SOURCE: "The Teaching of Socrates: The Prosaic and Ideal Interpretations; The Criteria," in Socrates, T. & T. Clark, 1905, pp. 101-50.

[In the following excerpt, Forbes studies the controversy over the Socratic sources, examining the versions of Socrates presented by Xenophon and Plato and identifying the possible biases of each author. Forbes concludes that through the use of Aristotle's comments on Socrates, "the artistic verisimilitude of the Xenophontic and Platonic portraits," and the analysis of the development of Socrates's philosophy, a consistent view of Socrates can be attained.]

The question of authorities for the teaching of Socrates meets us at the outset of any attempt to deal with the subject. To two writers mainly, Plato and Xenophon, we are indebted for our knowledge; their testimonies being supplemented or corrected by what comes to us from Aristotle and others. Broadly speaking, outside the three named, allusions to Socrates are scanty, or of poor authority. The testimonies of Xenophon and Plato are very full, but differ much from each other. The references of Aristotle are brief, but of great value.

What, then, was the historic connection of our two chief witnesses with their subject? Xenophon is supposed to have become a follower of Socrates at an early age. The story of his life being saved by the philosopher in the retreat from Delium (424 B.C.) is not now accepted on account of its chronological inconsistency with the impression received from the Anabasis as to the author's age.¹ Another story, which relates his first contact with Socrates, tells how the philosopher met the youth in a narrow lane, and, barring the path with his stick, asked him where this and that kind of thing could be purchased. The lad answered him modestly, and was then asked "where men were made good and virtuous." And on his answering that he did not know, Socrates said, "Follow me, then, and learn."² This was the beginning of his discipleship.³ From the same source we learn that he kept records of the informal discourse of his master. Out of these doubtless the Memorabilia grew. The number and variety of the incidents and teachings recorded imply a lengthy and close intercourse between the philosopher and his pupil. They include correction of personal faults in disciples, discourses on filial and fraternal duty, on public life and military command, on finance and statesmanship, and many other practical matters interesting to a practical mind. To the truth of some of the stories he relates, he testifies of his own knowledge. Many times he says he himself heard such and such teachings. As to counsel given to himself, for example, he relates⁴ that, when invited by Proxenus to join the expedition of Cyrus, who had been the friend of the Lacedæmonians in the war, he had consulted Socrates as to his acceptance or refusal of the invitation, and had received the counsel to consult the Delphian oracle; but having, like many another, first decided on his course, he inquired of the oracle to which of the Gods he ought to pray in order to successfully accomplish his journey. After he had received the response, he returned and told Socrates the result of his visit, and was censured by him for not inquiring first of all whether the journey was one to be undertaken or not. After this determination his whole life-course was altered. His exile resulted from his connection with the enemy of his country. It is uncertain whether he ever returned to Athens. Socrates was sentenced to death in 399 B.C., and if Xenophon did return before then it can only have been for a brief period. But he had enjoyed years of close intercourse with the philosopher, and it was a labour of love to write a vindication of the faith and morality of that misjudged heretic.

Plato's connection with Socrates was perhaps scarcely so lengthened. It appears to have begun about 410 B.C. It is not marked by any very special incidents. But the enthusiasm of discipleship has glorified Socrates by making him the spokesman of the Platonic Philosophy, and by preserving pictures beyond price of the living as of the martyred teacher. In the closing years of the Peloponnesian War, and thence right on to the fatal year 399 B.C., Plato was in the closest intimacy with his master.

So far as opportunity is concerned, both men, Plato and Xenophon, were most favourably situated. Long and close connection with a teacher whose pupils were in each case personal friends, equalises circumstance, and leaves the accounting for differences in the presentation of the Socratic philosophy to the personal equation. Here there is the greatest possible difference. Xenophon, it has usually been held, was an essentially simple nature, a man neither inclined toward speculative thought nor fitted for it, but one who conceived philosophy as largely a process of moral training. He was a cavalry officer and a country gentleman, and at the same time a literary man, interested in history, politics, war, and sport; fully alive to the practical side of things, but apprehending less clearly the relation of all this to ideal principle. He disliked Athenian democracy and admired Spartan institutions; and soon after his return from the East ceased to be an Athenian citizen, and, making a virtue of his exile, became as much of a Spartan as he could.

His bent was practical. Philosophic discussion was not for the purpose of gaining intellectual satisfaction in the possession of a consistent scheme of things; it was a true training as opposed to the culture of the Sophists; an implanting of pious convictions and virtuous habits. The metaphysical basis of his master's theories could not be expected to attract such a mind. What he would give us, according to this view, we should expect to be a popular presentation of the easier and more external aspects of the Socratic teaching. His Socrates would be the moral censor of his time and the preacher of practical virtue, but hardly the leader of a philosophic revolution.

The case with Plato is altogether different. It is manifest that his presentation of Socrates is largely ideal. He chooses to put his own boldest speculations into the mouth of the teacher whose own thoughts, original and powerful as they were, clothed themselves in plain and homespun dress, and took a more modest range. The truth Plato is concerned about is ideal truth, not historical and chronological accuracy. It is his way of honouring the memory of his great master, to represent him setting forth cosmical and epistemological theories foreign to his actual thought. His own mind is the antithesis of Xenophon's. He breathes freely in the upper air of abstractions. His view of anything may be unusual, extraordinary, wrong; it is never likely to be commonplace. Hence the Socrates we expect to find in his pages, and do find, is an enlarged, idealised figure, in which it is not easy sometimes to discern the homely lineaments of the original.

Now, when it was held that the one drawback to Xenophon's testimony was, to put it bluntly, his somewhat prosaic mind, incapacitating him from seeing the deepest things in his subject, and that, so far as he saw, his testimony could be absolutely accepted, which was, till recently, the orthodox view, the problem was simpler. Plato could enter into the full mind of his master, and, while persuading himself that his presentation was but the full development of what was germinally present in the Socratic teaching, did, it was certain, sometimes expand and idealise that teaching beyond recognition. What was said, then, was this, "We must go to Xenophon for the plain facts of the case: and if he only gives a limited and prosaic view, we can fill this out by the generous Platonic interpretation in so far as the two views are not flatly in contradiction." Xenophon is thus the check on Plato, who is really the deeper and truer interpreter so far as he can be accepted, which is, when held to fact by the plodding record of the humbler writer.

But it becomes clear to any patient reading that the matter is less simple. Xenophon is no more a mere recorder or annalist than Plato. In his own way he writes history "with a thesis." If he has not a special philosophy to teach in the same full sense, he writes, in any case, in a particular apologetic interest. He is concerned to minimise the revolutionary aspects of the thought of Socrates. He wants to present a picture of the blameless teacher of virtue, the pious worshipper of the Gods; and he certainly succeeds in his aim. But we cannot but feel that it is at the expense of completeness. If Xenophon relates of his master nothing but what is true, he can hardly be cleared of sins of omission. The man he describes is too much clipped and shorn of his originality; not as daring or as radical as we feel the real Socrates must have been; too purely a moraliser, and even a proser. He could neither have inaugurated a new philosophy nor met a reformer's death. But this is not all. Xenophon has a constructive scheme in his mind. He writes not as a simple chronicler, but as a practised literary man. And his thesis is indeed constantly before him as he writes: He is not penning history in the modern sense. It is a eulogy that he gives us, not a biography, much less an estimate; and his view is limited by his apologetic and eulogistic aim as much as by his personal incapacity for pure speculation.

There was doubtless a temptation to each writer to simplify the complex personality of his subject by selection and omission. It was not easy to reduce to the simple moralist the man who could sit out the strongest at a drinking party, whose jests touched themes on which silence is deemed best to-day, and who could apply the principles of his philosophy to the arts of the courtesan. Nor, on the other hand, is it easy to recognise as a purely speculative thinker one who tells Aristippus that he knows nothing of any but relative good.

It is plain, indeed, that we do not attain to colourless history in either of the great witnesses. We cannot escape from an altered Socrates by the simple process of taking Xenophon as final. It is as serious an error to lessen and make commonplace what was great and original, as to idealise and magnify. Plato's view is that of the poet and the idealist, but there is little question that he saw the inner truth of Socrates more clearly than the practical Xenophon. It has been seen before that the Memorabilia partakes little of the nature of notes. Xenophon is not a Greek Boswell, keeping chronological records of his master's words and doings. What he gives is a defensive plea with a collection of sample teachings, and a description of the method of their impartation. The individual characters of the discussions recorded are but indifferently realised. The answers put into the mouths of those who converse with Socrates seem sometimes prepared so as to minister to the greater glory of the principal speaker. It may be no objection that the opinions of Socrates are the opinions of Xenophon, for he may have accepted his philosophy complete from his teacher; but whether an objection or not, it is true. There is, too, about the whole of the Xenophontic portraiture a flatness that contrasts with the dramatically sharp realisation of individual features in the Platonic dialogues. Some few passages, like the talk with poor Euthydemus, make an approach to vigour and vividness, but a good deal of the matter of the Memorabilia is a little dull and insipid. Now, the charm of the conversation of Socrates was, we may be certain, very great, to attract men as it did through so many years, and it is permissible to think that some of its fascination has been missed in the record, as well as some of its less facile elements, and much of the deep radical thought covered by its light play.

The most modern view of Xenophon's Socratic writings,⁵ is that they are really composed in the spirit of "tendency." As Xenophon departs from history in his idealisation of Agesilaus, and makes Cyrus the central figure of a historical romance containing views of his own on education and government and many other matters, so in his Socratic writing he is not by any means a rigid historian, but an artist in literary portraiture, and the Socrates of the Memorabilia and the (Economicus is to some extent an imaginative production. According to this view, we have to deal not with the plodding chronicler whose historic veracity is unquestionable if his vision is limited, but with a literary artist who presents a picture of his hero's life and teaching in accordance with a certain thesis of personal goodness in character and positive philosophic content in teaching. If he has read his master aright, a true picture may be given, but it is not got by historical exactitude. On its literary and quasi-historical side it will be a view analogous to his view of Agesilaus. Philosophically, other views representing the negative and hortatory sides of the Socratic work had been put forth with which Xenophon was dissatisfied, not because of incorrectness so much as of incompleteness. He was determined to show his master not as the perpetual questioner so much as the oracle of his friends, the teacher of positive truth, the guide in personal perplexity, the trainer of intellectual gifts for the public service. And religiously, too, he felt that he could give a more satisfactory representation of Socrates the pious man and the good citizen than could be gathered by those who had not personally known him, and whose impressions came to them from accounts that emphasized the perplexity in which, from their negative character, his discussions left men, modified by praises of his personal faith and piety.

Of the record thus given, the doctrine that virtue is knowledge and the dialectic of definitions are absolutely certain Socratic teachings. These things, indeed, are known as such through the testimony of Aristotle and the agreement of the Socratic schools. Teachings there are, it is thought, in the Memorabilia which find no analogies in the other writings of Xenophon; and, provided other more probable sources do not offer themselves, these may turn out to be truly Socratic. Other matter must be judged by its affinity with the ascertained teaching. The result is that we fall back inevitably on more or less subjective grounds of judgment. The references of Aristotle being accepted as of unquestionable accuracy, there remains the task of sifting Socratic teaching from the mass of Plato's dialogues and the Socratic works of Xenophon.

One or two principles tend to safeguard the truth of the matter. If Platonism is Socratic teaching idealised and developed in some directions almost beyond recognition, the artistic sense of Plato, as Fouillée⁶ remarks, is too perfect for him to attribute to his characters doctrines of which they could not even have possessed the germ. The outgrowth is not monstrous but harmonious. And again in Xenophon the special appeal of his apology would have missed its aim had the real Socrates been to the ordinary Athenian a figure broadly irreconcilable with Xenophon's presentation. It is a view something like that of the unprejudiced man of average intelligence, although written by a man who is to the limit of his capacity a devoted disciple.

Taking whatever truth this view may hold into consideration, what we shall be led to will be careful judgment of all Xenophon's testimony, and the elimination of whatever can be shown to spring from his idiosyncrasies. In his Socratic writings it is evident, from criticism,⁷ that there is much that is suspiciously like a personal contribution rather than a record,—the interest in strategy and cavalry generalship generally, in field sports and the management of a country estate, the fondness for Persian illustrations, the comparisons of Lacedamon with Athens. We cannot build a true account of the Socratic philosophy merely by making an uncritical collection of quotations from all writings that mention the name of Socrates. There must be a "discerning of the spirits." But with the few but sure criteria given, the task, while difficult, is not impossible. It is not contended that much will not remain doubtful, nevertheless we may by taking pains reach a substantially correct view.

The difficulty, indeed, of this is not to be minimised. Take one point, supposed to be, above all, well established, the Socratic confession of ignorance, so beautifully dealt with in the Apology, as the basis of the oracular verdict awarding Socrates the crown of wisdom. Turn to Xenophon, and, as Benn has shown, nothing is more certain than that, if his testimony is to be accepted, Socrates was of all persons the least self-distrustful. He was accused sometimes of virtually saying, "Come unto me and I will give you restlessness";⁸ but in the Memorabilia he appears as a person who has no doubt whatever as to his own competency to pronounce verdicts on matters the most difficult and the most diverse. He can instruct a field officer or a statesman, can pluck out the heart of the mystery of artist and artisan alike. As was said of Macaulay, many would be glad to be as sure of anything as he is of everything. Compare this somewhat self-complacent state of mind with the enquirer of the Socratic dialogues of Plato, and it will be seen immediately how great must be the allowance for the point of view. Can we simply, as Benn does, attribute Socrates' confession of ignorance to Plato, who had a rigorous conception of knowledge, and who here puts his own idea into the mouth of his master and draws "a discreet veil over the positive side" of his teaching (for which we must resort to Xenophon), or can we reach a point where these apparent contradictions are reconciled?

As to this particular point we have incidental but emphatic testimony from Aristotle, from whom words can be quoted that seem to deny positive teaching to Socrates, of whom he says that he asked questions but did not give replies, confessing that he had no knowledge.⁹ But while such an utterance establishes the point against which Benn contends, by showing the characteristic attitude of Socrates, it cannot, of course, in view of other and ampler testimonies, be taken as more than a mere description of a method that was habitual.

The authority of Aristotle again enables us to say that of the mass of matter put forward in the name of Socrates, certain doctrines belong to the Platonic Socrates, not to the Socrates of history. He is "accredited" by Aristotle with two things, inductive arguments and definition by universal concepts;¹⁰ and with being also the first to apply this procedure in the province of ethics.¹¹ But these concepts, upon which knowledge must rest, have not in the thought of Socrates become hypostatised into independent realities of a world above sense upon which the mind prepared by dialectic discipline alone can gaze.¹² This is Platonic doctrine. What with Socrates is as yet a product of abstraction, having reality in the mind only, is in the Platonic development an existence above and beyond individual objects, is indeed the only reality. Where this doctrine is taught, and where knowledge is traced to the mind's prenatal view of an eternal ideal world, recollection of which is awakened through the dialectical process, we have left the historic Socrates behind and are listening to Plato. In the identification of virtue and knowledge, too, Socrates and Plato agree; but there is, as Zeller points out,¹³ a difference not negligible. Socrates knows but one virtue which, because it is science, is communicable. Plato does not consider conventional virtue altogether valueless;¹⁴ it is a step to that which is based on knowledge.¹⁵ Nor does his doctrine of the unity of virtue coincide with that of Socrates, for he admits the existence of particular virtues, such as temperance and bravery, fostered by music and gymnastic,¹⁶ in the absence of the knowledge upon which alone, he yet holds, perfect virtue can be based.

By the use mainly of such criteria as the Aristotelian testimony, the artistic verisimilitude of the Xenophontic and Platonic portraits, and the study of the various developments of the Socratic philosophy, a view at once self-consistent and faithful to critically sifted testimony may be gained. It is by its success or failure in approximating to this that any attempt must be judged.

Notes

¹ Dakyns, The Works of Xenophon, vol. i. Note iii.

² Diog. Laërt. ii. 48.

³Circa (?) 415 B.C.

⁴Anab. III. i. 4-7.

⁵ Dakyns, Works of Xenophon, iii. pp. xxi, xxii.

⁶La Philosophic de Socrate, Methode Gènerale, i. ix.

⁷ Cf. Dakyns, loc. cit.

⁸ Drummond.

⁹ Arist., De Soph. Elench. 183b, 7.

¹⁰Meta. 1078b, 27-30.

¹¹Ib. 1078b, 17-23.

¹²Ib. 1078b, 30-32; 1085a, 37.

¹³Plato and the older Academy, p. 448 sq.

¹⁴Meno, 97 sq.

¹⁵Repub. 518 D, E.

¹⁶Repub. 410; Zeller, Plato, p. 451.