Studies in Greek Philosophy, Volume II

Socrates, Plato, and Their Tradition

Gregory Vlastos, Daniel W. Graham, Daniel W. Graham

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691241890
• Thema: Filosofia
• Thema: Filosofia antica e classica

Gregory Vlastos (1907-1991) was one of the twentieth century's most influential scholars of ancient philosophy. Over a span of more than fifty years, he published essays and book reviews that established his place as a leading authority on early Greek philosophy. The two volumes that comprise Studies in Greek Philosophy include nearly forty contributions by this acknowledged master of the philosophical essay. Many of these pieces are now considered to be classics in the field. Perhaps more than any other modern scholar, Gregory Vlastos was responsible for raising standards of research, analysis, and exposition in classical philosophy to new levels of excellence. His essays have served as paradigms of scholarship for several generations. Available for the first time in a comprehensive collection, these contributions reveal the author's ability to combine the skills of a philosopher, philologist, and historian of ideas in addressing some of the most difficult problems of ancient philosophy. Volume I collects Vlastos's essays on Presocratic philosophy. Wide-ranging concept studies link Greek science, religion, and politics with philosophy. Individual studies illuminate the thought of major philosophers such as Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. A magisterial series of studies on Zeno of Elea reveals the author's power in source criticism and logical analysis. Volume II contains essays on the thought of Socrates, Plato, and later thinkers and essays dealing with ethical, social, and political issues as well as metaphysics, science, and the foundations of mathematics.

PART ONE

SOCRATES

1

THE PARADOX OF SOCRATES

[MOST OF THE RESULTS of scholarly work are not communicable to the public or even to scholars in other fields. They are reportable, certainly; but that is not the same thing, else why should these reports prove so boring? In this I see nothing to be ashamed of; university presidents and foundation potentates have no cause to scold us over it. In spite of glib talk of the community of scholarship on ceremonial occasions, the world of scholarship is of its very nature separatist, if not downright sectarian. Here the people who do the work, instead of the hiring or the paying or the talking, go out singly or in small groups, scattering widely, to do different jobs with different tools in different locales. To appreciate the value of what these search-parties turn up, one should know their language, which is not a carelessly concocted jargon, but an idiom ingeniously devised to say things which can be said in no other way; one should also be acquainted with their methods of collecting facts, assessing evidence, and testing generalizations. How can the outsider, who has not learned the vocabulary or the syntax or the discipline of a given field of investigation, be expected to get the point of findings in that field? And is it [496] surprising if, missing their point, he should think them pointless—bizarre, or picayune, or merely dull?

Are we then to give up the idea of a community of scholars? As a humanities association, you have the faith that such a community can exist, and I did not accept the honor of your invitation to come to tell you that yours is a credo quia impossibile. But perhaps you might allow me to tell you that your faith (and mine) is a credo quia difficile. Scholarship of itself does not breed community—only communities. To bring together companies of specialists into a grouping that is not a conglomerate but a community, something more than scholarship is needed. What is that? I should be willing to call it humanism, if you would go along with my homespun definition of a humanist as “a scholar who makes a strenuous effort to be human.” There are various ways of being inhuman, and all of them are offenses against community. Some of these are graver than others, as are cruelty and pride as over against, say, mere grumpy eccentricity. The scholar’s form of inhumanity is probably the least objectionable of all, generally harmless, even benignant, for the by-products of his work are sure to bless his kind in one way or another in the end. But it is inhumanity nonetheless, a withdrawal from the common language and the common values of humanity.

An address to a meeting of the Humanities Association of Canada at Ottawa on June 13, 1957. From Queen's Quarterly 64 (1957—58):496—516. Reprinted in Gregory Vlastos, ed., The Philosophy of Socrates (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 1–21. Minor changes have been made in punctuation and spelling. Copyright, the heirs of Gregory Vlastos. Material from reprint used by permission of Doubleday and Co.

Historically, the humanist has been the learned man aware of the perils of this alienation of learning from humanity. In the confident period of the Renaissance, the first generations of humanists looked to scholarship itself to heal the breach. They thought that to be a humanist it is enough to be a scholar. To revive their hope today would be to indulge in an illusion. Today it is a well-known fact that one can be a good scholar, an excellent one, without a peer in one’s field, yet not be a humanist at all. To be a humanist nowadays calls for a special effort: first, to find the relevance of our individual work to our common humanity; secondly, to state our findings in common speech—by which, of course, I don’t mean folksy talk, but (for those of us who speak English) just the Queen’s English, unassisted by a suitcase full of technical glossaries. For most of us this is costly and hazardous work: costly, for it takes time which the scholar in us grudges to anything but scholarly work; hazardous, because it compels [497] us to say things we have not weighed as carefully as the scholarly conscience would require, so that, while saying them, we are never wholly free from the suspicion that we may not mean all we say, if only because we don’t know precisely what we mean. Here are two good reasons for refraining from the performance on which I am about to launch. Yet in spite of cost and hazard, this work is worth attempting from time to time, for unless some of us are willing to do it I fail to see how the community of scholarship can be anything but a phrase, and humanism anything but a memory.

It was some such thought as this—not just vanity, nor just the pleasure of a reunion with my Canadian friends, though I plead guilty to both—that made me accept your invitation. And the same thought fixed the choice of the topic. For Socrates is one of those rare figures that have the power to interest scholars in several fields—the philologist, the philosopher, the historian, the critic of culture, the student of religion; and not only scholars, but all sorts and conditions of men. As a person and as a thinker, he has, I believe, the truly human importance that entitles him to your attention for the duration of this address.]

The Socrates [I have in mind] {of this book} is the Platonic Socrates, or, to be more precise, the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues. That this figure is a faithful imaginative recreation of the historical Socrates is the conclusion of some very reputable scholars, though not of all. It is [also] the conclusion [I have reached myself after working on the problems at first hand] {I would be prepared to defend myself}. [To report on this work in any detail would be out of keeping with the purpose of this address. But you are certainly entitled to some assurance that my Socrates is not Platonic fiction but historic fact. This I can give you in a few plain words:] {To try to do this in detail would be out of place in this Introduction. All I can do here is to indicate the main consideration which has led me to this conclusion.}

There is one, and only one, serious alternative to Plato’s Socrates, and that is Xenophon’s. The two are irreconcilable at certain points, and these are crucial:

Xenophon’s is a Socrates without irony and without paradox. Take away irony and paradox from Plato’s Socrates and there is nothing left. [498]

Xenophon’s Socrates is so persuasive that, “whenever he argued,” Xenophon declares, “he gained a greater measure of assent from his hearers than any man I have ever known” (Memorabilia 4.6.16). Plato’s Socrates is not persuasive at all. He wins every argument, but never manages to win over an opponent. He has to fight every inch of the way for any assent he gets, and gets it, so to speak, at the point of a dagger. Xenophon’s Socrates discourses on theology and theodicy, argues for the existence of a divine mind that has created man and ordered the world for his benefit. Plato’s refuses to argue over anything other than man and human affairs.

Plato’s Socrates maintains that it is never right to repay evil with evil. He says this in studied defiance of the contrary view, axiomatic in Greek morality from Hesiod down, and fixes here the boundary-line between those who can agree with him on fundamentals and those who can’t. Xenophon’s Socrates has never heard of the boundary-line. He stands on the wrong side, the popular side, parrots the common opinion that the good man will “excel in rendering benefits to his friends and injuries to his enemies” (Mem. 2.6.35).

What does this prove? If Plato and Xenophon cannot both be right, why must Plato be right? That his Socrates is incomparably the more interesting of the two figures, in fact the only Socrates worth talking about, proves nothing. We cannot build history on wish fulfillment. Fortunately there is another consideration that proves a great deal. It is that Plato accounts, while Xenophon does not, for facts affirmed by both and also attested by others. For example, that Critias and Alcibiades had been companions of Socrates; or again, that Socrates was indicted and condemned on the charge of not believing in the gods of the state and of corrupting its youth. Xenophon’s portrait will not square with either of these. Not with the first, for his Socrates could not have attracted men like Critias and Alcibiades, haughty aristocrats both of them, and as brilliant intellectually as they were morally unprincipled. Xenophon’s Socrates, [499] pious reciter of moral commonplaces, would have elicited nothing but a sneer from Critias and a yawn from Alcibiades, while Plato’s Socrates is just the man who could have got under their skin. As for the second, Plato, and he alone, gives us a Socrates who could have plausibly been indicted for subversion of faith and morals. Xenophon’s account of Socrates, apologetic from beginning to end, refutes itself: had the facts been as he tells them, the indictment would not have been made in the first place.

[So I trust you may be reconciled to the thought of parting company with Xenophon for the rest of this address and may even concur with me that the best thing we can do with this very proper Athenian is to make an honorary Victorian out of him and commend him to the attentions of some bright young man who would like to continue the unapostolic succession to Lytton Strachey. But that still leaves us with the question:] How far can we then trust Plato? From the fact that he was right on some things, it does not follow, certainly, that he was right in all his information on Socrates, or even on all its essential points. But we do have a check.¹ Plato’s Apology has for its mise en scène an all-too-public occasion. The jury alone numbered 501 Athenians. And since the town was so gregarious and Socrates {a notorious} [its] public character [number one], there would have been many more in the audience. So when Plato was writing the Apology, he knew that hundreds of those who might read the speech he puts into the mouth of Socrates had heard the historic original. And since his purpose in writing it was to clear his master’s name and to indict his judges, it would have been most inept to make Socrates talk out of character. How could Plato be saying to his fellow citizens, “This is the man you murdered. Look at him. Listen to him,"² and point to a figment of his own imagining? This is my chief reason for accepting the Apology as a reliable recreation of the thought and character of the man Plato knew so well. [You will notice that] here, as before, I speak of recreation, not reportage. The Apology was probably written several years after the event, half a dozen years or more. This, and Plato’s genius, assures us that it was not journalism, but art. Though the emotion with which [500] Plato had listened when life and death hung on his master’s words must have branded those words into his mind, still that emotion recollected in tranquility, those remembrances recast in the imagination, would make a new speech out of the old materials, so that those who read it would recognize instantly the man they had known without having to scan their own memory and ask, “Did he open with that remark? Did he really use that example?” or any such question. This is all I claim for the veracity of the Apology. And if this is conceded, the problem of our sources is solved in principle. For we may then use the Apology as a touchstone of the like veracity of the thought and character of Socrates depicted in Plato’s other early dialogues. And when we do that, what do we find?

We find a man who is all paradox. Other philosophers talked about paradox. Socrates did not. The paradox in Socrates is Socrates. But unlike later paradoxes—Scandinavian, German, and latterly even Gallic—this Hellenic paradox is not meant to defeat, but to incite, the human reason. At least a part of it can be made quite lucid, and this is what I shall attempt in the main part of this [address] {essay}. For this purpose I must put before you the roles whose apparently incongruous junction produces paradox:

In the Apology (29d–e) Socrates gives this account of his lifework:

So long as I breathe and have the strength to do it, I will not cease philosophizing, exhorting you, indicting whichever of you I happen to meet, telling him in my customary way:

Esteemed friend, citizen of Athens, the greatest city in the world, so outstanding in both intelligence and power, aren’t you ashamed to care so much to make all the money you can, and to advance your reputation and prestige— while for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your soul you have no care or worry?

This is the Socrates Heinrich Maier had in mind when he spoke of “the Socratic gospel.”³ If “gospel” makes us think of the Christian gospel, the evocation is not inappropriate at this point. Socrates could [501] have taken over verbatim the great questions of our gospels, “What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

The only gloss I need add here is a caution that [you] {one} should not be misled by the otherworldly associations with which the word soul is loaded in our own tradition and which were nearly as heavy in the Greek. If there is anything new in the way Socrates uses the word soul, it is that he quietly narrows down its meaning to something whose supernatural origin or destiny, if any, is indeterminate, and whose physical or metaphysical structure, if any, is also indeterminate, so that both theological and antitheological, mystical and naturalistic, doctrines of the soul become inconsequential. His is a gospel without dogma, You may hold any one of a great variety of beliefs about the s...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• NOTE ON TEXTUAL CONVENTIONS
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• PART ONE: SOCRATES
• PART TWO: PLATO
• PART THREE: AFTER PLATO
• BIBLIOGRAPHY: THE WORKS OF GREGORY VLASTOS
• INDEX LOCORUM
• GENERAL INDEX