Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher

"Yes. My fourth choice is Gregory Vlastos’ Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher . Vlastos was a great figure in ancient philosophy in the US, in the second half of the twentieth century. This book and the work that went with it created a school of interpretations of Socrates and of Plato vis-à-vis Socrates, thoughts about how we should understand Socratic method and so on, which dominated a large part of Anglo-American (less so European) ancient philosophy for a very long time. It’s a wonderfully lucid book, a series of chapters that are well-demarcated, a lot of which had their antecedents in separate essays. There is something about the chronology of the Platonic dialogues, and something about the direct evidence for the nature of Socrates’ theorising, and on how we might distinguish between what counts as Socratic and what counts as Platonic. For Vlastos, Socrates is transparently present in the dialogues, and has philosophical theories which are exclusively ethical. Then Plato comes along and he does the metaphysics and the epistemology and talks about knowledge and what there is. So in some sense the book offers the distinction I have been drawing – between the figure of the philosopher, and the more austere features of theorising about what it is to know, or what there is. Vlastos saw the figure of Socrates as someone to aspire to be — not merely to think about what he said, but to be that person. That comes across in his writing. It’s enormously passionate and committed, and has at times an air of certitude which sometimes obscures the ways in which what he says is not only very controversial, but highly contestable, too. One of the central theses of Vlastos’ book is an account of what we should say about Socratic irony. When we see the figure of Socrates and he says things which we take to be ironical, what do we think that means? When he says to a stuffed-shirt like Euthyphro – ‘teach me, because I don’t know anything about this subject in hand, but I am sure you know, so you can put me right….’, what do we take Plato’s Socrates to mean? Vlastos has a description of how we should understand this sort of irony – as ‘complex irony’, where Socrates both says what he means and doesn’t say what he means and we, the auditors and readers, can negotiate the difference between those two positions. So Socrates isn’t lying; nor is he being nasty. Irony is not sarcasm. Instead, Socrates offers a puzzle with the gap between where Socrates means what he says, and where he does not; and that gap is itself susceptible of explanation and account. As a consequence we can understand what Socrates says in terms of truth and falsity; but in terms of truth and falsity at different levels of implication and explicitness. The philosophical work is done by the negotiation between these two levels; but the figure of Socrates himself remains throughout innocent of deception. Instead, Socrates’ commitments are mostly concealed, but they are – on further work and exposition, scrutable and morally sound. The figure of Socrates, thus, can remain a moral paradigm even while he forces argumentative clarity from his interlocutor by not saying what he means. Socrates is concealed, on Vlastos’ view, he’s not saying what he thinks; but he is not deceitful nor morally base. There’s a wonderful figure at the end of the Symposium where Alcibiades describes Socrates as having these amazing gold figurines on the inside that you don’t see: Vlastos, like Alcibiades, is captivated by this figure of the philosopher all golden inside. And he sees – what surely in part Plato’s representations are designed to make us see – that for Plato the figure of the philosopher, or the figure of Socrates himself, cannot be separated from Socrates’ question ‘how best to live?’. The discussion of knowledge and what there is always inextricably bound to the questions of value and goodness."