Socratic Questions

New Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates and its Significance

Barry S. Gower, Michael C. Stokes, Barry S. Gower, Michael C. Stokes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138325784
• eBook ISBN: 9780429832765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book, first published in 1992, introduces some of Socrates' problems and some of the problems about him. It seeks at the same time to advance new views, arguments and information on Socrates' mission, techniques, ethics and later reception. From civil disobedience to ethics, this collection provides stimulating discussions of Socrates' life, thought and historical significance.

1

SOCRATES’ MISSION

Michael Stokes

PRELUDE

Dickens once began a novel, ‘What I want is facts!’ In talking of Socrates facts can be nothing more than a beginning, and they are in short supply. Quite a number of them (his age at death, some significant battlefields in Athenian history on which he fought, some details of the charges against him at his trial) derive from, among other places, the work of Plato’s traditionally called the Apology of Socrates; that means, in current English, Socrates’ Defence. Formally the Apology contains three speeches in Socrates’ mouth: one a defence proper against the charges brought at his trial; one after the verdict of guilty suggesting (as defence and prosecution each did in Athens) a possible penalty; and the third addressed to the jury, uniquely in recorded Athenian practice, after sentence. The work paints a portrait of a man who spent much of his life questioning people, particularly (perhaps only) on ethical issues, to their discomfiture, their edification or both – the discomfiting questions being called ‘elenctic’ or (roughly) ‘refutatory’; the verb elencho, ‘test’ or ‘refute’, but not the noun elenchos or the adjective, appears in the Apology’s text. That text portrays Socrates as insisting (among other things) that he does not think he knows what he does not know; whereas others do think they know things that in fact they do not know. Much of what scholars say about Socrates’ mission also comes from this work. In proportion to its authenticity as a record of Socrates’ actual defence it offers a priceless source for Socrates’ view of himself and of his own activities.

In proportion, yes. But the Platonic Socrates’ professions of ignorance make it ironic that so many scholars argue for the view, and some indeed appear to think they know, that Plato’s Apology is essentially what Socrates said at his trial. In my view they do not and cannot know this. We should start, not from the assumption even that Socrates’ general drift receives faithful reportage in Plato’s Apology, but rather from the fact that the Apology is a work of Plato’s. As such it should command no less and no more biographical credence than any other of Plato’s earlier works. True, it could (but need not) have been the first Socratic writing from Plato’s pen, but an early date does not seem to me a guarantee of biographical intention or historical authenticity in detail or even in significant argument. True, also, that Plato’s text says he was there; and at first sight the Apology might appear to be on a different footing from, say, the Crito, which depicts a private conversation between Socrates and Crito alone. But authorial autopsy is sometimes in Xenophon a literary embellishment without substance, and may equally be so in Plato; to assume the contrary is risky. True, further, that if one accepts a parallel between Platonic writings and Thucydides’ speeches, and emphasises the historian’s words about keeping as close as possible to the general sense of what was actually said, one ends up attributing biographical intent to Plato; but to draw such a parallel is to assume that Plato and his readers saw his Socratic writings as examples of the same (or allied) genre as Thucydides’ History – and thus to beg the question at issue.¹

You are warned that when talking about Socrates I normally mean Plato’s Socrates. I commit myself to nothing about the real Socrates of history unless I expressly take on such a commitment; and most of the other contributors to this collection would probably echo this reservation. I personally would go further: I am prepared when speaking historically to deny to the real Socrates some important parts of Plato’s version, in full consciousness that to do so is to go somewhat against the trend of recent major publications on the subject.² But in trying to make sense of Socrates’ mission it is in the first instance Plato’s Socrates’ mission I am trying to make sense of.

Making sense of it in context is not a wholly straightforward task. There have been scholarly doubts³ whether even Plato’s Socrates has any right to speak of a mission at all. There have also been those holding that he argues quite logically and clearly that he was acting, for much of his life, in obedience to instructions from Apollo, the god of, in particular, the Delphic Oracle.⁴ This chapter argues for a sort of uneasy halfway house between these views concerning Plato’s Socrates, while expressing serious doubts of Plato’s biographical reliability. The truth is that Plato’s text gets more difficult every time one looks at it; the difficulties are not those of following the meaning in the narrow sense, but of understanding exactly what is going on. Recent accounts have cleared up some points, but left others still obscure. But without the context one has no hope of grasping what is going on, so here, at some but I hope not excessive length, is the context.

The context mentioning the Oracle, at Apology 20e ff., has Socrates rebutting the first of two sets, as he puts it, of accusers. He will deal later with those who have accused him in court, and he is dealing at this juncture with the prejudice against him created by comic drama and by gossip (the ‘first accusers’, as he calls them). Gossip has it that Socrates belongs to one or both of two classes of intellectuals: those who produce grandiose theories of the universe and everything (with at most a minimal function for the traditional gods) and those who claim to teach young men goodness (where ‘goodness’ meant successfulness in personal and public life, and the values of success need not, but might, undermine traditional moral restraints). From both of these, from the so-called ‘natural philosophers’ and from the ‘sophists’, Socrates firmly dissociates himself. It is hardly coincidental that the two sorts of people he thus disowns correspond rather obviously and superficially to the two counts of the indictment – the charges respectively of impiety and of corrupting the young. The grounds of dissociation are those of ignorance. Socrates says he knows nothing of ‘natural philosophy’, and he disclaims knowledge of, and the ability to teach, whatever makes a personal success of a human being. But Socrates is sure the jury will suppose that there is no smoke without fire; and he sets out to answer the question what it was about himself that brought him a reputation for wisdom.

‘Wisdom?’ you may ask; ‘wisdom’ is a conventional rendering of long standing for a Greek word meaning ‘intellectual qualities or achievements (real or supposed) setting a man apart from or above his fellows’. This word has a strong association in fifth-century Greek with knowing many things.⁵ Socrates sets out then from a denial of two sorts of ‘wisdom’, two sorts of intellectual pretensions attributed to him, and seeks to explain how the false attribution arose. But his explanation would have startled a real-life jury, as it startles innocent first-time readers of Plato. His false repute for ‘wisdom’ arose, he says, ‘through nothing other than a sort of “wisdom”’ (Apology 23d6). Of this paradox there will be more to say later; all that is needed now is that its resolution depends on there being two applications of the word ‘wisdom’, one human and one, if it be genuine, superhuman. Socrates lays claim only to a human ‘wisdom’. This distinction does not appear at once to help explain his reputation; for his reputation was for something setting him apart from normal men, not from all human possibilities. Socrates’ argument depends on his attribution of superhuman ‘wisdom’ to those he has just mentioned, presumably both the physical philosophers and the sophists – if, that is, their claims are true. It is hard to imagine anything more likely than this to induce restiveness in a sizeable popular audience. Socrates stands accused, he implies, of being a physical philosopher or sophist. He says (adducing little or no evidence) that he is neither; he says that his false repute for wisdom is due to his, well, sort of wisdom; and he adds that the highly suspect physicists and sophists, if genuine, are superhumanly wise. It should not surprise anyone that Plato gives Socrates here a sentence telling the audience, even if they think he is boasting, not to raise a clamour.

The paradoxes become not a whit less provocative as Socrates proceeds. That he is wise is no saying of his; he can produce a witness to his wisdom (to the questions, that is, whether he has any and of what sort); and his witness? the god Apollo of Delphi, the Oracle (Apology 20e7).⁶ The respectable democrat Chaerephon, a man ‘given to the excessive’ or ‘impetuous’, asked the Oracle whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates; and he received the answer, ‘No one is wiser than Socrates.’ Nothing here, you will observe, dissociates Socrates from physics or sophistry; nothing here distinguishes human wisdom such as Socrates claims from superhuman wisdom, which he does not. All we have here is an oracle to say that there is none wiser than he; and Socrates produces Chaerephon as a human witness to it, though since Chaerephon is dead, his brother testifies from hearsay. Still nothing concrete explains Socrates’ reputation, except an oracle nobody, apparently, knew about.

MISSION AND ORACLE: SOME MODERN VIEWS

Socrates now gets down to explaining why he came to be the victim of false gossip; and we may get down to his mission. Of course he does not react to the oracle by saying ‘The Oracle declares there is no one wiser than me; that gives me a mission to go around questioning people.’ Socrates’ logic, deeply though many readers suspect it, is not normally as bad as that. And yet, about two pages later, after explaining how he went around questioning people, we find Socrates describing this way of life as a ‘help’ and a ‘service’ to the god of Delphi, which are terms appropriate to a mission – and this though, as many have remarked,⁷ there is nothing obviously jussive, no order, command, instruction or imperative, and no clear imposition of a task, visible to the naked eye in the actual oracle, nor any overt hint there that the god required of Socrates any help or service.

The puzzle thus set has a long history, and one cannot be confident of one’s ability to end that history. But some solutions we can surely abandon. In the 1920s the great German scholar Wilamowitz could write of Socrates finding welcome confirmation from an external source of an inner vocation, without enquiring too closely how the logic of this external confirmation worked.⁸ Theodor Gomperz earlier and Reginald Hackforth later⁹ believed that Plato played up the oracle’s significance in Socrates’ life. Hackforth described Socrates’ initial interpretation of the oracle as ‘a typical example of Socrates’ irony’ and spoke of Plato inventing the connection between the oracle and Socrates’ mission. There may be – and I suspect there are – elements of truth in these, but none seems properly to have faced the question why Plato, the master of creative argument, should suddenly become as incompetent as their views implied in the creation of a logical connection between oracle and mission.

More recently Guthrie¹⁰ skated over the problem, saying, ‘Having learned the lesson [of the oracle] himself he felt it to be the god’s will that he should impart it to others.’ ‘Felt it’? Socrates (and we) ought surely to be able to do better than that – though we shall have to see. More recently still, Brickhouse and Smith in their Socrates on Trial, finding no command in the oracle or Socrates’ interpretation of it, take refuge in an analysis of Socratic piety (as discussed especially in Plato’s Euthyphro); they argue¹¹ that this Socratic piety ‘fits well with’ Socrates’ description of his mission in the Apology, and indeed required him ‘to serve the gods by promoting what is good’, as Socrates claims to do later in this same speech by urging Athenians to pursue virtue. This theory, you will not fail to observe, makes Plato not only have his readers read his Socrates’ Defence backwards rather than normally but also assumes their knowledge of the contents of his Euthyphro. It leaves us with a fictional (I do not say fictitious) Socrates who confronts his mass audience at this point with a set of remarks likely to strike the more intelligent as thoroughly unconvincing and indeed irrational, who only later solves the conundrum he has thus set them, and in so doing does not stop to explain by even the briefest cross-reference that he has done so, or how he has done it. In this context one notices that Socrates’ audience can certainly not have been supposed even in fiction to know the doctrines which emerge from the Euthyphro. Earlier theories made Plato an incompetent reasoner; this one makes him an unimaginative writer.

Yet more recently comes Reeve’s stimulating and important essay Socrates in the Apology. Reeve¹² most helpfully identifies three separate problems. ‘First, the oracle, even as he finally interprets it, is not an explicit command or imperative. Second, it does not mention elenctic examination. By the same token, and this is the third problem, it does not mention elenctic examination on ethical issues.’ Reeve finds no explicit answers in the text, but believes that ‘a plausible explanation is implicit in what [Socrates] tells [the jury]’. This explanation, boiled down, I hope, not misleadingly, runs like this: (a) Socrates was already devoted to Apollo, or he would not have spent the time and trouble he did over determining the oracle’s meaning, or persisted as he did through unpopularity and poverty in the activity designed to find out that meaning. (b) The obvious people to go to for a counter-example were those with a repute for wisdom, and the obvious issues to discuss with them were ethical ones about which they were believed to be wise and he doubted his own wisdom. Building on this foundation, Reeve adds (c), Socrates’ practice of refuting claimants to knowledge of the most important things will tend to show that things are as Apollo said, so that ‘There is a sense in which Socrates is acting according to Apollo.’¹³ This leaves open the question why Socrates should have persisted, as he says he did, after the truth of the oracle had been demonstrated to his satisfaction. (d) Socrates interpreted the oracle as making the value-judgement that the person is wisest who recognises that no human being knows the most important things. Delphi thus ‘commended anti-hybristic awareness of human limitations in wisdom. And value-judgements and commendations … have – especially when uttered by a god to a religious person already devoted to him – strong action-guiding force.’ Socrates’ continuing activity brings about something which Apollo values. This constitutes a ‘much more full-blooded sense’ in which Socrates aids or serves Apollo; and “notice that Socrates speaks of coming “to the aid of the god” only at the stage at which he tries to get the interlocutor to recognise his own lack of wisdom (Apology 23b3-6)’.¹⁴

This reasoning is thoroughly grounded in the text. But it smacks of over-interpretation and at the same time of special pleading, inadequate to account fully for what Socrates says. For, in the first place, it is doubtful whether to ponder and take enormous trouble over an oracle was the mark of one already devoted to Apollo. The mythical Orestes and Oedipus, who took extreme measures or great pains to fulfil or avoid fulfilling respectively what Apollo’s Oracle advised or foretold, were not made out by the poets to be devotees, and a personal oracle such as Socrates says he received through Chaerephon would have been a major event in anyone’s life, provided that he believed in the genuinely divine nature of the pronouncement’s source – and the whole story is predicated on that much by way of Socratic piety. In the second place, whatever one may think about ‘acting in accordance with the god’ and ‘coming to the god’s aid’, this explanation hardly suggests an order from the god comparable, as Socrates later has it, with the orders of a mil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION: Barry Gower
• 1 SOCRATES’ MISSION: Michael Stokes
• 2 SOCRATIC QUESTIONS: Ian Kidd
• 3 SOCRATES AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: Spiro Panagiotou
• 4 SOCRATES VERSUS PROTAGORAS: Malcolm Schofield
• 5 SOCRATIC ETHICS: C. C. W. Taylor
• 6 THE LEGACY OF SOCRATES: P. J. FitzPatrick
• References
• Index Locorum
• General Index