Plato 7.5 Plato’s Socrates at Large
Socrates’ life is an enigma; the views that he on occasion advances as his own are paradoxical. His method, if he has one, seems totally inadequate to produce the virtuous life that seems to be his goal. He pursues truth and virtue with the passion of a street evangelist. Yet he claims to have no special knowledge and to depend on the opinions of whoever he is talking to in order to gain enlightenment.
Is Socrates then merely playing mind games with his interlocutors? Is he intent on embarrassing them in public? Is he perhaps mocking the pretenses of his contemporaries, or, worse yet, mocking the conventions of society along with the foundations of morality? Or is Socrates sincerely committed to the pursuit of virtue and the good life, but unable to arrive at the promised land? This is the view of some of the Socratics and of not a few modern interpreters of Socrates.
Plato himself never says in so many words what he thinks Socrates is up to. He is too good a dramatist to do that. He portrays Socrates as a congenial friend, a lively conversationist, and a brilliant practitioner of dialect, the philosophical art of question-and-answer. But he leaves the outcome uncertain. Many of the Socratic dialogues of Plato come to no conclusion; they are, as the scholars say, “aporetic,” arriving at “aporia,” puzzlement, or, more literally, an impasse or a dead end.
Yet Plato leaves a trail of breadcrumbs too: at crucial points Socrates makes suggestions, offers insights, and identifies propositions to which he is firmly committed.
There is another dimension too. Plato never forgets, and never lets his readers forget, that Socrates paid the ultimate price for his philosophy. The question of piety is the central question the arose at his trial: was Socrates guilty of impiety and rejecting the gods? The stakes for the examination of piety could not be higher. What precisely is piety, and where does Socrates stand in relation to the gods and their worship?
To understand that, we too must have an encounter with Socrates.
