Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche: Philosophy and Its Poetry. Lectures 3 and 4: “Socrates Philosophic Poetry” and “Socrates Becomes Socrates.” Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.
In his first two lectures, Lampert, following Leo Strauss, distinguishes between philosophy and philosophic poetry. In times of religious crisis, when the gods of the polis are no longer credible, especially among the youth, the future rulers of the polis, the activity of philosophy itself might come under threat. Under this circumstance, a philosopher might make a ‘politic’ intervention, proposing a new or at least reformed or reinterpreted myth, one that will convince the young and incline them to friendship toward philosophy and philosophers. In his second pair of lectures, Lampert considers Plato’s strategy in more detail, to some extent still through a ‘Straussian’ lens but very much with his own eyes.
How did “Socrates become Socrates,” a philosopher but also a political philosopher? This occurred in two steps: Socrates first became a philosopher, one who understands “the fundamental truths of being and knowing, nature tout court and human nature, and only then a political philosopher, “a teacher of a theological-political view” that will prove edifying in his time and place. Lampert takes these matters in reverse order, devoting his first of the two lectures to “how Socrates became the political philosopher he became.”
Of the 35 Platonic dialogues, 26 are performed, amounting to scholars now call ‘closet dramas,’ plays intended to be read, not performed. Nine dialogues are narrated or reported, six by Socrates, three by others. Lampert selects three of the Socrates-reported dialogues: the Protagoras, the Charmides, and the Republic. These dialogues reveal not only what Socrates was thinking at the time he wrote the dialogue but what Athens, his polis, was doing in Socrates’ time, and what Athenians were thinking and feeling. That is, they show the philosopher thinking about what philosophic poetry he might make that would prudently address the political circumstances of Athens, very much in view of how those circumstances might injure those few Athenians who love wisdom so much that they devote their lives to that love.
The arguments and actions Socrates reports in the Republic (in the Greek, Politeia or Regime) occur in early June of 429 BCE, the third year of what would become a twenty-year war between Athens and Sparta, the second summer of the devastating plague described so graphically by Thucydides. One of the participants in the dialogue refers to the feast of Bendideia; this feast honored Bendis, a foreign goddess whose consort was a healer-god. In the experience of all those alive at the time, this was the first time a foreign god was honored by Athens. What is worse, under the pressures of war and disease, but not only of war and disease, some Athenians suffer from “a spiritual crisis” that Thucydides also described. Plato sets the Charmides only a month earlier, upon Socrates’ return from a foreign polis, having spoken not to a healer-god but to a doctor who taught him “new things.” Finally, the Protagoras‘ dramatic date is before the war, about 434 BCE, when “the great city of Athens [was] at the very height of its power and glory.” Lampert accordingly begins with an interpretation of the Protagoras.
In his dialogue with the 65-year old Protagoras, then called Greece’s wisest man, “the founder of the Greek enlightenment,” Socrates, nearly thirty years his junior. “steps forward to restrain and redirect” the great man. In Socrates’ estimation, Protagoras is “too outspoken,” “not cautious enough.” Being so, he “puts the whole enlightenment at risk with his inadequate exotericism,” his “failure to hide adequately his own skeptical views,” which “has led the younger generation to mistrust their gods.” In leading the young to mistrust their gods, Protagoras “seem[s] to them to destroy the reasons for living a moral life, a life of justice.” What is more, Socrates hopes to “attract and win as his own student the young Alcibiades,” one of the witnesses to the dialogue, who is “the most promising young Athenian of all those who aspire to political glory and greatness.” [1] If he abandons morality, and especially if he abandons justice, very bad consequences could ensue for Athens and possibly for philosophers in Athens. Recognizing that Alcibiades will never become a philosopher, Socrates intends to win his political friendship, thereby “maintain[ing] in Athens a public spirit friendly to philosophy.”
Five years later, Socrates returns to Athens after serving in the Athenian army during the early years of the war. In the Charmides, Plato refers to Homer’s Odyssey, the story of another return, “the return of the wise king Odysseus” to his home in Ithaka. During his odyssey, Odysseus has learned many things, including things about nature (specifically, the nature of the moly root) and the many regimes that rule the poleis. Following the interpretation offered by Seth Benardete in The Bow and the Lyre, Lampert writes that Homer’s odyssey is “his gradual learning of the wisdom that is philosophy and the wisdom that is political philosophy”—theoretical and practical wisdom. The two are distinct but related. The moly root is given to Odysseus by the god Hermes in order to protect him from the magic of the witch, Circe, who has imprisoned Odysseus’ friends in her palace. One might say that men are readily ‘bewitched’ by the unnatural, by the spells cast by rhetoricians, priests, and sophists, but knowledge of nature can save them, if they or a friend of theirs has such knowledge and uses it for that purpose. After this adventure, Socrates returns to his home, prudently disguised as a beggar. After observing the circumstances prevailing in his household, in which his enemies, the suitors, have been held at bay by his wife’s own prudent policy, “Homer has Odysseus reveal himself in a series of recognition scenes, thereby winning the allies he needs to kill his enemies and restore his rightful household regime.” In founding or refounding his regime, Odysseus needs to consider not only how to regain his rule but to consider how to perpetuate the regime, how to establish an orderly succession in the future, a succession that will provide “wise rule without wise rulers,” wise men like Odysseus being exceedingly rare. To do so, he must “establish a new teaching about the gods,” a “religious founding” which will back up his political founding by reinforcing his succession plan.
In Athens, Socrates is “the new returning Odysseus.” By this parallel, Plato invites his reader “to think of Socrates as returning with a founding deed that is a theological-political program.” In the dialogue, the handsome young wrestler Charmides needs Socrates as a physician—a physician of the soul, not the body. As it happens, Socrates himself had consulted a physician “of Zalmoxis,” who was “a god who teaches that to cure the body the soul must also be treated and that the soul can be treated only with incantations which are ‘beautiful speeches'”; more, the doctors of Zalmoxis also “teach that the soul is immortal” and that there is only one God. The doctrines of monotheism and the immortal soul have made the people who believe these teachings, the Getae, “the most courageous and most just of people, the only people to effectively resist the Persian invaders”—exactly the virtues Athenians will need if they are to trust one another, unite, and win the war against Sparta. What Hermes is to Odysseus, the doctor of Zalmoxis has been to Socrates; what the doctor has been to Zalmoxis, Socrates intends to be to young Charmides and to other Athenian youths with whom he will dialogue. The topic of the Charmides is moderation. Before the war, Socrates had taught Critias, who is actually his main interlocutor in the Charmides. During the course of his conversation with him now, Socrates sees that he had earlier taught Critias “a view that would eventually turn him into a notorious Athenian criminal, a most immoderate sophist and tyrant in the Athenian civil war.” Socrates inadvertently had corrupted Critias; now and in the future, he must alter his exoteric teaching. Corrupting the youth will be one of the charges laid against Socrates, years later, at his trial before the Athenian jury. Socrates was indeed guilty as charged, if unintentionally. Well before the trial, he acts to correct his own actions.
In the Republic, a few days later, readers hear that, according to the myth Socrates proposes, in the afterlife the soul of Odysseus chooses “the life of Socrates” for his next life. That is, he chooses “the business of philosophy and everything it entails to protect itself and advance itself.” “Plato in the Republic makes the returned Socrates of the Charmides the thinker who recognized in himself the soul of Odysseus,” the soul that “carries on and advances the tradition of Greek wisdom that began before wise Odysseus, before Homer, and was passed on after improvements by Homer, and is passed on to Socrates, that ‘son’ of Homer who improves,” or, rather, adapts and adjusts, “Homeric wisdom and passes it on to his ‘sons’ after him.” Plato suggests that “a wise man knows who he is and he knows where he is and he learns what he must do because of who he is and where he is.” Whereas the Athenians are introducing a foreign god whose consort is a healing-god, Socrates, “on that very night,” introduces his own teachings, his own “incantations” or philosophic or natural religion, which he says he learned from another foreign god. The young gentlemen in this dialogue, Adeimantus and Glaucon, “have been exposed to the Greek enlightenment and learned the teaching of teachers like Protagoras, teachings that seem to them to destroy the reasons for living a moral life, a life of justice.” They are experiencing “the crisis of the death of the gods,” a crisis “similar to what Nietzsche would call nihilism.” His rival in this dialogue is another sophist, Thrasymachus, who is even less moderate in his teaching than Protagoras was, openly asserting that justice is only the advantage of the stronger—the “real and radical position of enlightenment teachers.” The sophists have shaken the young gentlemen’s belief in the gods; what will happen if they spoil their sense of justice, upon which the survival of any polis depends?
Socrates adopts three strategies for dealing with the Athenian crisis of the death of the death of the gods. First, he attempts to make the sophist Thrasymachus his friend, despite Thrasymachus’ attempt to compete with Socrates for the allegiance of the young gentlemen. Socrates had “learned a new strategy,” replacing the one that “did not succeed with Protagoras” or with Alcibiades. He offers teachings on the soul, on ‘epistemology,’ and on the gods—all “anti-Homeric teachings foreign to the Greek tradition, teachings meant to persuade and cure young men like Adeimantus and Glaucon.” Socrates teaches them that the soul has three “parts”: logos or reason; thumos or spiritedness; and the appetites. If reason exercises its rightful rule over spiritedness, and spiritedness exercises its rightful rule over the appetites, the young gentlemen will learn civic or political courage, not the raging, Achilles-like warlike courage that has entangled Athens in a war they will not win. He also teaches them that the soul is immortal, with Hades a place of reward and punishment for acts committed in this life. “The returned Socrates’ teaching on the soul’s afterlife is most clearly a teaching that he learned while he was away, from the doctor of Zalmoxis—or, Plato suggests, perhaps from Herodotus, the Greek historian who reports the teachings of Zalmoxis and their salutary or beneficial effects, and who says that the people of Zalmoxis are most courageous and most just.”
Socrates’ new teaching on knowing reality or ‘being,’ his ‘epistemology,’ consists of his doctrine of the ideas. Strauss forthrightly contends that “no one has ever succeeded in giving a satisfactory or clear account of this doctrine of ideas,” showing that “the doctrine is an exoteric teaching that can easily persuade non-philosophers who have been raised to believe in glorious gods like Nike and Dike, the gods of victory and justice.” But Socrates aims not at a rigorous philosophic proof; he rather intends to persuade young Athenian skeptics that while the goddess, Justice, does not literally exist, the idea of justice “has a permanent independent reality that can be known by humans.” Such a notion assuages their disappointment in no longer being able to believe in the existence of eternal gods, gives them instead an account of a principle of justice that is at least rationally conceivable if not rationally demonstrable as an idea, as an eternal thing, an idea easily acceptable to souls inculcated by religious doctrines about eternal gods. That is, “Socrates’ teaching on the eternal, transcendent ideas is a teaching consciously tied to its time, the time of the death of the Homeric gods.” It is poetic, a making, not a proof, but it is philosophic poetry.
Strauss placed his account of Socrates’ new teaching on the gods in the center of the chapter on the Republic in The City and Man. The philosophic lawgiver of the City in Speech “lays down two new laws for the gods”: they only cause good, never evil; they never change shape or lie. In each instance, the gods are quite unlike Homer’s Olympians. “A crucial part of making the gods more moral than Homer had made them is what Socrates adds in Book 10: he makes the gods ultimately responsible for punishing or rewarding the soul after death in Hades.” After all, the soul is immortal and receives reward or punishment for its actions in this life, and if the standard of good and bad (for political men, and young political aspirants, especially justice and injustice) is impersonal, an idea or set of ideas, then who will enforce the ideas, who will make them rule the immortal souls?
Socrates adds another novelty about the gods. If the idea of the good is the sovereign idea, the idea that sets the standard for all others, including justice, then “Socrates moves toward the monotheism of Zalmoxis.” This is one reason why Nietzsche regarded Plato’s account of Socrates as a teaching that “opened the way for the successful introduction of Christianity,” a religion about which Nietzsche expresses some well-known reservations, indeed animadversions. While “the Athenian introduction of Bendis failed to do anything to change the ultimate fate of Athens, Socrates’ introduction of his new teachings succeeded in changing the fate of philosophy in Athens and, ultimately, in changing the fate of Western civilization,” making him into “what Nietzsche said he was, ‘the vortex and turning point of so-called world history.'” And just as Homer’s Odysseus needed to kill the 108 suitors of Penelope in order to re-found his regime in Ithaka, just as Socrates “kills” Homer by “taking Homer’s place as the ultimate authority,” so too will Nietzsche, in this way following the lead of Machiavelli, ‘kill’ Plato in order to found a new spiritual regime adapted, as Nietzsche supposed, to the new circumstance in which both the transcendent God and the transcendent ideas are ‘dead,’ no longer believed, in need of substitution. Although Socrates ‘kills’ Homer exoterically, he “honors Homer as his own teacher” esoterically. Nietzsche ‘kills’ Plato, but only “the exoteric Plato whose teaching ultimately led to a cultural disaster,” Christianity. The esoteric Nietzsche “honors Plato as Plato honored Homer,” as what Nietzsche calls “the most beautiful growth of antiquity.” “Times change, gods die, and politic wisdom must change with the times by teaching new gods.”
Before turning to a fuller discussion of Nietzsche, Lampert devotes his fourth lecture to how Socrates became Socrates—a philosopher. That Socrates changed, that he changed his exoteric teaching, he has shown. How he changed may be seen not so much in the Protagoras, the Charmides, and the Republic as in a second trio of dialogues, dialogues reported by witnesses, not by Socrates himself. These are the Phaedo, reported by Phaedo, the Parmenides, reported by Cephalus, and the Symposium, reported by Apollodorus. These are the only ‘reported’ dialogues in which Socrates appears that Socrates himself does not report. [2] Lampert remarks that these dialogues form not only a sequence in time but a logical sequence, Plato’s way of depicting “Socrates’ progress in thought” toward “the deepest insight that a philosopher can attain.” His “calculated presentation of the exoteric Socrates is intended to lead his most interested reader to the esoteric Socrates” even as he makes it possible “to date these steps in the life of Socrates against the background of the life of Athens.” One might say that he thus beckons his young Chinese listeners to think for themselves, just as Socrates thought for himself.
The Phaedo is named after its narrator, who is telling the story of Socrates’ last day to Pythagoras in the polis of Philia—a conveniently named site for such a story, if ever there was one. On that day, Socrates had been talking to two young Pythagoreans who had begun to doubt the Pythagorean doctrine of the immortality of the soul. One of them, Kebes, has raised an objection to that doctrine which requires Socrates to reconsider “the cause at work in the whole of nature, the whole of becoming.” This will be “the last argument of his life,” but before he makes it, he recurs “to his first philosophic experiences in order to tell the story of his becoming a philosopher from its very beginning.” As a young man, he began with wonder, animated by the intellectual eros that desires knowledge of nature. Early and then-contemporary Greek philosophers had explained natural causes naturalistically, that is, without recourse to explanations depending upon claims about the gods. He found none of these explanations satisfactory, he recalls, until he heard the theory that Mind causes natural changes, that “everything in nature is what it is because it was for the best that it be that way, as judged by mind.” Strauss calls this Socrates’ “teleotheology.” But in examining the works of Anaxagoras, the philosopher who proposed the theory, Socrates found that the doctrine of Mind was an “exoteric and salutary teaching” that “cover[ed]” Anaxagoras’ “esoteric naturalism.” So, Socrates remained dissatisfied, thinking that natural/material causes “cannot explain human things.” As proof of this, he argues that the cause of his sitting in prison, awaiting death, cannot be fully explained by the actions of his body; the “human opinion” that commanded his death sentence as more important. But if natural causes do not suffice to account for causation, and Anaxagoras himself didn’t believe that Mind accounts for it, what then? This led to the philosophic adventurer’s “second sailing” under the banner of thinking that if the things to be explained don’t explain themselves, if that wind doesn’t fill the sails of the philosophic boat, then you, the philosopher, must row, turning to speeches (logoi) and ideas in order to attempt to understand causation.
The ideas he discusses in this dialogue, the Beautiful, the Good, and Bigness are themselves unchanging. Change occurs, however, in the natural phenomena according to whether or not the “participate” in one or more of the ideas. Socrates then “uses the ideas to prove that the soul is immortal,” and Kebes accepts the proof. Since no one has ever quite explained what it means for a thing to participate or fail to participate in an idea, the whole doctrine is suspect. Lampert simply remarks that this was Socrates’ next step in his philosophic odyssey, and that he was content if young gentlemen like Kebes took it as their last step.
The Parmenides takes Plato’s readers back to Socrates in 450 BCE, at age 19, when the philosophers Parmenides, then 65 years old, and Zeno, then 40 years old, visited Athens and conversed with him. By then, Socrates had already rejected materialist naturalism, discovered and questioned the adequacy of teleology, and turned “to the speeches and to the ideas as cause.” Socrates was “a philosophic prodigy, a young genius in philosophy who by age nineteen had thought through the whole history of Greek philosophy before him and arrived at his own novel solution to the problem of cause, his view of the ideas.” In arguing for it, he presents it “in the way a nineteen-year-old philosophic innovator would present it: he is proud, competitive, victory-loving; he is eager to prove that these two famous philosophers are wrong and that he, only he, solved their great problem, the problem of cause.” Far from being indignant at the upstart, Parmenides and Zeno very much like the young man, for “they saw in the young Socrates a man of their own kind, a great rarity of the kind a philosopher always seeks.” Parmenides gently “suggests” to Socrates “that there is way too much love of victory riving him” because he cares too much about the “opinions of men.” He has nonetheless “made the fundamental step of philosophy and learned for himself that things have natures“—even as Odysseus had learned the nature of the moly root—that “each thing belongs to a kind, a natural kind: that is what the ‘idea’ of a thing means.” If no such thing as a “kind” exists in nature, then understanding itself, the telos of philosophic inquiry, is impossible and nature is unknowable. The philosopher himself exemplifies a “kind” of the human, itself a “kind” in nature. Parmenides effectively challenges Socrates to show whether or not he can “discover and show others the grounds of the possibility of philosophy.”
Lampert suggests that in the Parmenides Plato has written a dialogue that “is only for the passionately interested few, nameless future travelers from afar, potential philosophers.” “This is how Plato thinks the tradition of philosophy works, how Socratic philosophy will be passed down: the essential esoteric Socrates is embedded in the preserved conversations of the exoteric Socrates.” Further, a comparison of the Parmenides with the Phaedo shows how, “on the last day of his life, at age seventy, in the last argument of his life, Socrates teaches young Pythagoreans the very view of the ideas that he himself, fifty years earlier, learned from Parmenides was rationally indefensible.” He does this because Phaedo and Socrates’ other young friends are not philosophers; “they are not of Socrates’ kind.” He gives them the doctrine of the ideas in order to save them from their doubts about the gods and their fears of death, and perhaps even more to make philosophy “publicly defensible as morally trustworthy.” It is political philosophy, philosophic poetry, ministerial poetry. (In modern China, too, surely philosophy needs to be seen as morally trustworthy.)
The last dialogue in this series is the Symposium. Strauss calls it the only dialogue that takes “praise of a God,” who happens to be Eros, Love, as its topic and the only dialogue named for the occasion upon which it takes place—a “drinking party at which wine loosens tongues and things are said that might otherwise not be said.” In this dialogue, those things are profanations of the religious mysteries; “it tells what it is a crime to tell, a secret about the gods and what they know.” It was Alcibiades who had been accused of having profaned the mysteries in 416 BCE, seventeen years before this party, just prior to the time of Socrates’ trial. Socrates was accused of corrupting the young, including Alcibiades. This year, 399 BCE, “was a time of fervent religious purification” in Athens, a movement or change, a change of public opinion, “to which Socrates fell victim.” It was also the year when the oracle at Delphi supposedly said that there was no wiser man than Socrates, effectively designating him as a worthy successor of Protagoras. That is, the religious purification of Athens, leading to the death of a most eminent philosopher, contradicted the judgment of the highest religious authority in Greece. This must mean that Athenian public opinion must not understand the judgment of the religious authority it acknowledges as authoritative. How so?
And if Socrates is indeed wise, how did he become so, what caused his change from unwisdom (where we all begin and most of us end) to wisdom? “In the Symposium we hear Socrates tell the genuine story of his wisdom.” The Symposium profanes not the Delphic mysteries, as Alcibiades was accused of doing, but reveals “the most hidden truths of philosophy that Plato will ever reveal, an unveiling of the mystery of Socrates’ being as a philosopher that is at the same time an unveiling of the mystery of being itself.” Like the Delphic mysteries, hidden by human beings from human beings, nature itself hides, as pre-Socratic Heraclitus revealed. Although the mystery of being or nature “can be divined,” it can be divined only “in a way that is itself mysterious, true to the hidden ways of nature.” At this point, we know from the Protagoras that Socrates “had already completed his philosophic education” before the year of the dialogue, 434. His philosophic education predated his political-philosophic education. Now, in 416, he claims to be ignorant, except for “the things of eros,” things more likely to be revealed during the course of a drinking party, as the inhibitions ingrained by conventions weaken.
Socrates converses with Agathon, a young poet who writes tragedies, and introduces a memory of Diotima, whom he met in 440. “Diotima” means “honor the god”; a prophetess, she was said to have delayed the onset of the plague in Athens by recommending that they make a sacrifice. In her discussion with Socrates, she refuted Socrates’ opinion, shared by Agathon, “that Eros is good and beautiful and wise.” On the contrary, Eros is none of those things. But neither is Eros bad, ugly, or ignorant. Eros “is a between.” Eros desires what a soul takes to be good, beautiful, wise. Diotima leads the young philosopher to self-knowledge, to recognition of his own nature as an erotic being of a certain kind, one passionate for wisdom. The philosopher begins his inquiry with “correct opinion”; his soul must at least be pointed in the direction of the good, beautiful, and wise; it not be misled by incorrect opinion, which points the soul to the bad, ugly, and ignorant. This is why philosophers take care to craft philosophic poetry, not only to incline the polis to a regime that will let philosophers philosophize but to give the few potential philosophers a better chance of becoming real ones. Socrates recognized himself in Diotima’s portrait as an erotic man of the type she described.
Philosophy, “driven erotically” in the right direction and knowing itself as erotic, “can best think the reality that lies between those abstractions of permanence and flow”; he recognizes nature as a whole within himself as a particular instance of nature. “The philosopher can come to know by knowing himself.” When Socrates asks Diotima what kind of power eros has, she calls it the power of “ferrying,” of “mediating or carrying things between the immortals and the mortal.” One is reminded also of the god who ferries souls from life to the realm of the dead.
And who, Socrates asks, are Eros’ father and mother—that is, “what are the origins of eros?” Shockingly, Eros is not a god at all and it has no parents. It turns out that eros is self-making, self-generating; “eros as self-generating power never simply is but is always coming into being as a result of its own activity and always slipping out of being as a result of its self-expenditure, its dying away in [is?] its expressing itself.” Intellectual eros and physical eros behave exactly the same way because they are both part of nature. “The deep structure of eros always disappears into the concrete experience that it enables,” “masked in the particular that it always disappears into.” It is dynamic, relational, temporal, “directed by its very nature to fulfillment or satisfaction, and its fulfillment always drains away and revives seeking fulfillment.” And that is what nature as a whole is, too. So, when Socrates says he is ignorant of everything but eros, “he seems to make a modest or moderate knowledge claim” but in fact makes “the largest of all possible knowledge claims,” that he knows “the character or way of all that is,” what Strauss calls “the nature of nature.” The nature of nature may be seen at the top of Diotima’s famous ladder, which the philosopher and the philosopher alone reaches. At the top of the ladder is a beholding, a beholding of the erotic character of being, but, like eros itself, the beholding also engenders, makes; it makes philosophic poetry. This is the coming into being and the slipping out of being, the slipping out of being involving what Socrates in the Republic calls the return to the Cave, the polis, the place of convention, where philosophic poetry can replace the shadows of idols no longer taken as real by the citizens.
Lampert calls attention to the rational character of the knowing the prophetess reveals. The trajectory of Socrates’ philosophic way of life, his regime. He wanted to know the answer to “the question of cause concerning generation and destruction as a whole,” not only of the human things but of all things. His second sailing brought him to the idea of the Ideas as the cause of generation and destruction, but Parmenides refuted this with his “proof of the rational impossibility of transcendent ideas.” The third stage came when Diotima taught him that causation lies between the “pure flow” (asserted by Heraclitus) and the permanence of what are often miscalled Platonic ideas. Rather, “everything that is has the dynamic, relational, temporal character of eros.” The Delphic command, “Know yourself,” is exactly what the philosopher must do, if he is to know the nature of nature. In this way, Socrates may be said to ‘profane’ the mysteries not in the sense of betraying them but in the sense that he “prepares an initiation into them” which is “available for all future Agathons, for you and me,” my Chinese auditors.
As Strauss remarks, Nietzsche replaces Platonic eros with the will to power. The way in which Nietzsche became Nietzsche is the topic of the final two lectures.
Notes
- The importance of Alcibiades’ presence is remarked by Patrick J. Coby: Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987). See “Plato’s ‘Protagoras'” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
- The “Young Socrates” or Socrates the Younger, also a philosopher, whom Plato’s readers meet in the Statesman.
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