A DATUM: THE TWO DIFFERENT MODES OF SPEAKING OF PLATO'S SOCRATES

The Socrates of Plato's Apology, on trial for his life, announces an intention to his jurors:

His example of what he usually says is this:

He also says:

We can then infer that concern for “how your soul will be…best” is for Socrates concern about how to live justly and piously. So Socrates' usual address involves issuing a challenge about the rightness of your way of living.

Socrates further reports that his challenge can lead to examination and that the examination can lead to reproach under certain conditions:

SOCRATES IN PLATO'S DIALOGUES

Consideration of Socrates' behavior in putatively doctrinal dialogues confirms so far my hypothesis that within the dialogues of Plato Socrates stays the same examining figure of the Apology. I do not say that my hypothesis is conclusively established. I think it at least as likely as the alternative hypothesis that Socrates speaks doctrine of a developing Plato.

The hypothesis that the Socrates of Plato's dialogues is deeply the same explains, for the dialogues I have considered, what Socrates is doing – he is engaging in the activity in which, as he says in the Apology, he spent his life. In the Apology he calls it his philosophizing; he says it comprises asking whether people care for the condition of their souls, and examining or testing them to find out if they do if they say that they do. He discerns their care or lack of it by observing their reaction to being shown not to know what they think they know. He reproaches if they seem untroubled. And all of that, he says, is persuading people to care about the way they live.

In the Theaetetus digression, the Republic, and the Phaedo we saw only a certain stage of the process of examination – the stage of the interlocutor's revealing himself by his reaction to Socrates' apparent teaching. Disclosing to his interlocutors what they are inclined to believe is the first step of the process of examination that he is always encouraging.

THE DIGRESSION AND ITS SETTING

A famous passage in the Theaetetus presents a challenge for my thesis that the Socrates of any of Plato's dialogues is profoundly the same as the Socrates of the Apology. Socrates, the main speaker of the passage (172–177), labels it a “digression” (parerga: “by-work”) at 177b8. Not only does the Socrates of the digression seem different from the Socrates of the Apology, he also seems different from the Socrates of the rest of the Theaetetus. In the surrounding dialogue Socrates deploys argument, analysis, and critical reflection of the greatest interest as he considers the theme question: “What is knowledge?” The digression has no argument, analysis, or critical reflection. It has both dismayed and fascinated readers. Gilbert Ryle calls it “the philosophically quite pointless digression.” On the other hand, Myles Burnyeat credits the passage with “impassioned otherworldliness.” He says:

However, Burnyeat also recognizes the two faces of the passage. He says that today's readers

I will admit immediately that I do not at all have the experience that Burnyeat describes of being gripped despite myself by the sweep and force of its rhetoric.

This chapter will pursue Ryle's insight that the passage is philosophically pointless.

The Republic is an interesting case for my hypothesis that the Socrates of all of Plato's dialogues is the same questioning character as the Socrates of the Apology. It has seemed to many readers, on the contrary, that there are two different Socrateses even within the Republic. That is one of two interpretative problems about the Republic with which I begin.

STRANGENESS AND DISCONTINUITY

There is wide agreement among readers of the Republic that in the last nine of its ten books Socrates proposes many views that are in various ways strange. One or another very careful and very sympathetic commentator has called one or another of these views “curious,” “altogether peculiar,” “philosophically frustrating,” “seriously flawed,” “very ugly,” “risible absurdity,” “too hasty and too crude,” “embarrassingly bad,” “botched,” “outlandish,” “a mistake,” “shocking,” “truly bizarre,” “preposterous,” “hysterical,” “utterly grotesque,” “repellent,” “inhuman,” “incoherent,” “nearly unintelligible,” or has said that they “rightly move us to horror.” The strangeness of Socrates' proposals in the Republic needs explanation: can the Socrates of the Republic possibly mean what he says?

A second feature of the Republic that needs explanation is the much-noticed feature that the Socrates of book 1 seems very different from the Socrates of books 2–10. In book 1 Socrates questions several interlocutors and reduces their answers to absurdity. He claims that he is ignorant about justice. He is the examining and ignorant Socrates of the Apology.

The Socrates of some of Plato's dialogues is the avowedly ignorant figure of the Apology who knows nothing important and who gave his life to examining himself and others. In contrast, the Socrates of other dialogues such as the Republic and Phaedo gives confident lectures on topics of which the examining Socrates of the Apology professed ignorance. It is a long-standing puzzle why Socrates acts so differently in different dialogues.

To explain the two different manners of Socrates a current widely accepted interpretation of Plato's dialogues offers this two-part, Plato-centered, hypothesis: (i) the character Socrates of the dialogues is always Plato's device for presenting Plato's own views; and (ii) Plato had different views at different times. The Socrates who confidently lectures presents these famous four doctrines: Plato's blueprint for the best state, Plato's “Theory of Forms,” Plato's view that philosophy is the knowledge of those Forms that fits the knower for the highest government stations, and Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul.

To explain Socrates' two different manners this book offers instead an interlocutor-centered hypothesis that the character Socrates, who is permanently convinced that he knows nothing great, has reason to conduct different kinds of examination with different interlocutors. With some, he is the avowedly ignorant questioner. With others, he has reason to appear to be a confident lecturer: the reaction of interlocutors to an apparently confident lecture reveals them. Revealing them is the first step of an examination of them. Throughout Plato's dialogues Socrates' philosophizing centrally involves examining.

COMPARISON OF SOME ACCOUNTS OF PHILOSOPHY

The dialogues that chapters 2–6 considered present several different conceptions of philosophy. At Apology 29d–e Socrates says that his philosophizing involves challenging, examining, and reproaching. The Apology also shows awareness, however, that some audience members conceive of philosophizing differently from Socrates. Their different conception counts considering what is in the heavens and under the earth as philosophizing (Apology 23d). Socrates denies conversing on those topics.

The Theaetetus' Socrates gives Thales as example of a philosophizer (174a–b). Thales' doing astronomy would put him into the group that the Socrates of the Apology says he is not part of. The Theaetetus digression describes a philosopher with interests very different from the philosophizing Socrates claims in the Apology.

In the Republic Socrates says philosophers focus on forms and on being itself. Socrates has to explain for his interlocutors what he means. Adeimantus' preconception that philosophers give inescapable argument to unwelcome conclusions interferes with Adeimantus' keeping Socrates' new explanation in mind.

In the Phaedo Socrates describes philosophers who practice dying.

Various details of Theaetetus, Republic, and Phaedo block any immediate inference that Socrates as depicted includes his own practice under the conceptions of philosophy that he articulates in those dialogues. The Theaetetus' description of philosophy was best understood to be part of a revealing extraction-by-declaration from the unexaminable Theodorus. Socrates offers the Republic and Phaedo descriptions as part of a task of persuading his interlocutors of a conclusion they assign to him.

WHEN CAN WE SAY THAT SOCRATES DOES NOT BELIEVE PROPOSALS HE MAKES IN BOOKS 2–10?

I have argued that the brothers' assent to Socrates' proposals in the Republic commits them to those proposals. Socrates, as persuasive speech-maker, so far commits himself to nothing that he says in his speech. His not committing himself, however, does not imply that he rejects any of the novel proposals to which he gets the brothers' assent. Only his explicit examination and his discovery of absurdity would imply that Socrates as depicted rejects what led to absurdity. And in Republic 2–10 he does not examine.

In the absence of Socrates' examination we readers may of course ourselves examine Socrates' proposals. We may after reflection reach the strong judgment that the lives of most of the people in the city constructed in imagination are not worth living: the philosophical ruling class is required to spend much of its life on military planning for this state that maintains its ill-gotten territory to meet excess desires of the manufacturing class that the military class fights for; all three classes have their lives largely organized around the maintenance of the shallow goal of the militarily efficient city that Glaucon set when he restricted discussion to the luxurious city; the arts are censored severely; the reproductive and childrearing arrangements seem inhuman; many of the citizens are, like slaves, unable to choose their ways of life (590).

In short, upon examination we may find Prettycity in many ways quite unacceptable.