Table Of Content

The NeoplaToNic SocraTeS This page intentionally left blank The NeoplaToNic SocraTeS ediTed by danielle a. layne and harold Tarrant uNiverSiTy of peNNSylvaNia preSS philadelphia copyright © 2014 university of pennsylvania press all rights reserved. except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. published by university of pennsylvania press philadelphia, pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress printed in the united States of america on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 a cataloging-in-publication record is available from the library of congress iSbN 978-0-8122-4629-2 coNTeNTS introduction 1 Danielle A. Layne and Harold Tarrant chapter 1. Socratic love in Neoplatonism 21 Geert Roskam chapter 2. plutarch and apuleius on Socrates’ daimonion 36 John F. Finamore chapter 3. The daimonion of Socrates: daimones and divination in Neoplatonism 51 Crystal Addey chapter 4. Socrates in the Neoplatonic psychology of hermias 73 Christina-Panagiota Manolea chapter 5. The character of Socrates and the Good of dialogue form: Neoplatonic hermeneutics 80 Danielle A. Layne chapter 6. hypostasizing Socrates 97 Michael Griffin chapter 7. Socratic character: proclus on the function of erotic intellect 109 James M. Ambury chapter 8. The elenctic Strategies of Socrates: The Alcibiades I and the commentary of olympiodorus 118 François Renaud vi contents chapter 9. Akrasia and Enkrateia in Simplicius’s commentary on epictetus’s Encheiridion 127 Marilynn Lawrence chapter 10. The Many-voiced Socrates: Neoplatonist Sensitivity to Socrates’ change of register 143 Harold Tarrant conclusion 163 Danielle A. Layne and Harold Tarrant appendix: The reception of Socrates in late antiquity: authors, Texts, and Notable references 167 Notes 179 bibliography 229 list of contributors 245 index 249 acknowledgments 255 IntroductIon Danielle A. Layne and Harold Tarrant Or how, before this, could we examine anything else, either of the things that are or of those that come to be when we have heard Socrates himself say: “It seems ridiculous of me to consider the properties of other beings, when I do not know myself”?1 —Proclus, in Alc. 6.12 (tr. O’Neill, modified) In one of the most romantic dialogues of his corpus, Plato depicts Socrates walk- ing barefoot in the waters of the Ilissus, coyly tormented by a seemingly benign conundrum: “Who am I, and what are my intentions?” Turning to the handsome Phaedrus and admitting his real difficulty with his lack of self-knowledge, Socrates famously wonders whether he resembles “a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature.”2 Unable to solve the problem immediately, Socrates spends the afternoon conversing with the boy on the nature of love, the soul, and the life of the philosopher and, in so doing, sets the question “Who is Socrates?” on the back burner. Yet, as we all know, years later, in a setting dramatically different from this meandering stroll on a hot summer day, this very same difficulty was readdressed before his peers and countrymen, the Athenians, and they replied rather forcefully, sentencing the philosopher to death for corrupting the youth. As history testifies, the Athenians were not the last to respond indignantly to the question “Who is Socrates?” Timon of Phlius, skeptic and disciple of Pyrrho, apparently believed that Socrates was a wicked dissembler, while Cato, the Roman statesman and Stoic, deemed him a seditious babbler.3 With satirical wit, Lucian, 2 Introduction in the imperial age, would unabashedly associate the philosopher with chicanery, branding Socrates a coward who would rather seduce boys than participate in the real affairs of the city.4 In contrast to such Athenian-like disdain, many others have felt the need to defend the philosopher and his activities, attempting at times to reconcile his beliefs with their own. Cicero famously regarded him as the father of the rival Academic and Stoic schools, while Julian, the last non-Christian Roman emperor, claimed that the son of Sophroniscus was more influential than Alexander the Great.5 In the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino, a leader in the revival of Platonism, prolifically referred to Socrates’ noble spirit and ability to save the youth, while in modern and contemporary philosophy Socrates’ image and philosophical method have been invoked and heralded in the works of authors as es- teemed as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Gadamer, and even the infamously cynical Foucault.6 Patently, opinion on “Who is Socrates?” and whether he was a Typhonic monster or a sage has been decidedly split. In contemporary scholarship on Socrates this question has been revived and comprehensively analyzed. In fact, the library stacks of most research universities testify to the wealth and abundance of second- ary literature on Socrates, and, like well-worn war trenches, the daunting material in the field can overwhelm and perhaps even frustrate students. In Socratic studies alone, the army of topics includes questions concerning the sufficiency of virtue for happiness, the necessity of knowledge for the good life, the sincerity or irony of Socrates’ avowals of ignorance, the (im)possible nature of akratic action, So- cratic method, and, most prominently, the so-called Socratic problem in which scholars debate the possibility of discovering the thoughts and beliefs of the “historical” Socrates.7 Assuredly, one of the most important texts in Socratic studies is Gregory Vlas- tos’s Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher.8 Written at the end of a long and industrious career in ancient philosophy, this book marked the beginning of a radi- cal resurgence in Socratic philosophy as Vlastos advanced many remarkable and provocative theses that attempted to wrestle with and uncover the “historical” Socrates. Inspired by Vlastos’s pioneering work, in the early 1990s several editions and monographs devoted to understanding the life and work of the philosopher began to appear, expanding the already abundant repertoire of appraisals on Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. Consequently, many interested students hoping to come to grips with the infamous question “Who is Socrates?” began turning to editions like Hugh Benson’s Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates, K. J. Bou- douris’s Philosophy of Socrates, and William Prior’s four-volume Socrates: Criti- cal Assessments to navigate a path through this overloaded terrain of scholarship. Introduction 3 These volumes offered students and scholars a rich compendium of essays devoted to various issues, not the least of which was responding to the Socratic problem and the search for the true Socrates, that is, the historical answer to the question “Who is Socrates?”. In the mid-nineties the quest for the so-called historical or true Socrates began to wane as specialists slowly forged the consensus that headway on the subject would not be possible without further evidence. In fact, many scholars voiced the opinion that the “Socratic problem” was a chimera, a Typhonic monster itself, as the literary genre that both Plato and Xenophon so eloquently employed, the logoi sokratikoi, allowed for considerable liberty and creativity, and thus neither of these authors could reliably be deemed the authentic voice of the historical Socrates.9 Accordingly, several experts maintained that what mattered in Socratic studies was not the discovery of the historical Socrates but rather the careful re- construction of Socrates’ legacy and the ideas that inspired various philosophical traditions.10 One need only think of Paul Vander Waerdt’s edited volume The So- cratic Movement, which, after examining Plato’s and Xenophanes’ depictions of Socrates, also included essays devoted to the philosopher’s influence on the Cyn- ics, Stoics, and Skeptics. In fact, in recent years there has been a remarkable surge of scholarship that explicitly endeavors to track the history of the Socratic commentary inaugurated in the Academy and surviving into the present age. For in- stance, Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis compiled a collection entitled Remembering Socrates, whose final two essays explicitly deal at length with the appearance of Socrates in later antiquity. Similarly, Donald R. Morrison opens his Cambridge Companion to Socrates with a very dense essay by Louis-André Dorion on the decline of interest in the Socratic problem, but also brilliantly ends with a piece by A. A. Long entirely devoted to Socrates in the Hellenistic and imperial ages. Continuing this trend, Michael Trapp’s two-volume Socrates from Antiquity to the Enlightenment and Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Cen- turies meticulously devotes itself to tracing the image of Socrates throughout the history of philosophy and even concludes with essays on Kierkegaard’s and Ni- etzsche’s attraction to this Athenian personality. Finally, one of the best publications aiming to give its readers a more comprehensive answer to the question “Who is Socrates?” is Sara Ahbel-Rappe’s and Rachana Kamtekar’s Companion to Socrates, which dedicates almost half of its 510 pages to the Socrates envisaged by later thinkers in the medieval, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary peri- ods. In this volume essays range over a variety of topics, including analysis of typical Socratic problems in Plato’s dialogues, as well as more creative and stimu- lating theses like Socrates’ sage-like status in the Arabic tradition and his 4 Introduction methodological impact on Hegel. It closes with persuasive discussions concerning the philosopher’s influence on contemporary teaching methods and even psychoanalysis. In such circumstances the present-day student or scholar in Socratic studies hears a variety of voices, all of which are attuned to the immeasurable worth of the stonemason’s son who challenged all comers to recognize that the unexamined life is not worth living. Nevertheless, it must be noted that despite this new wave of valuable resources in Socratic scholarship, there is a rather striking omission, a lacuna that assuredly resonates with anyone interested in the history of philosophy. Put simply, there seems to be an almost eerie silence with regard to the reception of Socrates in later antiquity; most predominantly in all of the publications mentioned above there is an unfortunate neglect of analysis on the reception of Socrates in the later Platonic tradition from the second to the sixth century CE. In other words, there is a marked neglect in engagement with the Neoplatonic render- ing of Socrates. For example, both the Trapp and the Ahbel-Rappe and Kamtekar collections contain an assortment of essays spanning various contexts from Hel- lenistic and medieval Jewish literature to contemporary contexts, but, nonetheless, regardless of their comprehensiveness, there is not one paper devoted to the Socrates of later antiquity. Strikingly, more than half a millennium of commentary is passed over in silence. This neglect is not completely unsurprising, as the oft-regarded father of this so-called school,11 Plotinus, rarely analyzes the character of Socrates and, more- over, pays little attention to what most consider the genuinely Socratic dialogues, that is, the early aporetic works. Furthermore, the Neoplatonic curriculum, first organized by Iamblichus in the late third or early fourth century, focused less on dialogues that modern scholars would see as somehow “Socratic” (e.g., the Apol- ogy and Euthyphro) and more on texts like the Timaeus or the Parmenides, dialogues where Socrates has ceased to be the protagonist.12 This tendency to bypass the ‘Socratic’ in the Enneads in general and in the Iamblichean curriculum in particular has led many scholars to conclude with W. Bröcker that this constitutes a Platonismus ohne Sokrates.13 For Bröcker it was clear that the Neoplatonic proj- ect stood counter to the Socratic tradition as it no longer valorized doubt and open inquiry but, in its lust to systemize Plato’s metaphysics, seemed to white-wash both Socrates’ association with skepticism and the ethical/political character of his divine mission. As Werner Beierwaltes neatly summarizes: “Ohne Sokrates”—dies hieße: ohne politisches Engagement und ohne politische Theorie, die auf eine durch philosophische Ethik gerformte