Plato and Aeschines: Socrates and Alcibiades: Four Texts. David M. Johnson translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003.
André Archie: Politics in Socrates’ Alcibiades: A Philosophical Account of Plato’s Dialogue Alcibiades Major. Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing, 2015.
Although Socrates’ most memorable encounter with the Athenian wild child occurs in the Symposium, when drunk Alcibiades bursts in while the guests are talking about eros, a topic with which he has some familiarity, the Alcibiades Major and Minor show the future general confronted with a choice between the philosophic life and the political life.
In the Alcibiades Major, Socrates addresses twenty-year-old Alcibiades as “Son of Cleinias.” His father was a hero, having died in battle four years after his son’s birth, leaving him under the guardianship of the eminent democratic statesman Pericles. The mothers of both Pericles and Alcibiades were members of the Alcmaeonidae, perhaps the most politically powerful family in Athens; the young man is noteworthy both for his lineage and his nature. It is his nature as a youth of high intelligence and unsurpassed ambition that most concerns Socrates. Alcibiades has had many male suitors in a society where homosexual relations were often less a matter of pleasure than of power, bespeaking political alliance. But he has rejected all of them; they have given up. Socrates thinks that Alcibiades is thinking, wondering, why Socrates alone has continued to love him but has not spoken to him, has only silently followed him (as Plato did Socrates) for “so many years” (103a). Socrates explains that his daimonion had opposed speaking to Alcibiades, although now the daimonion had lifted this opposition. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates’ daimonion stands for prudence, practical wisdom, offering ‘politic’ advice to the philosopher.
As for the other lovers, they have finally been repelled by Alcibiades’ “surpassing pride” (104a). Although politically ambitious, Alcibiades takes himself to be self-sufficient—that is, he contradicts himself, since no political man is ever truly self-sufficient. “You say that you have no need of anyone for anything, for your advantages are so great that you lack nothing, beginning with your body and ending with your soul” (104a). Between his “beautiful and tall” body and his prideful soul, he has membership in “the most active family in your city,” the “greatest city in Greece”; he has “many excellent friends,” as well, along with the most impressive guardian (104a-b). And you are rich. Beauty, family, friends, money, political connections—Alcibiades has it all. “I know well”—Socrates doesn’t wonder about it—that “you wonder just what I have in mind in not giving up my love and what hope I have in remaining after the others have fled” (104c). Alcibiades readily admits that Socrates is right: “I really wonder what you’re up to, and would be very glad to find out” (104d). Alcibiades knows exactly what his other lovers wanted, but Socrates has aroused not his pride but his curiosity, and wonder is the beginning of philosophizing. This means that Alcibiades may not be entirely consumed with political ambition, much less with physical eros. Can he become a philosopher? Socrates will test him.
He doesn’t begin gently but levels an accusation, an accusation which proves that Socrates has indeed “kept my mind on you constantly” for all these years (105a). Even as Socrates himself would face accusations for impiety and corrupting the young, including Alcibiades, and even as Alcibiades would eventually be accused of impiety, for vandalizing statues of the gods erected in front of many Athenian homes, Socrates says “I will accuse you, face to face,” of harboring the hope not only of ruling Athens but of ruling over the Greeks and the barbarians and even the Persians; he wants to rule the world (105a). If a god offered you the choice between world rulership and death “you’d choose, it seems to me, to die,” because that hope is what “you’re living for” because you would surpass Pericles and all others who have ever lived in honor (105a). Alcibiades is the supreme dreamer of supreme command for the sake of hubris.
Having observed Alcibiades since the youth’s childhood, and having obeyed the counsels of prudence, Socrates makes no direct, immediate attempt to talk Alcibiades out of his ambition. His accusation comes with no threat of punishment, which would be implausible to Alcibiades or to anyone else in Athens, in view of Socrates’ poverty and powerlessness. Socrates instead works with that ambition, while displaying a counter-hubris which shows that his love-offer entails no flattery, comes with no implication of inferiority. “It will be impossible for you to accomplish all the things you have in mind without me,” “so great is the power I have regarding your affairs and you” (105d). This astonishing claim only increases Alcibiades’ wonderment. How so?
To get a better foothold on the political ladder, you will tell the Athenians that you can give them good counsel “about the things you know,” Alcibiades (106d). So, what do you know? You have learned “to read and write, to play the lyre, and to wrestle,” although you refused to learn how to play the aulos, a flutelike instrument that doesn’t permit the musician to speak. According to the myth, Athena, Athens’ patroness among the gods, threw the aulos away when she realized that her face was distorted by playing it (106e). That is, the goddess of wisdom shares the vanity Alcibiades exhibits; neither she nor her favored polis is entirely wise. The aulos fell to earth, where it was found and used by a satyr, Marsyas; elsewhere in the dialogues, Socrates’ face is compared with that of a satyr. Socrates may be said to have picked up a musical instrument, a tool of harmony, once owned by the incompletely wise goddess of wisdom, worshipped by the incompletely wise city of Athens.
But what have the things Alcibiades knows have to do with offering wise advice to anyone, much less to Athenian citizens regarding their most important public questions, matters of war and peace? Socrates remarks that knowledge pertains to whatever the art of a given activity is; the best adviser is the one who knows that art best. What is better when it comes to “keeping peace and in making war with those one should”? (109a). Alcibiades doesn’t know. Under further questioning from his not-unkind accuser, Alcibiades sees that Athenians go to war when “we’re being cheated of something, or being done some violence, or being deprived of something”—that is, in matters pertaining to things done “justly or unjustly” (109b). However, as Alcibiades revealingly adds, one might advise making war against a just polis, but not admit its justice, and thus the injustice of one’s advice. These things being so, who taught you “what’s more just and what’s more unjust” (109d-e). Who taught you what you’ve learned, what you say you know, and when did you learn it? Alcibiades cannot say, initially, but then recalls that he learned it not from his parents, not from the gods, not from Pericles but “from the many” (110e).
But “these are no serious teachers,” Socrates objects (110e). Admittedly, the many taught him Greek, and that is reasonable, as the many do “know it themselves” (111a). They agree about Greek vocabulary and grammar. What they don’t agree about is “just and unjust people and deeds,” and indeed dispute amongst themselves about such matters (111e). How can you have learned from people who contradict one another? There is, of course, a sense in which one can learn from those who contradict themselves: one can learn from them that they are foolish, that they don’t know what they’re talking about. And those who contradict themselves might also learn from one who remarks their self-contradictions, from one who reasons, who thinks logically, who knows what the principle of non-contradiction is and can think in accordance with it. Here and now, prudent Socrates goes only so far as to say that you, “Alcibiades the beautiful, the son of Cleinias” the much-honored, “does not understand what’s just and unjust, but thinks he does, and is about to go to the Assembly to advise the Athenians concerning things he knows nothing about” (113b). To his credit, and showing that he is worth Socrates’ continued attention, Alcibiades admits that this is so. He is not entirely hubristic. He knows, and admits, that he does not know something, something central to the fulfillment of his supreme ambition. Even if he only wants to appear just, he needs to know what justice is.
If you have “taken no care to learn” about justice, why should I attempt to teach you, Socrates demands (113c). At this, Alcibiades peels back another layer of his pretense. What the many Athenians and the many Greeks altogether really teach, by their actions if not their words, is that they “rarely deliberate about whether something is more just or more unjust,” but rather, “letting this be,” they “consider what will be advantageous to those who do it” (113d). After all, the just isn’t the same as what’s advantageous, and “many have profited from having unjustly done great injustice, while others, I think, have gotten no advantage from doing what’s just” (113d). If so, Socrates replies, “you can hardly think now that you know what’s advantageous to people, and why, can you?” (113e). If you don’t want to think about justice, having learned not to think about it from the many, from the democracy, do you know any better what ‘the advantageous’ is? Surely it is not necessarily whatever the many, or anyone, might believe it to be, since we see people who pursue what they take to be to their advantage, seize it, then suffer ‘buyer’s remorse.’
Foreseeing that this line of inquiry may well finish once again with his embarrassment, with the dishonor he ardently wants to avoid, Alcibiades prefers to change the subject. After chiding him for being “spoiled”—no idle accusation—Socrates nonetheless persists, albeit by taking a new approach, getting Alcibiades to admit that the same person can persuade one person or many—that is, that persuasive speech, rhetoric, is an art that has universal application (114a). (Although perhaps not so much amongst those between the one and the many, the few, the aristocrats and the oligarchs, those of the gentleman class that Socrates most often converses with, the class most susceptible to hubris?) The person in question will be someone who knows—a grammarian on letters, a mathematician on numbers. But when it comes to persuading the many, Alcibiades claims to be the knower. If so, then he should be able to say what he knows, and although he tries to get Socrates to say what the art of rhetoric is, Socrates well knows that hubristic Alcibiades won’t believe anything he does not hear from himself. And so the questioning of Alcibiades continues.
Socrates begins by associating the advantageous with what is “admirable” (115a). This appeals to the honor that Alcibiades wants for himself; he wants to be admired, and so ought to know what things are admirable. Alcibiades initially wants to say that some things that some things which are not admirable are not good, as for example cowardice, “the most extreme of bad things,” the most disgraceful (115d). But a coward flees death, and Alcibiades also believes, crucially, that death is “among the worst” of things (115e). The reader will recall that Alcibiades’ courageous, much-honored father died courageously, honorably, in battle. Which, then is worse? A live dog or a dead lion? Alcibiades again contradicts himself, shows himself in the thrall of contradictory thoughts or (perhaps) passions, the hunger for honor and the fear of violent death.
As always, Socrates seeks to clarify matters for his interlocutor. Alcibiades considers the admirable to be good. If so, then “nothing that is admirable, so far as it is admirable, is bad, nor is anything disgraceful, so far as it is disgraceful, good” (116a). Admirable things are good; just things are admirable; just things are good; good things are advantageous; ergo, just things are advantageous because just things are good. “By the gods,” Alcibiades swears, “I don’t know what I’m saying myself, and I seem just like someone in a strange state” since, under Socratic questioning “at one time things seem one way, but at another time they seem different” (116e). “When you unwillingly give opposite answers about things,” Socrates helpfully suggests, invoking the principle of non-contradiction, “it’s clear you don’t know about them?” (117a). Alcibiades admits it; now knows he doesn’t know—an advance.
In that case, you must be “aware that mistakes in action come through this sort of ignorance, that of the person who doesn’t know but thinks he does” (117d). And “ignorance is the cause of bad things and is the most contemptible stupidity,” yes? (118a). Contemptible, which is to say dishonorable, disgraceful—exactly the kind of thing Alcibiades wants to avoid. “Not only are you ignorant of the greatest things, but not knowing them you think that you do know?” (118b). Probably so, Alcibiades admits, unenthusiastically. Then, you much-beloved man, you are actually “wedded to stupidity,” ambitious to jump “into the affairs of the city before you have been educated” (118b). And “most of those who manage the affairs of the city are the same way, except a few—perhaps [!] including your guardian, Pericles” (118b-c). Springing to the defense, Alcibiades immediately points out that Pericles has associated with many who are wise, including philosophers—pre-Socratic natural philosophers, not political philosophers—and at least one Sophist, who still advises him (in how to speak sophistically?). So, Alcibiades, there is “admirable evidence”—good and advantageous evidence—that “those who understand something” can “produce someone else who understands it,” teach it to them? Precisely Alcibiades’ point. But then “Can you name anyone Pericles has made wise, starting with his own sons?” (118d). Well, um…. “By Zeus, I can’t” (119a).
Since you admit your unwisdom, evidently Pericles, reputedly wise from learning from the wise, neglected to impart his wisdom to you. That being so, what are you going to do about it. “Will you go on as you are, or take care of yourself?” (119a). As the translator remarks in one of his many instructive footnotes, epimelia or caretaking implies effort, diligence, attention, improvement. As a beautiful man beloved of many, Alcibiades has become habituated to not needing to do much. Will he change his ways?
He prefers not to. After all, look at the competition. If all the Athenian politicians are unwise, “why should one train and bother oneself with learning? For I know well”—here’s something he does know—that “I will completely surpass them thanks to my nature,” thanks to what I have already been ‘given’ (119b). Everyone’s unwisdom being equal, I’ll still have it made in the shade. But not so fast, Alcibiades. You assume, Socrates observes, that “your competition will be with the people here,” in Athens (119c). Admittedly, many of the Athenian politicians “have slavish hair on their souls” (120b), but Athens has foreign enemies, the Lacedaemonians and the Persians. Are you so sure that their rulers are no better than your Athenian rivals? That they too lack aretē, excellence? And this—I say this as your only true lover, the one who cares for your soul, not your body—your complacency prevents you from taking care of yourself. Mere noble descent, even accompanied by remarkable gifts of nature, will not by themselves suffice, if your foreign enemies have cultivated their gifts and you have not. And indeed they have. The sons of Persian kings receive education from the best tutors available to them, the four “royal tutors,” each exemplifying one of the four principal virtues—wisdom, justice, moderation, and courage. “The first of these teaches the craft of the Magi, that of Zoroaster, son of Horomazus (this consists of service to the gods), and he also teaches him about being a king. The most just man teaches him to tell the truth throughout his life; the most moderate man teaches him not to be ruled by any pleasure, so that he may be accustomed to be free and truly royal, since he rules first of all over the things within him and is no slave to them. The most courageous man teaches by preparing him to be fearless and without dread, since to be afraid is to be a slave.” (122a-b) You, Alcibiades, had a worthless tutor, an elderly slave chosen for you by your guardian, Pericles, who evidently gave little thought to the guardianship of your soul (fearing a potential rival?). “Your breeding, Alcibiades, and your upbringing and education, or that of any other Athenian, is of concern, practically speaking, to no one—unless someone happens to love you,” namely me (122b).
As things now stand, you honor-lover, the Lacedaemonians will put you to shame, to dishonor, being your superior in moderation and orderliness, composure, contentedness, high-mindedness, discipline, courage, endurance, love of labor, love of victory and even love of honor (122c). And if you intend to fall back on your wealth, think twice; the Lacedaemonians have more money than you. As to the Persians, even wealthier than the Lacedaemonians, the mother of their king would look at you and “wonder just what this Alcibiades fellow is putting his trust in,” if he intends to fight Artaxerxes (123d). “She’d say that there’s nothing else for this man to trust in as he makes his attempt other than care and wisdom, for these are the only noteworthy things among the Greeks,” and such things a poorly educated twenty-year-old cannot possibly possess, and will not possess if he refuses to make the effort to acquire them (123d). And, honor-lover, “don’t you think it’s disgraceful, if even the women of our enemies have a better idea of what sort of men we’d have to be to take them on than we do ourselves?” (124a). Socrates finds in the inscription at Delphi, “Know Thyself,” religious authority for his own advice to Alcibiades.
Alcibiades surrenders. “How must I take care of myself, then, Socrates?” (124b). The difference between the two of us, Socrates modestly explains, is that “my guardian is better and wiser that your guardian Pericles”; my guardian is the daimonion, who prevented Socrates from speaking with Alcibiades until now. You must be joking, Socrates. “Perhaps,” the philosopher good-humoredly allows, “but I’m saying the truth when I say that we need to take care of ourselves, or rather that all people do, but the two of us very much indeed”—the philosopher, at risk for trial for impiety and for corrupting youths, and the would-be imperial statesman, who would exceed even his guardian, Pericles, in glory (124d). If we “want to be as good as possible” (124e), what kind of good are we aiming at. The good of those skilled at the affairs managed by those Athenians “who are admirable and good,” Alcibiades replies: the gentlemen (124e). Socrates quickly gets him to identify a specific virtue that those who rule must have, since “those who are able to rule in the city,” those who best “make use” of their fellow citizens (125b-c). The purpose of their rule, its telos, is “running the city better and keeping it safe,” Alcibiades says (126a), and in doing that they will foster homonoia, agreement, not stasis, faction. But agreement about what? And “what art produces it?” (126d). “Is it the same for a city and for a private citizen, both with himself and with another?” (126d).
Alcibiades agrees that homonoia is the same in the soul and in the city. It may be seen in the family when “a father who loves his son shares with the son, as does the mother, and a brother with brother and wife with husband” (126e). This is what Alcibiades did not have in his own, fatherless, family. Socrates finds the example inexact, remarking that husbands and men generally do not share many things with wives and women generally, and vice-versa—soldiering for the one, spinning wool for the other. So much more so in the city, “whenever everyone does his own work” (127b). Once again, Alcibiades feels disgraced, but Socrates encourages him to continue thinking, continuing to answer the philosopher’s questions.
What is it to take care of oneself and when is it when one does it? Good care of something preserves and improves it, they agree. Arts can do this. When it comes to one of your possessions, “whenever you take care of things that belong to you, you are taking care of yourself” because your possessions are the means by which you take care of yourself (128d). Your possessions are products of art, and they require one sort of care according to one sort of art; you are a product of nature, and you require another sort of care according to another sort of art. You polish the shoe that takes care of your foot; you get a pedicure to take care of the foot directly. “With what art could we take care of ourselves,” make ourselves better ? (128d). We cannot know that art while being “ignorant of just what we ourselves are” (128e). Socrates has returned the conversation to the Delphic maxim, Know Thyself. By now, Alcibiades knows himself well enough to know that he finds that knowledge “most difficult” to attain (129a).
And so, Socrates asks, “In what way could the self itself [auto to auto] be discovered?” (129b). Swearing now by Zeus, the king of the gods, the highest authority, Socrates calls Alcibiades’ attention to the fact that he is conversing with Socrates; they are using logos, speech. When a cobbler cuts leather, he uses an artifact, a knife, and his hand, a part of his body. We use the parts of our body for our body as a whole. We use our bodies by means of the soul; that is, the soul rules the body; “there’s nothing, I suppose, that we would say is more authoritative over us than the soul” (130d) (One might say Zeus is more authoritative, but Socrates is not that one). A human being is preeminently a soul; human beings converse with one another as soul to soul. Now, just as no master of an art, whether he is a physician, a trainer, a farmer, a craftsman knows himself insofar as he thinks of his art, for “they know the things that belong to the body, the things with which the body is tended” (131a-b). To know the self itself, to know one’s soul, one needs sophrosunē, a term (the translator remarks) he translates as moderation but literally means sound-mindedness. One might say that the “soph” of sophrosunē itself implies knowledge, and knowledge comes from the thinking part of the soul, not from the passions or from the body, although passions and bodies surely bring the mind things it will need to think about.
A lover of Alcibiades’ body therefore does not love Alcibiades but loves “something that belongs to Alcibiades”; “it’s he who loves your soul who loves you” (131c). That is why “I am the one who does not go off but remains as your body is fading, now that the others have departed,” as long as your soul “is getting better” (131d). Alcibiades promises to be as beautiful as he can be, as beautiful as his self itself can be, strive to make his soul beautiful. This means that he will need not merely to do nothing to keep Socrates’ loving attention but to strive, to care for his self itself.
What could prevent him from doing this? If he allows his soul to be “corrupted by the Athenian people and become uglier,” if you “become corrupted by becoming a people lover,” a Fanny Brice, a mere entertainer, who supposes that people who love people are the luckiest people in the world (132a). To avoid this, “learn what one must learn to get into the affairs of the city, and do not get into them before that” (132b). This means first of all to know yourself, and particularly “that region of [the soul] which the excellence of the soul, wisdom, resides,” the region “which is concerned with knowing and thought” (132e-133a). Socrates associates knowing and thought with the divine, that is, with what all gods have in common, their nature as gods, which (as Alcibiades agrees) must be even “more pure and more brilliant than that which is best in our soul” (133c). God is like a mirror in which we can see our selves themselves more clearly. To be a statesman, then, one must know what belongs to himself, and to know what belongs to oneself one must know one’s self itself, and to know one’s self itself one needs sophrusunē. Sound-mindedness is, one recalls, exactly what Athenians, including the gentlemen who Athens, so noticeably lack. To make the city happy, you will need to give aretē to the citizens, but you cannot give what you do not have. Therefore, you must become excellent before you can give excellence to citizens, and not remain “mindless,” as you (and they) now are (135a). A tyrant rules mindlessly over the mindless, although tyrants (even more so, the ‘ideological’ tyrants who would come to misrule their fellows in modernity) so often mistake themselves for men of wisdom; miserable themselves, far from admirable, they make their subjects miserable when they are not making them dead. They are rulers with the souls of slaves, making slaves of the people they misrule—the opposite of admirable. Alcibiades, who evidently has certain tyrannical inclinations while contradictorily seeking honor, take note. It is excellence, virtue, aretē that is “appropriate for one who is free” (135c). If, as Aristotle would later write, democrats mis-define freedom as doing as one likes, the freedom Socrates commends to Alcibiades will guard him, like a daimonion, against becoming a people lover, except in the Socratic sense of striving to moderate their impassioned souls and ruling justly.
You can escape “this current condition of yours,” Alcibiades, “if God is willing” (135d). To this, Alcibiades proposes not exactly a reversal of roles, in which Socrates becomes the beloved, Alcibiades the lover, but a relation analogous to the political relation, the relation of ruling and being ruled in turn; in this new relation I will “attend on you from this day forth, and you will be attended by me”—a relation not of mutual rule but mutual love and care (135d). For his turn, Socrates promises that his love will be like that of the stork, which (according to the claims of natural scientists at that time) nourishes its chicks and is in turn nourished by them with their life-blood. “I will begin from this point forth to care for justice,” Alcibiades avers, and Socrates hopes that he will continue to do so (135e). “But I am filled with dread, not because I do not trust in your nature, but because I see the force of the city and fear that it will overcome both me and you”—as indeed it did (135e).
If God is willing. At the beginning of the Alcibiades Minor, Alcibiades is on his way to pray to “the god” (138a). Seeing him, Socrates remarks that he seems “dour,” perhaps concerned that gods give us some things we pray for but not others, some to us but not to others (138a). That is, Socrates raises the question of divine distributive justice. But Socrates evidently thinks that Alcibiades should worry less about the gods and more about himself. “Does it seem to you that there is need for much caution, in order that one not, without being aware of it, pray for the worst things, thinking them to be good, when the gods are disposed to give whatever someone prays for? (138b-c). As a Christian saint would later observe, there are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones. Your prayers cannot control the exercise of divine power; you can control your own desires and, just as important, your own speech. Socrates offers the example of Oedipus, who “prayed that his sons would divide their inheritance with the sword” (138c); Oedipus sought retributive justice, inasmuch as his sons had failed to take care of their blind, elderly father, but the gods oversaw the deaths of both sons at the hands of one another, leaving Oedipus without any heir. Oedipus should have prayed more generally “for some relief from the bad things that he had,” whereas “his curse sought other bad things in addition to the ones that were already there” (138c). It is noteworthy that a more general, safer, prayer points to the most ‘general’ things of all, the Ideas. At least when it comes to petitioning exceedingly powerful or all-powerful beings, prudence dictates that one frame prayers in ways that, if answered in accordance with your speech, the gods won’t make your troubles worse.
Some people are prudent, others foolish, others mad. Socrates leads Alcibiades to say that the foolish and the mad are the same (as in the French, folie). There are degrees of folly, madness being the worst. This has to do with prayer because we need to be careful not to pray for something that seems good but is really bad, such as (in tacit acknowledgment of Alcibiades’ character) becoming a tyrant. “You see that it is unsafe either to simply accept whatever is given or to pray oneself that it happen” (141d); for example, “many who have desired tyranny” because they thought “they would accomplish something good” ended up being assassinated (141d) and accomplishing nothing. In the Alcibiades Major, Alcibiades said that he had taken his definition of justice from ‘the many,’ but here Socrates remarks that “the many would not refuse tyranny, were it given to them, or the generalship, or many other things that, when present, do more harm than benefit”; they end up “unpraying the things they had prayed for” (142d). They then blame the gods for their own recklessness, as their prayers have given them “pains beyond what is fated” (142d). As the translator notes, Socrates here misrepresents Zeus’ speech in the first book of the Odyssey, in which he blames men not for praying badly but for recklessness in action; when it comes to Alcibiades, Socrates cares more for his logos, his reasoning, than for his actions, the prudence or recklessness of which will be determined by his reasoning or lack of reasoning. Alcibiades takes the point: “Now I’m aware of how many bad things ignorance causes for people” (143b), a bit of knowledge Socrates reinforces by saying “Ignorance of what is best is a bad thing then, it’s likely, as is not knowing what is best” (143e). Ignorance is good only if one is mad, imprudent (hence Socrates’ teaching on lies in the Republic).
Socrates intends to bring Alcibiades to think of the hierarchy of knowledge. “Practically speaking, the possession of any other knowledge, if one does not possess knowledge of what is best, rarely benefits, and most often harms the one who has it”; therefore, “we must first either believe that we know or really know whatever we are so ready to say or do” (144d). The many, Alcibiades’ source for his supposed knowledge of what justice is, are badly advised by demagogues. An art, such as the rhetoric practiced by demagogues, is better used not by someone who merely knows the art but by someone who “knows what is best” (145c). One might, of course, know what is best and speak in such a way as to lead the many to what is worse, if you thought that would be to your advantage, but Socrates intends to caution not the many but Alcibiades: “What sort of community do you think would consist of good archers and aulos players, and good athletes and other artists as well, and mixed in with those the ones we were just talking about, those who know only how to wage war and how to kill, and also men who are public speakers full of hot air, if all of these are without the knowledge of what is best and without the one who knows when and on whom it is better to make use of each one of these arts?” (145e). That is, what sort of community is Athens under the regime of democracy? Alcibiades understands that this “would be a poor excuse for a community” (146a). Very well then, you should not put your trust in public opinion but in intelligence—that is, in Socrates not in the many.
Both poleis and souls need the knowledge of what is best, knowledge of the good, “for without this, the more brilliantly the fair wind of fortune blows for gaining property, bodily vigor, or anything else of this sort”—and thus far both Athens and Alcibiades have enjoyed good fortune—the “more errors necessarily come to pass from such things”—as indeed will happen, for both Athens and Alcibiades (147a). A helmsman who doesn’t know the right destination will be “cruising for no long lifetime,” he tells Alcibiades, who wants very much to preserve his life (147b). (Or worse, he might cruise for a long lifetime. The “Great Helmsman,” Mao Zedong, knew a lot about how to seize and retain tyrannical rule—died in his bed, as the saying goes—but he brought down mass murder upon the Chinese.) Socrates quotes the Margites, a comic epic poem attributed to Homer, in which the unheroic hero is described as knowing many things, but badly. If you don’t know the one greatest thing, the good (in Socratic terms, the Idea of the Good), your knowledge of all the subordinate things will prove worse than useless.
Once again, Socrates holds up the example of the Lacedaemonians. In their prudence, they pray for good and admirable things without specifying what they think those might be. And according to the Egyptian (that is, foreign) god, Ammon, the gods prefer such “reverent speech” (ephemia) even to sacrifices, to actions (149b). In this, the gods are wise, as “it would be an awful thing if the gods looked to our gifts and sacrifices and not to our souls, to see whether we are pious and just”; the gods “do not take bribes,” and true honor (Alcibiades’ love of honor being his ruling passion) goes to those who are just and prudent (150a). On this, both gods and “intelligent men” concur (150a). Alcibiades sees the point, replying, “It seems to me no different than it seems to you and to the god,” admitting that Socrates is godlike in his prudence (150b). And it “wouldn’t be proper for me to vote against the god”; voting, a political act more prominent in the regime of democracy than in any other, ought to be done under the aegis of Athena insofar as she is the goddess of wisdom, and assuredly not insofar as she is a goddess of vanity.
So, now you see why “it is not safe for you”—you, who do not know what the good, and therefore the best, is—to “go to the god to pray to him”; Socrates, who does know what’s best generally and what’s best specifically for Alcibiades, advises, “to me it seems best that you keep quiet” until you learn “what stance one should take toward gods and toward men” (150c-d). When will that be, and who will be my teacher, Alcibiades wants to know. Your teacher will be “the one concerned about you,” namely, myself, as we established in the Alcibiades Major (150d). Alcibiades once again vows to “flee from none of his commands, whoever the person is [he adds coyly], at least if it will make me better” (150e). He then goes ahead and identifies Socrates as that person, promising to crown him with a wreath, accept Socrates’ rule over him. Socrates recalls Euripides’ play, Phoenician Women, in which King Creon asks the wise Teiresias how Thebes can repel an army led by one of Oedipus’ sons. When Teiresias tells Creon that the king must sacrifice his son if he is to enjoy victory, Creon refuses, but the son nobly commits suicide and Thebes is saved. The translator remarks the parallel: that Socrates is Creon, Alcibiades the son, Menoeceus, but unfortunately “Alcibiades for his part surely did not kill himself for Athens’ sake, as Menoeceus had killed himself for Thebes, and Athens, unlike Thebes, was defeated” (Introduction, p. xx). One might add that Alcibiades would need to ‘kill himself,’ kill his ignorant, unnatural, tyrannical self in order to save himself and Athens. And indeed he did not.
Although there have always been those for whom any Platonic dialogue and its characters are as alive as they seemed in the fourth century BC, it is the great merit of André Archie’s study of the Alcibiades Major that he brings Plato into the minds of our contemporaries, showing how the philosopher addresses matters that remain with us today, still under consideration by citizens, philosophers, and scholars. “Alcibiades is inclined to believe that he does not need to learn how to rule wisely because his natural abilities will be far superior to his political competitors,” a mindset not unknown to us (3). And Archie has mastered the art of speaking to academics in words they understand, as in: “Socrates and his interlocutors model the workings of practical reason and belief formation and point the way to beneficial decision-making procedures on the topics under discussion” (4). He quickly points his readers to the right way to read a Platonic dialogue, first, as a “self-contained” work of art, treating its topic thoroughly in one sense but leaving readers with a lot to think about on their own, second, as an exercise in deliberation in which Socrates’ goads his interlocutor to think, and thus to realize that he doesn’t know it all. He has “been motivated by one basic question: ‘What does Alcibiades Major intend to teach us?'” (7).
Archie begins as many scholars begin, with a review of recent scholarship or, as one says with varying degrees of earnestness and irony, the ‘scholarly literature.’ “This scholarship is motivated by one central question: How does Socrates model rational knowledge seeking?” (15). These studies are on to something, but they usually have failed “to appreciate the methodological diversity employed by Plato” as he presents Socratic inquiry (15). To show why this is so, and why it is important, he identifies “three broad reasons why Socrates’ line of question in Alcibiades Major should be a model for readers: (1) The dialogue teaches us to know ourselves, and that we are really rational soul…. (2) Alcibiades Major is a protreptic (protreptikos) dialogue, [one that] means to turn, to urge on, or to exhort…. (3) Alcibiades Major is a maieutic dialogue… [one in which Socrates] draws out, as if he were a midwife of ideas, Alcibiades’ ideas so that they may come to life” (17). He considers three contemporary scholars, Michael Stokes, Ian Kidd, and Jaakko Hintikka in light of these diverse but related Platonic intentions. [1]
Stokes takes the opinions of the interlocutors to be “the sole force and motivation of the dialogues” (18). But Socrates doesn’t merely ‘have opinions’; while professing not to know many things, he evidently knows many things about the persons he converses with. Alcibiades in particular has been under Socratic observation for years, and Socrates talks with him with a strategy in mind. As for Plato, the author, he evidently knows a thing or two about his readers, then and now, drawing them into the dialogue, bringing them to wonder what a politically ambitious young man or a live-minded reader needs to know, and whether that might include knowledge of himself more than anything else. Plato is a philosopher who writes invitations to philosophize, but Stokes’s approach “renders the dialogues lopsided and unphilosophical” (20).
Ian Kidd commits the opposite error. He focuses exclusively on the strategy or “directional quality” of Socratic inquiry (21) at the expense of understanding “the role the interlocutor and reader play in moving the dialogue along to a conclusion” (21)—especially the character of the interlocutor, Alcibiades, a young man in the thrall of “intellectual conceit” (22). Alcibiades’ character affects the way he “frames the subject matter under discussion,” and “Socrates seems as concerned with an interlocutor’s subjective understanding” of a given topic “as he is with getting the interlocutor to appreciate [its] objective properties” (22). Alcibiades ardently wants to rule, but he “is not fit to advise the Athenians because he is ignorant about the most crucial issues pertaining to the rule of the city and to the rule of himself” (23).
Jaako Hintikka looks not at the dialogues as dialogues, as dramas, as “on the nature of the questions asked,” treating them a ‘stand-alone’ topics (24). In this, he partakes of “contemporary decision theory” (‘rational choice theory’ being the most prevalent), a set of models that “assume unbounded rationality on the part of the participants in decision making contexts” (24). But Alcibiades is not a person of unbounded rationality and the decisions people make are never “presuppositionless,” i.e., free of our opinions and passions. Socrates is out to examine precisely those opinions and passions, bring them to the attention of Alcibiades, even as Plato is out to bring them to the attention of his readers. Plato’s Socrates aims at convincing Alcibiades that “his ambition must be clarified in order to give birth to truth within himself (113a-114a5); his soul is the true ‘self’ (auto) that remains the same and is the true subject of his actions, with the body as its instrument (128b-131b1); he must turn towards philosophy (132b-133d1)” (28). Et tu, dear reader, Plato silently suggests.
Socrates has pursued Alcibiades because “he recognizes the outstanding nature (physis) Alcibiades has is conducive to philosophy, but that Alcibiades is profoundly ignorant about the means by which he can fulfill his desire to be a great political leader” (35). Socrates would redirect Alcibiades by “cultivating that part of his soul where reason rules and is most divine,” making this dialogue “a profound rejoinder to those who claim Socrates corrupted Alcibiades” and executed the philosopher for his alleged pains (35). More broadly, Alcibiades Major “explores the relationship between philosophy and political life” (36). Straussian scholars Steven Forde and Mark Lutz having already provided serious interpretations of the dialogue along these lines [2], Archie attends especially to themes of interest to today’s readers: among them, the role of women, the implications of the dialogue for “decision theory,” and the pursuit of happiness.
“Women play a prominent role in the Spartan and Persian Speech” in the dialogue, with their imagined “outspoken disdain toward Alcibiades,” whom they regard as pretentious, unworthy rivals of their husbands and sons (55). “Why would Plato cast women as judges of Alcibiades, and what might this suggest about the role of women in regard to male achievement, generally?” (55). Women are inclined to love ‘their own,’ the members of their own families. This may bias them against the foreigner and his ambitions, but they also serve Socrates’ “rhetorical advantage” in his conversation with him. Here, at last, are persons who not only have no interest in pursuing Alcibiades, no love for him—outsiders with no reason to flatter him or to rival him. Women are often astute judges of men’s characters and actions. And these women, royals, are in position to observe rulers closely without being rulers themselves—or at least not directly. They are “closely associated with the exercising of political power by the Spartan and Persian kings,” inasmuch as in their regimes the monarchs treat the political community as if it were a big household ruled by themselves (63). It isn’t only that “their judgments are intended to have the effect of making Alcibiades feel unmanly” (56), to humble him, but that their opinions have weight because they know what they are talking about, and surely more than a twenty-year-old will know, even one somewhat negligently raised by Pericles. Alcibiades’ proximity provoked his envy and fired his ambition, but it didn’t teach him much about ruling or about himself. Their Socrates-formulated criticisms question Alcibiades overestimation of his “natural abilities” (57), opening his eyes to the larger world beyond Athens, with enemy countries ruled by abler men than those who rule his polis. And women, being caregivers, can help to show Alcibiades that he “is still unprepared to see the need for education and the lengthy and taxing project of caring for himself” (58). And women, being household managers, keep an eye on money, knowing and saying that their men have more riches than the young Athenian, their countries more riches than Athens. And finally, women, being inveterate praisers and blamers of men, show that “it should be inglorious to Alcibiades” that they “have a better appreciation than he does of what he needs to undertake to compete” (61). Crucially, as Socrates arranges it, “each of these judgments” by the women “tends toward conserving right behavior” (63). They are far from seductresses, sirens luring him to ruin. In Plato’s dialogues, women are usually wise, with the comic exception of Socrates’ wife. As one says these days, they are strong women.
Archie interests himself especially in the dialogue as relevant to contemporary decision theory. Plato’s Socrates never treats choices abstractly, as matters of pure rational calculation. He always tests his interlocutors. Here, is Alcibiades truly worth his continued attention? And if so, how shall he attend to him, now that he has broken his silence toward him? “How these choices function is to make an interlocutor’s desires transparent and to assess degrees of belief as the bases for action,” choices “which interestingly enough, have come to be regarded as one of the key features of modern decision theory,” which is finally catching up with the old fellow (71). Archie holds up the example of F. P. Ramsey, one of the “prominent proponents” of decision theory, who discusses how to pose “hypothetical choices” to people “as a means of measuring degrees of belief,” somewhat if not entirely in the manner of Socrates (71). Seeing, with Socrates, that “individuals conduct themselves in ways that consistently realize the objects of their desires,” and that peoples’ desires often arrange themselves in hierarchies of intensity, Ramsey departs from his great predecessor in exactly the way one might expect from a ‘modern’: he seeks to measure those desires by quantifying them. Archie judiciously shows decision theorists that this dialogue, along with all other Platonic dialogues, exhibits “distinctive categories” under which human beings make choices, categories he calls “The Call of Ambition, The Limits of Ambition and The Transparency of Ambition” (73)
By ambition, Archie means “those overriding emotions or desires that cause an individual to act in a particular way repeatedly to achieve a particular end” (73). The “call” of ambition means the belief that the particular end is good; for Alcibiades, “the charm of political rule is the natural object of his ambition” (74), and perhaps chief among those charms is honor. The “limits” of ambition means “the lengths an interlocutor is willing to go in order to satisfy his desire(s)” (74). The “transparency” of ambition means disclosure of “the gulf between an interlocutor’s true beliefs that are instantiated in his deeds, as opposed to his stated beliefs” (74). Much of the comedy seen in the Platonic dialogues derives from such disclosures. “Alcibiades’ relationship with Socrates gives us a good opportunity to assess the categories of choice,” as he tests Alcibiades’ “with questions designed to make transparent the intensity of his ambition” (74). “Schematically, the hypothetical choices offered to Alcibiades by Socrates might look like the following: Would you rather have scenario α (‘to live with what you now have’) in any event; or scenario β (‘to die on the spot’) if ρ (‘if you weren’t permitted to acquire anything greater’) is true and scenario γ (implied: if Alcibiades is allowed to acquire greater things) if ρ is false?” In apparently choosing β, to die on the spot if he weren’t permitted to acquire anything greater than he now has, Alcibiades implies that his ambition has no limits, but when the transparency of his ambition is tested it transpires that he is less eager to sacrifice his life than he had said. By contrast, in the Apology Socrates is indeed “willing to forfeit [his life] in order to practice philosophy” (78 n.11). His actions confirm his words. By contrast, Alcibiades final reluctance to back words with actions show “just how conventional he is,” and therefore the unlikelihood that he will ever truly philosophize. Philosophy isn’t merely an intellectual exercise but a way of life, a regime of the soul. Socrates is a king in that regime; unless he changes his own ‘way,’ Alcibiades will never even be a citizen in it. The Alcibiades Minor confirms the result of the Alcibiades Major. ” Whereas Ramsey employs magnitudes to measure degrees of belief elicited by hypothetical choices and circumstances, we have found hypothetical choices similarly employed by Socrates, though without quantitative measurement, to assess various psychological states of an interlocutor” (83).
The third topic Archie highlights in the dialogue is eudaimonia or happiness, a natural and quite probably the overriding purpose of human lives in ancient Greece and in our own time and place. Alcibiades seeks it in imperial politics and war; in this, he resembles the Athenian polis. Alcibiades is the polis, in ‘concentrated’ form. Socrates’ questioning invites him to reconsider what happiness is, identifying “three types of goods: goods of the soul; goods of the body; and external goods” (89). Alcibiades and Athens are “blinded” by their “bodily goods and possessions” (89). In criticizing both, Socrates acts as a friend of both. “For the Athenians to disregard and not give thought to wisdom, the directing factor [of soul, body, and external goods], is to disregard the transformative, beneficial effect wisdom can have on the soul. It is only through wisdom that the soul can bring to fruition, by striving towards the appropriate ends through the appropriate means, the power at which Athens is reputed to excel” by setting life’s priorities straight (91). The difference between the Apology and the Alcibiades Major, “a difference that makes them complementary, is that in Alcibiades Major Socrates shows how the proper ordering of priorities plays out in a specific interlocutor with a specific ambition” (92). Alcibiades fails to recognize “the difference between the conventional goods he excels at and his soul as his true self” (95). Alcibiades fails to know himself, his true self, “the best part” of himself (96). Socrates discovers this by listening to Alcibiades’ words, his logoi. They reveal, through contradiction, that his logos isn’t really logical, that he contradicts himself. Alcibiades “sees his conventional goods,” the goods he shares along with the many Athenians under the regime of democracy, “as being the best part of himself” (98). “Under Socrates’ questioning, Alcibiades is reluctantly brought around to the realization that the best part of himself is not the conventional good he excels at,” and not even the natural beauty of his body, “but his soul” (98).
Famously, that realization did not rule Alcibiades’ soul or actions for long. To explain why this is so, Archie resourcefully calls upon Plutarch and his essay “On Listening to Lectures” in his book, the Moralia. Writing to a young friend, Nicander, who has just completed his studies, Plutarch teaches that one cannot learn without listening and one cannot listen without the right disposition of the soul. As Archie remarks, Plutarch’s treatment of listening is quite Aristotelian: in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle understands “moral capacities” as things “actualized as tendencies to listen appropriately on the right occasions because one’s moral character (hexis) has been habituated through moral activities; through the practice of listening or the cultivation of listening skills” (104). The main dispositions that impede listening, Plutarch argues, are envy, excessive admiration, and “non-rhythmic listening” (104).
Plutarch regards hearing as the sense that can best cause the habit of reasoning (as distinct from reason itself, which is natural to humans) to enter the soul, then to reinforce it when it gets there. “Hellenistic and Roman education was primarily moral” and (one might add) also oral, as exemplified by Quintilian’s treatise on rhetoric (105). Plutarch considers hearing to be “both a passive and an active power—a distinction taken from Aristotle, who observes that oil has the “passive power” to “be burnable” as well as the active power to burn (106). Similarly, the soul has passive and active powers. Among its active powers are actions, deeds, which can be good or bad. Actions stem from dispositions, but dispositions also change for better or for worse as good or bad actions become habitual. “Moral virtues and knowledge are perfections or completions rather than qualities that undergo change” (107). By contrast, actions that make things, also perfected by repetition, habituation, do not directly “involve the character,” since “technical proficiency” at one task or another might be achieved by any sort of person. Indeed, robots can exhibit technical proficiency. At most, achieving technical proficiency requires some moral virtue—discipline, for example; even robots are controlled by human reason in their design and use.
Plutarch is at pains to show that listening, indispensable to moral and intellectual learning, requires certain virtuous habits—courtesy to the speaker, careful attention to his words—and can be impeded by certain vices. Envy “scatters the mind” by directing it away from the speaker and towards the listener himself, preoccupied with comparing himself to the listener; it zeroes in on any mistakes, real or supposed, made by the speaker, ignoring those things he says that are worth hearing; it causes the soul to worry too much about whether the speaker is ‘getting over’ with the other members of the audience. Admiration for a speaker can be good if measured; in excess, it is undiscriminating, incautious “about philosophical argumentation and what it is conveying”(110). This is especially true of moral teachings; “the admiring listener must be aware of the moral effects of listening that are manifested in his conduct” (110). By “rhythmic” and “non-rhythmic” listening, Plutarch distinguishes between listeners who integrate what they hear into their own souls and those who merely take good notes, understanding the meaning of what they hear without taking it seriously in their lives. [3] It is true that “listening, like philosophy, causes pain” when it leads to the deflation of “youthful pretensions” (114). Nonetheless, “one should not run away before one has tried the treatment prescribed by reason” (114).
Alcibiades finally fails to heed the Socratic arguments he cannot refute because his soul tends too strongly toward envy, misplaced admiration, and non-rhythmic or unserious listening. “Socrates has correctly surmised that Alcibiades’ ambition is motivated by envy,” envy of his guardian, Pericles, or of anyone who achieves honor and particularly honor in the form of popular acclaim (116). Alcibiades also admires the Athenian politicians excessively, failing to consider their superiors in Lacedaemon and Persia, who deserve measured admiration (at least in Socrates’ portraits) in view of their own sense of measure, of moderation, and wisdom. What Alcibiades takes from Socrates’ argument is instead the importance of family connections in the foreign regimes, connections he already has in Athens. And, finally, Alcibiades’ mode of listening is “non-rhythmic.” He does not integrate into his soul what Socrates proves to him. Archie is unimpressed by Alcibiades’ promise of role reversal, the story of the stork. What would be required for rhythmic listening would be not the ‘bottom rail on top’ approach he claims to foresee in his future relations with Socrates, with philosophy, but a dialogic approach, similar to what Aristotle describes as true political rule, reciprocal rule—in this case, the reciprocity of conversation, of listening and speaking. “To care for ourselves there needs to be a perspective outside of ourselves to engage in conversation—just the sort of approach Socrates takes towards Alcibiades” and not the approach Alcibiades finally takes toward Socrates (120).
Archie concludes by inviting his reader to take the same approach toward his book. He is too discreet to advise us not to envy his erudition but to learn from it, and not so presumptuous as to advise us not to admire him excessively. So, I do it for him. He does touch on the need for rhythmic listening, or in this case, rhythmic reading. “I read the dialogue as a provocation, designed to help the reader reflect on its method and to come up with solutions to the issues and problems discussed within it” (123). Plato’s dialogues deserve to live in us. “My approach poses a challenge to the modern belief that the ancients are not as relevant as they once were” (124); “read carefully, Alcibiades Major can resonate in the lives of modern readers” (125).
Notes
- Ian Stokes: Plato’s Socratic Conversations (1986); Ian Kidd: “Socratic Questions” (1992); and Jaakko Hintikka: Socratic Epistemology: Explanations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning (2007).
- Steven Forde: “On the Alcibiades Major” in The Roots of Political Philosophy, Thomas L. Pangle, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Mark Lutz: Socrates’ Education to Virtue: Learning to Love the Noble (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1998).
- Archie rightly cites Plato’s Meno as an illustration of this distinction in terms of intellectual as well as moral instruction. “Meno is a poor interlocutor since he is not really active in the conversation. He does not much think but dodges. In contrast, the slave is active and takes to heart what Socrates says.” (112). See “Teaching Virtue” on this website, under the category, “Philosophers.”
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