Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (review)

Elinor J. M. West

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 31, Number 1, January 1993,

pp. 125-127 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.1993.0000

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/226158/summary

Access provided at 4 Jan 2020 06:42 GMT from Bournemouth University

 Book Reviews
Gregory Vlastos. Socrates, lronist and Moral Philosopher. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1991. Pp. xii + 334. Cloth, $57.5 o. Paper, $16.95.

That Vlastos is praised for raising Socratic scholarship to a level of excellence never
enjoyed before he jettisoned a manuscript, forty years ago, answering current ques-
tions about Socrates but missing his strangeness, is not as startling as first appears. For
what emerged from that sacrifice was a philosophical warrior, precociously dedicated
not only to scholarship but to Socrates. And even though Vlastos's standards are now
more commmonplace, one still recaptures a bit of his fire in a scrupulouschapter on
Socratic piety, in which he calls to account recalcitrant colleagues for refusing to face
awkward facts about Socrates. For it is not Vlastos who is embarrassed by Socrates'
penchant for the supernatural; nor is he distressed by Socrates' philosophizing not as a
professional but an amateur, on the streets of Athens, in response to divine commands
issued through dreams.
Such facts, curiously at odds with our domesticated rationalist, do not make Socra-
tes philosophically odd. T h e r e is no conflict between Socrates' dedication to divine direc-
tive and his insistence u p o n constantly testing what is revealed with h u m a n reason. Nor
was Vlastos launched on his forty-year odyssey by that out o f place (atopos) oddness
which led Alcibiades in a panegyric on Socrates to spurn comparing him with mortal
heroes. For logicians are rarely shaken up by spatial jolts as humorously set up by poets
like Aristophanes, who had exhibited Socrates, out o f place, in the air, looking down
upon mortals and priding himself u p o n that immortal element, thereby not only
marking his absolute difference but his hubr/s--unless Plato had quite seriously chosen
Alcibiades' unearthly analogies as a foil to that hilarious oddness which Aristophanes
had set out to vilify.
That the paradox which provoked Vlastos's intellectual journey is not the Greek
heroic paradox which poets, unable to forget the contrast between mortal and immor-
tal, perpetuate by encouraging their heroes to act as though the stuff o f which they
have been made is stern and immortal, might best be clarified by going through the
Various senses o f "paradox" already employed. T h a t is to say, it is not what is contrary
to c o m m o n opinion, or etymologically odd, that puzzled Vlastos. Nor was he distressed
by that out-of-place oddness that so frustrated Alcibiades. What made Vlastos anxious
were the following self-referential paradoxes in Plato.
How can Socrates say that he knows nothing and yet conduct his own affairs with
that steady sort o f moral vision which allows him to refute all comers and behave in
ways which belie what he disavows? How can Socrates disclaim teaching others and

[1~5]
le6 J O U R N A L OF T H E H I S T O R Y OF P H I L O S O P H Y 3 1 : I JANUARY 1 9 9 3

reputedly be the best teacher in Athens? Or how is one to understand Socrates as not
engaging in politics when his conversations produce the most virtuous citizens? It is the
self-referential difficulty inherent in such assertions which provides the best way o f
tracking Vlastos as he unpacks such paradoxes. But what must be noted, together with
the centrality o f the epistemological puzzle, is Vlastos's entry into Platonic studies not
through the portals o f the fifth century but through the reflections of later Hellenists,
who were first to single out Socrates' claim to know nothing and then ask how he could
know even that.
Differently put, what Vlastos reports, in an invaluable first chapter, is how he was
unable to resolve his anxiety until he rejected the Socrates o f the Skeptics. When he did
that, the contradictions could be explained away by speaking o f two sorts o f Socratic
knowledge. It was from the perspective o f Academic Skepticism, then, that Vlastos first
sensed how to take the philosophical propositions in Plato's earlier texts seriously, i.e.,
how they could be singled out, numbered, and tested for deductive consistency. It was
as if what could be removed from Plato's earlier texts were the philosophical fragments
of Socrates.
But can Socrates be surgically separated from Plato, by treating the sentences he is
overheard speaking as "statements" or "propositions" testifying to his knowledge,
method, or beliefs? H e r e is the assumption to which scholars from other interpretative
persuasions may object. Can it be that we humbly accept such statements as fragments
of Socrates because so much of what we have from ancient Athens is in pieces? Or
perhaps it is our twentieth-century penchant for logic that allows us to accept state-
ments (logical shorthand for timeless truths) as Socratic testimony and equate these
with Socratic rationalism after the arguments made from them have been tested?
Further, why should an argument extracted from a conversation, remembered by a
fifth-century witness, be attributed to Socrates, but not the conversation itself?.
That logical techniques can be invaluable tools for clarifying arguments has been
beautifully demonstrated. But whose Socrates is brought back to life when his rational-
ism is equated with such deductive support systems? And why should fragments o f talk
be accepted as the essence of Socrates unless we have been taken in by resemblances
created between such fragments and those o f Socrates' philosophical ancestors, as seen
from our century in monuments o f scholarship like Kirk and Raven's Presocratic Philoso-
phers? Or, to voice my complaint in Aristode's language: Are Plato's letters merely the
material reason for Socrates' presence? HOw might Plato have shaped what he writes so
that those listening to Socrates talk, whether in Athens or our century, can again hear,
from temporal perspectives built into Plato's texts, the reason why Socrates may not be
contradicting himself?. But that option is live only when one appreciates what Plato
mimics as conversation.
What is still missing from this marvelous book, required reading for anyone inter-
ested in Socrates, is the recognition o f a slightly different sort o f paradox, namely, how
Plato can write in such a way as to recreate the activity of philosophizing within the oral
traditions o f the fifth century. Or, to conclude with an example o f what may be
obscured through technical discussions o f Socrates' elenchus and its contingent results:
Recall how you first felt after closing one o f Plato's imitations o f Socrates--angry,
 BOOK R E V I E W S 12 7

puzzled, or discontent? Since content is not an emotion that can be appropriately listed,
perhaps that suggests how an enigmatic Plato functions as the efficient cause o f o u r
distress. Indeed, if one then recalls the m a n so frequently mentioned by those ques-
tioned by Socrates who complain of the aporia engendered in them by his strange
questions, it becomes possible to appreciate why Plato recreates conversations that stop,
without ending, forcing us back to his texts, why it may be helpful not to separate
Socrates from Plato's aporetic texts.
ELINOR J. M. WEST
Long Island University

Richard Kraut. Aristotle on the Human Good. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989. Pp. xi + 379. Cloth, $37.5 o.

Interpreters of Aristotle's ethical theory disagree about whether he favors an exclu-

sively theoretical life as ideally happy, or thinks instead that the happiness o f even the
most contemplative person must include some practice of the moral virtues. Propo-
nents o f the first view are called "strict intellectualists." Advocates o f the second are
said to favor an "inclusive ends" analysis o f happiness. Given Aristotle's conception o f
the moral virtues, inclusivism entails that those with capacity and leisure for the0r/a can
be fully happy only if they engage in some social and political activity as well, since such
activity forms for Aristotle much of the content o f morality. The problem then be-
comes determining how much. Some inclusivists think that unconstrained trade-offs
are permissible a m o n g the theoretical and moral virtues and the natural goods they use
and regulate. Others think that Aristotle denies a merely aggregative ideal and as-
sumes a hierarchical ordering principle, according to which a person whose life is
oriented toward contemplation can be fully happy only if he theorizes after the de-
mands of justice and of the other moral virtues have been satisfied and counted as
intrinsically good components o f his happiness. (Charles Young has wistfully dubbed
this the "department chairman view," an apt phrase when one remembers that Aris-
totle himself was something of a department chairman.) Inclusivism o f one stripe or
another has become the conventional wisdom. Its advocates include Ackrill, Cooper,
Kenny, Keyt, Irwin, Nussbaum, Sherman, Gomez-Lobo, Roche and o t h e r s - - a not
inconsiderable roster. In advocating an uncompromising brand of strict intellectualism
Richard Kraut goes against this consensus. His book is to be welcomed to the extent
that it gives inclusivists a r u n for their money.
One difficulty with inclusivism is that while it apparently pervades the Euclemian
Ethics (EE) and much o f the Nicomachean Ethics (NE), Aristotle seems to lapse into strict
intellectualism in NE X, which asserts categorically that the exclusively theoretical life
(bios theoretikos) is better than the "second-rate" happiness available through political
activity (bios politikos), since contemplation better meets a range of criteria for happiness
laid down in NE I. Some inclusivists have admitted the conflict, but denied that what
appears in NE X is Aristotle's considered view. Kenny, for example, has tried to
convince himself that NE X was an earlier work, while Nussbaum takes it to be little