Socrates Founding Political Philosophy in Xenophon's "Economist", "Symposium", and "Apology"

Thomas L. Pangle

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226642505
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The oeuvre of the Greek historian Xenophon, whose works stand with those of Plato as essential accounts of the teachings of Socrates, has seen a new surge of attention after decades in the shadows. And no one has done more in recent years to spearhead the revival than Thomas L. Pangle. Here, Pangle provides a sequel to his study of Xenophon's longest account of Socrates, the Memorabilia, expanding the scope of inquiry through an incisive treatment of Xenophon's shorter Socratic dialogues, the Economist, the Symposium, and the Apology of Socrates to the Jury. What Pangle reveals is that these three depictions of Socrates complement and, in fact, serve to complete the Memorabilia in meaningful ways.Unlike the Socrates of Plato, Xenophon's Socrates is more complicated and human, an individual working out the problem of what it means to live well and virtuously. While the Memorabilia defends Socrates by stressing his likeness to conventionally respectable gentlemen, Xenophon's remaining Socratic texts offer a more nuanced characterization by highlighting how Socrates also diverges from conventions of gentlemanliness in his virtues, behaviors, and peculiar views of quotidian life and governmental rule. One question threads through the three writings: Which way of life best promotes human existence, politics, and economics—that of the Socratic political philosopher with his philosophic virtues or that of the gentleman with his familial, civic, and moral virtues? In uncovering the nuances of Xenophon's approach to the issue in the Economist, Symposium, and Apology, Pangle's book cements the significance of these writings for the field and their value for shaping a fuller conception of just who Socrates was and what he taught.
 

CHAPTER ONE

The Socratic Science of Economics

Xenophon begins his Economist abruptly: “And I heard Him1 once also engage in dialogue about household management, in some such words as follow: ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘Critobulus,’ . . .” (1.1). This opening, following upon the laconic, one-word title,2 evinces a presumption that the reader will recognize the initiation of yet more of the author’s “recollections of Socrates.” Xenophon “creates the impression” that we have here “simply a continuation of the Memorabilia.”3

Accordingly, Xenophon does not at the outset indicate—as he emphatically does in starting his Symposium and his Apology—any distinguishing purpose or intention of his Economist. Since the Memorabilia consists mainly of numerous short dialogues depicting Socrates’s practice of beneficent and educative justice, Xenophon initially allows the reader to assume that the Economist will be devoted to showing still more of such short conversations, focused in some way on skilled household management.

But the Economist turns out to be a single, very lengthy conversation, the larger part of which consists in Socrates unfolding to a young interlocutor the tale of the dialogic encounter through which Socrates received his own education in economics, and indeed in morality as part of economics—from a perfect gentleman named Ischomachus. “The abrupt beginning” of the Economist “conceals the profound difference between” this work and the Memorabilia (XSD 90).

The Interlocutor Critobulus

The comedic nature4 of the Economist is signaled at the outset when Xenophon has Socrates address by name, and thus identify, the singular character who will be the framing dialogue’s (sole) interlocutor. For Critobulus is the most amiably unserious, the most lightheartedly erotic, of all the members of the Socratic circle portrayed by Xenophon.5 In the Memorabilia, we meet Critobulus as “the son of Crito” whom Socrates in mock horror advises to go into exile for a year, while describing him to the onlooker Xenophon as “a great hothead and one who will stop at nothing”—all on account of Critobulus’s having dared to kiss a beautiful, beloved boy. When Xenophon replies with the avowal that he himself might share in such foolhardiness, Socrates extends his mock aghast, chastising denunciation to our author (Memorabilia 1.3.8–15: Xenophon presents himself as tinged with a streak of the waywardly erotic Critobulus). In a later, extended dialogue with Socrates on friendship (ibid. 2.6, containing a high concentration of profane expletives), Critobulus’s gaily festive, wide-ranging, erotic proclivities continue to be evident—and Socrates’s disapproval appears much less severe. We learn from the Symposium (3.7, 4.9–29, 5.1–6.1) that Socrates found the handsome scamp to be an attractive and amusing companion. We learn from the Economist (3.7) that Socrates was drawn into long, early morning treks to attend rural comic dramas with the young man (we can assume that the expenses for good seats were paid by the wealthy6 Critobulus). We even learn, again from the Symposium (4.22), that Socrates allowed himself to be “dragged around” by Critobulus to wherever the latter would be able to contemplate his beloved beauty, Kleinias. As for Critobulus’s attitude toward Socrates, “we are free to suspect” that “he admired Socrates more, much more than his own father,” a possible reason why Crito’s “influence on his son” might “have been altogether insufficient” (XSD 101). In the Symposium (4.24) Socrates reports that because of Critobulus’s intoxication with his boyfriend Kleinias,7 “his father handed him over to me, so I might be able to help in some way.” In the Economist, again, we will soon find Socrates telling Critobulus to his face that he “pities” him because the young man, thinking himself affluent, is “neglectful in devising means of making money, and devotes his thought to affairs of boyfriends.” It was doubtless in large part on account of Socrates’s friendship with his lifelong comrade Crito, and in response to the latter’s anxious concern about his son’s erotic frivolities and escapades, that the philosopher undertook to educate Critobulus in his responsibilities and requirements as a wealthy household head.

This is the dramatic context of the framing dialogue of the Economist—a context which, we soon learn, is not without some comical risk to Socrates, of becoming entangled in a care for Critobulus’s household that goes way beyond what the philosopher is willing to undertake (2.9–18). We may conclude that Socrates’s intimacy with the devil-may-care Critobulus mixed the fulfillment of friendly educative duty with affectionate pleasure: Critobulus was a rather good-looking, generously rich, and amiably jocund young ne’er-do-well with whom Socrates had fun, while trying to help the young fellow, not least for the sake of the young man’s father, Socrates’s old friend Crito. Xenophon has made it abundantly clear (see esp. Memorabilia 4.1.1–2) that Socratic fun is always leavened with provocation to deep and serious thought for onlookers. And by his very first word in the Economist, as well as subsequently, our author Xenophon indicates that he is (fictively) portraying himself, in his younger days, in the role of an eyewitness to the dialogue—which Xenophon indicates he is reporting only selectively, and not word for word (toiade; see also the pōs at the start of chap. 2). Xenophon invites us to join him, vicariously, as the appreciative audience of what was a deeply illuminating and singularly beneficial comic performance: a drama that Socrates put on for the profound instruction, above all, of his beloved young friend Xenophon.8 This, I am inclined to judge, is the most important sense in which the Economist embodies and conveys “the Socratic Discourse written by Xenophon” (XSD 86, 130, 165) and even “the Socratic dialogue” (XSD 129): what we see portrayed here is nothing less than a version of the discourse that was a or the crucial part of the education that Socrates gave to young Xenophon (and maybe also to Plato?).9

The High Status of the Theme of “Household Management”

But, lest the previous observations strengthen or confirm a blinding bias from which readers may initially suffer—a prejudicial doubt as to the comparative lack of seriousness of the theme of “the economist” or “skilled household management,” in contrast with such apparently loftier themes as “statesmanship,” or “political and military leadership,” or “kingship, royal rule,” or even “divine providence” and “God’s rule over the cosmos”—let us preface our interpretation of the framing dialogue between Socrates and Critobulus with a look at the closing homily that Socrates reports his teacher Ischomachus having delivered to him (21.2–12).

The perfect gentleman proclaimed that at the heart of skilled household management, in which farm management bulks large, is an intellectual capacity together with a divine spiritual endowment that is at the heart of skilled rule universally: namely, the ability to inspire the ruled with “ardor, and with competitive love of victory in regard to one another, and with love of excelling in honor.” One who manifests this capacity Ischomachus “would declare to have something of the character of a king,” and Ischomachus further asseverated that “one who is going to be capable of these things needs even education in the full sense (paideia), and, to be possessed of a good nature” and—“what is the greatest matter”—“to become divine!” For “it seems to me that this—ruling over the willing—is not altogether a human good, but rather, divine.” For the gods “clearly reserve it for those who are truly initiated into the sacred mysteries of moderation” (tois alēthinōs sōphrosunē tetelesmenois). The perfect gentleman thus gave testimony to Socrates of a profound, personal,10 religious experience—of mysteriously sacred spiritual participation in, and elevation to, divinity. Such religious experience constituted the core of the gentleman’s own lifetime experience of the ruling vocation. “In contrast,” he solemnly affirmed, “the gods give tyrannizing over the unwilling, it seems to me, to those whom they hold to deserve to live out their lives as Tantalus is said to in Hades: spending all time fearing lest he will a second time die.” The gentleman conceives the tyrant’s life as a divinely allotted Hell of an immortal afterlife of endless mortal fear.

This divine rank that Ischomachus thus assigned to expertise in rule over the household—as on a par with statesmanship and kingship, differing only in the number of those led or ruled—was to be later ratified by his philosopher-student,11 if in the latter’s own distinctly philosophic way. Socrates was to designate as “household managing” (oikonomōn) God’s “ordering together and holding together the whole cosmos, in which all things are noble-and-good (gentlemanly), things which He always provides, unworn, and healthy, and ageless, (thus) serving the users, quicker than thought, and unerringly.”12 In learning the gentleman’s understanding of his vocation as ruler over the household, Socrates would seem to have been simultaneously learning the gentleman’s conception of divine rule over the universe, which, according to Ischomachus, his gentlemanly household rule not only reflects but mysteriously instantiates on the human plane.

Economics as a Universal Science

Xenophon recalls Socrates having opened the dialogue by asking Critobulus if “household management” (oikonomia) is “a name for some science” (epistēmē), as are the words “skilled doctoring,” and “skilled bronze working,” and “skilled wood working.” Conceiving household management in this unconventional way,13 as a science or craft, conduces to thinking of it as something one needs to learn from an expert teacher or teachers. Socrates would seem to have been taking the first step on a path that would bring Critobulus to realize his need for such an education. But Xenophon immediately lets us see that Critobulus had not grasped the radical implication of this uncommon perspective on household management. For when Socrates next characterized, more conventionally, as “arts” (technōn) the other three forms of expertise that he had adduced, and asked if, even as “we” could “say what the work or function of each of these arts” is, so “we” would “also be able to say, in the case of household management, similarly what the work or function of it is,” Critobulus fell back on common opinion: “it is opined, at any rate (said Critobulus)14 that it belongs to a good household manager [oikonomou agathou] to manage well his own household” (1.2). A gentleman is conventionally supposed to mind his own business (Aristotle, N. Ethics 1142a1–2); his concern as household manager is supposed to be primarily and chiefly the well being of his own household—to which concern he is presumed to be motivated by deep love of his own. (In Memorabilia 2.9.1 Socrates quotes Crito, the father of Critobulus, describing himself as one those men who “wished to mind his own business.”)

Challenging this conventional gentlemanly opinion on the basis of the nature of science, Socrates asked if it is not the case that “he who is a scientific knower (epistamenos) of skilled carpentry” would be able to do the relevant work for another, even as for himself; and “in the same way, wouldn’t the skilled household manager (oikonomikos—economist)”15 be able, “if he should wish,” to “manage well the household of another, even as his own, if someone turned it over to him”? In assenting, Critobulus once again showed that he was aware of departing from common opinion—and this time he addressed Socrates by name, thus indicating the distinctively “Socratic” character of this unusual perspective on the matter (1.3).

We see that Socrates as political philosopher has an understanding of skilled household management in which the component of scientific knowledge (of how to achieve what is good, or well done, for any and every given household) eclipses the love of one’s own (XSD 93), thus reversing the normal gentlemanly perspective. The scientific art as such aims only incidentally at the benefit of the expert’s own household. And the love of one’s own household contributes little or nothing to the expert’s scientific knowledge of how to manage well even his own household.16

But Socrates was not naively or abstractly ignoring the love of one’s own as essential human motivation to the practical implementation of the universal scientific knowledge. This became clear when the philosopher proceeded to ask a concluding question: Therefore, is it not possible, for “one who has scientific knowledge of this art (tēn technēn tautēn epistamenōi), if he himself happens not to have riches (chrēmata), to manage the household of another”—and “get paid”? (1.4). Socrates seemed to presume that an expert’s putting into practice his knowledge of the scientific art would not be disinterested, and, moreover, that the gratification that derives intrinsically from the skilled practice, and in addition from repute and gratitude for such skilled practice, would not be sufficient motivation. Socrates...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• Introduction
• 1.  The Socratic Science of Economics
• 2.  The Case for Farming
• 3.  Teaching Socrates How a Gentleman Educates His Wife
• 4.  Teaching Socrates the Activities of a Gentleman
• 5.  Teaching Socrates How a Gentleman Educates His Overseers
• 6.  Teaching Socrates the Art of Farming
• 7.  Socrates Leading the Festivity of Gentlemen in the Symposium
• 8.  Deliberate Defiance in the Apology
• Appendix: Preliminary Observations on the Contrasts and Complementarities between Xenophon’s and Plato’s Presentations of Socrates
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index of Names