Wisdom, Love, and Friendship in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Essays in Honor of Daniel Devereux

Georgia Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Evan Robert Keeling, Georgia Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Evan Robert Keeling

• Editorial: De Gruyter
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110702378
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria antigua y clásica

This volume consists of fourteen essays in honor of Daniel Devereux on the themes of love, friendship, and wisdom in Plato, Aristotle, and the Epicureans. Philia (friendship) and eros (love) are topics of major philosophical interest in ancient Greek philosophy. They are also topics of growing interest and importance in contemporary philosophy, much of which is inspired by ancient discussions. Philosophy is itself, of course, a special sort of love, viz. the love of wisdom. Loving in the right way is very closely connected to doing philosophy, cultivating wisdom, and living well. The first nine essays run the gamut of Plato's philosophical career. They include discussions of the >Alcibiades Euthydemus Gorgias Phaedo Phaedrus Symposium Nicomachean Ethics Politics Protrepticus Magna Moralia<. The volume ends with friendship in the Epicureans. As a whole, the volume brings out the centrality of love and friendship for the conception of the philosophical life held by the ancients. The book should appeal to anyone interested in these works or in the topics of love, friendship, or wisdom.

Part I Plato

1 Of Mice and Men: Socrates on Wisdom and Good Fortune in Plato’s Euthydemus

Michael Ferejohn

“The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft agley”

– From To A Mouse, by Robert Burns (1785)

The principal objective in doing history of philosophy, as I conceive of it, is to avoid making great thinkers look bad. On this conception, the discovery of a passage in some classical text that appears on its surface to expound implausible views, or to advance defective arguments, is taken as an occasion to look more closely into that passage itself and its surrounding context, and perhaps even to range more widely within the author's corpus, with the aim of exonerating the passage in question from its unflattering initial appearance. But there are also limits to such exegetical charity. These limits are exceeded when well-intentioned scholars lose touch with constraints imposed upon the range of legitimate interpretation by the actual wording of the text itself and other factors (e. g. the state of scientific understanding and the general intellectual milieu, in the relevant historical period). When this occurs, the result is an interpretation that may or may not be philosophically respectable, but is in either case insufficiently grounded in the texts it was concocted to explain. Taking into account both of these concerns, I believe the most reasonable approach to the history of philosophy is one that aims to strike a fine balance between exegetical charity on the one hand, and what might be called “textual piety” on the other. Hopefully the details of how such balance is to be achieved in actual cases will be illustrated very nicely in the case of a troublesome little passage from Plato's Euthydemus that will be the central subject of this paper.

I

The passage in question occurs within a wider discussion that has been surprisingly neglected in the scholarly literature, since it is one of the very few occasions in Plato’s works where he openly confronts an issue that is characteristic of Classical and Hellenistic moral philosophy. That issue is how one can attain the condition the Greeks referred to as eudaimonia, a term that it will be convenient (if not entirely accurate¹) to translate here as “happiness.” In the Euthydemus, Socrates initially raises this issue at 278e3 – 8 when, in the midst of some fairly inane and philosophically pointless banter by a pair of minor sophists, Socrates himself temporarily takes control of the conversation, gets his young interlocutor Cleinias to agree that everyone ultimately wants to “do well” (eu prattein), or as he puts it later (280d – e), to be “happy” (eudaimôn), and the two characters commence forthwith an investigation into how this might be achieved.

It is generally agreed that in the first book of his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle consciously develops an unorthodox approach to this issue on which the way to attain happiness is not to pursue instrumental means to it, but rather to engage in a certain sort of activity (namely, activity in accordance with rational excellence), which in Aristotle’s view is constitutive of happiness. By contrast, in the Euthydemus the character Socrates appears to presuppose a more traditional conception of the issue that is not only instrumental, but more specifically what I shall call “acquisitive.” By this I mean that from the outset he seems to assume without argument (1) that whatever exactly happiness might be, it is constituted by benefit, (2) that benefit is accrued through the acquisition of things that are “good” (agathon) and therefore “beneficial” (ôphelimon), and (3) that achieving happiness will consequently be a matter of identifying and acquiring the right sort of “goods,” namely those whose possession will yield happiness as their characteristic benefit.

Working within this acquisitive framework, in the so-called first protreptic of the dialogue (which spans 278e – 282d) Socrates employs a two-stage strategy for discovering how happiness is to be secured. In the first stage, he compiles a “shortlist” of items that are commonly called “good,” and which might therefore be thought to have some prima facie claim to produce happiness. This shortlist includes the usual suspects: wealth, health, physical beauty, good birth, and honor, along with the traditional virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom.² His objective in the second stage is to cull from this list a select class of these apparent goods that he describes as “per se goods” (agatha kath' hauta), whose possession really will bring about happiness. ³ The first protreptic then concludes at 281e when Socrates and Cleinias agree that wisdom is the only item on their shortlist that fits the bill as a per se good, and that it is therefore the only thing that one should try to acquire in the pursuit of happiness.

The discussion of good fortune (eutychia) that will be our central concern here occurs during the first stage of Socrates’ procedure. At 279c4 – 7, after getting Cleinias to agree that nothing had been omitted from their initial shortlist of “goods,” Socrates suddenly appears to have second thoughts, exclaiming, “Upon my word, we are leaving out the greatest good of all!” When Cleinias inquires what that might be, at c7 – 9 Socrates replies as follows:

“Good fortune (eutychia), Cleinias, which everybody says is the greatest good of all. Even the commonest fools say that!”⁴

But now, just when poor Cleinias is made to agree that this was indeed an oversight, Socrates reverses himself yet again and declares that they have in fact just now embarrassed themselves, because good fortune was in fact already on the original shortlist, which made the proposed emendation redundant. More specifically, Socrates now contends that the earlier explicit inclusion of wisdom on the list somehow brought with it an implicit inclusion of good fortune.

This is where we encounter the passage that gives rise to the central problem of this paper. In order to support his contention that adding good fortune to a list of goods already containing wisdom would be superfluous, Socrates makes a shocking declaration at 279d3 – 4 that this is because good fortune in fact is wisdom (hê sophia … eutychia esti). As it happens, Socrates never actually defends this stark identity claim, but over the next three Stephanus pages he adduces considerations he evidently takes to establish a claim only slightly less counterintuitive, namely that wisdom is sufficient for good fortune. He surveys a number of types of technical expertise (flute playing, reading and writing, ship piloting, military strategizing, and practicing medicine), and gets Cleinias to agree that in each case when it comes to selecting an expert, the skillful and the fortunate practitioner are one and the same. At the completion of this survey, Socrates concludes, at 280a6 – 7, that “wisdom everywhere makes people fortunate” (hê sophia ara pantachou eutychein poiei tous anthrôpous), or as Socrates glosses it at 280a10 – b3, that “when wisdom is present, whoever has it has no more need of good fortune than that.” And these are not the only counterintuitive theses that Socrates claims to follow from his survey of cases. In the same passage in which he expresses his sufficiency claim he also makes three other surprising assertions: that wisdom “doesn’t err” (ou … hamartanoi g’ an), that it “acts correctly” (orthôs prattein), and that it “turns out correctly” (tynchanein). What’s even more surprising is the modal and “conceptual” language he uses to present these claims:

Therefore, wisdom everywhere makes men fortunate. For presumably wisdom never errs, rather, it necessarily both acts and turns out correctly; otherwise it would no longer be wisdom.

(280a, emphasis added)

The occurrence of anankê at 280a8 and the final (emphasized) clause at a9 strongly suggest that Socrates’ position is not only that these three statements are true, but that their truth is in some way due to the very concept of wisdom.⁵

In reading this, one might well wonder if Socrates should not actually be embarrassed by his final position rather than the one it was intended to correct. For this view seems to fly in the face of common sense. How, one wonders, could Socrates possibly be oblivious to the host of sad human experiences in which the fates, the gods, or the vicissitudes of nature bring it about that, as Robbie Burns laments, even the best laid plans often go awry? To highlight its evident naïveté, in what follows I will refer to this quite literal understanding of Socrates' point in this passage as the “Pollyanna” interpretation.

My ultimate objective in what follows will be to avoid this unflattering interpretation by finding a more charitable way of understanding Socrates' position at 279d – 280b. But as my opening remarks suggested, exegetical charity should not be purchased at the cost of textual impiety. In what follows I will first explore one proposed charitable way of defending Socrates, which I call the “Proto-Stoic interpretation,” and argue that although it is more charitable than the Pollyanna interpretation, it is not adequately grounded in the Platonic texts. I shall then propose an alternative, “practical” interpretation of the passage, which I will argue is more charitable than the Pollyanna interpretation, but also faithful to the text of the Euthydemus.

II

The Proto-Stoic interpretation is so-called here because it involves locating certain distinctive elements of later Stoic ethical doctrine in the Euthydemus and other Platonic dialogues, and then arguing against this background that when Socrates asserts that wisdom entails good fortune and suchlike, his claims can be interpreted in ways that are not nearly so counterintuitive as they first appear. In particular, this interpretation attributes to Socrates the following two “Stoic” theses.

(S1)

Nothing external to the human soul is genuinely good or evil.

(S2)

Wisdom involves, at least partly, recognition that (S1) is true, and modifying one's motivational structure accordingly.

Besides the supposition that these two theses are genuinely Socratic, the “Proto-Stoic” interpretation of 279d – 280b also requires a couple of background assumptions. One of these, which seems plausible on its face, is that “fortune” (tychê) denotes forces beyond a subject’s control, and that “good fortune” (eutychia) therefore refers to circumstances where such forces bring about beneficial outcomes for the person whose good fortune is at issue.⁶ The second assumption, which upon reflection might not seem nearly so plausible, is that the effects of tychê are limited to what is external to the human soul, and that internal s...