Some years after Socrates leaves Agathon's dinner party with Aristodemus in tow, and a few years after Socrates follows Phaedrus outside the city walls to hear Lysias' speech, Socrates discusses friendship with two young boys at a palaestra. He admits to them and the others present that ever since he was young he desired to acquire friends, but he is so far from succeeding that he does not even know how one becomes the friend of another (211d-212b). If we can take Socrates at his word, he counts neither Aristodemus nor Phaedrus as a friend. When Phaedrus asks to be included in Socrates' prayer at the end of the dialogue bearing his name, because “the things of friends are common,” Socrates says only “let us go [back to the city]” (279c). Socrates' response can be contrasted with his remark at the end of the Lysis that he considers himself and his two young interlocutors to be friends (223b). At the end of the Lysis, it appears that “three go together,” and Socrates corrupts a Homeric dictum once again.

Even if Socrates has found friends by the end of the Lysis, they have not been able to discover what a friend is. The Lysis is one of Plato's aporetic dialogues, which end in perplexity (aporia) about the question discussed. Scholars have long held that Plato wrote his aporetic dialogues early when he was most influenced by Socrates' manner of questioning everything, and that he only later developed the philosophic positions we most associate with him.

If the community expressed through friendship serves for Plato as a model for both philosophy and politics, as I have argued, why does he often present the philosopher as transcending political life, or even human life altogether? Perhaps the most striking of such presentations involves Socrates' description in the Phaedo of philosophy as “the practice of dying and being dead” (64a). At the beginning of that dialogue, set on the last day of Socrates' life and concluding with his death, Socrates explains to his companions why he does not fear death: since the soul's bondage to the body - and to the senses - prevents clear understanding of the truth, only with the separation of his soul from his body might a philosopher find the knowledge that he seeks. Thus it is by dying, if at all, that a human being could become wise (64a-68b). Socrates even claims that anyone serious about philosophy should desire to follow him by dying as quickly as he can (61b-c). Philosophy, by this account, requires removing oneself from embodied, human life, not only from one's political community, but also from one's friends - a point with which Simmias and Cebes reproach Socrates (63a). The Phaedo thus seems to contradict the view of friendship and philosophy that I have developed in this book.

Try as he might, however, Socrates cannot remove the sting of death, which Plato captures in the tears of Socrates' companions at the end of the dialogue.

The issue of self-knowledge arises in the Phaedrus in various ways. This is the dialogue in which Socrates says that he follows the injunction to “know thyself” that is written on the temple at Delphi, and that this task leaves him no leisure for other things (229e). Later, he describes how lover and beloved come to see themselves in each other as a result of their love. And in the last half of the Phaedrus, he and Phaedrus discuss the three speeches about love that they have just delivered in the first half of the dialogue. The self-reflective character of the Phaedrus is highlighted when contrasted to the Symposium: instead of engaging in a discussion of their own speeches, the symposiasts are treated to stories about Socrates from a drunken Alcibiades, who has been disappointed in love. Although Socrates talks to the poets at the end of the evening about comedy and tragedy, they are falling asleep.

Because Socrates' and Phaedrus' discussion of rhetoric includes a discussion of writing, moreover, the Phaedrus serves as Plato's reflection on his own activity of writing dialogues. Socrates in fact offers a standard of good writing: it should be constructed as if it were a living animal, “neither headless nor footless, but with middle [parts] and extremities, written appropriately to each other and to the whole” (264c).

Kierkegaard gave his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, the subtitle, With Continual Reference to Socrates. In a way, this subtitle might characterize Kierkegaard's thought as a whole. Stages on Life's Way, for example, includes an imitation of Plato's Symposium, in which Socrates encounters representatives of Athens' intellectual and political life, and presents what he has learned about love. Fear and Trembling presents Socrates as an intellectual tragic hero, in contrast to a knight of faith, while Philosophical Fragments explores faith as an alternative to the Socratic understanding of knowledge and truth. Kierkegaard's journals and papers have numerous and profound references to Socrates. Nietzsche as well used Socrates as a point of departure for his own work. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, presents Socrates as the turning point of world history. And Twilight of the Idols, one of the last works that Nietzsche wrote, takes Socrates as an idol requiring a tuning fork to reveal his hollowness. He explains how Socrates “fascinated” the youth of Athens, but Nietzsche would be the first to admit that Socrates fascinated him as well, even if he regarded his own work “as a great declaration of war” against idols.

One does not take as one's primary interlocutor someone for whom one has no affinity. In this chapter, we shall explore the ways in which Kierkegaard and Nietzsche point to a much more complex Socrates than their more obvious criticisms of his self-denying universalism and otherworldly asceticism suggest.

This book is about Socrates and the place that friends play in his life of philosophy. Through friendship we experience both our own as not wholly our own and another as not wholly other. It is such an experience, I argue, that characterizes philosophy. Only by experiencing our own as other do we become aware of our need or incompleteness that leads us to pursue wisdom; only by experiencing another as our own do we have any reason to suppose that learning is possible. This twofold character of friendship not only connects it to philosophy for Plato, but means that friendship can serve as a model for a political community where there is both a common bond among citizens and recognition of their separate identities. This view of Socrates and friends, with its implications for philosophy and political life, emerges from my analyses of Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis.

Since at least Hegel, however, Socrates has been presented less as a proponent of friendship than as an alienated and alienating figure, even when his freedom has been a source of admiration. This is true of the interpretations of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments contrasts the universality of the truth to which Socrates led his interlocutors with the Christian demand for faith in a God who enters time or history. Whereas Socrates presents philosophy as drawing us away from temporal life, the god redeems human life by becoming man himself.

AIMING AND DETERMINING

In the Cleitophon, a short and strange dialogue attributed to Plato, the character “Socrates” speaks only twice. He accuses the eponymous interlocutor on the one hand of telling people that it is a waste of time to associate with him, while on the other of lauding contact with Thrasymachus, the infamous character from Book 1 of Plato's Republic. Cleitophon replies that Socrates has not heard the whole story: he is in certain respects deeply impressed by Socrates, but in other ways sharply critical. Always open to correction and betterment, Socrates is happy to hear Cleitophon's complaints and the last four Stephanus pages of the work consist solely of a speech by Cleitophon in which he sharply distinguishes between two tasks: (1) persuading a person that virtue is more important than anything else; and (2) saying precisely what virtue is. According to Cleitophon, Socrates does an excellent job, better than any other person, at persuading and exhorting people to pursue virtue and the care of their souls (407a7, 410b4–6), but he is utterly unhelpful when it comes to saying what virtue actually is. Because Socrates is so useless with this substantive question, Cleitophon is forced to conclude that either Socrates' ability to champion virtue does not in any way imply that he knows what virtue is, or else Socrates is simply unwilling to tell him. It is Socrates' failure on this second issue that leads Cleitophon to turn to Thrasymachus (410c–d).

It is difficult not to read almost all of Plato's dialogues either as preludes to the Republic, or as subsequent comments and reflections on it. I shall discuss aspects of the Republic on the assumption that one has read the dialogues we have previously discussed. As I have said, I do not assume that all of these must have been composed before the Republic; but I shall discuss how the positions presented in the Republic might usefully be understood in relation to views in those dialogues. As a device of convenience, I shall refer to the dialogues we have already discussed as “earlier,” without that committing me to a view about their relative date of composition. Perhaps, as some commentators argue, the Republic represents a new phase in Plato's philosophical thinking; perhaps, as others claim, many of its views are hinted at in other works which play a more propaedeutic role. With regard to the topics that I am focused on, I shall argue that the Republic elaborates views we have seen in the other dialogues in ways that are more detailed but nevertheless consistent with what we have found so far.

In this chapter I shall show that Plato has Socrates and the interlocutors in Book 1 move back and forth between debating the aiming principle SV and arguing about determining questions about just actions. Keeping the aiming/determining distinction in mind will help to explain and give order to the bewildering and rapid switching of interlocutors and, apparently, topics.

JUST ACTIONS AND THE JUST SOUL IN REPUBLIC 4

Near the end of Book 4, the argument turns back to just actions, a just soul, and the relationship between the two. The infamous tripartite account of the soul has been completed, with its rational, spirited, and appetitive parts, corresponding to the three classes of people in the ideal city. Socrates has also located courage, wisdom, and moderation in the tripartite soul. In terms familiar from chapter four, he has described what it is to be courageous, wise, and so on, rather than providing an account of what courageous or wise actions are. This is largely what leads commentators to say that he has abandoned behavioral definitions of the virtues. And indeed Plato does not attempt to put what all and only virtuous actions have in common into purely non-evaluative terms. But that does not mean that the question of determining which actions are the virtuous ones – that is, the question that such a behavioral definition intended to answer – can be simply skipped over and replaced by the question of what it is to be virtuous. For when we turn to the account of a just soul we find that nothing obviates the necessity of correctly identifying virtuous actions and performing them, if one hopes to become just and put one's soul in the proper order.

This chapter treats five dialogues, all of which attempt to answer determining questions about what virtuous actions are in general as opposed to what the virtuous action is in the here and now. Three of these – the Laches, Charmides, and Euthyphro – are so-called “dialogues of definition” in which Socrates asks a specific “What is F?” question, where F is a specific virtue: courage, temperance, and piety, respectively. The other two, the Protagoras and Euthydemus, do not present a “What is F?” question so starkly, although I shall argue that they too attempt to determine what virtue in general is. It is to be expected that Socrates turns to the question of what virtue is, given that he is committed to, argues for, and claims to know SV. It should also come as no surprise that these dialogues contain the majority of Socrates' disavowals of knowledge, and that, consistently with such disavowals and with Cleitophon's criticism of Socrates, these dialogues never succeed in successfully answering the question for virtue in general or for any particular virtue. The Apology, Crito, and Gorgias, by contrast, do not end in aporia – typically considered one of the hallmarks of “early” or “Socratic” dialogues – because they are primarily concerned with SV and/or determining what the virtuous action is in the here and now.

I proceed in this chapter as follows. I begin with a brief general discussion of these five dialogues, highlighting two of their common features (4.1).

DEFINING JUSTICE AND THE PROJECT OF THE REPUBLIC

Whatever may have been the case in previous dialogues, and even in Republic 1, most commentators believe that once Glaucon and Adeimantus take over the argument they “identify being just with a property possessed primarily by psyches.” This point is put in more general terms by saying that Plato moves in the Republic from an act-centered account of justice or virtue to an agent-centered account. The explanation of this is that once Plato has despaired of being able to provide an act-centered account of what justice is, he begins in Book 2 to present an agent-centered one, which culminates in his Book 4 account of “Platonic” justice as harmony in the tripartite soul. The attractiveness of this interpretation is allegedly buttressed by the plausibility of the ethical theory behind it. Plato, one of the original virtue ethicists, rejects the idea that one can specify virtuous actions first and then define the virtuous agent as the one who performs such actions and performs them in the right way. Matters will instead be the other way round. Defining what it is to be a virtuous person first, virtuous actions will then be the actions done by that sort of person.

If the argument of this book is correct, however, this will not be the best way of understanding how the central argument of the Republic develops.

OVERVIEW

When Glaucon and Adeimantus demand that Socrates demonstrate that the just person is happier than the unjust, they are demanding that he show that justice is a good for the soul. Relying on ordinary, common, beliefs, they argue that the consequences of acting unjustly without a reputation for injustice are clearly advantageous. The just person without a just reputation ends up entirely bereft of material possessions, tortured, and finally killed – that is, deprived of absolutely all “external goods.” By contrast, the unjust person who maintains a reputation for justice receives all of the good consequences of that reputation, namely, safety and security for himself and his material possessions, as well as the abundance of material possessions acquired through his unjust behavior, which can then be used to guarantee that one does not suffer any bad consequences in the afterlife by bribing the gods. On “the many's” account justice's and injustice's only value for the soul consists in desire satisfaction or frustration. On this score justice in itself is “painful” (ἐπίπονον) and “harsh” (χαλεπόν), since it thwarts a person's allegedly natural desire for pleonexia. Such a sacrifice of immediate desire may be worth it in circumstances where a person is too weak to ensure that he will not suffer injustice in turn. But since the good consequences of justice can be obtained equally well by successfully seeming to be just, such desire frustration, given propitious circumstances, might not be necessary.

INTRODUCTION

Even a casual reader of the Apology understands that Socrates believes that virtue is more important than anything else, even his own life. What has not been recognized, or at least not accorded any significance, is that for Socrates virtue is an aim. He believes that you should never aim simply at saving your life at the expense of aiming at what is virtuous; in other words, your life counts for nothing as an aim when compared with virtue as an aim. But “the supremacy of virtue” does not imply the quite implausible view that many readers apparently attribute to Socrates, that one's loss of life is not relevant to the deliberation about what is in fact the virtuous action in some circumstances; that is, the view that one's life counts for nothing in a different sense. It is not as though one could determine what the virtuous action is independently of considerations of life, death, pleasure, pain, or material loss or gain. Socrates is not saying that we should ignore these things absolutely. Any fact described in non-evaluative terms may in principle be relevant in a deliberation that seeks to determine what the virtuous action is here and now. Certainly factors like pleasure and pain, life and death, wealth, and the welfare of friends and family will be most relevant to such deliberations. We must ignore such things, however, as aims of action when they conflict with what virtue requires.

THE GORGIAS AND SV

Unlike the Apology and Crito, the Gorgias is not concerned with determining what a person or people should do in a particular situation. In the Apology, Socrates not only cites various specific actions of his own and explains how they were always done in accordance with SV, but he is also engaged in attempting to persuade the jury to perform a particular action. The jury must make concrete decisions then and there about what is to be done with Socrates and he calls on them to hold to the standard of SV as well. In the Crito, as we have seen, Socrates attempts to persuade Crito that to escape is to do an injustice, while to remain in prison is not. There again a concrete decision about what the virtuous action is must be made in the hic et nunc of the dialogue. No such context is present in the Gorgias. Nor, at least at the beginning, does the heavy atmosphere of Socrates' impending execution weigh over the dialogue.

Although there are these differences between the Apology and Crito on the one hand, and the Gorgias on the other, there are even more important similarities. Although usually considered “early” or “Socratic” dialogues, all three lack some typical criteria for inclusion in that group: none ends in aporia and none attempts to determine in general terms what virtue or a virtue is.