So let us concentrate on the most informative of the mas passages™” in which it occurs in dialogues of Plato's middle period This is that passage in the Symposium where Diotima" reveals to Socrates the vision awaiting the lover of the Form of Beauty at the terminus of his quest when he finally comes to ‘see! face to face the Form he has previously viewed only in its manifestations in beautiful bodies, minds, institutions, of sciences: 122 Simp. 21145-06:"" [a] Beauty will not be manifest to him fat that moment] as a face or as hands or as any other corporeal thing nor yet as some discourse or stience,(b] nor as existing somewhere in something eae sn or ramos ia sag eerie heron earth or esky a anything ese, Dut [e] as eng tf yal with lf always unique fe form, (a all ovher ttl things participating init in sonve such meaner 28 this: while those other things arse ud perth itis nether enhanced nor diminished in any way. is not affected at all” At [a] Diotima says that at the moment of climactic insight into the nature of Beauty the Form will not be seen as existing in any beautiful corporeal thing ‘hands, or face) nor yet in any beautiful process or product of thought (discourse or science}, Since the disjunction “‘corporeal/mental ” is exhaustive of things and happen- ings in the world of time, she has said that the Form of beauty wi not be seen as existing ix anything whatever in this world. But st 406 This question has been curiously mexlected in the vast He forge! Though rene aware the the exer 35°8), had been fly aeipaed tn Hates eather companions ede Gampietl Bae: g03-5: Bursesva2q 0h Pe yeh Oy Spey, Res Slew tgr0. re}. hey oad apy fled to noice tha fxinence™ of Form & ft sured do never in the eater dialogues for ings ino the dstneive importa ao na! eb TS was ever put om nee senda, ‘Mow surprising i fs neplect nthe ost boris pce af vesearch eer paeied on Plt’ echnical emniqaomy. Cenaanta Risers oe Unit shoge toe Place ion, ‘a investigation, camtaing a toaage caper on Eid, laa unl versandee We takes so aan (oe ele ode ie yu phrase inte saat of Pa Siolece The ult mat emedied in hs masse teowelume work Plato gon, 427 Bat lo infoative iit ocearrene tn she Pttoit rath) whee hal seen sisal yte 25, we ast Pa nigh senience "the Fama therm temscives” rfsana Spero. ygm 1390 1990-8 so enpres he ame mecphCl tlsin ag thac expreed ty “the Forms exit parse” ropes geet tyeey oe 128 goqurvarn diorun (3080). a Bictional figure, shose names "che who has hoses fem Zeta” sugges “ihe posesion highest wisdom so suthorty™ (Bury. ga wase The only othce pasage it the Platonic copa ip nich, Socrates i repented th incorporating nwo his own plenty higher truth derived froma rligaes sour we the Ate (Bture = 71 above): it from press and prestewes Sepby ek ‘Takara that he had “heard” the doctrine of reincarnation tag “Suddenly he will come tose « wonder! sort ef beauty” soe 150 For comment onthe smmesine accent of ts pasage sce ass, 108: 63a” Socrates “contra’ Socrates in Plato not satisfied that she has done enough to impress her point on her hearer, Diotima proceeds to say it again at (b]: the Form of beauty will not be seen as existing somewhere" in something else, such as a soul, incarnate (‘“on the earth”) or discarnate (‘in dhe sky” or beyond is)#* But surely this was made clear already ata? Why harp on it again at [b]? Why such repetitious emphasis?" We can best ace why if we reall het to speak of gn auribute as being “in" something is current usage for saying that it is instantiated theres this would be ordinary Greck for saying that the thing Aas the property associated with the Form, ‘This is how Socrates, speaks and thinks: he says “temperance is in you" for “you are temperate," “piety Js in those actions" far “those actions are pious.” Sq takes i for granted that if temperance oF piety or beauty exist they exist in something in the world of time. So Ff'Se were asked, "Where, in what, docs beauty exist?” he would point to beautiful bodies, minds, actions, institutions, thoughts in the world of common experience and say ‘There ~ it exists in them. This would be the only possible locus of its existence for him, as for all his interlocutors. And this is just what S,, would want to deny. He declares in T22 that when the Form of Beauty is confronted at the moment of its lover's deepest, most complete, discernment of its nature, it will be seen as existing Beyond all actual or possible’ instantiations of it, Even if there were superlatively beautiful bodies, minds, actions, institutions in our world, the Form of Beauty would not exist in them. The Form would not need any of them in order to exist. To be the very quality which itis suffices for its existence." ss iat [aj ana [b] is What is iutplicd itv he sequewee of wea: Thendinary anf pow hoduar hte wih amprien a ye} when deste {the superteenal place", Ph 2570) vam awlacad but unavoidable Race of Pat's 13 Ant noted earlier (a, 168 above) Plato not averse co repetition to produce eed ial} (ct Ee, ola Naparny vitoy tong aon ANC im ROD MN SEER Deer acs te we intended Socrates *comtra” Socrates in Plato 8 asserted directly at (c]: beauty exists itself by itself with itself: “with itself” is added here to " by itself" to reinforce the Form's capacity for isolated, sel-sufficient, existence. Existing “with itself” not need to exist in conjunction with anything in the world of time.'** And we can sce why this thought should lead to the one in [4]: the independent existence of the Form must be sustained in the face of the fact that multitudes of other things “participate” in it. So it is at [A], where we are assured that the existence of those “participants” does not affect its own in the slightest. “ Unique in form (jovoaBés), exempt from their endlessly variable is untouched by the vicissitudes of their births and deaths: when th “arise and pass away ” ic is neither enhanced nor diminished, “is not affected at all.” Ifevery beautiful abject in this world were to perish in a cosmic holocaust:" if all souls in the world were to perish with its even if— blasphemous thought ~ the Divine Creator himself were obliterated, the Form of Beauty would remain what it always was and will always be, “itself by itself with itself." world or no world, U this is what the “by itscif” existence of Forms means for Plato in the dialogues of his middle period and still in the Timacus,"" we have good reason to believe that it is meant to express what his greatest pupil and severest critic was 10 call the “separation” “xeopionds} of the Platonic Form: its existential independence of any actual or possible instantiation of it in the world of time." Aristotle's exact phraseology is not anticipated in Plato's corpus: Plato never writes that his Forms are “ separate” (xeptoré.! He does not need {8 And only herein she Pari on eee he rt by alg the ina eenive pronoun eel bp ict bur he dors day erphaa for he ean neta pat so wheat ah increment 60 at Cn ge, 47Gat'. Ta. out present pasage inthe Sap heehee ‘uowinal verbal weight bw adeing “wh lf tocol ace we ise +39 Weshould note st the sleaueiecy of ts own entenee axed cf ith to ee dijuncton from teseperl Istana, te ors ocher lol the Forme with one another 1k 4754) 12 the wnaientt {rultudes of over Forms inegil tothe note ofeach 4e & purely nosional pes lars unten, made Bete bet of hers" is made inueite ever Te grey 41 Gh atonal note 3.6 Below (Forms inthe Tings” 2 For the meaning of yep 9465 fm Arvone ie Plo see adconal note 2.7 13 That (a this tne ght interpretation of wha Avon mes oy seg “separate Formu to Plate that in dei he compet fatal so Praesent gos poweifilly erga agalot snr vicus to the conuary by Chem ene ae Fine, 1984.1 3H, comfyms Chemis ona) disens om (bn adits moss 5 ‘Separation’ in Hato." section 3, below, 1 gie resehs why we shoul ake wa {Gherniar on 1) 96 hss than a "44 Though iemay ive ben in oral dscasion in she Academs, as Lauggest in adionat tote 2, seton 9, below 145 By Ae comes else 0 this in what he docs write ~ that the Form “eis separately (Goat epi)" “with & dependent genve (Pr 1sobg ane ch oe Wee aitione eae “The "commana ges ofeach Fonin wih76 Socrates ‘contra’ Socrates in Plato to: he can, and does, express the same substantive doctrine by writing that they “exist separately” or, equivalently," that they “exist themselves by themselves,” He plants the latter phrase in the center of his great “hypothesis” in the Phaedo (ttt) that beauty exists itself by itself, feeling no need to offer a separate argument for it, since the existence of his Forms independent of any other constituent of reality ~ sensible bodies or incorporea) souls ~ is the immediate consequence of their essence.” This is the heart of Plato's metaphysics: the postulation of an eternal selfexistent world, transcending everything in ours, exempt from the vagaries and vicissitudes which afftict all creatures in the world of time, containing the Form of everything valuable or knowable, purged of all sensory content." We meet this theory in some guise or other wherever Platonism lives in the philosophy or theology, the poetics, erotics, oF even the mathematical philosophy of the Western world, So to continue interposing my exegetical mechanics between the ““Socra- tes” who expounds this philosophy in Plato's middle dialogues and Plato himself would be a vexing affectation. Hereafter I shall not say “Socratesy” in contexts where Plato is transparently what I We can now coi der how Plato’s non-sensible, eternal. in- corporeal, transcendent Forms connect with that extraordinary conception of the soul which breaks into his corpus in the Meno (71 above). ‘The transmigrating soul necessitates a two-world top- ography for the diachronic tale of che soul's existence: “this world! which is the soul’s present habitat, and that other world, whose location remains mysterious,"™ identifiable only by evocative sont that excelent eanslators {Cornfndep3g: Dit 1956: Allen, gob: reguats disregard de difference Thus rorrov taorov G85 doer wuss =a Ferme each test txins separately, "comes through Conordstaraaion st ech of thee at seperate Fore. "in Alles sa “uhere i's separate character fr each of then ab Plato ha ‘eluen xoperrev bos oat mao, 146. ArT aha argue in tome deal iw sedivonal mote 25,147 Chon. 197 above UB Hlece Sy refers tig eps rabapse, ng one the oor bath shes pists slong with the "eer by fel” pease’ evbac® sino depots Phd 60s = rid se fr even ithout that phase: Phi Grm. nev TO eAioney Sed Spas, avo To teav. ehipiés, saanor. Eureton, The realm ‘ct Fork “pure being™ ervey rip, 0 eso, yoQmis the pon region” rewen nabupe at Pl. Ban que Sn 152 belo 40 By the Lane to I hal nor ay Sorat when i lear that lates reveatin of Socrates in the caricr dialogues is what ean, vow ea ii lee ee yrds The deminer by descriptive predications which Meni eategorical sate! the "corporel and sible region’ fy ri cuscrbe val Spa ro Re. sp9c-0 ge iets that "eoperctlnual region ‘wey Grepeupves saxon which 06 hhymned worthy or ever wit” hdr syre Socrates “contra” Socrates in Plato 7 epithets," or by traditional locatives,!** but indispensable for the Uansmigration tale, since it is the world in which the soul exists before cach of its successive incarnations and to which upon its liberation from each. The transcendent Forms are the bridge between our present, incarnate, existence, and our discarnate past and future. Having come to know these entities in our prenatal history, we ean now “recollect” precious fragments of that lost knowledge. For the philosopher this “recollection” isa strenuously intellectual exercise. As I shall be explaining in chapter 4, its prerequisite is prolonged training in mathematics and dialectic. But it has also a ifferent dimension which the great myth of the Phaedrus signals through poetic imagery. In “recollection” the philosopher grows the “wings” by which at death his soul will “ascend” to the “other” world 123 Phdr. 24gc:_ “This is the reason why only the philosopher's intellect rightly grows wings: for to the best of his ability he is ever near in recollection to chose things to which a god's nearness makes hi divine, 1 In popular belief the gods owe their privileged exemption from the fatality of death to their supernatural diet of nectar and ambrosia." Plato in his myth upgrades, aetherealizes, those all-too-human gods of Homer, For feasting and carousing on Olympus his imagery substitutes processions of Form-contemplation Phir. 24781.) and he suggests that mind-contact with the Forms is precisely what makes his intellectualized divinities divine, His myth opens up the same privilege to men: we too have shared the nutriment of immortality in our prenatal state and now, in this mortal life. we may renew in recollection its immortalizing sustenance. * Creatures 152 "The region in which dels the mon bled part of hal exe nde te fon 18 sos uonovore tb Bron sabe" The we and pure and ine enon yoreain wor Ca8spos wl Bh eS "REOo BS es nah eating. federal Tcl cong Gam, hile ae ine a ire equa [nc dertion rea nave ye ahs eB Go ge soy "Mest noe heen ede ie Te sfnen =n ld he exher" Gamfrd33h "sam he deexipion ofthc onme as Sake aac Ta bgt bcheld by souls,” Pde. 2308. " i 194 tyes yor fay ei Bo rp ha Sau, mpi lane es ust: Bae’ tS [at filloning the wosion in Hacks, cage Ste seem tin ose £5 hee min gu se qt Dea dow m deine 199 Atos asthe bleach eau apt “How rule fe ge ‘be immortal, if they need food?” Metgpt. :oo0at 7 : i 156 The snus “nuntaon™ hough es enter wah For i highligted nthe dterison of ie comemplatan’ by the Sear and by" dca, ome ole Sceeee ea eecplatng wath she ourbhed and prosper [Sexadve Tenney olga ee ‘Sab ae when she as ra onterplate el esd upon os ag Pe8 Socrates ‘contra? Socrates in Plato eee eee ee eter ourselves in knowledge and in love? with the eternal Tat secSeaing to the OED a ke ballet in the Peni fee onestcian oe caiman |e teeter aan Eontemplaton.© Ass debnion ies much tomatoe, Bor ane cringe overlooks on-theats mytcons sein dew For anaes Igroes cron ‘ibeate mysdee whe Scr’ union wiih the Disne nature” by means other than contemplation, B&e in its ve narrowness it is a ttibute to that aspect of Platonism which genuinely myst ‘nd ha npc sysicalpiosphio and Seam weenti aerator nee purty the experience which Piao doreibes hough sorb eee ee eases fee Resa (Getcha ine reste ee eae alee ee Fh i hs uw src epee hc ere ee ean nates agen eect Insight that has the lucidity of vision and the immediacy of toe Divinl®™ naware” of Forma ie achioced Hens content th a oe ore ae rere Se esisieamer oes rag R.4goa-n: “The ue lover ofknowledge, shore nature it is to strive towards reality, will not tarry among the objects of opinion which the many believe to be real, but press on with a love that will not faint oF fail, until he has come in touch sith the esential nature of each thing with that of his soul which is it to touch reality because of kinship with it; and havi thus come close to true being and mixed with ig! he inay give birth to intelligence and uth, may know and truly live and be nourished and chs ins then, and not before, find release from labour In the Symposium too (2124) the philosopher “gazing upon and 198 Plotinis the creator ofthe purest mystett philosophy of the Western world i steeped in repel omer 160 ‘ramos wel uve no Bo Byes, For ualywan am common erm fr sexual srercoane Socrates “contra? Socrates in Plato 79 consorting with” (Gscouévev Kai vwévtos) the Form of beauty “will give birth (tedévti) to true virtue. ‘To evoke this experience Plato intimates that in vision of Form the philosopher achieves what the devotees of mystic cults seek to attain in their rites, At times he pictures it as a Dionysian mystery of divine possession ~ éfouardzeiv," the state in which man becomes #0405 (“god is in him") Alternatively he depicts the prenatal contemplation of Form as though it were the celebration of an Eleusinian vision-mystery: 25 Phdr. 2gon-c: “Radiant beauty was there to see when with the happy choir we saw that blessed sight and vision and celebrated that rite which, with all due reverence, we may call the most blessed of all. Perfect were we the celebrants, uncouched by any of those woes that befell us later Perfect, simple, tremorless, blessed were thase apparitions of the rite and celebration, Tn that pure light we too were pure, not vet entombed in this ‘hing we now call “body,” carrying it round, imprisoned in it as in an oyster-shell, 2 AAs this quotation shows, Plato's Form-mysticism is profoundly other- worldly, The ontology of non-sensible, eternal, incorporeal, self. existent, contemplable Forms, and of their anthropological corrclate, the invisible, immortal, incorporeal, wansmigrating soul, has far. reaching implications for the mind and for the heart. In the heart it evokes the sense of alienation from “this” world where the body lives, @ nostalgia for a lost paradise in that “other” world from ich the soul has come and to which it longs to return. In the mind arouses a hunger for the kind of knowledge which cannot be satisfied by investigating the physical world, All we can find here are images, copies, shadows of that real world which we shall fully know only when liberated from the “oyster-shell. One could hardly imagine a world-outlook more foreign to that of Socrates, He is unworldly: he cares little for money, reputation, security, life itelf, in fact for anything except virtue and moral knowledge. But he is not otherworldly: the eternal world with which, 169 Bide 293s, ess e590 264 OF Burkert 198 106, explaining toy as “within 2 god" ch. 6m. 55. And cé. Ph {690:""As those concerned with mystic ret Cl Mary ave te wenden few ne ‘he Boge [those wh have attained union with tye gid Barchun Those Booger nae pinion are none others than these who have pllesophired revay 185 The oystershell mage i acatr-ccer from the Riper ScD eorsai~ 10sec the soul ‘he really ise mutt “diencumber her ofall cent wld profusion‘ sc so te (Serpe), whose cantly substance has enersted her aaron aes Conan tog 265 "Is een relly shown us that ifwe are ter to achieve pare kno ledge of sotto Ne must ge id of te body... As the argument sadienen we tall hae dhe ster dee rot while we five (Pha 6635