Introduction:
The "Neo-Aristotelian" Rejection of Plato
Neo-Aristotelians like Martha Nussbaum(1) and
Alasdair MacIntyre,(2) in spite of their many differences,(3)
are therefore united not only in their positive turn to Aristotle but also in their
rejection of Plato and Plato’s Socrates.(4) And yet
some features of these rejections invite further reflection. Nussbaum, for example,
consistently recognizes that the Socratic-Platonic project requires us to remake
ourselves: "In short, I claim that [in the Protagoras] Socrates offers us,
in the guise of empirical description, a radical proposal for the transformation of our
lives." (FG 117, LK 112) But to what extent has she done justice to the particular
kind of remaking Plato has Socrates offer us? More pointedly, does she acknowledge the
extent to which Socrates aims at focussing his interlocutors on a process of questioning,
rather than simply handing doctrine over to them?(5) Or has
her Socrates been flattened out, his dialogical style rendered monological, so as to
support her overall thesis more easily?(6) As for MacIntyre,
does he see clearly enough the parallel between his own work and Plato’s when he says
that in his earlier dialogues "Plato is pointing to a general state of incoherence in
the use of evaluative language in Athenian culture" (AV 131)? Mutatis mutandis,
isn’t this precisely what the opening chapters of After Virtue attempt to
show? And to what extent must MacIntyre’s "quest for the good" in his
crucial chapter "The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a
Tradition" be committed to a Platonic, rather than Aristotelian, notion of the good?
When he says "now it is important to emphasize that it is the systematic asking of
these two questions ["What is the good for me?" and "What is the good for
man?"] and the attempt to answer them in deed as well as in word which provide the
moral life with its unity" (AV 219, emphasis added), isn’t it Plato’s
Socrates who serves as the ultimate source of inspiration here?
While a full treatment of these questions is beyond the scope of this paper, they can
still serve to provoke us into considering whether there are more resources available in
the Socratic-Platonic alternative than such Neo-Aristotelian thought allows. In
particular, in this paper I want to suggest that the Protagoras, Gorgias, and
Meno(7) offer a unified moral conception, as worthy an
alternative to enlightenment theories as the Neo-Aristotelian views of MacIntyre and
Nussbaum. These dialogues taken together form a dramatic trilogy, telling one continuous
story(8): it is the story of Socrates’ confrontation
with the major sophistic figures and their students, beginning with young
Hippocrates’ desire to study with Protagoras and Socrates’ attempt, on
Hippocrates’ behalf, to put Protagoras put to the test; working through a display of
the relations between a "second-generation" sophistic teacher like Gorgias and
his pupils Polus and Callicles, which ends paradoxically with a philosophical
transformation of the teacher and a failure of his students to follow him(9);
to a direct confrontation between a "real life" political follower of Gorgias
like Meno, who comes to Socrates with a crucial question but fails to learn much of
anything from him. The core of the unified moral conception here is the dialectical
activity of Socrates, "the patron saint of moral philosophy,"(10)
and its implications: the development of a moral practice that contrasts with sophistic
education, usually thought of as "Socratic elenchus"; the crucial notions of the
unity of arete and that arete is knowledge; and the psychological and political
consequences of Socrates’ moral practice. All of these implications have as their
guiding notion "self-education": the idea that we must each take the
responsibility upon ourselves for our own paideia.
Some Central Themes Developed in the Protagoras, Gorgias, and Meno
The theme enframing these three dialogues is the teachability of arete: the motivating
occasion for Socrates’ discussion with Protagoras is young Hippocrates’ desire
to study with Protagoras, in order to become "a man of respect in the city" (P
316c), and the Meno begins with the direct question: "Can you tell me,
Socrates, can arete be taught?" (M 70a) and ends with the glimmer of possibility that
there might be "someone among our statesmen who can make another into a
statesman" (M 100a).(11) Whereas the sophists claim to
make people better (P 318a-b, 348e-349a, G 460a; cf. M 95c (12)),
Socrates wonders whether this is possible, and whether it would really be possible as a
techne (P 319a-320b). The bulk of the Protagoras therefore focusses on the
question of the unity of arete in order to determine whether Protagoras really practices a
techne. Socrates’ conversation with Gorgias, too, focusses on what Gorgias’
techne, rhetoric, is (G 448eff.), and whether it is in fact a techne (see G 462e-466a and
502d, but also the less frequently cited 480c-481b and 503a-b).
Thus Socrates attacks the sophists’ claim to practice a techne. In the Gorgias,
though, Socrates himself claims to practice the politike techne:
I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians—so as not to say I’m the only
one, but the only one among our contemporaries—to take up the political craft and
practice the true politics. This is because the speeches I make on each occasion do not
aim at gratification but at what’s best. They don’t aim at what’s most
pleasant. (G 521d)(13)
Socrates therefore lays claim to the techne Protagoras and Gorgias (the former
explictly [P 319a], the latter implicitly [G 452e, 460a]) believed themselves to practice.
But what could this mean? And how could such a claim be aligned with the frequent avowal
of Socratic ignorance (e.g. P 361c-d, G 509a, M 71a-c)?
In my view, the techne Socrates is pointing to here just is his practice of conversing
with interlocutors. More precisely, this is the techne of focussing his interlocutor on a
particular kind of question, the what-is question (see P 360e-361d, G 448d-449a, M 71a-b,
86c-e). Note that this interpretation allows Socrates’ claim to practice(14)
a techne not to contradict his claim of ignorance: practicing a "craft" of
questioning does not imply that one "knows the answers"(15)
to the questions one asks. Furthermore, as befits a political "art,"
Socrates’ ability to practice this techne is going to be directly proportional to his
interlocutors’ engagement in the questioning: a distinctive feature of the political
art is that it "works on" citizens, who, themselves having logos, are capable of
engaging in politics, too. (More on this below.)
In what may seem to be a frustratingly formal sense, Socrates himself actually answers
the "what-is-arete?" question his conversations in these dialogues focus on: in
response to Meno’s first attempted definition of arete, Socrates claims that it is an
eidos, a "form" (72c). Thus the kind of unity Socrates holds that arete has is
not fully grasped by either the biconditional interpretation of Vlastos(16) or
the unity-of-a-psychic-state interpretation of Penner.(17)
The former leaves open the question why the biconditional should hold, and the
latter—although it is surely right in holding that "when Socrates said
‘Virtue is one,’ he meant it quite literally!"(18)—fails
to account sufficiently for the fact that a "psychic state" in which one knew
all goods and evils, past and future included, is surely not one any living human being
will ever fully instantiate. It must therefore be a form.(19)
Rather than thinking the unity of the form in terms of the unity of a thing, thereby
inviting the objection that this is merely reduplicating some part of "this
world," these dialogues invite us to think the unity of the form in terms of the
unity of a path of questioning or of a single subject matter. Consider, for example,
Socrates’ emphasis on the "about what" question in his discussions with
Protagoras and Gorgias (see e.g. P 318c-d, G 449d, 451a-e): he wonders whether there is
some "one thing" at which their teaching aims, toward which their speeches are
focussed. His own dialectical practice (his "political craft") is always
focussed in this way on the form of arete: hence he always tries to draw his interlocutors
toward the what-is-arete? question.
At this point we must attempt to face squarely what it means for Socrates to hold that
arete is knowledge—what kind of knowledge is at stake here? If we pay attention to
both its drama and its dialectic, to use Kahn’s terms,(20) the
middle part of the Meno is helpful here. Socrates uses the discussion with the
slave to point Meno, who has lost his way toward arete, in the direction of a certain kind
of knowledge. A crucial moment comes when Socrates’ attempt to put Meno on stage for
himself is made explicit, when the slave, like Meno before him, reaches a moment of aporia
(84a). Socrates then asks Meno—mimicking Meno’s own language about torpedo fish
and speeches before large audiences—whether the slave is better off now, knowing that
he does not know, than when he thought wrongly that he knew, and whether the slave has
been harmed by being made perplexed and numb. Meno appears to agree that the slave is
better off and that he has not been harmed. The kind of knowledge Socrates holds out for
Meno here is knowledge about himself—knowledge of the mistake Meno made when he threw
his little tantrum after being reduced to perplexity (80a-b, 80d). That is, Meno needs to
see that an active recognition of his own shortcomings would help him, not harm him.
If this is well-oriented, there is a way to connect up Socratic self-knowledge and the
kind of knowledge or understanding of the form arete that Socrates seeks here. Knowledge
of our own falling short of the form has as its necessary complement a positive grasp of
what the form itself is: truly to see, for example, that you are like a spoiled tyrant,
"forever giving orders in a discussion" (M 76b), is to see beyond this to the
kind of self-ruling that belongs to arete itself.(21) An
interlocutor who saw the point of Socrates’ elenchus, and who thoroughly participated
in that elenchus—say, a Meno who acknowledged his own tyrannical
self-conception—would ipso facto see beyond such tyranny to a more positive
conception of arete, to "the life that is adequate to and satisfied with its
circumstances at any given time," as the Gorgias puts it (493c).
The psychological and political implications of this view are drawn out clearly enough.
As Socrates goes on to point out, Meno fails even to attempt to rule himself, because he
is attempting to rule Socrates (86d). (Notice that by contrast, Socrates does not force
his interlocutors: he tries to get them to face the what-is-arete? question squarely; if,
as happens here, they refuse to do so, and so fail to engage themselves fully in Socratic
questioning, he lets them have their way, as he does with Meno here.) Imagine, though, a
Meno who understands what Socrates is trying to show him. The soul of such a Meno would
"rule itself" in the Socratic sense (see G 491d-e): satisfied with whatever it
has at the moment, it would be beyond the pleonexia that drives Meno’s definitions (M
71e, 73d, esp. 77b) just as it drives Callicles (see e.g. G 483c-d). Such a soul would
therefore be beyond the psychological condition that fuels the "power politics"
to which such interlocutors are committed. No longer wanting more and more, it would want
instead to continue to inquire into what the human good—arete—itself is.
Self-Education in the Protagoras, Gorgias, and Meno
The central themes developed in the Protagoras, Gorgias, and Meno can
be gathered together in the notion of self-education, a notion explictly referred
to—though not without irony—at Meno 96d-e:
We are probably poor specimens, you and I, Meno. Gorgias has not adequately
educated you [see M 70b-c, 71b-c], nor Prodicus me [see P 339eff.]. We must then at all
costs turn our attention to ourselves and seek someone who will in some way make us
better.
It is worth playing out the contrast between the sophistic/rhetorical notion of
education, referred to here through the figures of Gorgias and Prodicus, and the Socratic
notion of self-education. For Protagoras, education takes place by compelling the student
to follow a prescribed path (see esp. P 325c-326e)(22);
Gorgias shows how such education is independent of any content (G 459c). For Socrates, on
the other hand, the psychic activity of the student is crucial; as one interpreter puts
it, "insight is nothing if it remains external, another’s opinion and not
one’s own act."(23) Thus the need to seek someone
else as one’s teacher (dramatically represented by Hippocrates, Polus, and Meno) is
replaced by the desire to be one’s own teacher, even when one is conversing with
others.(24) The crucial notion here is self-compulsion,
holding oneself accountable; given such concern, one feels no need to force the
conversation to go one’s own way (contrast Protagoras at P 335a and Socrates at P
338d and 348a). As Socrates puts it in the Gorgias, he "wouldn’t be any
less pleased to be refuted than to refute" (458a).
Socratic paideia, then, is:
the commitment to a line of inquiry focussing on the what-is-arete question,
which culminates in the moment in which one realizes one’s own falling short of the
form of arete, thereby revealing to one a more positive sense of what arete itself
is—the revelation of which itself commits one to overcoming one’s present lack
of self-rule.
Notice that Socratic irony has a special place here: by leaving the interlocutor to
himself, pointedly not trying to explain what arete is to his interlocutor (in fact, not
even saying when he is being ironic!), Socrates brings his interlocutor to choose for
himself whether to engage in this kind of inquiry.(25) It is
precisely this kind of self-activity that constitues Socratic self-education.(26)
Towards a Socratic-Platonic Critique of Neo-Aristotelian Moral Theory?
It has been noted how close to the Aristotelian perspective several features of
Protagoras’ "great speech" (P 320c-328d) are.(27)
But we are now in a position to cast a different sort of light on this: to the extent that
Socrates offers a critique of Protagoras’ educational views in the Protagoras,
Gorgias, and Meno, we can now see how a Socratic-Platonic critique of
Neo-Aristotelian moral theory would go, even if this is not the occasion to work out such
a critique in full detail or come to a final decision about its cogency.
The crucial idea would be that the kind of insight discussed above must in a certain
sense precede the commitment to ethical habit which is the lynchpin of Aristotle’s
ethical theory. Thus I would argue, for example, that Nussbaum’s recognition of the
fragility of one’s own goodness is not denied by Plato’s Socrates, but instead
that a truly Socratic acknowledgement of such fragility leads one to an insight into the
good itself that transforms one’s character radically. (Why would it follow from the
fragility of our goodness that the good itself must be fragile? In fact, just the opposite
must be the case—in order for us to recognize how our goodness has shattered, we see
it as falling short of a goodness that remains whole.) It is not that Plato’s
Socrates overlooks or denies the need to become "finely aware and richly
responsible,"(28) so much as he sees the need for a
distinct kind of knowledge to precede the development of the kinds of habits such
perceivers have.
And must not MacIntyre’s quest for the good be understood, finally, in terms of
the Socratic "self-education" discussed above? His insistence that a quest is
"always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in
self-knowledge" (AV 219) embodies precisely that tension between knowing the form and
knowing one’s self(29) to which Socratic inquiry is
committed. Such a quest can be "self-fulfilling" in a positive sense.(30)
By acknowledging explicitly our own aporia, our own falling short of the goal,
then—in a paradoxical fashion, like the puzzling figure of Socrates himself, who
seems somehow to instantiate the virtue he seeks, even as he claims both that such virtue
is knowledge and that he himself is ignorant of what it is—we thereby achieve, in a
human rather than divine fashion, that very goal.
This kind of response to Neo-Aristotelianism might provoke us to further questions: (1)
To what extent is the understanding presented in the Protagoras, Gorgias, and
Meno transformed in the Republic and other "middle-period" Platonic works?
Does Plato himself criticize this Socratic notion of self-education in, say, the Republic?(31)
Or is that notion instead preserved there?(32) (2) To what
extent could this Socratic-Platonic view be appropriated today? Have Nussbaum, by making a
case for the fragility of our goodness side-by-side with a recognition of the
Socratic-Platonic remaking of the self, and MacIntyre, by arguing for a lifelong quest for
the good already gestured in this direction?
But these are no doubt best understood as questions to be pursued on another occasion.
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