The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates

John Bussanich, Nicholas D. Smith, John Bussanich, Nicholas D. Smith

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441107794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia antica e classica

Socrates, the largely enigmatic Greek thinker, is universally considered to have laid the foundations of western philosophy. His philosophy, available to us through the early dialogues of Plato and the writings of his contemporaries, has had a remarkably enduring influence on virtually every area of philosophical enterprise. This comprehensive and accessible guide to Socrates life and death, character and philosophical concerns, features thirteen specially commissioned sections, written by a team of leading experts in the field of ancient philosophy, covering every aspect of Socratic thought. The Companion presents a comprehensive overview of the various features, themes and topics apparent in Socrates' thought, including Socratic irony, metaphysics, epistemology, happiness, virtue, moral psychology, philosophy of love, political philosophy, and religious belief. It concludes with a thoroughly comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. This is an essential reference tool for anyone working in the field of ancient philosophy.

1

THE QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL SOCRATES^*

INTRODUCTION

The Socratic Problem, as it has come to be called, is a problem of literary archaeology: the attempt to excavate the historical Socrates from the soil of those who wrote about him. The problem would not exist, therefore, if Socrates had left any written remains himself, or had consigned his thoughts to writing at all.¹ His silence could be romanticized as distrust of the written word,² or even as an aspect of his ironic elusiveness, but it is closer to the mark to recall that in Socrates’ day, even in relatively cultured and literate Athens, it was very unusual to write one’s thoughts down, for ‘publication’ (see e.g. W. V. Harris 1989: ch. 4).

Clearly, this is a fundamental issue for the study of Socrates.³ If there is no solution to the Socratic Problem, Socrates is bound to remain forever invisible, or surrounded by scare quotes as ‘Plato’s Socrates’, ‘Xenophon’s Socrates’ and so on. In this chapter, I shall suggest that the literary archaeologists have been digging in the wrong place. I shall argue that no solution to the Socratic Problem is to be found in the pages of those who wrote about him, but that we need not therefore quite give up all hope of recovering some traces of the historical Socrates.⁴

Socrates was famous within Athens in his own lifetime,⁵ and after his death in 399 BCE he became famous throughout the Greek world. He died by drinking the poison hemlock in prison, having been found guilty by his fellow Athenians of the capital crime of impiety. Shortly after his death, a sub-genre of prose-writing emerged, dubbed Sōkratikoi logoi by Aristotle (Poetics 1447b1–3, Rhetoric 1417a21), in which the authors, often men who had known Socrates personally and held him to be their mentor or guru, showed Socrates conversing and arguing with others. We hear or know of such works by Aeschines of Sphettus, Alaxamenus of Teus, Antisthenes, Aristippus, Bryson, Cebes, Criton, Eucleides of Megara, Glaucon (Plato’s brother), Phaedon, Plato, Simmias, Simon the Cobbler, Stilpon and Xenophon.⁶ Not all the works that circulated under the names of these people were authentic,⁷ but they were available. In a piece written only 10 years after Socrates’ trial, Isocrates already mentioned a tradition of eulogistic and hostile writing (Busiris 4–6); this probably consisted mainly of pamphlets, such as the one written by Polycrates ca. 392, purporting to be a speech delivered by one of Socrates’ prosecutors, and the one written by Lysias in response to Polycrates, about which we know nothing (Lysias frr. 272–3, 457 Carey).⁸ Then, in later centuries, for certain of the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, notably the Stoics and the Sceptics, Socrates became the archetypal sage.⁹ Meanwhile, others made up speeches that either Socrates or his prosecutors might have delivered at the trial; this became a standard exercise for students at the schools of rhetoric (see Trapp 2007c: 53; Vander Waerdt 1993: 15–16). None of these speeches survives except a defence speech by Libanius of Antioch, written 750 years after the actual trial.¹⁰ At some point in the fourth century a biographical tradition started as well (see Trapp 2007c: 54–5). In short, Socrates shortly became, as he has remained, the most famous philosopher in the Western world, and a figurehead for philosophy. He is still probably the only Western philosopher who can safely be called a household name.

Very little of this long tradition of writing about Socrates is still available to us, so we do the best that we can. Obviously, if we are going to search for the historical Socrates in the literary remains, we need to rely on authors with privileged access to authentic Socratic material. Since Socrates himself wrote nothing, the only relevant privilege is that the authors should have been contemporaries or close contemporaries of Socrates. In these categories, there are few possibilities. We have the complete Sōkratikoi logoi of two of his followers, Plato and Xenophon, and we have a few fragments of other Socratics, mostly from Aeschines of Sphettus.¹¹ We have traces of Polycrates’ pamphlet, and the complete text of one of the two comic plays produced in 423 which prominently featured Socrates, Aristophanes’ Clouds.¹² These are the literary sources that have been mined for information about the historical Socrates, with the addition of Aristotle’s references to Socrates, if we assume that, as a resident scholar in Plato’s Academy, Aristotle had access to privileged information about Socrates, which he then reported in his writings.¹³

But the puzzles begin immediately. Aristophanes gives us a Socrates who was a teacher of atheistic science and the new rhetoric, teaching select students for money; the Socratics give us an upright and pious citizen, who spoke openly to all who cared to listen, and took no money for it. For Polycrates, however, Socrates was a dangerous dissident. There is equally little agreement among the Socratics and the Peripatetics. The ancients never quite asked which, if any, of these various portraits was true to the historical Socrates, but even if, in this sense, the Socratic Problem is a modern concern, we can see that its seeds lie in ancient uncertainty about the nature of Socrates.

QUOT HOMINES, TOT SENTENTIAE

The Socratic Problem, it has been said, is ‘one of the most difficult, but also one of the most important problems in the history of ancient philosophy’ (Patzer 1987b: 4). Hence it has generated an enormous amount of writing, some of which (even in modern times) is altogether worthless, a lot of it repetitious. Even in 1913, Maier found the literature on the subject ‘horrendously voluminous’ (Maier 1913: 2),¹⁴ and scholars continued to worry away throughout the twentieth century. A swift survey is instructive, to show what kinds of views have been canvassed by reputable scholars over the past 200 years or so.¹⁵ What follows in this section scarcely scrapes the surface of published work on the Socratic Problem, and draws on the most influential work from the beginning of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century.¹⁶

ARISTOPHANES

Clouds was held to be a reliable, if comic, portrait of Socrates (Kierkegaard 1842; Süvern 1826), or at least to be a reliable portrait of Socrates at an early phase of his intellectual career, when he was interested in natural science (Böckh 1838; Burnet 1911; Röck 1912;¹⁷ A. E. Taylor 1911b), or to be no more than a caricature of the new education, without anything to tell us about Socrates in particular, at any phase of his life, except perhaps a few personalia, such as his poverty (Grote 1849; Schanz 1893). Certain traits of the historical Socrates were perceived here and there in the play, such as traces of his dialectical method (Philippson 1932) or of his midwifery (Burnet 1914). Havelock (1934) held that the basis for the solution to the Socratic Problem was Plato’s Apology and anything in Clouds that was not contradicted by Plato’s Apology; Kierkegaard (1842) preferred the eclectic triad of Aristophanes, Plato and Xenophon; Gomperz (1924) settled for a combination of the comic Socrates, Antisthenes and Xenophon, with a smattering of Plato.

XENOPHON

Strange though it may seem today, and despite the influence of Schleiermacher,¹⁸ for much of the nineteenth century Xenophon was held to be the best source for Socrates (e.g. A. Döring 1895; Hermann 1839; Labriola 1871).¹⁹ But then Joel 1893/1901 argued that he was writing fiction (and that Plato was too), and he became discredited (Maier 1913; Robin 1910). When von Arnim tried to restore Xenophon’s credibility in 1923, he was already fighting a losing battle. An influential claim by those who disputed Xenophon’s reliability as a source was that he did not know Socrates particularly well: he did not study with him for long, did not understand what he was studying and derived his ideas from Plato anyway (Burnet 1911; A. E. Taylor 1911b).

PLATO

Qua a ‘genius’, Plato has been held to be too precocious to report Socrates accurately (A. Döring 1895; Grote 1849) and clever enough to report Socrates accurately (the dominant view: Burnet 1911; Maier 1913, etc.). However, everyone agrees that Plato also used Socrates to express his own opinions. Hence the view arose that even if in other dialogues we cannot tell where Socrates ends and Plato begins, nevertheless in Apology he is reporting Socrates’ own words (supposedly verified by the fact that he was at the trial [Ap. 34a, 38b], and would not have reported a public event such as the trial inaccurately), and so we can build up a picture of the historical Socrates by adding from Plato’s works whatever is consistent with Apology (Horneffer 1922; Natorp 1894; Schleiermacher 1818, etc.). This renders ‘Socratic’ a group of Plato’s early dialogues (Hermann 1839). Others, however, denied the historicity of Apology (Ast 1816; Schanz 1893). Since almost everything in Xenophon and Aristotle comes from Plato anyway, he is our only reliable source (Burnet 1911, 1914; A. E. Taylor 1911b). These two Scottish scholars were principally responsible for ending Xenophon’s reign as chief Socratic source in the English-speaking world, just as Robin 1910 did for the French, and Joel 1893/1901 for the Germans. The notorious excess of the Burnet–Taylor view, that everything Plato attributed to Socrates is historically reliable biography, soon became toned down (e.g. by Ross 1933; Tovar 1947), as scholars distinguished the early dialogues, as Socratic, from the later dialogues, as Platonic. Socrates was denied the theory of Forms and so on, and became the ethical thinker with whom we are familiar today.

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle refers to Socrates about fifty times in the extant works. He was regarded by Joel (1893/1901)²⁰ as the most reliable witness, but others argued that most, if not all of his evidence derives from the early dialogues of Plato (Natorp 1894). Generally, he serves as an ‘umpire’ (A. M. Adam 1918: 122) in what I shall call the eclectic view, pioneered by Schleiermacher: where the evidence of Plato and Xenophon coincides, we may confidently assume that we catch a glimpse of the historical Socrates; where Aristotle’s testimony coincides with that of Plato and Xenophon, that point of testimony may be taken to be confirmed (A. M. Adam 1918; Deman 1942; Zeller 1875, etc.).²¹ The difficulty has always been to distinguish where Aristotle is talking about the historical Socrates, drawing on privileged information circulating in the Academy, and where he is drawing on Plato’s dialogues. Some thought they could pinpoint grammatical devices that would enable us to make such a distinction (Fitzgerald 1853;²² Natorp 1894;²³ Stenzel 1927), but there were always counter-examples – cases where the chosen device was used to exactly the opposite effect (A. E. Taylor 1911b).

MODERN SCHOLARSHIP

GIGON AND VLASTOS

This brief and unnuanced survey takes us up to about the middle of the last century. It is a quagmire of more or less complete lack of consensus, in which every possible position has been argued for and against with great vigour, by reputable scholars. Since then, the flurry has somewhat died down, with fewer positions being argued for, so that there is greater consensus. Two scholars above all were responsible for this: Olof Gigon and Gregory Vlastos.

In various publications, Gigon argued forcefully for a highly sceptical position: that the Sōkratikoi logoi of Aeschines, Plato and Xenophon are fiction, not biography (following Joel 1893/1901), and that all of Aristotle’s relevant references to Socrates are dependent on Plato (following A. E. Taylor 1911b). Dupréel (1922) had been equally sceptical, 25 years earlier, but had attached his scepticism to eccentric theses, above all that the so-called Socratics were not Socratics at all, and were trying to disguise the fact that they were followers of the sophists. Gigon’s work has been more influential just because he was more rigorous than Dupréel.

Gigon more or less ignored Aristophanes, or rather he assumed that as a comic poet his value as a historical source was negligible. The most common position nowadays is that Aristophanes has nothing to offer our picture of the historical Socrates except some ‘personalia’ (Dover 1971; Konstan 2011). It has also been argued, however, that Aristophanes took steps to distinguish the real Socrates from the character appearing in the play, to separate comic exaggeration from reality, so that we can find distinct traces of the historical Socrates in the play (Erbse 1954;²⁴ Gelzer 1956). Otherwise, various modest claims are put forward to find this or that doctrinal or methodological trait of the historical Socrates adumbrated within the play: his daimonion or little inner voice (Edmunds 1985), a form of ‘practical irony’ (Edmunds 2004), the Socratic idea of care for the soul (Havelock 1972), a resurrection of Philippson’s view that there are traces of Socratic argumentative methodology or teaching methods in the play (Gelzer 1956; Nussbaum 1980; Schmid 1948), a resurrection of the Taylor–Burnet hypothesis that Aristophanes was referring to the ‘Presocratic’ phase of Socrates’ intellectual development (Vander Waerdt 1994b), some traces of Socratic Pythagoreanism (Rashed 2009). Others, on the cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1. THE QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL SOCRATES
• 2. SOCRATIC IRONY
• 3. SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHIZING
• 4. SOCRATIC METAPHYSICS
• 5. SOCRATIC IGNORANCE AND TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
• 6. THE PRIORITY OF DEFINITION
• 7. SOCRATIC EUDAIMONISM
• 8. SOCRATIC MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
• 9. SOCRATES ON LOVE
• 10. SOCRATES’ POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
• 11. SOCRATIC THEOLOGY AND PIETY
• 12. SOCRATES’ RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES
• 13. THE POLITICS OF IMPIETY: WHY WAS SOCRATES PROSECUTED BY THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index