Plato and Socrates : what divergences

Plato and Socrates : what personal, philosophical, political and social differences and divergences ?

Plato often hides behind Socrates to spread his own theses and it is not easy to distinguish, knowing that Socrates never wanted to write anything. Both seem to claim dialectics, maieutics, reasoning, an ideal of scientific knowledge (the search for truth), an ideal of human behavior (the search for happiness through virtue), wisdom, the practice of philosophy, knowledge through critical analysis, the rejection of pure sophistry, the need to define concepts, the distinction between appearance and reality, the need to verify even the most deeply held beliefs, the contradictory nature of experience (both sensitive and wary of the limits of the senses, both objective and subjective, methodical and devoid of method, based on knowledge and false beliefs, etc.), the use of dichotomies without being enslaved by them and seeing them everywhere, the need to study trades and arts professionally...

If we want to briefly summarize what Socrates and Plato oppose on all levels, personal, philosophical, scientific, intellectual, social and political, it suffices to say that Socrates is profoundly a revolutionary and Plato a conservative.

Socrates is against the emergence of state power in Athens, against its attempt to dominate all of Greece and the surrounding regions, against its dictatorship, even under the guise of "democracy," against any personal participation in state power, even when his own friends participate, against war and the cult of warriors, and Plato takes the exact opposite position, even participating in state power, which represents the first direct and public break between the two. This is an indisputable element, precisely because it was the subject of a public discussion and led the two to announce that they publicly diverged. In fact, in this public debate, they remained at moderate statements, with Socrates not publicly claiming to be a revolutionary, a supporter of the overthrow of state power, while Plato proclaims that he is a supporter of a systematic policy of strengthening state power and particularly the warrior caste ! He will later theorize this in his "Republic." His willingness to build clandestine discussion circles and his links with other revolutionaries like Zeno bear witness to this.

Not only does Socrates not want to participate in state power, but he refuses to participate in the "democratic" institutions that cover this dictatorship. He even rejects the social foundations of this class power, and first of all slavery, while Plato does not even fight it. Plato belongs, by birth, to the propertied class and does not break with this social milieu. Socrates, on the other hand, does not want to practice any institutionalized profession, not even that of teacher, philosopher, or sophist. During the warlike episodes in which he participated, he held responsibilities at the level of a general but refused to accept them later, playing the modest man in front of his comrades. He gives himself the appearance of a man who lives off the help of his friends, who does not want to build any university around him, but only to take part in private debates, for the simple pleasure of the participants. Plato, on the contrary, wants to establish an official school. Socrates does not want to leave behind writings that betray his revolutionary goals. Plato, on the contrary, leaves writings which claim to express the views of Socrates, while the latter, during his lifetime and in public, rejects Plato’s writings and their claim to give him a voice.

But this question, however burning it may be (one does not easily oppose the dictatorship of Athens by being an Athenian citizen !), is not the only or the main divergence.

Throughout his life, Plato built a religion that would herald Christianity, while Socrates fought against institutional or state religions, or at least public ones, and only admitted private beliefs.

Socrates’ thought is revolutionary and Plato’s is conservative.

It is not by reading Plato that we learn this, nor even from other "disciples" of Socrates. On the contrary, it is by reading the violent adversaries of Socrates who teach us that Socrates was a communist, a follower of women’s freedom, an opponent of slavery, affirmed that slaves had no particular nature differentiating them from free men, considered himself neither Greek nor a citizen of Athens, was a communist, was an opponent of private ownership of the means of production, refused to scorn foreigners, "inferior" and manual professions, etc. Yet none of these positions are found in Plato’s texts, not even in the words attributed to Socrates !!! Plato does not cite any of these positions, not even to distance himself from them. He gives a watered-down version of the character of Socrates, far from the sulphurous revolutionary, feminist, communist, anti-statist, etc.

Aristophanes, Socrates’s violent adversary, traces his revolutionary positions much better than Plato. This author describes, in his plays against Socrates, a man inclined to study experiments, natural sciences, and not only abstract thoughts, notably mathematics, which only Plato cultivates, full of the religious body/soul dualism that Socrates did not defend. There is no evidence that Socrates places the soul in a world other than the body, nor abstract sciences above experimental sciences, nor any religious dualism.

Moreover, Socrates took a stand against religions, for which reason he was condemned to death, while Plato was the builder of a religious thought, close to what Christianity would be, with a good and super-powerful creator.

When Socrates was condemned to death, all his friends in Athens were in the hot seat and felt compelled to present Socrates as a victim of an unjust misunderstanding, which he was not at all. The propertied classes of Athens knowingly condemned him to death, not for the crime of philosophical or religious opinion, but for revolutionary activities against power and the social system. Plato was certainly not only a philosophical but also a political and revolutionary follower as a young adolescent, but this did not last, and as soon as he had an opportunity to participate in political power, he seized it.

Socrates had nothing to do with the government of the Thirty Tyrants and did not support the tyranny, even refusing to obey its orders at the risk of his life. Socrates never envisioned his group participating in this government of the Thirty Tyrants. He even dissuaded Plato, who had briefly set foot there.

An example of the opposing attitudes of Plato and Socrates towards the power of the Thirty in Athens

If Socrates was disappointed by his young disciple, Plato, the latter after a somewhat left-wing youth revolt, having quickly fallen back into his original social rut, Plato himself trained Aristotle, a true theoretician of counter-revolution alongside the possessing classes and trainer of monarchs !!!

In his "Laws," Plato treats with the utmost severity those in his ideal city who do not conform to the religious rules respected by the city. He is therefore in favor of a state religion imposed on citizens, an idea that is the antithesis of the positions taken by Socrates.

In terms of his conception of the philosopher, Plato is as far removed from Socrates as possible. The former claims to be a fount of knowledge, the holder of knowledge, and the latter claims to know nothing, meaning that he in no way claims to know more than others, but rather to be a seeker of truths who is primarily concerned with his research and not with holding knowledge as private property, like one who possesses libraries of unobtainable works.

For Socrates, knowledge as the accumulation of knowledge is worthless, or at least, it does not replace personal reflection. To each according to his questions. The answer can be very different from one person to another, from one society to another, from one class to another. Socrates did not consider that there was only one notion of good. He only noted that men managed to communicate through language, because they shared something through words. And it was this something that he was looking for, because it seemed to him to represent deeper truths than immediate images. A definitive morality for all was not in Socrates’ mind, contrary to your conception, Plato. Defining it and then imposing it on everyone was even further from his conception. Personal morality must be produced by each individual, but this is not enough, according to Socrates, to resolve the question of the goals of society as a whole. Nor does society exist once and for all, nor is it as men wish. Plato, you try to bridge this great distance between individuals and society by taking states corresponding to cities with small populations, but the leap is no less significant, to go from individuals to society. It is not the sum of individuals, and it is not enough for each individual to try to follow the morality of virtue for society to be organized in the same direction. Socrates did not refuse to ask the question in global, social and political terms, but he did not do so entirely publicly and not at all in writing.

Socrates once had the opportunity to play a role in public politics. Threatened with death, Athens recovered in a final burst, promising, at Socrates’ initiative, citizenship to metics and slaves to form a fleet that defeated Callicratidas at the Battle of the Arginusae. This success was, however, tarnished by the execution of the victorious strategists (including Pericles the Younger and Thrasyllus). Athens, in a fit of anger under pressure from demagogues, therefore eliminated its best generals. It was out of disapproval of these decisions that Socrates permanently withdrew from public political life.

Socrates’ refusal to participate in public life and to write down his thoughts does not primarily have a philosophical cause, but a political one. Socrates is not silent, but he does not disseminate his philosophical lessons in writing for political reasons. There is neither a fear nor a rejection of politics on his part. He has his own goals and, therefore, his own political method. This is not discretion in general, since he has distinguished himself by his opposition to power and his refusal to participate in it, his rejection of money, his refusal to endorse all the unjust acts to which all powers have invited him. For example, he publicly stands up to a delirious Assembly in the trial of the generals of Arginusae. He refuses to obey the Thirty Tyrants who ordered him to go and arrest Leo of Salamis, an innocent man who was to be condemned to death. He also refuses to endorse the false democracy that succeeds tyranny. He even refuses to play the conventional game of trials, the charade of pleading guilty, of regrets, of offers of a fine to pay, which would have allowed him to avoid being sentenced to death. And he will also refuse to flee, a completely possible and morally defensible escape to save himself from an unjust and fabricated sentence. He is sentenced to death at the age of seventy for having diverted the children of the ruling classes from the dominant ideology and, in particular, from religion. This is not a miscarriage of justice, it is not a political error by Athens, it is not a personal revenge. It is simply the end of a revolutionary attempt that failed. It is that it hides, more deeply, the reproach of having tried to divert children of the ruling class to win them over to an ideology of abolishing social classes : communism. Socrates calls into question many things : patriotism, religion, machismo, contempt for and oppression of women, exploitation of children, contempt for the poor and poverty, corruption of the rich and worship of wealth, social foundation based on individual interest against that of the community, etc. Socrates said : "The City, where those who must hold power are least desirous of power, is necessarily the one which is best and most peacefully run."

Socrates was very far from the dualistic philosophy of good and evil. Socrates said to Euthydemus : "First, I consider health as a good and illness as an evil ; and then, if I consider the cause of these two states, I believe that drinks, foods, activities are all good when they bring health, and evils when they bring illness. Consequently, health and illness will be in themselves goods when they bring good and evils when they cause harm." Euthydemus, still not convinced, replied : "But how could health cause harm ?" And Socrates replied : "Oh, by Jupiter, those who are strong take part in a bad expedition, and they perish, while those who are weak stay and are alive ! Good athletes will participate in increasingly difficult competitions which will eventually make them sick. Their good health will turn out to be an evil. » Euthydemus insisted : "But is knowledge a good and ignorance an evil ? Is wealth a good and poverty an evil ? Is happiness a good and unhappiness an evil ?" One is so rich that he ends up ruined. Another is so poor that he invents a way out and becomes very rich. One has such extensive knowledge that he ends up disturbing the powerful and is eliminated. Another is so ignorant that, arrested during a riot, he is released because he is deemed harmless. And what did Socrates do ? He gave multiple examples, according to which good turns into evil and evil into good. He was therefore very far from wanting to spread a philosophy of the diametric opposition of Good and Evil ! It is rather the permanent and dynamic internal contradiction that Socrates studied. Thus, a man who wanted to govern for the good of the people became a politician and governed violently

The essential thing is that Socrates’ dialectic does not just oppose opposites but composes them, binds them, makes them indispensable to one another, and therefore it is anything but a dualism à la Plato which conceives of a perfectible and perishable material world and a world of souls, forms and ideas, perfect and immutable...

Why forget Socrates who, seeing a master who had harshly punished his servant, said to him : "I wonder who deserves to be punished more, you or your servant !"

Socrates always spoke of man, not just of citizens, including foreigners and slaves. And he also fought for women’s freedom. To take just one example of the Athenian mentality on this point, let us recall Sophocles, who wrote in his play "Ajax" : "For a woman, her adornment is her silence."

Socrates frequently cited examples of peoples among whom women had practiced the art of war with great success : the Amazons of ancient Greece, the women of certain regions of Mali, and, above all, the Scythian warriors. And he showed that these societies were in no way inferior to our own.

Why not recall that at all times, Socrates recounted that all his teachers in philosophy had been women. One of his teachers was Pericles’s wife, herself ! And he proclaimed it to Athenians who were in no way ready to listen to him on this subject !

The one who proclaimed "I am no one’s master" did not only mean that he abhorred having a parade of disciples who would follow him like sheep. He did not think only of the master and the disciple, but rather of the master and the slave ! This meant that slavery horrified him. While the way many of our citizens have found to live without working is to be maintained by investing in slaves who work in the mines and fields, Socrates always refused this means of providing for his needs. Just as he did not accept, like his fellow citizens, to hand over his feet to slaves to be washed with perfumed water while he lay lounging in bed. Let us recall that his greatest victory for Athens was achieved by proposing to foreigners, non-citizens of Athens, and to slaves to participate as free citizens in the battle. This is how we were able to defeat Callicratidas at the Battle of the Arginusae Islands. Socrates always rejected the possession of slaves to meet his needs. Charmides reminded us of this : he repeatedly tried to offer slaves to Socrates to help him materially, without success. Socrates, several times in public, denounced the searches for runaway slaves launched by citizens of Athens. Even beyond the question of slavery, Socrates questioned the entire economic and social system that was triumphing : the accumulation of wealth at one pole, of misery at the other, the growth of social dictatorship under the guise of political democracy, the growing oppression of formerly free and independent cities, the share given to the plundering of the wealth of ever-larger territories while the wealth acquired through work diminished, the growing corruption and the vices associated with it becoming the new virtue of Athens.

Socrates freed a large number of slaves. Phaedo of Elis knows something about this, having been kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery, and whom Socrates had freed by an Athenian landowner. He did not only undertake individual liberations, since he took advantage of an exceptional threat against the city to free all the slaves who agreed to take up arms alongside the citizens and to grant them freedom and the status of citizens !

Plato never took such positions, neither on women, nor on foreigners, nor on slaves, nor on the wars of Athens, nor on state power, and he even had completely opposite opinions on these questions.

In short, between Plato and Socrates, there is indeed the gap from the conservative to the revolutionary, from the dualist (body and mind) to the monist, from the thinker of freedom to the thinker of the State, from the atheist to the religious, from the student of natural sciences to the defender of the theory of forms according to which abstract thought (forms, ideas) dominates material objects which are only a pale imitation of perfection of the mathematical and religious type...