642297

Socrates: Devious or Divine?Author(s): Paul W. GoochSource: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Apr., 1985), pp. 32-41Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/642297 .

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Greece & Rome, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, April 1985

SOCRATES: DEVIOUS OR DIVINE?

By PAUL W. GOOCH

Perhaps happiness can be attributed only to the dead because they are beyond the reach of fortune: but that security is denied to one's reputation. The case of Socrates makes this clear, and it is his reputation which is this paper's theme. For since his death Socrates has been the object of such competing assessments that some have despaired of ever finding the real person executed in Athens in 399 B.C. Although that search need not be fruitless, this study is concerned not so much with the sources of our knowledge of Socrates as with the ways in which Plato's Socrates has been represented and assessed.' On the one hand are interpreters who hold him up as a model for life and thought, an ideal figure approaching sainthood if not divinity; and on the other more sinister hand are those who claim to discern under the saint's clothing the sly fox, the devious devil whose major aim is to destroy other people's beliefs and arguments. Socrates has been praised and condemned with fervour since his original trial, and although we will not reach yet another final verdict here, perhaps by canvassing a little of the evidence we may come to understand not only something of his reputations, but also how they find their sources in Plato's own writings.

From Plato we learn of Socrates' problems with his reputation during his life. Aristophanes had portrayed him in the Clouds as a new-fangled intellectual, trying to survey the world from his basket suspended midway between earth and sky. That this reputation was damaging and unfair is Socrates' contention in the Apology: he protests that the Athenians have found in Aristophanes' comedy 'a Socrates being carried about there proclaiming that he was treading on air and uttering a vast deal of other nonsense, about which I know nothing, either much or little' (19c).2 It is therefore a large part of Plato's purpose in writing his early dialogues to correct distortions and leave the world with a philosophically accurate portrait of Socrates. The man who emerges from the Apology is neither buffoon nor rogue, but a dedicated seeker of truth who is motivated by duty to god rather than man. We see him carrying out his mission in the other early dialogues, but nowhere is his character more effectively portrayed than in the closing pages of the Phaedo and the last moment of his life. For in Socrates' manner of dying Plato epitomizes his life and ideals. The scene allows us to view Socrates as the personification of the traditional Greek virtues. As the moment approaches when Socrates must drink the poison, the women and children are sent off so there will be no



SOCRATES: DEVIOUS OR DIVINE 33

outbursts of weeping. But everyone else does break down: only Socrates has the courage and self-control to remain calm in death's face. That he accepts death without making any attempt to escape from prison is testimony to his remarkable sense of justice, which places obedience to law above personal gain. So Socrates represents the ideals of bravery, justice, temperance: but supremely wisdom, for it is through reasoned argument and self-critical awareness that he is able to achieve his state of mind. As for that fifth traditional virtue, piety, it can simply be noted that, whatever the basis for the charges of irreligion at his trial, here his words before drinking the hemlock are a prayer, and his final utterance a request for a sacrificial offering to Asclepius. Plato's epitaph for Socrates has therefore more substance than most tributes: 'such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend who was, as we may say, of all those of his time whom we have known, the best and wisest and most righteous man' (Phaedo 118a).

With this kind of evidence we are prepared to say that Plato believed Socrates to be a paradigm or model for what it is to be an excellent human being. Of course, in Plato's developed philosophical vision, true archetypes of the virtues are to be found not in this world but in his World of Forms: nevertheless Socrates seems to come as close as is possible to an exemplification of those virtues in a single man.

We will find ourselves back with Plato in due course. Now, however, we must ask how Socrates' reputation fares in later centuries. As evidence we may consider three or four instances of the treatment Socrates has received. To start, there is the curious custom of cele- brating his birthday in antiquity.3 Celebration of birth dates of those long dead is an honour customarily afforded to saints or statesmen, not philosophers. Yet Socrates' traditional birthday was celebrated in the ancient world, along with Plato's, on two successive days of paper- reading and partying. We know tantalizingly little about this practice: Plutarch records it, and Porphyry tells us that it was Plotinus' habit to observe the birthdays. In what century the celebration began to be held, or how long the practice persisted, we do not seem to know. But the fifteenth-century Florentine Platonist, Marsilio Ficino, thought his reinstitution of the celebration in Florence on 7 November 1474 to be a revival after a lapse of twelve centuries. What had happened to Socrates' reputation in those many years is not easily discovered; but Ficino did his best for both Plato and Socrates. We find not simply a desire to honour them, but something approaching veneration. Ficino was known to keep a perpetual flame burning before a bust of Plato; and he writes of Socrates in imagery which reminds us of biblical passages. His commentary on the Symposium endows Socrates with all the perfections of love, including a compassionate concern for the



34 SOCRATES: DEVIOUS OR DIVINE

salvation of his followers. He frees the young from wicked men; 'the true lover, like a shepherd, keeps his flock of lambs safe from false lovers as from the ravage of wolves and disease' (Seventh Speech, ch. XVI). Socrates cares for the souls of others; and thus Ficino makes him into a pastor/saviour in the language of the Christian tradition. Here then is an instance of Socrates on the way to sanctification if not divinity - a direction which reaches some kind of culmination in the sixteenth-century tract of Erasmus known to us as The Godly Feast. At this feast several characters are discussing the spirit of Christ at work in pagan writers, and one, in contemplating Socrates' attitude towards death, reports that he is so moved that sometimes he feels like exclaiming, Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis. We are a long way from Aristophanes, a long way from the Socrates Athens thought it was putting on trial.

But that prayer-like cry to Socrates is not all that distant from our own day. The tendency to sanctify Socrates persists; or if it is not a full-blown sanctification, it is at least a strong association of the man with things Christian and with the one who is worshipped as God within the Christian faith. Look through Edith Hamilton's intro- ductions to the dialogues in the standard text in use today, The Collected Dialogues of Plato (New York, 1961 ). She gospelizes the Phaedo's ending by telling us that Socrates was 'entering not into death, but into life, "life more abundantly"' (p. 40), picking a phrase from Jesus' lips. Again, Socrates' message in the Gorgias is associated with the injunction from the Sermon on the Mount, 'Turn to him the other cheek' (p. 230). Such phrases might, I suppose, be thought only attempts to point to parallels between two great figures of the world's history. But that suggestion is far too weak when Miss Hamilton chooses to write of the Phaedrus (p. 475):

The stress in the Phaedrus is on visible beauty, but the reader of Plato must always remember that Socrates, the most beloved and the most lovely of all, was completely without it. Again and again his snub nose is mentioned, his protruding eyes, and so on. He has no form nor comeliness that we should desire him. His wonderful beauty was within.

The sentence she quotes, from Isaiah, has been applied pre-eminently to Jesus in the Christian tradition. Miss Hamilton and Ficino would have got on famously.

There are less obvious ways in which Socrates is appropriated as saintly and divine. It can happen in translating Plato's text, as in the case of Paul Shorey's 1930 Loeb translation of the Republic at 316e. It reads: 'the just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, the branding-irons in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of




suffering, he will be crucified.' Shorey confesses in a note that the verb anaschinduleuo more strictly means 'impaled', not 'crucified'. But he defends his choice by saying that writers on Plato and Christianity have often compared the fate of Plato's just man with the event of the crucifixion. Socrates is of course Plato's just man, unjustly condemned to death; and if he was not literally crucified nevertheless the translation suggests such an identification with the death of Jesus.

Perhaps these instances will suffice. There is a long-lived tradition of treating Socrates as a special person, the summation of perfections, the object of veneration and an honorary member of the kingdom of Christ and his saints.

To this point the alternatives in this paper's title, devious or divine, have been left without comment. They deserve some consideration now. For someone might propose in the manner of Descartes that the alternatives need not be mutually exclusive: a being might be both devious and divine if he were an evil genius bent on using his great power to deceive us about all manner of things. Such a proposal forces us to clarify our two epithets. By 'divine' we should intend here not omnipotence but that part of the dictionary definition which reads 'excellent in the highest degree'. By 'devious' we should mean 'not direct; not to be trusted; deceitful'. Keeping within these boundaries will allow us to say that any divine being will not be devious, since deceitfulness is not an excellence. It will also make it possible to use the word 'divine' of the sanctified Socrates we have been considering: he is 'divine' not because of a metaphysical status as part of God in the Judaeo-Christian tradition; that would be blasphemous and a manifest impossibility, since no mortal can ever shake his creatureliness. Rather, he approaches being divine by virtue of his moral and intellectual perfections.

That said, we may ask about the origin of this divine Socrates. Our earlier portrait of Socrates in Plato began with the texts that make him an ideal human being, so that the sanctification of Socrates, his growth beyond the rest of us ordinary mortals, might have appeared as the work of the Christian interpreters who link him with their religious tradition. In fact the matter is more complex than this, however. For within Plato's writings themselves Socrates is given status beyond the human. Consider this evidence, though it is more suggestive than complete. There is first the matter of Socrates' daimonion, his spiritual sign, however that is to be interpreted. Unlike the majority of mankind, he claims a special link with the supernatural. That is nonetheless only a clue. Plato is much more explicit in the Symposium, where he makes an unmistakable connection between Socrates and the semi-divine Eros, that spiritual being neither completely man nor completely god.




Alcibiades confirms this by likening Socrates to a satyr statue: un- attractive on the exterior, but full of figures of the gods inside. Once he had opened Socrates up, he reports, those internal images were 'so divine and golden, so perfectly fair and wondrous, that I simply had to do as Socrates bade me' (Symposium 217a). One more example, this time from the Theaetetus, must suffice. A passage near the beginning of that dialogue is famous for its metaphor of Socrates as midwife: he there claims that as his mother had been a midwife, so he practises the same art on the souls of those who think they may give birth to ideas and knowledge. One may see the major point of the image in the light of Socrates' professed ignorance; he does not implant ideas in the minds of others, but merely assists them in the discovery of whatever is already within them. This metaphor, offered in this one place alone, is however so striking that it tends to obscure another intriguing aspect of the passage - its religious tone. For Plato has Socrates insist that his own work is linked with god's work. Not only does he refer to his divine sign (151a); he also says that it is god who compels him to act as midwife (150c) and who grants progress to his pupils (150d), so that the delivery of truths is 'due to the god and me' (150d).

I conclude that Plato's own language is strong enough on several occasions to make Socrates more than human, to rank him with the divine. In an utterly serious fashion, and in an entirely different context, he agrees with Aristophanes that Socrates should be placed between earth and sky. On what understanding of divinity does he do this? Is this mainly a matter of exaggeration for effect?

It is not, in my opinion, simple hyperbole. Instead it is connected with Plato's understanding of soul and the divine. In some moods he suggests that what makes a being divine and godlike is its full apprehension of the World of Forms and the perfections which attend such apprehension. If a mortal were to gain this vision he would become the friend of god and the best candidate for immortality (Symposium 212a): or as he puts it in the Phaedrus, the soul of the philosopher is 'in communion through memory with those things the communion with which causes god to be divine. Now a man who employs such memories rightly is always being initiated into perfect mysteries and he alone becomes truly perfect' (249c). When, in this same mood Plato reflects on the beauty he found in Socrates, his attitude to Socrates will not be far from the emotions of the lover in the Phaedrus who experiences awe and reverence as at the sight of a god when he encounters someone who truly expresses beauty; so that 'if he did not fear to be thought stark mad, he would offer sacrifice to his beloved, as to an idol or a god' (251a).

Some Christian commentators may have been carried away by their




eagerness to claim a Socrates sanctified and perfected for the kingdom of God. But it now appears that Plato has the lead role in the develop- ment of a divine Socrates. That this Socrates has been preserved successfully into our own present can be established with one quotation, the closing words of a study published recently in Canada:

Socrates thus spoke a profound truth when he said to his jury that his conduct of philosophy was his service of the God, for through the life of philosophy Socrates had attained a godlike condition, and was actively engaged in leading men to that same sublime vision of the divinely beautiful Good wherein they too would become possessed and in their own measure godlike.4

The testimony of witnesses to the divine Socrates has concluded with such strong statements so that we might set them over against some very different voices. For there is another band of contrary witnesses who demand opportunity to put their case against Socrates, not for him. While not all of them would wish to be associated with the ethics or politics of Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic, they will feel something of his impatience to get into the discussion with a 'loud and bitter laugh' in order to draw attention to what they feel is Socrates' major flaw: his rotten tactics in argument. He is not the sincere seeker of truth; he is instead ironical, pretending ignorance and (as Thrasymachus has it) willing to do anything rather than give a straightforward answer (Rep. 337a). Although Socrates castigates the sophists of his day for being more concerned with success in argument than with the truth, he ends up using the same tricks as they do - except that he refuses to come clean about his tactics. Here are the charges of one witness, Frederick Woodbridge, writing a couple of generations ago; he brings our divine Socrates to earth with a thud:

He is no paragon of perfection. His egotism is pronounced and makes him very careful of the things that will keep him in character and very careless of everything else. He plays up to what is expected of him. In the arguments into which he draws others he is not fair as a disputant. Of the tricks of logic and the devices of rhetoric he is a master and trusts more to them than to coherent reasoning. Flattery, cajolery, insinuation, innuendo, sarcasm, feigned humility, personal idiosyncrasies, brow- beating, insolence, anger, changing the subject when in difficulty, distracting attention, faulty analogies, the torturing of words, making adjectives do the work of nouns and nouns of adjectives, tacking on verbs to qualities which could never use them, glad of an interruption or a previous engagement, telling stories which make one forget what the subject of discussion was, hinting that he could say much more and would if his hearers were up to it, promising more tomorrow if they are really interested and want to go on - an accomplished sophist if there ever was one.5

If Woodbridge's catalogue of charges is even half correct, Socrates will be only a pretender to the throne of respect where his partisans have tried to seat him. While we might wish to elaborate the list, we must confine our attention for now to Socrates' method of argument.




His usual approach is to ask innocently about some particular quality or concept (like holiness, friendship, virtue), claiming that he knows nothing about the matter himself. When his interlocutor attempts a definition Socrates immediately finds something wrong with it; sub- sequent attempts are examined without mercy and shown to lead to inconsistencies or contradictions which were implicit in the interlocutor's position and answers from the start. His victim reduced to speechless perplexity, Socrates passes on to the next person, always looking for a knowledge he professes not to have.

Now the deflators of Socrates argue that his great profession of ignorance is only a sham and pretense. He knows far more than he lets on, but since his aim is to expose the inadequacies of other people's minds he tricks them into conversation by his shameless mask of innocence. A well-known study by Richard Robinson of Plato's dialectic calls this Socratic 'slyness': Socrates will pose as needing instruction from others, as having a bad memory, as willing to be open to refutation himself - he will do anything to get from an interlocutor the premiss he needs to destroy the poor creature. 'Socrates seems prepared to employ any kind of deception in order to get people into this elenchus', Robinson complains.6 The consequence is that Socrates cannot be an effective teacher of virtue or a moral example. 'The insincerity of pretending not to be conducting an elenchus must surely lessen the moral effect. It is not possible to make men good by a kind of behaviour that is not itself good.'7 For all that he is clever, Socrates is a devious rogue.

Robinson has put his finger on what Thrasymachus calls Socrates' 'well known irony' and on the morally questionable nature of his method. There were ancient questions about such things too. Some of the Christian writers in the first few centuries were upset with Socrates' divine sign which they interpreted as demonic, but a man like Lactantius in the later part of the third century A.D. has other problems as well: 'Socrates had a measure of wisdom. He realized that these questions were incapable of resolution and withdrew from them. I am afraid that this is his only claim to wisdom. Many of his actions merit criticism rather than approval' (Divine Institutes 3.20). Lactantius cites as an example of Socrates' inconsistency his denial of the gods coupled with his swearing oaths by 'dog and goose'. 'Buffoon (as Zeno the Epicurean calls him)! Senseless, abandoned, desperate, if he wanted to make a mockery of religion! Mad, if he seriously reckoned a filthy animal as god!' (3.20). And one more criticism: 'Was Socrates able to implant ability in his disciples? It did not occur to Plato that Alcibiades and Critias were also continually associating with Socrates; one became his own country's most energetic opponent, the other a ruthless dictator' (3.19).




But even before the Christian criticism of Socrates (some of it partly motivated by a general condemnation of philosophy) there had been problems, especially with Socrates' irony. Some Epicurean philosophers had placed Socrates squarely in the tradition of the eirdn, the hypocrite and flatterer who claims to be less than he is, masking his arrogance towards others. This kind of behaviour the Epicureans considered particularly reprehensible in a teacher, for it is unfriendly and the direct opposite of the frankness which should characterize relations between pupil and master. 'The eiron, Socrates, does not receive help or advice from others; no one in the dialogues is his equal. He does not give help or advice in frank openness, rather his statements are tongue-in-cheek, sly.'8

We may find criticism of Socrates even closer to Plato's time in the little dialogue called the Cleitophon (though some scholars have tried to argue that it is an authentic work of Plato, most modern commentators think it spurious). There Cleitophon agrees that Socrates is very effective in waking his hearers from their slumber, through exhortation about justice and the care of the soul. His problem comes when he tries to exact from Socrates some content about justice, some positive knowledge about what he should do once he has been wakened up. He gets no help from Socrates' associates or Socrates himself, and concludes either that Socrates does not know justice or else that he refuses to share his knowledge. So the dialogue ends with his charge: 'While you are of untold value to a man who has not been exhorted, to him who has been exhorted you are almost a hindrance in the way of his attaining the goal of virtue and becoming a happy man' (410c). Cleitophon's sentiments would not have been welcomed at Plato's birthday celebrations.

Nevertheless, just as we found ourselves back in Plato's dialogues on the issue of Socrates' reputation as the embodiment of divine perfections, we must ask ourselves whether Plato himself contributes anything to the criticism of Socrates. Is there, within the dialogues, any grist to be ground in the mills of those who produce a devious Socrates, one who cannot be praised or trusted?

At an obvious level the answer is yes. Plato constructs for us a Socrates who clashes with opponents like Callicles or Thrasymachus, vocal critics accusing him of some of the things on Woodbridge's list. He is not straightforward; he uses language in slippery ways to his own advantage, and so on. That however is superficial. What is of more interest and importance is the criticism Plato's Socrates receives not from his opponents but from his friends. Think of Alcibiades' speech in the Symposium, the same speech in which he praises Socrates as full of godlike perfections: he adds to this praise the complaint that




Socrates does not take his personal relationships seriously. 'He spends his whole life in chaffing and make game of his fellow-men' (216e), Alcibiades laments. Since Socrates has refused to gratify him as he wanted, we might suspect that Alcibiades is speaking only from a wounded vanity. Yet his charge is more worrisome than that. He uses the language of a trial, a trial which considers not Socrates' heresy or his corruption of the young, but his arrogance towards even his friends. 'I am not the only person he has treated thus', adds Alcibiades: 'there are Charmides, son of Glaucon, and Euthydemus, son of Diocles, and any number of others who have found his way of loving so deceitful ...' (222b). Behind the extravagant talk sit some questions: How did Socrates relate to others? Are there really examples in Plato's text of the pastoral concern which Ficino thought was exhibited in Socrates' life? Is there in Plato's portrait of this compelling man any indication of the divine perfection of love as a self-giving for the sake of the other? These questions will not find easy answers, nor can they be explored here. Nevertheless Plato's characterization of Socrates' relations with others, and his discussions of friendship and love, bear careful examination if we are to come to an adequate assessment of Socrates.

One last issue in Plato's text deserves comment. We have summoned character witnesses who have argued for Socrates' moral perfection and his ideal, divine status; and we have listened to opponents who want to cut him down to size, if not slice him into small pieces. Plato's responsibility for this range of reputations is clear in some respects: we have examined places where Socrates is idealized and elevated to god-like stature. And we have just heard from the mouths of some of Plato's characters other suggestions of irony and indifference, upon which the critics of Socrates have seized. But are there indications that Plato himself had some critical distance on Socrates, that the issue of Socrates was a complex one for him, not resolvable into the simple alternatives of this paper's title?

Let me suggest that Plato, in constructing and preserving his Socrates, found himself involved in a difficult problem. He wanted to give us a striking character utterly dedicated to philosophy as religious duty - but also to philosophy as a negative enterprise, destructive of unthinking opinion. Socrates, as Plato started with him, claimed no positive knowledge. He also could claim no successes in his method: no one with whom he worked was able to produce knowledge. The result was anger and hostility, leading to Socrates' death. Plato, however, soon wanted to put his Socrates to more productive use in his dialogues. In the very act of writing down conversations Plato opened up the possibility for an interpretation of Socratic argument




as yielding more than negative content. And as his philosophic vision expanded, Plato developed a Socrates who allows many positive doctrines to emerge in the course of discussion. At the same time Plato attempts to be true if not to the content then at least to the form of the early Socrates' profession of ignorance. Hence the difficult problem: Plato is forced to create a Socrates who becomes insincerely ironical. He keeps saying that he does not know, but Plato's very writing pushes us to suspect that his Socrates does know whatever it is that Plato is using him to teach us.

The result is that there is within Plato, and therefore within Plato's reader, an ambivalence towards Socrates. On the one hand, his dedication to the search for knowledge and virtue embodies the ideals of the philosophic life, and of human existence. On the other hand, the question of the success and nature of his relationships with others is troublesome, as is the issue of his irony once Plato has positive doctrine to impart. By preserving his ironic Socrates Plato becomes the source of later suspicions about Socrates' insincerity, while pro- viding materials for Socrates' sanctification.

This is not the place to say more. It is not surprising that we have reached no final verdict. If we have achieved some understanding not simply of the enthusiasms and reservations of our witnesses but also of the ambiguities of Plato's portrait of Socrates, that is enough for the present. Of Socrates himself, and what he is if not really divine or utterly devious, we shall have to think another day.9

NOTES

1. I choose Plato's presentation as the most influential, and the most philosophically interest- ing, Socrates. For a helpful discussion of some of these issues see A. R. Lacey in G. Vlastos (ed.), The Philosophy of Socrates (Garden City, N.Y., 1971), pp. 22-49.

2. Ancient authors are quoted from the Loeb translations of their works. 3. For references see my note, 'The Celebration of Plato's Birthday', CW 75 (1982), 239-40;

see also P. J. Penella, CW 77 (1984), 295. 4. J. Beckman, The Religious Dimension of Socrates' Thought (Waterloo, 1979), pp. 180-1. 5. The Son of Apollo (Boston and New York, 1929), p. 269. 6. Plato's Earlier Dialectic (Oxford2, 1953), p. 9. 7. ibid., p. 18. 8. M. T. Riley, Phoenix 34 (1980), 67. 9. An earlier form of this paper was read to the Toronto Classics Club, 12 January 1982.



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