The extraordinary friendship between Socrates and Alcibiades should have struck many Athenians as odd. A technology separated them in age; then, too, they had been a research in contrasts. Whereas Alcibiades charmed, Socrates irritated. Alcibiades’ magnificence led these round him to swoon, whereas Socrates’ bulging eyes invited comparisons to a torpedo fish. Alcibiades was rich and politically well-connected whereas Socrates embraced his poverty and his humble lineage. Alcibiades strove to turn out to be the main Athenian statesman, whereas Socrates solely participated in politics when obligatory. Alcibiades was licentious and excessive, whereas Socrates was possessed of a outstanding self-control. When the Athenians recalled Alcibiades to cost him with impiety, he fled to Sparta, turning traitor. After they charged Socrates with impiety, he confronted the accusation head on, accepted the loss of life penalty, refused gives to assist him escape, and died loyal to Athens’ legal guidelines and residents.
The connection appears to have captivated Socrates’ associates. Aeschines, Antisthenes, Phaedo, Euclides, and Plato wrote philosophical dialogues that includes the pair in dialog. However it was additionally an issue for philosophers. Socrates, in spite of everything, was accused of corrupting the youth, and lots of of Socrates’ detractors had Alcibiades in thoughts as considered one of two key examples of his maleficent affect.[1] If Socrates had devoted his life to the pursuit of knowledge and advantage and exhorted others to hitch him, what are we to make of Alcibiades’ distinctly unphilosophical life?
Ariel Helfer’s Socrates and Alcibiades: Plato’s Drama of Political Ambition and Philosophy reckons with Plato’s therapy of the connection. Not solely did Plato write two dialogues that includes conversations between Socrates and Alcibiades (Alcibiades and Second Alcibiades), however Alcibiades is current and gives transient feedback in a 3rd (Protagoras), and Alcibiades enters a fourth fairly dramatically—drunk and loud—providing a speech about his relationship with Socrates that Helfer dates to the eve of his fateful Sicilian expedition (Symposium).
Socrates Takes an Boastful Scholar Down a Peg (or Two)
Helfer, an assistant professor of political science at Wayne State College, gives an in depth studying of those encounters, taking the reader line by line by means of the event of the Socrates-Alcibiades relationship within the Platonic corpus. He fastidiously analyzes each the drama of the dialogues and the nuances of the argument. What emerges, he tells us, is a case research in political ambition. Helfer identifies philotimia as the closest equal of political ambition however notes that Plato gives no express therapy of that idea. So as an alternative, Helfer distinguishes 5 key points of Alcibiades’ political ambition in Plato: his need for renown, his love of energy, his love of honor, his need to be a benefactor, and his need for the best items.
The broad outlines of the connection are as follows: Socrates first approaches Alcibiades by explaining that he had been following Alcibiades by means of his youth, ready for simply the appropriate second to introduce himself. Now having simply handed the bloom of youth, Alcibiades now not enjoys the eye of different admirers. Socrates seizes this second to flatter him, and it isn't lengthy earlier than he attracts out Alcibiades’ immense political ambition to guide and to counsel the Athenians on issues of justice.
However, as is attribute of Socrates’ conversations, after flattering Alcibiades, some devastatingly important challenges observe. Socrates poses questions till Alcibiades admits that he's really not sure in regards to the nature of justice. Socrates then tells Alcibiades that he’s “wedded to stupidity” and Alcibiades concedes that Socrates seems appropriate in his evaluation. Alcibiades, whose vanity solely moments earlier had him imagining himself as the best future chief of the Greeks, now feels confused. Whereas in a number of different Socratic dialogues, Socrates is content material to depart his interlocutors in such a state of aporia (bewilderment), in Alcibiades (and Second Alcibiades), he helps Alcibiades come to see the necessity for a instructor, somebody who might help him study what he should know earlier than he turns to the affairs of the town.
Alcibiades pledges his loyalty to Socrates on the finish of every Alcibiades dialogue, although much less explicitly within the second. In his ultimate look within the Platonic corpus, he describes his deep affection for Socrates. He's impressed by Socrates’ unfailing rebuffs of his sexual advances and in addition his unbelievable braveness once they had been on marketing campaign collectively at Potidaea.
Plato’s depictions of Alcibiades finish right here, earlier than Alcibiades has been accused of profaning the Eleusinian mysteries or desecrating the herms; earlier than he leads the disastrous Sicilian expedition; earlier than he defects to Athens’ best enemies—Sparta and Persia—and earlier than he's welcomed again by the Athenians once more.
Helfer proves to be a positive information to Plato’s characterization of Alcibiades. No matter how one judges the interpretative selections he makes, one will discover the type of insights that emerge solely from meticulous care in studying Plato.
He finally sees Socrates’ training of Alcibiades as a failure. Why? As a result of Alcibiades by no means abandons his perception that politics, slightly than philosophy, is the means to the best items. The instructor tried to show his scholar to philosophy however by no means totally succeeded. Based on Helfer, “the entire Platonic drama of Socrates and Alcibiades . . . means that Alcibiades’ pursuit of a political profession was a second-best final result from Socrates’ perspective.”
However this would possibly overstate the case, given how painstakingly this account reveals Plato’s portrait of Alcibiades to be stuffed with suggestion however little or no precision about Socrates’ targets with respect to him. One of many many virtues of the e-book is that Helfer takes critically Socrates’ declare that he's not merely serving to Alcibiades. Slightly, he foresees in his relationship with Alcibiades a profit to himself, particularly that Alcibiades will play some function in Socrates’ personal philosophical training.
Plato’s Radical Concept
As Helfer notes, whereas Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the American Founders had been skeptical of political ambition and had been involved with curbing it, it was not essentially problematic for the Greeks. Ambition was important for the flourishing of political neighborhood, the Greeks believed. However was the life and profession of the historic Alcibiades taken by Plato as proof that political ambition can by no means be reoriented to the Simply, the Good and Stunning as Socrates had hoped? Plato’s Alcibiades was, not less than for a time period, dedicated to Socrates, and, when associating with Socrates, able to give attention to better items. (Solely late of their relationship, as he describes in his Symposium speech, did Alcibiades plug his ears and run from Socrates as if he had been approaching the Sirens.) If Socrates couldn't achieve educating a terrific statesman when he had the good, gifted, formidable Alcibiades able to observe him, with whom would possibly he succeed?
Maybe the conclusion Plato drew from the case of Alcibiades is one which Helfer by no means takes up. Possibly one should, paradoxically, implant political ambition in those that lack it. Plato raises this radical concept—that philosophers have to be made into rulers—in The Republic and his Seventh Letter. If Alcibiades couldn't be made a thinker, possibly a thinker have to be made into the subsequent Alcibiades. Would possibly this be the Platonic instructing on political ambition?
I hasten so as to add that assured pronouncements about Plato’s intent are hardly ever justified, and one can study a lot from Helfer’s warning in approaching the works of that nice thinker. In the long run, Plato raises many challenges for his readers however leaves them to attract their very own conclusions. For these trying to make sense of the advanced portrait drawn of Alcibiades within the Platonic corpus, Helfer’s e-book is a wonderful start line.
[1] The opposite instance was Critias, a frontrunner of the oligarchy that overthrew the Athenian democracy in 404 B.C. See, for instance, Xenophon, Memorabilia (1.2).
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