Reexamining Socrates in the Apology

10. Becoming Socrates

209 10 Becoming Socrates Catherine H. Zuckert Readers have long observed significant differences among the dialogues in Plato’s depiction of Socrates. In some dialogues—for example, the Protagoras and Laches—Socrates merely refutes the opinions of his interlocutor(s) by showing that their views are contradictory. In dialogues like the Phaedo and Republic, however, Plato shows Socrates putting forth opinions and arguments of his own, especially concerning the eternally unchanging, purely intelligible “ideas” of the good, the noble, and the just. Embracing the nineteenth-century notion that the works of an author should be understood in terms of his “development,” commentators like Gregory Vlastos and Terence Irwin have suggested that the differences in the presentation of Socrates can be explained by sorting the dialogues according to the time at which Plato is supposed to have written them.1 Basing their argument partly on Aristotle’s report that Socrates raised questions only about moral phenomena and that Plato formulated the “theory of ideas” (Metaphysics 987a32–b10, 1078b12–1079a4, 1086a37–b11), these scholars contend that Plato must have written the dialogues in which he shows his teacher merely refuting the opinions of others early, because the picture Plato gives of Socrates in these dialogues corresponds most closely to the “historical” depiction of Socrates in the works of Xenophon.2 In the dialogues in which Socrates enunciates a “theory of the ideas,” Plato put his own arguments into his teacher ’s mouth. In the dialogues Plato wrote during this “middle” period, he was not yet willing explicitly to separate his own thought from that of his beloved teacher. He did so only in the “late” dialogues where the philosophical spokesman is not named Socrates.3 Unfortunately, as a number of recent commentators have pointed out, no one knows when Plato wrote any of his dialogues—or in what order.4 There is evidence, indeed, that he worked and reworked some, if not all, of them over long periods of time.5 Rather than try to explain differences in Plato’s depiction of Socrates on the basis of a highly speculative “chronology of composition,” I suggest we should pay more attention 210 B E C O M I N G S O C R A T E S to the times at which Plato indicates the conversations took place. If we do, we will see that, instead of reflecting stages in the development of his own thought, Plato’s varied depictions of his teacher trace the development of Socrates’ distinctive mode of philosophizing.6 In three retrospective statements in three different dialogues, Plato shows, Socrates explained how and why he adopted his characteristic philosophical stance and practices. On the last day of his life, in the Phaedo (96a–100a), the philosopher told his friends how he came to formulate the doctrine concerning the ideas that he used to criticize Zeno in the Parmenides. Relating the way in which he acquired his knowledge of “the erotic things” in the Symposium (201b–202a), Socrates indicated the way in which he attempted to address the difficulties Parmenides had pointed out in his teaching about the ideas by exploring what lies between the eternal intelligibles and the changing sensibles, that is, human opinions. To show how purely intelligible concepts can shape sensible existence, Socrates learned, he would have to persuade noble youths to join him in a life of philosophy. Unfortunately, he explained in the Apology of Socrates, both his examinations of the opinions of others concerning the noble and good, and the young people who imitated him by interrogating their elders, aroused the ire of his fellow citizens. Socrates’ explanation of his philosophical practice to his fellow Athenians has often served as an introduction to his philosophy not only for his contemporaries but also for later readers—appropriately so, because his defense is the only speech Plato shows Socrates giving to a public audience whose members were not very familiar with philosophical arguments. Although Socrates reiterates the fact that he is seventy years old and will soon die in any case, readers who take his defense as an introduction to his philosophy seem to ignore the implications of his having given the speech late in life. Reading the Apology in light of his retrospective explanations of the reasons and the way Socrates came to philosophize in the distinctive way that he did, we see that the practice the philosopher defends to his fellow Athenians resulted not only from a two-stage development in his thought but...