My regular references to self-knowledge should make it pretty clear that I owe a heavy intellectual debt to Socrates. There are worlds to be found within the dialogues and the manner in which they were written lend themselves to infinite re-readability. When it comes to the Platonic corpus, it is those earliest works, the ones which portray the trial and death of Socrates, that perhaps reach a characterization of the man which is closer to authentic than not. But this acknowledgement that some portrayals are more sincere than others gets to the heart of the issue. How much is the Socrates of Plato his own man, and how much is a puppet of penmanship? And what of that other disciple of his? Xenophon, whose works present the only other surviving primary source documentation of what it must have been like to consort with Socrates, to engage him in the streets and the agora, to lay in languor and luxury at a nobleman's symposium, presents a portrait of a man who is much less cerebral, much more particularist and even parochial in his concerns. Xenophon's Socrates is closer to the agrarian wisdom and moralizing of someone like Hesiod than the stratospheric intellectual concerns of Plato's characterization. Which, then, is right?
Robin Waterfield, translator of Penguin's edition of Xenophon's Socratic dialogues, believes that the only proper way to get at the "true" character of Socrates by way of his followers is to compare the broad principles that underlay the portrayals of him. Since he was notorious for leaving behind no written word (and at least the Platonic Socrates being philosophically hostile to the written word - hence his style might best be characterized as "esoteric" - in that the words written on the page are not reflective of his true thinking), his thought must be deduced via comparison of the accounts left behind by his disciples. While Plato and Xenophon's Socrates may differ in what they emphasize, they agree on the broad idea that the virtuous, wise and moral life is one that is self-reflective, one that is capable of discovering and maintaining knowledge about the individual's own self, his capabilities and the limits of his understanding. For Plato, this becomes an almost ascetic commitment to the reality behind appearances, to the cultivation of wisdom via learning (or remembering), and to the transformation of citizen and state through the inculcation of celestial (read: intellectual) contemplation and moral education at the expense of pleasure and unconstrained passion (hence the (in)famous hostility to certain types of art and poetry on the part of the philosopher-king - in the Platonic utopia only those artistic representations that reflect the virtues of the upstanding moral citizen ought to be publicly displayed). For Xenophon, his understanding of Socratic wisdom entails a more practical understanding of virtue; virtue as friendship, virtue as efficient management of the individual and his affairs, virtue as the ideal regulation of wants and desires in favor of equanimity, of facilitating concord and lawfulness in the state. Plato diverges into matters of metaphysics and epistemology later in his life, and his Socrates goes with him. Xenophon doesn't bother to put on airs, he simply has Socrates dance to the notes of his tune.
All this aside, it isn't hard to see the broad agreements here. It is a problem encountered when it comes to distinguishing all strains of Hellenic ethics from each other. What is the functional difference between Socratic asceticism and Epictetus's stoicism? Or cynicism and stoicism? Even epicureanism becomes difficult to untangle from the rest when you recognize that Epicurus's "hedonism" is merely the elimination of unpleasurable sensation and not an endorsement of unabashed indulgence. Of them all, it seems only Aristotle was successful in differentiating and specializing his ethical system to the extent where clear lines of division can be drawn - but ultimately it remains a matter of virtue ethics. It seems that most schools of Hellenic thought see virtue as the goal towards which to strive and the differences, as between Plato and Xenophon, lay merely in matters of emphases. Though I suppose (and perhaps this crucial point will undercut my entire thesis), those matters of emphases may lead to wildly different conclusions. Is Crates of Thebes' state the same as Plato's? Hardly. Though both would claim it to be the virtuous one. The ends are ostensibly the same, the means are different, but in practice each consummation of the end leads to a different place. Means and ends matter more than we think (or than I thought) at least when it comes to issues as sticky as virtue.
Lucky them, to be so close to general concord, separated by mere superficiality and not in the fundamentals. For us, it is a much different story. Plato and Xenophon both internalize Socrates's central point: that self-knowledge is wisdom and leads to virtue and an upstanding moral character, provided one heeds its lessons. We can't quite get that far. Somewhere along the way, the message was lost. That individual man, whose life to Xenophon seemed the perfect picture of goodness and happiness, was not so much erased by History as disregarded by it. We pay lip service to his name, just as we do to that of Jesus Christ, but we are not devout in following His message. And along the way that message has been twisted and distorted, reflected and contorted, bent and broken, regurgitated and turned inside out and sideways. How many times have we heard those platitudes to just "do better", to disregard negative energies, to "vibe", and my personal favorite, to "focus on yourself". Focusing on yourself entails something much different than Socrates's cultivation of self-knowledge. Amazingly, the ends typically lead to exact opposites, which indicates that what the inward-directed men and women of today, young and old alike, have in mind is something rather different from what the Delphic maxim intended. Because the same people that are spouting and sharing their nonsense platitudes on their social media feeds have an idea of self-improvement dedicated only to exoteric improvement. What is the purpose of an exercise regimen today? Not to enhance one's capacity to fulfill noble acts in service of the state or fellow citizens, but to maximize physical beauty, to score as many conquests at the bar as is conceivable. Look at any college campus today, the tacit endorsement of flagrant moral outrage on the part of the youth, a concession to the overriding desire on their part to acquire access to money, sex, alcohol and drugs - whatever the cost. Now compare that to Socratic moral education found in the Apology or Memoirs and tell me where the difference lies, besides the mere superficial similarity in their words. Socratic-ism today would be labeled "authoritarian" at best.
This is not really a problem exclusive to our own time, I will concede. It must come as quite the shock to the self-proclaimed traditionalist to discover that Ancient Athens, for instance, was rife with homosexual indulgence among its upper classes. Its people were known for their excessive hedonism, particularly at symposiums, as Plato and Xenophon make clear. Indeed, the entire purpose of Socrates's dialectics on Love are to disabuse us of the notion that indulgence and physical desire might be equated with the true educational power imbued in erotics. For Plato, Love is a stepping stone towards conceptualization of Beauty-in-itself. For Xenophon, Love is something of a leveling force between a mentor and his protege, it is directed towards the mutual improvement of the participants' characters by means of each other. Both were writing in reaction to what must surely have been a vexing and dominant impulse rampant among their fellow citizens. Little more needs to be said beyond the fact that adultery was punished more harshly than rape, for a willing consummation of carnal desire between two individuals was more destructive of their individual characters and the ties that bound them to others than the unwilling defiling of one pure soul for the gratification of a wicked one. Force is more moral than persuasion, even when it is used to achieve identical immoral ends. What does that say about force utilized in service of moral ends?
Today there is nothing but persuasion. Nothing but gratification. Nothing but "self-improvement" aimed not towards contemplation of self (and thus a deeper understanding of how to conduct oneself in righteous fashion) but toward self-gratification. In a world of autonomous individuals left to bump and grind upon one another, sinking further and further into an abyss of intellectual incontinence and ostentatious self-regard, we are cut adrift from any understanding of ourselves and thus what makes for a good society. In such a world we have forgotten what it means to be good. If knowledge is recollection, why leave us to remember the bad and not the good? If persuasion has lost all force to achieve good ends, why not utilize force in order to eliminate knowledge of what is bad? Goodness was sacrificed on the altar for a false vision of liberty and much of what had been known to the past has now been lost to us. The people know little else. This is a positional problem. It is merely a matter of memory. All it requires is a bit of tinkering with time, and some time for tinkering.
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