indignatio continued

The tumblers were falling into place in 420 B.C. At least, according to Laurence Lampert’s excellent analysis of the dialogue known as Hippias Minor in the Spring 2002 Review of Politics. The Review definitely has a Straussian tinge, but sometimes LI likes the odd faith that close reading of ancient texts will give us political redemption.

In the Lesser Hippias, Socrates’ antagonist is Hippias, an Elian sophist and politician. He has come to Athens to participate in the ninetieth Olympiad, in which the Elians were managers of the game. Lampert emphasizes a Thucydidian aspect of Hippias’ presence in Athens:

“More important, however, than the coming Olympics for the Lesser Hippias is the diplomatic conference for which Elis presumably sent Hippias to Athens. That conference had been arranged by the rising new force in Athenian politics, Alcibiades, the young Athenian to whom Socrates had devoted such close attention more than a decade earlier.(n7) Alcibiades had arranged the congress of 420 to implement his bold new strategy; altering the Periclean strategy Athens had followed since the beginning of the war eleven years earlier. Alcibiades' policy required that maritime Athens win Peloponnesian allies for a decisive hoplite battle against Sparta. Thucydides chose this critical moment as the fitting occasion to introduce to his narrative the flamboyant and fateful figure who would come to dominate it as he came to dominate Athenian politics.(n8) Alcibiades appears for the first time in Thucydides as a young strategist and diplomat of great ambition and talent who achieves a striking victory in the first endeavor Thucydides chose to report about him: Alcibiades won the diplomatic battle in 420 by perpetrating an outrageous trick on the Spartan ambassadors, persuading them to lie to the Athenian assembly about their power to finalize a treaty. Unscrupulous Alcibiades then immediately denounced them to the assembly as unscrupulous liars, inciting the assembly into a frenzy of outrage against the Spartans and turning it toward his own policy of alliance with the Argives, Mantineans, and Elians. An earthquake occurred at that inopportune moment and the assembly lost its chance to approve Alcibiades' policy immediately. They approved it some weeks later, however, after Nicias's attempt to negotiate a treaty with the Spartans failed. Alcibiades's diplomatic success further required that he persuade the ambassadors from Argos, Mantinea, and Elis to sign a treaty of alliance with the Athenians. The diplomacy was successful but the hoplite battle two years later would be lost, partly due to Athenian failure to implement Alcibiades' plan and send a full complement of Athenians in a timely manner to the decisive battle near Mantinea in 418.”

For those who like their nudge nudging to be more explicit – we think there is a striking parallel between Alcibiades trick and some recent deception that has been going down. Maybe our faithful readers can guess?..

As we know from the Symposium, Socrates has been close to Alcibiades. The contest staged in the Lesser Hippias between Hippias and Socrates turns on the question of who is better, Achilles or Odysseus? And in what respect? The later question is, abstractly, about the nature of virtue, and, practically, about Homer’s presentation of the two heros. Hippias takes the position that Achilles is the greater man, and the Iliad is the greater poem. His position is pretty straightforward, turning on the scene in the Iliad in which Odysseus pleads with Achilles to return to the Achaian force. The Andrew Lang translation on Gutenberg gives us this unfortunate Victorian translation of Achilles’ reply:

“And Achilles fleet of foot answered and said unto him: "Heaven-sprungson of Laertes, Odysseus of many wiles, in openness must I now declareunto you my saying, even as I am minded and as the fulfilment thereofshall be, that ye may not sit before me and coax this way and that. Forhateful to me even as the gates of hell is he that hideth one thing inhis heart and uttereth another: but I will speak what meseemeth best.”

The word for wiles, in Greek, is polytropoi. Lampert sees this as a key word. Hippias’ view is that Achilles is rebuking guile from the morally more unassailable position of straightforwardness. Lampert gives a quite adequate summary of the “plot” of the dialogue (which, I should add, is one of Plato’s smaller dialogues):

“Achilles' words initiate the first argument of the dialogue, an argument about lying, for Hippias interprets Achilles' words as a denunciation of lying and an attack on lying Odysseus. This first argument (365c-371e) begins with a view on the liar that Socrates suggests Homer held: "that the truthful man was one sort and the liar another, and that they are not the same" (365c). Hippias's conviction--"It would be terrible (deinon) if it were not so"--governs his reactions to Socrates' reasoning and leads ultimately to the conclusion of Odysseus's superiority (371e). At the end of the first argument, when Hippias hears this conclusion and the conclusion on which it is based (that the voluntary liar is better than the involuntary liar), he expresses his moral outrage and expands the topic dramatically: "And how, Socrates, can those who are voluntarily unjust, who have voluntarily plotted and done evil, be better than those who do so involuntarily?" (372a, emphasis added) This outburst initiates the second argument (372a-375d), an argument about justice and wrong-doing that in its way repeats the reasoning of the first argument. Hippias expresses the same conviction at the end of the second argument: "It would, however, be terrible, Socrates, if those doing injustice voluntarily are to be better than those doing so involuntarily" (375d). This response initiates the third and final argument (375d-376b) at the end of which "terrible" appears one final time, but this time it states Socrates' judgment on what would be terrible (376c), a judgment that ends the dialogue.”

Socrates’ position in this dialogue is rather startling, especially if you come to it presupposing a certain conventional image of Socrates. That conventional image, taken from the Apology, is of a man who will not lie, a man who seeks definitions, a man who believes, as he says in the Gorgias, that the virtuous man is so far from merely the powerful man that the virtuous man would allow himself to be put to death in defense of virtue. These are all, indeed, sides of Socrates. But there is also the friend of Alcibiades, the ironist who initiates the philosophical quest as one that searches for definition only to upend it by making clear the perpetual inadequacy of that quest (or, if you will, the strange space in which that quest is pursued, in which the end of the movement lands one at the beginning again), the man whose daimon is a sort of spirit of negativity. This Socrates contends for a viewpoint that seems paradoxical: the man who does voluntary injustice is better than the man who does involuntary injustice. The reason? Behind the windings of the dialogue, Socrates reason is strangely similar to Gorgias’ viewpoint: the man who does injustice voluntarily has a greater capacity, both for justice and injustice, than the man who does injustice involuntarily. In other words, being polytropic, wily, guileful, is not a mark of weakness – it is the feint of a higher capacity.

“Under Socrates' questioning Hippias seems eager to state that the liar is capable, prudent, knowing, and wise (365d-366a): his eagerness suggests that he is as outraged at the polytropic man as Achilles was at Odysseus. Outrage makes Hippias far less willing to agree with Socrates' argument that it is the true expert in an art who is both the liar and the truth-teller and that the same man is a liar and truthful about the things of that art (367c-d). Socrates selects arts in which Hippias claims special expertise (calculating, geometry; astronomy) and when he generalizes from these arts to all arts and sciences, he again uses Hippias as his example, the Hippias whom Socrates heard boasting in the market place beside the money tables that he is the wisest of all human beings in the greatest number of arts (368b). Socrates' argument shows that the same man is liar and truth-teller but Hippias's response shows that capable Hippias is not that man; something in addition to the capacity of a Hippias seems necessary for the polytropic man.”

This post is the successor of my last post. My complaint in that one is that politics in America is stuck in the rhetorical mode of indignatio – shame-making. Myself, I think opposition to the current regime (and I am not, here, talking simply about the left – I include even conservative opposition to the war and the lack of stewardship) would be better served by the polytropic. The weakness of, say, Kerry as a politician was not that he was all things to all people, but that he was not convincingly anything to anybody.

But is Socrates right? Does the capacity to lie or to tell the truth – does an elevation above shame – make for the better leader?