THE TWO SOCRATES

[With this entry I resume my own blog postings. Having finished my PreSocratica Sempervirens section, I am most naturally crossing the bridge into the realm of the giants of post-Socratic philosophy, as the said bridge happens to be none other than Socrates, first of fact, albeit questionable, and next of Plato’s glorious fiction, unquestionable, as we have it etched on paper.]

And so we have Socrates traveling from the PreSocratica section to the Magnificent Shadows, belonging in both, as the present entry proceeds to explain right away.

Socrates as himself, and as Plato’s alter ego. There is a difference between the two, and it will be properly explored in this entry. Also see the last entries of the previous section for clarification and harmonization.

First, some basic facts about both Socrates, summarized with an admirable brevity by Bertrand Russell:

(Born around 469 BC), he was undoubtedly an Athenian citizen of moderate means, who spent his time in disputation and taught philosophy to the young, but not for money, like the Sophists. (This fact is however in some doubt with regard to his younger years, but it is apparently true for his later life.) He was certainly tried, condemned to death, and executed in 399 BC, at about the age of seventy. He was unquestionably a well-known figure in Athens, since Aristophanes caricatured him in The Clouds.

It is, of course, true that everything else about him, even the facts that we are usually taking for granted, are mostly conjecture, or rather, untrustworthy reports of his somewhat biased contemporaries.

Socrates is very difficult to approach. How do we know that the father of modern philosophy, who presents himself to us at any particular instance, is Socrates himself, and not Plato’s “alter ego”?

In the previous section’s last entry Socrates In The Clouds, we may have seen a part of Socrates as himself through the offensive, but brilliant spoof of Aristophanes, insightfully interpreted by the great champion of PreSocratica and a pre-Socratic spirit himself, Nietzsche. There is also a voluminous testimony on Socrates in Xenophon’s works, written, like Plato’s, after Socrates’ death, but, despite the greatness of the author of Anabasis in the description of his personal military experiences in Persia, his “Socratic” works are suspect as to the authenticity and objectivity of their account. Here is how Bertrand Russell conveys his skepticism in the chapter on Socrates in his History of Western Philosophy:

“There has been a tendency to think that everything Xenophon says must be true, because he had not the wits to think of anything untrue. This is a very invalid line of argument. A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers, than by a friend innocent of philosophy. We cannot therefore accept what Xenophon says, if it either involves any difficult point in philosophy or is part of an argument to prove that Socrates was unjustly condemned.”

Having read and admired Anabasis, I am taking only a mild offense to Russell’s use of the word “stupid,” in his reference to Xenophon, but I have to admit the objective validity of his point. No matter what Professor Leo Strauss (see my several special entries on Leo Strauss in several previous sections: he definitely deserves all of them!) might say about it, Xenophon, although an excellent writer, is not a competent philosopher, unless we accept the stretch that any decent writer is automatically both a philosopher and a psychologist by the very nature of his occupation.

But now our “Socratic problem” looms large, and the difficulty of discovering and understanding the real, non-Platonic Socrates appears virtually insurmountable, considering that Socrates has not left us a word of his own, and in our efforts to approach him, we have to rely entirely on the middlemen. Faced with such a dilemma, we cannot rely on formal reasoning, but need to plug into the services of intuition. And of course one of the top grandmasters of intuitive thinking is Nietzsche, and owing to his natural interest in the Greek philosophy, we have the following priceless passage on Socrates from his Birth of Tragedy:

We are offered a key to the mind of Socrates in that remarkable phenomenon known as his daimonion. In certain critical situations, when even his massive intellect faltered, he was able to regain balance through the agency of a divine voice, which he heard only at such moments. The voice always spoke to dissuade. The instinctive wisdom of this anomalous character manifests itself as a purely inhibitory agent, ready to defy his rational judgment. Whereas in all truly productive men instinct is a strong, affirmative force, and reason the dissuader and critic, in Socrates’ case the roles are reversed. instinct is the critic, consciousness the creator. Truly a monstrosity! Because of his lack of all mystical talent Socrates emerges as the perfect pattern of the non-mystic, in whom the logical side has become, through superfetation, as overdeveloped as has the instinctual side in the mystic. Yet it was entirely impossible for Socrates’ logical impetus to turn against itself. In its unrestrained onrush it exhibited an elemental power, such as is commonly found only in men of violent instincts, where we view it with awed surprise. Whoever, reading Plato, has experienced the divine directness and sureness of Socrates’ whole way of proceeding, must have a sense of the gigantic driving wheel of logical Socratism, turning behind Socrates, which we see through Socrates as through a shadow. That he was hardly unaware of this relationship, appears from the dignity with which he stressed, even at the end and before his judges, his divine mission. It is as impossible to controvert him in this as it is to approve of his corrosive influence upon instinctual life. In this dilemma, his accusers, when he had been brought before the Athenian forum, could think of one form of punishment only, namely exile, to turn this wholly unclassifiable, mysterious phenomenon out of state would have given posterity no cause to charge the Athenians with a disgraceful act. When finally death, not banishment, was pronounced against him, it seems to have been Socrates himself who, with complete lucidity of mind and in the absence of any fear of death, insisted on it. He went to his death with the same calm Plato describes when he has him leaving the symposium in the early dawn, the last reveler to begin a new day; while behind him on the benches and on the floor his sleepy companions go on dreaming of Socrates the true lover. Socrates, in death, had become the idol of the young Athenian elite. The typical Hellenic youth, Plato prostrated himself before that image with all the fervent devotion of his enthusiastic mind.

In this single passage Nietzsche provides a link between Socrates and Plato, explaining the connection the old genius has with the young genius, but exactly because the student is a genius, he cannot be a follower, a parasitic vine around the old mighty tree, to use the Cartesian metaphor. Therefore, it is highly unlikely for this student to imitate his teacher, but far likelier for him to put his own words in the teacher’s mouth, and thus to create a Platonic Socrates, who tells us more about Plato than about Socrates.

As for us, we shall be talking about Plato in his proper place, but so far we are interested in his Socrates. It remains for us in this entry to dwell as briefly as possible on that artificial person, Plato’s creatura. In this regard, it is interesting to read what Bertrand Russell says about Plato’s Socratic problem: “In addition to being a philosopher, he (Plato) is an imaginative writer of great genius and charm. No one supposes, and he himself does not seriously pretend that the conversations in his dialogues took place just as he records them. (!) Nevertheless, at any rate in the earlier dialogues, the conversation is completely natural and the characters quite convincing. It is the excellence of Plato as a writer of fiction that throws doubt on him as a historian. His Socrates is a consistent and extraordinarily interesting character far beyond the power of most men to invent; but I think that Plato could have invented him. Whether he did so is, of course, another question.

Here are a few more features of Socrates, through the eyes of Plato’s mind given here in Bertrand Russell’s summary:

(Plato’s) Apology gives a clear picture of a man very sure of himself, high-minded, indifferent to worldly success, believing that he is guided by a divine voice (daimonion), and persuaded that clear thinking is the prerequisite for right living. He is not troubled, like the Christians, by fears of eternal torment: he has no doubt that his life in the next world will be a happy one. Everyone agrees that he was very ugly, he always dressed in shabby old clothes, and went barefoot. His indifference to heat and cold, hunger and thirst, was amazing to everyone. His mastery over bodily passions is constantly stressed. He seldom drank wine, but when he did, he could out-drink anybody; no one had ever seen him drunk. In love, he remained Platonic, if Plato is speaking the truth. He was the perfect Orphic saint: in the dualism of heavenly soul and earthly body. His indifference to death at the last is the final proof of this mastery. At the same time, he is not the orthodox Orphic; it is only the fundamental doctrines that he accepts, not the superstitions and ceremonies of purification.

The Platonic Socrates anticipates both the Stoics and the Cynics. The Stoics held that the supreme good is virtue, and that a man cannot be deprived of virtue by outside causes; this doctrine is implicit in Socrates’ contention that his judges cannot harm him. The Cynics despised worldly goods, and showed contempt by eschewing the comforts of civilization. This is the same point of view that led Socrates to go barefoot, and ill-clad.

It seems fairly certain that his preoccupations were ethical, rather than scientific. In the Apology, he says: ‘I have nothing to do with physical speculations.’ He is mainly preoccupied with the search for definitions of ethical terms. In all of these, no conclusion is arrived at, but he makes it clear that he thinks it important to examine such questions. (This is eminently consistent with my own contention many times repeated, that posing questions is immeasurably more important than answering them) He consistently maintains that he knows nothing, and that he is only wiser than others in knowing that, but he does not think that knowledge is unobtainable; on the contrary, he thinks that the search for knowledge is of the utmost importance. He is convinced that no man sins wittingly, and therefore, only knowledge is needed to make all men virtuous.

Dialectic, that is to say, the method of seeking knowledge by question and answer, was not his invention, but Socrates practiced and developed this method. When he is condemned to death, he reflects happily that in the next world he can go asking questions forever, and he cannot be put to death for this as there he will be immortal.

Such are the peculiarities of Plato’s Socrates, and, having said all this, we might just as well conclude that in retrospect the two Socrates are essentially one person, coming to us through the far distance of the ages, where the truth is so completely blended with myth and fiction that distinguishing among the components becomes a self-defeating and totally unnecessary exercise in futility. Why should we persist in doing so, if the aggregate person of this great man is a beacon of philosophical and psychological light, more credible, more edifying, and more conducive to human thought than a thousand scientifically established realities of our mentally and philosophically impoverished time?!