Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher

"This is a book that’s impossible to write, in a way. It’s a biography of Socrates , who refused to write anything down, as a matter of principle. Socrates felt that the written word was a bad thing for philosophy (and life) because although it looked intelligent, every time you asked a question it always gave the same response, whoever asked the question. Whereas if you spoke to somebody, you could adjust what you said according to who was in front of you. You could be more subtle and not waste time giving a complex answer to somebody who couldn’t possibly understand it. Armand D’Angour has attempted to write the story of Socrates’s life using his knowledge of Classics and ancient history. He has analysed the sources that exist: largely Plato’s writings—his famous dialogues—and also Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues, which are quite different in style and present a different, slightly more ploddy Socrates. D’Angour has managed to tell what I feel, as an outsider, is quite a convincing story about Socrates. At its heart is the idea that Socrates had a very significant female mentor figure. According to the story D’Angour tells, it’s very likely he had a love affair with Aspasia, who had been Pericles’s lover, and that she was the source of the character Diotima in Plato’s Symposium . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Diotima is incredibly important in the Symposium , because Socrates talks about being told a story by her about the nature of love. It’s about how you move from falling in love with a beautiful individual—which in Socrates’s case would probably have been a beautiful young man—to admiring beauty in others, to admiring the concept of beauty. You move up what’s known as ‘Diotima’s ladder’ to admiring the nature of beauty, the nature of the good, and then bingo, at the top, is moral goodness. So somehow falling in love with a beautiful young person is a route to philosophy and the highest form of morality. It’s almost a kind of sophistry (which would probably be inappropriate for Socrates, incidentally). You could also interpret it as a moral story about not being too obsessed with the beauty of an individual, because you want to get beyond that to more abstract concepts of justice and goodness. These are not connected with the sublunary world of individual beauty, but with the actual concept of Beauty, the concept of goodness removed into the weird world of Forms that Plato—and possibly Socrates—believed to exist as the true nature of reality. In Plato’s analogy of the cave, the beauty of an individual is just the flickering shadow on the wall, whereas the Form is the abstract thing that lies behind it. I found Socrates in Love completely fascinating. It’s a very readable book, even for somebody who doesn’t know much about philosophy. Whether or not he’s right about Aspasia, it’s still an interesting hypothesis. It would be nice if it were true because it would make the most significant early philosopher—the man who has cast a shadow across the whole of Western philosophy—in some ways dependent on the ideas of a woman. Socrates is portrayed as the father of philosophy, but here’s a hint that maybe there was somebody who was a mentor to him who was a woman. Given the history of excluding women from philosophy, that’s quite an interesting story to tell. I’m sure it’ll fall on receptive ears, even if it isn’t true. No, as I’ve said, it’s speculative but based on Armand d’Angour’s extensive knowledge of classical history, classical sources and Greek philosophy. It’s a reconstruction from the fragments, but inevitably with the classical world we are dealing with fragments. We’re lucky that the ideas of some thinkers and writers exist pretty much intact, but for most of the ancient world, we literally have fragments of their writing, which we piece together to try and tell the best story we can, given the many gaps. As a book, Socrates in Love is great. It’s a very clever idea and it’s very artfully done. I found it a quick read, surprisingly, given it’s a book about ancient history and ancient philosophy. Those can often be quite difficult to follow, but this is an enthralling story and there are lots of rewards along the way, little glimpses of different places, different aspects of ancient Greek society and so on. It’s a very readable book and it’s admirable in all kinds of ways. There’s a public story that it was convenient for Plato to tell about Socrates. That’s part of the theme of this book, that that story may not be entirely based on who the real Socrates was. There’s always that problem in ancient philosophy, working out who Socrates was—as opposed to the character that Plato created in his brilliant dialogues. Those are clearly artistically shaped for all kinds of reasons that suited Plato. It’s not as if he felt he was writing history in any sense that we would recognise. Yes, I should have mentioned that Aristophanes’s play is one of our other sources, which has Socrates coming out of the clouds. The basic driving force of the book is, ‘What made Socrates Socrates? Where did this guy come from?’ He’s quite a remarkable figure who pulled together all these bits of what we would now call pre-Socratic thinking, and emerged as this charismatic interrogator of assumptions. His reputation has survived two and a half thousand years and, to me, he is still one of the most interesting figures in the history of thought. Being able to fill in some of the details of his life, even in a speculative form, is really interesting. To go back to your question about what kind of year it’s been for philosophy books for a second, it’s certainly been a good year for biographical writing in philosophy."

"Just published, Socrates in Love is a fascinating attempt to uncover the early life of Socrates , one of the greatest thinkers of all time. Whether you accept D’Angour’s theory that the young Socrates was very different from the older man portrayed by Plato – lover, warrior, wrestler, dancer – the elegance of D’Angour’s prose, and the lightness of his touch, make this a very pleasurable read. The author is an Oxford Classics don, so the erudition is there, but he takes the general reader along every step of the way. Could Socrates have had a female mentor who taught him the meaning of love? It is a radical thesis. And it could be true."