Let us begin again with Aristotle as Aristotle so often begins with us: by attending carefully to the words of the ancients. Xenophanes, who, Aristotle so generously claims, “made nothing clear,” nevertheless gives voice to the hope and tragedy of the human condition: “But from the beginning the gods did not reveal all things to mortals; but by seeking they discover better in time.” Ours is not a world of superlatives but of comparatives – the best, the purest revelation of truth remains concealed to us, and yet in time, indeed by searching, we discover better. Xenophanes emphasizes the temporality of human striving, and one might imagine that this points not merely to the progressive attainment of ever more effective articulations of the truth, but also to the cumulative effect past articulations always already have on present attempts to give voice to the nature of things.

Despite his rather harsh judgment of Xenophanes, Aristotle's own words resonate with his:

introduction

It has long been a commonplace that ancient ethical thought is characterized by its eudaimonism. The great nineteenth-century moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick, for example, remarks that “in the whole ethical controversy of ancient Greece … it was assumed on all sides that a rational individual would make the pursuit of his own good his supreme aim.” Sidgwick also thinks that its commitment to eudaimonism is one of the most important features that distinguishes ancient ethical reflection from that of the moderns from the time of Bishop Butler on. 1 Whether or not we accept Sidgwick’s claims, eudaimonia (typically translated as “happiness”) is a central concept in ancient Greek ethical and political philosophy. In this chapter, I shall examine the idea of eudaimonia or happiness in Socrates’ thought and consider what place it has in his views about how to live and how to act, what content he gives it, and its relation to other important notions, such as virtue and knowledge.

But before turning to these substantive issues, I begin by marking out the territory that I shall be exploring. Many scholarly controversies surround any discussion of Socrates. For example, what evidence do we have for the views of the historical Socrates? How reliable are the depictions of Socrates by Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and other “Socratic” writers? Can we reliably date Plato’s dialogues so as to isolate those that are closest in time to his association with Socrates? Since other essays in this volume consider these disputes in greater detail, I shall simply state the limitations of my discussion without examining the arguments justifying them. My way of carving up this territory, although certainly not the only plausible one, is fairly common.

In Aristotle, truth, like being, is said in many ways. A person is said to be “able to be true in life as well as in speech”; an inquiry is said to be oriented toward the “truth and nature of things”; and the mark of good action is said to be the truth that “stands in agreement with right desire.” Truth is also, of course, articulated in the things said themselves: it belongs to those declarative sayings that attempt to give voice to the truth by saying something of something, by combining and separating, affirming and denying; and truth is said not to be missed by those who “say something concerning nature,” for it is “as though they were compelled by the truth itself.” Truth is compelling and pervasive. The power of perceiving, when directed at what is proper to it, “is always true”; and while being appeared to and thinking things through can be true or false, for a certain thinking, “the true is to touch and to express” and there is no falsity, “but only ignorance and not touching.” The pervasive plurivocity of truth in Aristotle testifies to the manner in which the nature of truth grows in and through encounters with the nature of things. Aristotle articulates the nature of truth by attending to the truth of nature.

introduction

Socrates is a philosopher whose world historical importance and renown are largely due to three remarkable facts. First, his life and especially his trial and death, though cardinal to his posthumous influence and standing, were relatively minor events for the majority of his contemporary Athenians and their immediate descendants. During the first years after his death, he was still the controversial figure he had been throughout his later life. He had written nothing, and it was just a few of his companions, Plato, Antisthenes, Xenophon, and the other Socratic authors, whose writings in his defense and teachings began, though only gradually, to turn this eccentric and disturbing Athenian into an intellectual and moral icon. He had hardly achieved that status even fifty years after his execution; for he is mentioned in only one context by Isocrates (Busiris 4.3; 5.9), but once by the orator Aeschines (Against Timarchus 173), and never by Demosthenes.

Socrates, then – and this is the second salient fact – owes his philosophical significance to the diverse ways he was interpreted, lauded, and sometimes even criticized by authors who, thanks to their own intellectual and educational creativity, made Greek philosophy the major cultural presence it had not yet become during his own lifetime. With the founding of official schools of philosophy – the Academy, the Lyceum, the Garden of Epicurus, the Zenonian Stoa – and with less formally organized philosophical movements, especially the Cynics, contexts emerged for Socrates to return to live a life far more wide-reaching and various than anything he could have imagined for himself. Because each school or movement had its own quite distinct identity, their interpretations of Socrates followed suit.

If truth is an offspring of the symbiotic relationship between the ways things express themselves and the ways they are said, it is because truth is rooted in a λόγος attuned to the appearing of phenomena. Aristotle's name for the sort of saying that addresses things by allowing them to show themselves as themselves is λόγος ἀποφαντικός – declarative saying. The question concerning truth in Aristotle announces itself implicitly as a matter of justice when his account of declarative saying is heard as an attempt to articulate a way of addressing the appearing of things held ultimately accountable by the ways things express themselves. This way of address is grounded in an ability to lend articulate voice to that which speaks with inarticulate eloquence. It is cultivated by an attentiveness that seeks to articulate things as they show themselves to be. In order to discern this way of address in Aristotle, it will be necessary to begin by attending to the way voice brings Aristotle's account of declarative saying to life.

Aristotle addresses the meaning of declarative saying in De Interpretatione, a text that seems on the face of it to treat λόγος in isolation from the life that gives it voice.

Human speech is rooted in our inchoate encounters with things. It grows in response to their primordial language, nourished by our attempts to come to terms with the world into which we are born. If, as Hannah Arendt claims, action corresponds to the human condition of natality insofar as it names the capacity to begin something new, speech must be heard to belong to a world of action in which new possibilities open as we are addressed by a language always operative in our encounters with things. Human speaking emerges in and through acts of response to the saying of things.

If human speaking is intimately bound up with action in the manner Arendt so powerfully suggests, it is because the speech acts that give rise to human speaking are themselves predicated on an ability to respond to things in ways that do justice to the paradoxical ways they show themselves, at once lending themselves to and eluding human articulation. However insightful, Arendt's analysis of the human conditions of action and speech does not go far enough. By grounding speech in “the fact of distinctness” and “the actualization of the human condition of plurality,” she registers only the human side of the dialogue, in effect muting the eloquence of things.

The Socratic problem has quite a history, and is now perhaps only a part of history, since its desperately unsolvable nature does not seem to guarantee it much of a future. It would undoubtedly be presumptuous to claim that the Socratic problem is a closed issue simply because it is not amenable to a satisfactory solution, but it is certainly useful to identify the principal obstacles and pitfalls that render the discovery of a solution improbable, or even impossible.

Socrates, as we know, wrote nothing. His life and ideas are known to us through direct accounts – writings either by contemporaries ( Aristophanes) or disciples ( Plato and Xenophon) – and through indirect accounts, the most important of which is the one written by Aristotle, who was born fifteen years after Socrates’ death (399). Because these accounts vary greatly from one another, the question arises as to whether it is possible to reconstruct the life and – more importantly – the ideas of the historical Socrates on the basis of one, several, or all of these accounts. The “Socratic problem” refers to the historical and methodological problem that historians confront when they attempt to reconstruct the philosophical doctrines of the historical Socrates. Any future stance on the Socratic problem, if it is to be an informed and well-grounded one, presupposes a full understanding of the origins and consequences of the proposed solutions of the last two centuries.

A number of the chapters in this volume began as presentations at a conference celebrating the many contributions of Allan Gotthelf to the study of ancient philosophy that took place on October 1–3, 2004. It gives the editors great pleasure to thank the many individuals and organizations who contributed to the success of that event. At the University of Pittsburgh both financial and organizational support were provided by the Center for Philosophy of Science and its staff, Karen Kovalchick, Joyce MacDonald, and Carol Weber. Further financial support was provided by the University of Pittsburgh's School of Arts and Sciences, and Departments of History and Philosophy of Science and Philosophy, and by the Rutgers University Endowment for Ancient Philosophy. Alec Stewart, Dean of the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh kindly made its remarkable rooms on the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth stories of the Cathedral of Learning available for a gala reception, funding for which was provided by the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship.

We would like to thank Michael Sharp for his support and patience in working with us at all stages on the production of the present volume; Cambridge University Press's referees, whose suggestions helped to improve the final product; Elizabeth Hanlon and Sarah Roberts for their careful handling of editorial matters; Jan Chapman for her skillful copy-editing; Benjamin Goldberg for help in preparing the indexes; and finally, the Syndics of Cambridge University Press for approving this volume for publication.