I can't remember the last time I found the introduction to a book so completely and delightfully satisfying as the one in Gregory Vlastos' Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Really. I hope to someday read the entire book, though I may never fully understand it, as it is part of a body of scholarship with a history that can only be apprehended substantially by the lifetime student of the specific discipline of Socratic study. (Which is part of my point in telling you about the introduction. But I'll get to that.)
"How This Book Came to Be" starts off like this:
Socrates' "strangeness" (ατοπια) is the keynote of Alcibiades' speech about him in the Symposium. The talk starts on that note (215A); and reverts to it near the end:
Such is his strangeness that you will search and search among those living now and among men of the past, and never come close to what he is himself and to the things he says. (221D)
This book is for readers of Plato's earlier dialogues who have felt this strangeness, have asked themselves what to make of it, have pondered answers to its enigmas, and are willing to work their way through yet another. What I offer should not distract them from their encounter with the Socrates who lives in Plato's text. It should take them back there for a closer look.
By this time there are two long footnotes, together about two-thirds the length of the text I just quoted. The 20-page Introduction has more footnotes than some books I've read (74). But I'm glad, because they explain and support the text and provide sources. (When it comes to scholarship, thoroughness is a cardinal virtue.)
In as abbreviated form as I can manage (these are, after all, blog posts), I will synopsize the story:
In mid-career, the author completed a manuscript for a book. Though giving the right answers to the proper questions, it still seemed to be missing something: the ατοποσ mentioned above. "A vague sense of this, more instinct than reasoned judgment, left me with the conviction that the best thing I could do with the MS was junk it. And so I did." (emphasis added) Looking back, he says, it was the wisest decision he ever made, saving him from going "further and further into the morass." He was able to start again on the right path: putting to the center those paradoxes which had been "the margins"...recognizing their presence even if he could never "crack" them.
In a series of speeches to college audiences Vlastos did address these paradoxes, acknowledging "the perils of docta ignorantia, never greater than in our own day of professionalized, dispersed, fragmented, minutely specialized research." Seeking to make his presentation accessible and relevant to "common humanity," he called this intent "humanism," though wasn't certain he could succeed, or keep his addresses sufficiently scholarly.
He also recognized that to "dig up and recant" all the errors of his early work would be counterproductive -- "It is boringly self-important to excavate the archaeology of one's mistakes" -- while realizing that one was "too noxious to be allowed a place in the limbo of forgettable mishaps." This was his treatment of "Socrates' central paradox: his profession of ignorance." He points out that others have made the same error - a "trap," he calls it. (The nature of the error was a faulty conclusion based upon wrongly linking two aspects of Socrates' philosophy.)
There comes chastisement: "It should not have taken me twenty years to discover that [my conclusion was] badly out of line with what we see in Plato's earlier dialogues, the most reliable of our sources." Yet of this conclusion he says that "Cicero, who [found] this position attractive, speaks of it as 'propounded by Socrates, reaffirmed by Arcesilaus and confirmed by Carneades'" though why, we cannot know due to scant information. But the scholar (Grote) who relates all this, according to Vlastos, ignores texts "scattered throughout Plato's earlier dialogues."
Vlastos expresses wonderment that "criticism was so slow in coming." (emphasis added) "Extended critique" appeared no less than nine years later. By that time, though, and for the next ten years, he was "too deep into other concerns" to address the subject. Inspiration to revisit finally came in a book by one of his students, Terry Irwin (Princeton), which, unlike the "highly reputable" books which came before, neither perpetuated nor dodged a line of thought about Socrates which cannot even be understood by the modern meaning of the term used to represent it.
Hmmm. (Take the problems illustrated in this post and multiply them by years removed.)
...to be continued in part III: part II...yes, all this does have something to do with the case for "unfeminizing" the church...
