On Professor Vlastos\' Xenophon

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Ancient Philosophy 7 ©Mathesis Publications, Inc.

On Professor VIastos' Xenophon Donald Morrison

Xenophon the Athenian has been badly treated by our century. In the 19th century he was a school author, read and studied by everyone. Toward the end of the 19th century, when the critical study of sources was at its height, investigation into the problem of the historical Socrates also reached its high point, both in interest and in sophistication and complexity oftreatment. Xenophon's Socratic writings were naturally a central focus of this investigation, and most of the best work on Xenophon's Socratic writings dates from this period-roughly from 1880 to 1920. By contrast, although today the flood of scholarship on Socrates continues, about Xenophon's Socratic writings very little is written and published. Moreover the sophistication of the arguments for specifically historical claims about Socrates is, by comparison with the Golden Age, often rather low. The lack of interest in Xenophon' s Socratic writings seems to be due to a widespread impression that he was too dull and conventional to understand Socrates, and that therefore his Socratic writings contain very Httle that is of philosophical or even historical interest. 1 The most influential contemporary critic of Xenophon' s Socratic writings in the English-speaking world has been Gregory VIastos. The first three pages of his essay 'The Paradox of Socrates' (VIastos 1971) have been dismayingly effective in discouraging interest in Xenophon' s Socrates. Two examples of their influence shall suffice. At the beginning of his book Socrates, Gerasimos Santas (1979, x) modestly states his personal opinion that Plato' s account of Socrates is more trustworthy than Xenophon's-and for a defense of that opinion refers the reader solely to VIastos' essay. At the beginning of his Socrates and Legal Obligation, Richard Kraut (1984, 4) disposes of the matter more boldly: 'Though Plato and Xenophon overlap considerably in their portraits of Socrates, Plato is to be followed wherever they conflict, for reason weIl stated by VIastos, pp. 1-3.' The influence of VIastos' essay is dismaying, first, because it shows how little independent understanding of these issues the scholarly community hase Professor VIastos hirnself does not pretend that these three pages are sufficient to settle the issue. And when placed beside the 1,690 pages of Joel's Der echte und xenophontische Socrates, they hardly make a beginning. The second reason for dismay is that the charges VIastos brings against Xenophon are almost wholly without merit. In this paper I hope to make a small contribution to the rehabilitation of Xenophon' s reputation by defending hirn against these charges, made by the most important of Xenophon's more recent accusers.

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Professor VIastos brings four charges against Xenophon's Socrates. He presents them as 'incompatibilities' between Xenophon' s Socrates and Plato's, but since in each case Xenophon' s Socrates comes off much the worse, we may fairly treat them as 'charges' . He has recently recanted the first of these charges, though in a way which continues to accuse Xenophon' s Socrates of being far less interesting than Plato's. We must take a detailed look at VIastos ' new criticism as well, since it raises serious and complex issues, and shows how much an interpreter's assessment of Xenophon can depend on his correlative interpretation of the Platonic Socrates. The first charge is this: 'Xenophon's is a Socrates without irony and without paradox. Take these away from Plato's Socrates, and there is nothing left' (VIastos 1971, 1). To the contrary, Xenophon's is a Socrates capable ofboth irony and paradox. Xenophon does not emphasize the irony and paradox as much as Plato-he does not beat drums over it the way Plato does-and he is careful also to show the sides of Socrates that are not ironical or paradoxical. Xenophon thinks it is important about Socrates that he does have those sides. But there is irony and paradox aplenty in Xenophon' s Socratic writings. Just one example of a philosophically important paradox will do. 2 At the beginning of Xenophon's Oeconomicus (1.7) Socrates defines property (x-rTi~e.Ae.r~) people, i.e., the thoroughly bad people. Now there are people in between, those who are not quite good (ol XP1)cr'tOL, ol X/xAOL xeXy/X9oL), but are not useless either. There are, for example, people who are somewhat good, but not extremely goodnot XP1)cr'to(, not X/xAOL xeXy/X9o(-and also those who are not yet good but are capable of becoming good. In a revealing exchange-but one about which Xenophon, with his characteristic subtlety and understatement, makes no fuss-Socrates asks Critoboulos whether he thinks that bad, i.e., ignoble (1tOV1)poO men can have good men as friends (ii 6.14-15). Critoboulos answers 'Yes', for he has seen bad (q>/XUAOO~) orators being friends with good orators and inadequate generals being companions with good generals. Socrates does not contradict Critoboulos on this point; 19 rather he changes the topic to that of useless people, whom Critoboulos agrees cannot be friends with useful people. So a really good and noble person, like Socrates, can be friends with mediocre people, and with people who are not yet good but can become SO.20 Since friendship is a good thing, a really good and noble person ought to try to be friends with those people if he can, and treat them weIl. (According to Xenophon' s Socrates, the main way to win people as friends is to treat them as friends,

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that is, to treat them weIl.) Thus the only people whom the good man will regard as enemies, and hence treat badly, are the thoroughly bad people, the useless ones. But they are just the people whom it is impossible to benefit. These people are useless. They cannot improve, for if they could improve they would not be useless. But since they cannot improve, the good man cannot be useful to them. But if he cannot be useful to them, he cannot treat them weIl. When Xenophon's Socrates advocates, as he implicitly does, that the good man should treat useless people badly, he does not advocate choosing to treat someone badly rather than weIl. The fact about useless people is that their condition makes it impossible for anyone to treat them weIl. The analysis just given depends on equating 'improving character' and 'benefitting' and 'treatipg weIl'. There is reason to doubt that this is justified, at least when interpreting Xenophon's Socrates. For Xenophon's Socrates, 'treating badly' seems to include such behavior as lying, selling into slavery, and plundering goodS. 21 Thus Xenophon's Socrates seems to understand 'treating badly' in the ordinary sense, which therefore includes 'harming' in the ordinary sense. Thus understood, a good man can treat a useless man badly, insofar as he is rode to him, obstrocts his projects, and opposes his material interests. But this does not mean that the good man will 'harm' the useless man in the special sense which Socrates extnlcts from Polemarchus in Republic i. 22 The good man cannot harm the useless man in this sense, because in such a man the characteristic excellence of a human being is already missing. The fundamental ethical principle of Plato's Socrates is that one is never justified in making another person worse in respect of his or her characteristic human excellence. No opinion expressed by Xenophon' s Socrates contravenes that principle. The views of Xenophon' s Socrates presented thus far contain nothing, I think, to which Professor VIastos would object. But one implication ofwhat Xenophon's Socrates says is that often, due to misunderstanding and accident, enmity arises between individuals, and also between cities, who in principle ought to be friends. The counseI of Xenophon's Socrates in these situations is that if it is is possible to win the friendship ofthe enemy, one ought to try to do so, and that means treating them weIl. But if under the circumstances enmity is inevitable, one is justified in treating the enemy badly, even if the enemy is noble and good. That is not the view of Plato's Socrates; and VIastos may be right to say that it is a less morally 'advanced' and less noble view. But it is a more realistic view than that of Plato's Socrates; I myself find it a wiser, sager view. If two countries, both good, should through some misunderstanding or other circumstance go to war with each other, the citizens of each should feel obliged to defend their country-although it means treating good people badly. This is certainly a controversial thesis; but defensible, and I would defend it. Thus I contend that Xenophon was right and Plato's Socrates wrong. 23 Moreover, it is perfectly possible that the historical Socrates had the view we find in Xenophon. I do not myselfwish to claim that he did, butjust to argue against those who claim to know that he did not. The doctrine of friendship presented by Xenophon's Socrates is not too dull to have attracted interest; to the contrary, it was new and exciting and wise. It would have been characteristic of Plato's genius and character to have taken that doctrine and made it even more radical, even more excitingand unrealistic, overblown, and wrong. VIastos concludes from his four 'incompatibilities' that Plato's must be the more

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accurate portrait of Socrates. For Xenophon' s Socrates is too dull to have attracted the attention of Critias and Alcibiades and too conventional to have been indicted plausibly for subversion of faith and morals. But we have seen that Xenophon' s Socrates is neither dull nor conventional. The Socrates of Xenophon and the Socrates of Plato consistently share fundamental views which separate them from ordinary Greek society. What differences they do have in philosophical doctrine should be seen as internal philosophical differences within the Socratic movement-differences so fine that it is impossible to say with confidence which view, if either, was held by the historical Socrates. It is a tribute to Xenophon' s greatness as a writer that he fooled Professor VIastos into thinking that his Socrates was too conventionally pious to have been indicted. The Memorabilia is a defense speech, and Xenophon knows his audience. The aspects of Socrates which will appeal to conventional Athenian attitudes are skillfully stressed, and the controversial aspects correspondingly deemphasized. But as VIastos hirnself says apropos of Plato, since Xenophon's purpose in writing was to clear his master's name and to indict his judges, it would have been most inept to make Socrates talk out of character. The most revolutionary and hence controversial aspects of Socrates' character are deemphasized, but they are left in. Xenophon's Socrates rings true. But in making such a global claim, I have gotten ahead of myself. I do not wish to pretend that the few remarks I have made in refuting VIastos ' charges are sufficient to settle the basic issues concerning the Xenophontic Socrates. There are other charges to be faced, and additional evidence to be considered. My purpose in this note has been merely to remove a few sources of the prejudice which has prevented many scholars from giving these issues the detailed and continuing investigation they deserve. In closing, I wish to suggest that the philosophical differences between Xenophon' s and Plato' s Socrates uniformly make Xenophon' s writings more philosophically interesting rather than less. For it is because of these differences that Xenophon gives us an independent window onto the variety and richness of Socratic philosophy at the end of the 5th century B.C. And our interest in Socrates, I submit, ought really to be an interest in this movement. One good reason for the recent comparative lack of interest in the historical Socrates has been a justified pessimism about the possibility of achieving results. One reaction to this situation is just to give up and restrict oneself to studying bits of text in individual authors. This is what most scholars in effect have done. But there is another possibility, that of giving up on the noumenon Socrates-Socrates in hirnself, the way he actually historically was-while retaining a vivid interest in the phenomenon Socrates-that is, Socrates as he is manifested through his influence on his followers, and more generally on the culture around hirn. Think of each of the Socratics as a facet through which Socrates may be viewed. The view through each facet is different. The views are of the same object, yet they are not reducible to any simple unity. Socrates-as-seen-through-the-many-facets-of-theSocratic-movement-that is a Socrates which is available to us, and one which is endlessly fascinating. From the point of view of this interest, the obsessive preoccupation of our scholarly community with Plato is unfortunate. Plato was the greatest of the Socratics; but he was only the greatest of the Socratics. Our richest single source of evidence about the Socratic movement is Xenophon. If one is interested in what Socrates meant to his time, or could mean to ours, then Xenophon' s Socratic writings

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are a precious treasure. 24 Freie Universität Berlin

NOfES 1 The remarks of VIastos quoted below are an influential North American example of this attitude. An example of a widespread similar attitude among continental scholars may be seen in leaD Humbert 1967, 7: '11 est certain que Xenophon n'etait pas apte par son esprit a saisir dans sa profondeur l'originalite d'un maitre qu'il n'a de plus frequente que peu de temps.' 2 A second example will be discussed below, namely, the paradox that a bad man cannot have friends. 3 Cf. Strauss 1970, 95: 'knowledge seems to be the sole title to property'. 4 Along with Antisthenes in the Symposium. s Other particularly delicious examples of Socratic irony in Xenophon include: Oec. 3.6, Symp. 1.5, and Mem. iii 11.16. On Socratic irony in the Oeconomicus, see Guthrie 1969, 3J7. 6 This article appeared just as this note was undergoing the final revisions before publication. I am grateful that the accident of timing has given me the chance to respond to Professor VIastos' more recent view. Perhaps I should say explicitly that, in arguing against opinions which VIastos expressed many years ago, I do not presume that he holds them in unaltered form today. My reason for publishing this note is that the widespread and continuing influence of the earlier remarlcs makes them worth refuting, independently of the current opinion of their author. 7 VIastos does not say this explicitly. But it is implied by his claim that each doctrine is 'intelligible only as a complex irony' (86), and there is no reason to doubt that the implication is one he intends. 8 Mem. i 2.3; i 2.8. See also Mem. iv 4.5. At Mem. i 6.13-14 we have a typical example of Xenophontic subtlety. Socrates describes what he would do ifhe could teach, but the whole thing remains hypothetical: he never affirms that he can. 9 Xenophon does not report Socrates' disavowal ofknowledge, although he reports nothing incompatible with it. I speculate that Xenophon's silence is due to his apologetic purpose. If Socrates knows nothing, and in particular has no moral knowledge, then he does not know whether or not his influence on his young companions is good or bad. But if he does not know whether his influence is good or bad (while it is clear that his influence is very great!), then he has no business taking the risk. The Socrates of Plato's Apology has no defense against this argument. Xenophon' s Socrates avoids the charge by never expressly claiming ignorance. 10 His text Tl2 is too informal to bear any weight. In order to encourage Callicles, Socrates uses a polite exaggeration and claims to 'know'. Tl3 is dialectical: he says to his interlocutors 'you surely know X', because he is confident that they would claim to know it, and he finds it useful to introduce this knowledgeclaim into his argument. From Socrates' use of this dialectical move on others, it does not follow that the same move would work on hirn. If Socrates believes X, but does not claim to know it, the move fails. In Tl7 'the man who knows' is explicitly distinguished from Socrates. The point of the text is that one who has knowledge should set the standard for those who do not-viz., for Socrates and his companions. Tl6 can be explained as a combination of imaginative projection and dialectical rhetoric: the sea-captain would claim to know that X, and Socrates suspects that Callicles would also claim to know that X, so, even though Socrates hirnself does not think that either he or the sea-captain knows that X, for the sake of narrative vividness he suppresses his scruples and teIls the story from the sea-captain's and Callicles' point of view. Thus VIastos' interpretation of Tl6 is possible but by no means necessary. The problem with Tl5 is that it comes from the Republic, and hence is an unreliable guide to the Socrates of the early dialogues. Even if Republic i were written much earlier than the remainder of the Republic, it would be a rash scholar who claimed to know that no changes were made as it was fitted onto the rest. And the Socrates of the Republic does not disclaim knowledge. Of the texts cited in evidence by VIastos, this leaves only T11, the notorious passage in the Apology in which Socrates claims to know that injustice is evil. Probably the way to accomodate this text is not to distinguish between senses of knowledge, as VIastos does, but between objects of knowledge. In Apology 21d2-6 Socrates disclaims knowledge of anything fine and good (kalon kagathon). Knowledge of what constitutes happiness or of what awaits a person after death would be knowledge of this sort. But knowledge that injustice is evil is virtually tautologous. It is too empty and obvious for it to count as 'fine and good', i.e., the sort of knowledge which Socrates disclaims. Reading the Apology dis-

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claimer (and the related passages elsewhere) as carefully restrieted to a certain class of objects of knowledge would allow Socrates to claim that he knows, e.g., that virtue is beneficial, and that he knows such methodologieal principles as that presented in T12, while still not knowing anything of substance about the good life. And it does so without committing Socrates of trading on an ambiguity between two senses of knowledge. (On this 'last point, I am indebted to conversation with Peter Stemmer.) 11 What VIastos does is to describe a sense of 'teach ' in whieh it is true that Socrates was a teacher. From this it folIows, if the sense is a legitimate one, that Socrates should have acknowledged this sense (or perhaps that, if he had had someone like VIastos to explain it to hirn, he would have), but not that he did. 12 The type of case in whieh a (complex-) ironical paradox is consistent is unusual and even perverse. Such a case is the reverse of the one whieh VIastos ascribes to Socrates, namely, one in which the two meanings are 'switched' so that both communicated beliefs turn out heterodox instead of orthodox. Consider a Socrates who disclaimed knowledge, intending to imply by this (a) that he does not have justified true belief, but (b) that he has certain true belief. Another, perhaps more realistie example is the schizophrenie who says, 'This pen is my mother', meaning by this to communieate (a) his belief that the pencil is literally his mother, and (b) his belief that the pencil is not his mother in any mere metaphorical sense. In the case where the schizophrenie believes that his or her hearer is disposed to interpret the remark as a metaphorical statement, this speech act has a niee point: it is a case of what VIastos calls 'riddling' irony (79-80). 13 This sense is recognized by the lexiea: see, e.g., LSJ s. v. 1tapaoo~ot; and the American Heritage Dictionary s.v. paradox. Gareth Matthews' illuminating discussion of paradoxieal statements in Matthews 1974 can be expanded to cover this sort of paradox by revising his definition (0) on 133 to read: '[A paradox is] a statement made with a sentence which is formally incompatible with some sentence that can be taken, on a standard reading of its terms, to express an obvious truth. ' (Definition (0*) on 138 can be revised similarly.) 14 In the form of the participles 0IlOAOjOUIlEVWV and 0IlOAOjOüv'tat; 15 Note that the intoerlocutors in question in this passage are not Socrates' close associates, but those who disagree with hirn (iv 6.14), or worse, those who disagree without being able to speak clearly (iv 6.13). This antagonistic setting is what makes a safe method for enforcing verbal agreement so necessary. 16 Oespite having made a point of this very distinction earlier, in item (2) on page 39. 17 See further Mem. ii 3.14; iv 2.14-16; iii 1.6; Cyrop. 6.28-34. Compare Rep. i 332d-335e, and the pseudo-Platonic de iusto 374bff. 18 Cf. the fragments of Antisthenes; and see Joel 1893-1901, vol. 2 2.1011 ff. 19 The text of this passage is, however, compatible with another interpretation. The past tense in Socrates' question and Critoboulous' answer, and the repetition of 1tOVTlPOl in ii 6.20, permit one to suppose that Critoboulous is being led to admit that no bad person of any sort can be friends with a good person. The interpretation I give, however, is also compatible with the text, and has the advantage of being philosophically stronger. Socrates could not be friends with his students unless inadequately virtuous people who are capable of learning can be friends with the truly good. Gigon 1956, 140 argues that Socrates believes friendship between