SOCRATES THE PRE-SOCRATIC

As is well known among those who know such things, there have in fact been two Socrates: one as his own person, and the other one as Plato’s alter ego. It is also known that, as the most recent scholarship on this so-called Socratic Problem declares, the real Socrates is virtually impossible to distill from the imaginary one, even though we have several accounts of him, which are different from Plato’s, and efforts have been made repeatedly to “harmonize” them, that is, to find their common denominator, assuming that such will be the man behind the portraits. But, apparently, different works of fiction put together do not one credible nonfiction make, and such is the very latest verdict of the critical history of Western philosophy.

And yet as we know there are two Socrates. The one we know the best is Plato’s creation, and Plato was of course the first hybrid philosopher type, to use the Nietzschean expression. Thus, the Platonic Socrates has to be a hybrid type as well, which makes Socrates an-Sich, who must be necessarily different from Socrates Platonicus, the only credible pre-Socratic character, otherwise, he, the real Socrates, and not Plato and his creation, would have been the first hybrid type.

It is not our intention to start looking for the real Socrates in the non-Platonic literature of those times. We cannot trust Xenophon, who has also left us a large volume of Socratica, which is rather contradictory in its substance. We may safely assume that wherever Xenophon contradicts Plato, he follows his personal fancy, whereas wherever he agrees with him,--- this may be attributed to Plato’s influence. A much earlier literary work, Aristophanes’ satirical play The Clouds, presents us with a picture of a “Socrates in the Clouds,” as I have put it, which is differently, but no less intensely, biased… However, as the reader will gather from my next entry, there is bias and bias, and in this case I am with Kierkegaard, who values Aristophanes’ Socrates as a historical figure over Plato’s, not even to mention Xenophon’s…

More of this discussion of the two Socrates will be conducted in the next section, but as for this one, it has been our intent only to identify the pre-Platonic Socrates as a pre-Socratic Socrates. He is such by virtue of being an apparent disciple of Anaxagoras (perhaps, both directly and via Archelaus) in his young years, and later a student and a fairly close associate of the sophist Prodicus. Thus, in his person we see an impact of both Hegelian parents, namely, the thesis and the antithesis, of the philosophical synthesis, which may well be the person of Socrates himself who rightly or wrongly is often identified as the father of all post-Socratic philosophy, that is, from Plato to our day, the phrase our day being used impersonally, as I do not know an adequate name to make it personal, courtesy of any particular philosopher living today.