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The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy
By Thomas Gould PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07375-0
CHAPTER 1
"PHILOSOPHY" IN SOCRATISM
The trial and execution of Socrates was a consequence of several different kinds of crisis, political as well as religious; but it is likely that one of the issues was the one stated most prominently in the actual charge against him. Socrates was accused of holding and fostering a vision of divinity that was incompatible with Athenian piety. He was thought to honor novel divinities, literally "novel divine things," and to teach the young to do so also. In the Apology (31 d 1) and Euthyphro (3 b 5) Plato appears to interpret the mention of novel divinity as a contemptuous reference to Socrates' divine voice—a sign that came to him whenever he was about to do or say something that was not entirely right. But in the Euthyphro Plato also interprets the larger charge as a reference to Socrates' well-known insistence that gods are always just (6 a–c). We must begin by clarifying what "good" means for a human being, Socrates believed, then hold fast to the pious assumption that gods are always "good" in this sense. It is never possible to look first at the old stories, he thought, and to extrapolate from them what it is that the gods honor. That procedure would force us to conclude that there are two notions of "good," good for mortals and good for gods. In all too many of the traditional holy stories the "justice" imposed on us by divinity would qualify as terrible injustice were it to characterize the dealings of man with man.
The Socratic revolution is essentially an extreme and uncompromising formulation of the principle announced by Zeus at the beginning of the Odyssey: men should blame themselves, not the gods, for their unhappiness. A man becomes good when he has the prerequisites for happiness (eudaimonia, "god-blessedness"). That is what "good" means, being the kind of person you must be if you are to be happy. To be good is to have not only the necessary, but also the sufficient condition for happiness. It follows that all good men and only good men are happy; also that all bad men and only bad men are unhappy. The gods merely see to it that this is so. Stories purporting to show genuinely good men and women genuinely unhappy show an impossibility and cause audiences to draw disastrously incorrect conclusions.
No one is bad of his own volition, Socrates always insists. Men fail to pursue happiness in the right way—by making themselves good—because they have never been taught the all important connection between goodness and happiness. We should pity bad men, therefore, not feel anger toward them. We should blame their teachers. Nor did Socrates have any doubt as to the identity of these teachers: they were the tellers of the old stories of unpredictable and unjust divinities. Socrates' primary target was popular religion. But since he was a fifth-century Athenian he naturally attacked, among others, the most honored and influential of the contemporary purveyors of corrupt religious visions, the Attic tragedians.
There is a dark side to Socratism: Socrates was obviously convinced that unhappiness was almost universal. Most of the stories that are given the young, those revealed in holy enactments, in literature, and in the "little tales" told by nurses and mothers, teach listeners to accept the vision Plato called "poetry," a vision of monstrous god-caused injustices. Even when the tellers of these stories superimpose an interpretation from "philosophy," says Socrates in Republic II, they still teach the wrong lesson. This is because children are always more impressed by the story itself than they are by a theologian's allegorical explanation of it (378 d 7). It is little wonder, then, that most people are condemned to unhappiness throughout their lives, Socrates believed. It should be remembered that those offending stories were depicted everywhere in Greece, in religious performances, entertainment, on the walls of buildings, even on household objects like drinking cups, mixing bowls, and oil jars.
Yet Socrates undoubtedly saw his mission as the announcement of good news. Mortals are not in fact prey to inscrutable, warring, and vindictive gods. Nor do the gods jealously exclude them from divine happiness, as was widely supposed. Immortal happiness is possible for mortals after all. It is in our own power to win supreme and permanent joy: we must make ourselves good and the rest will follow. We are not even really at the mercy of bad luck, malicious enemies, illness, old age, or death. None of these things can reduce the happiness of someone who has pursued happiness correctly. And everyone really knows this. The knowledge is in-born and never extinguished altogether by the discouraging lesson learned from those unholy stories. Socrates need only sting us, irritate us, make us see our inconsistencies, awaken us from our complacency, and we will begin to see the light.
Plato has Socrates tell his jurors that he is beyond being harmed by his accusers. They have no power to harm him, he insists. It is not permitted by heaven for a better man to be harmed by a less-good man. Oh, his accusers may succeed in depriving him of his rights, or exiling him, or putting him to death, and they may believe, with the majority of mankind, that these are terrible fates. But Socrates does not agree (Apology 30 c–d). Later, after the death penalty has been passed, Socrates reassures those who had voted for his acquitttal that they should take heart from his experience when they look forward to their own deaths. An extraordinary thing had happened to him that day. Not once—during his arrest, during the speeches for the prosecution and defense, nor now that he was about to go off to his death (as he believed)—did his warning sign come to him. He understood this to mean that he must therefore be approaching something good. This in turn he took for proof that nothing can ever reduce the happiness of a truly good man, either in life or in death, and that the gods see to it that this is so (Apology 41 c–d). The sign had been saying no to him from childhood on, many times a day, even in trivial matters (40 a–b). His unprecedented freedom from its interruptions was an exhilarating message from the gods. To be sure, his accusers had intended that his happiness be taken away, not enhanced. For that they should be censured, he says. But he pities them for the ignorance in which they had been brought up.
Early in the morning on the day of execution Crito, an old, rather muddleheaded friend of Socrates, urges him to flee Athens rather than submit to his monstrously unjust sentence. Socrates refuses and explains why. The desperate Crito suggests that people will think that he and Socrates' other friends had failed to do everything that could be done for him. Why should you care what people think? asks Socrates. Well, says Crito, you see yourself what limitless power people have to harm you once they turn against you. Nonsense, Socrates replies: would that they did have limitless power to harm! They would then also have limitless power to do good. As it is, since they do not know how to increase or decrease a man's understanding, everything they do in order to help or harm someone they do at random, in the dark (Crito 44 c–d). If having the right kind of understanding (phronesis) is having the necessary and sufficient condition for happiness, then true harm, the reduction of one's happiness, can only be accomplished by making one aphron, without right understanding. But of course bad men are bad precisely because they have had their understanding molded by "poetry." They are without the true understanding of "philosophy," which is the revelation that happiness could only be reduced if true understanding were reduced. The "power" of bad men to harm the good is therefore very limited indeed.
There are a number of important features of Platonism that are attributed by Plato to Socrates but never in the so-called "Socratic dialogues," the dialogues in which Plato appears to recreate the mind and manners of the historical Socrates. There is room for doubt, therefore, as to the strict truth of these attributions. Socrates' opposition to the poets, however, is not one of these ideas. Criticism of the poetic tradition appears in virtually all of the early dialogues. On this basis alone we should have to assume a Socratic origin for this feature of Platonism. But beyond that, Socratism is in fact at odds with the poetic tradition in general and tragedy in particular. Socratism already included much of what is meant by "philosophy" in Plato's description of the "ancient quarrel."
CHAPTER 2
SOCRATISM IN PLATO
Plato's earlier dialogues are dramatic recreations of the effect Socrates had on those whom he met in the marketplace. Plato wanted the whole world to share that special experience. Socrates is shown in the act of embarrassing or irritating the great or notorious as well as the obscure or very young. The contests often end without a resolution, but we are made to understand that the distress caused by Socrates' unnerving questions can sometimes be the beginning of a new enlightenment. Republic I may well be the last Platonic dialogue of this sort. As we pass to Book II and beyond we are introduced to a new tone and a new manner. Plato shows us how much more can be accomplished if we turn away from confrontations with self-important adults and spend most of our time instead with puzzled but gifted and well-brought-up young people.
No doubt this change was necessitated, in part, by a reluctance on Plato's part to imitate the daily routine of his beloved teacher. But at least as important was a new philosophical pessimism concerning the efficacy of Socratic irony and cross-examination. The Socratic technique is to make the interlocutor sense a deep and dangerous inconsistency in the way he is living. He is made aware of a conflict between the things he really wants—the things he would never willingly go against or be without—and the goals he is in fact pursuing. But what if the thing he really wants most of all is also an apparent good only, not the best thing he could be pursuing? How will the Socratic process help him then?
Socrates did make people center their attention on their goals, as opposed to the means to what they wanted or the obstacles presently frustrating them. Men's unhappiness, he believed, came much more rarely from their inability to get what they wanted than from wanting the wrong things—things that cannot be won, or cannot last, or cannot satisfy them. But a Socratic conversation will help someone think more clearly about his highest values only if a true appreciation of genuine good lurks somewhere in his mind or instincts alongside the shabby values given him by a corrupt society. Socrates evidently assumed the existence of such an instinct. But Plato appears eventually to have come to doubt it. He doubted that a true understanding could be awakened in most people after they had been fully formed (or deformed) by a corrupt society. As a result, he concentrated more exclusively than Socrates had on eager but uncertain young people. Modern readers often lament the cessation of drama after Republic I. They regret the substitution of Glaucon's and Adeimantus's ever-repeated "Yes, Socrates," "No, Socrates," "Of course, Socrates." But we owe much of Platonism to this new emphasis. And we owe to it also the founding of the Academy and the idea of the university.
Plato was appalled by the power of a corrupt society to corrupt its citizens completely. The first thing the philosopher kings will do once they have taken power is to banish to the countryside everyone above the age of ten (Republic 7.540 d–541 a). Presumably most people are assumed to be ineducable beyond that age, so deeply will their minds and characters have been formed (or rather, deformed) by their societies. Nor were his doubts limited to ordinary governments. Even after the ideal state has matured and the happiest possible society has been realized, not everyone will be as happy as man can be. Every citizen will be shaped only by religion, art, play, and music, designed by true philosophers; yet this will succeed in turning few of them into philosophers themselves. Most will still take the visible world for the real world. The "images" (eikones) they accept as ultimate reality will indeed be good images, images that point truly to true reality. Also, what these inferior citizens want is what they should want, what they would have wanted had they been gifted enough to be full philosophers. Yet they will be condemned, even with an ideal art and government, to remain all their lives at a level of understanding that true philosophers leave behind in their youth. Although they will be far happier than they could be in any other society, the limitations they were born with will exclude them forever from truly divine happiness (Republic 9.590 c–591 a; cf. 7.517 d–e and 3.401 a–d). There is little evidence that Socrates was so deeply pessimistic.
Plato was as certain as Socrates had been that what all human beings always want most is their own true well-being. Happiness, eudaimonia, the state of being god-blessed, is defined as that which all men desire (Symposium 205 a). It is rarely the case, as both men saw, that what appears to be best to a person at any point in his life is what he really wants, eudaimonia. Both insist, nevertheless, that it would be wrong to say that what he really wants (boulesthai) is anything other than the best thing he could want (Gorgias 466–68). Where Plato departs from Socrates is in his perception of the need to investigate the causes, mostly social, of this gap between "what we really want" and "what seems best for us."
As he puts it in the Timaeus, those of us whose minds and character make us unable to be completely happy have become that way as a consequence of one or both of two factors, both as contrary as they could be to what we choose for ourselves (dia dyo akousiotata, 87 b 4). One of these is what we were born with, a weak constitution, perhaps, or inferior intelligence. The other is all the things that have happened to us from our birth to the moment of decision making—the bad luck never to have met a Socrates, for instance, or to have read the right Platonic dialogue at the right moment in our youth. We are obviously morally responsible for neither factor. "But of course [men] all our strength must be directed toward the need to acquire good and avoid evil, by our training, habitual activities, and intellectual enlightenment" (87 b 6–8).
In one sense, the individual is always "responsible" (aitios) for his own unhappiness. If all good men and only good men are happy, then it is always fair to infer from a person's unhappiness that he is imperfectly good in mind or character. In another sense, however, no one is "responsible" for having become the kind of person he is at any point in his life. Two quite different kinds of action are needed. We must improve the unhappy individual himself by adding new factors to his life—altering his upbringing, his habits, and his intellectual understanding. (These things will be required because he is indeed "responsible" in the first sense.) And we must improve society as a whole in order to alter anything seen now to have made him into someone who could not now be happy. (This is required because he is not "responsible" in the second sense.) For the most part, Socrates concentrated on the first kind of enterprise. Plato, because of his withdrawal from marketplace encounters and his gloomy assessment of the corrupting powers of society and tradition, shifted the emphasis to the second kind of enterprise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy by Thomas Gould. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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