Plato's Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics logic of desire: Aquinas on emotion

1. Religion, Socrates, and the Platonic Socrates

15 1 Religion, Socrates, and the Platonic Socrates Socrates was born in 470 B.C. and died in 399, victim of a judicial murder at the hands of an Athenian democracy restored to power after a brief period of oligarchic tyranny in which some of Plato’s relatives had played a prominent role. His father was a stonemason, and Socrates belonged to the middle class of Athenian society, able therefore to serve as a “hoplite” infantryman, as he did with distinction during the Peloponnesian War. He had, however, many friends among the aristocracy and the political élites, was endlessly fascinating to bright young men, and became sufficiently well known to the Athenian public at large to be fit subject for caricature by the comic playwright Aristophanes. In The Clouds the poet was able to represent Socrates as a typical “sophist”: atheist, freethinker, charlatan , skilled “to make the worse argument appear the better.” Entertaining and unfair though the portrait is, it sheds light on Socrates’ fame as in some sort a representative of the new enlightenment, as well as on the popular view of that enlightenment. It is normal for satirical writers to present themselves (when it suits) as conservatives , defending the good old days and ways, but there can be little doubt that in portraying Socrates as subversive, Aristophanes was 16 Religion, Socrates & the Platonic Socrates touching a chord with his Athenian audience. In the Apology Plato himself, who would later depict a very sympathetic Aristophanes in the Symposium, has Socrates tell the jury at his trial that The Clouds had considerably damaged his reputation, indeed had hindered his chances of obtaining a fair hearing on charges revolving round blasphemy and “atheism.” Scholars agree that it is immensely difficult to be precise on what Socrates’ views (as distinct from those of the “Platonic” Socrates) actually were, but all accept the testimony of Aristotle that a major effect of his career was to direct thinkers of the age away from natural science to ethics. In confirmation of this, it is as moral philosopher that he is portrayed in the other principal contemporary witnesses to his life: Plato himself and the historian Xenophon, the latter no close member of the Socratic circle and composer of a portrait of Socrates so banal that one would be mystified as to how such a person would be considered a dangerous subversive, even by the philistine demagogues who ran Athens after the Peloponnesian War. I have no wish to construct yet another account of the moral thought of the historical Socrates. This is a book about Plato and what Plato took to be the outcome of reasoning in a Socratic spirit. I shall assume that Plato considered himself the true heir of Socrates and that his own ideas burgeoned at the point where he came to think Socrates had left off or failed. That means that in Plato’s portrait of Socrates it will be impossible to determine exactly where the historical Socrates ends and the idealized Socrates takes over. For my present purposes that is unimportant, even irrelevant. Plato built upon Socratic ideas and could claim to have improved them; his portrait of Socrates reflects that development, though the growth of his own thought was a gradual process, and I have here no full-scale scheme of demarcation to propose. Nevertheless, it will become clear—at least on some issues—roughly how I would construct such a scheme. Socrates’ philosophical life spanned the end of the Sophistic period of Greek thought, so we must first look at those aspects of 17 Religion, Socrates & the Platonic Socrates that movement with which he was concerned and determine why, in general, he was critical of the Sophists while recognizing the philosophical importance of many of the ethical problems they raised. Fifth-century Greeks had become aware of the diversity of religious, cultural, and social practices, not only among their own cities, but in the wider world. No longer content simply to assume superiority to their “barbarian” (that is, non-Greek-speaking) neighbors, they began to ask whether their own cultural habits and beliefs were necessarily so much more advanced, and if so, why—and in terms of the history of philosophy, that led to ethical relativism. But relativism , the idea (in one variant) that “when in Rome one does what the Romans do,” was not the only possibility. Perhaps beneath the variety of local conventional behaviors there lies...