The Philosopher's New Clothes

The Theaetetus, the Academy, and Philosophy's Turn against Fashion

Nickolas Pappas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317399247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book takes a new approach to the question, "Is the philosopher to be seen as universal human being or as eccentric?". Through a reading of the Theaetetus, Pappas first considers how we identify philosophers – how do they appear, in particular how do they dress? The book moves to modern philosophical treatments of fashion, and of "anti-fashion". He argues that aspects of the fashion/anti-fashion debate apply to antiquity, indeed that nudity at the gymnasia was an anti-fashion. Thus anti-fashion provides a way of viewing ancient philosophy's orientation toward a social world in which, for all its true existence elsewhere, philosophy also has to live.

Part I

Socrates in the Theaetetus

1 Entering the Theaetetus

Maurice Drury recalls Wittgenstein’s giving him a translation of Plato’s Theaetetus to read. Drury told Wittgenstein he found the dialogue “cold,” to which Wittgenstein answered “It was far from cold when it was written.”¹

And yet today the body of the Theaetetus has grown cold to the touch. Philosophers who examine knowledge rarely approach the subject as Plato did. Or it rarely strikes them, as Wittgenstein reported being struck, that someone today wondering how to understand knowledge resembles the characters in this arcane and off-putting dialogue. Wittgenstein’s reply to Drury attests to the talent he had, maybe the sharpest of his many philosophical senses, for discovering the metaphysical impulse motivating abstract texts. However chilled they are now into systems, and described in technical jargon, these works began in the heated effort to grasp something impossible, or to grasp it impossibly.

For those readers who continue not to be warmed by Plato’s Theaetetus even after contemplating the philosophical impulses that drive it, there may be other paths that lead back toward the world that produced the dialogue. This is not a book about the Theaetetus, but it will dwell on the first half of the dialogue for a while, in the hopes of recovering part of the motive force behind it. For this dialogue contains, as I believe no other work of Plato’s does, signs and remnants of Plato’s movement toward the institutionalization of philosophy. And reading for those signs may help some modern light fall on obscure turns of this conversation.

I will be saying that the first half of the Theaetetus bears the marks of the Academy’s founding, and that the founding of the Academy creates the possibility of a philosopher at home in a school. Such a philosopher is a teacher but also a citizen of his homeland. Usually pictured as male, he is an exemplar of that free man’s virtue sôphrosunê “moderation, temperance, self-control.”

Because Socrates was not normally depicted as at all aristocratic, sometimes not even presentable among the prosperous, elite citizens of Athens, this new philosophical type that the Theaetetus introduces to its readers will leave us wondering where Socrates belongs in the new world of philosophical schools. He is something of a wonder, and Plato must have known that Socrates would persist as a model for philosophers. But what would this new type be or look like if not like Socrates? Does philosophy have two models of its practitioners now?

It will take some time, and turns of interpretation, to find the rival images of philosophers speaking out from the pages of the Theaetetus. This chapter begins that interpretation and the next two will carry it forward. Part I as a whole will leave us with sharper images of the philosopher – the reality of the philosopher, but also that less-studied adjunct to this reality the philosophical appearance: what you might have to look like to resemble a philosopher. In pursuit of this appearance we will enter into the Theaetetus but also pass through it, to locate the question of the philosopher among discussions of dress and fashion.

Plato’s Academy

There is no doubt about the existence of schools in Athens, but considerable uncertainty about what they were like. Several schools appeared during the century after Athens executed Socrates: the Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa, and Epicurus’s Garden, together with others not as formally organized or not as long lasting. It is clear that Plato’s Academy came first and that it took its name from the gymnasium known as the Academy, but too many more general claims about the institution are up for debate. Did the school exist on the grounds of the gymnasium, or was it nearby, with members of the Academy using the gymnasium as a place to convene? Did the school have some traditionally recognized religious status when Plato founded it?

It does seem that as a public institution an Athenian gymnasium itself could not have been purchased. By the time of Socrates, Athens had three main gymnasia open and regularly attended, the Academy, Lyceum, and Cynosarges. It is telling that all three came to be associated with philosophical schools. Besides the Platonists meeting at the Academy, there were the students of Aristotle at the Lyceum. According to one explanation of the Cynics’ name, it derived from their meeting at the Cynosarges, a gymnasium open to illegitimate children and (perhaps) non-citizens.²

This last association however is less clear than the others. The Cynics might have simply called themselves kunikoi “doglike.” The next chapter will explore another possible origin for their name.

A palaistra was a smaller place focused on wrestling and usually reserved for use by younger men. It could be privately owned, and new ones would appear from time to time. The gymnasia were larger and treated as permanent institutions. They stood outside the city walls, and although they mostly consisted of open space they were enclosed within walls of their own. The architecture inside those walls included dressing rooms and meeting rooms, and a covered walkway around the central space, a colonnade known as the peripatos (from which, at the Lyceum, Aristotle’s associates would come to be known as Peripatetics, no doubt because they used the colonnade as their main meeting place).³

The open space of the gymnasium must have been considerable. Writing around the middle of the fourth century, when Plato’s Academy had been operating for a few decades and Aristotle had not yet founded his school at the Lyceum, Xenophon refers to both of those gymnasia as locations for cavalry exhibitions. The cavalry commander, Xenophon says, is responsible for leading all the displays that the city requires the cavalry to put on, “those both in the Academy and in the Lyceum.”⁴

Given the mildness of Greek weather, and given that this was the world before modern technology, most of the exercising would have taken place in the open air. So a gymnasium looked more like a garden or park than like a big building. The Academy’s philosophers could have walked along those colonnades, or sat inside meeting rooms. Just as easily they could have wandered the grounds where young and old men sprinted, threw javelins, lifted dumbbells, or wrestled.⁵

Trying to say more about what the philosophers did leads to another thicket of questions, this time about the Academy’s membership. How many people belonged to the Academy at any one time? Did they stay for life, or for a specified period? Aristotle famously arrived at the Academy when he was seventeen, and was still there twenty years later when Plato died. Did the typical Academician stay as long as that?

If long times at the Academy were common, one obvious next question is how formally the school distinguished its students from its teachers. Even Aristotle did not arrive at seventeen to join the Academy’s faculty; but just as surely he was not being called a student twenty years later.

Philosophical schools neither created education in Athens nor replaced earlier schools, but rather became one kind of supplement to existing schools. In Athens, young children studied in groups (depending on what their parents could afford, and for how long), using Homer or another traditional poet to learn how to read and write; in the process they familiarized themselves with a fair quantity of poetry. Socrates describes mimêsis in the Republic using the first episode of the Iliad,⁶ quite possibly so that even the poorest students will know what it says. (When Tom Sawyer has to memorize Bible verses he is tempted to stick with “Jesus wept.” The passage from Iliad 1 is the “Jesus wept” of Homer.)

This training in literacy provided the rudiments of intellectual ability. Basic literacy was probably widespread among adult citizens, who needed to deal with written material as legislators and members of the boulê “council, executive committee” of Athens. And a recurring scene from Athenian tragedy, of an illiterate man describing letters he does not understand, implies that the audience recognizes the word being spelled out as this messenger is unable to.⁷ But this much gives only the beginnings of literacy. As William Harris has concluded, “the majority of free Greeks did not go to school for any substantial period.”⁸ The boys who moved on to skilled professions would learn their trades as apprentices, and presumably farmers’ sons simply worked alongside their fathers.

By the time that Socrates was an adult, around the middle of the fifth century BC, sophists had come to Athens to fill the vacuum in higher education. Although some sophists offered instruction in just about every subject – Hippias is the most famous example of the sophistical polymath – the prosperous young men in Athens soon made clear that what they really wanted to learn was skill at public speaking and at refuting anything an opponent might say. They wanted to prevail among the crowds at the Athenian assembly, or in court where jurors could number in the hundreds. So rhetoric and eristic (or dialectic) – probably mixed together with samples of grammar, history, and natural science – made up the sophists’ curriculum. The Clouds of Aristophanes, the earliest reference to Socrates surviving from any writer, depicts him as the head of a phrontistêrion “intellectuary, thinkery,” in which lessons on outsmarting creditors combine with wordplay, materialist ethics, and zoology. Aristophanes probably had no knowledge of the real Socrates, and anyway wanted to amuse the crowd more than to portray a contemporary, so Clouds does not make reliable evidence about Socrates. Nevertheless the elements of this stage school likely derive from what had begun to take place around Athens.

One other feature of sophistry emerges from an anecdote about Prodicus. Socrates speaks of having attended the cheap public lecture that Prodicus gave, though he could not afford the cost of a full course of study. If Prodicus resembles other sophists, their activity must have included both lectures and tutorials. The lecture had to contain a few nuggets, or it wouldn’t make much of an advertisement for the expensive private course, but Prodicus saved the real doctrines for his paying customers; and in general every student learned in the sophist’s classroom what was not available to the public.⁹

Most famously the sophists charged money for their services. The protagonist of Clouds pays for a Socratic education, but this says more about the general public awareness of sophistic practice than it does about Socrates, who by all other accounts conversed without charging a fee.

The difference between charging tuition and free philosophizing let Plato distinguish philosophy from sophistry; in other ways too the first philosophical schools would have made the sophists their foils; but separating a philosopher from a sophist would draw attention to similarities as well as oppositions. Here it is worth pausing over the strange result of Plato’s one sustained effort to define the sophist, in the conversation that all but fills his dialogue the Sophist. Sometimes the definitions given there make the sophist sound like a philosopher. One in particular is still allegedly the account of a sophist, but the sophist’s definition describes the pedagogical values of philosophical cross-examination.¹⁰ Other dialogues illustrate the same trickiness of telling the two kinds of clever men apart. Socrates and Protagoras almost merge, in the dialogue named after Protagoras, deploying similar techniques to one another and finally swapping views on the teaching of virtue. And Jacques Derrida has shown that in Plato’s Phaedrus, the word pharmakon “medicine, poison” that Socrates uses to tell philosopher and sophist apart applies duplicitously to both.¹¹

Institutionally speaking, the philosophical schools acted contrary to sophistic schools in not charging tuition, but seem to have followed the sophists’ lead in combining certain subjects in their curriculum and excluding others.¹² Anecdotes speak of geometrical and astronomical research at the Academy, while the empirically minded Lyceum maintained supplies of plant and animal samples.¹³ It does not appear that any philosophical school offered instruction in rhetoric, as did the school of Isocrates, intellectual heir to the sophist Gorgias. In this respect we are left saying that philosophy resembled sophistry to the point of choosing some areas of focus or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Socrates in the Theaetetus
• Part II: Philosophy regarding fashion
• Part III: The philosopher’s new clothes
• Index