Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher

by Gregory Vlastos

Vlastos's new book begins from the conviction that Socrates strangeness is the key to his philosophy. It is a marvelous book, in which no major aspect of Socrates career is eclipsed. The rigor of his arguments, the depth of his moral commitment and understanding, his complex relationship to Athenian ethical traditions, his rational religion: all this comes to life in writing whose vigor and lucidity put the challenge of Socrates squarely before the reader.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Biography

354 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Randal Samstag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vlastos on Socrates

First point: An earlier version of this entry in Goodreads displayed a subtitle for this book as, "Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States." This was NOT correct. It was a whopper, in fact. Thanks to Goodreads for correcting this!

Gregory Vlastos’s last major book, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher, was the culmination of a truly great career in scholarship. The book builds upon over 50 years of scholarly work in ancient Greek philosophy. Vlastos is truly revered in this field as a scholar and teacher of many prominent students, including Terrence Irwin and Alexander Nehamas. He is perhaps best known for his early article on Plato’s “Third Man Argument” in the Parmenides dialog, the argument by Parmenides to a young Socrates that seems to disprove Plato’s own Doctrine of Ideas. This article spawned dozens of critiques and responses by such noted philosophers of the mid-twentieth century as Wilfrid Sellars and Peter Geach. Vlastos finds in the Parmenides dialog a case of true puzzlement and in subsequent articles written in response to the flood of scholarly critique that followed the original 1954 article, argues that attempts to improve Plato’s argument don’t find support in a close reading of the text. His book on Socrates was published in 1991, shortly before Vlastos’s death at 84, and after his receipt of a MacArthur “genius” grant, the oldest person to receive one.

Ειρϖνεια

The subtitle of the book names Socrates as an ironist. Vlastos explains that the words for “irony” in Classical Greek, ειρϖνεια, and its cognate forms typically meant “deception” or something like it. By the time of Quintillian in the first century AD, it had become what we now know it, that figure of speech “in which something contrary to what is said is to be understood.” In this modern form it does not carry the derogatory sense that it did for Aristophanes, for example. Vlastos’ claim is that this transformation was due to the subject of his book. He quotes Cicero’ s Latin “ . . . Socratem opinor in hac ironia dissimulantiaque longe lepore et humanitate omnibus praestitisse. Genus est perelegans et cum gravitate salsum.” (In this irony and dissimulation Socrates, in my opinion, far excelled all others in charm and humanity. Most elegant is this form and seasoned in seriousness.) Vlastos considers Cicero the first to emphasize this change of meaning of the word from “deception” to what we now understand the word to mean. As is characteristic of Vlastos, he doesn’t insist on the finality of his conclusion but gives his reasons with detailed quotes from his sources in Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato.

The argument from Xenophon comes from the Memorabilia in the chapter about the beautiful woman, Theodote, who “was ready to keep company with anyone who pleased her” (Book III, Chapter xi). When Socrates is told by a bystander that artists painted her and that she “showed them as much as decency allowed” Socrates and his Agora friends resolve to visit. They ask how she can afford her expensive home in Athens and she replies that “I live on the generosity of any friend that I pick up.”

Here is Xenophon’s Greek:

και ο σωκρατης στις κοπτων την αυτού απραγμοσυνην, Αλλ ω θεοδότε έφη, ου πάνυ μοι ράδιόν εστι σχολάσαι και γαρ ίδια πράγμαυα πολλα και δημόσια παρέχει μοι ασχολίαν· εισι δε και φίλαι μοι, αϊ οϋτε νυκτοσ αφ· αυτων εάσουσί με απιέναι φίλτρα τε μανθάνουσαι παρ εμου και επωδάς.

Vlastos’s translation of the key phrase in this is:

I have my own girlfriends (philai) who won’t leave me day or night, learning from me philters and enchantments.

Vlastos says of this, “Since she is meant to see, and does see, that these “girlfriends” are philosophers, depressingly male and middle aged, there is no question of his being misled into thinking that her visitor has a stable of pretty girls to whom he teaches love potions. So here at last do we see something that Cicero or Quintilian would recognize as ironic, though hardly a gem of the genre . . .”

The next example from Xenophon is a clincher. In Xenophon’s ΣΥΜΠΟΣΙΟΝ (Banquet) a large collection of friends of Socrates are invited to a banquet. In the course of the evening Socrates poses the question to each as to “what he considers the most valuable knowledge in his possession.” The question gets immediately garbled by Callus, who transforms it into the question of “what I take the most pride in.” When Critobolus is asked in what he takes the greatest pride, he replies, “In beauty.” After a bit of wrangling he gives a long-winded discourse as to his “grounds for taking pride in my handsomeness.” Socrates’s truly ironical reply is “How now? You boast as if you actually thought yourself a handsomer man than me.”

Socrates being well known for his ugliness, few would have been deceived into thinking this other than a humorous and self-deprecating reply. Vlastos calls this “complex irony,” where what is said both is and isn’t what is meant. This gets to the heart of Vlastos’s conception of irony and, he proposes, the key to understanding the philosophy of Socrates.

Examples of this are plentiful in Plato. The chief example that Vlastos emphasizes is Socrates’s frequent avowal of his lack of knowledge, ironically (complex irony) contradicted by his equally frequent avowals of knowing the right. Vlastos will take this up in subsequent chapters of his book.

Here Vlastos concentrates on a detailed analysis of a single sequence in Plato’s Symposium; the one in which Alcibiades unsuccessfully attempts to make a foul exchange with Socrates, sex for wisdom. Socrates refuses because he wants Alcibiades to come upon this wisdom by his own effort. Here Vlastos argues is Socrates' complex irony at work. “Socrates doesn’t say that the knowledge by which he and we must live is utterly different from what anyone has ever understood or even imagined what moral knowledge could be. He just says that he has no knowledge, though without it he is damned, and lets us puzzle out for ourselves what that could mean.”

SocratesE and SocratesM

Here Vlastos’s primary thesis is that the Socrates of the early Platonic dialogs (the Charmides, Georgias, Crito, Apology, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, and Protagoras dialogs and the first book of the Republic) differs markedly from the Socrates represented in the dialogs of Plato’s mature (or middle) period (the Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II-X, Phaedrus, Parmenides, and Theaetetus dialogs) and that this marked difference can be taken as an indicator that the Socrates of the early dialogs (SocratesE) is closer to the historical Socrates and that the Socrates of the middle dialogs (SocratesM) is a stand-in for Plato’s own philosophical positions at the time of his early maturity.

Vlastos sets out 10 positions upon which these two Socrates’s markedly differ:

I) SocratesM took positions on a wide variety of philosophical topics from metaphysics to epistemology to philosophy of science and religion, where SocratesE is exclusively a moral philosopher.
II) SocatesM holds a strong metaphysical theory of “separately existing” forms, while SocratesE holds no such theory.
III) SocratesE seeks knowledge by elenctic investigation and avows that he has none, while SocratesM seeks conclusive knowledge.
IV) SocratesM holds a complex, tri-partite theory of the soul, while SocratesE mentions no such theory.
V) SocratesM has mastered the mathematic theory of his time, while SocratesE has no such knowledge.
VI) SocratesE’s conception of philosophy is populist, while SocratesM is elitist.
VII) SocratesM has an elaborate theory of politics, while SocratesE has none.
VIII) Homoerotic attachments have a metaphysical grounding in love for transcendent beauty for SocratesM, for SocratesE not so much.
IX) For SocratesE religion is practical, for SocratesM it is mystical.
X) The method of philosophical investigation for SocratesE is adversative, for SocratesM didactic.

His presentation of these ten theses in Chapter 2 serves as an summary of his book. These theses come up at various times in the rest of the narrative.

The Paradoxes of Socrates

A key paradox of Socrates occurs with his disavowal of knowledge. He says in the Apology:

[a] For I am not aware of being wise in anything, great or small. . . . .[b] It looks as though, while neither of us know anything worthwhile, he thinks he does; but as or me, while, as in point of fact, I have no knowledge, neither do I think I have any. (Ap. 21B and D)

Vlastos calls this complex irony and calls it a “misreading” to say that Socrates is saying here that he has no knowledge. “All he says at [a] is that he is not aware of having any knowledge, and at [b] is that he has none.” He relegates to a footnote this argument of another scholar who commits the “misreading” that this reaction to the oracle is a self-contradiction. But what else can the statement “I have no knowledge” be but a profound contradiction, a self-referential contradiction along the lines of the Liar paradox. The Liar sentence (“This sentence is false”) is false if it is true and true if it is false. It seems that Socrates poses a similarly paradoxical condition: he disavows knowledge, but this very disavowal is a claim to knowledge.

Graham Priest calls this an Inclosure Schema. This is a characteristic condition at the limits of experience: at the limits of knowledge, the limits of language, or the limits of iteration. An Inclosure Schema includes three characteristic conditions: 1) Existence, 2) Transcendence, and 3) Closure. In this case Socrates 1) admits that knowledge exists, 2) says he has none, but 3) in so doing implies that this is something that he knows.

Conflicts between SocratesE and SocratesM are not necessarily paradoxes. Vlastos makes a strong case that SocratesE is a closer approximation to the historical Socrates while SocratesM is the mouthpiece of a mature Plato after his exposure in his thirties to mathematics. But Socrates avowal / disavowal of knowledge to me, at least, qualifies him as a true father of Eubolides, the riddler, and a true appreciator of the skeptical possibility that both horns of a dilemma may be true.

Conclusions

Vlastos’ book contains a series of other well documented arguments on a number of topics:
1) Does Socrates cheat?
2) What was the nature of Socrates’ piety?
3) Socrates' rejection of retaliation
4) Socrates’ principle of the sovereignty of virtue
5) Socrates’ secret to happiness

All of these topics are worthy of discussion, but time is short and I have only covered what I think are the most important topics that Vlastos’s book raises: Socrates as the inventor of irony and the depth of his appreciation for contradiction. Although I can’t fully agree with Vlastos’ conclusions on this, I am in awe of the scholarly devotion that this open-minded and good-natured man brought to the task.

[Tyler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this at a time when there arose the need for a book I could slog through slowly. I couldn't have done it otherwise. Since no review of the book has yet been done and the Goodreads synopsis is a bit off base, I’ll give a short glimpse into what I found.

The ideal reader will be a philosophy professional who knows Greek. This book examines the historical Socrates based on source texts. A casual philosophy reader can read it, but I’d advise learning or refreshing one’s knowledge of the Greek alphabet to better follow the discussion. Even with this, the arguments over Greek syntax lost me.

Fortunately, most of these are confined to the footnotes. Rather less fortunately, the footnotes take up about a quarter of each page. More perplexing still is the vitriol with which Vlastos, footnote after footnote, attacks his fellow Greek scholars. I am really taken aback by it. But if what he says is true, Plato scholarship has suffered from near criminal incompetence and neglect over the years.

That brings us to the point of the book. Vlastos wants to bring out the real Socrates hidden in Plato’s dialogs. Who was he, and what did he really stand for? Now that’s what I wanted to find out, and it’s what the author does a great job explaining. From the dialogs of Plato most likely to represent the historical Socrates, the author gives us a coherent picture of the real Socrates and resolves much of what’s unclear in English translations.

What emerges is a philosopher dedicated to one subject only: the moral life. What comes clear is Socrates’s method of questioning, in which he apparently is the first to use what we now call irony to make his points. Much of the book irons out translation errors that make Socrates appear to endorse subterfuge or outright lying, as well as passages in which his arguments make no sense to English speakers.

Once these problems are cleared up we get a picture of the world’s greatest philosopher as he was, a man who with singlehanded brilliance nailed the first step in philosophy, the profession of doubt and skepticism. What we now have is a clear, consistent and beautiful picture of this famous thinker, the way Plato in large part wanted us to see him before the vagaries of language blurred the picture.

Despite the book’s technical nature, casual philosophy readers can still get a lot out of it. I recommend the book to professionals first, and then to general readers.

[Michael Michailidis]

A book of rare scholarship on the subject of the real Socrates. Vlastos is opinionated and not afraid to admit it. He believes that Plato gives us two versions of his mentor, with the first being historical and the second a literary character through which he expresses his own ideas about the immortality of the soul and the theory of forms. Vlastos does not limit himself to that problem however and goes on to uncover what Socrates might have really thought of religion, happiness and the achievement of virtue. The book is argumentative, providing all the material necessary to uphold the position of its author, making it a somewhat heavy read. It is relatively short however and always presents its points in the opening of every chapter, making it easy to navigate. Worthwhile for anyone interested in the so-called "Socratic Problem"

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book divides more or less into two parts; in the first four chapters, Vlastos argues that the "Socrates" of the early dialogues of Plato, through the Gorgias, is essentially the historic Socrates, while in the last four he examines these dialogues to try to work out the major features of Socrates' moral philosophy.

He begins by showing that the "Socrates" of the earlier dialogues, ironic and "elenchic" and limited to moral philosophizing, is significantly different from and incompatible with the "Socrates" of the middle dialogues, who presents positive theses and deals with non-moral questions of metaphysics and epistemology and has distinctively Platonic theories about the Ideas, the tripartite soul, and so forth. Oddly, he spends much time arguing that the "Socrates" of the middle dialogues is Platonic rather than historically Socratic, something which no one would question, rather than what he needs to prove, that the "Socrates" of the earlier dialogues does not represent an earlier Platonic theory different from that of Socrates. He then deals with the evidence of Xenophon and Aristotle, showing that it is broadly compatible with the early Platonic dialogues; where Xenophon differs from early Plato, he tries to show either that the features in Xenophon which differ from Plato also contradict other claims in Xenophon himself, or are unlikely on general principles. He makes a big point of the fact that Plato was "closer" to Socrates' circle than Xenophon, who was in Anatolia at the time of the trial and execution of Socrates; he also argues that Plato as a philosopher would have understood Socrates better than the "litterateur" Xenophon, although this really cuts both ways. I think it is probable that the early Plato is basically still following the philosophy of Socrates (as he understood it), but I find it difficult to believe that he didn't add or change anything until after the Gorgias. Without the lost dialogues (which we know existed) of those like Crito, Phaedo and so forth who actually (unlike both Plato and Xenophon) belonged to Socrates' "inner circle", I think it is really impossible to be sure. (Guthrie's history still seems to me to be better balanced.)

The second part is a good discussion of some of the major questions of the early Platonic dialogues; it doesn't really matter if we consider it a study of Socrates or of the early Plato. He focuses especially on the rejection of "retaliation" and the relationship of virtue to happiness, and everything he says is interesting if not completely convincing.

One point I need to make is that while Vlastos says he is trying to write in ordinary, non-technical language for non-scholars, this is disproved by his constant polemical references to other writers (not to mention his frequent untranslated Greek quotations.) This is a book for students of the history of Greek philosophy with a certain amount of background.

[John Gossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book consists of a series of academic but accessible essays on the nature of Socrates—the ‘strangeness’ Alcibiades mentions in the Symposium and Vlastos discusses in the Introduction to this book. In the first essay, Vlastos examines Socratic irony: how Socrates simultaneously claims ignorance and wisdom and how this leads his audience to knowledge. It is a subtle yet simple and beautiful argument that I found shed much light on the ‘strangeness’ one finds in Plato. In the second essay, Vlastos tries to tease out the philosophy of Socrates from that of Plato by carefully comparing the dialogues and their claims. Later essays look at what other writers said about Socrates and dive into subjects such as Socrates’ view of happiness.

The book bears close reading yet remains enjoyable. It backs up its conclusions with serious philosophical arguments rather than simple intuition and copiously annotates the source references. Here is the only quibble I can make. The footnotes are nearly the size of the text itself—not a problem—and contain additional arguments and insights that should be in the main text. This is a problem. Normally you expect the argument in the text and supporting references in the notes making it possible to skip the notes unless you need them. In this book, skipping the notes means missing many interesting points, but forces you also to at least scan every note, defeating the purpose.

There are a few later essays that contain so much Greek that they are almost unreadable without knowing the language but otherwise all the essays are accessible to anyone who has read Plato and wants a deeper dive than found in a typical History of Philosophy or Paul Johnson’s fine biography.

[Ross Jensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a library copy of Prof. Vlastos’s book and was therefore not entirely surprised when I came across the following marginal note roughly halfway through my perusal: “Vlastos sucks.” It is admittedly difficult not to sympathize with this stark (if whining) undergraduate statement. After all, with his flat-footed (and mind-numbing) “analytical” method of reading, Prof. Vlastos did more to destroy serious, literate study of Plato (and Socrates) in the Anglophone world than just about anybody else. Most egregiously, Vlastos perpetuated for decades the insidious myth of a fundamental division between the so-called “Socratic” and “post-Socratic” dialogues of Plato—a myth that renders Plato’s uniformly Socratic philosophy unintelligible, if not invisible.

And yet, all of that notwithstanding, Prof. Vlastos has also made important contributions to our understanding of Socratic irony. For that reason alone, his essays are worth slogging through, even when he sucks.

[Tom Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

First thing I ever read on 'the Socratic problem' was Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies, and the the picture that Vlastos presents is fairly similar - the early dialogues reflecting the historical Socrates as an ethical teacher and friendly critic of the democracy, with the Socrates of the middle dialogue more of a vehicle for Plato's metaphysical and scientific concerns, and for his oligarchic politics.

I'm not sure I'm totally convinced about Socrates' relatiohship to the democracy, and I'd like to go back and compare Ellen Meiksins-Woods interpretation of his role at some point. Nevertheless, I still feel this is basically a compelling argument about the relationship of the dialogues to the historical Socrates.

[Kevin Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosophical commentary at its finest

A literate and perceptive discussion of one of the great philosophers. I walked away with a new appreciation of the man. I don’t think I can give higher praise than that.

[Zeb · Rating 3 out of 5]

A largely well-researched and illuminating study of plato's socrates, drawing from both platonic and other then-contempory sources. The first half of the book makes a solid case for the common assumption that early plato's socrates resembles the historical figure, while the socrates of the middle and late periods is a mouthpiece for plato's personal evolving philosophy. It also gives a general outline of the defining traits of these socrates, both the respects in which they are similar and the respects in which they differ or are even antithetical. Essays 1-4 come recommended without reservation.

The second half, which attempts to nail down cohesive individual aspects of socrates' philosophy, is a bit dodgier - in this section in Vlastos' attempts to both break new ground in his field and demonstrate a fully invariable aspect of socratic philosophy, he incorporates a lot of far-reaching linguistic interpretations and unusual translation choices in order to present a 100% cohesive socrates. In many of the examples it seems like it would be more likely that plato simply occasionally contradicted himself over the course of his life's work.

In a few cases, even granting vlatos his choice of translation and meaning, the logical structure of his argument seems suspect. For example in chapter 8 vlastos classifies the category of things like wealth, health and status as "lesser goods"- reliant on virtue to be good at all, but inherantly better than their alternatives. However, his evidence to support this is largely focused on a series of claims that these statuses are good if found in a virtuous, but if found in an injust being they are worse than if the injust person did not have them ( that is an unvirtuous soul would be better off not being healthy/rich/acclaimed/etc) The conclusion to be drawn from seems to me not that these characteristics are "minor goods" but that they are themselves neutral and magnifiers of existing virtue or injustice.

Despite my quibbles with the second half of the book, I feel that I got a lot out of reading it. I had initially read over 1100 pages of plato's primary works prior to starting this book and referred back to the primary material regularly while reading vlastos' essays. Vlastos' work confirmed for me that my independent readings were "correct", as well as filling me in on a few aspects of socratic philosophy that I had missed. I certainly feel like reading this book has benefitted me in my study of plato.

Overall I would rate this book as "good" . It's a solid study of socratic philosophy, and I got a lot out of it. My caveats are that vlastos is perhaps a little too eager to break new ground in his field, as well as a little too determined to clear all conflicting evidence to some of his claims. I think the arguments would have been better served by painting socrates as "general" behaving in a certain manner, rather then attempting to magic away every single contradictory passage. Still, if read with these things in mind, this book comes highly recommended.

3/5 - Good

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting study of the differences between Plato and Socrates and of how to separate the "real Socrates" out of his various characterizations in Plato, Xenophon, and others. Very accessible and clear - important for non-specialists. The book gave me an entirely different and more sympathetic view of Socrates than commonly obtained in intro history of philosophy courses. I was referred to this by a Martha Nussbaum book.

[Marko Jurcevic · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ako vjerujete u ono u što vjeruje Sokrat, tajnu sreće imate u svojim rukama. Ništa što bi vam itko mogao učiniti ne može vas učiniti nesretnim." To vjerovanje je da je čovjeku koji čini dobro ujedno sretan covjek. Knjiga je analiza velikana filozofije i vrijedi je pročitati, pogotovo radi samog finalnog poglavlja o vrlini i sreći.

[Scott Collingwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very heavy going for the layman but also very rewarding indeed.