The Neoplatonic Socrates

262 Pages·2014·1.232 MB·English

by  Layne, Danielle A., Tarrant, Harold

The NeoplaToNic SocraTeS
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The NeoplaToNic
SocraTeS

ediTed by
danielle a. layne and harold Tarrant
uNiverSiTy of peNNSylvaNia preSS
philadelphia
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published by
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coNTeNTS
introduction 1
Danielle A. Layne and Harold Tarrant
chapter 1. Socratic love in Neoplatonism 21
Geert Roskam
chapter 2. plutarch and apuleius on Socrates’ daimonion 36
John F. Finamore
chapter 3. The daimonion of Socrates: daimones and divination in
Neoplatonism 51
Crystal Addey
chapter 4. Socrates in the Neoplatonic psychology of hermias 73
Christina-Panagiota Manolea
chapter 5. The character of Socrates and the Good of dialogue form:
Neoplatonic hermeneutics 80
Danielle A. Layne
chapter 6. hypostasizing Socrates 97
Michael Griffin
chapter 7. Socratic character: proclus on the function of erotic intellect 109
James M. Ambury
chapter 8. The elenctic Strategies of Socrates: The Alcibiades I and the
commentary of olympiodorus 118
François Renaud
vi contents
chapter 9. Akrasia and Enkrateia in Simplicius’s commentary on epictetus’s
Encheiridion 127
Marilynn Lawrence
chapter 10. The Many-voiced Socrates: Neoplatonist Sensitivity
to Socrates’ change of register 143
Harold Tarrant
conclusion 163
Danielle A. Layne and Harold Tarrant
appendix: The reception of Socrates in late antiquity: authors, Texts,
and Notable references 167
Notes 179
bibliography 229
list of contributors 245
index 249
acknowledgments 255
IntroductIon
Danielle A. Layne and Harold Tarrant
Or how, before this, could we examine anything else, either of
the things that are or of those that come to be when we have
heard Socrates himself say: “It seems ridiculous of me to
consider the properties of other beings, when I do not know
myself”?1
—Proclus, in Alc. 6.12 (tr. O’Neill, modified)
In one of the most romantic dialogues of his corpus, Plato depicts Socrates walk-
ing barefoot in the waters of the Ilissus, coyly tormented by a seemingly benign
conundrum: “Who am I, and what are my intentions?” Turning to the handsome
Phaedrus and admitting his real difficulty with his lack of self-knowledge, Socrates
famously wonders whether he resembles “a monster more complicated and more
furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet
lot is given by nature.”2 Unable to solve the problem immediately, Socrates spends
the afternoon conversing with the boy on the nature of love, the soul, and the life
of the philosopher and, in so doing, sets the question “Who is Socrates?” on the
back burner. Yet, as we all know, years later, in a setting dramatically different
from this meandering stroll on a hot summer day, this very same difficulty was
readdressed before his peers and countrymen, the Athenians, and they replied
rather forcefully, sentencing the philosopher to death for corrupting the youth.
As history testifies, the Athenians were not the last to respond indignantly to
the question “Who is Socrates?” Timon of Phlius, skeptic and disciple of Pyrrho,
apparently believed that Socrates was a wicked dissembler, while Cato, the Roman
statesman and Stoic, deemed him a seditious babbler.3 With satirical wit, Lucian,
2 Introduction
in the imperial age, would unabashedly associate the philosopher with chicanery,
branding Socrates a coward who would rather seduce boys than participate in the
real affairs of the city.4 In contrast to such Athenian-like disdain, many others have
felt the need to defend the philosopher and his activities, attempting at times to
reconcile his beliefs with their own. Cicero famously regarded him as the father
of the rival Academic and Stoic schools, while Julian, the last non-Christian
Roman emperor, claimed that the son of Sophroniscus was more influential than
Alexander the Great.5 In the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino, a leader in the revival
of Platonism, prolifically referred to Socrates’ noble spirit and ability to save the
youth, while in modern and contemporary philosophy Socrates’ image and philo-
sophical method have been invoked and heralded in the works of authors as es-
teemed as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Gadamer, and even the infamously cynical
Foucault.6
Patently, opinion on “Who is Socrates?” and whether he was a Typhonic mon-
ster or a sage has been decidedly split. In contemporary scholarship on Socrates
this question has been revived and comprehensively analyzed. In fact, the library
stacks of most research universities testify to the wealth and abundance of second-
ary literature on Socrates, and, like well-worn war trenches, the daunting material
in the field can overwhelm and perhaps even frustrate students. In Socratic studies
alone, the army of topics includes questions concerning the sufficiency of virtue
for happiness, the necessity of knowledge for the good life, the sincerity or irony
of Socrates’ avowals of ignorance, the (im)possible nature of akratic action, So-
cratic method, and, most prominently, the so-called Socratic problem in which
scholars debate the possibility of discovering the thoughts and beliefs of the “his-
torical” Socrates.7
Assuredly, one of the most important texts in Socratic studies is Gregory Vlas-
tos’s Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher.8 Written at the end of a long and
industrious career in ancient philosophy, this book marked the beginning of a radi-
cal resurgence in Socratic philosophy as Vlastos advanced many remarkable and
provocative theses that attempted to wrestle with and uncover the “historical”
Socrates. Inspired by Vlastos’s pioneering work, in the early 1990s several edi-
tions and monographs devoted to understanding the life and work of the philoso-
pher began to appear, expanding the already abundant repertoire of appraisals on
Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. Consequently, many interested students hoping to
come to grips with the infamous question “Who is Socrates?” began turning to
editions like Hugh Benson’s Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates, K. J. Bou-
douris’s Philosophy of Socrates, and William Prior’s four-volume Socrates: Criti-
cal Assessments to navigate a path through this overloaded terrain of scholarship.
Introduction 3
These volumes offered students and scholars a rich compendium of essays de-
voted to various issues, not the least of which was responding to the Socratic
problem and the search for the true Socrates, that is, the historical answer to the
question “Who is Socrates?”.
In the mid-nineties the quest for the so-called historical or true Socrates began
to wane as specialists slowly forged the consensus that headway on the subject
would not be possible without further evidence. In fact, many scholars voiced the
opinion that the “Socratic problem” was a chimera, a Typhonic monster itself, as
the literary genre that both Plato and Xenophon so eloquently employed, the logoi
sokratikoi, allowed for considerable liberty and creativity, and thus neither of
these authors could reliably be deemed the authentic voice of the historical
Socrates.9 Accordingly, several experts maintained that what mattered in Socratic
studies was not the discovery of the historical Socrates but rather the careful re-
construction of Socrates’ legacy and the ideas that inspired various philosophical
traditions.10 One need only think of Paul Vander Waerdt’s edited volume The So-
cratic Movement, which, after examining Plato’s and Xenophanes’ depictions of
Socrates, also included essays devoted to the philosopher’s influence on the Cyn-
ics, Stoics, and Skeptics. In fact, in recent years there has been a remarkable surge
of scholarship that explicitly endeavors to track the history of the Socratic com-
mentary inaugurated in the Academy and surviving into the present age. For in-
stance, Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis compiled a collection entitled
Remembering Socrates, whose final two essays explicitly deal at length with the
appearance of Socrates in later antiquity. Similarly, Donald R. Morrison opens his
Cambridge Companion to Socrates with a very dense essay by Louis-André
Dorion on the decline of interest in the Socratic problem, but also brilliantly ends
with a piece by A. A. Long entirely devoted to Socrates in the Hellenistic and
imperial ages. Continuing this trend, Michael Trapp’s two-volume Socrates from
Antiquity to the Enlightenment and Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Cen-
turies meticulously devotes itself to tracing the image of Socrates throughout the
history of philosophy and even concludes with essays on Kierkegaard’s and Ni-
etzsche’s attraction to this Athenian personality. Finally, one of the best publica-
tions aiming to give its readers a more comprehensive answer to the question
“Who is Socrates?” is Sara Ahbel-Rappe’s and Rachana Kamtekar’s Companion
to Socrates, which dedicates almost half of its 510 pages to the Socrates envisaged
by later thinkers in the medieval, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary peri-
ods. In this volume essays range over a variety of topics, including analysis of
typical Socratic problems in Plato’s dialogues, as well as more creative and stimu-
lating theses like Socrates’ sage-like status in the Arabic tradition and his
4 Introduction
methodological impact on Hegel. It closes with persuasive discussions concerning
the philosopher’s influence on contemporary teaching methods and even
psychoanalysis.
In such circumstances the present-day student or scholar in Socratic studies
hears a variety of voices, all of which are attuned to the immeasurable worth of
the stonemason’s son who challenged all comers to recognize that the unexamined
life is not worth living. Nevertheless, it must be noted that despite this new wave
of valuable resources in Socratic scholarship, there is a rather striking omission, a
lacuna that assuredly resonates with anyone interested in the history of philoso-
phy. Put simply, there seems to be an almost eerie silence with regard to the recep-
tion of Socrates in later antiquity; most predominantly in all of the publications
mentioned above there is an unfortunate neglect of analysis on the reception of
Socrates in the later Platonic tradition from the second to the sixth century CE. In
other words, there is a marked neglect in engagement with the Neoplatonic render-
ing of Socrates. For example, both the Trapp and the Ahbel-Rappe and Kamtekar
collections contain an assortment of essays spanning various contexts from Hel-
lenistic and medieval Jewish literature to contemporary contexts, but, nonetheless,
regardless of their comprehensiveness, there is not one paper devoted to the
Socrates of later antiquity. Strikingly, more than half a millennium of commentary
is passed over in silence.
This neglect is not completely unsurprising, as the oft-regarded father of this
so-called school,11 Plotinus, rarely analyzes the character of Socrates and, more-
over, pays little attention to what most consider the genuinely Socratic dialogues,
that is, the early aporetic works. Furthermore, the Neoplatonic curriculum, first
organized by Iamblichus in the late third or early fourth century, focused less on
dialogues that modern scholars would see as somehow “Socratic” (e.g., the Apol-
ogy and Euthyphro) and more on texts like the Timaeus or the Parmenides, dia-
logues where Socrates has ceased to be the protagonist.12 This tendency to bypass
the ‘Socratic’ in the Enneads in general and in the Iamblichean curriculum in
particular has led many scholars to conclude with W. Bröcker that this constitutes
a Platonismus ohne Sokrates.13 For Bröcker it was clear that the Neoplatonic proj-
ect stood counter to the Socratic tradition as it no longer valorized doubt and open
inquiry but, in its lust to systemize Plato’s metaphysics, seemed to white-wash
both Socrates’ association with skepticism and the ethical/political character of his
divine mission. As Werner Beierwaltes neatly summarizes:
“Ohne Sokrates”—dies hieße: ohne politisches Engagement und ohne
politische Theorie, die auf eine durch philosophische Ethik gerformte