A Simpler Socrates (II)

Last time I looked at some of the implicit themes of Xenophon's Socratic dialogues. In particular, I tried to show that Xenophon's Athens might have been democratic, but it certainly wasn't liberal. And that puts quite a different spin on Plato's world-building efforts, with his anti-democratic pseudo-tyrannies becoming far more the product of his existing society than a direct challenge to the social order.

In this concluding part, I feel it's only fair to tackle at least some of Xenophon's explicit claims. Much of what he says is more interesting than simply acting as a foil to Plato, so let's try and give the man his due. Time to un-scratch and get back to the surface.

Xenophon's Lucky Dip

This is how the translator's describe it. There's not much sort of structure to Xenophon's work or works, so I'll try and summarise the most interesting stuff only in brief. It's hard to assemble this in any sort of linked theme, so I'm not going to try.

Proto-Stoicism

Let's start with Xenophon's sometimes prudish and certainly conservative sense of self-discipline. There are a number of passages which are very similar to Epictetus' pseudo-Vulcan idea that emotional control is the acme of social achievement. Let's begin with a fun one. The translator's might call him prudish, but there are some particularly colourful metaphors when it comes to sex :

Socrates is reported to have said, in the presence of several persons including Euthydemus himself, that Critias seemed to be suffering from a pig's itch : he wanted to scratch himself against Euthydemus like a piglet scratching itself against a stone.

"You are dense," said Socrates. "Do you think that good-looking people inject nothing in the act of kissing, just because you can't see it ? Don't you realise that this creature which they call the bloom of youth is even more dangerous than spiders ?"

And yet while he sometimes seems to be espousing a policy of strict denial, elsewhere :

And don't forget that whereas to other animals they [the gods] have granted the pleasures of sex for a limited period of the year, for us they provide them continuously, and up until old age.

The man who is hungry or thirsty of his own free will can eat and drink when he wants to, whereas the man who suffers through force of circumstances can't stop the suffering... Easy tasks and momentary pleasures cannot produce physical fitness, or develop in the mind any knowledge worth mentioning; sustained application, however, enables us to achieve truly good results... My friends can enjoy food and drink with pleasure and without effort, because they abstain until they feel a desire for them.

This is a view that self-denial is not to be sought because the things we enjoy are wrong in themselves, but because they may become all-consuming. The goal is not abstinence, but self-control. As in the examples of rape and adultery last time, for Xenophon the moral "wrong" is not necessarily so much the act itself but the ruin of character. Compare this with Epictetus' comments that the sack of Troy itself was no more than the destruction of "stork's nests", and that the real crime was not the destruction of property but that the Greeks wanted to carry this out.

The essence of Stoicism in Epictetus is that only your opinions affect you, that how you respond to events is what matters, not the events themselves. Nothing can really hurt you unless you let it. While Xenophon never quite hits on this idea, and certainly doesn't develop it to the ludicrous extremes that Epictetus did, he comes tantalisingly close :

Enemies too are assets for someone who is capable of deriving benefits from them.

Which certainly seems to be the case for the modern politician who deliberately courts the hatred of the masses ! Xenophon was a long way from saying "only opinion is what matters", but there are definitely common themes all the same : you may be my enemy, but whether you can hurt me is not necessarily up to you.

Another similarity to Epictetus is the notion that ignorance is a form of slavery. Notably, in Xenophon's recounting of Socrates trial, he has Socrates not defend his own ignorance as in Plato's (infinitely more dramatic) version*, but behave as a much more ordinary character blessed with great wisdom and the regular sort of knowledge : he simply knows a lot of different things, rather than being self-aware of his own ignorance.

* Xenophon's version of the defence is interesting but unremarkable. Some missing aspects, such as the importance of self-examination, are found elsewhere in his works, but nothing comes close to the high drama of Plato's Apology.

This is how he spoke about those who occupied themselves with these [supposedly useless] speculations. He himself always discussed human matters, trying to find out the nature of piety and impiety, honour and dishonour, right and wrong, sanity and lunacy, courage and cowardice... while those who were ignorant of them might fairly be called slavish.

This is almost verbatim how Epictetus viewed knowledge and freedom. Likewise, both viewed behaviour as paramount. If you had the theoretical knowledge of right and wrong, but were unable to actually carry out the correct actions (or avoid the wrong ones), then you couldn't be called wise or said to be truly knowledgeable. 

When somebody asked him [Socrates] if he thought that those who understood what they ought to do, but did the opposite, were wise and weak, he replied, "No more than I think them both unwise and weak. I presume that everyone acts by choosing from the courses open to him the one which he supposes to be most expedient. So I think that those who act wrongly are neither wise nor prudent."

Plato develops this theme of nobody doing wrong intentionally at some length. I wondered if this might be because there seems a tendency in the Greek philosophers to get their knickers in a twist when it comes to definitions, e.g. Plato insisting that laws cannot be unjust, which to his great credit Xenophon partly remedies, as we'll see later. 

But after thinking it over, I think it might instead only reflect ancient Greece's much more limited understanding of psychology, both in terms of neuroscience and our apparent reasoning processes - how our minds seem to work. Conflicting desires, unconscious thoughts, hormones, an element of chance and uncertainty, do not seem to have come into the Greek thought much : pretty nearly everything in both Plato and Xenophon is a matter of knowledge and choice. 

Yet when I look at both contemporary politicians and those of history, I find it hard to believe that an element of sheer malice didn't play any role. There are some actions which are so obviously wrong that nobody can doubt them or be unaware of them; as with bullshit, it's not that some people don't know about the truth or right action, it's that they don't care. They don't misjudge which action is better or worse. They either don't make that judgement at all, or they make it and proceed wrongly anyway... or they actively enjoy making other people suffer.

Some men just want to watch the world burn. For all their many faults, both Plato and Xenophon appear to have had too noble a conception of man to allow for this simple possibility.

A Moral Busybody

Xenophon sometimes comes across as incredibly petty, criticising people for eating food without bread, insisting that washing must be done with cold water, and that people can be made to behave properly in the same way as dogs : rewarding good behaviour and punishing (often physically) the bad. There's a lot of slippery-slope fallacies, that any small deviation will lead inevitably to ruin. Start wearing soft shoes and you'll end up as a drug-addled hedonistic whore, or something.

This is an issue which continues to plague mankind. Every time we invent something which can automate an unpleasant chore, we fret over it : not just that it might not work, or be unsafe, but that if it does work it'll make us all soft and ill-disciplined, it'll be the downfall of civilisation, get those kids off my lawn...

As I see it the two competing strains of thought must both be true. We certainly can become lazy and ill-disciplined in some circumstances, but we can also be improved by easier conditions (compare the desert-hardened but brutal Fremen of Dune with the thoughtful but combat-ready officers of Star Trek) . In one very interesting passage, Xenophon says that giving people more money improves them :

When they know they've got something with which to buy what they need, they don't want to risk committing crimes.

Sadly this passage, in a work thick with humour and irony, is like many parts of Xenophon poorly developed and the discussion moves on far too soon. Elsewhere he frequently commends Socrates for his poverty.

I cannot here address the wider issue of which resources make us better or worse and under what circumstances. But I will venture a few thoughts. In my recent look at the possible impacts of AI development, I put forth that the better you are without AI, the better you'll be able to make use of it. Furthermore, it's silly to insist we must still all be capable of pencil-and-paper long division when calculating devices are utterly ubiquitous. We will always need a certain base level of understanding, but beyond that, when a technology (or resources) becomes truly universal, we should take it for granted*. That is a key part of how we elevate our capabilities, through the development of both mental and physical tools, extended cognition and extended biology. We really are man the tool-maker as a defining characteristic of our species.

* My take on AI in the classroom/exams is : yes, this is perfectly fine... if and when it becomes comparable in availability and accuracy to a calculator. Similarly, nobody would suggest giving calculators to 7 year olds and avoid training them in the absolute basics of mathematics, but nobody would suggest banning calculators in astrophysics exams either.

In other words, instead of saying that technology makes us less human, as in Dune especially, we should see it as a key part of our identity. Our solution to most problems is to invent the appropriate tool, and there's nothing wrong with that. Technology raises our concerns to ever-more cerebral levels, but this doesn't make them any less valid.

Still, it's good practise to be able to do as much as we can with as few resources as we can manage. But once we've mastered that, once our training period is complete, our devices become valuable assets. We do not become soft just because we have hot soapy water on demand and don't have to break through a frozen river to get clean every morning, as long as we're straining ourselves in other ways. Someone equipped with a state-of-the-art supercomputer who is using it to play Minecraft is a self-indulgent twit, but someone who's using it to solve ever-more complex problems, thinking about whether the results are plausible and using it to inspire themselves to further investigations, is enriching both themselves and society.

So I vehemently disagree with Xenophon's passage ranting against useless knowledge (something very similar can also be found - yet again - in Epictetus) :

Geometry should be learned so far to enable one to receive or convey or apportion land accurately in point of measurement, or to carry out a task. He [Socrates] deprecated taking the learning of geometry as far as figures which are difficult to comprehend. He said that he didn't see the use of them, and he said that these studies were capable of wasting a man's life and keeping him from learning many other useful things.

He told them to become acquainted also with astronomy, but here again only so far as to be able to to recognise the time of night... or for any other business. But to learn astronomy to the extent of even acquiring a knowledge of bodies moving in different orbits... and to wear oneself out with trying to discover their distances from the Earth... from this he vigorously tried to dissuade them. He said that in these studies he saw no utility and they too, he said, could waste a man's life and keep him from much that was profitable.

Blink.

Well, FUCK YOU, SIR !

A more stupid, short-sighted and badly-aged comment I think I have never encountered. I've railed against this kind of bigoted, backward, absurd strain of pragmatic "thinking" at length here, so I won't do so again. I am, however, dismayed to see people falling into this stupid anti-thought trap just because nowadays billionaires are the ones pushing technological development in certain areas rather than governments. This strain of cynicism is not unfounded (since mega-corps undeniably don't have the best interests of the masses at heart), but to say that therefore the technology itself is bad is as nonsensically, reprehensibly stupid as Xenophon/Socrates raving against knowledge for knowledge's sake.

Legally lawful

One different topic I feel I owe it to Xenophon to pick up on his is brief discussion of the legitimacy of laws. Recall my dismay at how this gets such a short dismissal in Plato, thanks to his strange definition that laws must only be that which is good, and anything else isn't a "real" law. Xenophon somewhat avoids this. He describes laws enacted by a despot as inherently using violence and compulsion rather than persuasion, when "a minority enacts something not by persuading the majority but by dominating it".

As usual this is not well-developed. What exactly is the difference between the sort of compulsion that defines an act of despotism and the kind of punishments that good laws must enforce ? Reading between the lines it feels like because the latter have been discussed by "truly good" men, i.e. experts, which have then been disseminated into the wider populace and accepted by a vast majority. The populace have then, in effect, voluntarily signed up to them ahead of time, knowing that if they transgress they will deserve the appointed punishment. By contrast, a despot has no agreed-upon principles and can act retroactively, without any kind of consensus in society. 

This is reading in quite a lot, however. In another dialogue, Xenophon develops much more explicitly the concept of "natural law", the laws of the gods which are universal truths; we might think of them as the laws of physics. In both cases, natural and human law, one must pay the penalty for transgressions, which may be enforced by man or god (e.g. you can't break the law of gravity, and if you pretend to be an expert in something you're not, eventually the consequences will become apparent), or both if the laws happen to coincide (e.g. laws against incest). 

This may help a little in explaining Plato's idea of the impossibility of bad law, but it has a distinct vibe that those who suffer without apparent cause are doing so because of divine wrath*. For example, Xenophon's description of farming is highly romanticised, only paying brief lip service to the hardship and toil it must have involved (interestingly, his statements about the importance of farming and fighting are eerily similar to the pantomime villain of moral philosophy, Lord Shang).

* Plato was more concerned with the opposite, emphasising that those who seem to have gotten away with wrongdoing will suffer divine retribution in the end.

Who was Socrates ?

As mentioned in the previous post, Socratic dialogues seem to have been a type of literary genre at the time, almost a sort of fan fiction. The translator warns that we learn more about Xenophon here than we do about Socrates himself, and that while the earlier works (as in Plato) are likely closer to the historical figure, this is by no means certain. Basically we've got Xenophon's half-remembered, biased recollections that he probably set down years later, sometimes not intending them to be read as fact at all.

I'm not even remotely capable or interested in doing a Plato/Xenophon Socratic comparison (the ideas themselves discussed are much more worthwhile anyway), so I'll keep this very brief. There are a myriad of similarities between the two Socrates' (Socrateases-es ? Socratii ?), especially an enthusiasm for expert knowledge. Contrary to the Apology, in both writers, Socrates is often keen to acknowledge that experts are indeed knowledgeable in their specialist area. The style of questioning and answer is, though, not always similar : in Xenophon, Socrates sometimes simply gives a whole series of rhetorical questions in the form of a speech, without waiting for or even asking for responses.

The most frustrating thing about Xenophon is that conversations are never really rounded off. They just sort of... stop. Plato keeps everything nicely self-contained, trying to summarise the findings and often stating possible errors worthy of further examination, and letting the reader know explicitly when no firm conclusion can be drawn. Xenophon's Socrates can be incredibly cringey, with clumsy metaphors and mansplaining to an unbearable degree, which is nothing like Plato's version.

The translator suggests a few things that might be going on. First, we all of us present different versions of ourselves to different people, and different people interpret us differently. Plato was mainly concerned with the abstract, high theory of philosophy, while Xenophon was much more pragmatic. So perhaps not only did they interpret Socrates in this light, but he himself probably adjusted his style to suit their preferences. And where there are some stark differences in conclusions, what might be happening is that Socrates would try to establish general principles, with his followers then applying them differently to the same specific examples, according to their own preferences.

This is reasonably satisfying. But as the translator's note, the true historical figure of Socrates is likely lost forever.

Conclusions

I found Xenophon well worth a go. He's not a perfect writer, but then unlike Plato he went on military campaigns, so he probably just didn't have the time to polish stuff up. Even so, there are moments when he comes close to Plato's level of scrutiny, and occasionally touches on issues that Plato preferred to avoid.

The most interesting take-home points for me are :

• Ancient Athens was a more religious, far less liberal society than the view one sometimes gets in popular culture. Plato neglects slaves and the issue of slavery almost entirely, Xenophon does not. While plenty of historians do emphasise that ancient philosophers existed in a very different social environment than modern academics, to read the source material in support of this has somehow a different impact. 
• Likewise, democracy is not necessarily liberal. It emerged in this early instance from a very different society to ours (albeit strikingly similar in some aspects), and was consequently shaped to an altogether different form and purpose. Any attempts to draw lessons from history regarding the success and virtues of democratic government need to take account for this.
• The idea that nobody does wrong intentionally is in my view a reflection of the Athenian's lack of understanding of psychology and neurology. We don't act entirely on conscious decisions, and we can be influenced by various forces to act contrary to our own careful, sincerely-held assessment of what's right and wrong. Behaviour doesn't always reflect belief; belief doesn't always cause behaviour.
• Self-control does not mean abstinence, and not every sort of labour-saving device or improvement in comfort will lead to a moral decline. What matters is that we take advantage of these, to use them to elevate our concerns ever further from the base level of subsistence to more profound achievements. This does not mean our workloads should always remain constant, that we aren't sometimes overworked. Enjoyment of pleasures does not automatically mean we're slacking off.

Right, that's Xenophon dealt with. On to the next in my enormous pile of unread books.