Isocrates and Civic Education

7. The Inscription of Isocrates into Aristotle’s Practical Philosophy

Did Aristotle Have a Close Encounter with Isocrates? THERE is a doxographical tradition that when the seventeen-year-old Aristotle first came to Athens he studied for three years with Socrates (Vita Marciana 3). Now that is plainly impossible. Socrates died in 399, while Aristotle was born in 384 and arrived in Athens in 367. It is not impossible, if “Socrates” is a mistake for “Isocrates,” as Anton Chroust has argued that it is (1973). It is significant in this highly speculative connection that Aristotle , having “transferred,” as we would put it, from Isocrates’ school to the Academy, made a name for himself by lecturing publicly on rhetoric. In that role, he would have been in a good position to confute Isocrates’ rhetoricbased conception of education, which he presumably knew firsthand.1 Aristotle would have been prepared for this task by having cut his teeth, as all young Academics did, on Socratikoi logoi, which served as instruments for dialectical training within the Academy (Kahn 1996). By devising imaginary conversations between well-known, and in some cases wellhated , personages whose fates were antecedently known to the audience (since they lived as long ago as the 1930s now seem to us), Plato asked his Academic pupils to appreciate subtle links between character traits, conversational style, and dialectical ability. It is probably in this way that Aristotle first encountered Plato’s Phaedrus, which contains some condescending, and possibly ironic, praise of the young Isocrates. Isocrates is said to be more philosophical in temperament than Lysias, the other focal orator in this dialogue (Phaedrus 279a). But, as in the case of figures such as Alcibiades, Charmides, and Critias, one must bear in mind that early promise is not always fulfilled, and that what begins well can end badly—if the burdens, as well as the pleasures, of philosophy are not correctly taken up. 157 7 david depew The Inscription of Isocrates into Aristotle’s Practical Philosophy Aristotle’s earliest extant works, such as the Gryllus and the Protrepticus , give us glimpses of his stump speeches on behalf of the Academy. In spite of sustained efforts to see in them intimations of the philosopher of the corpus Aristotelicum, these works exhibit little more than the boiler-plate sublimatory rhetoric of Plato’s middle period, which their author would have mastered in the course of his own dialectical education. The puzzle is that during Aristotle’s formative period the theory of Forms as we find it in Phaedo, Republic, and Symposium had already been set up as a target for Academicians, including the elderly Plato himself (Düring 1960). It would appear that Aristotle participated wholeheartedly in this revisionist project intra muros, perhaps even while he continued to give or circulate (like Isocrates ) extra muros the eloquent exoteric speeches for which he became known in antiquity. Yet Aristotle’s close encounters with the school of Isocrates, however they may have unfolded, whether directly or at a distance, seem to have left a mark. For in the course of developing his own philosophy Aristotle took it upon himself, perhaps uniquely among his peers, to produce a philosophical account of rhetoric—a “rhetoric within the bounds of reason,” as Kant might have put it—and to encase this account of rhetoric within a wideranging philosophy of “human affairs” (ta anthrōpina). This philosophy of the human sciences, as I will try to show, exhibits more traces of Aristotle’s encounter with Isocrates than the limited number of overt references to that figure in the Aristotelian corpus might suggest. I will argue for three points in this connection. First, Aristotle’s philosophy of human affairs—by which I mean the doctrines about praxis contained in Politics, both versions of Ethics, and less directly the subordinate technai discussed in Rhetoric and Poetics—can plausibly be read as a critique , more sustained and systematic than it is normally thought to be, of Isocrates’ views about topics which, in a text that clearly has Isocrates’ Antidosis in its gunsights (Nicomachean Ethics [EN] X.9.1181b15–16), Aristotle calls “ta anthrōpina,” human affairs (EN VI.7.1141b9; X.9.1181b15). Second, in criticizing Isocrates Aristotle pays him a backhanded compliment . He cooptively incorporates within his own philosophy of human affairs the meanings that Isocrates (but not Plato) assigned to key terms, notably phronēsis. At the same time, he constricts the conditions of applicability of these terms in a distinctly non-Isocratean way, subordinating practical reason (praxis) to theoretical (theo...