How Socrates Became Socrates: A Study of Plato’s “Phaedo,” “Parmenides,” and “Symposium”

2020·2.15 MB·english

by  Laurence Lampert

How Socrates Became Socrates

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How Socrates Became Socrates
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A Study of Plato’s
Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium
laurence lampert
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
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Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 74633- 3 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 74647- 0 (e- book)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226746470.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Lampert, Laurence, 1941– author.
Title: How Socrates became Socrates : a study of Plato’s Phaedo, Parmenides, and
Symposium / Laurence Lampert.
Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020039060 | ISBN 9780226746333 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226746470
(ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Socrates. | Plato. Phaedo. | Plato. Parmenides. | Plato. Symposium. |
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900.
Classification: LCC B317 .L357 2021 | DDC 183/.2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039060
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of
Paper).
[ contents ]
Introduction 1
1 Phaedo: The First Stage of Socrates’ Philosophic
Education 7
Prologue: Heroic Socrates as the New Ideal 7
1. First Words 10
2. A New Theseus to Slay the Real Minotaur 14
3. A New Herakles to Cut Off and Bury the Immortal Head of
Hydra 18
4. A New Odysseus to Teach the Safe Way to Understand Cause 31
5. Odyssean Socrates’ Report on His Second Sailing in the Phaedo
Measured by the Parmenides 52
6. Odyssean Socrates Ends His Life of Argument 71
7. Socrates’ Last Words: Gratitude for a Healing 82
2 Parmenides: The Second Stage of Socrates’ Philosophic
Education 89
Prologue: A Socrates for the Philosophically Driven 89
1. First Words 91
2. At Pythodorus’s House during the Great Panathenaia 95
3. Socrates and Zeno: How to Read a Philosophic Writing 99
4. Socrates’ Solution to What Parmenides and Zeno Made to Seem
beyond Us 103
5. Parmenides the Guide 108
6. What Is This Gymnastic? 120
7. Guiding Socrates 124
8. Last Words 146
9. The Socratic Turn 148
3 The Symposium: The Final Stage of Socrates’ Philosophic
Education 152
Prologue: Socrates’ Ontological Psychology 152
1. First Words 157
2. Socrates Beautifies Himself for Agathon 161
3. Diotima’s Myth Guides Socrates to the Third Stage of His
Philosophic Education 172
4. Diotima’s Logos Guides Socrates to the Third Stage of His
Philosophic Education 182
5. Diotima Teaches Socrates What to Teach 191
6. Alcibiades Arrives 203
7. Last Words 206
Note on the Dramatic Date of the Frame of the Symposium 209
Conclusion: Plato in a Nietzschean History of Philosophy 221
Works Cited 227
Index 233
[ introduction ]
Socrates, the one turning- point and vortex of so- called world history
— Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, §15
Did Plato show Socrates becoming Socrates? This book is the second of
two in which I answer yes. The first of the two, How Philosophy Became
Socratic: A Study of Plato’s “Protagoras,” “Charmides,” and “Republic,” answered
yes by showing how Plato ordered those three dialogues chronologically
to give his reader access to Socrates’ development in devising a successful
political philosophy. This second book answers yes by showing how Plato
ordered his Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium chronologically to give
his reader access to Socrates’ development on philosophy’s fundamen-
tal questions of being and knowing.1 All three events in Socrates’ educa-
tion in philosophy itself occurred earlier than the Protagoras, which Plato
set around 434 and which he made the chronologically first of his tem-
porally arranged sequence of dialogues. The three dialogues that treat
Socrates’ becoming in philosophy proper therefore had to be given more
complex structures: each has a frame whose dramatic date is much later
than 434 and each reaches back from that later time to a time earlier than
434 in order to recover a stage of Socrates’ becoming, back to his youth-
1. Seth Benardete speaks of the “three stages in Socrates’ philosophical education”
(“On Plato’s Symposium,” in Argument of the Action, 178). While recognizing the three stages,
Benardete never treated them thematically; nor did Leo Strauss, who also recognized
them (Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 149). My book owes a special debt to Benardete, the
twentieth- century thinker and master of classical thought who opened the tradition of
Greek philosophy like no other modern commentator.
2 introduction
ful beginnings in the Phaedo and Parmenides, back to his young manhood
in the Symposium.
These three dialogues demand careful attention if one is to recover the
proper sequence and learn just how that progress in thinking led Socrates
to his ultimate conclusions about nature and human nature. In contrast to
that demand for dedicated recovery work, Plato made it easy for everyone
to have a pleasing account of how Socrates became himself: Plato’s Apology
of Socrates presents the only speech Socrates ever made to the Athenian
public, to the five hundred “men of Athens” who were his judges and the
large crowd of interested onlookers at his trial for his life. Socrates tells
the Athenian public an autobiographical tale of his becoming, an edifying
story that made him the servant of the god at Delphi who assigned him
responsibility for the well- being of Athens, particularly its youth. How did
Socrates become that odd character that everyone knew him to be, that
man of the marketplace talking incessantly of the common things and the
public virtues? Apollo made him do it, he says in the Apology, commis-
sioning him with a public task to improve public virtue. So a tale of Soc-
rates’ becoming the philosopher he became takes its proper place as the
most prominent of all the stories Plato related of Socrates. In contrast to
that easily accessible pious tale of Socrates’ becoming, Plato scattered his
other account of Socrates’ becoming across three dialogues, leaving it to
the reader truly interested in Socrates to recognize that Plato gave three
separate installments to the true account of Socrates’ becoming, that they
fit together chronologically, and that the work of interpreting them opens
a route to the truth about Socrates’ becoming: he gained a deeply satisfying
set of philosophical, that is to say, radical conclusions about human being
and beings as a whole.
Plato thus judged that there had to be two accounts of Socrates’ becom-
ing a philosopher, different in their content, reconcilable in their inten-
tions. The easily available pious account is literally intended for the whole
Athenian public and by extension the public that reads the dialogues. The
other account, scattered across three very different dialogues, including
the most puzzling of them all, and demanding that work be done to fit
them together properly, is intended for those interested enough in phi-
losophy and in Socrates to do that work. For such devoted readers, Plato
made it possible to know how Socrates non- mythically became himself as
a thinker about nature and human nature and just what he became— what
“Apollo” enabled him to achieve through the natural gifts of a passionate
drive to understand the causes of all things, and an intellect of genius to
generate and sort out rational explanations.
introduction 3
Starting with this premise that Plato gave two accounts of Socrates’
becoming a philosopher and that the relation between them is that of a
public Socrates and a private one, my book treats only the private account.
One reason for this is that the public account is well known and the pri-
vate account barely visible as a possibility. More importantly, by treating
only the veiled account, I aim to show not only that Plato offered such an
account, but also that this Socrates is the philosophically fascinating one,
beyond his public moral and political concerns. Once that private philos-
opher is seen, the account of his becoming that Socrates gave to the Athe-
nian public becomes understandable from a new perspective: his public
presentation of his becoming at his trial, a presentation consistent with
how he had shown himself in the marketplace for thirty years, is a defense
of philosophy, of what he discovered in private and kept private but what is
clearly in need of a public defense. He knows that defense will cost him his
life, but it is a cost he is willing to pay, at age seventy, for the sake of philos-
ophy. Philosophy’s best- known practitioner died heroically for philosophy
of a kind he kept hidden.2
The fact that Plato’s Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium are related in
containing sequential accounts of the three major events in Socrates’ be-
coming a philosopher is supported by a structural or taxonomic feature
that Plato gave to these three dialogues and to them alone. Among the
thirty-fi ve dialogues he wrote, nine are different in being narrated rather
than simply performed; Plato had an identified person speak each of the
nine to a given audience, whereas he put all the others before their reader-
audience directly, as in a play.3 Of the nine narrated dialogues Socrates nar-
rates six; each of the other three is narrated by a person identified as its
speaker: Phaedo narrates the Phaedo, Cephalus the Parmenides, and Apol-
lodorus the Symposium. That these three dialogues are unique in their be-
ing narrated by persons other than Socrates befits that other far more im-
portant uniqueness: they are the three dialogues from which Socrates’ way
to his genuine philosophizing can be recovered. The three share another
feature: each is concerned with the transmission of Socrates’ philosophy. In
the Phaedo, Phaedo carries the story Socrates told on his last day of his first
2. The public account in the Apology, read with careful attention, can itself be seen as
harboring Socrates’ deeper, philosophic perspective; see Strauss, “On Plato’s Apology of
Socrates and Crito,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 38– 66; and Leibowitz, Ironic
Defense of Socrates.
3. Leo Strauss set out the distinction between narrated and performed in The City and
Man, 58. The Parmenides is an exception regarding a “given audience”: it is narrated by a
Cephalus to an unidentified audience.