The Neoplatonic Socrates ed. by Danielle A. Layne and Harold Tarrant (review)

The aim of this volume is to address the apparent fact that the Neoplatonists did not account for the role of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues. As it shows at length, not only in relation to the person of Socrates, the Neoplatonists attended, sometimes with great acuity, to the role that the different characters played in the dialogues, and often attempted to distinguish between the historical character and Plato’s use of him. However, the subtext of the book seems to target contemporary Anglo-American interpretations of Plato, of Plato’s Socrates, and of the nature of ancient philosophy. This is no small game, and the editors, who have miraculously managed to find an original niche in Socratic studies, and their contributors have provided a very worthwhile service in so doing.

The underlying problem of this volume is a Socratic one: who has defined Socrates correctly? The two camps begin, from the outset, with different answers; both would argue that their interpretations represent the Platonic text better. Philosophers in the analytic tradition highlight the aporetic, ironic, and elenctic Socrates of the “early” dialogues, with sizable gaps toward the middle and late dialogues that are presumed to be Platonic. Our contributors uncover in the Neoplatonic Socrates, quite usefully, a continuum (67) between the “merely” elenctic Socrates and the Socrates who sought “assimilation to god as far as possible” (57). To accomplish this, the Neoplatonists resorted to pedagogical theory, but surely one grounded in Plato: changes in register (145), the absence or provision of philosophical content; these things are due to Socrates’s attending to the difference in audience: refuting a Protagoras requires a different approach from persuading an Alcibiades, or from expositing the nature of the cosmos among those well-disposed and suitably trained (96). But this insight would radically transform the nature and purpose of the elenctic and maieutic methods, and thus of Socrates. Many authors in this volume lament that the aporeticism of the Neoplatonic Socrates has not been appreciated, but once one connects the elenchus to self-knowledge and its necessary relation to the divine, “Socrates” can no longer be aporetic in the sense it is often meant today.

At the heart of these essays and, indeed, at the heart of Neoplatonism is the Delphic command “know thyself” and the prophetess’s annunciation that Socrates is the wisest of all. For these authors, Neoplatonism not only offers sophisticated interpretations of Socrates—the ostensible subject of the book—but also continues what is at the heart of ancient philosophy: trying to understand the relation between the divine and human, self-knowledge, and philosophy as a mode of living. It is the nature of philosophy today, if not also of ancient philosophy, that is at stake.

The culture of the late ancient cosmopolitan world, with the rise of Christianity, was no doubt different from that of classical Athens and the Mediterranean, but it is infinitely closer in spirit than our age is to Plato’s Athens, and we should remember this. Reducing Socrates’s daimon to “a hunch,” as Martha Nussbaum does, and against which Crystal Addey argues (57), merely bespeaks the sadly unconscious chasm between twentieth-century America and fifth-century Athens. Surely, the Neoplatonists have the divine élan of Socrates right. One need not accept the Neoplatonic henads and a panoply of daimons and hērōs, of course, to realize the value of its hermeneutical sophistication, often perspicacious analysis, and, to my and the book’s point, its unique and undoubtedly correct focus on Socrates as embodying an examined life, examining others, confirming the prophecy of the Delphic oracle and following his daimon, that providential mediator of gods and humankind. The Neoplatonists are at one about the necessity of the unity of life and thought, clearly embodied in Socrates, and the authors here find solace through Socrates, and the Neoplatonic interpretation of him, against the modern disaggregated self and its scholarly instantiation. However, I would say...