Socrates Young and Old

1 Socrates Young and Old: From the Parmenides to the Phaedo Introduction The Parmenides is the earliest of Plato’s Socratic dialogues (I mean the dialogues in which Socrates appears). Only in the Parmenides is Socrates a young man. Everywhere else he seems to be at least middle-aged. In the Phaedo, by contrast, he is an old man of 70 and at the end of it he dies. The Phaedo is thus the last of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. The other Socratic dialogues come somewhere in between. Such matters are beyond dispute. What is not beyond dispute is the significance to be attached to them. Should we, for our reading and understanding of the dialogues, follow the dating of the dialogues according to when Socrates engaged in them (the dramatic chronology)? Or should we instead follow their dating according to when Plato wrote them (the historical chronology)? The scholarly world has, for the most part, decided to adopt the latter course. I wish to explore adopting the former.1 My first reason for doing this is simply one of curiosity. I would like to try out the experiment of interpreting the dialogues, or rather some of them, according to dramatic chronology to see where that will take us. We have had plenty of interpreting of the dialogues according to historical chronology and we know pretty well where that takes us and what sort of Plato (and Socrates) it produces. It would seem worth trying the other chronology too to see where that takes us. Or at least it would seem worth doing this as regards those dialogues which have a 1 Several scholars have recently suggested readings of Plato’s dialogues other than that according to historical chronology. I would instance in particular Julia Annas Platonic Ethics, Old and New, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press (1999), who is in this respect expressly following some of the ancient commentators, and John M. Cooper in his introduction to Plato. The Complete Works, Indianapolis and Cambridge, Hackett (1997): viii-xviii. Such various ways of reading Plato have, in fact, been in favor for some time among certain groups of scholars. For a helpful summary, with extensive references, see Gerald A. Press’s introduction to his edited volume Who Speaks for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity, Lanham, Maryland, Rowman and Littlefield (2000): 1-6, as well as his earlier “The State of the Question in the Study of Plato,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 34 (1996): 507-532. 2 clearly marked dramatic chronology (for not all of them do), and a chronology that is made key to the setting of the dialogue (as is true, in particular, of the Parmenides and the Phaedo). A second reason is that the dramatic chronology would seem, at least initially, to be the better one to follow if our aim is to understand what Plato himself meant to convey. For he went to some lengths to tell us that chronology2 but none to tell us the historical chronology, so at least in his mind the former was important for understanding what he wrote but the latter was not. Of course it could be that Plato was mistaken, or devious, and the historical chronology is important in ways that he ignored or hid. But it can hardly be reasonable to start with that assumption. A sane hermeneutics should counsel us to read a work according to the intention of its author before we try to read it according to some other intention. A third reason is that the dramatic chronology is the only chronology that we know anything definite about. The historical chronology, for all its sophistication, cannot profess to be more than speculation. Although Plato could not and did not write the dialogues all at one sitting, he could and did go on revising them throughout life.3 Hence even if, say, he wrote the Republic and the Phaedo before the Parmenides it does not follow that the Parmenides does or must represent a later stage in his thinking. Not only can an author choose to write a logically earlier part of a series of works after he has written a logically later part but, in addition, if all Plato’s dialogues were continually being revised in the light of each other, they would, in the form we now have them, all represent the final stage of his thinking and not any stages in between. So the effect would be as if Plato had written them all at one sitting even though he did not. Stylistic analysis will not help much here. For even if we can differentiate dialogues according to overall differences 2 At least in many cases, and certainly in the case of the dialogues I am particularly concerned with here. 3 See Jacob Howland, “Re-Reading Plato: the Problem of Platonic Chronology,” Phoenix 45 (1991): 189-214, and especially 200-203. 3 of style, and can associate these styles with different periods in Plato’s life (neither of which points is easy to establish),4 it still does not follow that Plato could not have used an early style when revising an early dialogue or a late style when revising a late dialogue. Or does anyone claim to know so much about Plato the man and about how he aged as to be able to say that imitating the writing of the young Plato was beyond the skill of the old Plato? For such reasons, therefore, I want to try out interpreting Plato’s dialogues, or several of them, according to the dramatic chronology. As a result I will not look for the sort of development in Plato that scholars propose who separate the dialogues into the historically early, middle, and late. Instead I will look for the development, or at least the differences, in the portrayal of the characters, or rather in the portrayal of one character, that of Socrates. Hence my interest in the Parmenides and Phaedo, since these portray Socrates at the limits of youth and age in his philosophical life. Accordingly, while most scholars interpret the Parmenides as marking a turning point in Plato’s thinking from the classical theory of forms in the Republic and Phaedo to the later dialectic of the Sophist and Statesman, I propose rather to explore seeing it as marking a turning point in Socrates’ thinking from an immature approach to the classical theory of forms in the Parmenides itself to a mature approach in the Republic and Phaedo. I shall, therefore, first concentrate on the theory of forms as Socrates presents it in the Parmenides and on Parmenides’ criticisms of this presentation. My aim will be to show both how Socrates’ presentation can be seen as immature and also how Parmenides’ criticisms, while effective against Socrates’ immaturity, have no force against the theory itself as Socrates presents it later in the Republic and Phaedo.5 4 See Howland, “Re-Reading Plato,” passim. 5 My claims here are, interestingly enough, supported by an article that argued the opposite, ‘How Parmenides Saved the Forms,’ by Samuel Rickless in Philosophical Review 107 (1998): 501-554. Rickless contends that the several 4 The Young Socrates in the Parmenides Consider, then, Socrates’ speech at the beginning of the Parmenides where he criticizes Zeno’s attack on plurality (Parmenides 128e5-130a2). A point of particular interest about this speech is that Socrates is not content to question the validity of Zeno’s arguments. He insists on going further and proposes a particular theory of his own that, as he thinks, gives an account of plurality which escapes Zeno’s attack. This approach of Socrates’ is not only unnecessary (one can question another’s criticisms of a certain position without putting forward rival theories of one’s own), it is also what gets him into trouble. The way Socrates behaves here is, indeed, not dissimilar from the way Thrasymachus behaves when he criticizes Socrates in the first book of the Republic, or, to keep to the present dialogue, from the way Zeno himself behaved, according to Zeno’s own account, when he wrote his attack on plurality—namely out of a young man’s love of victory (Parmenides 128e1-4).6 The young Socrates seems to be caught by the same love. For, as just noted, in his criticism of Zeno he does two separable things. The first is simply to point out that Zeno’s arguments against plurality, as so far stated, do not establish any problem for believers in plurality. For there is nothing paradoxical or contradictory about something’s having contrary predicates if it has these predicates in different respects. Socrates himself, for example, is both one theses that make up the theory of forms as presented in the Parmenides are also found in the theory as presented in the Republic and Phaedo. He also contends that the theory can be saved if one of these theses is removed and that the main purpose of the Parmenides is to show us this solution. Thus, he says, the Parmenides is intermediate, in the way many scholars have maintained, between the Middle Period dialogues of the Republic and Phaedo and the Late Period dialogues of the Sophist and Statesman. But the thesis that Rickless identifies as needing to be removed from the theory is not found in the Phaedo or Republic but only in the Parmenides. His argument therefore suggests, contrary to his intention, that the Phaedo and the Republic were already avoiding the fault that the Parmenides was meant to expose, and therefore that the former dialogues are logically posterior and not prior to the latter.

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