SOURCE: "Socrates's Charitable Treatment of Poetry," in Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 13, No. 2, October, 1989, pp. 248-61.

[In the following essay, Pappas examines Socrates's interpretation of poetry and its relation to his philosophical positions.]

Of course this title seems wrong. If anything is certain about Socrates' treatment of poetry in Plato's dialogues, it is that he never gives a poem a chance to explain itself. He dismisses poems altogether on the basis of their suspect moral content (Republic II and III), or their representational form (Republic X), or their dramatic structure (Laws 719); he calls poets ignorant (Apology, Ion) and—not obviously as a compliment—mad (Ion, Phaedrus); and when he wants to use a poem to support his own position, he unhesitatingly distorts its apparent meaning (Protagoras, Lysis).

I will not argue that, in spite of this behavior, Socrates occasionally gives poetry its due, nor that even as he dismisses it he is willing to preserve some portion of it. When I refer to Socrates' charitable interpretations of poetry, I mean a way of reading a poem that motivates and grounds the mistreatments I have catalogued. Socrates is, at all times, prone to read a poem charitably; and that is part of his hostility toward poetry.

To make this point I will discuss the last mistreatment of poetry I named: Socrates uses a poem in his defense by forcing it to say what its author plainly did not intend. We see the workings of his interpretive method in an extended analysis of Simonides in the Protagoras, and perhaps also in a use of Homer and Empedocles in the Lysis. I will argue that what looks at first simply odd in those passages may be shown to follow a principle of interpretation which in some extreme form resembles the principle of interpretive charity. Thus it is Socrates' excessive charity toward poetry that starfds behind his abuse of it.

That charity points to a new attitude toward poets, perhaps the first theoretically motivated rejection of the author. I think that this fate of the author in Socrates' interpretation will illuminate both his hostility toward poetry and his examination of his live interlocutors. More generally, Socrates' example will show how the search for truth in an interpretation is one way to deny appeals to the author.

I

Although Socrates' interpretation of Simonides in the Protagoras has been discussed many times, its purport or explanation is usually left unexamined.¹ What is uncontroversial is that in Protagoras 338e-348a, Plato's most extensive depiction of Socrates saying what a poem means, we find Socrates systematically misreading Simonides. He plucks individual lines out of a poem, combines them with his own highly specific ethical beliefs, and from this conjunction deduces a point which he then attributes to the poet. We must decide whether this is all some sort of joke, or whether on the contrary, as I believe, the interpretation reveals a coherent and deliberate method.

The text examined is a nearly continuous piece of Simonides' writing, roughly twenty-five lines from a much longer poem. It is Protagoras who goads Socrates into interpreting the poem, as part of the intellectual battle between them that continues through the dialogue. Protagoras sets an interpretive problem for Socrates to solve: two bits of Simonides' poem seem to contradict one another, for the first bit says it is hard to become good, and the second denies that it is hard to be noble (339). Socrates begins with the more modest aim of resolving that contradiction, but goes on through the poem to hang a sophisticated moral point on Simonides.

At first Socrates tries to resolve the contradiction by saying that Simonides thinks it hard to become good or noble, but easy to remain in that state (to be noble) once it has been achieved (340d). Protagoras ridicules this explanation, and Socrates quickly drops it in the face of objections (34 1e); but already the tone of Socratic interpretation has been set. In a broad sense, this paradoxical notion of moral improvement is a Socratic notion: the steps toward clarity of understanding are slow and taken only reluctantly, but the state of enlightenment can be maintained, Socrates usually seems to think, without effort (see, e.g., Symposium 211d ff.). Socrates, in other words, has made Simonides' thought consistent by identifying it with his own.

But that is still too broadly put. We need to find specific interpretive decisions that bear out this general description. I claim that the rest of Socrates' interpretation does indeed retain the same spirit. His method emerges in the pages that follow, as he seeks to extract philosophical content from Simonides' poem. I want to look at four specific cases, all occurring within two pages, in which Socrates reinterprets or emends individual lines of poetry.

1. Socrates restates a line he has begun with, "To become a truly good man is hard," as "To become a good man is truly hard" (343d-e). He moves the "truly" (alētheōs) to go with a later clause in the same line. (In Greek this requires a shift in phrasing, but no change in word order. Like Socrates' restatement of the poem in (d) below, this is a hyperbaton, a transposition of a word out of its normal place in the sentence.) Socrates explains his emendation thus: "He does not mean the 'truly' with ['good'], as if some men were truly good and others good but not truly so. That would seem silly and not the work of Simonides" (343e). Socrates is arguing (i) that it is nonsensical to speak of someone as good but not truly so, and (ii) that therefore Simonides cannot have meant his words that way.

   But (i) is patently false. Anyone who thinks virtue can be partly achieved will unhesitatingly call some people truly good and others only somewhat good. What then can Socrates mean by (i)? I understand him to be assuming a position he argued for earlier in the Protagoras—that the virtues are (in some sense) identical (329ff). Later he will also claim all the virtues to be manifestations of some sort of knowledge (357). This knowledge guarantees perfectly virtuous behavior as soon as one begins to apply it. Now from that point of view it would indeed be silly to speak of someone as good but not truly so: once virtue has been reached it is possessed all at once, and with regard to every aspect of moral life. Socrates' real interpretive argument, then, is that he finds this reading of Simonides nonsensical, and that Simonides must therefore have meant something else. But this second step now looks less clearly warranted.

2. At this point Socrates' reading becomes more explicitly paradoxical. He announces again that he will explain the "outline" (typos) and "purpose" (boulēsis) of this poem (344b), and starts with the pair of lines: "That man cannot help being bad / Whom extraordinary misfortune has cast down" (344c). To reconstruct the argument implicit in these lines, Socrates explains that to be cast down and left resourceless one must first be resourceful; then he implicitly glosses "resourceful" by "noble" (344d). Thus he can claim the lines to mean that disaster makes good people bad.

   Here, although the conclusion attributed to Simonides is not shocking, the requisite gloss on "resourceful" is: to be mēchanos is not at all to be agathos. Socrates gets that translation of the term, I take it, from his earlier argument with Protagoras, in which he claimed that virtue is grounded in wisdom (e.g., 333b). Here he simply inserts that claim to get Simonides' meaning, by sliding unremarkably from "resourceful" to "wise" and then leaping to that word's equivalent (for him), "good."²

3. The next lines Socrates looks at say, "For when doing well every man is good / But when doing badly evil" (344e). This platitude would seem to need (or admit of) no further explanation. But Socrates now wants to make the poem say that a good man cannot remain continuously good (345b-c). As a reading of the lines there is nothing strange about that; what is strange is the path Socrates takes from poem to implication. He begins with a typical craft example: "Now what is doing well in letters, and what makes a man good at them? Clearly it is the learning of them" (345a). Socrates understands "good" in terms of the capacity to perform a given craft; as in the previous example, he assumes that doing good involves knowledge. Then the danger, he says, lies in one's loss of knowledge, for that is the only way to do badly (345b). Therefore Simonides is saying that the good man cannot be continuously good. We may schematize Socrates' argument as follows:
   1. When he does well every man is good. (Simonides)
   2. Doing well means possessing knowledge. (Socrates)
   3. Knowledge may be lost.
   4. Therefore, (Simonides says that) no one is continuously good.

   Again, the conclusion attributed to Simonides is generated by a premise from Socrates' own supply.

4. But the clearest case of Socrates' use of his own principles in an interpretation comes in his reading of "I praise and love everyone / Who does nothing shameful voluntarily"; he emends this to read, "I voluntarily praise and love everyone who does nothing shameful" (345d-e). This is another hyperbaton; hekon, the word for "voluntarily," is moved from its place to the next line in the poem. In Greek the new word order is natural, but plainly not, in this context, the ordinary reading of those lines. Socrates' argument for such a radical change in meaning goes as follows: "Simonides was not so uneducated as to say that he praised all who did nothing bad voluntarily, as if there were some people who voluntarily act badly. For I think that no wise man believes any human being voluntarily sins, or does anything bad or shameful" (345d-e).

This last sentence is preposterous. Socrates, quite famously, was the only person to think wrongdoing was involuntary. He puts that position forward twice in this very dialogue (352d, 358e); here he attributes it casually to Simonides, allegedly in the interest of telling us what the poet thinks. As in the first example, Socrates changes the text to make the poet agree with him.

We have, in other words, two related interpretive procedures at work. In examples (a) and (d), Socrates straightforwardly emends the text to make Simonides agree with him. In (b) and (c), he derives the implication of Simonides' statements by assuming the poet to hold certain beliefs that Socrates (and nearly no one else) holds. In both cases, crucially, he assumes Simonides to know everything that he knows himself.

II

The latter interpretive method also appears in the Lysis, which contains several appeals to poets for philosophical ideas on the subject of friendship. In particular, after the failure of one proposed definition Socrates explicitly turns to poets for inspiration: they are, he says, "fathers of wisdom, and guides" (214a). He then quotes Homer (Odyssey 17.218) and, implicitly, Empedocles, to the effect that like is attracted to like. This is the new proposal about friendship which Socra-tes and his interlocutors will examine next.

Of course, Socrates adds right away, the premise cannot be accepted just as it stands, since that would imply the friendship of wicked men with one another. And "as it appears to us" (dokei himin), he says, that is not the case: the wicked quickly turn on one another (214bc). Therefore that implication of the poets' claim must be rejected right away. Socrates concludes, remarkably: "Therefore those who call like friendly with like are obscurely hinting that the good man is a friend only to the good man, but that the bad man never enters into true friendship either with a good man or with a bad" (214d). Homer and Empedocles are thus assumed, as Simonides had been, not to mean a statement that would deny things as they seem to Socrates.

The readings are astonishing. In Empedocles' vocabulary there is simply no room for the elaboration Socrates suggests. His explanation for natural forces could not work if attraction were restricted to the good.

Homer's case is more problematic. The line in the Odyssey about like being led to like is spoken by the goatherd Melanthius as an insult to the disguised Odysseus and his swineherd Eumaios. Melanthius says, "Now here's one worthless man leading another one," and concludes in the next line, "The god always brings like together with like that way." On the surface, then, the line Socrates quotes says precisely that bad men do become friends.

What might complicate this point is that Socrates could nevertheless be right in his interpretation; for Eumaios and Odysseus really are like each other, and they—being both good—enjoy a truer friendship than Melanthius is capable of with Penelope's suitors. In his own obscure way Homer may indeed be hinting that the good man is a friend only to the good man.³ Still, as in examples (b) and (c) above, Socrates has reached his plausible reading by means of an unprecedented and implausible method. What strikes me about his interpretation here, as in the Protagoras, is that he arrives at it by casting out readings he considers false.

III

We must now ask what this puzzling behavior means. So far we can only say that Socrates has set out to misinterpret poetry, and that he has done so by arguing fallaciously about what the poets may be assumed to believe. Or, to catalogue his misdeeds as Rudolph Weingartner has, Socrates "puts words together that clearly do not belong together.… He ignores bits of text that would be difficult to harmonize with his thesis… He puts in words that are not part of the poem" (p. 100). These "sins of interpretation" lead Weingartner to say, "This section is rich with humor and gives us a rest from the fatiguing duty of following complex arguments" (p. 101). Most other commentators have likewise set this passage aside as ironic or humorous, when they have not ignored it altogether.⁴ (Indeed, it is striking how little is ever said about the Protagoras in any discussion of Plato's view of poetry.)

Certainly Socrates is ironical; nor is there any doubt that this particular passage is ironic. But unless we understand irony in the most simplistic sense—that Socrates simply doesn't mean what he says—an ironic tone by itself cannot license us to ignore the passage. Compare: When Socrates complains of his ignorance, he is usually ironic about it, and sometimes his interlocutors even point that out (Symposium 175e, Republic 337a). But for all the irony he nevertheless does believe himself to be ignorant. Therefore his irony is not a sufficient reason for us to call Socrates' professions of ignorance insincere. In the case at hand, too, Socrates' evident irony need not mean that he does not endorse his own interpretive method.

There are at least three reasons not to dismiss this passage, or even to call it a burlesque of poetic interpretation.⁵ First, Socrates himself agrees with the claims he attributes to Simonides. He cannot be questioning poets' authority, in the sense of believing them mistaken, when he finds Simonides to equate virtue with knowledge, and deny the existence of voluntary wrongdoing. This is hardly the way to show the silliness of a procedure. So even if Socrates' interpretation is ironic, we have to explain why it is used to justify Socratic principles: this poses, rather than settles our problem.

We also need an explanation of what Socrates is doing here because it fits into the larger context of his behavior. To my ear, for instance, Socrates' treatment of Simonides resembles strikingly his treatment of his live interlocutors. His leading, even tendentious questions subject his interlocutors' statements to inquiry they were never prepared to address, and he reaches conclusions which the interlocutors would not have taken themselves to believe—indeed, which they typically deny. The questions, the unexpected inquiry, and the unintended conclusions are all here too, together with Socrates' insistence that this conclusion is what the other person really believes. If this is a parody of interpretation, then Socrates' whole interrogative method is a parody.

Finally, Socrates' attitude toward poetry in this passage is consistent with his positions in other dialogues. The Lysis, for one, at least suggests that Socrates' strategy toward Simonides reveals more about him than his ability to make an isolated joke. And I hope to show below how the attitude toward the author implicit in this interpretive method might fit together with the recurring attacks on poetry in Plato's dialogues.

That is all by way of saying that we need some explanation for Socrates' performance; the explanation of it as only ironic will not do. I find a clue to understanding Socrates in his own concluding comments to this section. Those comments are often put forward as the strongest reason to ignore the whole section, since Socrates urges his friends to leave poetry out of their discussion. But to use the conclusion in that way it must be understood as straightforward, empty of the ironies that commentators find in the philosophical digression itself; whereas, to my mind, the conclusion is the most problematic part of the passage.

Socrates suggests that the group carry on in direct philosophical conversation, without poetry or songs (347c). Like musical entertainment, he says, the appeal to poets brings "an outside [other, foreign, strange, extraneous] voice" (allotria phone) into the discussion (347e): "It is not possible to ask poets about what they are saying, and when they are introduced into discussions some claim them to think one thing and some another, and no one can argue decisively on the matter. But the best people leave such gatherings alone, and converse among themselves, exchanging their own words with one another to test what they have to say" (347e-348a). In other words, discourse about the poet's meaning cannot meet standards of philosophical discourse. Better to have only Socratic criticism.

This comment might be taken to rule out Socrates' own interpretation along with every other one. But Socrates' criticism of textual exegesis, that it wanders too far from the discussion at hand, is entirely opposite to the criticisms which have been made of his exegesis—namely, that it does not wander far enough. If Socrates has ascribed his own beliefs to Simonides, then his criticisms do not apply to his own reading. For to the extent that Socrates, in putting his ideas into Simonides' mouth, has blatantly ignored the question of what the poet actually believes, he is immune to the charge of having listened to an outside voice. He says it is wrong to search out the poet's particular beliefs; but since he never looked for them himself, there is no reason for him to set his own reading aside.

I see Socrates' advice about poetry rather as a warning to other readers, who will not be able to attack a poem as he has himself. None of them will be able to argue decisively about what the poet thinks, because for them that question will entail entering into the poet's private thoughts. In other readers' hands, then, the poet will draw us away from the independent search for the truth. We will have to understand the poet first and so never get to our original question. But since Socrates clearly has stayed with his original question, it follows that for him the poet has ceased to be an outside voice. His abandonment of the poet here is continuous with Apology 22b, in which he comments that authors themselves are usually the least capable interpreters of their own works; by Socratic standards, authorship can be no assurance of one's ability to generate true interpretations.

Thus, when Socrates does claim to aim at Simonides' thoughts, he must mean something quite different from the usual sense of that phrase. I have two passages in mind here: when exbarking on his most substantive discussion of Simonides, Socrates says, "Now I want to tell position on intentions, as I have construed it, is that intentions cannot be known—but not, as in some recent accounts, because they cannot be reached. Socrates does not suggest that Simonides' own thoughts on his poem cannot in principle be reached; indeed, he implies that if the poet were there the rest of them could ask him what he meant (347e). For a modern theory of the impossibility of intentions this is clearly fruitless and beside the point (Wimsatt and Beardsley, p. 18). From Socrates' point of view, though, it does not help to say that intentions can be reached, because reaching them does not count as knowledge. As Socrates sees them, intentions are idiosyncratic; inquiring about them is akin to familiarizing oneself with the peculiarities of one blade of grass, what sets that blade apart from the others. That is some sort of information, but it does not lie on the path to general knowledge about grass. So, too, learning Simonides' thoughts—what is peculiar to him—is possible, but stands in the way of learning about his subject matter. Thus nothing is gained from excavating the poets' thoughts, when more true statements may be attained by ignoring them.

(This is the clearest way in which Socrates' treatment of Simonides reflects anti-poetic views he expresses elsewhere. In the Ion, it is not poets' or critics' ignorance that Socrates wants to fault so much as the inevitable allure that the poet's person had for the reader: it is by trying to see the author's point of view, and not aiming separately at the facts of the matter, that the reader is always doomed to ignorance.⁹ I further suspect, though I cannot argue for this point here, that the emphasis on mimesis of character in Republic X—on which Socrates there blames the ill effects of poetry—is of a piece with this avoidance of the author's person. In both lines of argument there seems to be something about the individual speaker as such that Socrates most wants to escape. Only when poetry is freed from its ties to individuals can it impart verifiable knowledge.)

At this point I expect an objection: Haven't I misunderstood the role of intentions? How can the principle of charity work against intentions when its goal is to attribute certain claims to the author? Why isn't this done precisely in service to intentions?

The ethical analogy may provide the best answer. If I give you a present because it is something I like myself, and I never wonder whether you will like or need it, then something has gone wrong with the gift-giving. To protest that nothing is wrong, that I am still genuinely interested in you as another person—I did give you a present, didn't 1?—is plainly disingenuous.

Similarly, my explanation of what you said has gone wrong if I could in theory get the same words out of any horse's mouth. The attribution of intention does not consist simply in hanging the author's name on a sentence. Or to put it the other way around: the feeling that a search for the author's intention has somehow been violated does not arise only when the author's name is not mentioned; it arises also when the author's name is mentioned, but inappropriately.

The real joke for Socrates is that he does not care what Simonides may actually have believed. From this implicit disregard for authorial intention, it is a short step to Socrates' overt disregard for poets in other discussions, such as his bowdlerization of Homer in Republic 11 and III. Socrates feels justified in emending Homer for the young guardians' education because the unity of the poems, or Homer's greater purpose in writing them, is irrelevant to him. Ethical standards (here not so much what is true about the gods or about death, as what ought to be believed about those subjects) govern Socrates' decision about what is to be said in the ideal state.

The kind of intention lost in Socratic interpretation is intention understood as that which is fundamentally other, or outside. It begins with the sense that there is another person speaking here—the awareness that I am not the poet. An intention, unlike a meaning, must be someone's and must come from someone. The fact that someone said these words is why they are thought to be worth hearing. Thus, "Why did Simonides say that?" is really a way of asking, "Who is he?" We have all the reasons for wanting to know the author's intention (and all the reasons for avoiding it) that we have for wanting to understand another person. The problem of the author is the problem of the other.

Notes

¹ See Hermann Sauppe's commentary on Protagoras, trans. with additions by James A. Towle (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1889); E. G. Sihler's edition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1881); Leon Woodbury, "Simonides on Arete," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 84 (1953), pp. 135-63; W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), vol. 4, pp. 213-35; I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato's Doctrines (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 232-45; Rudolph Weingartner, The Unity of the Platonic Dialogue (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973). The general descriptive point I will stress concerning this passage—that Socrates imports his own philosophical doctrines into this reading of the poem—has been made by all these readers. They have also pointed out the particular instances of Socratic misinterpretation, though with varying degrees of specificity as to exactly what doctrines Socrates is importing.

² Sauppe says of this passage, "Here sophon [wise] is inserted as the characteristic mark of true excellence." He adds that "in this whole exegesis Socrates keeps in mind his main argument" (p. 126n).

³ This point was made to me by the anonymous reader for Philosophy and Literature.

⁴ Thus Sauppe says at two points in the passage, "this is obviously ironical" (pp. 123n and 129n). Sihler says, "The entire point made in the philological episode, as we might call it, is a negative one" (p. 120); and Guthrie goes so far as to call the passage "splendid entertainment, but hardly philosophy" (p. 227).

⁵ This phrase is Nicholas Smith's. I first heard this account of Socrates' behavior from Patrick Coby. See also Crombie, who finds in this passage the implication "that reliance on poetry as a means of education is misguided" (p. 234).

⁶ Donald Davidson has systematically brought the principle of charity into discussions of radical interpretation. See esp., "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973-74): 5-20; "Belief and the Basis of Meaning," Synthese 27 (1974): 309-23 (hereafter abbreviated "BBM"); "Mental Events," in Lawrence Foster and J. M. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), hereafter abbreviated "ME." For worries about the extent to which the principle of charity might be taken, see David Lewis, "Radical Interpretation," Synthese 27 (1974): 331-34; W. V. Quine, "Comment on Donald Davidson," Synthese 27 (1974): 325-29; Bruce Vermazen, "General Beliefs and the Principle of Charity," Philosophical Studies 42 (1982): 111-18.

⁷ Even a review of the titles of works in that debate lies outside the scope of this paper. But I must at least mention W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984), pp. 3-18. And although I need no position on the issue for my present purposes, my approach to intentions is indebted to Stanley Cavell, "A Matter of Meaning It," in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 225-37; see also "Music Discomposed" in the same volume, pp. 180-212. Specifically, I owe to Cavell the general point, implicit in those articles, that the problem of knowing the author is a recast (or miscast) version of the greater problem of other minds.

⁸ That more recent proposal about intentions likewise does not enter into my discussion. But see Alexander Nehamas, "The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal," Critical Inquiry 7 (1981): 133-49 and esp. 144-47; "What an Author Is," Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 685-91; Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, "Against Theory," Critical Inquiry 8 (1982): 723-42.

⁹ As I have argued elsewhere; see my "Plato's Ion: The Problem of the Author," Philosophy 64 (1989): 1-9.