Socratic Ignorance and Platonic Knowledge in the Dialogues of Plato

Sara Ahbel-Rappe

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438469263, 9781438469270
• eBook ISBN: 9781438469287
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this highly original and provocative book, Sara Ahbel-Rappe argues that the Platonic dialogues contain an esoteric Socrates who signifies a profound commitment to self-knowledge and whose appearances in the dialogues are meant to foster the practice of self-inquiry. According to Ahbel-Rappe, the elenchus, or inner examination, and the thesis that virtue is knowledge, are tools for a contemplative practice that teaches us how to investigate the mind and its objects directly. In other words, the Socratic persona of the dialogues represents wisdom, which is distinct from and serves as the larger space in which Platonic knowledge—ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics—is constructed. Ahbel-Rappe offers complete readings of the Apology, Charmides, Alcibiades I, Euthyphro, Lysis, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, and Parmenides, as well as parts of the Republic. Her interpretation challenges two common approaches to the figure of Socrates: the thesis that the dialogues represent an "early" Plato who later disavows his reliance on Socratic wisdom, and the thesis that Socratic ethics can best be expressed by the construct of eudaimonism or egoism.

CHAPTER ONE

SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY

I am making two strong claims about how to read the legacy of Socratic philosophy as adumbrated in the Socratic dialogues. The first claim relates to what is known to most students of Plato as the Socratic denial of akrasia, in other words, to the thesis that virtue is knowledge. This thesis forms the basis of a whole interpretive tradition in contemporary Socratic studies, generally associated with the thesis of egoistic eudaimonism. Thus Penner and Rowe (2005) specify that what human beings are after, again according to Socrates, is the “maximum happiness available to one in one’s particular circumstances, over a complete life” (264).1 It is in this sense that virtue can be equated with knowledge of the good; having more knowledge, I am better able to bring about this happiness that I desire.2

By contrast, I am going to suggest that, for Socrates, there is no such state of affairs in the world that can bring about the ultimate satisfaction of desire and that this strategy is entirely unsuitable if the agent wants to bring about the good that, according to the prudential principle (everyone desires the good), she desires. I am going to suggest that, when Plato references the thesis that virtue is knowledge, one, and possibly even the one most crucial, component of this knowledge is self-knowledge. At the outset, then, I suggest that Socrates’s philosophy takes an inward turn. He does not encourage, or, rather, he actively discourages, the pursuit of states of affairs in the world as determinative of happiness as such. Instead, the elenchus, Socratic examination, and the thesis that virtue is knowledge signal a practical orientation to the objects of mind. According to this version of the thesis that virtue is knowledge, then, all states of mind—appetitive states, emotions, desires, opinions—are in another sense objects of knowledge. At least they are treated as such in the practice environment of the elenchus, the inner examination. In bringing forth the mind that seeks wisdom and truth, which attends to desire and aversion, or pleasure and pain, not as one’s own nature, the wisdom of the knower shines through the conditions of the psyche. Socrates refers to the virtue of self-knowledge as guardian temperance, which keeps watch on, protects against, and even rules over the passions of the soul.

The second claim I make is that the division of Plato’s dialogues into Socratic ethics and a distinct and separate Platonic metaphysics, an approach that sometimes also coincides with developmentalism (the idea that the Socratic dialogues are early and represent the teaching of the historical Socrates), is not helpful if we want to understand the figure of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. Rather, the Socratic quest for virtue is in fact an entry point into the art of theoria,3 of contemplating the nature of reality. We must begin by healing the cleft between Socratic ethics and Platonic metaphysics that has dominated our understanding of Socrates ever since Aristotle offered his testimony, to the effect that Socrates was (solely) a moral philosopher, interested in questions of definition (Metaph. 1078b22–33; Vlastos 1991, 80–106). Readers familiar with the history of Socrates scholarship will recognize the extent to which this testimony has provided a platform for developmentalism, the interpretation of those who believe that the Socratic disavowal of knowledge, Socratic aporia, and Socratic psychology can be extracted from Plato’s philosophy, as representing the philosophy of the historical Socrates (Vlastos 1991, 45–80). It will be one of our tasks to rethink this dichotomy, for the simple reason that the Socratic path and the Platonic path converge in their attempted discovery of the good. Socrates tracks the good through his approach to the definition of virtue as knowledge of the good, whereas Plato tracks the good through his metaphysics, which posits the form of the good as the source of existence and knowledge. Despite this convergence, developmentalism, the separation of the Socratic from the Platonic, describes two distinct paths of inquiry that have come to be seen as failing to be asymptotic: Socratic ethics and Platonic metaphysics. One assumption I make throughout this book is that Plato’s metaphysics directly informs, from its very inception, the exemplary or ethical function of the Socratic figure in Plato’s dialogues, as that figure resonates with Plato’s characterization of the nature of the divine. At the same time, Socratic wisdom, the capacity to assimilate all doctrinal constructions into the open ground of wisdom that never loses its own self-awareness, is always present even in what seem to be the least Socratic of the Platonic formulations.

Most important for understanding the passage from aporia to theoria, is the meaning and location of virtue in the life of the philosopher. Socrates’s mission, to convert the ordinary person to the life of philosophy, starts with each person as she is and not as she ought to be. This insight allows us to view the egoism (commonly touted as Socrates’s great psychological discovery) that Socrates apparently assumes in or assigns to his interlocutors in its proper perspective. Socrates does not endorse this egoism nor does he find it normative. Rather, as he finds human beings, their desires and their knowledge are woefully amiss; they mistake the search for the good as the pursuit of self-interest, and yet are at a complete loss as to the nature of the self to whose interests they are apparently committed. The disparity between people as they are and people as they could be is similar to the disparity between paradigm and particular that we find in Plato’s metaphysics. Socrates is also the exemplar or paradigm; Socrates reveals that he does not share in the ubiquitous egoism that so engulfs the people he encounters. On the contrary, everything Socrates does is directed, as Plato tells us in so many words, toward “the common good,” as he strives to make his fellow citizens “actually be happy,” and even defends himself against the capital sentence “for the sake” of those same citizens. In the reading program of the dialogues, we are meant to notice the inversion of the Socratic desire—to benefit all—in the interlocutor’s desire for his own good. The difference between them has to do with the difference between being the cause of good, as the form is the cause of the good and benefits, and being the recipient or participant in that cause, as the particular participates and receives its good from the form, with which it is not identical.

To take one example of how Socratic and Platonic proximity works once we set aside the distraction of developmentalism, let us think for a moment about the Timaeus, certainly a dialogue in which Socrates hardly figures and one that is, by developmentalist standards, not even remotely Socratic. Throughout the dialogue, Plato characterizes god as possessing absolute and complete benevolence, generosity, and lack of envy; god desires all things to be as good as possible.4 On the other hand, the receptacle, wet nurse of becoming and matrix of birth and death, is hardly real, and has nothing, literally, to offer, except its neediness: τίν᾽ οὖν ἔχον δύναμιν καὶ φύσιν αὐτὸ ὑποληπτέον; τοιάνδε μάλιστα: πάσης εἶναι γενέσεως ὑποδοχὴν αὐτὴν οἷον τιθήνην (49a7). What power and nature must one understand it to possess? Surely only this, that it is the receptacle, as it were the wet nurse of all becoming). Metaphysically, then, there are two poles: absolute generosity and absolute poverty.5

Contemplating these two poles—one of extreme need and poverty and the other of abundant wealth and generosity—it is hard to miss the parallel to the ethical language of Plato. After all, don’t all people “want the good”? And isn’t all desire due to lack? (Symp. 201a–c). So, this intrinsic poverty, the lack of possessing the good, haunts the human psyche. All people seek their own good, necessarily, because they lack the good. Yet in the Socratic dialogues, especially in the Apology, we see the virtues embodied in Socrates. He is not afraid of death; he serves his fellow citizens; he obeys the god; he is the wisest of all human beings. Socrates is exemplary, above all, by devoting himself to the well-being of his fellow citizens. He lives in order to make them happy. He does so by sharing the good of truth-telling equally with all he encounters. In this generosity, Socrates is actually quite unlike his fellow citizens; he is more like the god Socrates himself invokes, the god who only brings about the good. Socrates is not motivated by the pursuit of his own individual good; he seeks to bestow the good, and not merely as something subordinate to his own interests. It is legitimate, then, to refer to the Timaeus to understand and trace how these two lines of inquiry, Socratic ethics and Platonic metaphysics, converge in terms of the ethical slogan from the Theaetetus that defines virtue as assimilation to god.

In virtually all of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates formulates something like the prudential principle, that all people wish to be happy, that they desire the good. But what is the status of this principle? Is it descriptive or normative? If it is descriptive, then what is normative? All individuals necessarily seek their good, and this is a metaphysical need, based on their status as individuals. What then does it mean to seek one’s own good? Again, from the perspective of Plato’s metaphysics, to seek one’s good as an individual is to seek the form: true being. What will this good be like? It could not further be a state of the individual, as this would be simply more of the same (metaphysical and epistemological) poverty.

Socrates, then, seeks to motivate his fellow citizens to understand that lack-based erotic impulse cannot in itself arrive at the good, though it certainly is true that all beings strive for the good. Instead, what is needed is recollecting who they are and what they already know. They are already in possession of the form, even the form of virtue, which nevertheless they so painfully fail at articulating in conversation with Socrates. So, the progression is from feeling lack and seeking outside themselves to recollecting and seeking within themselves. Socratic aporia and Platonic recollection are really two aspects that must be integrated into the total conception of wisdom.

This commerce between the (so-called early) dialogues of discovery that seek after the definitions of virtue and the (so-called middle) dialogues that study the metaphysics of form is on view when Plato makes Socrates in some sense responsible for the theory of forms. Readers of the dialogues stumble onto this relationship when they encounter the inexplicable articulation in Plato’s Parmenides of Plato’s “theory of forms” by a virtually adolescent Socrates who (cf. Arist., Metaph. 1078b22–33) could not have been acquainted with them.6 To be sure, there are a number of books focusing on Plato’s “early theory of forms,” and unitarian readers of the dialogues have all along read the Socratic dialogues of definition as providing outlines, early formulations of, or, more recently, prolepses (Khan 1996, 38–42) of the metaphysical or ontological theories elaborated in longer and possibly later dialogues. My point, rather, is that self-inquiry is approached in the dialogues of search for definition as an inquiry into ethics, and that this ethics, which assists in or aims at the assimilation of the self to the knowing self, by virtue of the establishment of the priority of the knower over the conditions known, in turn becomes the ground for a more mature consideration of wisdom in its own right, and allows Plato a more nuanced articulation of the contours of being.

To come now to a specific articulation of the project at hand, it would be best to couch the study in terms of its narrative dimensions. In these pages, the reader will find a story about the Socratic quest for knowledge of virtue, for knowledge of the good, and about how this quest then led Socrates to discover that virtue could not arise without satisfying a fundamental condition. The inquirer had to begin with herself, and to study the question of just who, initially, was inquiring into virtue. Who is it that wishes to be happy, to attain virtue, to know the good, in the first place? The inquiry into virtue, then, leads into an inquiry into the self. It is in this sense that the Socratic life is the examined life. Socrates is not, therefore, a dogmatic teacher. He does not, for example, have a theory of motivation that can be described as egoistic eudaimonism. He does not propound any theories about human nature nor does he inculcate his teachings in a doctrinal form. Instead, he encounters his interlocutors and allows them to articulate the way things seem to them. He is a guide into the life of philosophy, which both begins in and culminates in self-knowledge. This is why the Socratic dialogues show Socrates reflecting back the views, prejudices, and assumptions of the interlocutor. Nevertheless, this initial encounter with Socrates is not the final stage of the journey. Indeed, several of the interlocutors clearly won’t be accompanying Socrates very far into the depth or height of the philosophical path.

How does self-knowledge become foundational to the practice of philosophy, and why is philosophy approached via the path of self-inquiry? These are, broadly speaking, the questions that this book addresses. To answer them, we need to revert once more to the Socratic paradigm, recalling that Socrates extends his teaching to all in his friendship and that his approach to others is in terms of their fundamental nature as knowers. At the same time, his actions are performed in service to the good, which is to say that he wills the good and wills the good for others. Yet there are some facts about the nature of the good and hence about the well-being that Socrates wishes to promote that make it impossible for him to extend well-being to others, to impart knowledge of virtue or of the good. Instead, Socrates must rely on others’ cultivation of their own self-knowledge if he is to benefit them. To clarify, then, Plato’s Socrates is not so much the purveyor of doctrine, although he certainly is the author of a number of paradoxes or astonishing theses that have been interpreted doctrinally. Socrates does not transmit any doctrinal knowledge to others, much less any doctrinal formulations that allege or even assume the truth of psychological eudaimonism.7

In the Clitophon, Plato (or a Platonic author) means to call attention to the problem of how Socratic ethics can endorse the supremacy of virtue while at the same time apparently offering no definite views as to what constitutes virtue. Clitophon is an erstwhile conversant of Socrates, one of many such men who, having his views rejected too many times, is no longer a member of the Socratic circle. The dialogue begins with the revelation that Socrates has overheard Clitophon disowning his former association with Socrates in the company of Hippias. Clitophon has been captious concerning Socrates in his teaching evaluations; Socrates confronts Clitophon about the purport of the latter’s criticisms. Socrates in fact meekly submits to the young man’s complaints, which come to a climax with Clitophon’s assertion that Socrates “gets in the way” of his happiness, since his instruction does not lead to knowledge of virtue:

I finally asked you yourself these questions and you told me that the aim of justice is to hurt one’s enemies and help one’s friends. But later it turned out that the just man never harms anyone, since everything he does is for the benefit of all.

When I had endured this disappointment, not once or twice but a long time, I finally got tired of begging for an answer. I came to the conclusion that while you’re better than anyone at turning a man towards the pursuit of virtue, one of two things must be the case: either this is all you can do, nothing more … there are only two possibilities, either you don’t know or you don’t wish to share it with me. (410a1–c10)

For I will say this, Socrates, that while you’re worth the world to someone who hasn’t yet been converted to the pursuit of virtue, to someone who’s already been converted you rather get in the way of his attaining happiness by reaching the goal of virtue. (410e6–10)

The upshot of this conversation is that Clitophon, unable to obtain the instruction he seeks from Socrates, has become a student of Thrasymachus. Clitophon proceeds to give a display of a typically Socratic protreptic speech—the kind to which Socrates in the Apology refers: “I was always concerned with you, approaching each one of you like a father or an elder brother to persuade you to care for virtue” (31b). Clitophon’s point is not that Socrates is mistaken in his exhortation to virtue, but that the elenchus offers its participants no doctrinal answers to its questions (Clitophon says he “got tired of begging for an answer”).

The present book offers an interpretation of Socratic philosophy that does not assume that there is something substantively missing from Socrates’s insistence on the pursuit of virtue, even though Socrates says he knows “practic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface • Socrates as an Esoteric Figure
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction • Socratic Ignorance and Platonic Knowledge
• Chapter 1 • Socratic Philosophy
• Chapter 2 • Socratic Receptions
• Chapter 3 • Socrates and Self-Knowledge
• Chapter 4 • Euthydemus: Native and Foreign
• Chapter 5 • Alcibiades I: The Mirror of Socrates
• Chapter 6 • Lysis: The Aporetic Identity of the First Friend
• Chapter 7 • From Virtues to Forms in the Phaedrus
• Chapter 8 • Theaetetus: Socrates’s Interrogation of Platonic Knowledge
• Chapter 9 • “He Who Is Wisest among You”: Socratic Ignorance between the Parmenides and the Apology
• Conclusion • The Socratic Paradigm
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover