The Socratic Problem

Abstract

“Any account must begin with the admission that there is, and always will be, a ‘Socratic problem’,” W. K. C. Guthrie (1969: 6) warned; and having said that, he immediately set out hopefully to find a solution. I welcome the precedent. The ‘Socratic problem’ is a tar baby of questions arising from the fact that Socrates wrote nothing, but appears variously (some would say irreconcilably) as a character in works by an assortment of his contemporaries. Who was the real Socrates? Did Plato represent Socrates accurately? Did Aristophanes? Xenophon? What reasons can be given for privileging any one of these accounts? The theoretical difficulty presents itself that authors, Plato included, are always and necessarily presenting interpretations of the personalities and lives of their characters, whether they mean to or not, whether they write biography or fiction or philosophy (if the philosophy they write has characters). And perhaps that difficulty is magnified when the authors in question lack our modern categories of, or sensibilities about, what constitutes historical accuracy or poetic license. More certainly complicating the issue is the incontrovertible fact-and there are precious few of those-that Plato was some forty years younger than Socrates, so their acquaintance could only have been in Socrates’s later years. Was the life and personality of Socrates so consistent that Plato’s characterization of a man in his fifties and sixties should utterly undo a lampooning account of the younger Socrates? To what extent is Socrates idealized? Do the Socratics, and Plato in particular, feel a mission of apologia as strong as the desire of Aristophanes to ridicule? 1