Plato 9.4 Who Is Socrates?
It is easy to get lost in the marvel that is Socrates. Affable, idiosyncratic, self-deprecatory, incurably curious, logical to a fault, sometimes playful, sometimes passionate, always intellectual, he exercises a commanding presence in the dialogues that represent him. But who was Socrates really? Was he a force of nature, God’s gift to Athens? Was he a wise man or a windbag? Was he an epoch-making philosopher or a charlatan? Was he, after all, a chimera invented by Plato and others? Was he Plato’s alter ego? Or Plato’s mouthpiece?
The so-called Socratic Problem is a centuries-long debate among scholars to try to separate out the historic Socrates from the literary representations of him. Our most compelling portrayals are those of Plato. But even in Plato, as we shall see, there are at least two Socrateses. We have Plato’s complete oeuvre — as well as some pseudo-Platonic dialogues. We also have the complete dialogues and memoirs of Xenophon, who also was, like Plato, a young follower of Socrates. Then we have the comic play The Clouds by Aristophanes — the work that lampoons him as a sophist and a natural philosopher, and which libeled the thinker. We have also scattered quotations (“fragments”) of other Socratic writers who produced dialogues, now lost, about their mentor. We also have reflections on Socrates as a philosopher by other philosophers, most significantly Aristotle, who never knew Socrates but was Plato’s student and a diligent researcher into the history of philosophy.
Among scholars there are several interpretations of the historical figure.
9.4.1 Socrates Among the Sophists
Historically, Socrates appeared on the scene at the same time as the sophists.[17] As we saw in the last chapter, the sophists made important contributions to the culture of the second half of the fifth century BC. For the first time they offered education to adults — higher education, we might say. And they offered education on practical matters: on financial management, public speaking, argumentation, management, and the like. Some of them also offered education on advanced subjects in science and mathematics, but all of them offered practical subjects as well. And in an era when democratic principles were blossoming in Athens and throughout the Greek world, they offered a shortcut to influence and success in government.
The sophists were not, however, just educators. They were also entrepreneurs, men who made money by their teaching. They traveled from city to city offering their services for short-term seminars. They gave free lectures to the public, displaying their brilliance; they then advertised their courses and the fees they charged. From Plato’s dialogues we can gather that they generated considerable excitement among ambitious young men who had the means to enroll as students.
Like the sophists who were his contemporaries, Socrates was interested in gaining and sharing knowledge. But unlike them, he did not profess to be an expert in multiple areas of knowledge. Socrates was a seeker of truth, but he did not claim to have any special knowledge. He did not give public lectures, he did not advertise courses, and he was not an itinerant educator. He was indeed interested in the practical applications of knowledge. But he asked questions rather than supplying answers, and he never charged for his services. Indeed, he was famous for going about barefoot in a tattered cloak, revealing his relative poverty.
To be sure, the labels we now apply to ancient intellectuals — philosopher, sophist, scientist, mathematician — did not exist, at least as rubrics to discriminate different flavors of expert, in Socrates’ time. Plato, in fact, helped to create the vocabulary we still use, notably the distinction between sophists (bad) and philosophers (good). Socrates himself did not explicitly disparage sophists or natural philosophers, according to Plato anyway,[18] though he seems to have held aloof from them in his own inquiries.
[17].Laks and Most in their edition of Early Greek Philosophy (2016), include Socrates in the list of sophists, vol. 8.
[18].With the notable exception of the Gorgias, Plato is respectful and sometimes even obsequious to sophists (e.g., the Euthydemus). On the Gorgias, see ch. 11.
