Socratic Humanism (review)

Book Reviews Socratic Humanism. By Laszlo Versenyi. Foreword by Robert S. Brumbaugh. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963. Pp. 184. $5) Even a cursory glance at Socratic historiography supports the contention that every generation produces a Socratic legend. Although the creation of legends is peculiar to many classical philosophers--witness Heidegger's Parmenides and Ryle's Plato--it is more so in the case of Socrates, for the Socratikoi logoi from Aristophanes to Aristotle already belong to the domain of interpretation. No matter how historically rigorous Burner, Zeller, and Taylor have been, they too, no less than the ancient philosophers, are bound to recognize that their solutions to the Socratic problem are theoretically plausible hypotheses whose chances of verification are rather slim. Eventually this situation led Gigon to commit the whole Socratic problem to the flames of scepticism. In the essay under review Versenyi, a student of Existentialism as well as of the Classics, accepts the problem's historical character with Socratic irony. The aim of his study is to recapture Socrates' doctrine in its purity and to establish what Socrates must have been so that "the Socratics for all their divergence could each claim to be authentically Socratic or at least to continue Socrates' work, elaborating the implications of his theories" (p. 117). He qualifies his goal by adding the restriction that any reconstruction of Socrates must conform to Aristotle's comments and must render the charges made against Socrates at least superficially credible. The sources chosen to accomplish this goal are Plato's early dialogues and parts of the Meno, Symposium, and Republic. He offers his findings as one man's view, makes no claim for its authenticity or historical finality, and leaves his readers to decide whether the hypothesis proposed is tenable. The result is a refreshing portrayal of the traditional view of a Socrates who is neither the founder of the theory of ideas nor a legendary figure but rather a practical moral teacher mainly concerned with the cultivation of man, his self-development, and self-unfolding into full humanity. Socrates asking questions on man's nature and trying to answer them without an appeal to transcendent forms is what Versenyi believes most authentically Socratic and what he has chosen to call Socratic humanism. As the author himself recognizes there is nothing revolutionary about this view. But the novelty of this treatment lies in Versenyi's masterful ability to show how existentialistic themes--such as love, death, ecstasy, unveiling--can be meaningfully applied to Socrates while discovering his identity. Hence Versenyi turns Socrates into a contemporary figure who can answer questions on human existence posed by scholars like himselL Justifiably enough, the resultant ambiguity of aim has provoked the criticism of historians (see Classical Philology, LXI (1966), pp. 200-201) who accuse Versenyi of reducing the certainty of history to the fancy of philosophical imagination. Yet if one grants (and who would not?) that Socrates is the "advocate and master of unveiling" (see Brumbaugh's foreward , p. viii), then there is no confusion in the goal of Versenyi's study and in its result. A Socrates with an existential commitment seems just as tenable an hypothesis as the Analysts' Socrates playing linguistic games. Unfortunately for the historian, Socrates presents an exception to Robinson's fifth criterion of historical rigor (Plato's Earlier Dialectic [Oxford, 1962], p. 3), and the certainty of historical truth is to give way to the endless search for philosophical truth. In the footsteps of F. C. S. Shiller, Versenyi considers the natural setting of Socrates' activity the sophistic movement centered around Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus which was fundamentally similar in goal and purpose but different in method to Socrates' humanism. Drawing not only from Plato's dialogues but also from the dissoi logoi and the treatise on "Ancient Medicine" Versenyi interprets Protagoras' ~.~po~ ~vOp~=or as the slogan of a prag- [791 80 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY matic-utilitarian movement. He analyzes the ~dwtov gp~-}~tov of the fragments neither as ~otdx~-.~r (perceived qualifies, hot, cold, bitter, and sweet) nor as Jv~ct (things in themselves) but as things one uses and needs, objects that concern us, affairs and events...