Gregory Vlastos’ Socrates and Nietzsche’s Critique of Metaphysics
Ian Angus
Department of Humanities, Simon
Fraser University
Friedrich Nietzsche drew no distinction between Socrates and Plato in his diagnosis of the origin of philosophy and metaphysics. My argument will lean heavily on the scholarship of Gregory Vlastos to draw a sharp distinction between Socrates and Plato in order to argue that the critique of metaphysics, at least in Nietzsche’s formulation, refers solely to the legacy stemming from Plato and, since it does not apply to Socrates, does not apply to philosophy outright.
Vlastos’ argument that distinguishes Socrates(E) of the early aporetic dialogues from Socrates(M) of the middle dialogues (which he takes to be representative of Plato’s own views in that period) rests on a periodization of Plato’s writings that reveals three stages in the internal development of the problematic established at the first stage. [1] The periodization is the basis for an argument that the elenctic method of inquiry that characterizes the early Socratic, aporetic dialogues is replaced by the mathematical method in Plato’s middle period that provides the basis for the metaphysical doctrine of the forms.[2] Vlastos’ philosophical periodization thus rests on the assumption that the method of inquiry is a fundamental characteristic of Socrates and Plato’s philosophies and, by implication, that method is fundamental to philosophy.
The periodization proposed by Vlastos allows him to define ten features of Socratic philosophy in distinction from the positions adopted by Plato in his middle period. I will focus on only two of these features. First, the most significant difference for Vlastos is that the dialogues of Plato’s middle period defend a metaphysical theory of the forms, and a theory of recollection whereby the soul comes to know the forms, whereas Socrates has no such theory.[3] Second, while the middle dialogues seek and find demonstrable knowledge, Socrates seeks knowledge elenctically and expresses consistently his failure to find such knowledge.
The absence of a theory of forms in Socrates is sufficient to suggest that the critique of metaphysics errs fundamentally in conflating Socrates and Plato. Consider one of Nietzsche’s formulations: “Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are for them [philosophers] objections – refutations even. What is, does not become; what becomes, is not …. These senses, which are so immoral as well, it is they which deceive us about the real world.”[4] Only with the theory of forms would the notion of reality as unchanging being—which is Nietzsche’s target—have emerged as the denial of the reality of change and the positing of a real world beyond change.
This suggestion could be proven through the argument that the theory of forms is only possible through the substitution of the mathematical method for that of elenctic inquiry. Vlastos makes this assertion. “[I]t was in the course of pursuing such [mathematical] studies himself and to a great extent because of them that Plato had reached the metaphysical outlook that characterized his middle period.”[5] The only proof of this claim that Vlastos adduces is a citation from Republic (521c10-523a3) in which Plato himself makes the claim. “What is that study, Glaucon, that pulls the soul away from becoming to being? … It seems to belong to that study we are now investigating which naturally leads to insight, for in every way it draws us towards reality, though no one uses it aright.”[6] But Plato’s assertion, which Vlastos seems to take at face value, does not establish the truth of Vlastos’ claim that the theory of forms derives from the shift to a mathematical method. This claim derives from Vlastos’ assertion that method is fundamental to philosophy. It is nevertheless clear enough that the shift to mathematical method and the theory of forms emerge both co-temporaneously and in close theoretical relation in Plato’s middle period.
The essence of the Socratic elenctic method is the search for the relevant eidos, a practice that I will call ‘essential definition,’ through the dialogical examination of proffered answers. The ‘what is x?’ question—what is piety, justice, friendship, etc.—provokes answers that often confound specific examples of ‘x’ with the essence that is being sought (though the answers can also be wrong in other ways). The elenctic method is not reflexively justified in the early dialogues. Vlastos points out that “[h]e asks: What is the form piety? What is the form beauty? And so forth. What is form? He never asks.”[7]
Vlastos pinpoints the substitution of a mathematical method for an elenctic one in Meno (81dff.) where Socrates aims to illustrate that all learning is recollection through questioning a slave boy about the area of a square.[8] He argues that this episode demonstrates the reach of Socrates’ elenctic method.
Only as far as convicting him [the slave boy] of error. Elenchus is good for this, and only this. It does not begin to bring him to the truth he seeks. … To bring him to it Socrates must shed the adversative role to which persistence in elenctic argument would have kept him. Shed it he does.[9]
Socrates steps beyond the elenchus in the moment that he extends the diagram in a manner that makes visible to the boy that it is the diagonal of a square that produces another square with twice the area of the original square (84d). Though Socrates states immediately prior that “I simply ask him questions without teaching him,”[10] his drawing is such as to elicit a response that could not be elicited by any amount of showing contradictions in incorrect answers.
Here, where the mathematical demonstrative method incipiently replaces the elenctic one, is the origin of the theory that the soul recollects atemporal forms which have been forgotten at birth that becomes full-blown in Plato’s middle period and utterly changes the role of Socrates in the dialogues. A demonstrative method will tend to take didactic form resulting in a conception of education as instruction based on a distinction between a knowing elite and an untutored mass.[11] Its basis is the ontologization of the distinction between opinion and knowledge in which knowledge is taken to be a ‘higher reality.’
The essence of this ontologization of essence is that form is taken to be a higher reality than an instance of the form. It is justified by Plato in his discussion of the divided line (509d – 511e) whereby intelligibility is distinguished from visibility. Thus far, in simply making the distinction, he agrees with Socrates. But the key argument of the divided line is that its various levels are not merely distinct, but that “they participate in clearness and precision in the same degree as their objects partake of truth and reality” (511e).[12] The order of truth, or intelligibility, is thus identified with, or mapped onto, the order of reality, or ontology. Thus emerges the identity of truth with being beyond becoming.
It is this conception of philosophy, set into place in Plato’s middle period, that is the object of the critique of metaphysics. This is perhaps most straightforwardly demonstrated with reference to the section of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols entitled “How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth,” subtitled “History of an Error,” where it is the distinction between the real and apparent worlds that he is concerned to criticize.[13] For Nietzsche, Socrates, Plato and Christianity are compacted due to their common dependence on this distinction.[14] To distinguish the real world from the apparent one is an expression of a “denial of life” whereby one flees the world of becoming for the security of unchanging being. Vlastos’ distinction of Socrates from Plato shows that such security would only be provided by an ontologization that associates knowledge with higher being such that one could move higher toward true being away from opinion. It is hard to see how Socrates’ aporia denotes security. Nietzsche’s critique doesn’t go ‘all the way back’ into the origin of moral philosophy, but stops at the metaphysical guarantee that writes morality into the structure of Being.
I have argued that the distinction between
Socrates and Plato that Vlastos’ scholarship justifies relegates the
critique of metaphysics to the legacy of Plato and makes space for a conception
of philosophy distinct from metaphysics stemming from Socrates. However, this
argument, even if correct, would be without merit for an alternative conception
of philosophy if it were the case that the aporetic Socratic dialogues allowed
for only one logical and coherent development—that put in place by Plato
during his middle period. In other words, though the critique of metaphysics
would not apply to Socrates, it would apply to any logical development of his
thought. Socrates’ thought would be exempt only at the price of being an
incomplete expression of philosophy whose completion would not be exempt. Thus,
I would like to indicate in briefest outline that another line of development
of Socrates’ philosophy than that established in Plato’s middle
period is viable
I will begin from the observation that there is an
ambiguity in the notion of essential definition which pervades both Socrates
and Plato’s accounts. The ambiguity is whether searching for an eidos refers to
apprehending the eidos itself or giving an account of the eidos. In other words, is
it apprehension of essence or definition of the essence that is at issue? In
Plato, apprehension of the essence is taken to be equivalent to giving a
definition of the essence. The giving of an account is not thought as distinct
from apprehension. Thus, when one cannot give an account, it motivates the
judgment that the essence is not apprehended. Similarly, the giving of a
definition, suffices as proof of the apprehension of the essence. This must
seem less compacted to us than to either Socrates or Plato.
Let us turn to the point in Republic where philosophers
are distinguished from the lovers of other spectacles.
The lovers of sounds and sights,
I said, delight in beautiful tones and colours and shapes and in everything
that art fashions out of these, but their thought is incapable of apprehending
and taking delight in the nature of the beautiful in itself (476b).[15]
The
apprehension or non-apprehension of the beautiful itself that allows its
enjoyment is here attributed to thought. Fair enough, it is to be expected that
for the philosopher apprehension and definition would coincide. But it is also
the case that for the non-philosopher non-apprehension and the inability to
give an account coincide. “He, then, who believes in beautiful things,
but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries
to guide him to the knowledge of it” (476c).[16]
Not believing in beauty itself here is taken as, not exactly equivalent to, but
necessarily connected to being able to follow an account. Not being able to
follow an account is, of course, a lesser criterion than not being able to
produce one. One may then say: The one who does not believe in beauty itself
can neither produce nor follow a definition of the beautiful.
The compaction between apprehension of the eidos and being able to
define it is already present in the early Socratic dialogues. Consider the end
of the Euthyphro, where the failure of the search for the eidos of holiness leads
Socrates to remark “For if you didn’t know clearly what holiness
and unholiness are there’s no way that you would have taken it upon
yourself to prosecute your father” (15d).[17]
Here, being unable to give a definition is taken necessarily to involve an
inability, or unwillingness, to act in such a way that contains the assumption
that one apprehends the essence. The lack of apprehension of the eidos is taken as a
sufficient criterion for inability or unwillingness, not only to follow an
account, but to act a if such an account had been given. The compaction
between apprehension and definition thus extends to action. In
Nietzsche’s phrase, reason = virtue = happiness. As Vlastos notes, one of
the consequences of the rule of elenctic inquiry—say only what you
believe—is that it has an “existential dimension” which is
“a challenge to his fellows to change their life.”[18]
Compaction of apprehension of an eidos with giving a
satisfactory account of it, such that the process can be called
‘essential definition’ in both Socrates and Plato, disallows
certain other possibilities. For example, it disallows the possibility that an
artist, or political actor, apprehends the relevant essence when rendering it
in a specific instance, yet in remaining focussed on the instance cannot give a
universal account. Against this compaction, a greater possibility of
differentiation may be suggested: 1] the wise man who sees and also can define
the essence, 2] the philosopher who sees and fails to define the essence, 3]
the ‘artist/politician,’ or ‘genius of the instance’
who sees the essence in the instance and who does not attempt to define
it—due perhaps to the felt need to act/make immediately, and 4] those who
see only instances and are thus stuck in opinion. Thus, there might be two
intermediate positions between wisdom and opinion that are not apparent to
Plato. One of these is directly relevant to the interpretation of the
philosopher in the Socratic dialogues as one who fails to give an account of
the eidos but nevetheless remains committed to the search for it. One might
suggest that the essence is nevetheless always present, since it is apprehended
by all whenever they cite valid instances. Recall that Socrates does not
disallow the instances as instances when they are proffered; he disallows them
as the eidos itself. However, Socrates’ experience is one of continuous
failure to define this apprehension. Given a failure to define, but an
apprehension, instances must remain crucial.
For Plato, the search for essential definition
must be successful, at least in principle. Its success is guaranteed due to the
ontologization of essential definition. Only philosophers apprehend the form;
the others do not; therefore they do not apprehend true reality. Thus, in
Plato, when philosophers apprehend the form and can give an account of
apprehending the form, they move beyond sensuous instances and go directly to
the forms themselves. The philosophical teaching is indifferent to bodily
pleasures (Republic 485e), preaches the immortality of the soul (Republic 611a) and the
likeness of the soul to eternal being (Republic 611e), and prefers the eternal
laws to the laws of his own city. This is indeed the object of
Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics. The philosopher, since his insight
into essence is also a higher reality, discards instances of the beautiful because
he has no need for them to apprehend the beautiful itself. The beautiful itself
is apprehended directly.
The Socratic aporetic dialogues do not move beyond the instances which animate them, whereas it is the purpose of Plato to do exactly that. I have raised these other possibilities solely to pose the question of whether a different development of Socrates initiation of moral philosophy other than Platonic metaphysics were possible. This is meant in a logical, rather than a historical, sense. The question is not without historical interest, since it implies an assessment of to what extent Hellenic schools such as skepticism, Stoicism or Cynicism might validly claim Socrates as an ancestor. But in a logical sense the issue is rather whether a different development of Socratic moral philosophy was foreclosed by the Platonic option. Moreover, the question poses the issue of whether a continuation of Socratic moral philosophy is a valid option in the present post-metaphysical conjuncture. I am suggesting that the compaction of apprehension and definition in both Socrates and Plato could be disaggregated in a direction that would continue Socrates’ fidelity to instances through the artist/politician whose ‘genius of the instance’ bears a certain similarity to the Socratic failure to define essence even while it is being apprehended.
If we recall that Vlastos’ distinction of Socrates from Plato rests on the assumption that the method of inquiry is a fundamental characteristic of Socrates and Plato’s philosophies and, by implication, that method is fundamental to philosophy, it may be thought significant that the present inquiry, while beginning from Vlastos’ distinction, has come to define the difference as one of ‘fidelity to instances.’ Vlastos subtitled his essay on the Socratic elenchus “method is all.”[19] The present argument suggests that, not only is method not all, it is not the main thing. Vlastos’ interpretation of Socrates at this point seems to waver. On one hand, the question of method is the crucial difference that allows him to distinguish Socrates from Plato. On the other hand, the question of method is never explicitly addressed by Socrates, though it is by Plato.[20] If one wishes to argue for the superiority of the elenctic method to the mathematical one, then one would suppose that the failure to articulate it as a method, or to reflexively justify it, is a significant failure. The present argument suggests that, while an elenctic method can certainly be abstracted from Socrates’ search for knowledge as depicted in the early aporetic dialogues, it is misleading to use this method—which has been abstracted by the interpreter, was never articulated by Socrates, and was never associated by Socrates with his practice of philosophy—as a mark of the specific difference between Socrates and Plato. As noted above, Vlastos argues that the theory of forms is only possible through the substitution of the mathematical method for that of elenctic inquiry. What he proved, however, was only their co-emergence. The difference between Socrates and Plato would likely be better marked by the difference in substantive philosophy which consists in the ontologization of essential definition. Thus, in conclusion, I am suggesting that it is not elenctic method but fidelity to instances that defines the practice of inquiry of Socrates in distinction from Plato’s otherworldliness. Such a continuation of Socrates’ inquiry would not be in the direction of Plato and would not succumb to Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics. It leaves us post-Nietzscheans in a position analogous to that of Socrates: eidos, elenchus, aporia and a fidelity to instances without a reflexive justification of method.
Notes:
[1] Vlastos’ argument makes a distinction
between the Socrates of the early elenctic dialogues (Apology, Charmides,
Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras, Republic I) and the Socrates of the middle
dialogues (Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II-X, Phaedrus, Parmenides,
Theaetetus), referring
also to a transitional period between early and middle dialogues (Euthydemus,
Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno) and a late period (Timaeus, Critias, Sophist,
Politicus, Philebus, Laws).
While I refer, for the sake of simplicity, simply to a distinction between
Socrates and Plato, Vlastos’ rendering pays careful homage to the fact
that both Socrates are artifacts of Plato’s dialogues. The simplicity of
my terminology does not, in the present context, obscure the detailed point
being made by Vlastos. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral
Philosopher, pp. 46-7;
cf. Gregory Vlastos, Socratic Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
additional note 1.1, p. 135 where the transitional period is not yet
distinguished from the early one.
[2] Vlastos has pointed out that, in
distinction from the middle dialogues where reference to method is common, the
early dialogues make no reference to a special method of philosophical inquiry.
“They are constrained by rules that he does not undertake to
justify.” That is to say, the question of method has become a thematic
issue for Plato in the middle period. This is not to say that the Socrates of
the early dialogues has no method, but only that its reflexive justification is
not posed as an issue, that “Socrates’ inquiries display a pattern
of investigation whose rationale he does not investigate.” Gregory
Vlastos, Socratic Studies, pp. 1, 36.
[3] Vlastos argues that “the
irreconciliable difference between Socrates(E) and Socrates(M) could have been
established by this criterion even if it had stood alone.” Socrates:
Ironist and Moral Philosopher, p. 53, italics throughout removed.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of
the Idols in R. J.
Hollingdale (trans.) Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) p. 35.
[5] Socrates: Ironist and Moral
Philosopher, p. 108.
[6] Socrates: Ironist and Moral
Philosopher, p. 109.
[7] Socrates: Ironist and Moral
Philosopher, p. 58.
[8] Vlastos argues that the confidence of
Plato in Socrates’ elenctic method undergoes a “demise” in
the dialogues Euthydemus,
Lysis, and Hippias
Major, which he
classes (with Meno)
as a transitional dialogue, however this demise does not motivate Socrates to
“conclude that his own ability to make personal judgments … has
been discredited.” In contrast, Meno shows the emergence of an alternative method and
thus signifies an initial discrediting of the elenctic method. Gregory Vlastos,
Socratic Studies,
pp. 29-33, quote from p. 32. In this sense, Meno seems to occupy a privileged place in
Vlastos’ account of the transition.
[9] Gregory Vlastos, Socratic Studies, p. 119. Italics in the original.
[10] In the W. K. C. Guthrie translation.
[11] The divided line in the Republic, where the distinction between opinion
and knowledge is written onto a hierarchical conception of experience, is the
epistemological basis for this social distinction as, contrariwise, when
Husserl declares that the task of philosophy is “knowledge of
opinion” the return of philosophy to Socratic dialogue has begun (even
though this return is still incipient in an analogous sense to the Meno) since in Husserl it vies with a
conception of science that is being overthrown.
[12] In the Paul Shorey translation.
Francis MacDonald Cornford’s translation reads “assigning to each a
degree of clearness and certainty corresponding to the measure in which their
objects possess truth and reality.”
[13]Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the
Idols, pp. 40-1.
[14] “In the great fatality of
Christianity, Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the
‘ideal’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity
to misunderstand themselves and to step on the bridge which led to the
‘Cross’.” Twilight of the Idols, p. 106. There are defensible
historical reasons for this compaction between Plato and Christianity which
tend to reinforce the ‘philosophical’ reason given by
Nietzsche—otherworldliness. Werner Jaeger has documented the crucial role
of Greek paideia in
transforming Christianity from a late Jewish sect into a universal force and
the revival of Plato, in particular, as the mediation that preserved Greek paideia within Christain civilization. See Early
Christianity and Greek Paideia (oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).
[15] In the Paul Shorey translation.
Francis MacDonald Cornford has: “The lovers of sights and sounds delight
in beautiful tones and colours and shapes and in all the works of art into
which these enter; but they have not the power of thought to behold and to take
delight in the nature of Beauty itself.” Allan Bloom’s translation
is: “ ‘The lovers of hearing and the lovers of sights, on the one
hand,’ I said, ‘surely delight in fair sounds and colors and shapes
and all that craft makes from such things, but their thought is unable to see
and delight in the nature of the fair itself.’ ”
[16] In the Paul Shorey translation.
Francis MacDonald Cornford has: “Now if a man believes in the existence
of beautiful things, but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to
follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it …” .
[17] In the Hugh Tredennick and Harold
Tarrant translation.
[18] Socratic Studies, p. 9.
[19] Socratic Studies, p. 1.
[20] Moreover, as Vlastos shows, there is a sense in which Plato’s theory of recollection is a solution to the grand assumption in elenctic inquiry that false beliefs can always be brought into conflict with true beliefs that the answerer holds. The answerer can never be entirely wrong in the conduct of his life, as it were, even if his answers to specific questions are. Socratic Studies, p. 29.