2
simply an a-moral logician, or perhaps as the logician Plato’s tool. If the ancients and
the moderns differ with respect to the possibility of progress, with the moderns arguing
for and the ancients against its possibility, and if we limit our focus to Socrates, score one
for the ancients. We moderns may have figured out how to make human life in a bottle,
but we haven’t a clue as to how to fashion Socrates. If we used the consensus view of
Socrates as our blueprint, our yield would be an abhorrent monstrosity. It suddenly
makes sense that Socrates never wrote. The question remains, why did Plato? Socrates,
evidently, thought himself too particular to represent in words, even his own words. So,
what could Plato hope to accomplish?
That Plato hoped to accomplish something is evident in his Apology, where his
Socrates suggests despite his staying out of politics that the city needs him.
3
In the
Apology Socrates suggests that the city does not know what he is, but will miss him when
he is gone. It is a claim we would love to believe, so tantalized are we by the image of
Socrates that Plato projects. Yet, before we accept Socrates as our hero, we would do
well to know what we are getting ourselves into. For when one actually looks at the
Socrates of the Apology, at first blush it appears that Plato is trying to pull a fast one on
us. On the one hand, we have Socrates’ insufficiently defended assertions of the good he
does the city, and on the other, we have Socrates’ strange and highly dubious wisdom.
Whatever this wisdom is, it seems it is much easier to say what it is not than what it is. In
the Apology, Socrates asserts that he is not a physicist, an educator of the young, or a
political man, though he apparently is mistaken for all three.
4
Socrates admits not having
3
In the Apology, Socrates says that his daimonion kept him from politics. (31c4-32a3)
4
In the Apology, Socrates claims that he is mistaken for a physicist. Although in the Parmenides, Socrates
admits he was once a physicist of sorts. In the Sophist (see 216aff), Socrates suggests the philosopher will
be mistaken, at one time, for a sophist (i.e. an “educator” of the young), and, at another time, for a
Convention