Socrates (13 page)

Most of the ancient biographical evidence about Aristippus concerns his luxurious mode of life, and he appears in that aspect in Xenophon’s
Memorabilia
, where Socrates admonishes him by telling him Prodicus’ fable of the Choice of Heracles (2.1). The moral of this is the broadly Antisthenean one that a life of simplicity and hard toil brings greater pleasure in the long run than a life of luxury. The appeal is to long-term considerations, and there is no suggestion that Aristippus has any theoretical grounds for rejecting that appeal. We might then suggest that the contrast between Antisthenes and Aristippus may not have been an extreme doctrinal antithesis, but rather a matter of temperament, Antisthenes being attracted by the ascetic aspects of Socrates’ life to the extent of elevating them to the status of a moral ideal, while Aristippus may have felt that the Socratic ideals of self-knowledge and self-control could be accommodated to a more easygoing way of life. It is worth recalling some less stern aspects of the figure of Socrates, such as his exceptional capacity to enjoy food and drink (Pl.
Symp
. 220a), and his erotic reputation. The hedonistic Socrates presented in
Protagoras
may have been taken by some to represent his actual views, as is suggested by the papyrus mentioned above, where Socrates is counted among those who think that pleasure is the best goal in life. It is a striking fact (commented on by Augustine (
City of God
8.3)) that the figure of Socrates was sufficiently plastic to allow two such contrasting life-styles as those of Antisthenes and Aristippus both to count as in certain respects Socratic.

The connection of Socrates with the Cynics via Antisthenes developed into a connection with Stoicism, since the Stoics saw themselves as heirs both of the Cynics and of Socrates. The succession of leaders of the schools drawn up by Hellenistic historians (exhibited in the order of lives in DL 6–7) runs from Antisthenes via Diogenes of Sinope (who was described as ‘Socrates gone mad’ (DL 6.54)) and Crates to Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism; Zeno is said to have been converted to philosophy by reading Xenophon’s
Memorabilia
on a visit to Athens, and to have asked where he could find someone like Socrates, in
answer to which he was advised to associate with Crates. From the Cynics the Stoics took the central doctrine of the life according to nature as the supreme human good. It was, however, Socrates rather than the Cynics whom they took to reveal what the life according to nature consisted in. For the Stoics, the life according to nature was the life appropriate to each kind of living thing, whereby it fitted into its place in the perfect order of nature as a whole. Human beings are rational creatures, and life according to nature for humans is therefore life in accordance with reason. Since there is no distinction of rational and non-rational elements in the human soul, there is no distinction between moral virtue and rationality. The Stoics thus accepted the cardinal doctrines of Socratic ethics, that virtue is knowledge, and that virtue is sufficient for
eudaimonia
. The doctrine of
Meno
and
Euthydemus
that virtue (= knowledge) is the only unconditional good they interpreted in the strong sense that virtue is the only good, everything else being ‘indifferent’, that is, neither good nor bad. Aristo, a follower of Zeno, maintained the thesis of the Unity of the Virtues, interpreting it as the thesis that the names of the different virtues are alternative characterizations of the knowledge of good and bad, differentiated by reference to the relation of that knowledge to different circumstances.

The Stoics thus held both the doctrines which we saw to lead to an impasse in Socratic ethics, that virtue is knowledge (sc. of the good) and that virtue is the only good, and their critics were not slow to claim that they too had no escape: Plutarch alleges (
Common Notions
1072b) that when asked what the good is they say ‘Nothing but intelligence’ and when asked what intelligence is say ‘Nothing but knowledge of goods’, referring directly to the passage in
Euthydemus
(292e) where the difficulty was originally raised. But their doctrine that human goodness is conformity with the perfect order of nature gives them an escape route. Human goodness is knowledge of goodness indeed, but it is not thereby knowledge of nothing other than human goodness, that is, knowledge of itself. It is knowledge of the goodness
of the universe,
i.e.
conformity to the goodness of the universe by the realization of perfect rationality in the soul. But now it seems that the difficulty has been merely postponed; for rationality has to consist in making the right choices, that is, choices of what is good in preference to what is bad, and if nothing is good or bad but virtue and vice respectively we have after all no informative account of what goodness is. This problem exercised the Stoics, some of whom sought to find a solution in a distinction among ‘indifferent’ things between ‘preferred indifferents’ such as health and ‘unpreferred indifferents’ such as sickness. Neither kind of indifferent is better or worse than the other, but nature prompts us to seek the preferred and shun the unpreferred, and goodness consists in making the right choices in accordance with these natural promptings. Critics such as Plutarch (
Stoic Contradictions
1047–8) claimed that by this manoeuvre the Stoics were attempting to have their cake and eat it, in that they had to claim that the choice of indifferents was both a matter of the utmost concern and a matter of no concern at all. The many fascinating issues which this raises cannot be pursued here.

The dependence in Stoic thought of human goodness on the rational order of the universe presented a special difficulty for their claim to follow Socrates, in that it makes knowledge of nature prior to ethical knowledge, whereas Socrates had famously eschewed interest in natural philosophy and confined himself to ethics (Xen.
Mem
. 1. 1. 16, Aristotle
Metaphysics
987
^b
1–2). Yet they could find passages in Xenophon’s
Memorabilia
where Socrates draws moral implications from general considerations about nature. In 1.4 Socrates seeks to convert the atheist Aristodemus by arguing for the existence of the gods and their care for humans from the providential design of the human body. In the course of this discussion he argues that human intelligence must be a portion of a larger quantity of intelligence pervading the world, just as the physical elements which compose the human body are portions of the larger totalities of those elements; later he says that the intelligence which is in the universe organizes
everything as best pleases it and that the divine sees and hears everything and is everywhere and takes care of everything all at once. This certainly can be read as foreshadowing the Stoic picture of the cosmos as itself a divine, intelligent, self-organizing being, and both Cicero (
De Natura Deorum
2.6.18) and Sextus (
Adversus Mathematicos
9.92–104) refer explicitly to this passage of Xenophon as a source of Stoic argument for cosmic rationality. (A similar argument occurs in
Memorabilia
4.3, with special reference to the gods’ care for humans as evinced in their conferring rationality and language on them.) Another passage of
Memorabilia
which strikingly anticipates Stoic doctrine is 4.4, where Socrates and Hippias agree that there are some universal, unwritten moral laws, for example, that one should worship the gods and honour one’s parents, which are not the product of human convention as are the laws of particular communities, but are laid down by the gods for all men, and sanctioned by inevitable punishment. For a detailed Stoic parallel (so close as to raise the possibility of imitation) see Cicero,
Republic
3.33.

According to the first-century
BC
Epicurean Philodemus the Stoics wished to be called Socratics, and Socrates remained a paradigm of the sage throughout their history. His acceptance of death was a model of how the wise man should confront death, as is reflected in descriptions of famous Stoic suicides such as that of Seneca. To Epictetus, writing in the first and second centuries
AD
, he is the sage
par excellence
, whose influence he sums up in the words ‘Now that Socrates is dead, the memory of what he did or said when alive is no less or even more beneficial to men’ (
Discourses
4.1.169).

There were two principal traditions of philosophical scepticism in antiquity, the Pyrrhonians and the Academics. The former traced their philosophical ancestry from the fourth-century Pyrrho of Elis, who like Socrates wrote nothing himself and for that reason remains a somewhat elusive figure. There is no firm evidence that adherents of this school regarded Socrates as a sceptic. In the works of Sextus
Empiricus, who is our principal source for Pyrrhonian scepticism, Socrates is almost invariably listed among the dogmatists, that is, those who maintained positive doctrines as opposed to suspending judgement on all questions as the sceptics recommended; only once (
Adversus Mathematicos
7.264) is Socrates cited as suspending judgement, on the strength of his ironical statement at
Phaedrus
230a that he is so far from self-knowledge that he does not know whether he is a man or a many-headed monster. For the Academics the situation was different. The Academy was Plato’s own school, which embraced scepticism under the leadership of Arcesilaus just over a century after its foundation and remained a sceptical school for over two hundred years until it reverted to dogmatism under Antiochus of Ascalon. Arcesilaus claimed that in embracing scepticism he was remaining faithful to the spirit of both Socrates and Plato, whose philosophical practice he claimed to have been sceptical, not dogmatic.

Cicero, our main source, makes it clear that Arcesilaus saw Socrates’ argumentative practice as purely negative and
ad hominem
; he maintained no doctrines himself, but merely asked others what they thought and argued against them. In the dialogues we do indeed find many cases where Socrates’ interlocutors are brought to an impasse by the revelation of inconsistency in their beliefs; Arcesilaus interpreted this outcome as supporting the general sceptical position that there is nothing which the senses or the mind can grasp as certain (
De Oratore
3.67; cf.
De Finibus
2.2, 5.10). He attributed to Socrates the paradoxical claim that he knew nothing except this, that he knew nothing (
Academica
1.45; cf. 2.74), and criticized him on the ground that he should not have claimed to know even that.

Our previous discussion should have made it clear that while Arcesilaus’ reading of Socrates does pick out genuine features of his argumentative practice, it is unduly selective. His profession of ignorance is a denial that he possesses wisdom or expertise, which is compatible with the claims (a) that he knows some things in a non-expert way, and (b) that others know some things as experts. He
neither claims that he knows nothing, nor does he claim that he knows that he knows nothing. He never draws from the negative outcome of his examinations of others the universal thesis that there is nothing which the senses or the mind can grasp as certain. On the contrary, he thinks that knowledge is identical with the good, and takes the negative outcome of his enquiries as a stimulus to the further search for it. Of course, the sceptic is entitled to maintain that the search for knowledge is not incompatible with scepticism. A
skeptikos
is a searcher, and the sceptic continually searches for knowledge, which constantly eludes him. But despite the claim to be engaged on an ongoing search for knowledge, the sceptic is committed to a general pessimism about the human capacity to achieve it; in Arcesilaus’ version ‘there is nothing which
can
[my emphasis] be grasped as certain by the mind or the senses’. It is not just that any enquiry so far undertaken has failed to reach certainty. The sceptic believes in advance that that will be the outcome on any occasion and has some general strategies, such as the appeal to conflicting appearances or arguments, to show that it must. There is no trace of that pessimism in Plato’s portrayal of Socrates.

Not all subsequent philosophers were well disposed towards Socrates. Some of Aristotle’s successors were hostile, notably Aristoxenus, whose malicious biography was the source of the story of Socrates’ bigamy; it attracted a rejoinder from the Stoic Panaetius. The most consistent hostility came from the Epicureans. True to their tradition of abusive comments on non-Epicurean philosophers, a succession of Epicureans made rude remarks about Socrates. Typical of these are some remarks of Colotes which Plutarch cites, describing the story of the oracle given to Chaerephon as ‘a completely cheap and sophistical tale’ (
Against Colotes
1116e–f), and Socrates’ arguments as so much boasting or quackery (
alazonas
) on the ground that they were discordant with what he actually did (1117d; presumably Colotes had in mind some instances of Socrates’ ironical professions of admiration of his interlocutors). As both the Stoics and the sceptical Academics were
regarded by the Epicureans as professional rivals, it is plausible that the Epicureans’ hostility to Socrates stemmed in part from the position which he was accorded by those schools.

The tendency to appropriate Socrates as a precursor was not restricted to pagan philosophers. Writing in the second century
AD
the Christian apologist Justin cited the example of Socrates in rebuttal of the accusation of atheism levelled at the Christians. Like them, he claimed, Socrates was accused of atheism because he rejected the fables of the Olympian gods and urged the worship of one true God. Socrates had thus had some partial grasp of the coming revelation through Christ, since, though philosophers are responsible for their own errors and contradictions through their limited grasp of the truth ‘whatever has been well said by them belongs to us Christians’.