SOURCE: "The Socratic Problem," in The Philosophical Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 214, July 1927, pp. 287-306.

[In the following essay, Dubs argues that, contrary to "the view commonly held," Plato's account of the character and philosophy of Socrates is "substantially correct." He concludes that, at the very least, Plato did not deliberately distort the historical Socrates's character or opinions.]

The purpose of this paper is to present some considerations in support of the thesis that Plato's account of the character and philosophic opinions of Socrates is substantially correct, as against the view commonly held.

The usual interpretation of Socrates is based on scepticism of Plato's trustworthiness. In 1741, Brucker, sceptical of the accuracy of ancient writers, first refused to accept the unanimous opinion of antiquity as to the genuineness of Plato's account, and reasoned that Plato was a creative thinker, and so would naturally put his own original thoughts into the mouth of his master, Socrates; whereas Xenophon, just because he did not have any philosophic originality, would be more likely to preserve the historic Socrates. Therefore our knowledge of Socrates must be founded on Xenophon's account. This opinion gained the assent of Hegel and the Hegelians, and through their influence became accepted by the philosophic world. Schleiermacher proposed to add to Xenophon's testimony those elements from Plato's account which would be necessary to justify the picture of Plato. Zeller accepted that canon, and so there grew up the received interpretation of Socrates—that he was interested chiefly in ethics and conceptual definition, and certainly did not propound the theory of ideas.

The two chief foundations of this interpretation are the almost universal lack of a historic sense by writers of the ancient world, and the fact that Plato was undoubtedly an original thinker. When Xenophon wished to express his own views upon household management, land improvement, and agriculture, he put them into the mouth of Socrates. The picture of the man who was so little interested in the country that he never went out of the city of Athens except when compelled to do so, Socrates, teaching agriculture, was a little too much even for Xenophon, so he put most of his material into the form of a conversation related by Socrates, a literary form which had been adopted in some dialogues of Plato; but the fact that a work could be published which portrayed the city-loving Socrates relating a conversation on estate management twenty books long, shows how little sense of historic accuracy was possessed by people of the time. Since the author of the subtle and highly philosophic dialogues of Plato could have been no other than a great philosopher, and consequently a creative philosopher, it was also thought that, like Xenophon, he put his own opinions into the mouth of his master. And so the educated world has pretty generally accepted the theory that most of what Plato attributed to Socrates, especially the deeper philosophic views, are really views of Plato, and not of the historic Socrates at all.

But an argument such as the foregoing, which is based on general considerations only, may fail when applied to a particular case. It might be that Plato is an exception to the almost universal rule, and he might nevertheless be giving us a trustworthy account. Great men are always exceptional, and so we should not close our minds to this possibility. Socrates is generally credited with being the founder of the school of philosophy which includes Plato and Aristotle—the most influential philosophic movement the world has ever known. There is no case known where the founder of a great and original movement was himself a second- or third-rate thinker, whose historic importance is largely due to the fact that he attracted men who were much more brilliant and original than himself, to elaborate and develop the foundations which he himself laid. Yet that is the conclusion to which the received interpretation of Socrates is driven—that he was greatly inferior in philosophic ability to Plato, merely a second- or third-rate thinker, who was interested only in the 'practical' problems of philosophy, especially ethics and definition, and left the theoretical problems of metaphysics severely alone. How much more probable that the man who discovered the concept and founded the classic Greek philosophy should have himself been a great philosopher!

So we find that there are general probabilities on both sides of the question. It is indeed a most complex problem, and can best be compared, in its difficulty, with the problem of the authorship of the Pentateuch, and must be solved by like methods—the detailed consideration of verses and words, and the fitting of all into a harmonious whole. It is indeed a scientific, rather than a philosophic, problem. Since the author of this paper cannot claim to be an authority on Greek literature and language or Greek philosophy, he can only present a few considerations which have come to him as he has studied the works of Plato and Xenophon, and the interpretations of Professors Burnet and Taylor.

The received theory of the historic Socrates makes Xenophon the primary source for our knowledge of the man, and takes Plato only as a secondary source, in accordance with the dicta of Brucker, Hegel, and Schleiermacher. But how much reliance can we put upon Xenophon? He was not a philosopher. He had no interest in the theoretical problems of philosophy. A bluff general, he is at his best in the campaigns of the Anabasis; but when he attempts to portray a banquet, he only succeeds in giving a very ordinary conversation, which, had it not been for the historic characters portrayed, would not be worth preserving or reading. The Cyropwedia shows that he had a taste for writing philosophical romance. Even in the Memorabilia it is impossible to believe that all of the conversations recorded there are genuinely historical. Who could suppose that while Socrates lectured his son on his duty to his mother, or when he urged Cherecrates to make up his quarrel with his brother, Xenophon was standing by, silent, treasuring up all that good advice in his memory? Again and again we meet with passages that sound suspiciously like the voice of the author of the other works of Xenophon. The first seven chapters of the third book are devoted to subjects in which Xenophon, the general, with his regimental interest in efficiency, was particularly interested. Ten passages are repeated from the Cyropcedia. We have many other such indications that Xenophon is far from a trustworthy historian. Indeed, when we hear him imputing to Socrates the teaching that geometry should only be studied sufficiently to gain a knowledge of the principles of land measurement, and astronomy, to be able to discern the directions at night or to set the night watches, we seem to hear the voice of the practical and efficient general, Xenophon, especially when in the same passage he admits twice that Socrates was versed in exactly the purely theoretical portions of mathematics and astronomy which he said were worthless, and had attended lectures upon them.¹ We begin to suspect that the 'practical' man, Socrates, whom we have been inferring from the Memorabilia, is really Xenophon himself masquerading in the figure of his master!

Just how much actual contact Xenophon had with Socrates, we do not know. It was three years before the death of Socrates that he saw that teacher for the last time, when he left on the expedition of the immortal Ten Thousand. Xenophon was under thirty at the time. We know that he took the literary form of his dialogues from Plato, who invented the philosophic dialogue; the subjects of Xenophon's dialogues, the Apology, and probably also the Banquet, were taken from similar dialogues of Plato. Indeed there are surprisingly few facts of Socrates' life (as distinct from reports of his opinions) recorded by Xenophon, which he could not have gotten from the published writings of Plato. If we compare the writings of Xenophon with those of Plato, we find that exclusive of those things which are plainly the result of the working of imagination, there are very few statements about Socrates' life in Xenophon's writings, except those given by Plato. In fact Aristotle never quotes Xenophon, although he must certainly have known his writings. Xenophon is at best an unreliable witness to the historic Socrates, and his evidence may be almost entirely secondary, a distortion of the Platonic account.

It would be out of place here to discuss at length the result of the researches into the development of Plato's style as dating the different dialogues. From the importance which stylistic and linguistic considerations have assumed in the discussion of the Pentateuch, it is easy to see that such stylistic conclusions may have an important bearing upon our interpretation of Plato. If, for instance, it could be shown, from purely stylistic considerations, and quite independently of any presuppositions as to the development of Plato's thought, that the Phaedo was an earlier work, and was not his "last testament to his school," we should be very much more inclined to consider the teaching of the Phaedo as genuinely Socratic. That such may well be the case can be seen even by those ignorant of Greek. It is a well-known fact that the literary style and dramatic quality of some great writers have declined considerably with the approach of age. This was notably true in the case of Robert Browning. There are few poems written by him after the Ring and the Book which equal in literary quality those written earlier, although there is a gain in philosophic content. Plato died at the age of eighty-one, and the character of his literary style in his later years can be seen from a reading of the Philebus, which entirely lacks the subtle humor and dramatic quality of the earlier dialogues. But the Phaedo, not only in the description of the death of Socrates, but also in other passages, such as the passage on the dying swan of Apollo, ranks with Plato's best literary work, and is therefore not likely to have been composed in the same period when he wrote the Philebus and the Laws, but in his younger days, when his powers were at their height.

A more striking piece of evidence of the historicity of the Platonic Socrates is to be drawn from the character of Socrates himself. The Protagoras is generally conceded to be a 'Socratic' dialogue. It is in that dialogue that Alcibiades declares that Socrates exceeds all men in the power of grasping and pursuing an argument. Indeed there could be no better picture, than the one in that dialogue, of what the Chinese call the power to hold one subject through a thousand twists and turnings. And at the inconclusive end we are left with the impression that the Socrates who so pertinaciously pursued the argument and who showed such eagerness to continue the discussion, will certainly carry it further in his own mind. This impression we get from each of the inconclusive dialogues, such as the Euthyphro—that Socrates was a logical thinker who would pursue a problem as far as reason would carry it, and not stop in the middle of an inquiry.

When we turn to a consideration of the philosophy which Plato puts into Socrates' mouth, we find the same characteristic of logical coherence. If Socrates made any philosophic discovery at all, he at least discovered the concept. That is conceded to him by almost everyone. But the inquiry into concepts leads logically to the Socratic search for definitions. A definition is nothing more than an explicit statement of the content of a concept. And the Socratic practice of seeking for definitions led directly to the practice of the maieutic art. Socrates' way of discovering the definition of a concept was to question his hearers and lead them to express their own implicit convictions, much as in the Meno he led an ignorant slave lad to recognize what was the side of a square of twice the area of the original square. That this practice of spiritual midwifery was genuinely Socratic is shown by a passage in Aristophanes' Clouds, where the disciple tells Strepsiades that his loud knocking has caused the "miscarriage of a thought." But the maieutic art logically involves the doctrine of reminiscence. Whence could it be that different persons had the same content for their innermost conceptions? Either because they had had the same experiences or because these ideas were implicit in their souls. But this common content could not come from experience, since often they had never before thought of such matters, any more than the slave lad in the Meno had ever before heard of the term, the 'diagonal' of a square. But Socrates showed his audience that nevertheless the slave lad recognized the meaning of that concept, although he did not know the name for it. If these concepts are inherent in men, and not from experience, how could they come into human nature except in a previous existence, from which time they were unconsciously remembered? Even though for Socrates this doctrine of reminiscence might have been only a myth, and not literally true, he must certainly have thought that something like it was true. The maieutic method of eliciting conceptual definitions from different persons implies at the very least that these concepts are in some sense independent of the individual and so exist independently. This doctrine logically involves the preexistence of these ideas. To be remembered from a former existence, the ideas must have existed in that former existence independently of individual human beings. So we are led to the notion of a realm of ideas, which realm is independent of human knowledge of them, and to the doctrine of two worlds—the world of preexistent ideas and the changing world of experience—and to the theory of ideas with the worlds of Being and Becoming, knowledge and opinion, etc., by a logical chain of reasoning, beginning with the admittedly Socratic concept. Where can the chain be broken? Certainly not until we reach some form of the ideal theory; and if we must attribute a theory of ideas to Socrates, why not the particular theory so plainly attributed to him by Plato? It is the difficulty of presenting one end of the chain without being led, by the sheer force of its logical concatenation, to the other end, which led the writer to feel that the theory of ideas is Socratic. Indeed it is difficult to think that the logical thinker, Socrates, if he pursued arguments as relentlessly and pertinaciously as he is pictured as doing in the Protagoras, should not have followed his conceptions to their logical conclusion in the doctrine of the two worlds and the fully developed theory of ideas. A second-rate man, a Xenophon, might have stopped half way; Xenophon never pursued any chain of reasoning very far: but then Xenophon could never have discovered the concept, nor would the purely 'practical' Socrates, whom he presents, have done so! The persistent reasoner who seems to be drawn from life in even the earliest Platonic dialogues would hardly have refrained from carrying his argument to its ultimate conclusion. In view of the coherence of this doctrine, it would seem that we must either take the whole of it as Socratic, or else deny that any of it is Socratic at all, even the logical concept. Either we must deny that we know anything at all about Socrates, and assert that the accounts of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes are alike fiction, or if we assert that Socrates had any philosophic originality at all, we must assert that the whole of the teachings which Plato attributes to him are really Socratic.

There is an apparently sufficient answer to this position in the statement of Aristotle: "Two things may be fairly ascribed to Socrates—epagogic arguments and universal definition.… Socrates did not make the universals or the definitions exist apart."² But we have no right to expect in the lecture notes of the Metaphysics, such careful statements as we would get in a history of philosophy. To understand the passage we must consider the context. In the previous part of the chapter, Aristotle is considering the sources of the ideal theory. In one sentence he talks about "the supporters of the ideal theory," and in the next he talks about Socrates. From the close connection we might well gather that Socrates was one of the supporters of the ideal theory! Then he speaks of how Socrates was led to make his contributions to the ideal theory, the source of which he finds especially in these two things, epagogic reasoning and universal definition. We cannot fairly interpret this passage as asserting that Socrates' interests were confined to these two things—even the received interpretation asserts that Socrates was interested in ethics, which is not mentioned here. As to the other sentence, that "Socrates did not make the universals or the definitions exist apart," Aristotle unfortunately does not explain what he means by "exist apart" or by whom they were made to exist apart. The people who declare the ideas to "exist apart" might very well be, as Professor Burnet has suggested, the "friends of the ideas" of the Sophist (248 A), who made a far sharper separation between ideas and things than did Plato, and who are attacked in that dialogue. So upon closer consideration, this passage in Aristotle not only is no contradiction to the interpretation of Socrates' philosophy which is here upheld, but even points in the same direction.

There is an additional piece of evidence for the genuineness of Plato's picture of Socrates to be derived from what we know of Plato's own character and artistic ability. He was a man of extraordinarily keen and exact dramatic sense of fitness. There is little or no indication that Plato wrote with an ideal of historic accuracy such as that demanded by modern historians. Such a conception did not yet exist, and what we know of contemporary writings, such as those of Xenophon, shows that the reading public did not require or expect historical verisimilitude. But Plato was a dramatist who has rarely been equalled in the dramatic characterization of his figures. He can best be compared with Shakespeare in the way in which he completely effaced his own personality in the characters whom he depicted. Plato was able to throw himself into the most various and unlike characters and depict them with marvellous fidelity. So true to life are the figures we meet, and so great Plato's self-effacement, that the personality of Plato does not appear at all in his dialogues, and when we have read them all we know little more about Plato as a person than about Shakespeare. Undoubtedly he put speeches into Socrates' mouth, but so keen was his dramatic sense that he put only those things into the mouth of Socrates which were thoroughly appropriate. We must remember that Plato was thoroughly acquainted with the persons who figure in his pages and the subjects on which he makes Socrates discourse. Socrates was a close friend of several members of Plato's family. An uncle, Charmides, had been a close associate of Socrates. An older brother, Glaucon, had been a disciple. A half-brother, Antiphon, studied the Socratic philosophy. Plato probably heard Socrates and his philosophy discussed by members of his family from the time that he was a child. In addition, during the last eight years of Socrates' life, Plato was associated with him. Plato's own philosophic ability is a guarantee that he understood the subjects discussed and appreciated fine philosophical distinctions. The speakers in the dialogues are almost all men who were well known in Athens and with whom Plato could have become well acquainted. It is admitted by those who hold to the usual interpretation of Socrates that the other figures in the Protagoras are depicted with entire fidelity to life. With such a keen dramatic sense and such a full understanding of the subject and of the persons whom he portrays, it is hard to think that Plato did not also depict his chief character, Socrates, with full fidelity. Not that the conversations are historic records, but they are dramatically true to life—Plato, with his nice dramatic sense, would not have portrayed Socrates as discussing any subject or uttering any sentiment which he could not well have uttered historically. That such is the fact is further shown by certain peculiarities of some of the dialogues, which will next be considered.

Plato began his career as a writer, with full acceptance of Socrates' philosophy and with an intention of perpetuating the memory and teachings of his master. It was not until he was more than forty years old, that he came to differ from his master. We find a similarly late development of philosophic doctrine in the case of Immanuel Kant. But in Plato's first period he devoted himself solely to proclaiming the teachings of Socrates and to perpetuating his memory. In that attempt he was so successful that today it is still the Platonic Socrates who lives in our minds; while the Socrates whom we have created in accordance with the dictates of the received interpretation and the accounts of Xenophon remains only a poor lay figure. But there came a time when Plato, as every great thinker, began to differ from his master, and when he wished to elaborate upon what his master had taught. He wanted to say things which Socrates would never have said, and yet which were direct outgrowths of Socrates' own teaching. Sometimes the literary necessities of the dialogue made him put these things into Socrates' mouth, but Plato's dramatic sense of fitness was outraged in so doing, so he satisfied it by putting into the text a warning to the reader not to take this saying as genuinely Socratic. We find such warnings in various places in the later dialogues. In the Republic, when Socrates is enumerating the sciences which should constitute the curriculum of the guardians, and hence the ideal for the youth of the day, he comes to solid geometry. Solid geometry did not exist in the time of Socrates, and so Socrates could not have spoken about it; yet it did exist in the time of Plato, and Plato could not leave it out. So Plato has Socrates include solid geometry in the curriculum, but satisfies his own literary conscience by making Socrates' companion reply (528B), "But that does not seem to have been discovered yet"! In the Thaetetus, in which Plato discusses different theories of knowledge, he is so disturbed by the parts of this dialogue which are not quite faithful to the historic Socrates that he prefaces the discussion with an account of the maieutic art, in which he emphasizes that Socrates is not wise and did not originate anything of himself.³ This statement cannot be literally true and must be an exaggeration, for in the Meno (98B) Socrates says that he does know some things. This statement is sometimes used in defence of the received interpretation; but even that interpretation admits that Socrates did know some things, even such important generalizations as that virtue is knowledge. The whole dialogue, in which Socrates propounds one epistemological theory after another, contradicts the statement that Socrates knew nothing, which sounds quite out of place. This statement is an example of the Socratic irony. Plato evidently means that Socrates did not know the things which he speaks of in this dialogue, and so the statement is exaggerated to counteract the general impression of the dialogue, because in it Plato makes Socrates know so much and propound such novel ideas! The Protagorean sensualistic theory (152D ff.) is plainly indicated as not Socratic and not that of Protagoras; one reason for connecting it with Protagoras was probably to make it possible that the historic Socrates could have known it. When Socrates is made to use the term doxa in a new sense to mean 'judgment,' he prefaces it by saying (189E), "I am speaking of what I do not know"! Later when Socrates comes to state an idealistic theory of knowledge, he says that he learned it in a dream! So we see that where Plato is obviously not dramatically accurate, he recognizes and indicates that fact. Evidently Plato was very much bothered by the lack of historical accuracy of this dialogue, and so was compelled by his literary conscience to indicate in various ways its shortcomings in that respect.

In other dialogues Socrates is no longer the chief speaker, and his place is taken by the Eleatic Stranger, Pannenides, Timaus, or the Athenian Stranger. Socrates listens to others or is absent altogether. Evidently there were some things which Plato could not put into Socrates' mouth at all. But in his old age, long after he had ceased writing Socratic dialogues, Plato did write another, the Philebus. The subject of the dialogue is an attack upon pleasure as the highest good, and consequently was fairly appropriate to Socrates. But Plato's dramatic power had waned very greatly, and so he was not so careful as to just what he made Socrates say. He had long before published his own views wherein he differed from Socrates, and probably thought that his readers would understand which doctrines were his and which really Socratic; but even here, when Socrates enunciates the central doctrine of the dialogue, Plato apologizes for putting it into Socrates' mouth by making him say (16C) that it is a gift from the gods handed down by tradition!

Were Plato a pious fabricator who sought to gain authority for his own ideas by putting them into the mouth of his better-known master, he would certainly not have boggled at adding such a detail as solid geometry or these other teachings to what Socrates is made to say. If Plato did not hesitate to put his own theory of ideas into the mouth of Socrates, why should he have refused to make him utter the teaching of the Sophist or the Statesman? Why should he warn his readers at times not to take some teachings as genuinely Socratic? A fabricator would not have warned his readers at all. If Plato thus warns his readers at times, and refuses to attribute some dialogues to Socrates at all, have we not a right to infer that where there is no warning, the teaching is genuinely Socratic, or at least like what Socrates did actually teach? At least it must follow that Plato never deliberately falsified the character and opinions of the historic Socrates. That he may have unconsciously attributed views of his own to Socrates is possible, but only to a very limited extent. That such unconscious attribution could not go very far is shown by Plato's carefulness and the delicacy of his dramatic sense. A writer who could portray the characters of the Protagoras with such dramatic fidelity could not go very far astray. Especially when in the Parmenides he came consciously to criticize Socrates' views and to distinguish them from his own, he would become aware of the differences between his own philosophy and that of Socrates. But the philosophic doctrines there attributed to Socrates are exactly those of the Phxedo and Republic, the theory of ideas. Plato's nice sense of dramatic fitness has preserved the historic Socrates for us.

In the Socratic irony there is to be found a seemingly conclusive reply to these arguments. If Socrates knew so much, if he worked out the metaphysical system of the Phxedo and the Republic, how could he say that he did not know anything? This asseveration of his ignorance is found in many dialogues, but it is stressed most of all in the Apology, where Socrates states that he alone is wise because he knows that he does not know anything. This assertion of ignorance cannot be denied, since it is too closely connected with passages which are universally conceded to be those picturing the historic Socrates, yet it appears to be quite inconsistent with the man who discovered the two worlds of Being and Becoming, and formulated the ideal state of the Republic.

This is indeed an important consideration, and unless Socrates' irony can be shown to be harmonious with the character of the Platonic Socrates, we must give up that interpretation altogether. But we must remember that the Socrates of Plato's dialogues is not a figure who always puts his philosophic theories into exact language, nor is he a man who always addresses himself to a philosophic audience. Plato was so much of a dramatist that the dramatic necessities of the dialogue take precedence over the ideal of technically philosophic accuracy. The Socrates of the dialogues is addressing his interlocutor, not the reader of the dialogue. To an ignorant person, Socrates would naturally speak in terms which could be understood; he would not speak of his deeper philosophic theories to men who could not comprehend them. Socrates was too keen a judge of men to do that. Furthermore his sense of humor and his eagerness to get some persons to discuss with him sometimes led him to subtle sarcasm and even exaggeration. Sometimes he was like the great scientist who says, 'I cannot explain anything,' or the great biologist who says, 'I know nothing about life,' or who may even say, 'I really as yet know nothing.' But in the Apology he was quite sincere, and there is no reason for thinking that in that case his irony was in any sense a pose. He was on trial for his life, and was concerned only with telling the truth. If Socrates was a philosopher seeking truth, his plain declaration of ignorance given in the Apology must be a confession of failure.

In interpreting this assertion of ignorance, we must ask two questions: What does Socrates mean by 'knowledge'? If he has some special definition of knowledge in mind, our interpretation of the Socratic irony must hang upon the meaning of that word. Secondly, we must ask how he could be honest and yet say that he did not know anything, if he had created what we recognize as one of the most brilliant of philosophical constructions—the theory of ideas of the Phcedo and the Republic?

It is the greatest scientists who are most humble. It is the man who has achieved most in the advancement of human knowledge who recognizes most keenly what is lacking and is most conscious of his ignorance. It is a mark of Socrates' greatness that he too recognized his own limitations, and that much as he had accomplished, he saw that he had not attained the goal which he had set up for himself. He too confessed his failure.

Socrates was a thinker whose ideals were so high that he was compelled, again and again, to take what was only second best. In the Phcedo (98 f.) he tells of his ideal of philosophy—that it would give a completed teleological account of the universe—that it would show that the world and everything in it, is as it is, because in that way it contributes to one universal good purpose. But he also says that he failed utterly to discover such a principle, and so had to turn to a second-best method of inquiry. In the Republic (504D) he admits that he has not given a detailed description of the virtues, but only an outline, and when he comes to the highest idea of all, the idea of good, he says that we know very little of it (505A); and he can only describe it by analogy with the sun. Here are important gaps which might well justify Socrates in a statement that he is not wise.

But he goes further than that; he says he has failed: and the implication is that he has failed, not only in some important aspects of metaphysical theory, but even in gaining the practical knowledge he sought. The social and political situation in Athens during the latter part of the Peloponnesian war and afterwards must have emphasized in Socrates' mind the importance of ethical knowledge, and so we find that in almost all of the dialogues except those with special students of philosophy, Socrates discusses ethical questions. Furthermore it is noteworthy that Socrates' statement of his ignorance occurs almost always only when ethical problems are under consideration.

In the Meno we find the clue to the answer of this problem. Socrates is discussing whether virtue can be taught, and he asserts that he "literally does not know what virtue is," and that he has "never known of any one else who did" (71 A, C). This statement is not to be pressed, for further on (98B) he says that he does know some things. The explanation of such an extreme statement is to be found in the meaning of 'knowledge.' A study of the Greek text of the Meno shows that the words episteme and phronesis, and the verbs oida and epistomei are used interchangeably.⁴ Socrates gives an example of knowledge-a geometrical proposition which he dramatically demonstrates to an ignorant slave lad. It is plainly said to be episteme (85D). Knowledge is that which can be demonstrated in the same way as a geometrical proposition, which, like it, is inherent in the soul, and which has the compelling power of a mathematical proposition. Socrates has the deductive, mathematical ideal of knowledge. Virtue, to be taught, must be knowledge, i.e., it must be capable of being put into the form of a proposition which can be deductively demonstrated.

This was the ideal of Socrates' ethics—to get the concepts of virtue and the virtues stated in such a form that they could not only be demonstrated to be correct, but could also be applied to any particular concrete situation in the same way that a geometrical proposition is applied to a concrete case. Then virtue could be taught, and everyone would be compelled to accept the idea of virtue in the same way that he must accept the Pythagorean proposition. In that way Socrates' mission to teach his fellow-citizens to care for virtue and their souls, would be fulfilled. For that purpose he must search into himself and other men.

But how far did he achieve that ideal? Only to a very small degree. He did succeed in identifying virtue with knowledge and temperance and justice. But he failed to demonstrate them from the highest idea of all, the idea of the good. He was not even able to define the idea of good in itself. As for the particular virtues, he was unable to get an exact definition which would enable any one to recognize an act as just or unjust without equivocation. He had to confess that he was able merely to give an outline, and could not give the perfect representation which would alone satisfy.⁵ No wonder Socrates felt that he had failed! He was unable to make ethics the deductive science of his ideal, and to apply his brilliant metaphysical system to the concrete problems of ethics. Aristotle likewise recognized this difficulty when he made the larger part of ethics a mere empirical study.

Socrates' confession of failure created just the sort of situation which would naturally bring about the scattering of his disciples and the development of a number of schools of philosophy. Each disciple would naturally attempt to solve the problem which Socrates had left, and each in his own way. Aristippus and Antisthenes concentrated on the ethical problem; Euclid and Phzedo emphasized the metaphysical problems; Plato alone was sufficiently keen to see the full greatness of the problem which Socrates had left, and he alone had sufficient Socratic humility to keep him from asserting that he had solved the problem. Only in later years did he venture to criticize Socrates' formulation; to the end of his days he was never sufficiently satisfied with his own views on the central doctrine of all—the good—so he never published his lecture on that subject. Indeed failure was inevitable for Socrates—he had separated the realms of being and becoming; knowledge could only be of being: but practical problems are only to be found in this changing world of becoming of which there can be no knowledge. Hence ethics, in as far as it deals with practical problems, cannot be a science or knowledge, and Socrates could not get more than abstract conceptual formula. How far Socrates recognized this as an inevitable necessity of his own philosophical system we do not know; but in the Republic he admits that no actual state can embody the ideal which he describes (473A): and in the Meno the conclusion is that virtue certainly is not taught; instead, people are guided by right opinion or intuition. Socrates was such an original and great thinker that he recognized his own failure to attain to his ideal, and confessed it publicly in his irony when he said he was not wise and did not have knowledge.

These considerations drawn from the logical character of Socrates' thought, the dramatic faithfulness of Plato, and the Socratic irony, are among the reasons which have commended the historical accuracy of Plato to the writer. There are other reasons which are equally cogent, but which need no more than a mention, since they are expounded so well by Professors Burnet and Taylor. Most striking is the extremely destructive criticism in the Parmenides of one form of the theory of ideas. Philosophers have often changed their views; but if the theory of ideas as given in the Phcedo and the Republic is Platonic and not Socratic, it is strange that Plato should have devoted one of his works to a destructive criticism of his former teachings. Philosophers have never done that. If Plato did it, it is the only case in the history of philosophy. When philosophers have changed, they have done it silently; sometimes they have asserted, as Schelling did, that they have not changed at all. But Plato would not have publicly criticized his own theory, for he was keen enough to realize that public destructive criticism was quite unnecessary to invalidate his own theory. The very fact that the author of a theory has discarded it, is quite sufficient to discredit it. Public criticism is only for the theories of other philosophers.

If we have any doubts that Socrates held the ideal theory in the form given in the Phaedo and the Republic, and think that it was elaborated, in many respects at least, by Plato, such doubts would be dispelled by a careful study of the Parmenides. Here, if anywhere, when Plato is openly criticizing his master, we would get a statement of the philosophy which Socrates actually held. What we find attributed to him is the theory that there are abstract ideas in which all things participate, but that the ideas do not participate in each other (129A). This is exactly the doctrine of the Phcedo; in that dialogue the immortality of the soul is ultimately proven as a deduction from the propositions that the soul participates, as its essence, in the idea of life, and that ideas do not participate in each other, but repel their contradictories, i.e., the idea of life repels its contradictory, death, and so the soul is immortal.

There are, in addition, differences between the political philosophies of the Republic on the one hand and the Statesman and the Laws on the other—just those differences which we should expect between an idealistic and uncompromising theorist who refused to engage in practical politics but criticized the Athenian democracy and its leaders, and the more practical founder of the world's first university, whose family were engaged in politics and had been close friends of Pericles.

Aristotle was not hesitant in criticizing his master, but he said nothing about a change in Plato's opinions, or of the Laws as being "the product of senile weakness." He had been a member of the Academy for the last twenty years of Plato's life and would have known of Plato's change of philosophy, if there had been one, and would have spoken of it at one of the many times when he criticized the ideal theory. In only one place he professes to give a careful statement of Plato's philosophy, and to distinguish the teachings of Plato from other philosophies.⁶ In that passage, after speaking of the theory of ideas, Aristotle attributes to Plato a number theory which is unlike anything we have in the dialogues, although we have Plato's complete works. It is only in a few of the later dialogues, the Philebus, the Timceus, and the Laws that there is anything which approaches this number theory. Had Plato been anxious to spread his philosophy by attributing it to Socrates, he would certainly not have left out such an important doctrine. Had it been a mere "senile aberration," Aristotle would have known that fact and would have spoken of it instead of spending so much time in combating the theory. On the contrary he tells us that Plato's central doctrine was given in his "Lecture on the Good" which Plato never published and even forbade others to publish. That sort of conduct is just what we might expect of a disciple of Socrates who was enthusiastic in publishing his master's teachings, but ready to allow his own central teaching to be perpetuated only in the thought of the school which he had founded and by the individuals whom he had influenced, especially as he was not too sure of it. Aristotle was a nobler monument to Plato than another philosophic work would have been.

The problem of discovering the historic Socrates resolves itself into an attempt to account for the differing statements of Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato, and to explain each account as derived from the one true account. By starting with the wholly 'practical' Socrates of Xenophon, we could never arrive at the figure portrayed either by Aristophanes or by Plato. But it can be shown that the Socrates of Aristophanes, the leader of a school interested in physical and mathematical investigations, which practiced dialectic, observed some kind of mildly ascetic regimen, and spoke strangely of the soul, is a legitimate distortion of the Platonic figure, and that Xenophon's account is likewise explicable as a distortion of the same Platonic Socrates, this time by an advocate of practical efficiency and military regimentation of life. In this way the other two accounts are shown to be derivable only from the Platonic account, and so the substantial accuracy of Plato's account is assured.

To sum up, we find that the chief reasons for accepting the Platonic Socrates as historical are: that Xenophon, on whose testimony the usual interpretation of Socrates is based, often plainly attributed his own views to Socrates, and is quite untrustworthy; that stylistic criteria seem to group some important members of what have been called the 'Platonic' dialogues with the 'Socratic' dialogues; that Socrates was undoubtedly a man who thought his problems through to the end, and the Socratic doctrine of the concept and practice of the maieutic art lead inevitably to a theory of ideas involving independent existence of the ideas, and quite naturally to the theory of the Phcedo and the Republic; that Plato's extraordinarily nice sense of dramatic fitness and his carefulness in pointing out where he deviates from what would be appropriate to the historic Socrates guarantee his historical accuracy; that the Socratic irony can be shown to be a logical and necessary consequence of the theory of ideas of the Phcdo and the Republic and the interpretation of 'knowledge' in the Meno and the Republic; that the Parmenides can only be adequately interpreted on the supposition that in it Plato is criticizing the theory of another philosopher; that the differences of political theory in the Republic on the one hand and the Statesman and the Laws on the other can best be explained as due to the different character and family traditions of Socrates and Plato; and that Aristotle's explicit account of Plato's central philosophy is wholly different from that given by the usual interpretation of the Socratic problem, and can only be adequately accounted for by accepting this newer interpretation of Socrates and Plato.

As a result of this criticism, Socrates is restored to us as one of the greatest figures in the history of philosophy, and by his side we find Plato, equally great in philosophic ability, now recognized as not a mere poet, fabricating dramatic fictions, a person whom the author of the Laws would despise, but as one of the greatest dramatists the world has known, who succeeded in making the historic persons of Athens into the eternally living figures of his dialogues, a man who possessed the spirit of scientific accuracy in an age when it was almost unknown, who was at the same time the keenest critic of his master's philosophy and the person who developed it most powerfully.

Notes

¹Memorabilia, IV, vii. 3-5.

²Melaphysics, XII, iv, 1078b.

³Thecetetus, 15OC; repeated in 157D and 161B.

⁴Cf. especially Meno 85, 89.

⁵Republic 504D.

⁶Metaphysics 1, vi.