Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche: Philosophy and Its Poetry. Lectures 3 and 4: “Socrates Philosophic Poetry” and “Socrates Becomes Socrates.” Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

 

In his first two lectures, Lampert, following Leo Strauss, distinguishes between philosophy and philosophic poetry. In times of religious crisis, when the gods of the polis are no longer credible, especially among the youth, the future rulers of the polis, the activity of philosophy itself might come under threat. Under this circumstance, a philosopher might make a ‘politic’ intervention, proposing a new or at least reformed or reinterpreted myth, one that will convince the young and incline them to friendship toward philosophy and philosophers. In his second pair of lectures, Lampert considers Plato’s strategy in more detail, to some extent still through a ‘Straussian’ lens but very much with his own eyes.

How did “Socrates become Socrates,” a philosopher but also a political philosopher? This occurred in two steps: Socrates first became a philosopher, one who understands “the fundamental truths of being and knowing, nature tout court and human nature, and only then a political philosopher, “a teacher of a theological-political view” that will prove edifying in his time and place. Lampert takes these matters in reverse order, devoting his first of the two lectures to “how Socrates became the political philosopher he became.”

Of the 35 Platonic dialogues, 26 are performed, amounting to scholars now call ‘closet dramas,’ plays intended to be read, not performed. Nine dialogues are narrated or reported, six by Socrates, three by others. Lampert selects three of the Socrates-reported dialogues: the Protagoras, the Charmides, and the Republic. These dialogues reveal not only what Socrates was thinking at the time he wrote the dialogue but what Athens, his polis, was doing in Socrates’ time, and what Athenians were thinking and feeling. That is, they show the philosopher thinking about what philosophic poetry he might make that would prudently address the political circumstances of Athens, very much in view of how those circumstances might injure those few Athenians who love wisdom so much that they devote their lives to that love.

The arguments and actions Socrates reports in the Republic (in the Greek, Politeia or Regime) occur in early June of 429 BCE, the third year of what would become a twenty-year war between Athens and Sparta, the second summer of the devastating plague described so graphically by Thucydides. One of the participants in the dialogue refers to the feast of Bendideia; this feast honored Bendis, a foreign goddess whose consort was a healer-god. In the experience of all those alive at the time, this was the first time a foreign god was honored by Athens. What is worse, under the pressures of war and disease, but not only of war and disease, some Athenians suffer from “a spiritual crisis” that Thucydides also described. Plato sets the Charmides only a month earlier, upon Socrates’ return from a foreign polis, having spoken not to a healer-god but to a doctor who taught him “new things.” Finally, the Protagoras‘ dramatic date is before the war, about 434 BCE, when “the great city of Athens [was] at the very height of its power and glory.” Lampert accordingly begins with an interpretation of the Protagoras.

In his dialogue with the 65-year old Protagoras, then called Greece’s wisest man, “the founder of the Greek enlightenment,” Socrates, nearly thirty years his junior. “steps forward to restrain and redirect” the great man. In Socrates’ estimation, Protagoras is “too outspoken,” “not cautious enough.” Being so, he “puts the whole enlightenment at risk with his inadequate exotericism,” his “failure to hide adequately his own skeptical views,” which “has led the younger generation to mistrust their gods.” In leading the young to mistrust their gods, Protagoras “seem[s] to them to destroy the reasons for living a moral life, a life of justice.” What is more, Socrates hopes to “attract and win as his own student the young Alcibiades,” one of the witnesses to the dialogue, who is “the most promising young Athenian of all those who aspire to political glory and greatness.” [1] If he abandons morality, and especially if he abandons justice, very bad consequences could ensue for Athens and possibly for philosophers in Athens. Recognizing that Alcibiades will never become a philosopher, Socrates intends to win his political friendship, thereby “maintain[ing] in Athens a public spirit friendly to philosophy.” 

Five years later, Socrates returns to Athens after serving in the Athenian army during the early years of the war. In the Charmides, Plato refers to Homer’s Odyssey, the story of another return, “the return of the wise king Odysseus” to his home in Ithaka. During his odyssey, Odysseus has learned many things, including things about nature (specifically, the nature of the moly root) and the many regimes that rule the poleis. Following the interpretation offered by Seth Benardete in The Bow and the Lyre, Lampert writes that Homer’s odyssey is “his gradual learning of the wisdom that is philosophy and the wisdom that is political philosophy”—theoretical and practical wisdom. The two are distinct but related. The moly root is given to Odysseus by the god Hermes in order to protect him from the magic of the witch, Circe, who has imprisoned Odysseus’ friends in her palace. One might say that men are readily ‘bewitched’ by the unnatural, by the spells cast by rhetoricians, priests, and sophists, but knowledge of nature can save them, if they or a friend of theirs has such knowledge and uses it for that purpose. After this adventure, Socrates returns to his home, prudently disguised as a beggar. After observing the circumstances prevailing in his household, in which his enemies, the suitors, have been held at bay by his wife’s own prudent policy, “Homer has Odysseus reveal himself in a series of recognition scenes, thereby winning the allies he needs to kill his enemies and restore his rightful household regime.” In founding or refounding his regime, Odysseus needs to consider not only how to regain his rule but to consider how to perpetuate the regime, how to establish an orderly succession in the future, a succession that will provide “wise rule without wise rulers,” wise men like Odysseus being exceedingly rare. To do so, he must “establish a new teaching about the gods,” a “religious founding” which will back up his political founding by reinforcing his succession plan. 

In Athens, Socrates is “the new returning Odysseus.” By this parallel, Plato invites his reader “to think of Socrates as returning with a founding deed that is a theological-political program.” In the dialogue, the handsome young wrestler Charmides needs Socrates as a physician—a physician of the soul, not the body. As it happens, Socrates himself had consulted a physician “of Zalmoxis,” who was “a god who teaches that to cure the body the soul must also be treated and that the soul can be treated only with incantations which are ‘beautiful speeches'”; more, the doctors of Zalmoxis also “teach that the soul is immortal” and that there is only one God. The doctrines of monotheism and the immortal soul have made the people who believe these teachings, the Getae, “the most courageous and most just of people, the only people to effectively resist the Persian invaders”—exactly the virtues Athenians will need if they are to trust one another, unite, and win the war against Sparta. What Hermes is to Odysseus, the doctor of Zalmoxis has been to Socrates; what the doctor has been to Zalmoxis, Socrates intends to be to young Charmides and to other Athenian youths with whom he will dialogue. The topic of the Charmides is moderation. Before the war, Socrates had taught Critias, who is actually his main interlocutor in the Charmides. During the course of his conversation with him now, Socrates sees that he had earlier taught Critias “a view that would eventually turn him into a notorious Athenian criminal, a most immoderate sophist and tyrant in the Athenian civil war.” Socrates inadvertently had corrupted Critias; now and in the future, he must alter his exoteric teaching. Corrupting the youth will be one of the charges laid against Socrates, years later, at his trial before the Athenian jury. Socrates was indeed guilty as charged, if unintentionally. Well before the trial, he acts to correct his own actions.

In the Republic, a few days later, readers hear that, according to the myth Socrates proposes, in the afterlife the soul of Odysseus chooses “the life of Socrates” for his next life. That is, he chooses “the business of philosophy and everything it entails to protect itself and advance itself.” “Plato in the Republic makes the returned Socrates of the Charmides the thinker who recognized in himself the soul of Odysseus,” the soul that “carries on and advances the tradition of Greek wisdom that began before wise Odysseus, before Homer, and was passed on after improvements by Homer, and is passed on to Socrates, that ‘son’ of Homer who improves,” or, rather, adapts and adjusts, “Homeric wisdom and passes it on to his ‘sons’ after him.” Plato suggests that “a wise man knows who he is and he knows where he is and he learns what he must do because of who he is and where he is.” Whereas the Athenians are introducing a foreign god whose consort is a healing-god, Socrates, “on that very night,” introduces his own teachings, his own “incantations” or philosophic or natural religion, which he says he learned from another foreign god. The young gentlemen in this dialogue, Adeimantus and Glaucon, “have been exposed to the Greek enlightenment and learned the teaching of teachers like Protagoras, teachings that seem to them to destroy the reasons for living a moral life, a life of justice.” They are experiencing “the crisis of the death of the gods,” a crisis “similar to what Nietzsche would call nihilism.” His rival in this dialogue is another sophist, Thrasymachus, who is even less moderate in his teaching than Protagoras was, openly asserting that justice is only the advantage of the stronger—the “real and radical position of enlightenment teachers.” The sophists have shaken the young gentlemen’s belief in the gods; what will happen if they spoil their sense of justice, upon which the survival of any polis depends? 

Socrates adopts three strategies for dealing with the Athenian crisis of the death of the death of the gods. First, he attempts to make the sophist Thrasymachus his friend, despite Thrasymachus’ attempt to compete with Socrates for the allegiance of the young gentlemen. Socrates had “learned a new strategy,” replacing the one that “did not succeed with Protagoras” or with Alcibiades. He offers teachings on the soul, on ‘epistemology,’ and on the gods—all “anti-Homeric teachings foreign to the Greek tradition, teachings meant to persuade and cure young men like Adeimantus and Glaucon.” Socrates teaches them that the soul has three “parts”: logos or reason; thumos or spiritedness; and the appetites. If reason exercises its rightful rule over spiritedness, and spiritedness exercises its rightful rule over the appetites, the young gentlemen will learn civic or political courage, not the raging, Achilles-like warlike courage that has entangled Athens in a war they will not win. He also teaches them that the soul is immortal, with Hades a place of reward and punishment for acts committed in this life. “The returned Socrates’ teaching on the soul’s afterlife is most clearly a teaching that he learned while he was away, from the doctor of Zalmoxis—or, Plato suggests, perhaps from Herodotus, the Greek historian who reports the teachings of Zalmoxis and their salutary or beneficial effects, and who says that the people of Zalmoxis are most courageous and most just.”

Socrates’ new teaching on knowing reality or ‘being,’ his ‘epistemology,’ consists of his doctrine of the ideas. Strauss forthrightly contends that “no one has ever succeeded in giving a satisfactory or clear account of this doctrine of ideas,” showing that “the doctrine is an exoteric teaching that can easily persuade non-philosophers who have been raised to believe in glorious gods like Nike and Dike, the gods of victory and justice.” But Socrates aims not at a rigorous philosophic proof; he rather intends to persuade young Athenian skeptics that while the goddess, Justice, does not literally exist, the idea of justice “has a permanent independent reality that can be known by humans.” Such a notion assuages their disappointment in no longer being able to believe in the existence of eternal gods, gives them instead an account of a principle of justice that is at least rationally conceivable if not rationally demonstrable as an idea, as an eternal thing, an idea easily acceptable to souls inculcated by religious doctrines about eternal gods. That is, “Socrates’ teaching on the eternal, transcendent ideas is a teaching consciously tied to its time, the time of the death of the Homeric gods.” It is poetic, a making, not a proof, but it is philosophic poetry.

Strauss placed his account of Socrates’ new teaching on the gods in the center of the chapter on the Republic in The City and Man. The philosophic lawgiver of the City in Speech “lays down two new laws for the gods”: they only cause good, never evil; they never change shape or lie. In each instance, the gods are quite unlike Homer’s Olympians. “A crucial part of making the gods more moral than Homer had made them is what Socrates adds in Book 10: he makes the gods ultimately responsible for punishing or rewarding the soul after death in Hades.” After all, the soul is immortal and receives reward or punishment for its actions in this life, and if the standard of good and bad (for political men, and young political aspirants, especially justice and injustice) is impersonal, an idea or set of ideas, then who will enforce the ideas, who will make them rule the immortal souls? 

Socrates adds another novelty about the gods. If the idea of the good is the sovereign idea, the idea that sets the standard for all others, including justice, then “Socrates moves toward the monotheism of Zalmoxis.” This is one reason why Nietzsche regarded Plato’s account of Socrates as a teaching that “opened the way for the successful introduction of Christianity,” a religion about which Nietzsche expresses some well-known reservations, indeed animadversions. While “the Athenian introduction of Bendis failed to do anything to change the ultimate fate of Athens, Socrates’ introduction of his new teachings succeeded in changing the fate of philosophy in Athens and, ultimately, in changing the fate of Western civilization,” making him into “what Nietzsche said he was, ‘the vortex and turning point of so-called world history.'” And just as Homer’s Odysseus needed to kill the 108 suitors of Penelope in order to re-found his regime in Ithaka, just as Socrates “kills” Homer by “taking Homer’s place as the ultimate authority,” so too will Nietzsche, in this way following the lead of Machiavelli, ‘kill’ Plato in order to found a new spiritual regime adapted, as Nietzsche supposed, to the new circumstance in which both the transcendent God and the transcendent ideas are ‘dead,’ no longer believed, in need of substitution. Although Socrates ‘kills’ Homer exoterically, he “honors Homer as his own teacher” esoterically. Nietzsche ‘kills’ Plato, but only “the exoteric Plato whose teaching ultimately led to a cultural disaster,” Christianity. The esoteric Nietzsche “honors Plato as Plato honored Homer,” as what Nietzsche calls “the most beautiful growth of antiquity.” “Times change, gods die, and politic wisdom must change with the times by teaching new gods.” 

Before turning to a fuller discussion of Nietzsche, Lampert devotes his fourth lecture to how Socrates became Socrates—a philosopher. That Socrates changed, that he changed his exoteric teaching, he has shown. How he changed may be seen not so much in the Protagoras, the Charmides, and the Republic as in a second trio of dialogues, dialogues reported by witnesses, not by Socrates himself. These are the Phaedo, reported by Phaedo, the Parmenides, reported by Cephalus, and the Symposium, reported by Apollodorus. These are the only ‘reported’ dialogues in which Socrates appears that Socrates himself does not report. [2] Lampert remarks that these dialogues form not only a sequence in time but a logical sequence, Plato’s way of depicting “Socrates’ progress in thought” toward “the deepest insight that a philosopher can attain.” His “calculated presentation of the exoteric Socrates is intended to lead his most interested reader to the esoteric Socrates” even as he makes it possible “to date these steps in the life of Socrates against the background of the life of Athens.” One might say that he thus beckons his young Chinese listeners to think for themselves, just as Socrates thought for himself.

The Phaedo is named after its narrator, who is telling the story of Socrates’ last day to Pythagoras in the polis of Philia—a conveniently named site for such a story, if ever there was one. On that day, Socrates had been talking to two young Pythagoreans who had begun to doubt the Pythagorean doctrine of the immortality of the soul. One of them, Kebes, has raised an objection to that doctrine which requires Socrates to reconsider “the cause at work in the whole of nature, the whole of becoming.” This will be “the last argument of his life,” but before he makes it, he recurs “to his first philosophic experiences in order to tell the story of his becoming a philosopher from its very beginning.” As a young man, he began with wonder, animated by the intellectual eros that desires knowledge of nature. Early and then-contemporary Greek philosophers had explained natural causes naturalistically, that is, without recourse to explanations depending upon claims about the gods. He found none of these explanations satisfactory, he recalls, until he heard the theory that Mind causes natural changes, that “everything in nature is what it is because it was for the best that it be that way, as judged by mind.” Strauss calls this Socrates’ “teleotheology.” But in examining the works of Anaxagoras, the philosopher who proposed the theory, Socrates found that the doctrine of Mind was an “exoteric and salutary teaching” that “cover[ed]” Anaxagoras’ “esoteric naturalism.” So, Socrates remained dissatisfied, thinking that natural/material causes “cannot explain human things.” As proof of this, he argues that the cause of his sitting in prison, awaiting death, cannot be fully explained by the actions of his body; the “human opinion” that commanded his death sentence as more important. But if natural causes do not suffice to account for causation, and Anaxagoras himself didn’t believe that Mind accounts for it, what then? This led to the philosophic adventurer’s “second sailing” under the banner of thinking that if the things to be explained don’t explain themselves, if that wind doesn’t fill the sails of the philosophic boat, then you, the philosopher, must row, turning to speeches (logoi) and ideas in order to attempt to understand causation.

The ideas he discusses in this dialogue, the Beautiful, the Good, and Bigness are themselves unchanging. Change occurs, however, in the natural phenomena according to whether or not the “participate” in one or more of the ideas. Socrates then “uses the ideas to prove that the soul is immortal,” and Kebes accepts the proof. Since no one has ever quite explained what it means for a thing to participate or fail to participate in an idea, the whole doctrine is suspect. Lampert simply remarks that this was Socrates’ next step in his philosophic odyssey, and that he was content if young gentlemen like Kebes took it as their last step. 

The Parmenides takes Plato’s readers back to Socrates in 450 BCE, at age 19, when the philosophers Parmenides, then 65 years old, and Zeno, then 40 years old, visited Athens and conversed with him. By then, Socrates had already rejected materialist naturalism, discovered and questioned the adequacy of teleology, and turned “to the speeches and to the ideas as cause.” Socrates was “a philosophic prodigy, a young genius in philosophy who by age nineteen had thought through the whole history of Greek philosophy before him and arrived at his own novel solution to the problem of cause, his view of the ideas.” In arguing for it, he presents it “in the way a nineteen-year-old philosophic innovator would present it: he is proud, competitive, victory-loving; he is eager to prove that these two famous philosophers are wrong and that he, only he, solved their great problem, the problem of cause.” Far from being indignant at the upstart, Parmenides and Zeno very much like the young man, for “they saw in the young Socrates a man of their own kind, a great rarity of the kind a philosopher always seeks.” Parmenides gently “suggests” to Socrates “that there is way too much love of victory riving him” because he cares too much about the “opinions of men.” He has nonetheless “made the fundamental step of philosophy and learned for himself that things have natures“—even as Odysseus had learned the nature of the moly root—that “each thing belongs to a kind, a natural kind: that is what the ‘idea’ of a thing means.” If no such thing as a “kind” exists in nature, then understanding itself, the telos of philosophic inquiry, is impossible and nature is unknowable. The philosopher himself exemplifies a “kind” of the human, itself a “kind” in nature. Parmenides effectively challenges Socrates to show whether or not he can “discover and show others the grounds of the possibility of philosophy.” 

Lampert suggests that in the Parmenides Plato has written a dialogue that “is only for the passionately interested few, nameless future travelers from afar, potential philosophers.” “This is how Plato thinks the tradition of philosophy works, how Socratic philosophy will be passed down: the essential esoteric Socrates is embedded in the preserved conversations of the exoteric Socrates.” Further, a comparison of the Parmenides with the Phaedo shows how, “on the last day of his life, at age seventy, in the last argument of his life, Socrates teaches young Pythagoreans the very view of the ideas that he himself, fifty years earlier, learned from Parmenides was rationally indefensible.” He does this because Phaedo and Socrates’ other young friends are not philosophers; “they are not of Socrates’ kind.” He gives them the doctrine of the ideas in order to save them from their doubts about the gods and their fears of death, and perhaps even more to make philosophy “publicly defensible as morally trustworthy.” It is political philosophy, philosophic poetry, ministerial poetry. (In modern China, too, surely philosophy needs to be seen as morally trustworthy.)

The last dialogue in this series is the Symposium. Strauss calls it the only dialogue that takes “praise of a God,” who happens to be Eros, Love, as its topic and the only dialogue named for the occasion upon which it takes place—a “drinking party at which wine loosens tongues and things are said that might otherwise not be said.” In this dialogue, those things are profanations of the religious mysteries; “it tells what it is a crime to tell, a secret about the gods and what they know.” It was Alcibiades who had been accused of having profaned the mysteries in 416 BCE, seventeen years before this party, just prior to the time of Socrates’ trial. Socrates was accused of corrupting the young, including Alcibiades. This year, 399 BCE, “was a time of fervent religious purification” in Athens, a movement or change, a change of public opinion, “to which Socrates fell victim.” It was also the year when the oracle at Delphi supposedly said that there was no wiser man than Socrates, effectively designating him as a worthy successor of Protagoras. That is, the religious purification of Athens, leading to the death of a most eminent philosopher, contradicted the judgment of the highest religious authority in Greece. This must mean that Athenian public opinion must not understand the judgment of the religious authority it acknowledges as authoritative. How so?

And if Socrates is indeed wise, how did he become so, what caused his change from unwisdom (where we all begin and most of us end) to wisdom? “In the Symposium we hear Socrates tell the genuine story of his wisdom.” The Symposium profanes not the Delphic mysteries, as Alcibiades was accused of doing, but reveals “the most hidden truths of philosophy that Plato will ever reveal, an unveiling of the mystery of Socrates’ being as a philosopher that is at the same time an unveiling of the mystery of being itself.” Like the Delphic mysteries, hidden by human beings from human beings, nature itself hides, as pre-Socratic Heraclitus revealed. Although the mystery of being or nature “can be divined,” it can be divined only “in a way that is itself mysterious, true to the hidden ways of nature.” At this point, we know from the Protagoras that Socrates “had already completed his philosophic education” before the year of the dialogue, 434. His philosophic education predated his political-philosophic education. Now, in 416, he claims to be ignorant, except for “the things of eros,” things more likely to be revealed during the course of a drinking party, as the inhibitions ingrained by conventions weaken. 

Socrates converses with Agathon, a young poet who writes tragedies, and introduces a memory of Diotima, whom he met in 440. “Diotima” means “honor the god”; a prophetess, she was said to have delayed the onset of the plague in Athens by recommending that they make a sacrifice. In her discussion with Socrates, she refuted Socrates’ opinion, shared by Agathon, “that Eros is good and beautiful and wise.” On the contrary, Eros is none of those things. But neither is Eros bad, ugly, or ignorant. Eros “is a between.” Eros desires what a soul takes to be good, beautiful, wise. Diotima leads the young philosopher to self-knowledge, to recognition of his own nature as an erotic being of a certain kind, one passionate for wisdom. The philosopher begins his inquiry with “correct opinion”; his soul must at least be pointed in the direction of the good, beautiful, and wise; it not be misled by incorrect opinion, which points the soul to the bad, ugly, and ignorant. This is why philosophers take care to craft philosophic poetry, not only to incline the polis to a regime that will let philosophers philosophize but to give the few potential philosophers a better chance of becoming real ones. Socrates recognized himself in Diotima’s portrait as an erotic man of the type she described.

Philosophy, “driven erotically” in the right direction and knowing itself as erotic, “can best think the reality that lies between those abstractions of permanence and flow”; he recognizes nature as a whole within himself as a particular instance of nature. “The philosopher can come to know by knowing himself.” When Socrates asks Diotima what kind of power eros has, she calls it the power of “ferrying,” of “mediating or carrying things between the immortals and the mortal.” One is reminded also of the god who ferries souls from life to the realm of the dead.

And who, Socrates asks, are Eros’ father and mother—that is, “what are the origins of eros?” Shockingly, Eros is not a god at all and it has no parents. It turns out that eros is self-making, self-generating; “eros as self-generating power never simply is but is always coming into being as a result of its own activity and always slipping out of being as a result of its self-expenditure, its dying away in [is?] its expressing itself.” Intellectual eros and physical eros behave exactly the same way because they are both part of nature. “The deep structure of eros always disappears into the concrete experience that it enables,” “masked in the particular that it always disappears into.” It is dynamic, relational, temporal, “directed by its very nature to fulfillment or satisfaction, and its fulfillment always drains away and revives seeking fulfillment.” And that is what nature as a whole is, too. So, when Socrates says he is ignorant of everything but eros, “he seems to make a modest or moderate knowledge claim” but in fact makes “the largest of all possible knowledge claims,” that he knows “the character or way of all that is,” what Strauss calls “the nature of nature.” The nature of nature may be seen at the top of Diotima’s famous ladder, which the philosopher and the philosopher alone reaches. At the top of the ladder is a beholding, a beholding of the erotic character of being, but, like eros itself, the beholding also engenders, makes; it makes philosophic poetry. This is the coming into being and the slipping out of being, the slipping out of being involving what Socrates in the Republic calls the return to the Cave, the polis, the place of convention, where philosophic poetry can replace the shadows of idols no longer taken as real by the citizens. 

Lampert calls attention to the rational character of the knowing the prophetess reveals. The trajectory of Socrates’ philosophic way of life, his regime. He wanted to know the answer to “the question of cause concerning generation and destruction as a whole,” not only of the human things but of all things. His second sailing brought him to the idea of the Ideas as the cause of generation and destruction, but Parmenides refuted this with his “proof of the rational impossibility of transcendent ideas.” The third stage came when Diotima taught him that causation lies between the “pure flow” (asserted by Heraclitus) and the permanence of what are often miscalled Platonic ideas. Rather, “everything that is has the dynamic, relational, temporal character of eros.” The Delphic command, “Know yourself,” is exactly what the philosopher must do, if he is to know the nature of nature. In this way, Socrates may be said to ‘profane’ the mysteries not in the sense of betraying them but in the sense that he “prepares an initiation into them” which is “available for all future Agathons, for you and me,” my Chinese auditors. 

As Strauss remarks, Nietzsche replaces Platonic eros with the will to power. The way in which Nietzsche became Nietzsche is the topic of the final two lectures.

 

Notes

1. The importance of Alcibiades’ presence is remarked by Patrick J. Coby: Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987). See “Plato’s ‘Protagoras'” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
2. The “Young Socrates” or Socrates the Younger, also a philosopher, whom Plato’s readers meet in the Statesman. 

 

Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche: Philosophy and Its Poetry. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

 

In 2015, the eminent political philosophy scholar Laurence Lampert was invited to lecture at Remain University, Beijing by Professor Liu Xiaofeng, who had read his book, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. This “turned out to be the best intellectual experience of my life,” as Lampert found the Chinese students to be attentive, exceptionally well-versed in classical Western philosophy, and eager to engage in dialogue. For his part, Lampert carefully honed his talks in view of the needs of philosophy students living under the regime in China. His topic was the relationship between the philosophic intentions of Plato, Nietzsche, and their astute interpreter, Leo Strauss. In his first two lectures he considered Strauss’s account of Plato and Nietzsche, in the second pair he considered Plato’s account of Socrates, and in the third pair he considered Nietzsche’s account of Plato and of Plato’s Socrates.

Lampert began with Strauss’s (now familiar) rediscovery of the techniques of exoteric writing as practiced by Plato and Xenophon. In a series of letters to his friend Jacob Klein, written in 1938-39 as the twin tyrannies of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ menaced the liberal republics of Europe, Strauss expressed his delight “at discovering what the philosophers had written as if it were just for him, which in a way it was“—just for someone like him, a Jewish thinker with family members who would soon would perish in the Holocaust, a thinker who might well be alert to techniques of literary legerdemain practiced by writers who needed to protect themselves from persecution. Strauss told Klein that he had noticed something in Moses Maimonides, no stranger to the hazards of expressing heterodox views in a political regime hostile to heterodoxy and the heterodox. Ten years earlier, Strauss had taken Maimonides as “a believing Jew,” just as Maimonides evidently wanted to be taken by the majority of his readers. Upon more careful reading, Strauss noticed that Maimonides actually regarded the world as eternal, a heterodox view indeed. Maimonides further defined Judaism as a tradition of law, with Moses as the lawgiver. “In Plato,” Lampert writes, following Strauss’s argument, “Plato the philosopher is the ideal lawgiver.” Maimonides accepts the ‘ontology’ of the philosophers along with the politics of the great political philosopher. Strauss saw that Maimonides points his readers to the heterodox core beneath the orthodox shell of his writings by leaving marks on the shell, directing his most alert, ardent, and tenacious readers to look within. The esoteric core of the exoteric teaching hides that teaching “in plain view, if you know how to look.” 

In their youth, Strauss and Klein had shared a fascination with Nietzsche, a fascination not at all uncommon among young European ‘intellectuals’ before and after the First World War. Nietzsche too understood the need for exotericism, remarking three “true but deadly” doctrines that previous thinkers had often concealed: in Nietzsche’s words, these were “the sovereignty of becoming, the fluidity of all concepts, types, and kinds; and the lack of any cardinal difference between man and the animals.” These truths are deadly to political society because they are “deadly to the beliefs on which society to depends for its health.” That is, Maimonides, Plato, and Nietzsche all saw the need for philosophers to be ‘politic,’ prudent in the presentation of their teachings, the publication of which might harm the regimes under which they live and invite harm to themselves by those regimes. In the presentation of Socrates, both Plato and Xenophon hinted at, but did not fully disclose, that Socrates was “a kind of ruler and a kind of founder,” the founder of “a new kind of empire,” the “empire of a philosophic ruler” who questioned the moral conventions that prevailed in his polis, Athens, conventions upheld by the man of kalokagathia, the good and noble man, “the Greek gentleman, the pillar of civic life in the Greek civil order.” Whereas for the gentleman the virtue of moderation meant temperance tout court, including obedience to the laws of the polis, for the philosopher moderation means “controlling and guarding what you say or write”: “Philosophic moderation means in part continued use of the old moral words but understanding them in a radically different way,” a way that departs from legally sanctioned (and sanctioning) conventions. Philosophic moderation guards not an indiscriminate set of passions but a particular passion, the passion to know. “Exotericism protects society from philosophy and protects the philosopher from society.” It also provides a means by which young persons who might come to be philosophers can be tempted in both senses of the term: led by their curiosity to philosophizing, tested for their capacity to philosophize. 

Perhaps even more remarkably, Strauss found exotericism in a poet, Hesiod, who, as Strauss wrote to Klein, taught that “the first things are not the gods but such things as earth, sky, stars, ocean which at one place are expressly distinguished from the gods simply.” As Lampert summarizes, “Learning what the unborn things are illuminates what the Olympians are; it shows what the gods who care about the human things are: the inventions of wise poets like Hesiod. and this enlightenment shows what wisdom is: wisdom is the knowledge of nature and human nature, and knowledge of what a god is.” Following Strauss’s hint, one of his students, Seth Benardete, would later show that “the founding poet of Greece,” Homer, was also a philosopher, indeed Greece’s “founding philosopher.” He, too, knew nature and human nature and what a god is. Strauss, Lampert remarks, “regarded the Symposium—which he called the most beautiful, thus the most poetic, of the dialogues—also as “the most important” of them “because it reveals the real secret of the [Delphic] mysteries,” the “secret truths about philosophy and the philosopher.” Maimonides learned that truth by exactly that careful reading, which requires the reader to infer conclusions that the philosopher he is studying only suggests. To understand what a philosopher thinks “you have to earn it, you have to work” at it, following his argument to its center, its core—sometimes located in the physical center of the book he has written. 

In his essay on the Republic in The City and Man, Strauss makes his central paragraph a discussion of the education Socrates proposes for children in his “regime in speech,” an “education through poetry, a most important word.” The gods and heroes depicted in stories for children “teach the right kind of behavior and warn against the wrong kinds of behavior.” Socrates, Strauss writes, “lays down two laws” concerning the depiction of the gods in these stories; Lampert tells his audience that this means “Socrates is a legislator,” one who “lays down laws for the gods”—an ambiguous phrase, inasmuch as it can mean laying down laws for how poets shall depict the gods and/or laying down laws that the gods must obey. To presume to do the latter suggests that the gods are man-made, not really gods at all. This matters, because “the untrue stories the citizens [of Athens] absorbed as children are what the grown-up citizens believe: what is taken in during one’s childhood is what one continues to believe and act on as an adult”—the laws underlying the laws citizens make for themselves and their own children. This matters not only for the city generally but for Socrates’ interlocutors, which include some young Athenian gentlemen, Adeimantus among them.

Adeimantus “was beginning to experience a death of the gods,” that is, disbelief in the gods. The Homeric gods often behave badly, unjustly. If the very gods behave unjustly, why should he not do so, too? As a “decent and noble young gentleman,” Adeimantus “dearly wants to continue being decent and noble,” but “why should he take that hard and difficult way himself,” when the gods set such a bad example? Adeimantus and his brother, Glaucon entertain such doubts because they “have been brought into touch with the Greek enlightenment,” that is to say, the Greek philosophy of nature, which throws conventional opinions about the gods, opinions fostered by the poets, into question. Strauss observes that Plato’s Socrates doesn’t say what, or who, the gods are at any point in the Republic. Why not? Because Adeimantus is neither a philosopher nor a potential philosopher; he hasn’t asked ‘What is a god?’ but only ‘Why the gods aren’t more just, more moral, more trustworthy than they are.’ Socrates accordingly turns to the question, ‘What is justice?’ That is, Plato’s Socrates takes care to understand and respond to the circumstance in which he speaks, both the character of his interlocutors and the moral and political ‘atmosphere’ of the polis, Athens. “At the time of the Republic, Homer’s and Hesiod’s gods were in crisis. Socrates in the Republic sets out to be a philosophic ruler during the crisis time of Homeric religion when Homer’s gods were dying.” With his dialogues, Plato writes “philosophic poetry.” Nietzsche understood this, going so far as call Socrates “the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history”—so called, it might be added, by Hegel and his historicist followers, who may or may not be writing philosophic poetry with their claim to find reason, dialectics, in history. Chinese scholars, living in a regime animated by Marxist historicism, might be led to wonder how much of Marxism is philosophy, how much poetry.

Poēsis means making. If philosophic poetry is something philosophers make, what or who is the philosopher? And what is “the understanding of being or nature that lies behind” these poetic, theological-political efforts? And if philosophic poetry concerns the gods, the question of what a god is is a “question about being,” a question about what “the highest possible being” is. Adeimantus wants to know a principle that can guide his practice; the philosopher wants to know the answer to a theoretical question. The philosopher’s exoteric teaching is the moral, the theological-political answer; his esoteric teaching is his theoretical answer to a different question. There is a relation between the two kinds of answer because the nature of the gods has bearing on human practice, and therefore “legislating what a god is is in part an instrument in the philosopher’s rule” in Socrates, Plato, and Nietzsche. In the center of the Republic, Plato has Socrates say that unless philosophers become kings, or unless kings adequately philosophize, cities on earth will remain troubled, unjust. Socrates will never rule Athens; indeed, Athens kills him.  But “Strauss shows how Socrates the philosopher actually ruled: a philosopher rules by laying down new laws for the gods; a philosopher rules by ruling the view of the gods that will rule the minds of the young men.” In the final book of the Republic, Plato has Socrates make the gods “the moral judges of human behavior” and “makes the soul immortal, living out is next life in reward and punishment for its actions in this life.” He quite literally re-forms the gods of Homer and Hesiod, reaffirming the decent, noble inclinations of the young gentlemen. Strauss calls this not only philosophic poetry but “ministerial poetry”—ministerial in the sense that it serves the regime, which has now become the regime in speech of the philosopher insofar as decent and noble young gentlemen may well become sympathetic to philosophy because kindly old Socrates, defender of decency against cynical Thrasymachus, has won their minds and hearts. Ministerial also because it is therapeutic, “giv[ing] aid and comfort to those like Adeimantus who suffer spiritually from the loss of their beliefs in justice and in the gods.” In the regime not of speech but of practice, the Athenian regime, philosophy and philosophers have not always flourished; Socrates will die at the hands of outraged citizens. Given time, the Athenian regime might have become more friendly toward such a man as Socrates, if Adeimantus and his fellow gentlemanly youths rule it.

Nietzsche famously denounced Socrates and Plato because Platonism (specifically, the theory of the ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’) made Christianity possible by preparing the minds of Europeans to accept a holy god, a god who transcends nature just as the ideas transcend the ‘cave’ that represents the conventions of the polis. Lampert considers Strauss’s presentation of Nietzsche in his second lecture to the Chinese scholars. Strauss placed his chapter, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” in the center of his book, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, following the chapter titled “Jerusalem and Athens.” “Strauss seems to be saying quietly: in the study of Platonic political philosophy, Nietzsche now occupies the central place, just after Jerusalem and Athens.” Now: after Nietzsche’s forthright challenge to Christianity and to the Platonism he claims to have spawned it. Just as the Symposium is Plato’s most beautiful dialogue, according to Strauss, so is Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche’s “most beautiful book,” a well-made example of “the exoteric art” in form, intention, and reticence. Nietzsche charges Plato with the “fundamental error” of inventing, in poetically making, the ideas—particularly the ideas of “pure mind” and “the good in itself.” In the Symposium, Socrates discloses what Delphic Diotima told him, that “human beings can only strive for wisdom or philosophize” but “gods do not philosophize” because they are wise. This is the supposed secret of Delphi that Socrates “blabbed.” On the contrary, Strauss’s Nietzsche counters. “Nietzsche divulges after the proper preparation the novelty, suspect perhaps especially among philosophers, that gods too philosophize.” As Lampert points out, in other dialogues (the Sophist and the Theaetetus) Plato suggests that the gods do philosophize, and further suggests that “the gods who philosophize are the philosophers themselves“—a blasphemous thought in any religion. If so, then Plato and Nietzsche may not be such antagonists as Nietzsche exoterically says they are. “Strauss suggests to a reader who is paying attention that Plato thought what Nietzsche thought but found it desirable to teach something different through Diotima.” Nietzsche himself ‘blabs,’ divulging “the secret about the gods philosophizing by introducing the philosophizing god Dionysos.” Qua philosopher, Socrates, Plato, and Nietzsche each knows the secret about the god, Diotima’s “noble lie about the gods that serves Plato’s political purpose for philosophy”; moreover, “Nietzsche, Strauss may also suggest, may divulge that secret “in order to serve his political purpose for philosophy.” Both Plato and Nietzsche “platonize in the service of philosophy,” having interpreted “the spiritual situation of their times” and having taught “what the times required for the well-being of philosophy.” 

Strauss ends his chapter by contrasting the teachings of Plato and Nietzsche on the virtues, “one of the themes of the second main part of Nietzsche’s book,” where he attends especially to “the virtues of the philosopher of the future.” Nietzsche’s nature—aristocratic, “noble nature,” with its hierarchy of rank—”replaces nature as Plato taught it, nature and the super-natural that transcends it.” (Although Lampert says that Socratic eros is “the good in itself,” Strauss says it is “the striving for the good in itself.”) For Nietzsche, “the world is will to power and nothing else”; “will to power is Nietzsche’s name for the being of beings, the nature of nature.” Both nature as eros and nature as will to power endanger the polis. In that sense, Platonic eros and Nietzsche’s life principle, the will to power, are “deadly” truths, even if life-giving in the more comprehensive sense. Or, as Nietzsche puts it in his thirtieth aphorism, “What serves the higher type of human being as nourishment or refreshment has to be nearly poison to a very different and lesser type”: hence esotericism and exotericism. Thirty-three, the age of Jesus Christ when He died, is the number of the aphorism in which Nietzsche cautions against “devotion”—to God?—and “sacrifice for our neighbor”—that is, Christ’s Great Commandment, the sum and substance of God’s Law. Nietzsche calls such “feelings” seductions to be resisted. It is Platonism, with its City in Speech, that inclines Europeans to posit a world beyond nature, a City of God, the God Who is Logos— speech and reason. To posit, as Plato seems to do, a disembodied Mind to go along with his disembodied Ideas takes the path taken “consciously or unconsciously” by every advocate of God. Today’s philosophers ought to be more suspicious of the claim that Mind leads them to a truth, or even that the truth is more to be esteemed than appearance, an assumption Nietzsche treats as “a moral prejudice” in Aphorism 34. Life itself would not exist “if not on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances”; a disembodied Mind contemplating a disembodied Idea would be lifeless, and he who attempted to live, so seduced, would soon perish (as Machiavelli also says of Christianity and of Platonism). Truth and neighbor-love are very far from being the same. When a Voltaire (whom Nietzsche quotes in the aphorism immediately following) says that “he only searches for the truth in order to do good,” “I bet he finds nothing!” Life is harsher than that, imposing an order of rank that puts the free minds, the undeluded ones, above the suckers. The real nihilists are those who believe in the Ideas and/or God—those nothings, according to Nietzsche. 

Lampert guides his readers to look at Aphorism 36 and Aphorism 37. “Aphorism 36 is reasoning; it is philosophy. Aphorism 37 is only a kind of corollary because it follows the reasoning with something that is not reasoning but that belongs to religion.” It is an example of Nietzsche’s version of “philosophic poetry.” Lampert judges the reasoning to combine “the strictest philosophical logical seriousness and play,” presenting a “strictly logical inference about what the mind can know of the self, the other, and the world of the whole,” namely, that it is “will to power and nothing else.” He promises his audience that he “will look at the reasoning in my last Nietzsche lecture,” but there is nothing wrong with looking at it now. 

Nietzsche begins with a somewhat Cartesian move, with introspection, his well-known “method.” For Descartes, introspection is the surest way to know what we can know, inasmuch as the world presented to us by our senses, thoughts, and passions may be illusory, very much including what words may be said to reveal to us about God. “Supposing nothing were ‘given’ as real besides our world of desires and passions, that we could go down or up to no other ‘reality’ than simply the reality of our drives—since thinking is only a relation of these drives to one another—: is it not permissible to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this given or something like it is not sufficient for understanding even the so-called mechanistic (or ‘material’) world?” This is more than permissible; “the conscience of method demands it.” Must we not then “recognize the will as efficient?” If so, and if (as the free spirits of the modern Enlightenment, including Voltaire himself) maintain that human beings are no different essentially from animals and the rest of nature, is not everything animated by “will force”? “The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else.—”

How strict is this logic, really? Is thinking “only a relation of [our] drives to one another”? In making this ‘thought-experiment,’ I incline to doubt that it is. If, for example, I think ‘2 +2 = 4’ I must have some “drive” that makes me want to think that more than anything else I might otherwise have on my mind, but the thought itself isn’t reducible to a drive or concatenation of drives. Yet that is the premise of Nietzsche’s argument. Lampert calls his argument “a comprehensive rational conclusion about the nature of nature, about what philosophy ultimately seeks,” but I think otherwise.

Lampert then turns to Aphorism 37, in which Nietzsche draws “a kind of corollary or inference” from his philosophic argument. This corollary is directed to “the free minds that Nietzsche is training,” minds that, though ‘enlightened’ in accordance the Machiavellian-Cartesian-Baconian modern project, retain the Voltairean squeamishness about abandoning the moral teachings of Christianity. “What?” they exclaim, “Does this not mean, using a popular expression: God is refuted but the devil is not—?” Nietzsche answers immediately, “On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends!” Lampert calls the addressees of this exclamation, Nietzsche’s friends, the free minds, who are experiencing “a deeply human reaction to philosophy’s rational conclusion.” Even if they are free of religion, notional deniers of God and the devil, they have yet to abandon the Christian morality in which they were imbued since childhood. But if the God of the New Testament, “the transcendent God of Christianity,” has “condemned the world as the kingdom of darkness, as the place of the devil from which he would redeem us,” and if nature is life force, will force, will to power and nothing else, then “that God, the refuted God, is the devil, the refuted devil.” Nietzsche’s will to power has a place, not for that God, but for “gods” of a different sort. “Nietzsche’s ontology introduces a new way to think about divinity, about what a god is,” and “Strauss has led his reader into the heart of this temptation“—the reference to Genesis being salient—that Nietzsche has formulated for him. More, “Strauss had suggested that Nietzsche and Plato may not differ on what a god is,” that both take “the philosophizing god Dionysos” to be the god of the philosophically-minded. This talk of divinity might confuse atheistic minds, minds ‘free’ of the belief in God, but Strauss points to passages where Nietzsche argues that human beings cannot live “without gods” of some sort; they are “necessary for a healthy social order.” Life itself justifies belief in gods, just not belief in life-denying gods. The God of the Bible does in fact give life, indeed offer eternal life, but those teachings must be false, according to Nietzsche and his “friends,” the free spirits. Real life does not transcend life as we know it on earth. Accordingly, Aphorism 57 clears the way for a new religion, “a new poetry of divinity for humans whose world can turn only around a god”—now, according to Nietzsche, the real, living god of the will to power. This is Nietzsche’s philosophic-poetic replacement for Plato’s philosophic poetry.

The exoteric doctrine, the public teaching of the new religion is the eternal return. The eternal return is “a new ideal” for human beings, just as Plato’s Ideas were a new ideal replacing the dead or dying Olympian gods. Instead of world-denying Platonism or the world-denying Christianity that, according to Nietzsche, gained traction thanks to the doctrine of Ideas, the eternal return unqualifiedly affirms life. In Strauss’s word, it is “the eternal Yes-saying to everything that was and is.” Among the Stoics, the first to give a full account of the eternal return, the cosmos undergoes periodic cycles of destruction and rebirth; for them, the moral imperative is to endure this, as a past, ongoing, and future reality, without sniveling. Christian writers denounced this as a denial of God’s promises. Nietzsche’s new religion adjures the free spirits neither to merely suffer it, nor to deny it, but to embrace it as life itself, the supreme manifestation of the will to power. As Lampert puts it, “eternal return is not a vicious circle but, on the contrary, the virtuous circle of life made eternal, made god in some sense,” “the making divine”—notice “making,” as this is an act of poēsis —of “the whole natural cycle of things,” one in which you, free spirit, will return, with the same nature and the same life experiences, as you have undergone, undergo, and will undergo in this cycle of life. “Eternal return is a non-theistic vindication of God,” an answer to what theologians call the problem of evil. It also vindicates God’s promise of eternal life. Philosophy says, “to be is the to be will to power and nothing else”; the new religion, the “political philosophy or philosophic poetry” Nietzsche makes from that insight is this “new highest ideal, the affirmation of the world as it is,” leading “to a vindication of god”—now, in the lower case—of “what alone can make a world possible for humans.” Nietzsche founds this new religion because it meets the needs of certain human beings, the free spirits, who, like the young gentlemen of Socrates’ Athens, are experiencing the ‘death’ of their own beliefs about divinity. In a sense, this parallel is a (willed) example of the eternal return.

The new religion propounds a new morality, “beyond good and evil,” as Nietzsche puts it. The “new teaching on human virtue arises out of Nietzsche’s new understanding of nature”; that is, it derives from Nietzsche’s philosophy, even if it seems to come from the new religion. “Nietzsche went beyond seeing human nature, to act on what he saw.” Human nature has been led astray by Christian de-naturing, but that isn’t the most urgent dilemma now, in Nietzsche’s time. Belief in Christianity is dying, indeed already dead in the minds of the free spirits. But Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon and their followers have proposed the conquest of fortune and of nature by means of modern science. Modern science uses the experimental method to torture nature into revealing her secrets and then, with those secrets in hand, to invent technologies that will beat her down, conquer and master her. But, as Strauss writes, “there are no assignable limits to this conquest.” It could extend to the conquest of human nature, as “the direct result of modern virtue.” By modern virtue, Nietzsche evidently does not mean the real modern virtue, Machiavelli’s virtù, but the secularized Christian virtue of Voltaire, the attempt to remove suffering and inequality. Lampert quotes Strauss, looking at aphorisms 237 and 257: “Suffering and inequality are the prerequisites of human greatness,” including philosophy, the greatest human greatness. Aphorism 237 is an attack on what would come to be called feminism, the attempt to make men and women equal, a project Nietzsche deems contra naturam; Aphorism 257 is an attack on democracy, another form of egalitarianism. “Every enhancement so far in the type ‘human being’ was the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be this way again and again: a society that believes in a long ladder of rank order and value-difference between one person and another and in some sense requires slavery.” On this, Lampert claims, “Strauss’s point is Nietzsche’s point: the limitless conquest of nature threatens to bring about the end of philosophy.” One might add that this is exactly what Strauss says in his own voice in his exchange with the Hegelian Communist, Alexandre Kojève. [1]

Philosophers make arguments, but they also take actions. “The actions of the highest natures, the history-making philosophers,” consist of “postulat[ing] as true what they see as beneficial to philosophy and humanity in their times.” All of these postulations, all these claims, are “acts of the will to power on the part of the highest natures.” Nietzsche’s legislation, his act of the will to power, his postulation of the eternal return, “is not fundamentally a description of the way the world is, although it may be lived that way by most people”; it is really “a statement of desire, the desire of a lover” of nature who seeks to limit the conquest of nature, which “is not to be conquered through alteration but celebrated as it is.” Lampert calls this “the first comprehensive ecological philosophy.” Nietzsche is the first ‘post-modern.’ 

Or at least in part. “Nietzsche embraced the scientific aspects of the modern revolution while modifying or assigning limits to its technological aspects.” Modern philosophers “tamed Christianity with their philosophic poetry, their modification of Christianity’s other-worldly promises into worldly promises promising a paradise at the end of history through a scientific technology applied to nature.” This has begun to threaten human nature itself, including the highest manifestation of human nature, the philosopher. This Nietzsche seeks to prevent; evidently, the religio-poetic doctrine of the eternal return cloaks the possibility that human nature might destroyed permanently, if a philosopher does not stand up to set a limit on the conquest by calling upon free spirits to turn against the remnants of Christian morality, against the humanitarian compassion, the spirit of ressentiment that seeks revenge upon the world as it is. In becoming friends of philosophy (if hardly philosophers themselves), the free spirits will help philosophy, the activity of the highest persons on nature’s order of rank, to continue philosophizing.

What relevance has this account of Strauss have for Chinese scholars? What does Lampert’s account of Strauss’s accounts of Plato and Nietzsche bring to the Chinese? Several things, perhaps. Strauss’s account of exoteric writing and esoteric teaching would surely interest thinking men and women living in a regime in which persecution of heterodoxy is not unknown. A thoughtful Chinese might already have thought heterodox thoughts, and Plato’s critique of the gentleman, Nietzsche’s critique of the free spirits, might give encouragement to young persons among China’s ruling class to persist in thinking for themselves. If philosophers know and love nature and human nature, where does that leave Hegel, Marx, and other historicist thinkers, who suppose that nature can be triumphantly mastered? (With its air and water heavily polluted, will not an “ecological philosophy” prove healthful, live-giving?) If they do so persist, if they experience the death of the ideological ‘gods’ of their time and place, even as the young Athenian gentlemen and the modern free spirits experienced the death of gods in theirs, what gods will they put in the place of Maoist Marxism? With his account of ‘how Strauss became Strauss,’ Lampert suggests to any young potential philosopher, and to the much larger class of young free spirits, how one might become a philosopher, and how many others could become friends of philosophy, the activity of the true gods. Such persons will surely not believe that a political ruler is a true god, inasmuch as philosopher-kings rule spiritually, leaving practical politics to others. They do not believe that theory and practice can be unified, much less embodied in a human being like Stalin. Finally, there is the theme of temptation, testing by an effort at seduction. The late Professor Lampert was quite the old charmer, if his death notices are to be believed. His lectures make the claim plausible.

 

Note

1. Leo Strauss: On Tyranny. Revised and expanded edition. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. On this website, see also: “Strauss’s Critique of Hegel,” “Historicity and Reason,” and “The Philosopher-King: A Contradiction in Terms?” all under the category, “Philosophers.”

Plato: Greater Hippias. Harold N. Foster translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. 

Catherine H. Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. Chapter 4, section iv: “The Sophist’s Inability to Say What Is Noble.”

 

Socrates greets the prominent sophist, Hippias of Elis, newly arrived at Athens, calling him kalos (noble, beautiful) and wise—the word ‘sophist’ itself meaning ‘wise one.’ “What a long time it has been since you have put in at the port of Athens!” Well, yes, “I have no leisure, Socrates,” since the regime in Elis calls on him whenever it needs to transact business with “any of the poleis,” calling upon his ambassadorial skills, “thinking that I am the ablest judge and messenger of the words that are spoken by the several poleis“— particularly formidable Lacedaemon. After all, a truly wise man must be the best judge and also the one most capable of relaying messages accurately, and of understanding their meaning. Socrates appears impressed, indeed enthusiastic, exclaiming, “That’s what it is, Hippias, to be a truly wise and perfect man!” Hippias looks like the perfect specimen of humanness itself, traveling from polis to polis, serving Elis but in some respects a citizen of the world, or at least of Greece as a whole, its many poleis with their several regimes. He seems at once a patriot and one who transcends city-states and their regimes. What is more, privately, he makes “much money from the young,” whom he charges for his teaching, while “confer[ring] upon them still greater benefits than you receive,” even as he “benefits[s]” his own city-state, “as a man must who is not to be despised but held in high repute among the many.” Hippias seems to square all the circles. But is his seeming a reality? If, for example, he has no leisure, when does he have the time to think, to become wise, a ‘soph-ist’? Or does his sophistry mean that, having become wise already, he no longer needs to think?

As always, Socrates has a question. “What in the world is the reason why those men of old whose names are called great in respect to wisdom—Pittacus, and Bias, and the Milesian Thales with his followers—and also the later ones, down to Anaxagoras, are all or most of them, found to refrain from the affairs of the polis?” Because they were not me, Hippias replies; they “were not able to compass by their wisdom both public and private matters.” They were wise privately but lacked political wisdom. Their public reputation was a recognition by the many of their sound personal advice; they were the Dr. Phils of their time. 

Hippias affirms Socrates’ suggestion, that “your art has progressed” since then, “just as the other arts have progressed,” and so the ancients “who were concerned with wisdom are of no account in comparison with you.” This might suggest that the art of sophistry might progress still further, that Hippias might still have much to learn, that he is not fully wise after all. But Hippias doesn’t take the hint. Instead, he confides a trade secret: although he knows his superiority to the ancients, “I am in the habit of praising the ancients and our predecessors rather than the men of the present day” as “a precaution against the envy of the living and through fear of the wrath of those who are dead.” (Hippias appears to presume that the dead only get wind of his public statements, not his private ones.) Socrates makes a show of agreement, pointing to the sophist Gorgias, who came to Athens and “spoke excellently in the public assembly, and in his private capacity, by giving exhibitions and associating with the young, he earned and received a great deal of money from this city.” “Our friend here, Prodicus,” has done the same thing. [1] “But none of those ancients ever thought fit to exact money as payment for his wisdom or to give exhibitions among people of various places; so simple-minded were they, and so unconscious of the fact that money is of greatest value.” And indeed, Socrates himself, admittedly no sophist, no wise man but a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, charges no money for his conversations. 

Socratic irony is lost on Hippias. “Why Socrates, you know nothing of the beauties of this. For if you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed.” Not only has he far surpassed the ancients, but he has bested his competitors, his contemporaries: “I pretty well think that I have made more money than any other two sophists together,” including Protagoras, older and more famous than Hippias but surpassed by him in getting money out of Sicily. Still in seeming agreement, Socrates cites the earlier sophists “of the school of Anaxagoras,” who likewise missed the money boat, and Anaxagoras himself, who made money and then lost it “so mindless was his wisdom”—he, who taught that Mind rules the universe. Hippias caps the point by aphorizing, “A wise man must be wise for himself especially, and the test of this is, who makes the most money.” Evidently, even Hippias’ service to his city-state amounts to an advertisement for himself, an indirect means of lining his pockets. And of course, Elis is his city-state; its prosperity may well redound to Hippias’ benefit. For Hippias, a ‘proof’ consists not of a logical argument, nor of a right assessment of another’s soul, but of a visible, tangible thing. He is an ’empiricist.’

But not so fast, Hippias. Have you made the most money at Lacedaemon, the city-state you have visited most frequently? This elicits Hippias’ first oath: “No, by Zeus. I never made anything at all” there. Socrates finds this obvious self-contradiction “a marvel, and a wondrous one at that.” And so he asks, your wisdom makes “better men in regard to virtue?” And yet the Lacedaemonians desire virtue as much as the citizens of other city-states and they have the money to pay him. Nor do they educate their children better than you, Hippias, as Hippias readily affirms. Nor did the fathers of the young Lacedaemonians “begrudge it to their children to become as good as possible.” Further, Lacedaemon is well-ruled, and in well-ruled city states “virtue is most highly honored”? And you are, as you say, demonstrably the best at “transmitting” virtue to others, the proof of which is seen in one’s earnings, which you didn’t get from the Lacedaemonian regime or from its citizens? 

What is more, since sophistry an art, why should it have a different effect in Lacedaemon than elsewhere? The best teacher of horsemanship could teach it Thessaly, be “most honored” there, and in all of Greece, receiving more money than all of the other teachers of that art. This being so, as Hippias concedes, “then will not he who is able to transmit the doctrines that are of most value for the acquisition of virtue be most highly honored in Lacedaemon and make the most money, if he so wishes, and in any other of the Greek poleis that is well governed?” Tell us why, then, Lacedaemon failed to lavish you with drachmas? Why, it is because they are hidebound, Hippias replies. “It is not the inherited usage of the Lacedaemonians to change their laws or to educate their children differently from what is customary.” They resist progress. Do you mean to say, Hippias, that “for the Lacedaemonians” it is “the hereditary usage not to act rightly, but to commit errors?” Surely, if a father has the choice between following the traditions of the ancestors, the ancients, and doing what is best for them, he will choose to do what is best, educate the young better, not worse? But (now changing ground) “it is not lawful for them to give [the young men] a foreign education,” Hippias explains, shifting the blame from Lacedaemonian traditionalism to their suspicion of the foreign. The Lacedaemonians love to listen to me; “they applaud me”; but they do not pay me much because “it is not the law.”

This raises the question of the status of law. “Do you say that law is an injury to the polis, or a benefit?” It is made “with benefit in view,” according to the opinion that it is beneficial, but “if the law is badly made,” if the art of lawmaking is defective in that instance, “it is injurious.” Hippias agrees that lawmakers, those who ‘craft’ the laws (as our eminently artistic American lawmakers like to say, nowadays), do so for “the greatest good to the polis,” and to fail to do so would make it “impossible to enjoy good government.” If those who make the laws “miss the good” they have “missed the lawful and the law,” yes? That is, law is an instrument crafted by lawmakers for the sake of the good, which is therefore not identical to the law. Yet to be good law, true law, the law must serve the good? Hippias cannot disagree: “Speaking accurately, Socrates, that is true, however, men are not accustomed to think so.” What men? Those who know, or those who don’t know? Why, those who don’t know, “the many.” As to those who do know, they must “think that in truth for all men that which is more beneficial is more lawful than that which is less beneficial”? Well, Hippias answers, “they think it is so in truth.” Hippias, a sophist or ‘wise one,’ that knower of truth, allows the possibility that there may be a disjunction between wisdom conceived as knowledge of the good and wisdom conceived as he conceives it, as money-making. 

If so, Socrates persists, for the Lacedaemonians it must then be “more beneficial to be educated in your education, which is foreign, than in the local education”; more, beneficial things are lawful; therefore, it is more lawful to be educated “contrary to the law” in Lacedaemon. “I agree to that,” Hippias now states, “for you seem to be making your argument in my favor.” If only the Lacedaemonians saw what Socrates sees, they would have given me money, the measure of wisdom. Arguments do not prove anything, but they can be useful. Pesky logic says otherwise, however: turning to their listeners (thus appealing to the opinion sophists seek to manipulate) Socrates says, “My friends, we find that the Lacedaemonians are law-breakers, and that too in the most important affairs—they who are regarded as the most law-abiding of men.” Their reputation, the public opinion not only of themselves but of all Greeks, is mistaken. If so, Hippias, “what sort of discourses” do these lawless upholders of law and of tradition enjoy and applaud you for? Astronomy? No. Geometry? No, some of them don’t even know arithmetic. “The processes of thought,” then? “Far from it indeed, by Zeus.” Nor harmonies. Rather than such matters of the mind, such as it were Anaxagorean concerns, they love to hear about “the genealogies of heroes and men,” the “foundations of cities in ancient times and, in short, about antiquity in general”—precisely those things progressive, master of the art of sophistry Hippias has deprecated. “For their sake”—that is, for his own sake—Hippias “has been obliged to learn all that sort of thing by heart and practice it thoroughly.” But does that not mean that Hippias cares for something other than money, only? Does he not love to be applauded, honored? 

This is enough to elicit an oath not from Hippias but now from Socrates. “By Zeus, Hippias, it is lucky for you that the Lacedaemonians do not enjoy hearing one recite the list of our archons from Solon’s time,” as it is very long. [2] But Socrates, “I can remember fifty names.” My mistake, Hippias, “I did not understand that you possess the science of memory” as well as the science of wisdom. But in both cases, what are your arts for? The Lacedaemonians “make use of you as children make use of old women, to tell stories agreeably.” They rule you, not you them; for all your supposed wisdom, betokened by wealth, they don’t pay you a dime. This brings out a “by Zeus” from the sophist; on the contrary, my reputation in Lacedaemon derives from “telling story about noble and beautiful pursuits,” exactly the virtues Socrates had initially attributed to him. I recount what the pursuits “of a young man should be.” That is, the memorized genealogies of heroes, men, and cities teach virtue. His finest speech consists of the story of Neoptolemus, who, after the fall of Troy, “asked Nestor what the noble and beautiful pursuits were,” and received a list of “many lawful and beautiful pursuits” (if not necessarily noble ones?). Hippias invites Socrates to listen to his discourse, which he will deliver at a school tomorrow. And be sure that you bring “others who are able to judge of discourses that they hear.” In the Greek poetic tradition, Nestor, the elderly adviser of warriors at Troy, gives counsel that sometimes doesn’t work out well, although this may register the unpredictability of gods or luck more than unwisdom; Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, has a decidedly mixed record in terms of both virtue (he seems to have had a cruel streak) and fortune (he founded a city but was killed by Orestes). Promising to go, “God willing” (the philosopher is more mindful of circumstances than either warriors or sophists), Socrates quickly turns to a philosophic question, having been “reminded” of the beautiful “just at the right moment.” In doing so, concocts an imaginary questioner who supposedly asked him “very insolently” how he knew what the beautiful is. The insolent questioner asks exactly the kind of question Socrates himself famously asks. Claiming that he vowed to ask the next of the “wise men” he met, in order to return to renew the dialectic with his questioner, he puts the question to Hippias. As usual, the sophist does not lack confidence. If I cannot do this, Hippias says, “my profession would be worthless and ordinary.” Indeed. Socrates promises to imitate the insolent questioner by interjecting “exceptions,” counter-examples,” to what Hippias will say.

Just, wise, men and good things are so by justice, wisdom, and goodness; beautiful things are beautiful “by the beautiful.” Very well, what is the beautiful? Hippias asserts that there is no difference between the beautiful (what the beautiful is) and beautiful things (what is beautiful). All right, but the questioner wanted to know what the beautiful is, to which Hippias answers that a beautiful maiden is beautiful—a what-is-beautiful answer, not the answer to the question. The questioner remarks that a beautiful mare is also beautiful, as are a beautiful lyre and even a beautiful pot. All of these objects share beautiful in common, but they are different things. How can what the beautiful is be the same thing as what is beautiful?

Hippias is offended at the mention of the lowly pot. “Socrates, who is the fellow? What an uncultivated person, who has the impudence to mention such worthless things in a dignified discussion!” To this ad hominem argument Socrates immediately but ironically yields: “That’s the sort of person he is, Hippias, not elegant, but vulgar, thinking of nothing but the truth.” Yet isn’t a well-wrought Grecian pot beautiful? Yes, for what it is, but “it does not deserve to be regarded as beautiful in comparison with a mare and a maiden and all the beautiful things,” things innately superior to a pot. Yes, but if we compare maidens or wise men to gods, will they too not be inferior in beauty? And even so, we have not found what “the absolute beauty,” beauty itself, is. 

Just as we begin to suspect that Hippias cannot think abstractly, only concretely and instrumentally (as would a materialist, Zuckert observes), he tells Socrates that if that is all the questioner is looking for, “nothing is easier to answer.” Beauty is that “by which all other things are adorned and by the addition of which they are made to appear beautiful.” Tell him that the beautiful “is nothing else than gold.” To the sophist, a thing is as it appears to be. The sophist, who takes money to be the coin of wisdom, takes beauty to be less than skin deep, a thing of surfaces. The wise man coats his speech with appealing words, glistening appearances. Money is gold, gold is money.

Socrates’s vulgar questioner is ready with a counter-example. Phidias the sculptor doesn’t cover his beautiful statue of Athena (goddess of the wisdom Hippias claims to possess, calling himself a ‘sophist’) with gold. His statue is made of ivory. A beautiful pot may hold soup, which may be nutritious but is seldom beautiful. The statue is ivory all the way through; it beautiful; it does not merely appear to be beautiful. Don’t even talk with this fellow “when he asks such questions,” noble-by-appearance, wise-by-appearance Hippias advises. Socrates accordingly shifts to another, related question: Is the ladle of gold or a ladle of fig wood more appropriate to spooning soup? The ladle of fig wood, Hippias replies. But why did Phidias “not make the middle parts of the eyes also of ivory, but of stone, procuring stone as similar as possible to the ivory,” since the ivory is beautiful? The beautiful stone is also beautiful, Hippias stipulates, so long as it is “appropriate.” Then, it will be ugly when not appropriate? Emphatically so—indeed, “if anyone has anything to say against this, you may say I know nothing at all.” Hippias assumes that he knows quite a lot, that he has escaped the dialectic, whereas the philosopher is famous for asserting that indeed he knows nothing except that he does not know. To prove that he knows quite a lot, Hippias ventures a definition of what a beautiful way of life is, implying that he knows not only what is beautiful but what is noble. “I say, then, that for every man and everywhere”—universally—it is “most beautiful to be rich and healthy, and honored by the Greeks, to reach old age, and, after providing a beautiful funeral for his deceased parents, to be beautifully and splendidly buried by his own offspring.” Wealth, health, honor, longevity, giver and receiver of beautiful funerals—such is the fitting, the appropriate. As Zuckert writes, “the sophist wants to be admired everywhere, by everyone” for his wisdom, but this depends upon the opinion of both the few and the many. The sophist wants self-sufficiency but depends upon reputation, granted by others. That is, the profitability of his art, whether in money or in honor, depends upon his ability to defend his art in the face of Socrates, in the face of a philosopher, in terms of the rational dialectic he would prefer to avoid.

Socrates congratulates Hippias. The philosopher now swearing by Hera, the kind goddess, for “coming to my assistance”—well, “to the best of your ability.” The appearance of Hippias is one thing, his nature another. He is neither gold nor ivory, all the way through. But, Socrates conjectures, the questioner will laugh at the answer. If so, Hippias assures him he will “be laughing at himself and will himself be laughed at by those present”; the questioner will lose ‘face,’ the appearance of wisdom, the honor that accrues to the appearance of wisdom. Not only that, Socrates says; more alarmingly, the questioner may beat me with a stick. Is he your master, Socrates? Or does Athens so “disregard justice and allow the citizens to beat one another unjustly?” On the contrary, Hippias, “the beating would be just, I think.” Now it is finally time for Hippias to ask a question: Why do you think so? Because the questioner “asked for the absolute beautiful,” that “by which everything to which it is added has the property of being beautiful.” You have evaded the question, but I, the questioner, have caught you and I shall now punish you, in justice. (Hippias could of course ask, ‘What is justice?’ but that would only suggest that he sees the questioner’s vulgar-but-true point, that the distinction between what beauty is and what is beautiful must be a real distinction, that ‘What is’ questions ‘make sense.’) The questioner will ask, bringing his own concrete example into the dialectic, if “the stranger from Elis”—patriotism cuts both ways—claims that “for Achilles it was beautiful to be buried later than his parents, and for his grandfather Aeacus, and all the others who were born of gods, and for the gods themselves”—some of whom overthrew the older gods, the Olympians having overthrown the Titans. Hippias can only sputter, recurring to an argumentum ad hominem, “these questions of the fellow’s are not even respectful to religion.” Socrates does not deny it, preferring respectfully to change the subject to the demigod hero, Heracles, who didn’t bury his parents, one of them being Zeus. Hippias continues to retreat before the dialectical onslaught. I didn’t mean to include the gods in my definition, or those who were children of gods. So, the beautiful is the fitting, the appropriate, then? Not even that, as a man might wear clothes that fit him and still be “ridiculous,” as Hippias understands. Socrates pounces, once again. “It could not be the fitting” to make things “appear more beautiful than they are,” to not “let them appear as such as they are.” 

Still, “we must”—once again—attempt “to say what that is which makes things be beautiful.” Hippias gives it another try: “the fitting, Socrates, makes things both be and appear beautiful by its presence.” He has, at last (and at least) managed to separate an idea from things. This, Socrates remarks, means that things really beautiful must also appear to be beautiful. But why, then, is there so much “strife and contention” over what things are beautiful? If they were beautiful and appeared to be beautiful, and if that connection were necessary, then no such controversy would erupt. If the fitting both makes things beautiful and makes them appear so, then the coincidence of beauty and beautiful appearance would hold; since it doesn’t the fitting can at most only make things beautiful in reality, in their being, or in their appearance. Speaking very much as a sophist, Hippias chooses to say that the fitting makes things appear beautiful; to a sophist, a word fitly spoken gilds being with an attractive surface. But this is to admit that Socrates is right; the fitting cannot produce one dimension of beauty, namely, real beauty, the beauty of a thing by nature, its ‘inner’ beauty, as it were. We still haven’t discovered what beauty is.

The putatively wise knower now scales back on his claim to know, telling Socrates that he knows “that if I should go away into solitude and meditate alone by myself, I could tell [what the beautiful is] with the most perfect accuracy.” A reader might be excused for suspecting that the honor-loving, money-loving sophist wants to escape this dialogue with whatever remains of his reputation intact. “Ah, don’t boast, Hippias”; stay with us, “for Heaven’s sake,” and “find it in my presence or, if you please, join me, as you are now doing, in looking for it.” If we find it now, I will not be a nuisance” to you, anymore—no idle threat, given the precarity of Hippias’ profession, dependent as it is on the approval of the few and the many. Socrates has caught him in another contradiction, this one not in thought but in his way of life. To save his reputation, Hippias must go; to save his reputation, Hippias must stay. Socrates has turned the sophist’s tactic of ad hominem argument against the sophist. In the event, Hippias stays, and Socrates begins the inquiry anew.

He approaches the question by invoking a new idea or ‘abstraction,’ the useful. Perhaps the beautiful is “whatever is useful for us.” For example, beautiful eyes are not those that seem to be beautiful but are sightless; beautiful eyes are “those which are able and useful for seeing.” Similarly, “the whole body is beautiful” when fully ‘functional.’ And not only natural objects but artifacts, customs, and laws. We look at each thing with regard to “how it is formed by nature, how it is wrought, how it has been enacted”; “the useful we call beautiful, and beautiful in the way in which it is useful, and for the purpose for which it is useful, and at the time when it is useful.” More than two millennia later, Americans still exclaim ‘Beautiful!” when something ‘works.’ Beleaguered Hippias quickly agrees.

Oh, but no. A powerless thing is a useless thing. If usefulness is beauty, then power is beautiful and lack of power is “disgraceful or ugly.” The money-lover likes the sound of that: “Decidedly. Other things, Socrates, testify for us that this is so, but especially political affairs; for in political affairs and in one’s own polis to be powerful is the most beautiful of all things, but to be powerless is the most disgraceful of all.” Very well, then is wisdom, your claim to power or authority, “also for this reason the most beautiful thing and ignorance the most disgraceful thing”? Maybe, Hippias cautiously rejoins. And maybe not. If a person cannot do “what he did not know how and was utterly powerless to do,” and if “men do many more bad things than good,” erring involuntarily, then the acts of the powerful cannot necessarily be beautiful and power cannot be beautiful. Hippias then suggests a qualification. The acts that one has the power to do are beautiful “if they are powerful and useful for good.” If so, Socrates says, beautiful persons and customs must be beautiful because they are beneficial, “the beautiful seems to us to be the beneficial.” 

But no. If the beautiful causes the good, if the beautiful “has the nature of a kind of father,” then the good cannot be the caused by the beautiful any more than a father can be his own son. “By Zeus,” the beautiful cannot be the good, or the good beautiful. This “does not please me at all,” Hippias says, himself swearing by Zeus. He is stuck conversing with ugly old Socrates, who pronounces himself to be “at a loss.” As for Hippias, he has nothing more to say, except to recur to his desired escape-hatch: he is “sure I shall find it after meditation.” 

Socrates happily presses on, being a man who is never at a loss for long. Perhaps “the beautiful is that which is pleasing through hearing and sight.” For example, beautiful customs and laws are beautiful for that reason; we are pleased to hear and see Lacedaemonian customs and laws, to take the ones instanced earlier. Socrates prompts Hippias to admit that sensual pleasures, not only laws and customs, are truly pleasurable. This admission may ruin the claim, however, since the act of eating and the act of sexual intercourse can be pleasant but they are hardly pleasant to hear or to see. And if you were to admit that these pleasures are beautiful, you would lose respect among the people, since they “do not seem so to most people,” and you depend upon public opinion to make money. But that is not truly dispositive, since “that is not what [the questioner] asked”: again, he asked not “what seems to most people to be beautiful, but what is so.” So, we still might say “that that part of the pleasant which comes by sight and hearing is beautiful,” despite what the many may suppose. If we say that what is pleasant through sight is beautiful, we do not mean to say that what is pleasant through the other senses is not beautiful.” All these pleasant things “have something identical which makes them beautiful,” both as individual things and collectively. Or, taking another idea, as Hippias now sees, “if we are both just, would not each of us be just also and if each is unjust, would not both again also be unjust”? Now on a roll, as the expression goes, Hippias identifies health, affliction, nobility, wisdom, honor, age and youth as the sort of characteristics the questioner has in mind. But he has a new objection.

“You see, Socrates, you do not consider the entirety of things, nor do they with whom you are in the habit of conversing, but you all test the beautiful and each individual entity by taking them separately and cutting them to pieces. For this reason, you fail to observe that embodiments of reality are by nature so great and undivided. And now you have failed to observe to such a degree that you think there is some affection or reality which pertains to both of these together, but not to each individually, or again to each, but not to both; so unreasoning and undiscerning and foolish and unreflecting is your state of mind.” That is, Hippias wants to emphasize the unity of the cosmos, its homogeneity, against the Socratic claim of a heterogeneous whole. The homogeneous cosmos fits nicely with Hippias’ sophistry because the more the cosmos is conceived as homogeneous, undifferentiated, the less reason, with its principle of non-contradiction, can understand it. As Zuckert remarks, Hippias “embodies a way of life based on such a homogeneous cosmology,” posing “an important test of the rationale for Socratic inquiry” and, one might add, to any “rationale” at all. Hippias claims to understand reality all at once and as a whole; again, as Zuckert has it, Hippias has no felt need for dialogue because he is unerotic, supposing he already has wisdom, already knows the nature of the cosmos.

Unfortunately for Hippias, “human affairs,” as Socrates replies, “are not what a man wishes, but what can”; wishful thinking doesn’t make the wish ‘come true.’ Hippias now tries to bluff his way out: “You will speak to one who knows, Socrates,” a soph-ist, “for I know the state of mind of all who are concerned with discussion; but nevertheless, if you prefer, speak.” “Well, I do prefer.”

And now, Hippias is really in for it. “Are you and I one or are you and I two?” Socrates begins. That is, are we both an odd number and an even number? Undeniably so. Therefore, “what both are, each is, and what each is, both are.” This establishes the principle of heterogeneous unity. By the same logic, “some things are so and some are not so.” Pleasures through sight and through hearing are distinct as to the senses through which they come to us, but they are both beautiful. You yourself have “conceded that both and each were beautiful.” If so, “if both are beautiful, they must be beautiful by that essence which belongs to both. So it is, with strength and “countless other cases.” That is, Socrates has proved that the cosmos is not homogeneous, that it encompasses heterogeneous parts. If so, then if a pleasurable thing may not be beautiful (as they have already agreed), pleasure is not the same as beauty; if it were, then all pleasurable things would be beautiful. 

Hippias can no longer dispute the argument. He can dispute the worth of the argument. “What do you think all [philosophizing] this amounts to? It is mere scrapings and shavings of discourse, divided into bits.” It is sophistry that is “beautiful and of great worth” because sophistry can “convince the audience,” “carry off the greatest of prizes, the salvation of oneself, one’s property, and one’s friends,” unlike these “petty arguments” of yours, “mere talk and nonsense,” by which you “appear to be a fool”—whether you are or not. Given the coming trial of Socrates, in which the philosopher fails to defend himself against his accusers in front of a jury of Athenian citizens, would Socrates not be better off if he were a sophist? To recur to the earlier argument, Hippias claims to be the noble mare, denigrating Socrates as the lowly pot. Socrates may be beautiful, but only in an inferior way.

Socrates agrees, ironically. Yes, “my dear Hippias you are blessed because you know the things a man ought to practice, and have, as you say, practiced them satisfactorily,” while “I, as it seems, am possessed by some accursed fortune, so that I am always wandering and perplexed, and, exhibiting my perplexity to you wise men, am in turn reviled by you in speech whenever I exhibit it.” Why, I am so confused, “I do not even know what the beautiful itself is.” It is questionable, then, whether I am better to be alive than dead; in this way, the sophist’s accusation loses its force, not because it is false but because it is the sophist who fails to see “the entirety of things” even while asserting the homogeneity of things. In the case at hand, the danger of capital punishment might not be a real danger at all, inasmuch as I might be better off if my fellow Athenians go ahead and kill me. That, too, is a matter for philosophic inquiry. There is, however, one sure benefit to the philosophic life. I may not know what the beautiful is, but “I think I know the meaning of the proverb, ‘beautiful things are difficult.'” To move from wishful thinking to rational thinking is difficult because the cosmos is heterogeneous, complex, in need of rational explication, not as simple as the sophist wants it to be.

 

Notes

1. Prodicus has come down to us as the teller of the story of the ‘choice of Hercules,” who chooses chaste Lady Virtue over seductive but injurious Lady Vice. Is this wholesome teaching the sort of thing that makes Prodicus Socrates’ friend, if still a sophist? No other sophist is called Socrates’ friend in this dialogue, including Hippias—despite Socrates’ friendly greeting. 
2. Plato’s readers will recall the Ion, in which Socrates dialogues with the eponymous rhapsode, a prodigy of memory who seldom bothers to think.