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From Myth to Mind
November 30, 1998
Socrates & Other Sophists
I. On Anaxagoras:
A. (b. circa 500 BCE, Clazomenae, Anatolia - d. circa 428, Lampsacus, a Milesian colony on the Propontis.
"He was eminent for wealth and noble birth, and furthermore for magnanimity, in that he gave up his patrimony to his relations." [D.L., op.cit., Vol. I, 137].
Anaxagoras moved to Athens in 480 BCE (the first Presocratic philosopher to reside there), bringing Ionian natural philosophy with him. Having been a Persian subject, he is thought to have served in the Persian army. He was nicknamed: "Mind" (nous), and was most notably associated with the Athenian Statesman, Pericles. Around 450 BCE he was prosecuted for atheism and 'impiety', having declared the sun to be "a fiery lump, larger than the Peloponnese" of Hellas. Anaxagoras was forced to leave Athens.
"Satyrus in his Lives says that the case was brought by Thucydides, Pericles' political opponent; that the charge was not only impiety but also Medism; and that he was condemned to death in absentia." {D.L., op.cit., Vol. I].
B. His Works: Only fragments survive of his first book, the Physics [On Nature].
C. Presocratic Influences on Anaxagoras: although his initial influences were Ionian physics (esp. Anaximenes), he adopted the idea from Parmenides that all coming-to-be and passing-away was impossible.
"The Hellenes follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation." [John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, New York, Meridian, 1957, pp. 260 - 261].
He also assimilated the notion from Empedocles of "like producing like".
D. Anaxagoras' influence on his Contemporaries: Pericles & Plato:
E. Major Contribution: The concept of Mind (nous). Mind is the prime mover of the primeval vortex, which separates the Chaos of the cosmic mixture into individual elements and substances according to the principle, "like attracts like". He also posited the notion that:
"There is a portion of everything in everything"
All objects, elements and substances contain a portion of each other, albeit in varied proportions. While this is not yet an atomic theory, there is implicit in this notion the idea of very minute particles, like atoms, which all objects emit and comprise. The glass of wine in my hand, therefore, contains tiny particles of a dog, a planet, a blade of grass, fire, a bird, etc.
II. I. F. Stone'sThe Trial of Socrates [New York, Anchor Doubleday, 1988]
A. Socrates and Athens
Chapter 1: Their Basic Differences
"Socrates was neither an oligarch nor a democrat. he stood apart from either side. His ideal, as we see it variously expressed in both Xenophon and Plato and reflected in what we know of the other Socratics, was rule neither by the few nor the many but by - as he put it in Xenophon's Memorabilia- 'the one who knows.' This must have looked to his contemporaries as a reversion to kingship in its most absolute form. And to advocate kingship was to set oneself wholly in opposition to the polis"
Chapter 2: Socrates and Homer
Chapter 3: The Clue in the Thersites Story
Chapter 4: The Nature of Virtue and Knowledge
"It followed - at least for Socrates and his disciples - that since virtue was knowledge and knowledge was unattainable, ordinary men, the many, had neither the virtue nor the knowledge required for self-government."
"There is a strong element of class prejudice in the Socratic animosity toward the Sophists. They were teachers who found their market in democratic cities like Athens among a rising middle class of well-to-do craftsmen and traders whose wealth had enabled them to acquire arms. Their participation as hoplites - or heavy-armed infantry - in the defense of the city had also won them a share in political power. They wanted to be able to challenge the old landed aristocracy for leadership by learning the arts of rhetoric and logic so they could speak effectively in the assembly. They wanted to share in the arts and culture of the city. The Sophists served as their teachers."
"Protagoras was only the most prominent victim of Socrates' genius for confusing his interlocutors and the issues. He (and Plato) often do this by gross oversimplification and the search for absolute abstractions where there are only complex realities."
Chapter 5: Courage as Virtue
"One of the strangest traits in the character of Socrates was his attitude toward teaching, though teaching was his lifelong occupation. He never did any other work. Apparently he lived on a small income from an inheritance left him by his father, who is variously described as a sculptor or stone-cutter - the distinction between the artist and craftsman was blurred in antiquity. Socrates was as much an itinerant teacher as the Sophists he (and Plato) are constantly denigrating. While they traveled about the cities of Greece, he spent his days in the gymnasiums and colonnades of Athens talking philosophy with anyone who would listen."
Three Reasons why Socrates may have denied that he was a teacher: (1) Political: "only one who knows" may rule -- self-rule therefore cannot be taught; (2) Philosophical: only absolute definitions grant real knowledge, and to Socrates the definitions of knowledge and virtue are unattainable; (3) Personal: Critias and Alcibiades were students of Socrates who overthrew the democracy.
Chapter 6: A Wild Goose Chase: The Socratic Search for Absolute Definitions
"Socrates begins his argument in both dialogues [Theaetetus & Phaedrus] with the truism that you cannot make a shoes without knowing what a shoe is, nor can you be a trader in horses without knowing what a horse is. But to know what a shoe or a horse IS, for the purpose of shoemaking or horse-trading, is it necessary to meet the impossible standards of Socratic logic by coming up with an absolute and perfect definition of either shoes or horses? Must the shoemaker or horse-trader qualify for a Ph.D. in metaphysics? Socrates demands not only perfect definitions of the shoe and the horse but - more difficult - a perfect definition of knowledge itself. [Example of dialogue: pp. 71 - 72]"
Chapter 7: Socrates and Rhetoric
"The orators,Socrates concludes, 'like the poets' are 'set on gratifying the citizens...sacrificing the common weal to their own personal interests' and behaving 'to these assemblies as to children.' Coming from any less venerable figure than Socrates this outburst would be dismissed as antidemocratic demagogy."
"The Aristotelian respect for observation and distrust of absolutes may reflect the fact they he was a physician's son. In his philosophical work, he often thinks like a physician and reflects medical experience. Thus in the Nichomachean Ethics , rebutting the idealist conception of knowledge, Aristotle says that the doctor does not treat a disease, he treats a patient, a particular patient, each with how own complications. No two patients, though suffering from the same disease, are quite alike."
"The negative dialectic of Socrates - if the city had taken it seriously - would have made equity and democracy impossible. His identification of virtue with an unattainable knowledge stripped common men of hope and denied their capacity to govern themselves."
Chapter 8: The Good Life: The Third Socratic Divergence
"Socrates preached and practiced withdrawal from the political life of the city. In Plato's Apology he defended his abstention as necessary for 'the perfection' of the soul. The Athenians and the Greeks generally believed that the citizen was educated and perfected by participating fully in the life and affairs of the city."
"By these standards, Socrates was not a good citizen. He did his duty as a soldier, and acquitted himself bravely. But it is extraordinary that so prominent an Athenian managed in his seventy years to take almost no part at all in civic affairs. Had Solon's law against nonparticipation in times of civil strife been in effect in the fifth century B.C., Socrates might have been disenfranchised under it."
Stone asks where Socrates was in 426 B.C. when Athens brutally sacked Melos, killing all the men after they had surrendered, and enslaving all the women in children. Socrates says nothing about it. In the second instance, the last-minute salvation of Mytilene, Socrates' silence is contrasted to the moderate Diodotus, who persuaded the Athenians to spare Mytilene. [106- 107]
Chapter 9: The Prejudices of Socrates
"Once, but only once, does Socrates advise a disciple to enter politics. The unusual advice was given, oddly enough, to Charmides, Plato's uncle, who became the chief lieutenant of Critias in the regime of the Thirty" [which overthrew the Athenian democracy in 404 B.C.]
"Socrates is revered as a nonconformist but few realize that he was a rebel against an open society and the admirer of a closed. Socrates was one of those Athenians who despised democracy and idealized Sparta. [121]"
"Plato finally returned [after leaving Athens when Socrates was executed] from a self-imposed exile to his native Athens. he founded his academy and spent the remaining forty years of life there teaching antidemocratic philosophy unmolested, but without ever a word of appreciation for the freedom Athens afforded him"