Vlastos was a classics professor at Princeton and Berkeley. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990 and was considered, along with Leo Strauss, the foremost American expert on Socrates in the twentieth century. First, Vlastos tackles the unique double meaning behind some of Socrates’ irony. “We can see how Socrates could have deceived without intending to deceive…. The concept of moral autonomy never surface’s in Plato’s Socratic dialogues—which does not keep it from being the deepest thing in their Socrates, the strongest of his moral concerns…. Socratic irony is not unique in accepting the burden of freedom which is inherent in all significant communication. It is unique in playing that game for bigger stakes than anyone else ever has in the philosophy of the West.”
At the heart of Vlastos’ argument is that while the Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues was the historical Socrates, the Socrates from the middle dialogues onward was a “Socrates” of Plato’s invention, whose espoused metaphysics was actually Plato’s. Vlastos argues, “This is the heart of Plato’s metaphysics: the postulation of an eternal self-existent world, transcending everything in ours, exempt from the vagaries and vicissitudes which afflict all creatures in the world of time, containing the Form of everything valuable or knowable, purged of all sensory content…. Plato’s Form-mysticism is profoundly other-worldly. The ontology of non-sensible, eternal, incorporeal, self-existent, contemplable Forms, and of their anthropological correlate, the invisible, immortal, incorporeal, transmigrating soul, has far-reaching implications for the mind and for the heart…. One could hardly imagine a world-outlook more foreign to that of Socrates…. He is not other-worldly: the eternal world with which Plato seeks mystical union is unknown to him. For Socrates reality—real knowledge, real virtue, real happiness—is in the world in which he lives.”
Vlastos argues that the early Socrates relied on elenctic arguments that consisted strictly of peirastic statements. In the Gorgias, Socrates implores, “By the god of friendship, Callicles, you mustn’t think that you may play with me and say whatever comes into your head, contrary to your real opinion, nor, conversely, must you think of me as jesting. For you see what our discussions are all about—and is there anything about which a man of even small intelligence would be more serious than this: what is the way we ought to live?” Vlastos explains, “When engaged in elenctic argument, searching for the right way to live, he is in dead earnest…. This is my claim: when Socrates is searching for the right way to live, in circumstances in which it is reasonable for him to think of the search as obedience to divine command, his argument cannot involve willful untruth. For elenctic argument is the very process on which he depends to test the truth of his own convictions about the right way to live, no less than those of his interlocutor.” As Socrates, himself, says, “I examine the argument chiefly for my own sake, though no doubt also for the sake of my friends.”
In the rest of this book, Vlastos describes what made Socrates’ morality so original. Vlastos begins, again, with the Gorgias, “The thesis Socrates undertakes to prove to Polus in this section of the Gorgias (474B-475C) is at the heart of his vision of the good life. It is that he who commits injustice inflicts upon himself a greater injury than on the one who he wrongs…. Has any stronger claim been ever made by a moral philosopher? I know of none.” For Socrates, piety is intimately tied with reason. In the Crito, he claimed, “I am the sort of man who is persuaded by nothing in me except the proposition which appears to me to be the best when I reason about it.” The original leap first proposed by Socrates was that even the gods were bound by reason. Vlastos explains, “For [Socrates] the highest form of wisdom is not theoretical, but practical. And it is of the essence of his rationalist program, in theology to assume that the entailment of virtue by wisdom binds gods no less than men. He could not have tolerated a double-standard morality, one for men, another for the gods: this would have perpetuated the old irrationalism…. Piety, and by the same token, every other virtue, has an essence of its own which is as normative for the gods as it is for us.” In the Euthyphro, Socrates asks, “Is piety loved by the gods because it is piety? Or is it piety because the gods love it?”
Socrates’ own conception of his own pious life engaged him in being a gadfly to the community of Athens. Vlastos suggests, “Socrates saw his own work in summoning all and sundry to perfect their soul as work he did at god’s command, as his own service to the god.” Socrates reveals, “I believe that no greater good has ever come to you in the city [of Athens] than this service of mine to the god.” Another of Socrates’ contentions was his refusal to countenance the justice of an eye for an eye. Vlastos “argued for the ground-breaking originality of Socrates’ interdict on retaliation…. If, when we see that an option is unjust, we should reject it instantly without giving any consideration at all to countervailing benefits, then, naturally, we should never commit injustice.” In the Crito, Socrates states, “Therefore, we should not return wrong for wrong nor do evil to a single man, no matter what he may have done to us.” Socrates realizes just how revolutionary this morality is. He continues, “And between those who do believe and those who don’t there can be no common counsel: of necessity they must despise each other when they view each other’s deliberations.”
Vlastos concludes by returning to how Socrates see his own hierarchy of ultimate ends: “The final unconditional good is happiness. It is the only we “pursue” or desire only for its own sake and thus the “end” of all our actions…. The supreme non-final unconditional good, both necessary and sufficient for our happiness, hence the sovereign constituent of our good is virtue…. Regardless of whatever other good we may gain or forfeit, if we achieve this constituent of the good we shall possess the final good: we shall be happy…. The subordinate, non-final and conditional goods: health, wealth, etc. the difference to our happiness these can make is miniscule. But goods they are; we shall be happier with than without them, but only if we use them aright, for they are not “good just by themselves”: if separated from wisdom they will go sour on us and we shall be worse off with them than we would have been without them…. The “intermediaries”, which are reckoned “neither good nor evil” because they are not constituents of the good: their value is purely instrumental; they are never desired for their own sake, but only for the sake of goods.”
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