Having read all of Plato, all of Xenophon (another student of Socrates) and most of Aristotle all in the past year or two, I have pretty decent context to offer some thoughts on this. Long comment incoming, and I don’t address the majority of the ideas of the post since it would get somewhat repetitive and be even longer than this.
First, this whole essay is criticizing Socrates, but it’s really only talking about Plato’s representation of Socrates. These are different things. Plato was a student of Socrates, and there’s way we can infer much about what is an idea of Socrates and what’s Plato’s, but ultimately we’re reading Plato’s dialogues, where he uses Socrates as a character in a story told to emphasize a point, or told to educate the reader on something Plato wants to communicate. We know Plato disagreed with Socrates on multiple points, as he drops him has a character in his chronologically later writings and gets into more extreme philosophical speculation. We also know from Xenophon, another student of Socrates and a sort of precursor/early Stoic, that there was disagreement about what Socrates was like. In Plato he’s living in the realm of complex logic, universal definitions, and long/confusing dialogues. In Xenophon, who also wrote Socratic dialogues, he’s much more down-to-earth and humorous. This Socrates doesn’t focus on defining what leadership is, but literally walks through the best ways to manage a household—practical advice.
This depiction was also intended for the context of education. The dialogues would be read out loud, and most of them end with an open question, and some very obvious paths of Socratic questioning remaining. The point was primarily that students would go through them together, then at the end take their own route of Socratic questioning to essentially “continue” the dialog. Some scholars disagree with this interpretation, but IMO this is quite clearly what they are. Keeping in mind that these are a learning tool to get at an idea that Plato specifically wanted to communicate can recontextualize the subtext a bit. Specifically the “wrong things are wrong” points;
Vice is ignorance.
Falling in love is an attempt to ascend to another plane of existence.
It is impossible to fight injustice.
Everyone desires The Good.
Treating others unjustly is worse than being unjustly treated yourself.
are all examples of philosophical positions that scholars generally believe are more from Plato than Socrates. Of course Socrates may have believed this too, but they fit very neatly into Plato’s overall system that either a) Socrates while professing ignorance did have quite a well developed system of Philosophy that Plato then mostly wrote down or b) These positions that the dialogues are implicitly trying to argue for are Plato’s. I lean towards the latter, but this is controversial among scholars.
More to the point, the dialog of Alcibiades gets a lot of attention in this essay, but the general consensus is that this wasn’t even written by Plato. It was a later work written by a student of Plato or Aristotle (or even later, students of of students of Aristotle), meaning that it is even less likely to accurately represent the methods or beliefs of the real Socrates.
The Socratic tradition we’re looking at is Socrates --> Plato’s selective interpretation of Socrates --> Plato --> Aristotle. While Plato is the most important link here, you would be left with half an understanding without Aristotle, who clarified (and disagrees) on a lot of points Plato uses Socrates to make. Importantly he often brings up Socrates as contributing two (maybe 3) main things to the practice of Philosophy;
Universal definition: What is noble, pious, just, etc. is apparently “known” by most of those “well-bred” in society, but when investigating the issue, the definitions offered are very contradictory. Socrates never offered Universal definitions, but he offered a way to at least determine what they’re not, and what they’re like. Essentially; “justice is like what the God’s love, but not exactly that.” The way we approach that is through -
Dialectic: The systematized practice of walking through both sides of a question/problem (either individually or with a conversation partner) to find contradictions, discard contradictory answers to the question, and come close to the truth. The questioner would propose a problem/question, the other side would propose a solution, and they would walk through the implications of the question to see if it agreed with or conflicted with the answerers existing beliefs. This walking from premises to conclusions was the systematization of;
Logic: This wasn’t put to paper until Aristotles Prior and Posterior Analytics, but Socrates is really the “first” (extant that is) example of using consistent logical operations to go from a set of premises to a conclusion. This was the basis of formal logical for thousands of years, and while not as useful in the face of modern formalized logic, can still be used successfully for complex deductions.
Now Aristotle got a lot wrong (some of his cosmology is laughably wrong) but absent the scientific method, he was the standard of “acquiring knowledge” in the west for thousands of years. And he was right quite often about a lot of things, since he applied the system of “take known premises and deduce conclusions from them, compare those conclusions to what is known by the wise or the general opinion of the many” to see if your premises match reality. This would generally hit upon the truth of things.
Second, Socrates himself didn’t live a life of pure contemplation, he was quite a lot more active than Plato alone would suggest. He was a soldier well-recognized as being able to bear cold, heat, lack of sleep on campaign better than anyone. He saved Alcibiades on campaign in a brave defense against unlikely odds, nephew and heir of Pericles, the leading Athenian statesmen of the early Peloponnesian war, who was an important figure in Athenian history in his own right (he prompted the disastrous Sicilian expedition and led the restoration of Democracy under the tyrants). Socrates was the only one to stand up against the illegal vote of executing generals who failed on campaign during the rule of the Oligarchical Athenian council of the 500. So while Plato emphasizes the life of contemplation, Socrates himself lead an active and exceptional public life.
In reference to Alcibiades;
If we take the account in Thucydides seriously, this clearly insane expedition plausibly led to the fall of the Athenian Empire to Sparta, and thereby to the fall of all of Greece and the end of its golden age.
Alcibiades himself proved a very capable general throughout his life. The Sicilian expedition failed, and he was the impetus for it, but he never got to participate in the actual expedition itself. He was tried in absentia after leaving Athens for Sicily for defacing the Hermes (almost certainly a false charge), and then fled to Sparta. It’s hard to place the blame on Socrates, or even Alcibiades, for it, since the attempt on Sicily was failed by lesser generals (leadership fell a general who was the strongest opponent to the expedition. The account of the expedition shows he repeatedly wavered between pushing forward and calling the expedition off. Indecision is the worst quality a leader can have.).
So we have an account of Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades that was written by someone who didn’t know either of them (not Plato), and the failure of Alcibiades’ expedition was out of his hands. I find it hard to assign blame to Socrates for this.
And the practice of dialectic itself was a very valuable skill in Classical Athens. Aristotle distinguished between “Sophistry” as working towards winning arguments and creating a specific opinion in the other party and “Dialectic” as working towards truth. Sophists were relatively well respected, and prominent men would pay them huge sums to teach their children how to argue and deconstruct an argument. Pericles (and his nephew Alcibiades) gained their power through precisely their excellent rhetoric and argumentative skills. The Socratic method is that same skill as applied to pursuing truth as it was also applied to pursuing power. From this I’d say that in that context, there was practical application beyond philosophy of what Socrates taught. The method if not the substance.
But all this is perhaps less of a criticism of this essay as it is of the book. Things like;
Thinking, as Socrates understands it, is not something that happens in your head, but rather out loud, in conversation. Socrates argues that it is only by recognizing thinking as a social interaction that we can resolve a set of paradoxes as to how thinking can be open-minded, inquisitive, and truth-oriented.
are simply not correct. The Socratic method was very transparently something that didn’t have to happen out loud or in a social context. There’s many anecdotes throughout Plato and Xenophon where Socrates spends hours absorbed in thought, going over a question by himself. He repeatedly insists in the dialogues that what he’s doing to his conversation partner is simply what he does to himself, by himself.
Agnes has a very particular view of Socrates that is closest to Socrates as Plato represented him than anything else. There was a real person, who was certainly meaningfully different than this, as the Socrates we have as Agnes prefers him is a product of being filtered through Plato, and the Platonic tradition.
This is one of the reasons I prefer original sources when one has the time to read them. Secondary accounts come with a hidden agenda that is hard to distinguish.
Having read all of Plato, all of Xenophon (another student of Socrates) and most of Aristotle all in the past year or two, I have pretty decent context to offer some thoughts on this. Long comment incoming, and I don’t address the majority of the ideas of the post since it would get somewhat repetitive and be even longer than this.
First, this whole essay is criticizing Socrates, but it’s really only talking about Plato’s representation of Socrates. These are different things. Plato was a student of Socrates, and there’s way we can infer much about what is an idea of Socrates and what’s Plato’s, but ultimately we’re reading Plato’s dialogues, where he uses Socrates as a character in a story told to emphasize a point, or told to educate the reader on something Plato wants to communicate. We know Plato disagreed with Socrates on multiple points, as he drops him has a character in his chronologically later writings and gets into more extreme philosophical speculation. We also know from Xenophon, another student of Socrates and a sort of precursor/early Stoic, that there was disagreement about what Socrates was like. In Plato he’s living in the realm of complex logic, universal definitions, and long/confusing dialogues. In Xenophon, who also wrote Socratic dialogues, he’s much more down-to-earth and humorous. This Socrates doesn’t focus on defining what leadership is, but literally walks through the best ways to manage a household—practical advice.
This depiction was also intended for the context of education. The dialogues would be read out loud, and most of them end with an open question, and some very obvious paths of Socratic questioning remaining. The point was primarily that students would go through them together, then at the end take their own route of Socratic questioning to essentially “continue” the dialog. Some scholars disagree with this interpretation, but IMO this is quite clearly what they are. Keeping in mind that these are a learning tool to get at an idea that Plato specifically wanted to communicate can recontextualize the subtext a bit. Specifically the “wrong things are wrong” points;
Vice is ignorance.
Falling in love is an attempt to ascend to another plane of existence.
It is impossible to fight injustice.
Everyone desires The Good.
Treating others unjustly is worse than being unjustly treated yourself.
are all examples of philosophical positions that scholars generally believe are more from Plato than Socrates. Of course Socrates may have believed this too, but they fit very neatly into Plato’s overall system that either a) Socrates while professing ignorance did have quite a well developed system of Philosophy that Plato then mostly wrote down or b) These positions that the dialogues are implicitly trying to argue for are Plato’s. I lean towards the latter, but this is controversial among scholars.
More to the point, the dialog of Alcibiades gets a lot of attention in this essay, but the general consensus is that this wasn’t even written by Plato. It was a later work written by a student of Plato or Aristotle (or even later, students of of students of Aristotle), meaning that it is even less likely to accurately represent the methods or beliefs of the real Socrates.
The Socratic tradition we’re looking at is Socrates --> Plato’s selective interpretation of Socrates --> Plato --> Aristotle. While Plato is the most important link here, you would be left with half an understanding without Aristotle, who clarified (and disagrees) on a lot of points Plato uses Socrates to make. Importantly he often brings up Socrates as contributing two (maybe 3) main things to the practice of Philosophy;
Universal definition: What is noble, pious, just, etc. is apparently “known” by most of those “well-bred” in society, but when investigating the issue, the definitions offered are very contradictory. Socrates never offered Universal definitions, but he offered a way to at least determine what they’re not, and what they’re like. Essentially; “justice is like what the God’s love, but not exactly that.” The way we approach that is through -
Dialectic: The systematized practice of walking through both sides of a question/problem (either individually or with a conversation partner) to find contradictions, discard contradictory answers to the question, and come close to the truth. The questioner would propose a problem/question, the other side would propose a solution, and they would walk through the implications of the question to see if it agreed with or conflicted with the answerers existing beliefs. This walking from premises to conclusions was the systematization of;
Logic: This wasn’t put to paper until Aristotles Prior and Posterior Analytics, but Socrates is really the “first” (extant that is) example of using consistent logical operations to go from a set of premises to a conclusion. This was the basis of formal logical for thousands of years, and while not as useful in the face of modern formalized logic, can still be used successfully for complex deductions.
Now Aristotle got a lot wrong (some of his cosmology is laughably wrong) but absent the scientific method, he was the standard of “acquiring knowledge” in the west for thousands of years. And he was right quite often about a lot of things, since he applied the system of “take known premises and deduce conclusions from them, compare those conclusions to what is known by the wise or the general opinion of the many” to see if your premises match reality. This would generally hit upon the truth of things.
Second, Socrates himself didn’t live a life of pure contemplation, he was quite a lot more active than Plato alone would suggest. He was a soldier well-recognized as being able to bear cold, heat, lack of sleep on campaign better than anyone. He saved Alcibiades on campaign in a brave defense against unlikely odds, nephew and heir of Pericles, the leading Athenian statesmen of the early Peloponnesian war, who was an important figure in Athenian history in his own right (he prompted the disastrous Sicilian expedition and led the restoration of Democracy under the tyrants). Socrates was the only one to stand up against the illegal vote of executing generals who failed on campaign during the rule of the Oligarchical Athenian council of the 500. So while Plato emphasizes the life of contemplation, Socrates himself lead an active and exceptional public life.
In reference to Alcibiades;
Alcibiades himself proved a very capable general throughout his life. The Sicilian expedition failed, and he was the impetus for it, but he never got to participate in the actual expedition itself. He was tried in absentia after leaving Athens for Sicily for defacing the Hermes (almost certainly a false charge), and then fled to Sparta. It’s hard to place the blame on Socrates, or even Alcibiades, for it, since the attempt on Sicily was failed by lesser generals (leadership fell a general who was the strongest opponent to the expedition. The account of the expedition shows he repeatedly wavered between pushing forward and calling the expedition off. Indecision is the worst quality a leader can have.).
So we have an account of Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades that was written by someone who didn’t know either of them (not Plato), and the failure of Alcibiades’ expedition was out of his hands. I find it hard to assign blame to Socrates for this.
And the practice of dialectic itself was a very valuable skill in Classical Athens. Aristotle distinguished between “Sophistry” as working towards winning arguments and creating a specific opinion in the other party and “Dialectic” as working towards truth. Sophists were relatively well respected, and prominent men would pay them huge sums to teach their children how to argue and deconstruct an argument. Pericles (and his nephew Alcibiades) gained their power through precisely their excellent rhetoric and argumentative skills. The Socratic method is that same skill as applied to pursuing truth as it was also applied to pursuing power. From this I’d say that in that context, there was practical application beyond philosophy of what Socrates taught. The method if not the substance.
But all this is perhaps less of a criticism of this essay as it is of the book. Things like;
are simply not correct. The Socratic method was very transparently something that didn’t have to happen out loud or in a social context. There’s many anecdotes throughout Plato and Xenophon where Socrates spends hours absorbed in thought, going over a question by himself. He repeatedly insists in the dialogues that what he’s doing to his conversation partner is simply what he does to himself, by himself.
Agnes has a very particular view of Socrates that is closest to Socrates as Plato represented him than anything else. There was a real person, who was certainly meaningfully different than this, as the Socrates we have as Agnes prefers him is a product of being filtered through Plato, and the Platonic tradition.
This is one of the reasons I prefer original sources when one has the time to read them. Secondary accounts come with a hidden agenda that is hard to distinguish.