8 - Socrates and Plato: an introduction

Summary

Approaches to Platonic interpretation

To introduce Socrates and Plato is to introduce the problem of the relation between them. Although other contemporaries left portraits of Socrates as well, it is Plato’s writings – primarily a body of dialogues in which Plato himself never appears – which stamped the figure of his teacher indelibly on the history of Western philosophy. Because Socrates is best known to us as a character in Plato’s writings, there arises what has been called the ‘Socratic problem’. Can a real or ‘historical’ Socrates, with distinctive beliefs, be identified on the basis of the testimony roughly contemporaneous with his life which survives from Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and (a generation later) Aristotle? Or is, perhaps, the Socrates we value largely the portrayal Plato makes of him?

The ‘Socratic problem’ is complicated by the fact that Plato’s ‘Socrates’ seems to argue for contradictory positions in different dialogues. For example, in Protagoras (352–8) Socrates argues that because no one does wrong willingly, vice results simply from ignorance, an argument which assumes that only rational beliefs determine action. But in Republic IV he explains vice as due to the two irrational, or less than rational, parts of a tripartite soul when not stably governed, as they should be, by the third and rational part. This apparent contradiction has often been resolved by assuming that the Protagoras is one of a group of dialogues written early in Plato’s career (the ‘early’ dialogues), in which the character ‘Socrates’ is meant by Plato to represent the historical Socrates’ views, whereas the Republic is one of the ‘middle period’ dialogues in which Plato is using Socrates simply as a mouthpiece for his own theory.