Clouds I [redux]
On understanding the Socratic example
In the Clouds we see a contest between philosophy and other claims to wisdom, in particular the claims of religion and poetry or the arts. There were great philosophers before Socrates, but they’re not concerned with politics. Rather they were concerned with nature, they investigated nature, and as such we can think of them as the contemporary equivalents of natural scientists. For them, politics was the place where conventions reigned, that is, there was no firm, no solid, no certain political knowledge to be discovered because everything was based upon mutual agreement.
Socrates is credited with bringing philosophy down into the streets from the heavens, with turning it from a concern with the stars to a concern with morals. In short, Socrates is credited with being the first to recognize the possibility that there may be a natural foundation underlying conventional things. Or put another way, Socrates is credited with recognizing that human beings live according to conventions by nature, that is, that conventions themselves are natural.
Given the world historical importance of Socrates, it’s worth noting we have only three primary sources by which to learn about him: Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes—and only the latter wrote while Socrates was alive. As such it is only the writings of Aristophanes that could have had any effect on Socrates’s life, that could have altered his behavior, that could have taught him something that he didn’t know. Posthumous writings can affect how we see someone later, that is, it can affect how their example shapes history, but they cannot affect how the person written about actually lived.
As mentioned before there were great philosophers before Socrates, but we have almost no complete pre-Socratic writings – except for The Clouds. As a result, we do not really know how the old philosophers viewed the new philosopher.
Furthermore, Plato notes in the seventh letter that he portrays Socrates made young or novel (neos) and beautiful or noble (kalos). What the relation of this beautified Socrates is to the historical Socrates we cannot say for sure. We simply do not know what the historical Socrates was like, because we only have the depictions of these three, again Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes. In every portrait, no matter how distorted, there must nevertheless be some truth, at least if we are to be able to recognize its subject. As such it’s worth asking after the relationship between the depictions of Socrates that we do have.
Aristophanes is the only one who wrote while Socrates was alive, and so his depiction is the earliest. Moreover, it seems to contradict the depictions of both Plato and Xenophon. That said, is not necessarily the case that they do contradict each other. They may not contradict if there was a shift in Socrates’s way of life or behavior—or if there is an underlying unity beneath the surface. It’s clear that Aristophanes’ writings could have had an influence on Socrates. In fact, there’s a story, which is perhaps apocryphal, of Socrates being in attendance while the Clouds was being performed and of his standing up so that the audience could see the mask worn by the actor portraying him was sufficiently ugly.
In the Clouds, we get Socrates the natural philosopher, that is, we see a man who is concerned with natural things. On the fact that Socrates was a natural philosopher, at least at some point in his life, all our sources agree. Thus, it’s clear that at some point there was a shift or turn in Socrates’s inquiry. This shift or this turn or the second sailing is depicted in Plato’s Apology, Symposium, and Phaedo. Interestingly, in the Symposium, the dialog where Diotima teaches Socrates about love or eros, Aristophanes plays a role.
Now one of the lessons that might arise out of Aristophanes’ Clouds is that there might be a problem with doing natural philosophy or science without paying attention to the political community within which one exists. In other words, we might not be able strictly to separate the scientific from the political; each might bear upon the other; each might affect the other.