The Art of Living

"Nehamas takes Vlastos’s account of complex irony as his point of departure. Nehamas’s view is that Vlastos misses something fundamental about the figure of Socrates: that the figure of Socrates is ironical through and through, that is, it is all concealed. The difference between Vlastos and Nehamas is a fundamental one, and goes to the heart, I think, of the ways in which they think differently about how philosophy is done. For Vlastos, we can understand the role of Socrates’ remarks by thinking about their truth and falsity, one by one, and by figuring out how they can be rendered consistent – against the background of some kind of moral certitude, embodied in the figure of Socrates. For Nehamas, by contrast, the ironical figure of Socrates is, as it were, cut from whole cloth: Socrates is always concealed, always resistant to this kind of piecemeal interpretation. In that case, the only way that we can think about the figure of Socrates is as the representation it is (not of some actual figure, but a representation, through and through). Nehamas’s point is that as we look at this figure, we’re always in a vertiginous position of uncertainty – and that for this reason the figure of Socrates can be some kind of model even for those who resist imitating him. Nehamas’s book is a tour de force, a book which uses the figure of Socrates as a way of thinking about ‘the art of living’, through the eyes of other writers, themselves transfixed by this ironical stance. “The sense of vertigo or incompleteness may indeed go all the way down ” There are two main chapters on Socratic irony, but there’s also an introductory chapter on irony in the work of Thomas Mann, then there’s a chapter on Montaigne, one on Nietzsche , and another on Foucault . Nehamas insists that the enigmatic, questioning features of the represented Socrates are central to understanding the way to think about ‘how best to live’. Vlastos, by contrast, seeks some kind of certainty beneath the puzzles about Socratic knowledge and ignorance. The radical contrast between the two does not merely illustrate the diverging ways in which Plato’s Socrates can be interpreted, they also bring out the tension that we find in the dialogues themselves, between the representations of the philosopher and the arguments embedded in those representations. The two books, taken together, gives you a snapshot of how it is that thinking about the difference between represented figures and itemised arguments might make a difference as to how we read these texts, a philosophical difference. The sense of vertigo or incompleteness may indeed go all the way down. I’m not saying that the arguments don’t count, but I think the arguments are repeatedly finessed by the questions about how the arguments are underpinned, and questions about how those arguments figure in a life, or from the perspective of a life, or from the perspective of reading about the life of a figure such as Socrates. This means, among other things, that questions about knowledge or what there is cannot in fact be separated from questions about how to live; the ways in which Socrates lives his philosophical life is not detachable from the content of the arguments, once the context as a whole is fully taken into account. So the arguments stand, but they are always finessed by their context; conversely the context is itself reflected upon by the arguments. The figure of Socrates stands in the middle. Should we think that there is really a Socrates at all? In all of these versions of him, he is a construct or a fiction. When we read a dialogue like the Theaetetus , is the point of the figure of Socrates that he is a character to emulate? Isn’t that a bit like asking ‘Should we emulate Harry Potter?’ The answer in the case of Socrates is probably not: we should think about things with this figure, but only by recognising that this figure is a representation, not a real person. Thinking about Socrates as a real man misleads us, because we don’t get Socrates the man, we always get Socrates represented to us by other people who have other purposes of their own. The interesting thing about Plato is that his agenda themselves are interesting: he wants us to think about argument, about how you live with arguments, or, indeed, how you could live without them. There was a tendency in the philosophy with which I grew up to believe that argument is all there is, and that arguments can be demarcated and separated, particularly that arguments about knowledge could be separated from arguments about the good. What you see with these texts, with these representative figures discussing how best to live, is that for thinkers like Plato questions about knowledge aren’t separable from questions about how best to live – in fact they’re integral to each other. If one takes that view then the figure of Socrates and the arguments he uses in both these areas are intimately connected, and can’t be teased apart. In my view that is exactly right."