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FIVE Civic Wisdom, Divine Wisdom Isocrates, Plato, and Two Visions for the Athenian Citizen Since human nature cannot attain knowledge that would enable us to know what we must say or do, . . . I think that the wise are those who have the ability to reach the best opinions most of the time, and philosophers are those who spend time acquiring such an intelligence as quickly as possible. Isocrates, Antidosis 271 When [the soul] investigates itself, it passes into the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless, and . . . when it is once independent and free from interference [by the body], consorts with it always and strays no longer, but remains in that realm of the absolute, constant and invariable. . . . And this condition of the soul we call wisdom. Plato, Phaedo 79d The decades from the birth of Isocrates in 436 b.c.e. to his death in 338 were among the most tumultuous in Athenian history. When Isocrates was born, Athens was at the pinnacle of its military, economic, and cultural power in the Aegean world. When Plato was born almost a decade later, the Peloponnesian War was already under way. At the time he died in 347, the Greek world was still embroiled in interpolis rivalries and military conflicts that continued to sap its energies and to distract from what may have been the greatest threat against Greek political and cultural autonomy: the Persian king’s expansionist impulses. In the year of Isocrates’ death, Athens and most other Greek states fell under the hegemony of Macedon’s king Philip II, whose overriding ambition was to defeat the Persians once and for all. During these years the three principal threads of Greek philosophical thought—the Sophists’ emphasis on civic and practical excellence and on linguistic dexterity, Socrates’ pursuit of moral universals, and the Presocratics’ naturalistic investigations—found their fullest development and expression Civic Wisdom, Divine Wisdom 147 in the teachings of Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In several important ways Isocrates carries forward the interests and outlook of the older Sophists, though he explicitly rejects their teachings in his own writings. Plato, who became Socrates’ most illustrious and influential student, took his teacher’s inquiries to what he believed were their logical conclusions. In Aristotle’s writings, as we will see in the next chapter, we find an integration of Presocratic, sophistical, and Socratic thought in the first comprehensive philosophical system produced in the Western world. The writings of each of these thinkers express distinctive views of the relationship between wisdom and speech, philosophy and rhetoric. For Isocrates, philosophy and rhetoric merge into a single intellectual discipline aimed at educating the democratic statesman and at reforming the Athenian political culture. Plato, in contrast, draws a sharp line between them, identifying philosophy with the pursuit of immutable moral truths and subordinating a “true art” of rhetoric to this pursuit. Aristotle’s response to these divergent conceptions will be to identify two realms of “reality ” in which philosophy and rhetoric find their proper applications and to articulate two conceptions of wisdom to which each is linked. What follows presently is an illumination of the conceptions of wisdom and its relation to logos that emerge from the writings of Aristotle’s two teachers, Isocrates and Plato. The historical events through which these two men lived shaped their thinking and teaching. Before either of them reached the age of forty, Isocrates and Plato would witness the rupture of public morality in Athens, the rise of demagogues in civic life, acts of great brutality at the hands of the dêmos, the city’s military defeat by the Spartans and their allies, the rule of a ruthless tyranny, a bloody civil war, the execution of Socrates by a restored democracy, and the reemergence of Athens as an aspiring imperial power. This was a traumatic period, not just for Athens as a whole but perhaps especially for youthful citizens such as Isocrates and Plato as they sought their places in Athenian life. Isocrates was some nine years older than Plato (and outlived him by the same number), but his formative years were spent enduring the same upheavals, brutalities, and uncertainties that affected his younger compatriot. However, whereas Plato left Athens for an extended period following the execution of Socrates in 399, Isocrates remained, earning a living by writing speeches for others to deliver in the law courts and by teaching the civic arts to aspiring Athenian leaders. His political outlook and philosophical interests...

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