SOCRATES IN THE CLOUDS

(In a certain sense, all non-Platonic testimonies on Socrates can be called pre-Socratic, once we admit that the primary picture of Socrates has been painted for us by Plato. Aristophanes’ depiction of Socrates in his comic play The Clouds, going back to Socrates’ younger years, is therefore as “pre-Socratic” as they come, and omitting a mention of it in this section would have been terribly unfair to its title. So, here is an extra entry on this subject, which in fact becomes the last one in the PreSocratica Sempervirens section.)

...I know that I seemed to promise to present Socrates next in the next section’s (The Magnificent Shadows) opening entry The Two Socrates. But the “non-Platonic” Socrates has some unfinished business left in this section. In fact, there are more than two Socrates, so to speak,-- namely, four, the other two arising from the respective fancies of Aristophanes and Xenophon. The present entry rightfully focuses on “Socrates” in The Clouds, courtesy of Aristophanes.

Aristophanes was one of the greatest comedic geniuses in history (this is a statement of fact, rather than an opinion: those who disagree have no understanding or appreciation of the Ancient Greek culture, hence the disconnect), and his testimony on Socrates cannot be dismissed as a wicked satire without any merit, even though it is difficult to imagine  the things Aristophanes makes Socrates do on stage (making his first appearance in a basket, encouraging his students to steal and to cheat, and to beat up their parents, etc.) done by the real Socrates. There is an added super-irony in the fact that we are well familiar with a Socrates himself making fun of his contemporary sophists, whereas Aristophanes represents him as being one of them, warts and all.

Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates was painted of a much younger man than the one known to Xenophon and Plato, who were babies at the time when The Clouds hit the Athenian stage. For this reason, scholars legitimately assume that, besides the natural differences between the same man in his young days and old age, there may be some other elements of truth there, which can only be noted and exposed by a critic, as opposed to an admirer and iconographer.

But there is a much finer explanation of Socrates in The Clouds, provided by Kierkegaard, who regards the portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds to be the most accurate representation of the man. Whereas Xenophon and Plato portrayed Socrates as too serious, Kierkegaard said, Aristophanes had a far better understanding of the intricacies of Socratic irony (compare this to Nietzsche’s characterization of Socrates as the ironist), and therefore it is through that irony that the genuine person of Socrates ought to be seen, and thus, Aristophanes had a better clue to the essence of his target than either Xenophon or even Plato.

This highly unusual approach by Kierkegaard may have been discerned and furthered by Nietzsche, in his 1886 Preface to the earlier work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, as Nietzsche asks himself the following question: The Greeks: this most beautiful and accomplished, so thoroughly sane, universally envied species of man; was it conceivable that they, of all people, should have stood in need of tragedy; or, indeed, of art? Greek art: how did it function, how could it?!, and answers it thus:

Socratic ethics, dialectics, the temperance and cheerfulness of the pure scholar; couldn’t these, rather than their opposites, be viewed as symptoms of decline, fatigue, distemper of instincts caught in dissolution? Or the ‘Greek serenity’ of the later period as, simply, the glow of a sun about to set? Or the Epicurean animus against pessimism merely as the sort of precaution a suffering man might use? And as for a “disinterested inquiry,” so called: what, in the last analysis, did it come to when judged as a symptom of the life process? What were we to say of the end (or, worse, of the beginning) of all inquiry? Might it be that the “inquiring mind” was simply the human mind terrified by pessimism and trying to escape from it,--- a clever bulwark erected against the truth? Something craven and false, if one wanted to be moral about it? Or, if preferred to put amorally, a dodge? Had this perhaps been your secret, great Socrates, most secretive of ironists, had this been your deepest irony?

This hypertrophied sense of irony, observed by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the real Socrates, but failing to be noticed by Xenophon and Plato, who demonstrably lacked an ear for it,-- this sense of irony could not escape the sensibilities of Aristophanes, who thus may have created a private joke between himself and his object of derision, and both of them may have relished the secret which had completely eluded their overly serious, straight-laced contemporaries.

This concludes the PreSocratica section. My commentary on the history of philosophy will continue with Socrates and Plato in the Magnificent Shadows section. In the meantime, I am once again taking a break in posting my material on this blog, resuming my wife’s Bulgakovian postings, starting tomorrow, under the general title Galina Sedova’s Bulgakov.