Who was Socrates?
Socrates was an Athenian citizen, executed for poisoning with hemlock in 399 BC, at the age of 70. He was the son of a stonemason, Sophroniscus, and a midwife, Phainarete, who lived all his life in Athens, only rarely leaving the city on military campaign. His life was spent in the extraordinary golden -and black- years of Athens in the second half of the 5th century BC. when, as the Athenian empire spectacularly triumphed and failed, there was an explosion of culture: poetry, drama, historiography, and philosophy, as well as art and architecture (this is the age of the Parthenon).
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all this was happening at the same time as a great political ferment: a 30-year war between athens and sparta that was the background of much of the discussion about politics that happened then. In this context, the figure of Socrates, in at least one incarnation, says that he will not get involved in politics and that it is the best thing that ever happened to Athens. Socrates did not write anything, but he spoke. and in doing so, to the Athenians he represented in one way or another a deep and abiding threat. of all the subversive characters of the late fifth century -and there were many, politicians, thinkers, tragicians, comic writers- what socrates did in athens terrified them. it is the enigma of that threat that those who wrote, and write, about it, try to solve.
“some treat him like a martyr; some treat him as a philosophical enigma, others as a hero”
Socrates was an ordinary citizen. he served in the army, as all citizens did; he went to the assembly and voted, as all citizens did; and he spoke in some accounts, he spoke to anyone who responded to him, in others that he was engaged in philosophical conversation with the young men of the Athenian elite. he did not make money like that, asking philosophical questions, and he insists that – unlike the sophists, the itinerant professors of rhetoric or philosophy or getting away with it in court – he did not make a living like that, but was central in their life. and this was clearly part of the threat: the Athenians brought him to court and killed him. The consequence of that was to polarize what people thought of Socrates forever. Far from simply dealing with his local troublemaker in response to his political difficulties, the Athenians created a figure who, as he has been presented and represented in the millennia since, has been an icon to all. it is remarkable how many people of completely different beliefs say ‘I am a Socratic’, both in ancient times and today. some treat him like a martyr; some treat him as a philosophical conundrum, some as a hero. In trying to understand Socrates, we meet as many Socrates as there are people who describe him.
because, like I said, he didn’t write anything. All we have of Socrates is the writings of other people who used him in various ways as a character or model: Aristophanes, the comic playwright, Xenophon, a rather tiresome chronicler, all the other composers of the Socratic dialogues that were in vogue at the time. fourth century – and of course Plato, whose protagonist is usually. if we think about what these writers tell us, we may be mistaken if we treat it as “evidence” for some particular historical figure. Instead of talking about Socrates, we can think of Aristophanes, Xenophon or Plato who represent Socrates to us. and that may seem a bit strange. how strange to do philosophy under the aegis of some special figure, repeatedly represented again and again in different configurations. Why, we might ask, do later philosophers insist on the Socratic provenance of it? Why did this enigmatic figure exercise such influence in the business of philosophy after his death? is it feeling? or something deeper through the history of philosophy itself?
How did Socrates manage to irritate the Athenians to such an extent?
I can’t say what the Athenians really thought or felt. maybe they could catch the other people who were teaching the youth and who were causing all kinds of political fuss, because they were doing it for money, and a lot of them were foreigners anyway, and they could just go back to where they came from. maybe it was because socrates was doing this for nothing, and that seemed completely suspicious. or maybe they really thought he was corrupting the young or not obeying the state religion. perhaps in this moment of crisis the Athenians looked for a scapegoat; perhaps, in fact, the nature of the charges against him, both formal and otherwise, are characteristic of regimes in crisis. Or maybe it was more particular to Socrates himself.
“in a state of political turmoil, someone who encourages young people to question the establishment may be an intolerable risk”
if you think about the nature of the philosophizing he was engaged in, more than the sophists, the playwrights or the historians, his main interest was in argumentation and explanation, especially in the question of value. as Plato represents him, at least, he verifies and reverifies the basis of the argument, the statement, and the principle, and follows the argument where it leads. it is often not obvious whether he espouses a certain opinion, apart from a few general principles, such as “I’d rather die than do injustice”; instead, most of the time was spent examining the opinions of others. but this kind of conscientious defiance, learned by the young and careless, could be dangerous, and was certainly so presented by critics and accusers of him. one of the charges brought against him was that he was seen as strengthening the weakest argument. In a state of political turmoil, someone who encourages young people to question the establishment may be an intolerable risk.
your first choice is one of plato’s most famous writings, the apology.
This is Plato’s version of Socrates’ court speech. it’s very short, but it gives us all sorts of extraordinary things. on first reading it’s a brilliant piece of forensic oratory.
socrates begins by saying ‘well, my opponents are incredibly polished and have wonderful things to say, but of course everything they have to say is false; while, poor me, I’ve never done this kind of thing before, but everything I’m going to tell you is true”. and yet he overrides all of that, because it’s actually an incredibly polished piece of rhetoric. that can distract the reader from the philosophical content. but when you look at it more closely, it becomes, i think, two separate thoughts that socrates gives to the accusers of him and to the jury that he is about to convict him. the first thought is this. Socrates says that he faces two kinds of accusation, one old and one new. the former is the general sentiment against him in the city, that he studies metaphysics[!] and that he “makes the worst argument the strongest, and teaches others how to do the same”. the (new) real charge against him is that he corrupts the youth and does not believe in the gods of the city. he deals with both charges at once by complaining that people assume he knows what he’s doing. but, he says he, he doesn’t know.
people resent him because they think he has wisdom and somehow pretends; but he only concedes that he has the wisdom to know that he is not wise. what is brilliant about the philosophical content of the apology is that he explains what he means by it. because, he says, he has spent his life going around talking to people who might know more than he does, and he shows the various conditions for knowledge or wisdom that each of them fails. some of them do not know the truth; some of them know the truth, but only get it by inspiration; some know the truth because they know a trade, but they think that because they know a trade they are experts in everything else. his argument is that all these people are mere pretenders to knowledge, because they do not fulfill these conditions about knowledge, while he alone is the person who understands what knowledge is. what’s creepily exciting about this text is that on the back of forensic oratory there’s this examination of what we might think the value of knowledge is, how we might understand its dimensions, and what we might think about its scope. the philosophical content surprises you when you think that all this is just a rhetorical flourish: it is completely extraordinary.
“you must explain what it is for a life to have value: until you can do that, your ethical theories are null”
The second thought is ethical. Socrates remembers where in the Iliad Achilles, who had the great advantage of being the son of a goddess, which gives him some additional advantages, was allowed to choose his future. he could choose a really long and boring life, come home from troy, get married, have lots of kids, get really bored but live to old age; or he could have great glory against Troy and die in the heat of battle. Socrates imagines himself with this kind of choice, faced with the possibility that the jury will sentence him to death. Socrates says, “Look, suppose you offer me the choice of surviving but abandoning philosophy, or continuing to philosophize and die.” he chose the second: death is preferable to abandoning philosophy”. again, it seems that this is a rhetorical trope. but is not; instead, it’s a wonderful treatment of how we explain the values of all the lives we live. it is that life has its value when it continues for a long time, without the things that make it valuable; Or does it consist of the things that make it valuable? That is an agenda that Socrates proposes not only for Plato, but also for all subsequent ethical theorists. you must explain what it is for a life to have value: until you can do that, your ethical theories are empty and empty.
Is this implied or something that is explained in detail in the apology?
In a sense, Socrates’ choice is entirely specific to his own case: it is the choice he is going to make in that situation in the face of possible execution. but he goes on to say that if he is killed, there will be no one left to ask the questions he asks, and that this will be a great loss for the Athenians. So Socrates’ questions are generalizable. the way this is stated gives us this philosophical content, even though it appears to be a standard piece of rhetoric. that is the genius of plato, of course; that’s what plato does.
this is much more sophisticated as writing than most writing philosophies today. it’s amazing that 2500 years ago there were writers who were better at writing about ideas than anyone alive today, even though there are far more philosophers in our age.
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“The question is not ‘what should I do now?’, it is Socrates’ deepest question: ‘how to live better?’”
this is the question of how to read plato. Some people think that in a dialogue like the apology you get just a little bit of philosophy, something about what value is, something about what knowledge is, but that is really a rhetorical tour de force, and not much else. That seems to me to miss something absolutely fundamental about the way Plato writes. he writes so that philosophy reaches the end. for philosophical thought, he supposes, you can’t separate yourself and say ‘today I’m going to do philosophy in my studio; and tomorrow I’m going to be in court, and that’s something different.’ however, plato too often reads as if the dialogues were little wagons carrying bits of platonic doctrine, and you just have to pick those bits and let the wagon roll away down the track. That, I think, is an impoverished reading of Plato that he himself gives us the material to reject. but he also ignores the view that is put into the apology itself, that when you talk about ethical or political questions, you talk about entire lives, not about philosophical moments whose environment can be ignored, and whose importance for its exponent is indifferent. so bernard williams, in the first chapter of his book ethics and the limits of philosophy, insists that when you start to think about the nature of ethics, the question is not “what should i do now?”, it is the Socrates’ deepest question. : ‘how to live better?’, the change in scope is really important to understand what these ancient texts can contribute to contemporary thought.
You have chosen Aristophanes’ Cloud Game as your second book. Aristophanes gives a quite different view of Socrates than Plato’s comprehensive description.
yes. this is a famous work of a great comic writer. it’s fun in its own right; but it probably appears in the apology as one of the sources of the “old” accusation against socrates. In the Clouds Socrates is lampooned: he is the comic figure arriving in a basket, and he is clearly a grimy old man, a chipper, and a swindler. The play is the story of Strepsiades, who is in debt because his son keeps spending his money on horses, and hopes that Socrates can educate him so that he can win his court cases and get out of debt. it is a domestic drama. but the clouds is also a philosophical game. If you read it in some sort of relation to the things Plato says in the Republic or the Phaedo, or the Apology, there are all sorts of philosophical moves in the clouds that are familiar from other, more serious passages in Plato. for example, the chorus (there were choruses in classical comedies, as in tragedies) is a chorus of clouds. one of the lines that they repeat several times in the work is “we are the clouds, we can explain anything that needs explanation: we explain the thunder, the lightning, the crops that grow, etc.” why do you need other gods?’, and that kind of argument, which is a classic philosophical argument about ontological economics, is one that Plato himself uses in places (in connection with his so-called theory of forms in the Parmenides dialogue ). , and Aristotle, later, too, but it is also, surprisingly, the argument that Aristophanes presents in the play, and not in the mouth of Socrates.
“reading the clouds and apologizing for a snapshot of athens in the late fifth century”
but the claim of ontological parsimony of the clouds, as one might say, is a basis for the indictment against socrates, namely that he was encouraging the young not to believe in the gods of the city. In the apology, Socrates complains that the minds of the Athenians have been polluted by this very work, and he may be right; But it is ironic that the damaging argument is not represented by Socrates at all, but by the playwright’s own choir. the old calumny is not too careful in attributing him.
It is extraordinary that we have both works from two thousand five hundred years ago: both the clouds and the apology that alludes to them. in the apology socrates suggests that this play has damaged his chances of getting a fair hearing at court, and there is the play, and you can see not only why it would have done so much damage, but also how deeply into the fabric of greek philosophical ideas of thought had permeated. there’s even a bit at the end where the fair argument and the unfair argument have an argument with each other. it seems familiar to us, the kind of discussion you might have in a platonic dialogue, in a philosophical text.
It is revealing, then, of the cultural scope of philosophy at the time, that this philosophy is included in an obviously funny play, with jokes about measuring the jump of a flea, abundant eschatological material, and some allusions to Persian slippers that I never fully understood (clearly rude, but I have no idea why). if you read the clouds and the apology side by side you get a snapshot of athens in the late 5th century in the combination of something that was written at the time (aristophanes text) and something that was written later looking back (Plato’s apology). there you can see a lot about what it would have been like to live in the terrifying ferment of athens at that time with the spartans at the gates at any moment.
How do we decide between the two? the socrates received is the socrates of plato, possibly because plato is a great writer. But couldn’t Aristophanes’ Socrates be more precise?
do we have to decide? there was a man who talked to people in the street and was killed with hemlock in 399 BC. c., that is well attested. But the representations of Socrates are all representations: even the version of Xenophon, who is a rather boring, dignified guy who does dignified things. so I reject the question, I think. what one might think is that the explicit reference in the apology to the representation of Socrates in the clouds makes us see as we read (especially if we read the two texts side by side) that the Socrates of the apology is also a representation, just as much as the Socrates of the clouds. that makes us rethink how we treat the representations of particular thinkers: if the representation is supposed to give us a lens on some historical reality, or if it is doing something very different. both in the apology and in the clouds he is doing something very different. that helps us understand what’s going on in the other books I’ve chosen as well. They all represent a historical figure in ways that are not intended to be transparent to the historical figure, whatever it may be, but in ways that make us think about the representation itself and its role in our understanding of Socrates’ question, ‘how best to live? ?’
You have chosen another book by Plato, the Theaetetus. does that represent the same socrates we saw in plato’s apology?
The Socrates of the Theaetetus is more like the Socrates of the Apology than the Socrates of the Republic, which many think was written between the Apology and the Theaetetus. the socrates of the republic is in charge, and takes the lead role in crafting what is said; and although what is said there is often marked as tentative or provisional, the dialogue is not one that ends in a dead end or an aporia. The Theaetetus, by contrast, provides what appears to be a complete dead end, and descriptively reminds us of the depicted figure of Socrates as we saw him in the Apology and in some of the earlier works. but that makes us think a bit more about theaetetus itself: how it is constructed and whether the Socratic representation is integrated here with the heavy arguments about knowledge.
the great contemporary translation of the theaetetus is by m j levitt, with a masterful introduction by myles burnyeat, which makes clear the deep philosophical meaning of this dialogue and its utterly puzzling nature. The Theaetetus begins with a long account of who Socrates is, how his mother was a midwife, and how he himself does not propose theories: he deals with people who are ‘pregnant’ in mind and finds out if they have real ideas or ‘wind eggs’ . so this opening offers a theme and variations on the figure of socrates offered by the apology, the euthyphro or the laches, focusing on how we approach philosophical discussion, how we approach philosophical research and how we relate to each other. This is followed by a very dense argument about whether knowledge is perception, interrupted by a six-page digression on the nature of the philosopher, presented as a hopeless imbecile who falls into wells because he doesn’t look where he’s going because he’s too busy trying to figure it out. look like god then an even thicker argument about knowledge and belief ends the dialogue in a final dead end.
“deal with people who are ‘pregnant’ in mind and find out if they have real ideas or ‘wind eggs’”
In short, the dialogue raises many more questions than it resolves (about knowledge, about the structure of reality, about the nature of perception); but he also offers a challenge in his portrayals of Socrates: why is all this sharp argument bracketed in these twin passages on the nature of the philosopher, or the portrayal of this particular philosopher? And why Plato, clearly interested as he is in the representation of a philosopher, whether historical figure or stereotype, juxtaposes that rich material here to highly abstract discussions of knowledge and reality. Why, here, do we need to think of Socrates’ sterility of ideas, or his engagement with other people, or the solitary enterprise of the philosopher seeking to become like God? It seems that we have a number of different paradigms here, some of them identified with Socrates and some of them identified with other figures that Socrates produces for us, but all of them are somewhat inconclusive.
The inconclusiveness of these models of philosophy reflects the inconclusiveness of the dialogue, and invites the reader to think not only about knowledge and ignorance, and how we are disposed towards them, but also brings us back, in the figures of the philosophers , to the question of how that kind of inquiry is, or should be, part of a life. Socrates’ depictions, even in this austere discussion of knowledge and belief, still invite us to ask “how best to live?” This happens in Plato’s writings over and over again: he uses the context of the formal arguments to push the discussion upwards, making you think of the principle rather than the particular argument at hand. theaetetus is the most extraordinary version of that. it’s also quite funny.
are you suggesting that when plato came to write the theaetetus, he reverted to representing the real socrates, after a phase in writing the republic in which the character “socrates” was simply a mouthpiece for plato’s own ideas?
Many people assume that we should think of Plato’s development psychologically. the idea could be that the young plato admired socrates tremendously, so in his early works he depicts socrates doing philosophy (so to speak, the ‘historical’ socrates), then suddenly when plato wanted to say something on his own name, the character ‘socrates’ became a kind of peg to hang those ideas, so in those dialogues ‘socrates’ actually means plato. that is indeed a tenable view, albeit a somewhat naive one, psychologically speaking. however, I think he may be undermined by the characteristics of the theaetetus he was mentioning, as well as the connections between the theaetetus and other dialogues: apology, pheodo, republic, for example.
“The representations of Socrates invite us to ask: how to live better? ”
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because the theaetetus is much more reflective than dogmatic: when thinking about the figure of the philosopher, it makes us think about the two paradigms at the same time and ask ourselves if either of them is the correct way of approaching things. the entire dialogue, in this sense, is reflective, both about what knowledge is and about what it would be like to live life with knowledge-oriented values: to live as a lover of wisdom, a philosophos. but reflection like this is not the same as skepticism: the puzzles, dead ends, and uncertainties of the dialogues, and of the figures represented in the dialogues, are not, I think, just an enormously sophisticated system of skepticism. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. Rather, Plato repeatedly raises the paradigm (of knowledge, of philosophy) and makes us see how the paradigm can fail. the purpose of that, in my opinion, is to make us think about the paradigm, instead of making us think that knowledge is impossible and that we should go and sit on a barrel.
are you saying that although plato through socrates leads us to question the basis of any knowledge, is he not suggesting that the end point is that we give up the quest and just wring our hands?
I don’t think that the theetetus arguments conclusively undermine what is said in the republic, but they do allow us to take a critical view of it. it is like the difference between a treatise that gives us a philosophy and something that philosophizes with us. There is much more to Plato’s second than we might think (or tradition would have us believe). in fact, it often establishes a critical relationship between one dialogue and another, perhaps again to make us reflect on the arguments and claims that they offer, rather than to demand a commitment to one or another particular thesis. so it may well be worth thinking of a triangular relationship between the figure of the philosopher in the apology, the figure of socrates in the republic, and the two figures of philosophers given in the theathetus, in the context of theathetus’s question as to whether we understand what knowing is, the conditions we put on knowledge: is it true belief, true belief with a story, or perception?
“Plato repeatedly raises the paradigm (of knowledge, of philosophy) and makes us see how the paradigm can fail”
There is a trope, repeated throughout the Platonic corpus, in which Socrates admits that he doesn’t know about a particular subject, but at the same time says that he recognizes some conditions that must be placed on any proper answer. you get stuck trying to give a general explanation of what, for example, beauty is, but Socrates suggests conditions that must be attached to the answer. One of the things that Plato makes clear in the process is that this is very much what philosophy does: he not only presents first-order answers, but he thinks about what the constraints are on those answers. the philosophical enterprise is at that level: at the level of thinking about thinking. but we can miss that in plato, if we miss what’s going on with the figure of socrates in his dialogues.
your last two chosen books were written two thousand five hundred years after the ones you have chosen so far…
yes. my fourth choice is gregory vlastos’s socrates: ironist and moral philosopher. Vlastos was a great figure of ancient philosophy in the United States, in the second half of the twentieth century. this book and the work that accompanied it created a school of interpretations of socrates and of plato versus socrates, thoughts about how we should understand the socratic method, etc., that dominated much of anglo-american (less european) ancient philosophy for a long time weather. it is a wonderfully lucid book, a series of well-delimited chapters, many of which had their antecedents in separate essays. there is something about the chronology of the platonic dialogues, and something about direct evidence for the nature of socrates’ theorizing, and about how we can distinguish between what counts as socratic and what counts as platonic. For Vlastos, Socrates is transparently present in the dialogues, and has philosophical theories that are exclusively ethical. then comes plato and does metaphysics and epistemology and talks about knowledge and what there is. so, in a sense, the book offers the distinction I have been drawing: between the figure of the philosopher and the more austere features of theorizing about what it is to know, or what there is. vlastos saw the figure of socrates as someone to aspire to be, not only to think about what he said, but to be that person. that appears in his writing. he is hugely passionate and committed, and has an air of certainty at times that sometimes obscures the ways in which what he says is not only highly controversial, but also highly debatable.
One of the central theses of Vlastos’s book is an account of what we should say about Socratic irony. When we see the figure of Socrates and he says things that seem ironic to us, what do we think he means? when he says to a conceited man like euthyphro-‘teach me, because I don’t know anything about this subject at hand, but I’m sure you know, so you can correct me…’, what do we take from the plate, socrates does he mean? vlastos has a description of how we should understand this kind of irony: as ‘complex irony’, where socrates says what he means and doesn’t say what he means and we, the listeners and readers, can negotiate the difference between those two positions. then Socrates is not lying; nor is he being unpleasant. irony is not sarcasm.
Instead, Socrates offers a puzzle with the gap between where Socrates means what he says and where he doesn’t; and that gap is itself capable of explanation and account. as a consequence we can understand what Socrates says in terms of truth and falsehood; but in terms of truth and falsity at different levels of implication and explanation. philosophical work is done through the negotiation between these two levels; but the figure of Socrates himself remains completely free of deception. Instead, Socrates’ commitments are mostly hidden, but are, in later work and exposition, scrutinizing and morally sound. The figure of Socrates, therefore, can remain a moral paradigm even when he forces the argumentative clarity of his interlocutor by not saying what he means. socrates is hidden, in the opinion of vlastos, he is not saying what he thinks; but he is not deceitful or morally low. there is a wonderful figure at the end of the symposium where alcibiades describes socrates with these amazing little figurines of gold inside that you cannot see: vlastos, like alcibiades, is captivated by this figure of the philosopher all gold inside. and he sees-what surely in part plato’s representations are designed to make us see-that for plato the figure of the philosopher, or the figure of socrates himself, cannot be separated from socrates’ question “how to live better?” the discussion of knowledge and what there is is always inextricably linked to questions of value and goodness.
how do these ideas relate to your final choice of book, the art of living by alexander nehamas?
nehamas takes vlastos’ tale of complex irony as his starting point. Nehamas’s view is that Vlastos misses something fundamental about the figure of Socrates: that the figure of Socrates is ironic from beginning to end, that is, completely hidden. the difference between vlastos and nehamas is fundamental, and i think it goes to the heart of the ways they think differently about how philosophy is done. For Vlastos, we can understand the role of Socrates’ observations by thinking about their truth and falsity, one by one, and discovering how they can be made consistent, in the context of some kind of moral certainty, embodied in the figure of Socrates. For Nehamas, by contrast, the ironic figure of Socrates is, as it were, cut off entirely: Socrates is always hidden, always resistant to this kind of piecemeal interpretation. In that case, the only way we can think of the figure of Socrates is as the representation that it is (not of an actual figure, but of a representation, from beginning to end). Nehamas’s point is that when we look at this figure, we are always in a dizzying position of uncertainty, and that for this reason the figure of Socrates can be a kind of model even for those who are reluctant to imitate him. the book of nehamas is a tour de force, a book that uses the figure of socrates as a way of thinking about “the art of living”, through the eyes of other writers, themselves transfixed by this ironic stance.
“the feeling of vertigo or incompleteness can go all the way”
there are two main chapters on socratic irony, but there is also an introductory chapter on irony in the work of thomas mann, then there is a chapter on montaigne, one on nietzsche and one on foucault. Nehamas insists that the enigmatic and inquisitive characteristics of the depicted Socrates are fundamental to understanding the way of thinking about “how to live better”. Vlastos, by contrast, looks for some kind of certainty beneath the puzzles of Socratic knowledge and ignorance. The stark contrast between the two not only illustrates the divergent ways in which Plato’s Socrates can be interpreted, but also highlights the tension we find in the dialogues themselves, between representations of the philosopher and the arguments embedded in those representations.
The two books, taken together, give you a snapshot of how thinking about the difference between depicted figures and detailed arguments can make a difference in how we read these texts, a philosophical difference. the feeling of vertigo or incompleteness can go all the way.
It would be fair to summarize his point of view here as follows: Reading Platonic texts in which Socrates is represented implies a sensitivity not only to the arguments in the mouths of the characters, but also to how different ideas are expressed, And is this a philosophical question and not simply a literary one? the individual arguments do not exhaust the philosophy.
I’m not saying that plots don’t count, but I do think that plots are repeatedly refined with questions about how plots hold up and questions about how those plots figure in a life, or from a life’s perspective, or from the perspective of reading about the life of a figure like Socrates. this means, among other things, that questions about knowledge or what is there cannot in fact be separated from questions about how to live; The ways in which Socrates lives his philosophical life cannot be separated from the content of the arguments, once the context as a whole is fully taken into account. thus arguments stand, but are always refined by their context; conversely, the context itself is reflected in the arguments. the figure of Socrates is in the middle.
You talked about Vlastos trying to emulate Socrates. Do you think there are elements of the various Socrates we have discussed that are worth emulating now in philosophy?
Should we think that there really is a Socrates? in all these versions of it, it is a construction or a fiction. when we read a dialogue like the theathetus, is the point of the figure of socrates that he is a character to emulate? isn’t it a bit like asking ‘should we emulate harry potter?’, the answer in the case of socrates is probably not: we should think of things with this figure, but only recognizing that this figure is a representation, not a true person. thinking of Socrates as a real man misleads us, because we don’t have Socrates as the man, we always have Socrates represented by other people who have other purposes of their own.
the interesting thing about plato is that his agenda itself is interesting: he wants us to think about arguments, about how you live with arguments or, indeed, how could you live without them. there was a tendency in philosophy that I grew up with to believe that argument is all there is, and that arguments can be demarcated and separated, particularly that arguments about knowledge can be separated from arguments about good. what you see with these texts, with these representative figures that discuss how to live better, is that for thinkers like plato, questions about knowledge are not separable from questions about how to live better; in fact, they are an integral part of each other. If one takes that view, then the figure of Socrates and the arguments he uses in both areas are intimately connected and cannot be separated. in my opinion, that is exactly correct.
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