Socrates and Plato

Abstract

The idea that Plato's Socrates even the Socrates of the 'Socratic' dialogues is a construct (see Book Notes on Socrates and Plato, Phronesis 1999/1) is fundamental to Alexander Nehamas's The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (based on his Sather Lectures of 1992-3).' Plato operates like a kind of philosophical version of Thomas Mann, enticing us, his audience, into a position where we think, wrongly, that we know where we are with his characters: '[his Socratic dialogues] revolve around a character who remains completely mysterious to the other figures that share his fictional world, to the dialogues' readers, and finally, like Hans Castorp [in The Magic Mountain],2 to his own author as well. And though Castorp and Socrates are vastly different characters, Mann's novel and Plato's Socratic dialogues are two of the most scornful displays of the weakness of readers who assume they are morally superior to various characters while they are in fact revealing that they are made of the same stuff as those they deride' (32). Thinking we have recognised Euthyphro's selfdelusion, we tum away from the Euthyphro, but in doing so 'we demonstrate [selfdelusion] to be ruling our own lives as well which is really the aim of this Whole mechanism' (41; author's own italics). We are being invited to make our lives chime with our beliefs, in this case identified with Socrates' call to perpetual examination of ourselves; but we refuse the invitation. For 'the art of living', read 'philosophy as a way of life'. Plato's depiction of Socrates again, in the 'Socratic' dialogues is a description of one properly philosophical way of living, which he thought the way. (Nehamas himself is less certain than 'Socrates', or Aristotle, that there is any single philosophical way of life.) Plato's 'Socrates' is a construct at once philosophical and literary (like The Art of Living itself): literary, because it has in the end to be a written construct, even if in Socrates' case it had to be written for him. Plato's chief weapon is