The Highest Music: Socrates in Love

Samuel Loncar on Armand D'Angour's Socrates in Love: A Philosopher in the Making

Alphonse Mucha (1896)

Socrates is so important, he is the measure by which we depict historically important individuals, beginning with Jesus of Nazareth. There is a narrative type and style associated with the attempt to portray a person as a transcendental force in history. The Gospels, as translator Sarah Ruden points out, are extremely strange. They have a literary and narrative power which is bizarre and difficult to explain. This feature of the Gospels is connected to a term often associated with Socrates, a peculiar Greek word, atopos, that means “out of place,” sometimes in the sense of strange, bizarre, or perhaps crazy. Armond D’Angour, Professor of Classics at Oxford University, explores Socrates strange attractiveness in his remarkable biography, Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher (Bloomsbury).

The history of philosophy and of Western culture is, in many ways, a history of our visions of Socrates—from Plato's influential depiction of him in over 2000 pages of brilliant prose, to Xenophon’s Memorabilia, to Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche's influential visions of Socrates in the 19th century, up to academic philosophy’s most recent picture of him in Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. In all of these varying depictions, Socrates is synonymous with a distinctive way of life, a bios, a Greek concept from which modern biology descends, but through its use in philosophy emphasizes life as a living pattern, a way, or manner. This is what attracted people to Socrates: his way of being human.

Images of Socrates, like Jesus, usually reflect the historical epoch and image of the writer more than the historical setting of their biographical subject. In his sensitive reconstruction of what Socrates’ actual way of life might have been like as a fifth-century Athenian, Armand D’Angour succeeds as a brilliant scholar and stylist in his bold goal: to give us a new image of Socrates, different than that given by prior biographers, even the best of whom, he suggests, reflect certain male biases in reconstructing Socrates’ life.

D’Angour, making shrewd use of historical speculation, constructs a compelling historical image of Socrates. He shows Socrates to have been not only a skilled fighter, but a truly heroic and veteran soldier, a person in love with love itself, who may have had many lovers, some very influential, including Aspasia of Miletus, the eventual second wife of Pericles. This plot line, the possibility of Socrates’ relationship with Aspasia, guides the book's central drama: the identity of the figure of Diotima of Mantinea, a woman who gives us the deepest ideas we have about Eros (Love) and Beauty through Socrates, in Plato's Symposium. Eros is a semidivine being who brings the radiance of the absolute beauty of reality into our ever-changing physical world. Eros, our visceral physical desire for union with beauty, becomes an energy that through education is elevated, step by step, towards ever more real and universal levels, each including the love of the lower level inside of the higher. Thus, from the love of sensory beauty in a single person one can be guided towards the love of invisible beauties, like numbers, qualities, and the soul, which are shining into visibility as the physical world.

Is Diotima and her teaching based on the figure of Aspasia? That is the central historical question of the book. D’Angour provides a compelling image of Aspasia as a brilliant mind and independent thinker, who, based on her relation to Alcibiades and as indicated in Plato’s Menexenus, we know was connected to Socrates. What is historically inarguable is this: behind Socrates and his most distinctive teaching, about love as the philosophical way of life, is a great woman, his teacher in Eros. The very man who claimed that he “knew nothing at all” claimed he knew something about Eros, and the reason, he said, was because he was taught by Diotima. This teaching of Socrates about Eros has changed Western history. It underlies everything from Christian martyrdom and mysticism, to Dante, the Renaissance, and every romance movie that anyone has ever seen. Socrates, in a way, created a whole new world based on the glorification of beauty as our deepest object of desire. D’Angour is correct, regardless of Aspasia’s exact role, in observing that Western academic, male dominated philosophy, tends to obscure the fact that the source of Socrates’ most profound teaching on the only thing he claimed to know anything about, Eros, was a woman.

This woman is at the heart of D’Angour’s book, which is written with a light but poised touch, never trivial, always arresting, featuring gripping scenes of battles and hilarious depictions of plays, providing a vivid sense of history. The book concludes with a powerfully written final summary that presents a cohesive mini-biography of Socrates, based on the preceding chapters. What emerges is a Socrates who feels deeply human and deeply Athenian, a person involved in the history of his own time who was an excellent musician and poet, the son of a stone mason who was not poor, as he is often portrayed, but rather from a well-to-do family that had property Socrates inherited and could live off of.

Socrates, supposedly ugly, at least in later life, was in fact a well-known lover, attractive, it would seem, to the most powerful people in Athens—both men and women. Of particular focus in D’Angour’s reconstruction of Socrates is his relationship to Alcibiades, the dashing and reckless young man who comes in drunk at the end of the Symposium, and instead of giving a speech to Eros, as everyone else has done—most recently Socrates himself—gives a speech to Socrates. This is a clear device used by Plato to show that in the mind of the inebriated Alcibiades, knowing the truth that you only know drunk, he makes no difference between the god Eros and Socrates himself. Socrates, for Alcibiades, was Eros incarnate.

But do these historical details, however illuminating of a long-ago life of love, concern us today? Why should we care about a figure from almost 2500 years in the past, even if he is so influential that he helped shape our image of Jesus of Nazareth?

Armand D'Angour, Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. 272 pgs. $10.95 (hardback)

If it is not enough to realize that everything that we think about love and beauty is influenced by this single individual, another way to express the importance of Socrates is that he lived life, even in his way of dying, as a witness to love, and particularly the love of truth, the love of wisdom. To love our own lives, which Socrates saw as our essential duty, we require wisdom, which enables us to care for our soul, to nourish our life and its value. But for Socrates, this discipline did not detach him from his body, but was the perfection of his prior education as a free born Athenian man.

The Greek ideal in Athens of an excellent human being was a person who possessed mousikē, which, as D’Angour notes, is far broader than our term for music.

Ubiquitous in the ancient Greek world and at the heart of Athenian cultural and religious life, mousikē embraced song, literature, and dance…it was considered vital both for social and intellectual education, a key means of expressing religious devotion, and resource for practicing and exercising military discipline.

Socrates was a master of these, and it is in this context of his commitment to the erotic embodiment of an Athenian male of his class—a soldier, a lover, an athlete, a musician, a dancer—that we see a fully enfleshed life, and we recognize in this life, and the resistance to it by prior biographers, a deeper truth that we can note from the broader context of the history of philosophy. As we intellectually idealize human beings, we tend to remove their involvement with the flesh, to discarnate them form their concrete historical circumstances and their meaning.

Although this may be done for good biographical reason, it privileges a sense of clarity and authority as a proxy for real goodness, which is often odd seeming at first glance. Socrates way of life is a visceral deviation from crowd enforced opinion, and can arouse fear. We fear a way of life that calls us to do more than just think, but to act and to live, to eat and to enjoy life, even under difficult circumstances. We fear a way of life that demands we compose ourselves with courage and decorum, as Socrates does, while walking across the battlefield as calmly as he would in the streets of Athens, amid soldiers, as Alcibiades points out, who are being routed and fleeing in terror. Alcibiades recounts how Socrates saved his life on the battlefield, but he can never get quite what he wants physically from Socrates. Not that Alcibiades ever feels rejected or spurned, but rather that Socrates keeps talking about wisdom, keeps trying to get Alcibiades to love wisdom more. It's tragic and ironic that in many ways, on D'Angour’s analysis, that Socrates' unjust execution is deeply connected to his relationship with Alcibiades and his disastrous exploits that tainted his reputation, and therefore the reputation of those associated with him, like Socrates.

Socrates, by perfecting yet also reforming the Athenian values of his time, lived a life which has become the most unforgettable life that we have ever remembered: the life of wisdom, where one individual, even unjustly condemned, succeeds in changing the world for the better by their very way of living. This wisdom shaped life and style of story-telling provides the templates for the Gospels. It provides the archetype for later Christian martyrdom accounts. The Hellenistic schools of philosophy were descended directly from people who were influenced by the life and death of Socrates. Socrates matters because everything that we consider our culture—our history of debate, of free thought, of romance, of the importance of working clearly through our values and of upholding them in the face of opposition—did not emerge ex nihilo. Our culture is philosophical at its core, linked to a very specific life, the life of an Athenian man who was the son of a stone mason, a great warrior and a courageous pursuer of truth, someone who lived a life that seemed strange then and remains strange now. In Socrates' Athens, there was no place for questions that made the certain feel lost.

Socrates pursued what we would call science in the first part of his life, but finding that no scientific knowledge could answer the questions—What actually does it mean to be human and to live a good human life? And what does it matter if we say we know anything else and can't answer that question?—he changed his pursuit to the singular focus on the ethical dimension of life, ethical, not as moralistic, but as that which tells us what we are, and therefore what we are to become, what we are to do, what it means to be human, and therefore how we become human. This is the focus of Socrates, and this is what he realized was to be his way of life. This is what god Apollo, through the Oracle of Delphi meant, Socrates concluded, when he said that “no one was wiser than Socrates.”

Socrates knew that he didn't know most things. As D’Angour points out, the word for love used by Socrates, erotika, sounds similar to “the Greek word erōtan, which means ‘to ask questions.’” But what Socrates did know is that it was important to know what it means to live a good human life and admit if we did not know how to do this. He found people conflated their being experts in one area with being wise in life, and they would claim to know things that they actually did not know, like what a good human life was.

For Socrates, a good human life is not going to be perfect like the gods. We start in a state of internal civil war, and from this rough and discordant matter we must humbly fashion a harmonious self, built on repeated correction and refinement, just as in musical and athletic training. While not perfect to begin with, Socrates shows life can be perfected by the pursuit of the divine mission of seeking self-knowledge, of asking questions, of loving to discover what you need to know to grow, to live beautifully.

Socrates shows us the kind of joy and courage that is attainable in this life. It's hardly what we think of as ascetic, although he had great ascetic powers. But all of Socrates’ powers of endurance, his capacity to stand still, his ability to march barefoot in the snow, his sexual energy, are not lost in body-denying thought, but expressed in a deeper, more focused way in his pursuit of wisdom. The life of wisdom, far from rejecting everything below it, seems for Socrates to be their highest expression. And thus philosophy, he says, is “the highest mousikē.” Philosophy as a musical way of life is not primarily academic but an embodied search for beauty and grace, one that has, for many individuals, including me, not only restructured and reshaped their intellectual life but led to deep healing of the body and spirit.

Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher gives us a new Socrates by showing that he was a student, and thus to truly know him, we should seek his teacher. Whether she was Aspasia of Miletus or whether there was another woman, perhaps literally named Diotima of Mantinea, may not, in the end, matter so much. In doing justice to the influence of the female philosopher who lies behind Socrates’ song, D’Angour advances both philosophy and history, bringing us closer to the source of love itself.  

---

Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale) is a philosopher, the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, the Director of the Institute for the Meanings of Science, the creator of the Becoming Human Project, and the founder of Olurin Consulting. His speaking and consulting clients include the United Nations, Red Bull Arts, Oliver Wyman, and Flagship Pioneering. His work focuses on integrating separated spaces, including philosophy and poetry, science and spirituality, and the academic-public divide. His book, Becoming Human: Philosophy as Science and Religion from Plato to Posthumanism, is appearing with Columbia University Press. Learn more at www.samuelloncar.com X@samuelloncar