Portraits of Integrity

26 Case Studies from History, Literature and Philosophy

Charlotte Alston, Amber Carpenter, Rachael Wiseman, Charlotte Alston, Amber Carpenter, Rachael Wiseman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350040397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Portraits of Integrity depicts more than 20 historical, fictional and contemporary figures whose character or life raises questions about what integrity is and how it is perceived. Integrity might be culturally bound, but this diverse set of portraits demonstrates that it is not the special preserve of any one culture. Portraits of Socrates, Mencius, Rama and Job, alongside the aspirational 16th-century couple John and Dorothy Kaye, civil rights activist Ella Baker and an anonymous banker, highlight the persisting – sometimes conflicting – features of a life lived with integrity. An introduction identifies and discusses the key questions and themes raised by the case studies, encouraging the reader to determine for themselves the weight and significance of the recurring topics integrity brings up - truth, awkwardness, goodness, and charisma. For anyone looking to learn more about this elusive virtue, Portraits of Integrity is an essential collection. It uncovers the manifold aspects of integrity, illustrates the various possibilities for its expression in a life and asks whether living a life of integrity means living a life of isolation and hardship, or if it is possible to live with integrity without jeopardising all else.

1

Plato’s Socrates

The oddness of the integrated soul

Amber D. Carpenter

There are many other quite marvellous things one might applaud in Socrates. While some of his accomplishments may perhaps be said of others as well, still there is no one like him, not among the ancients nor among contemporaries – this is what is most amazing of all.

(SYMPOSIUM 221c)

In the Gorgias, Callicles accuses Socrates of lurking with boys in dark corners. Plato’s Socrates has been lurking in the dark corners of the European imagination ever since. He is shoeless and rumpled, bug-eyed and snub-nosed, slightly shiftless – and yet, the hero of the story. What is it about him that haunts us – and at the same time attracts us?

Athenians of the fourth century bce. were evidently equally bothered by Socrates (the man himself) – a jury of five hundred of your peers does not vote to have you executed for a non-capital offence unless you have really got under their skin. The comic poet Aristophanes mocks him in his comedy The Clouds; the historian-statesman Xenophon commits his admiring memories of Socrates to writing. Indeed, so many people wanted to have a say in drawing the definitive portrait of Socrates that a new genre of writing was born, ‘the Socratic dialogue’, in which Socrates generally appears as the unalloyed hero of civilized discourse. As Plato – one of these writers of ‘Socratic dialogues’ – tells it, these diverse reactions stem from the same source – and tell us as much about ourselves as about Socrates.

This common source lies, according to Plato, in what he has taught us to call Socrates’ outstanding integrity. While there is no ancient Greek equivalent of ‘integrity’, the attribution is not merely a retrospective one. For Socrates as Plato describes him in his several dialogues is perhaps the figure more than any other that has shaped the complex resonances and tensions that virtue has in European moral thought generally.

This is not because Plato was simply the better writer – in most cases, it is impossible to judge (since rivals’ works are lost), and about Xenophon, it is more seemly for the philosopher to acknowledge that literary style can be a matter of taste. The reason Plato’s Socrates guides and grounds our moral thought in this area is that Plato married carefully chosen details of Socrates’ life and behaviour, vivid depictions of ‘the man himself’ in conversation, to a searching diagnosis of what it is about human nature, our condition, and the good that enabled Socrates to have this extraordinary goodness, and affect those around him in the diverse ways he did.

In short, as Plato tells it, Socrates’ unfailing consistency in word and deed, his steadfastness and incorruptibility, are all inevitable expressions of his unified soul. Our complex psychēs can be in conflict, and ordinarily are; but they can also be harmoniously unified, when governed by a commitment to truth about goodness. Note that this commitment is unifying only when it is a commitment to what is really and absolutely good – no adherence to mere partial or apparent ‘values’ will do the trick. Such inner unity of the person can only issue in harmonious fittingness between goals, words and action; there can be no deceit or prevarication, famously no weakness of will, in the person who has unified herself and her life around an overriding commitment to the truth about goodness. The notion of the properly integrated psychē as grounding consistent behaviour through a steadfast commitment to truth and goodness was born of Plato’s attempt to create categories for articulating the uncanny exceptional goodness of Socrates.

What Plato captures particularly well is the way that Socrates is experienced by others as both maddening and charismatic. I use the present tense ‘is’ here because, as anyone who has taught Plato’s dialogues knows, Socrates continues to be experienced as both maddening and charismatic. As Plato presents it, this is no accidental feature of a peculiar man. Socrates may strike us (all ‘us’s, at all times and cultures) as odd; but he is not a bundle of eccentricities. His behaviour, his words, are both infuriating and inspiring for the same reason – namely, because of Socrates’ particular form of goodness, his whole self unified around love of the good and of wisdom. Our varied reactions to this reveal our own ambivalence and discomfort in the presence of this particular virtue. To come into contact with a person of outstanding integrity is demanding; as Plato shows us, it demands that one put oneself and one’s life on the line. And that is uncomfortable.

Plato avails himself of all the tools of the dialogue form in order to convey a vivid, dynamic portrait of Socrates and the effect he had on those who came into contact with him. We are never given a full biography, which makes the carefully selected details we are given of Socrates’ character and life more telling.

Plato’s Socrates was a man of unimpeachable courage, seeing action at the battles of Potidaea and Delium, distinguished in the latter by dignity in retreating as ordered, even as others were running away around him (Symposium 219e–221c; Laches 181b). In the line of duty he also manifested outstanding fortitude, unaffected by cold or lack of shoes (Symposium 200b–c). This courage and fortitude were conspicuous in Socrates’ civilian life. The oligarchy that seized control of Athens, trying to implicate others in their crimes, ordered Socrates to illegally arrest someone. Socrates refused, simply going home instead (Apology 32c–e); in another incident, Socrates alone refused to cooperate in an illegal mass trial (Apology 32b). Both of these refusals were made at significant personal risk.

Among his friends, Plato’s Socrates is known for his indifference to drink in both senses: he neither cares whether he drinks, nor is he affected when he does drink. Nor is sex a temptation to him (Symposium 217b–219a), though he is a well-known connoisseur of physical beauty (Charmides 154c–d) and considers love to be the only thing he really knows anything about (Phaedrus 257a; Symposium 177e).

Although Socrates practically never left the confines of the city, apart from his military service (Crito 52b–c, Phaedrus 230e), he strikes his fellow Athenians as atopos – out of place, or strange – on many dimensions (Tht. 175a; Symp. 215a, 221c–d; and at Phdr. 230c6, ‘most strange’). In addition to his uncanny sobriety and steadiness of character, Socrates has a host of socially awkward habits that betray a disconcerting indifference to social judgement. Not a rich or well-born man, nor a particularl y attractive man (Symposium 215a–c, 221d–e; Theaetetus 143e), Socrates has no shame or embarrassment in his poverty or plainness. For Socrates, making a special effort with his appearance, for a celebratory occasion with fine folk, consists merely in having a wash and putting on his best sandals (Symposium 174a). Plato’s Socrates even openly declares that ‘one shouldn’t care what all men think, but only what good men think’ (Crito 47a; Laches 189a; cf. Symp. 194b–c). So it is evidently nothing to him to stand stock-still if he is puzzled about something, refusing to move on until he knows which direction he ought to go in (Symposium 174d–175c, 220c–d). He does not mind that he has acquired no fame for Great Deeds (leaving him open to Callicles’ charge that he is unmanly for pursuing philosophical conversation with teenagers, Gorgias 485d–e). And he knows that his adherence in conversation to what is best rather than what is pleasant will do him no favours in life or in the law courts (Tht. 172–7, Gorgias 521d–e). This same obliviousness or disregard for social censure means he does not hesitate to ask awkward questions of public figures as they do their morning’s shopping (e.g. Anytus at Meno 89e–94e), or work out at the gym (Charmides 155c–d). Even visiting dignitaries or celebrities are not spared from being publicly called to account by Socrates (such interrogations are the basis of both the Protagoras and the Gorgias).

This particular kind of disregard for social censure is disconcerting, for it is invariably accompanied by implicit critique of the censurer: Socrates would be receptive to the critique if it were well founded (Gorgias 487e–488b); that he is not thus receptive implies the critic is the one who has got his values mixed up. Surely, whether virtue can be taught, and how, is more important after all than whether people watching think you ‘won’ – right? This is why Socrates’ questions, as Plato describes them, are so awkward for so many interlocutors. Socrates asks about things that really matter – and he insists on treating them as if they really mattered. He asks about virtue and justice and friendship and courage and beauty – and expects his interlocutor to engage seriously with the question. Glib answers are returned to sender unopened. Indeed, he is so serious about it that he says nothing is more important than virtue, and nothing can be good without it (Apology 28b–30b); and that what is truly good is the only thing worth knowing. Not only does he mean it, but he says it as if it were obvious that everyone agrees. Anyone at that moment concerned rather about his standing or reputation is forced to shift uncomfortably in his seat.

This discomfort is accentuated by the fact that Socrates so obviously does not just say virtue is important – he lives it, thus showing up the lives around him as lived differently, as if money or fame or pleasure were more important. In addition to Socrates’ refusal to participate in injustice, at great personal risk, he refuses to appeal (as was the norm) to the needs of his family and youth of his children when defending himself against charges of impiety (Apology 34d–e). He refuses to beg. Socrates then refuses to run away from prison when sentenced to death for a crime of which he knows himself to be innocent, even when his friends arrive with the money to bribe the guard to look the other direction. And while this looks like a formidable instance of sticking to what one knows to be right in the face of strong temptation to do otherwise, Plato’s Socrates almost perversely eschews claim to any knowledge – in particular any knowledge of good and bad, of virtue and vice, and therefore any knowledge that he is, in fact, doing right when he acts by what appears to his best reflective critical evaluation to be right. In spite of all his seeking, Socrates insists he knows nothing (Gorgias 506a, 509a; Apology 21d) and has nothing to teach (Apology 33a–b) – yet Plato shows him as adept at making anyone with pretensions to knowledge look even more ignorant and foolish.

People around him interpret this as obscene arrogance (Apology 37a; Thrasymachus in Rep. I; Alcibaides at Symp. 215c, 219c), as a mocking of others (‘That’s just Socrates’ usual irony’, Thrasymachus snarks at Republic 337a; cf. Symp. 216e, and Gorgias 489e), and find it absolutely infuriating. But others find it magnetic, and find in Socrates a true and reliable friend (Crito and Phaedo in the Phaedo; Nicias and Laches in the Laches), an inspiration to self-improvement through self-examination (Hippocrates in the Protagoras, Aristodemus and Alcibiades in the Symposium), and ‘the best, and also the wisest and most upright’ person they have known (Phaedo 118a).

This is the portrait Plato gives us of Socrates. It is a vivid and artfully drawn portrait of an unusual and charismatic personality – someone who is constantly searching, and whose search is necessarily a collective one, though it is not a comfortable one for his neighbours. He puts himself on the line by putting others to the test (Gorgias 467c, 487e–488b). His unselfconscious embodying of what it is to take virtue seriously exposes those around him as merely paying lip service to virtue, and this makes him out of place, odd, even when most at home.

Plato’s masterstroke is that while drawing this portrait of Socrates he simultaneously presents an explanation of this remarkable personality. Over several dialogues, Plato develops and explores a philosophical psychology that offers an analysis of what people are like in general, what they are like when they are virtuous and do good things, and what they are like when they are vicious and do bad things. The details of the account he arrives at – both its plausibility and the reasons offered in favour of it – need not concern us here. Our focus is just the fact that this account offers an explanation of Socrates’ extraordinary and atopos goodness in terms of unity of the soul, or of the personality.

Across the dialogues, when Plato looks inside human beings, he sees a seething mess. Countless desires, wayward and wilful, struggle against each other, with no promise of practical consistency – indeed, impulses not even aiming to cooperate in forming a harmonious personality. Desire for truth jostles alongside pride and envy, and these rub up against our bare animal aversion to physical pain , and desire for pleasure. That is what human beings are like ‘by nature’ – tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Plato’s Socrates: The oddness of the integrated soul
• 2 Boethius: Integrity as attunement to reality
• 3 Rāma: The imperfections of the perfect man in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa
• 4 Antigone: Staging integrity through sorority
• 5 Job: ‘And still he holdeth fast his integrity’
• 6 Ella Baker: Leading with integrity in the service of a cause
• 7 ‘Albert’: Transformational agency and integrity in the workplace
• 8 Huang Zongxi: Making it safe not to be servile
• 9 Lambert Strether: ‘What plays you least false’ in a life with others
• 10 Confucius’ village worthies: Hypocrites as thieves of virtue
• 11 G. E. M. Anscombe: The false hypocrisy of the ideal standard
• 12 Mohandas Gandhi: ‘My life is its own message’
• 13 Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans: Facing life as a whole
• 14 Simone Weil: Against being true to yourself
• 15 Guan Yu: ‘Righteousness that is not righteousness’ in the Romance of The Three Kingdoms
• 16 Gerrard Winstanley: Radicalism and the struggle for integrity during the English Revolution
• 17 Amadou Bamba: Integrity and the struggle for spiritual cultivation
• 18 Abai Kunanbayev: Integrity and the law in nineteenth-century Kazakh society
• 19 Amrita Sher-Gil: Identity and integrity as a mixed-race woman artist in colonial India
• 20 Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann and Georg Waitz: Two models of scholarly integrity
• 21 Hannah Arendt: Integrity, truth and the political realm
• 22 Anansi the Spider: Individual trickery and communal integrity
• 23 The Cookes and the Kayes: Assertions of virtue among the ‘middling sort’ in post-Reformation England
• 24 Titus Pomponius Atticus: Writing the life of an uncommonly honourable Roman
• 25 Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Letters from America: Creating a speaker with integrity
• 26 Virginia Woolf: ‘Writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching’: Integrity and the woman writer in A Room of One’s Own
• Afterword
• Index
• Copyright