The Philosophy of Socrates (review)

Book Reviews The Philosophy of Socrates. By Norman Gulley. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968. Pp. viii+222. $8.50) Although concerned with questions of history and scholarship, the primary business of Professor GuUey's book is philosophic (p. vii).x However, I doubt that philosophy meant to Plato's Socrates what it means to Gulley's Socrates. The difference concerns nothing less than the nature of the soul and its moral freedom. Gulley's Socrates demands for himself and for any individual the fight to be free to determine his own good (p. 178). In his eyes, all men are morally self-sufficient. Political order is not so much the child of repressive laws as of free, mutual clarification of ultimate goals through dialectical intercourse. Gulley notes that Plato and Aristotle were less optimistic about the redemptive virtues of dialectic in the political arena. In this view of Plato's relation to Socrates, Gulley seems to follow Farabi whose Plato combined the pedagogy of Socrates and Thrnsymachns: "the Socratic method with the elect, and Thrasymachus' method with the youth and the multitude" (The Philosophy of Plato, X, 36). Gulley would reject Farabi's Plato as he does the "authoritarianism" of his Plato and Aristotle. That authoritarianism arose from the mating of Socratic "intellectualism" with an un-Socratic realism about the dominant role of passion and/or weakness of will in most men (pp. 89-91, 134, 147-150, 160-164, 170-179). Precluding philosophy, that role required fear of punitive gods or laws as the basis of popular morality. Not only does Gulley condemn this harsh PlatonicAristotelian modification of Socratic intellectualism, he rejects Socratic intellectualism in favor of moral "subjectivism." Thus, he approves Aristotle's condemnation of Socratic "theorizing" in morality, while censuring what he regards as Aristotle's inconsistent recourse to theorizing in defense of the primacy of the theoretical way of life (pp. 138, 178, 212 [note 40]). According to Gulley's modified Aristotelianism, "the good is what each person conceives to be the good" (p. 147). Although Gulley notes that Socrates' search for one authoritative definition of the good militates against this moral subjectivism, he is convinced that, for Socrates, the summum bonum was not knowledge of the good, but critical analysis of one's notion of the good (pp. 201-204). Gulley's Socrates is more concerned with the individual's-any individual's--right of free choice than with "evaluating the principles which the individual has determined to be the right ones for him" (p. 178). Would a consistent devotee of this position hesitate to evaluate the morality chosen by a Hitler or a Mao? In this regard, GuUey rightly notes the naivete of those dismissing the choice of arbitrary tyranny as invariably suicidal (p. 173). Gulley's subjcctivism arises from his emphasis on freedom in morality. Consequently , he praises Aristotle's denial of the Socratic-Platonic thesis that all crime or sin is involuntary. If that were true, the criminal could not do otherwise and is, therei This review was assisted by a research grant from the Ford Foundation and Scripps College. The view of Socrates presented in it is further eLaborated in "Philosophers and Intellectuals" Social Research, 36 (1969), 562-584 and "The Permanent War of Students and Teachers," Journal o/ General Education, 21 (1970), 271-279. [335] 336 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY fore, not morally blameworthy. Aristotle makes this criticism in the realm of mora/ action in which the legitimacy of judges and courts must be respected. However, for Aristotle, this realm stands to the realm of intellectual activity as men do to gods or as medicine to health. It exists to provide the socio-polltical conditions in which intellectual virtue is tolerated. Thus Aristotle's defense of the criminal's free will is not intended to be a statement of scientific truth (Nicomachean Ethics, 1145A5-15; 1177B25-78B30; I113B15-35). Aristotle's moral-political philosophy is meant to do the job of Farabi's Thrasymachus: to prevent a breakdown of law and order in those communities toleiant of philosophy. One need not have recourse to the influence of psychiatrists and sociologists in the courts to realize the political dangers in...