The century which preceded the death of Alexander (323) was the great century of Greek philosophy; it is at the same time above all the century of Athens: with Socrates and Plato, with Democritus and Aristotle, we reach a moment of apogee, where philosophy, sure of itself and its methods, claims to support on reason itself its right to be the universal leader of men: this is the time of the founding of the first philosophical institutes, which are the Academy and the Lyceum. But in the same century the mathematical sciences and astronomy also took on an extraordinary expansion. Finally, the brilliant development of the systems of Plato and Aristotle should not hide from us the existence of schools originating from Socrates, foreign or hostile to the Platonic-Aristotelian movement; they prepare the doctrines which will dominate from the death of Alexander and which will cause Plato and Aristotle to be neglected for a long time.
In February of the year 399, Socrates, aged 71, died, condemned by his fellow citizens; before the democratic tribunal, he had been accused of being an impious person who did not honor the gods of the city and introduced new deities, and of corrupting the youth through his teaching (1). This extraordinary man was not, like the wise men we have spoken of so far, a head of school; the schools which claim to follow Socrates are numerous and on many points opposed to each other; they have no doctrinal tradition in common. We therefore reach Socrates neither directly since he wrote nothing, nor through a single tradition, but through multiple traditions which give us so many different portraits. Let us add that these portraits have no intention of being faithful; the oldest of all, that of Aristophanes’ Clouds (in 423, Socrates was then 47 years old), where Socrates is portrayed, is a satire. Then comes, after his death, all the literature of the Socratic Discourses, dialogues where disciples give their master the leading role; these dialogues constitute a literary genre which in no way prides itself on accuracy: in the first place, the Socratic works of Plato, firstly the apologetic dialogues, written under the influence of indignation immediately after the death of his master (Apology, Crito), then the idealized portraits (Phaedo, Symposium, Theaetetus, Parmenides), finally the works where Socrates is nothing more than the spokesperson for the doctrine of the Academy. In second place, the Memorables of previous Socratic discourses. Among the works published on Socrates, that of E. Wolff, who contests the historicity of Plato’s Apology, and especially that of O. Gigon remain very skeptical about the possibility of reconstituting the doctrine of Socrates. We must add the titles and very thin fragments which remain of the dialogues of Phaedo and Aeschines, some data from Aristotle; finally a tradition hostile to Socrates, which persists until the end of Antiquity, in Porphyry (third century), in the rhetorician Libanius (4th century), emerges among the Epicureans and is linked to the pamphlet written by Polycrates in 390 (2); We see, for example, the Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara blaming Socratic irony as a form of pride (3).
Certainly, everyone agrees on the strangeness and originality of this wise man: the son of the stonemason and the midwife Phenaretes, who, dressed in a coarse cloak, roamed the streets barefoot, who abstaining from wine and all delicate foods, with an extraordinarily robust temperament, the man with a vulgar exterior, a snub nose and the face of a Silenus (4), hardly resembled the richly dressed sophists who attracted the Athenians, nor to the wise men of yesteryear who were, in general, important men in their city: a new type, and who will become the constant model in the future of a completely personal wisdom, which owes nothing to circumstances: not a politician, but only an excellent citizen, always ready to obey the laws, whether it is to hold his post in the battle of Potidaea, or to fight, in the magistracy where fate has called, against the illegal fantasies of the tyrant Critias, or finally to refuse, out of respect for the laws of his country, the escape that Crito offers him to escape death after his conviction (5).
Neither sophist nor politician, he has in fact, in the chance conversations he holds in market shops (6) and in stadiums as well as in the houses of the rich, no doctrine, no legislation to propose. This is because he has, above all, the clear desire to make his teaching escape the agonistic form; he has no marks to judge, he only claims to ensure that everyone becomes their own judge. In the dialogues of Plato, Socrates is almost always the spoilsport who does not want to comply with the rules of the game and who makes it stop. “Choose,” advises Callias to Socrates and Protagoras, who refuse to discuss any further, “choose an arbiter, an epistate, a prytane”; Socrates responds pleasantly “that it would be improper to choose an arbiter, since that would be an insult to Protagoras” (338 b). But the truth is that its goal is to examine theses, to put them to the test and not to make them triumph. The scenario of the third part of Gorgias is characteristic in this respect. : ‘Callicles’ speech against philosophy is a sort of competition piece; Plato made this clear enough by recalling on several occasions Euripides’ Antiope, a play in which two brothers alternately supported, in one of those jousts whose tragedy is customary, the superiority of practical life and that of life devoted to the muses. ; like the second of the brothers, Socrates should, in response to Callicles, have pronounced an apology for philosophy; nothing like it; he does not himself express any opinion, but forces Callicles, through his questions, to examine himself. Ultimately, philosophy (and perhaps this is what made it suspect, or at least strange in the eyes of a fifth-century Athenian), is what cannot take the agonistic form, and which, consequently, escapes the judgment of the crowd.
Notes
(1) On the date of the trial, article by Praechter, 1904, p. 473; on the charges, Plato, Apology, 24 BC; Euthyphro, 2 d 3 b; Xenophon, Memorables, I, 1
(2) On Polycrates, Diogenes Laertius, II, 38: hostility in Epicurus (Cicero, Brutus, 85). Porphyry, History of the Philosophers, ffagm. 8 and 9. ed. Nauck. [Cf. J. HUMBERT, Polycrates, Vaccasation de Spcrates et le Gorgias, 1930.]
(3) In De Vitiis. collar. X, 23, ed. Jansen, et al. XXI, 36 to XXIII, 37. Cf. on the various forms of irony, Aristotle, Nicom Ethics., IV, chap. vile Montaigne, on the contrary: “Socrates makes his soul move with a natural and common movement; […] with a soft and ordinary step, he deals with the most useful speeches” (Essays, book III, chap. xn).
(4) Diogenes Laertius, II, 18; the comic Ameipsias in Diogenes, U, 28; Aristotle, Clouds; 410-417, Plato, Symposium, 215 a ff., Crito.
(5) Plato, Apology, 281; 32c; Diogenes Laertius, II, 24.
(6) A Socratic dialogue from Phaedo bears the name of the shoemaker Simon (Diogenes, II, 105).
Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2023 Nicolae Sfetcu
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