Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 052 - Fighting Over Socrates - the Hellenistic Schools.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the League of Human Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Fighting over Socrates, the Hellenistic Schools. Socrates, as I pointed out when discussing him, has a strong claim to be the most influential philosopher who never wrote anything. It was not only Plato who wrote Socratic literature, using Socrates as a character and depicting his combative inquiries into ethical topics. There was also Plato's contemporary, the soldier and historian Xenophon, who, as we've seen, wrote stylized reminiscences of Socrates and his conversations. But neither Plato nor Xenophon qualify as Socratic in the stronger sense of living a lifestyle inspired by the gadfly of Athens. They may have talked the Socratic talk, but they didn't walk the Socratic walk, which would have meant going barefoot, hanging around in the marketplace, accosting passers-by, and demanding that they account for their claims to knowledge. Plato and Xenophon were certainly inspired by Socrates, but they did not seek to imitate him. Indeed, writing about Socrates was a way of failing to imitate him, given that Socrates didn't write anything. But perhaps this is a rather superficial idea of what it would mean to follow Socrates's example. Surely, Socrates wasn't just asking us to throw away our shoes and be rude to pedestrians. He wanted us to reflect seriously on the most important matters, such as virtue. And this is certainly something Plato and Xenophon did. We might further ask, though, whether Plato, Xenophon, or Aristotle for that matter arrived at distinctively Socratic conclusions regarding these most important matters. To be truly Socratic is not merely to choose poverty, and not merely to ask certain types of questions, but to give certain answers to those questions—that virtue is knowledge, for instance, or that all value derives from virtue and wisdom. Thus, being Socratic could mean different things to different admirers. There was the lifestyle, with its defiant exhibition of self-sufficiency, there was the relentless questioning, and then there was the core of Socratic doctrine, if that is not too grand a word for the philosophical ideas we associate with Socrates. So it's no surprise that when we turn our attention to ancient philosophy after Plato, Aristotle, and their immediate associates, we find that Socrates had followers of many types. There were some men who, as far as we know, were content simply to hang out with Socrates. Faithful companions, if not disciples, like Critobulus or Apollodorus. These men have left no trace of independent philosophical ideas. But at least they showed up at Socrates' execution, which is more than we can say for Plato, who, as I mentioned before, tells us in the Phaedo that he was ill. Of greater interest to us was a movement which imitated the Socratic lifestyle, and also reflected on the meaning of this lifestyle. These were the cynics, perhaps the most outrageous group of philosophers to emerge in the ancient world. They did choose poverty and make cutting remarks to the townspeople, accusing them of hypocrisy and insufficient interest in virtue. No doubt the good citizens of Athens and other ancient cities regretted this particular form of allegiance to Socrates. Having gone to the trouble of putting the man to death, it must have been annoying to find a whole school of philosophers keeping the man's habits alive. But the cynics were devoted to Socrates' philosophical ideals, and not only his habits. They were convinced, perhaps in part by Socrates' arguments, and in part by the example he had set in his own life, that virtue is not only its own reward, but the only reward worth having. A similar outlook was adopted by the Stoics. They were a more successful school than the cynics in terms of their historical impact and dominance of the philosophical scene. But the early Stoics were influenced by the cynics, and followed them by seeing Socrates as an ethical exemplar and insisting on the primacy of virtue and wisdom. As we'll see in due course, they admitted that some things other than virtue, like physical health and safety, possess a lesser kind of value. But for them, the goal of the philosophical life, indeed the only rational goal for anyone's life, was virtue and wisdom alone. On the other hand, the Stoics did not follow the cynics in adopting Socrates' way of life. If Stoicism had required voluntary poverty and antisocial behavior, it would hardly have been possible for a Stoic philosopher to be emperor of the Roman Empire, yet this is precisely what happened with Marcus Aurelius. Another group of philosophers in the period following Plato and Aristotle fastened on to yet a different aspect of Socrates, his incessant questioning. These philosophers, whom we call the skeptics, adopted a permanent pose of, well, skepticism, greeting the claims of other philosophers with deft counterarguments without proposing positive views of their own. Subskeptics went so far as to adopt what you might call negative views of their own. Where Socrates admitted to know only that he knew nothing, these radical skeptics claimed to know only that nobody can know anything. Other skeptics, the more interesting ones, for my money, followed Socrates' example more closely by remaining open to argument, always willing in principle to be shown that some philosophical claim is well-grounded, but always able to pick holes in each positive argument as it came along. A final philosophical tradition in this period has, like Stoicism, become a household name, Epicureanism. Unlike the other groups I've just been discussing, the Epicureans do not seem particularly Socratic. With their atomism, which seems to hark back to pre-Socratic theories such as those expressed by Democritus and Leucippus, and their hedonism, that is, their view that pleasure is the good, they in fact seem almost deliberately anti-Socratic. But this may be misleading. Even Plato presents Socrates on one occasion as assuming that pleasure is the good, in his dialogue The Protagoras. Epicurean hedonism was basically a careful consideration of what Socrates suggests in that dialogue, namely that if pleasure is the good, then wisdom will be paramount, since it will give us the ability to measure and calculate what will provide us with the most pleasure over our lives. These four schools, the Cynics, the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epicureans, are the main philosophical traditions of what we call the Hellenistic period. This is often defined as the time beginning with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, and ending wherever the historian you're talking to decides it should end, one popular choice being the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. By that time we enter the period in which the Mediterranean basin, and beyond, is completely dominated by the Roman Empire, first under Augustus Caesar, and then under a series of emperors, some good, some bad, and one a Stoic philosopher. With the slow collapse of the Roman hegemony in the 5th and 6th centuries AD will come the end of what is usually thought of as ancient philosophy. It's worth dwelling on that chronological fact for a moment. Plato and Aristotle wrote in the 4th century BC. When Aristotle died in 322, ancient philosophy had been going for a couple of centuries. Aristotle was already able to refer to early pre-Socratic thinkers like the Milesians as the ancients, and yet ancient philosophy was only just beginning. The better part of a millennium would pass before ancient philosophy drew to a close, and late antique philosophy was passed on to medieval thinkers in the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We have enough on our plate for a good number of episodes, just dealing with the Hellenistic schools and their legacy during the Roman Empire. In the rest of this first introductory episode, I'll first sketch a bit of the historical context in which those schools operated, then say something about why I am calling them schools, and finally return to the question of the Hellenistic response to Socrates, to his student Plato, and to his student's student Aristotle. First then the historical context. I just said that the Hellenistic period is traditionally dated from the death of Alexander, and with good reason, given the shattering sequence of events leading from his death. From his base in Macedonia, Alexander had built upon the conquest of his father Philip, to conquer mainland Greece, and then to push east through Asia Minor, Persia, and all the way to modern-day India. He and his armies left the indelible marks of Greek culture wherever they went. But even if Alexander's personality and military prowess could have served to unify such a vast terrain as a single, lasting empire, his untimely demise at a young age ended that possibility. After a contentious face-off between several of his lieutenants, his domain was fractured into three more or less stable units, which continued for a few centuries until the Romans became a new, almost unchallenged power. These units were, first, the remnants of Macedonian power, which continued to dominate mainland Greece and the Balkans, second, the Ptolemaic dynasty in the fertile and rich land of Egypt, and third, the eastern power of the Seleucids, named for Seleucos, a commander in Alexander's army who was able to consolidate power in the eastern provinces following Alexander's death. During the Hellenistic period, the dynasty of Seleucos ruled over a vast territory stretching eastwards from modern-day Iraq through Persia and central Asia. I have to say that I'm rather glad that these podcasts are devoted to the history of philosophy, and not plain old history, because the Hellenistic dynasties can be a bit confusing. Particularly annoying is that almost all the rulers of Egypt were named Ptolemy, unless they were women, in which case there was a good chance they'd be named Cleopatra. The famous Cleopatra was in fact Cleopatra VII. Similarly confusing patterns of dynastic naming held sway in the Macedonian and Seleucid empires too. The names of these rulers are recognizably Greek, one sign of a vital outcome of Alexander's conquests, namely the spreading of Greek language and culture throughout the areas he had conquered. For instance, the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt spoke Greek, not Egyptian, and the famous library they founded at Alexandria was principally intended for storing Greek works and doing research in Greek. In the last days of the Hellenistic period, as the Roman Republic was about to complete its transition to a vast empire ruled by a single man rather than a senate, the great lawyer, rhetorician, and philosopher Cicero visited Greece. For him, this meant traveling to a place that retained dominance culturally despite its loss of political relevance. Cicero knew Greek, and it was this that allowed him to learn and write about Hellenistic philosophy. In his own writings, he often refers to the fact that he is having to find Latin expressions to correspond to Greek technical terms. Although Lucretius, the greatest Epicurean apart from Epicurus, was a poet who wrote in Latin, the greatest skeptic, Sextus Empiricus, wrote in Greek. In due course, Neoplatonism would become the main philosophical school in late antiquity. It was founded by Plotinus, a man who hailed from Egypt and lived in Rome, but wrote in Greek. So Hellenistic philosophical schools spanned cultural, political, and linguistic divides, but each of them, even as its characteristic doctrines developed, retained a reasonable degree of unity and continuity. Hellenistic philosophers were willing, indeed eager, to identify themselves as card-carrying Stoics, Epicureans, and so on. This is my reason for calling these groups schools. The schools built allegiance over generations, in part by devoting themselves to the authority of their founders. In the case of the Stoics, this meant giving an authoritative position to Zeno of Citium. For the skeptics, the founding father was Pyro, Sextus Empiricus calls himself not a skeptic but a Pyronist. Meanwhile, the cynics looked back to Diogenes of Sinope, and in the case of the Epicureans, it was of course Epicurus. Those of the Hellenistic schools always honored the memory and teachings of their founders. Even though the greatest early Stoic was certainly Chrysippus, not Zeno, and even though it was Chrysippus who systematized the teachings that all Stoics would defend for centuries, it was Zeno who was admired as the school founder, and all self-proclaimed Stoics had at least to pay lip service to the truth of his pronouncements. Unfortunately, though, we do not have any of Zeno's works, nor do we have any extant writings of Chrysippus, though not for lack of effort on his part, since he wrote hundreds of them. Indeed, if Socrates is the most influential ancient thinker who wrote nothing, Chrysippus is surely the most important ancient philosopher for whom we have no surviving writings. I tend to think, in fact, that if a sizable number of his works had survived, he would be a household name, studied in philosophy departments around the world, and seen as one of the top four ancient philosophers along with Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. But that's just a hunch. As it is, with the early Stoics we do not have the luxury of referring to extensive surviving writings, as is possible with the great names I just mentioned. Instead, we have to consult later authors who report on their views. This means that with Hellenistic philosophy, we are to some extent returning to the situation we faced with pre-Socratic thinkers. Our knowledge is indirect, often fragmentary, or in the form of summaries or testimonies about what these philosophers thought. On the bright side, that information is more extensive than in the case of the pre-Socratics. This is due in no small part to a man I just mentioned, Cicero. He wrote a series of treatises, in Latin, of course, where he summarized and argued on behalf of the various Hellenistic schools, that is, the skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans. He didn't see the cynics as worthy of this sort of attention. He himself tended towards the skeptical persuasion, but this didn't stop him from providing elaborate and apparently fairly accurate accounts of how Stoics and Epicureans might defend their doctrines. Many authors who lived under the Roman Empire also preserve evidence about the Hellenistic schools. This includes Christian writers who were refuting Stoic ideas or adapting them for their own purposes. From the same period, we even have important original works of Stoic philosophy. These were composed by the so-called Roman Stoics, not only Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, but also Epictetus, perhaps the greatest Stoic apart from Chrysippus, who has left a significant body of writings, in Greek, thanks to one of his students. For the Epicureans, we not only have the great poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, which expounds and defends the school doctrines in Latin verse. This was written before the fall of the Republic. We also have several extant works and sayings of Epicurus himself. We owe this to our old friend, the biographer Diogenes Laertius, who saw fit to quote entire letters of Epicurus in his Lives of the Philosophers. For early skepticism, things are much as with early Stoics. We know the tradition solely through fragments and testimonies. But many of these are found in the works of the greatest representative of the skeptical school Sextus Empiricus. He lived well after the end of the Hellenistic period, in the second century A.D., when Aristotelianism and Platonism were already returning to become dominant forces. Still, between Sextus, Cicero, and some other authors, we're well served with information about the development of the skeptical philosophy. Now I know what you're thinking. How is it that I've been talking about philosophy directly after Plato and Aristotle and have said essentially nothing about Platonism and Aristotelianism? I just mentioned that they managed a resurgence by the second century A.D., and in fact this began at least a century earlier. But what was going on in the intervening 300 years or so? After all, Aristotle had been the teacher of Alexander, so you'd think that Aristotelian philosophy would have been ruling the roost following Alexander's conquests. But in fact, Aristotle was not in vogue during the Hellenistic period. An ancient tale claims that his works were essentially lost at this time, literally buried underground until being rediscovered. This is surely an exaggeration, as we'll discuss in a later episode. And Aristotle may have exerted influence on specific points of doctrine among the Hellenistic schools. But this influence was minor. For the first few hundred years, there was no sign that philosophy would in due course become nearly synonymous with the teachings of Aristotle, something that occurred only in late antiquity, and even more so, the medieval period. With Plato, things were a bit different. The Stoics responded thoughtfully to the dialogues, and especially to the Timaeus, which was a major influence on them. More obviously, the Platonic Academy itself continued as a force in the Hellenistic period. But the brief burst of Pythagorean theory we discussed last time was a false dawn for metaphysical Platonism. In the Hellenistic period, academic philosophy turns out to mean skepticism, and around 400 A.D., St. Augustine could still attack skepticism in a work entitled Against the Academicians. That may seem odd. We don't normally think of Plato as a skeptic. But imagine if you restricted your Platonic readings to the dialogues now considered early, also called the Socratic dialogues. These invariably pose a philosophical question, usually about the nature of some virtue like piety or courage, and then reach an inconclusive impasse at the end. The skeptics looked to these Socratic dialogues when they made their negative brand of philosophy into the school position of the Platonic Academy. And as we've seen, they were happy to embrace Socrates as a model philosopher, always questioning, admitting to know nothing, he could plausibly be seen as a skeptic before there was such a thing as skepticism. As these Hellenistic schools competed to be the true heirs of Socrates, they adopted a broadly Socratic stance on the fundamental purpose of philosophy. We do find these thinkers speculating about logic, the universe, and the divine, but for all of them, philosophy centrally concerned the question of how to live. Ethics became a central preoccupation in the Hellenistic period, as it had been for Socrates. The Hellenistic schools also shared a devotion to Socrates' ideal of self-control and self-sufficiency. They had bitter disagreements, of course. The Stoics cared nothing for pleasure where the Epicureans put it at the core of their ethics, and the skeptics sought to undermine the teachings of all other schools. Yet all the schools, even the skeptics, promised that their adherents would achieve what was called ataraxia, freedom from disturbance. Other philosophical questions were often explicitly marked as worthy of consideration only insofar as they would help lead to that ethical goal, and for good reason. These schools shared very little apart from the notion that ataraxia goes hand in hand with eudaimonia, or, to say that in English, the notion that happiness requires freedom from disturbance. Among the Hellenistic schools, none went so far in the pursuit of self-sufficiency and imitation of Socrates as the cynics. Famous for their shocking behavior, whether it was living in wine jars or having sex in public, the cynics were social critics who stood outside the society they criticized, and heirs to the Socratic practice of pestering their fellow-citizens into philosophical reflection. Plato supposedly remarked that the greatest of the cynics, Diogenes, was like a Socrates gone mad. The countercultural exploits and barbed remarks of Diogenes make him one of the most entertaining figures in ancient philosophy, at least at this distance. A direct encounter with him in the marketplace would have been far from entertaining. But was there more to Diogenes than just a series of amusing and titillating anecdotes? Did cynicism have any plausible claim to carry on the legacy of Socrates? Without skipping any of the good anecdotes, we'll try to answer these questions next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.