Socrates and the critique of metaphysics

Abstract

Contemporary appropriations of the “end of philosophy” and “end of metaphysics” usually draw no distinction between these two terms. Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger distinguished between Socrates and Plato with respect to the origin of philosophy and metaphysics. My argument leans on Gregory Vlastos to draw a sharp distinction between Socrates and Plato based upon his account of “the Socratic elenchus.” In the first place, I argue that the critique of metaphysics refers to the legacy stemming from Plato's middle period and, since it does not apply to Socrates, does not apply to philosophy outright. However, this argument might provoke the rejoinder that the only logical and coherent development of Socrates' thought is into Plato's. If this were so, then my argument would be without effect for the practice of philosophy even though it would apply to the thought of Socrates as a historical individual. In this way, the identity of philosophy and metaphysics might again be established. Thus, in the second place, I criticize Vlastos' assertion that method constitutes the specific difference between Socrates and Plato suggesting that “fidelity to instances” defines the practice of inquiry of Socrates. Thus, a continuation of Socrates' inquiry in which this fidelity to instances is central to philosophy would not be in the direction of Plato and would not succumb to Nietzsche's and Heidegger's critique of metaphysics.

Notes

Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 55.

Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Weick and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 17, the reference to Plato and Kant is on p. 26.

Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” 57.

Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 204.

See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Vol. 1, aphorism 261 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), Preface.

See, for example, Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 212.

A detailed account of such changes is available in Werner J. Dannhauser, Nietzsche's View of Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Problem of Socrates,” in Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 29–30, aphorism 2.

Ibid., aphorism 10, 33.

Compare the sections in Twilight of the Idols that deal with “The Problem of Socrates” and “How the ‘Real World' at last Became a Myth.”

Hugh H. Benson, “The Dissolution of the Problem of the Elenchus,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 13 (1995), 47, n. 6.

See the summary by Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith which suggests that “Vlastos' understanding of the elenchos, however, has failed to generate even a consensus, much less universal agreement, among scholars. Most of the subsequent scholarship on the topic has sought to show the ways in which Vlastos' account fails, and several alternative accounts have been offered. None of these either, has won much support among other scholars …” Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “The Socratic Elenchos?” in Does Socrates Have a Method? Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato's Dialogues and Beyond, ed. Gary Alan Scott (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 146. In referring to this assessment, I am not suggesting that anything substantive is proven by a lack of scholarly consensus but rather indicating that the direction of the vast majority of scholarly attention paid to Vlastos' thesis is strictly toward its adequacy as an account of Socrates in Plato's dialogues and not, as is presently intended, toward a substantive philosophical issue.

There is an established, even if superficial, figure of thought which would diagnose the moment in which philosophy “went wrong” in order to (once, and finally, this time) set it right. The sense of origin on which this figure of criticism rests suggests that the erroneous “moment” itself is a pure error in the sense that it was not prefigured by any prior development. If it were so prefigured, it could not be extracted in order to set philosophy aright. Thus, the error must be understood as an internal fall deriving entirely from an external pressure. This is not a viable way to understand the intrusion of metaphysics into philosophy. Moreover, this figure fails to understand that the notion of “finally setting it [truth, philosophy, metaphysics] right” undermines itself because it depends precisely on a metaphysical notion of truth.

I have attempted to show how this is the case in another essay, “In Praise of Fire: Responsibility, Manifestation, Polemos, Circumspection,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 4 (2004).

I should clarify that this question does not rest on an assumption that a “development” of Socrates' philosophy, with regard to essentials and not merely new applications, is indeed required for an adequate practice of philosophy. I later formulate this “development” in terms of removing an ambiguity in the practice of essential definition through the notion of “fidelity to instances.” This would be a clarification within the non-metaphysical Socratic orientation. However, it does imply that the fact, noted by Vlastos, that the reflexive justification of the elenchus is never addressed by Socrates, has a significance that he does not appreciate. A contemporary analysis, unlike the practice of Socrates, has to seek such a justification—which is precisely what Vlastos attempts. Vlastos' imputation of A and B assumptions to Socrates in order to sustain the claim that the elenchus leads to positive moral knowledge seems a rather unwarranted leap in some respects comparable to Plato's ontologization of essence. For this reason, I am inclined to accept the argument that Vlastos' error here is with respect to the concept of “proof ” that he attributes to Socrates put forth by Richard Kraut in response to Vlastos' original (1983) paper, “Comments on Gregory Vlastos, ‘The Socratic Elenchus',” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 (1983), 59–70. However, my current argument is different from that put forward by Kraut insofar as he follows, or perhaps initiated, the main orientation of scholarship to the critical analysis of Vlastos' account of the elenchus as practised by Socrates. My orientation focuses rather on the centrality of method to the distinction, which is not addressed in this scholarship.

Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, chapter 3 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), This argument for the historical Socrates is not important for my argument, however. Though he incorrectly claims that Vlastos does not consult Xenophon in this matter, even if Lloyd P. Gerson is justified to say “I do not think that there is the slightest basis for such a confident separation, other than perhaps Vlastos' a priori judgment about what his Socrates would or would not say,” it is enough for my current argument that “I believe, along with most scholars, that the two fundamental pillars of Plato's speculative and systematic philosophy are the separate existence of Forms and the immortality of the soul. … The dialogue Phaedo is the first dialogue in which arguments for both claims are offered.” Lloyd P. Gerson, “Elenchos, Protreptic and Platonic Philosophizing,” in Does Socrates Have a Method?, ed. Scott, 221.

Vlastos' argument makes a distinction between the Socrates of the early elenctic dialogues (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras, Republic I) and the Socrates of the middle dialogues (Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II–X, Phaedrus, Parmenides, Theaetetus), referring also to a transitional period between early and middle dialogues (Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno) and a late period (Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, Politicus, Philebus, Laws). While I refer, for the sake of simplicity, simply to a distinction between Socrates and Plato, Vlastos' rendering pays careful homage to the fact that both representations of Socrates are artefacts of Plato's dialogues. The simplicity of my terminology does not, in the present context, obscure the detailed point being made by Vlastos. Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 46–7; cf. Gregory Vlastos, Socratic Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), additional note 1.1, 135, where the transitional period is not yet distinguished from the early one.

Vlastos has pointed out that, in distinction from the middle dialogues where reference to method is common, the early dialogues make no reference to a special method of philosophical inquiry. “They are constrained by rules that he does not undertake to justify.” That is to say, the question of method has become a thematic issue for Plato in the middle period. This is not to say that the Socrates of the early dialogues has no method, but only that its reflexive justification is not posed as an issue, that “Socrates' inquiries display a pattern of investigation whose rationale he does not investigate.” Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 1, 36.

Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 47–9.

Vlastos argues that “the irreconcilable difference between Socrates(E) and Socrates(M) could have been established by this criterion even if it had stood alone.” Ibid., 53, italics throughout removed. It is pertinent to my later argument for the non-priority of method that this major stand-alone criterion is that of the theory of forms not that of method.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 35.

Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 68.

Ibid., 108.

Ibid., 109.

Ibid., 58.

Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 4, 8–9, and additional note 1.2, 135–6.

Ibid., 4.

“And the term ‘suspension' is derived from the fact that the mind is being held up or ‘suspended' so that it neither affirms nor denies anything owing to the equipollence of the matters in question.” Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R. G. Bury (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1990), 74.

Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 114.

Vlastos uses this supposition as a clue to what Socrates might have meant in disclaiming knowledge in Ibid., 114.

Vlastos argues that the confidence of Plato in Socrates' elenctic method undergoes a “demise” in the dialogues Euthydemus, Lysis, and Hippias Major, which he classes (with Meno) as a transitional dialogue, however this demise does not motivate Socrates to “conclude that his own ability to make personal judgments … has been discredited.” In contrast, Meno shows the emergence of an alternative method and thus signifies an initial discrediting of the elenctic method. Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 29–33, quote from 32. In this sense, Meno seems to occupy a privileged place in Vlastos' account of the transition.

Ibid., 119. Italics in the original.

In the W. K. C. Guthrie translation.

The divided line in the Republic, where the distinction between opinion and knowledge is written onto a hierarchical conception of experience, is the epistemological basis for this social distinction as, contrariwise, when Husserl declares that the task of philosophy is “Knowledge of Opinion” the return of philosophy to Socratic dialogue has begun (even though this return is still incipient in an analogous sense to the Meno) since in Husserl it vies with a conception of science that is being overthrown.

476b. In the Paul Shorey translation.

In the Paul Shorey translation. Francis MacDonald Cornford's translation reads “assigning to each a degree of clearness and certainty corresponding to the measure in which their objects possess truth and reality.”

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 40–1.

“In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the ‘ideal' which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on the bridge which led to the ‘Cross'.” Ibid., 106. There are defensible historical reasons for this compaction between Plato and Christianity which tend to reinforce the “philosophical” reason given by Nietzsche—otherworldliness. Werner Jaeger has documented the crucial role of Greek paideia in transforming Christianity from a late Jewish sect into a universal force and the revival of Plato, in particular, as the mediation that preserved Greek paideia within Christian civilization. See Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 41.

Ibid., 106, 31.

Ibid., 33.

Ibid., 41.

In the Paul Shorey translation. Francis MacDonald Cornford has: “The lovers of sights and sounds delight in beautiful tones and colours and shapes and in all the works of art into which these enter; but they have not the power of thought to behold and to take delight in the nature of Beauty itself.” Allan Bloom's translation is: “ ‘The lovers of hearing and the lovers of sights, on the one hand,' I said, ‘surely delight in fair sounds and colors and shapes and all that craft makes from such things, but their thought is unable to see and delight in the nature of the fair itself.’ ”

In the Paul Shorey translation. Francis MacDonald Cornford has: “Now if a man believes in the existence of beautiful things, but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it … .”

In the Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant translation.

One might claim that Euthyphro is rushing off to withdraw his suit because he has, under Socrates’ influence, come to realize its injustice. This would not affect the point that I am making here since such a realization would also be predicated on the coincidence of not being able to give an account, not apprehending an account, and not being able to act as if an account were given.

Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 9.

Ibid., 1.

Ibid., 58.

Moreover, as Vlastos shows, there is a sense in which Plato's theory of recollection is a solution to the grand assumption in elenctic inquiry that false beliefs can always be brought into conflict with true beliefs that the answerer holds. The answerer can never be entirely wrong in the conduct of his life, as it were, even if his answers to specific questions are. Ibid., 29.

Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 47–9.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 43.