William H.F. Altman, The Bogotá Lectures; §2. “Plato and ‘The Presocratics’”

Last year in Buenos Aires, Livio Rosetti opened the inaugural meeting of the International Society of Socratic Studies with a paper called “Né filosofo né sofista.” Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rosetti’s paper as a whole was his relentless hostility to Plato: Socrates was neither “philosopher” nor “sophist” because Plato had transformed the meaning of both terms and had, as a result, created the distinction or rather opposition between the two. The principal result of “Platonic affabulation” (a marvelous phrase) and “the substantially arbitrary portrayal of Socrates-the-philosopher to which Plato loved to devote himself” was what Rosetti called “the ‘modern’ notion of philosophy,” one that had supplanted an older view: “So, if really no traces of the ‘modern’ notion of philosophy were available before Plato, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion—I dare to insist—that it is not correct to speak either of pre-Socratic philosophers or of Socrates as a philosopher.”[1] Since much of Rossetti’s work has focused on the Presocratics,[2] it would be interesting in the context of last night’s lecture to consider the connection between his attempt to establish “another Parmenides” as “Parmenides φυσικός”[3]—and thus to rehabilitate Δόξα as evidence of its author’s important contributions to physics—with his attempt to rehabilitate a pre-Platonic conception of Socrates. But last November, other matters seemed more important, and in the meeting that formally constituted the International Society of Socratic Studies three days later, the best I could do was to prevent, against Rossetti’s formidable authority, the inclusion of the following statement in the new society’s by-laws: “the study of Plato as such is outside our scope.”

Even more striking to me on that first day than Rossetti’s attack on Plato—and naturally I am particularly sensitive to and indeed rather defensive about that kind of thing—was the fact that his “Né filosofo né sofista” began with high praise for André Laks and Glenn W. Most for their nine-volume Early Greek Philosophy published in 2016:[4] “This work surprised everyone because of the inclusion of a section dedicated to Socrates. I would like to begin by noting that this is not an appendix, but a chapter which is placed immediately after those on Protagoras and Gorgias and before those dedicated to Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Hippias, and Antiphon, to other intellectuals and other texts of the end of the fifth century BC. His inclusion among the pre-Socratics does not fail to surprise, and certainly it surprises not only because of the paradox of a Socrates who, if not as a sophist, happens to be treated, at least, as a pre-Socratic, something that would not be good anyway. There is no reason, however, to lose ourselves behind such obviousness, since the choice of Laks and Most constitutes, I dare to say, an unexpected but wholly due act.”[5] In the light of this extraordinary endorsement, it became obvious that despite his paper’s title, Rossetti was far more interested in denying that Socrates was a philosopher than that he was a sophist. And what made this endorsement extraordinary is that it was Socrates who had brought us together in Buenos Aires, and as I said in response to Rossetti’s talk as soon as it ended, it seemed very strange to begin the conference with praise for the decision of Laks and Most to include Socrates among the sophists.

There are in fact three things that make the presence of Socrates an extraordinary feature of Early Greek Philosophy in addition to the fact that its authors place him among the sophists, and Rossetti has pointed to the second one of them. Since Laks and Most have created the “new Diels-Kranz,”[6] and are therefore supplementing or replacing what Hermann Diels called “The Fragments of the Presocratics,”[7] it is extraordinary to find Socrates among the Presocratics, which would seem to be a logical impossibility. The principal theme of tonight’s lecture is that it is a turning point in the reception of Plato that has made this possible, and Rossetti’s rejection of “Platonic affabulation” exemplifies but neither initiates nor consummates that turning. Of course Laks and Most avoid the logical problem here by naming their work “Early Greek Philosophy,” thus deliberately making no reference to either Socrates or the Presocratics in their title.[8] But there is a third extraordinary aspect of the inclusion of Socrates in Early Greek Philosophy that has been overlooked. Whatever other differences there may be between Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker and Early Greek Philosophy, their format is the some: both consist of a numbered series of fragments. This is as it must be because what unquestionably joins almost all of the authors in both of these books—whether we call them “philosophers,” sophists,” or something else—is that their sayings and teachings, like the biographical information about all of them, exist only in fragmentary form.[9] The only exception, indeed, is Socrates.

Although he wrote nothing, Socrates cannot be said to survive in fragments. This separates him from all of the other thinkers considered in Diels-Kranz and Laks-Most. It is true that we have only fragments of some of the authors who wrote about Socrates, but even if we do not include Aristotle among our principal sources for information about him—and last night I tried to show why we should not—we have a complete play of Aristophanes along with a great number of intact works about Socrates by Xenophon and Plato. It is therefore not just the elimination of “Presocratic” that marks the advance of Early Greek Philosophy on Diels-Kranz, but even more necessarily, albeit covertly, the elimination of the word “Fragments” from its title. The point is an important one: thanks to the inclusion of Socrates in Early Greek Philosophy, we are no longer dealing exclusively with fragments, but—and I will return to this point later in more detail—Socrates will nevertheless appear in Laks-Most in the exact same format as all the other thinkers considered there, and that means: as if he survived only in fragments. To be sure Laks and Most will include passages in their chapter on Socrates from Xenophon, Plato, and of course Aristotle, including the passages I discussed critically last night. But this format will conceal the truth. It is the fact that Socrates does not survive only in fragments, and is therefore unique among the thinkers included in Early Greek Philosophy, that constitutes the best reason—a far better reason, that is, than an antipathy to “Platonic affabulation”—for preserving “Presocratics” as a concept.

I emphasize the word “concept” because it appears in Most’s recent translation of Laks’s Introduction à la ‘philosophie presocratique’ (2004): The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origins, Development, and Significance.[10] In the Preface to Early Greek Philosophy, Laks and Most devote only a single paragraph to their attempt to avoid, suppress, and replace the term “Presocratics,” concluding significantly: “Thus our collection takes as its object more the Preplatonic philosophers than the Presocratic ones, following the line of demarcation that was usually Nietzsche’s as well.”[11] It is therefore primarily in The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy that Laks makes the most extensive case for what Laks and Most would bring to light twelve years later. At the center of this book’s first chapter, and then reappearing in its last one,[12] is a distinction between two ways of considering “Presocratic” as a concept. The first of these, the one that uses physics and cosmology to distinguish Socrates from the thinkers that preceded him, Laks calls “Socratic-Ciceronian,” the other “the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition,” and he comments on the difference in a preliminary way as follows: “while the former only thematizes a certain rupture, the latter by contrast brings to light the thread of a deeper continuity behind it.”[13] A few pages later, he explains the two in more detail, and the passage deserves to be quoted at length:

“The Socratic- Ciceronian tradition is characterized by the fact that it locates the rupture between Socrates and his predecessors at the level of a certain content, in certain cases linked to a definite epistemological attitude: before Socrates, nature, the sky, and more generally being, within a purely theoretical perspective; starting with Socrates, man, his action, and morality, within the perspective of an essentially practical philosophy. The Platonic- Aristotelian tradition, by contrast, locates this rupture at the level of the method, that is, of the instruments that allow the contents to become objects of thought: one might say that it attributes to Socrates a second- order kind of thought, by opposition to the first-order kind that was characteristic of his predecessors. This shift toward epistemological questions, which evidently can open up the possibility of reinterpreting not only Socrates himself but also the pre- Socratics, occurs for the first time in the Phaedo of Plato.”[14]

I will make the following observations about this revealing passage: (1) neither of these alternatives address the distinction between the survival of Socrates in complete works and that of the others—whether they be Presocratic, Preplatonic, or anything else—only in fragments. (2) Although there is certainly a sense in which Aristotle maintains his own continuity with the so-called “Presocratics,” his comment that Socrates was in no way concerned with physics undermines the rupture-continuity distinction Laks is attempting to make, and (3) this means Laks’s “continuity” claim rests entirely upon Phaedo,[15] where Plato’s Socrates tells about how his youthful interest in physics ended with the discovery that he was unsuited to pursue such matters. From these observations I draw the following conclusion: that no matter how useful “continuity” as opposed to “rupture” may be for avoiding, suppressing, and rejecting the concept “Presocratic,” calling it “Platonic-Aristotelian” is unacceptable, even more unacceptable than the lack of attention Laks gives to Xenophon.[16] In short: Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, are all agreed that Socrates was “Socratic” in accordance with what Laks calls “The Socratic-Ciceronian tradition.”

It would therefore have been more honest to distinguish the tradition that includes Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero from what might be called “the Aristophanic tradition,” for in the Clouds of Aristophanes, Socrates is famously similar both to the Presocratics and the sophists. Indeed apart from a chronological argument against the concept “Presocratic”—one that points out that Socrates was contemporary with the sophists and earlier than Democritus[17]—the tradition of “rupture” can only be suppressed by emphasizing both the continuity of his predecessors with Socrates with respect to ethics and Socrates’ continuity with his predecessors with respect to physics.[18] Laks and Most are at pains to make the best case for both that they can, and in this they are part of a broader movement, as we will see. But for now the important thing to emphasize is that it is not so much the category “Presocratic” that is under attack here as it is the concept “Socratic.” And it is the suppression of Socrates as a Socratic that creates the continuity between tonight’s lecture and last night’s: then my subject was the attempt to create a rupture between Socrates and Plato by denying that Plato was a Socratic. With Timaeus in his hand, Plato could be and has been made to appear as a physicist, and by linking him to the Pythagoreans on the basis of his “unwritten teachings,” Aristotle made it possible to shrink the category of “Socratic” to Socrates himself. As should be obvious, now not even Socrates is safely “Socratic.”

It is in the context of an ongoing attempt to suppress a “Socratic” rupture that the decision of Laks and Most to place Socrates among the sophists becomes intelligible and even necessary. It is the sophists, not the physicists formerly known as “Presocratics,” that create the needed continuity with Socrates’ concern for ethics and the right-conduct of life. By placing Socrates after Protagoras and Gorgias,[19] Laks and Most can refute the claim that Socrates’ turn to ethics was any kind of rupture. As for suppressing the rupture between Socrates and physics, the key figure—aside from Aristophanes—is Arcesilaus,[20] and I can safely predict that you will be hearing that name more frequently in the years ahead. In the meantime, I will recommend that you read the chapter about him in Diogenes Laertius,[21] where the tradition that Socrates was the disciple of Anaxagoras’ disciple Arcesilaus—who combined a recognizably “Presocratic” cosmology with the claim that “what is just and shameful exist not by nature but by convention”[22]—is presented as fact.[23] In short, although the replacement will inevitably masquerade as an up-to-date improvement on a recognizably flawed classic, the distinction that must ultimately serve to dethrone Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker for the sake of Early Greek Philosophy is not “Socratic-Ciceronian” vs. “Platonic-Aristotelian” but rather “Socratic” in the tradition of Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero vs. an alternative based on Aristophanes and Arcesilaus.[24]

But even though the name “Socratic-Ciceronian” is incomplete, it does usefully call attention to Cicero’s seminal role in the discovery of “Presocratic philosophy.” The famous passage in his Tusculan Disputations where Cicero describes Socrates as having been the first who called philosophy down from the heavens into the lives of men[25] is the first to use the phrase “from ancient philosophy all the way to Socrates” and to mention that Socrates had heard Archelaus. To begin with, this demonstrates that the clearest and indeed classic statement of the “rupture” theory was made by our oldest source for what has now become the best piece of evidence for the “continuity” alternative; not only did Cicero see no conflict between the Socratic revolution that in effect reduced all that preceded him as essentially “Presocratic,” but he also ties that revolution not only to the rejection of Anaxagoras—as Plato had done before him—and to the influence of Archelaus. What this means is that the essence of what it meant to be a Socratic was still accessible to Cicero long after Aristotle’s attempt to establish the continuity between Plato and the Pythagoreans and between himself and “Presocratic philosophy” as its culmination. And just as Cicero could join Xenophon and Plato as a fellow Socratic long after Aristotle, so too was it possible for Parmenides to have laid the foundations for Plato’s “Socratic” rejection of cosmology long before Socrates. In fact, the sharper the divide between Parmenides’ “Truth” and his cosmological “Δόξα,” the more it is his goddess, not Socrates, who appears to be the creator of the “rupture” that it remains necessary to call “Socratic” only because it is now that rupture itself that is coming under so concerted an attack.

At this point, I would like to tell you a personal story about two conferences I attended in the summer of 2014. It was at the second of these—the fourth biennial conference of the International Association for Presocratic Studies in Thessaloniki—that Cicero, Parmenides, and the Presocratics came together for me. I was giving a paper on one of the most famous fragments of Parmenides, the single line alleging that to think and to be are the same, arguing that it belonged not in “Truth,” where it had been placed by Diels-Kranz as “B3,” but in Δόξα.[26] After showing that those who had preserved the fragment—Plotinus and Proclus—had shed no light whatsoever on where in the poem B3 belonged, I cited the ongoing debate about its meaning as evidence that it was characteristic of what the goddess called “two-headed mortals.”[27] The important thing is that my argument was based entirely on the sharp distinction between the two parts of Parmenides’ poem, and there is an interesting and important connection between an attempt like Rossetti’s to weaken that distinction and the attempt of Laks and Most to weaken the distinction between Socrates and both Archelaus and the sophists. Moreover, and in the context of last night’s lecture, there is an even deeper continuity that connects both of these phenomena to Aristotle’s “as Plato says in Timaeus” and the attempt to weaken the distinction between Being and Becoming in Plato generally. In any case, it is worth mentioning before continuing my story that the independent existence of Diels-Kranz B3 has disappeared in Early Greek Philosophy, and that Laks and Most have joined it to another fragment that clearly does belong in “Truth.”[28]

The International Association for Presocratic Studies conference was a large one, and in the presence of most of the greatest names in Presocratic studies—Graham, McKirahan, Casertano, Bernabé, Primavesi, Cordero, Rossetti, Mourelatos, Curd, and Huffman—papers like mine were bunched together for “Discussion” that involved two of us sitting at either end of a table in a large room and awaiting any questions or comments that any of the conference participants might wish to stop by and pose. From formats like this, I have learned not to attach much importance to my own paper but rather to see what I could learn from others, and in this particular case, I had formulated a question on my way to Thessaloniki that I put to every person I met at the conference, including such luminaries as would converse with me: “Who do you think created the concept of ‘Presocratic Philosophy?” It is here, of course, that Cicero enters my story, for I had already reached the conclusion that “Cicero” is the right answer, and I was therefore delighted to discover recently that both Laks and Most agree.[29] But at the time, in 2014, I found no one who agreed—Plato and Aristotle were the usual anwers—not even when I defended my answer by quoting the Tusculan Disputations. Between these disappointing answers, the sycophantic deference shown by so many careerists to the luminaries, and its huge size and format, the conference was a great disappointment to me, and my most vivid memory of it is something Oliver Primavesi said in his plenary lecture: “Scholars who ignore the twelfth-century Byzantine scholia on Empedocles do so at their own peril.”[30]

This conference was all the more disappointing to me because it was the second I attended in the summer of 2014. The first was much smaller, more collegial, and indeed intimate; it met in Israel and was called “Plato and Xenophon: Comparative Studies.” It is curious that a theme so closely related to Athens should be discussed in such close geographical proximity to Jerusalem, but when the summer was over, and I had the chance to reflect on my experiences at the two conferences, I realized that I’d been closer to Athens in Jerusalem than I had been in Thessaloniki. It would be difficult to describe what made the “Plato and Xenophon” conference so magical, but there were three of us that attended both conferences, and we all agreed that the first was infinitely more fun, more open-minded, and more educational than the second. For me personally, the distinguishing feature was what the Greeks called ἔρως, and by that I mean neither sexual coupling—of that I saw traces only at the Presocratics conference—nor anything like one of Empedocles’ two cosmological principles. It was rather the self-expression of mutual appreciation made possible by a chaste and playful kind of flirtation that enlivened the conference, and since both Xenophon and Plato wrote a Socrates-centered Symposium, “erotic” seemed to be the right word for this magical je ne sais quoi. In short, I learned something about myself in the summer of 2014: I am very definitely a Socratic, and it was the conference on the Presocratics that brought this truth home to me with great force.

The principal luminary at the “Plato and Xenophon” conference was Louis-André Dorion, a tireless and effective champion of Xenophon. Like Cicero’s, his fellow Socratic on my account, Xenophon’s defenders must fight his critics over the very name “philosopher,” for despite an attempt like Rosetti’s to show that Plato created the “modern” sense of “philosophy,” the fact is that whatever it was that the Presocratics called what they were doing, it was closer to what continues to pass for “real philosophy” than anything we find in Xenophon or Cicero, except—in the latter’s case—for the valuable information he preserves about the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the New Academy. Dorion’s principal claim is that we should abandon “the Socratic Question” and give up the attempt to discover “the historical Socrates” on the basis of Plato, Xenophon, or Aristophanes.[31] Rather, we should read both Plato’s and Xenophon’s Socratic writings on their own terms, and for the sake of better understanding what these two Socratics are using their Socrates to teach us. Although there was no need for Dorion to make so obvious a point, the open-mindedness required from a scholar willing to find a Socratic pursuit of excellence in both Plato and Xenophon depends on the simple fact that both tried to express the essence of Socrates in works of literature that survive complete and can be interpreted as the artistic wholes that they are. As I’ve mentioned before, it is precisely the fact that Socrates does not survive in fragments that further justifies treating him differently from Empedocles and the rest of the Presocratics, although on chronological grounds, it might be better to use term “not-Socratic,” as proposed by Kranz in his Preface to the fifth edition of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.[32]

So great is Plato’s contribution to Socratic literature that it is easy to forget that it is not Plato himself but Xenophon who is the first ancient philosopher whose writings survive complete. How are we to explain this fact? Given that Plato was the second whose writings survive intact, there is an obvious but easily overlooked answer: it was Xenophon’s Socratic writings that caused all the rest of his works to survive. And why was Socratic literature the first kind of philosophy to survive? Here we are confronted by the dilemma at the center of tonight’s lecture. Is it our scholarly duty to regard this as an unfortunate accident, and therefore peel away the Plato-inspired distortions that have caused the tradition to identify Socrates as a turning point in Ancient Philosophy, and to emphasize instead Socrates’ continuity with both the sophists and the physicists as opposed to the artificial differences between them that Plato and constructed? Or is the concept “Presocratic” amply justified not so much because it is the best name for the sophists, physicists, thinkers, and philosophers to whom it has been applied but rather because it preserves the distinction that makes Xenophon and Plato recognizably “Socratic,” not only because their writings survive as the wonderful interpretive puzzles they are, but because it was their combination of ethical seriousness and playful pedagogy that made them a treasure worth preserving?

The section on Socrates in Early Greek Philosophy is one hundred and nineteen pages in length, two hundred and ninety-six pages shorter than the section on Empedocles. Despite this difference in length, the format of the two sections is for the most part the same, both beginning with a chapter outline, followed by information regarding “the philosopher as a person” and “his doctrine” (in the case of Empedocles and the rest, with his actual words in bold); in the unique case of Socrates, Laks and Most delete a third section on “the history of the reception of his doctrine in antiquity”[33] on the grounds that “the reception of Socrates is indistinguishable from a large part of later Greek philosophy.”[34] Notably, none of Socrates’ words are placed in bold, and Laks and Most comment: “any attempt to reconstruct his ideas on the basis of his two most famous disciples, Xenophon and Plato—two profoundly different spirits—is speculative.”[35] This might sound like Dorion’s point but it isn’t: their goal is to pass beyond any merely “speculative” reconstruction: “We provide a small selection of what seem to us to be the most reliable reports concerning his life, views, and argumentative style.”[36] Although they add “we are in no doubt that other scholars would have made other choices,”[37] they conceal the fact that there are still other scholars who would disagree on principle with making any such choices, and above all with the choice to use the same format for Socrates—which demands not only a selection process but treating as fragmentary what are not in fact fragments—and for Empedocles.

The fact that Laks and Most use the words “ideas” and “views” points to another basic problem with including Socrates in Early Greek Philosophy. The letter “D,” which stands for “doctrines,” precedes each testimonium in the second part of each chapter, but their use of “ideas” and “views” indicates a certain degree of warranted hesitation to attribute “doctrines” to Socrates so explicitly. But the sixty-five testimonia marked with a “D” in their chapter tell a more honest story. In last night’s lecture, I pointed to Aristotle as inaugurating a tradition that made it possible and indeed practically inevitable that subsequent historians of Ancient Philosophy would try to isolate the doctrines or δόγματα of Socrates. It is this approach, not Socrates’ Aristotle-endorsed “rupture” with physics, which allows Laks and Most to promote an even broader kind of “continuity” embodied in their book’s format. Consider, for example, the subsection called “The Search for Definitions in Ethics.” As indicated last night, this way of speaking derives from Aristotle.[38] But the subsection also includes a rather more accurate and varied description from Xenophon that makes no reference to “definitions,” “the universal,” or even “the virtues” specifically:

“He himself always discoursed about human matters, investigating what is pious, what is impious, what is fine, what is shameful, what is just, what is unjust, what is temperance (sôphrosunê), what is madness, what is courage, what is a city, what is a citizen, what is the government of men, what is the man who governs men, and about the other things about which he thought that those who know them are fine men (kalos kagathos) while those who ignorant of them could justly be called slavish.”[39]

Let me ask: Are Xenophon and Aristotle really saying the same thing? Should we consider that this passage from Xenophon is confirming the claim—central both to the Stagirite’s account of his predecessor’s δόγματα and to the approach that Laks and Most are now implementing—that what motivated Socrates to discourse in the way he did was “the search for definitions in ethics”? Is it not rather obvious that the goal of Xenophon’s Socrates was to make each of his companions strive to be a kalos kagathos, and that inquiries into, yes, the virtues, but also the city and the citizen were his chosen means to this educational end? And do Socrates’ “two most famous disciples” really differ about this end, or is it an exaggeration—one that undermines the basis of what it means to call both of them “Socratic”—to regard Plato and Xenophon “as two profoundly different spirits” in the context of what it is that is now causing Laks and Most, echoing Aristotle, to speak of Socrates and his “doctrines”? It is therefore both significant and predictable that the list of such doctrines in Early Greek Philosophy includes: “Virtue as Knowledge,” “The Unity of Virtue,” “It is Impossible to Choose Evil,” and “Intemperance is Impossible,”[40] and it should likewise surprise nobody that these four subsections contain six testimonia from Protagoras—three more than the testimonia from all the other Platonic dialogues in these subsections combined—and four from Aristotle.[41]

With respect to Early Greek Philosophy, I have tried to show why dismissing a reconstruction of Socrates’ “ideas” based on Plato and Xenophon as “speculative,” reducing “Socrates” to a number of selected fragments,[42] following Aristotle in emphasizing Socrates’ “doctrines,” and then placing him among the sophists, all contribute to weaken the distinction between “Socratic” and “Presocratic.” But this is not the end of the story. As already mentioned, aligning Socrates with the sophists with respect to ethics and “human matters” is only one part of attacking the Socratic “rupture,” and Laks and Most don’t hesitate to use the other part as well. This explains why the subsection on “Socrates’ Place in the History of Philosophy” is divided into two parts of which the first is called “Was He Only Ever Interested in Moral Philosophy, Never in Natural Philosophy . . . ” and the second: “ . . . or Was he Interested in Natural Philosophy Too?”[43] In short, just as the theme of last night’s lecture was the interpretive trend initiated by Aristotle that has encouraged so many to consider Plato as something other than a Socratic, the theme of tonight’s lecture is the ultra-modern radicalization of that trend that now aims to show that Socrates himself was not a Socratic.

In what remains of tonight’s lecture, I will try to explain my use of “ultra-modern” here, thereby preparing for tomorrow’s. The simple point is that as unfriendly to both Plato and his Socrates is the ancient and ongoing attack on the category “Socratic,” the revival of interest in “the Presocratics” importantly advanced at the beginning of the twentieth century by Diels in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker was itself already unfriendly to Plato and his Socrates. In tomorrow night’s lecture, attention will turn to Nietzsche and Heidegger, but it should be obvious from the start that both of them were reviving interest in Presocratics or Preplatonics as part of an attack on Plato and Platonism. I am calling this trend in German Philosophy “modern,” and will reserve “ultra-modern” for a trend that goes beyond it. For now, I want to show how the difference between Diels-Kranz and Laks-Most exemplifies that difference. In other words, by advancing a “modern” project that made it possible for the Presocratics to speak for themselves in crisp German translations, Diels was already building on an anti-Platonic turning point initiated by Nietzsche on which Heidegger would then use Diels-Kranz to build after the First World War. But the story does not end there, and I am calling Laks-Most “ultra-modern” because, as I have tried to show, even the concept “Presocratic” is too Plato-friendly for them.

In a brilliant 1995 article, Glenn Most laid out the basis for the case I am trying to make.[44] He showed that it was only after the First World War that Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker became popular, and that this popularity was caused by the fact that the War had made Nietzsche into a Presocratic, and more specifically into a second Heraclitus.[45] It is this remarkable thesis that explains the double meaning of Most’s title, itself borrowed from Heraclitus: “War is the father of all things.” Although Most also looks forward to Heidegger’s lectures on Parmenides and Heraclitus delivered at the height of the Second World War,[46] it is the impact of the First to which he draws the reader’s attention. But most important for present purposes is the proof that it is Most, not Laks, who was the pioneer in distinguishing the two different ways of considering the Presocratics. Most emphasizes Aristotle’s teleological approach—by which the Stagirite completed what his primitive forerunners had merely prepared—in describing what will become the “continuity” model. And it is Most who first recognized Cicero’s seminal role in creating the second model, in which “Socrates represented a radical break in the continuity of Greek Philosophy.”[47] He then documents that it was this second path that Nietzsche championed, the difference being, of course, that the same “rupture” that made Cicero a Socratic made Nietzsche himself not so much a Presocratic as an anti-Socratic, the proud restorer of what he called “the tyrants of spirit.”[48] It should go without saying that Nietzsche regarded this as praise.

Tomorrow night, I will follow the path that begins with Nietzsche to Heidegger and beyond him, for indeed Heidegger’s approach to Plato remains what I am calling “modern.” For the present I want to make two points, one that points forward, ominously, and the other that points back. The backwards glance relates to the revival of the “continuity” approach to the Presocratics that Laks and Most are championing: despite the fact that both of them place Nietzsche on the “rupture” side,[49] I hope that I have already said enough tonight to suggest how their kind of “continuity” is advancing the project that begins with Nietzsche’s turning, not reversing it. Unlike his followers, Nietzsche still allowed Socrates to be a Socratic and Plato to be a Platonist; it is the post-Nietzsche refusal to allow this that I am calling “ultra-modern.” As for the look forward, I will recall a comment Karl Löwith made about the effect of Heidegger’s lectures on him and his fellow auditors: “one was in doubt as to whether one should start reading Diels’s Pre-Socratics or enlist in the SA.”[50] The Sturmabteilung, itself modeled on the storm-troops of the First World War, provided the early muscle necessary for the success of the Nazi Revolution in Germany. My ominous point, then, is that Löwith had good reason to be confused.

In last night’s lecture, I staked out my position: what makes Plato a Platonist is the affirmation of the transcendent Ideas. We can debate whether it was the revelation of unchanging Being in Parmenides that made Platonism possible or whether it was Socrates’ response to the sophists on the one hand and to Archelaus on the other that was primarily responsible, for both the physicist and the sophist came to regard the Just and the Beautiful as merely conventional. If forced to express an opinion, I would point instead to the gulf between Heraclitus and Parmenides as the basis for Platonism’s sharp division between Being and Becoming, and see in Plato’s Socrates a perfect pedagogical device for Plato’s attempt to prepare the student for recognizing that division, then to see it for themselves, and finally to test whether they would be able to defend it against its enemies. An education of this kind proved necessary, for Platonism—and the transcendent and otherworldly Being that is its essence—clearly does have enemies. Moreover, it has and will always have them, whether ancient, medieval, modern, or ultra-modern. But enemies aside, it is this primordial division, χωρισμός, or Kluft that is logically prior to the division between the “Truth” of Parmenides and his Δόξα, and thus to the difference between Socratics and Presocratics as well.

In defense of Löwith’s confusion, then, I would point first—with the gesture of Raphael’s Plato—to the necessarily transcendent G-d of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition generally, and of the Jews especially and originally. It is no accident that the prophet of the Übermensch proclaims the death of G-d, for there is no room on earth for the one as long as the Other remains in a kingdom that is not of this world. But closer to the specific theme of tonight’s lecture is one of the fragments gathered by Nietzsche’s editors in The Will to Power: “The Sophists were Greeks: when Socrates and Plato took up the cause of virtue and justice, they were Jews or I know not what.”[51] Thanks to a most curious turning [peripecia] I regard this revealing claim as perfectly consistent with the place that Laks and Most have assigned to Socrates in Early Greek Philosophy. There is, of course, a difference between them, and I formulate that difference as follows: Nietzsche’s position is what I am calling “modern” whereas that of Laks and Most is “ultra-modern.” But theirs is not the last word in ultra-modernity, for in Early Greek Philosophy, it is only Socrates who is no longer numbered among the “Jews” in Nietzsche’s sense; tomorrow night’s lecture will consider the ultra-modern “Plato.”

Notes

[1] I am quoting from the English translation that conference participants received (entitled “Neither Philosopher nor Sophist”) first on 2 and then on 6. See also Livio Rossetti, “Philosopher Socrates? Philosophy at the Time of Socrates and the Reformed Philosophia of Plato” in Alessandro Stavru and Christopher Moore (eds.), Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue, 268-298 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), especially 295.

[2] See especially Livio Rossetti, La filosofia non nasce con Talete—e nemmeno con Socrate (Bologna: Diogene Multimedia, 2015).

[3] See Livio Rossetti, Un altro Parmenide, two volumes (Bologna: Diogene Multimedia, 2017) and most recently his “Il Parmenide phusikos e il meccanismo di Antikitera: Risposta alle osservazioni di N.-L. Cordero (Archai 25, 2019).” Archai 27 (2019), 1-7.

[4] I.e., EGP.

[5] Rossetti, “Neither Philosopher nor Sophist,” 1.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Griechisch und Deutsch, three volumes, seventh edition edited by Walther Kranz (Berlin-Charlottenburg: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1954). The date of this work’s first edition is 1903.

[8] This is a feature of their work that everyone has noticed, and one that deserves critical consideration and will receive it. For two important reviews, see Alexander D. P. Mourelatos in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2018.03.15 and Christopher Moore in Classical Journal-online (2017.12.10).

[9] This is particularly odd in the context of EGP, Preface, p. 7, on “the difference between those authors who are transmitted in the form of fragments and the first philosophical authors for whom a corpus of writings has largely or completely survived.”

[10] André Laks, The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origins, Development, and Significance, translated by Glenn W. Most (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018).

[11] EGP, Preface (volume 1), 6-7.

[12] See Laks, Concept, 79-95 on Cassirer and Gadamer.

[13] Laks, Concept, 1-2; cf. 79 (first words of the last chapter): “Considered as a certain group of thinkers (rather than as the individual thinkers they also are), the Presocratics illustrate paradigmatically two possible ways of relating to origins, in the present case to the origins of Greek rationality: according to whether these are placed under the aegis of the other or of the same, under that of discontinuity or of continuity. The two ancient traditions that I distinguished in the first chapter under the names of Socratic-

Ciceronian and Platonic-Aristotelian were divided precisely on this point.” In the last chapter, Gadamer represents the first, Cassirer the second.

[14] Laks, Concept, 12-13.

[15] Plato, Phaedo, 96a5-c3, i.e., EGP, 33, D7.

[16] But see Laks, Concept, 1: “Antiquity knew of two ways to conceive of the dividing line between what preceded Socrates and what followed him: either Socrates abandoned a philosophy of nature for the sake of a philosophy of man (this is the perspective that I shall call Socratic- Ciceronian, which also includes Xenophon).”

[17] See EGP, Preface, 6: “Socrates is contemporary with a good number of ‘Presocratics,’ and indeed is even earlier than some; it should be noted that the collection of reference for Presocratic thought, the Fragmente der Vorsokratiker of H. Diels and W. Kranz, includes numerous texts of authors later than Socrates, for example on the Pythagoreans or the Atomists.”

[18] On the latter, see EGP, 33, D7 and D8.

[19] See EGP, 31 and 32; the Introduction to “33. Socrates” begins (volume 8, p. 293): “Although chronologically Socrates (469-399 B.C.) is a central figure of the period considered in this collection, Plato’s sustained efforts to set him as an authentic philosopher in the sharpest possible contrast to the ‘sophists’ and the historical success of these attempts have made it difficult to realize what they had in fact in common.”

[20] See EGP, 26.

[21] For an indication of the influence of Diogenes Laertius on Early Greek Philosophy, see André Laks, “Diogenes Laertius and the Presocratics” in Mensch and Miller, Diogenes Laertius, 588-592, especially 589: “In Diogenes Laertius, the sense of continuity betwee Socrates, despite the novelty of his approach, and his predecessors is made manifest by the construction of Archelaus—a pupil of Anaxagoras who is said to have been Soctrates’ teacher—as an intermediary between ‘physics’ and ‘ethics.’

[22] EGP, 26, D22; for context, see Mensch and Miller, Diogenes Laertius, 69 (2.16).

[23] See EGP, 26; P1, P2, and P3.

[24] On which see Gabor Betegh, “Socrate et Archélaus dans les Nuées; Philosophie naturelle et éthique” in A. Laks and R. Saetta Cottone (eds.), Comédie et philosophie; Socrate et les ‘Presocratiques’ dans les Nuées d’Aristophane, 87-106 (Paris: 2016); this is the only study Laks and Most include under the heading “Studies” in EGP 26, on p. 186 of volume 6.

[25] Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.10; note especially ab antiqua philosophia usque ad Socratem.

[26] The substance of this paper has been published as “Parmenides’ Fragment B3 Revisited.” Hypnos 35, no. 2 (2015), 197-230.

[27] EGP, 19, D7.4-5.

[28] See EGP, 19, D6; the following note (volume 5, 39n1) is attached to the former B3: “This phrase is transmitted separately from the preceding lines but it completes them in meaning and meter, and it is plausibly attached them by [some] scholars. For the meaning, cf. D8.39-41.” See Altman, “Parmenides’ Fragment B3,” 199-200 for the need for my bracketed “some” and 204-211 for the alleged identity with D8.39-41 (i.e., Diels-Kranz, B8.34-36).

[29] In addition to “Socratic-Ciceronian” in Laks, Concept (2004), see Glenn W. Most, “πόλεμος πάντων πατήρ. Die Vorsokratiker in der Forschung der zwanziger Jahre” in Hellmut Flashar (ed.), with held from Sabine Vogt, Altertumswissenshaft in den 20er Jahren: Neue Fragen und Impulse, 87-109 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995), 102.

[30] Primavesi’s paper was entitled: “Pythagoreanism in Empedocles’ Physics.”

[31] See, for example, Louis-André Dorion, “The Rise and Fall of the Socrates Problem” in Donald R. Morrison (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Socrates, 1–23 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[32] Diels, Fragmente, volume 1, p. 10 (Kranz): “hier eine Philosophie spricht, die nicht durch die Gedankenschule des Sokrates (und des Platon) gegangen ist, also nicht sowohl die vorsokratische als die nichtsokratische alte Philosophie.”

[33] EGP, Preface, p. 7.

[34] EGP, 33, Introduction (p. 294); but see EGP, 1, T20-22.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid.

[38] EGP, 33, D10.

[39] EGP, 33, D9.

[40] EGP, 33, Outline of the Chapter, p. 296.

[41] For Protagoras, see EGP, 33, D36, D39, D42, D44, D49; for Aristotle, see D37, D38, D40, D50; D46 and D51 are from Magna Moralia.

[42] Cf. EGP, Preface, p. 7, on “the difference between those authors who are transmitted in the form of fragments and the first philosophical authors for whom a corpus of writings has largely or completely survived.”

[43]  Of the two testimonia for this subsection, EGP, 33, D8 is from Diogenes Laertius (2.45): “It seems to me that Socrates also discoursed about natural phenomena.” D7 is the “autobiographical” passage from Phaedo.

[44] Most, “πόλεμος πάντων πατήρ.”

[45] Most, “πόλεμος πάντων πατήρ,” 106-109, beginning with: “Für die Zwanziger Jahre galten Heraklit und Nietzsche als die zwei wichtigsten Vorsokratiker.”

[46] See Most, “πόλεμος πάντων πατήρ,” 97-98.

[47] Most, “πόλεμος πάντων πατήρ,”102.

[48] Most, “πόλεμος πάντων πατήρ,” 102-103; for “Die Tyrannen des Geistes,” see Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, §261.

[49] Cf. Laks, Concept, 21-26, culminating with “Thus Nietzsche’s revival of the Socratic- Ciceronian theme of Presocratic philosophy as physics and of physics as theory is traversed from the beginning by a critical movement that in fact is equivalent to its reversal.”

[50] Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, translated by Elizabeth King (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 34.

[51] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, edited with commentary by Walter Kaufmann, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 234 (§429).

Also see “§1. Plato and Aristotle”; “§3. Plato and ‘Plato’”; and “§4. The Return to Platonism”

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