Ariel Helfer - Socrates and Alcibiades: Plato’s Drama of Political Ambition and Philosophy

Socrates and Alcibiades

PLATOS DRAMA
OF POLITICAL AMBITION
AND PHILOSOPHY

ARIEL HELFER

Copyright 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Helfer, Ariel, author.

Title: Socrates and Alcibiades : Platos drama of political
ambition and philosophy / Ariel Helfer.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of
Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016049601 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4913-2
(hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Plato. Alcibiades. | Alcibiades 2. | Plato.
Symposium. | Alcibiades. | Socrates. | AmbitionPolitical
aspects.

Classification: LCC B391.A53 H45 2017 | DDC 184--dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049601

For Mom, Pops, Max, and Joj

The most interesting reasons for studying political ambition have become the hardest to see. Ambition nowadays tends to signify a zealous, even ruthless desire for gain or advancement, and is therefore often distrusted in the political arena. The purpose of government in the best case, after all, is not to enrich or empower the politicians who administer it, but prudently and justly to provide what is necessary for people to live out a harmonious and fulfilling coexistence. Ambition is to be tolerated in the private sphere, if at all, and political ambition often connotes something akin to political corruption: a willingness to misuse political power and public trust for selfish ends. We might study this sort of political ambition in order to understand better how it can be muted, or perhaps controlled, channeled, and molded into something politically constructive. Moreover, we might study it with a view to protecting the legacy of vigilance against tyranny and oppression that we inherit as citizens of liberal democracy. Such studies of political ambition would be worthwhile. They could not, however, be as philosophically far-reaching as a study that begins with the fuller and more complex, albeit less familiar, understanding of political ambition.

Indeed, if the above description appears caricaturish, it is because we sense that political ambition can also be something noble and good. We may think, for example, of those who pursue careers in politics in order to do good in their communities and in the world, to improve the lot of their fellow citizens, to be champions of justice, democracy, and freedom of thought. Someone who exhibits this type of political ambition will see in politics not a set of mundane administrative tasks but the stage upon which humanitys most admirable goals are pursued and achieved. We are thus led to distinguish between two different phenomena, each bearing the name of political ambition. One is private ambition that merely happens to find itself in the political world and hence seeks to use political power as an expedient means to private ends. But there is also ambition that is not incidentally political, but essentially and emphatically so, seeking goods that appear to be available only in and through political activity.

What are these goods that can be attained only in political activity? The very idea may seem foreign to the modern reader, but it is the focus of much of classical political philosophy. Aristotles famous claims that the human being is by nature a political animal, and that the political community must be set down as [a community] of noble actions, not merely of living together, reflect a view of human nature according to which the powerfully felt need to live nobly and selflessly points to active civic engagement as its most complete fulfillment. Virtuous political ambition directed toward civic engagement and political leadership is understood, in this Aristotelian framework, to be the highest expression of the natural human attraction to a life of noble devotion. But this characterization of political ambition also points to the tension in political life that Aristotle and his Socratic predecessors presented so incisively. Political ambition, even at its most virtuous, is never simply selfless. The desire to be the nobly devoted benefactor of ones fellow citizens is bound up, perhaps inextricably, with the desire for the vividly imagined rewards of gratitude, honor, power, and famea fact that is all the more readily seen in contexts where Aristotles description of human nature resonates more clearly. The democracies of ancient Greece consistently produced ambitious figures whose zeal for political honor was so great it threatened to outstrip or distort the intention to win that honor through honorable service. Thus, even ambition that is at its core civic spirited, and that is thus political in the fuller sense, can develop a dangerous edge. And yet for a time Athens found great success in nourishing this explosive, glory-seeking form of ambition by yoking it to its citizens deep-seated sense of patriotism and civic duty. The most brilliant and talented citizensThemistocles, Pericles, and otherswere enticed to lead Athens to ever-greater glory with the promise of sharing in its eternal fame should they succeed. But there was always the risk that the statesmen whose ambition the Athenians fed would one day throw off the yoke of the city to seek fame and power on their own terms.

Thus do we learn from ancient history how the belief that the peak of human fulfillment is to be found in political rule can be a source of political volatility: not precisely because politicians who hold this belief will abuse public trust for private gain, but rather because they may seek the political rewards of glory and rule without insisting on making themselves worthy of them through their service to the political community. Many centuries later, the Enlightenment philosophers who were attempting to bring stability to a chaotic political world explicitly rejected the Aristotelian claim that politics grows in part out of a natural human desire to pursue the noble. As heirs of the Enlightenment, our core political and intellectual principles can be traced back to Hobbess premise that we are by nature not political or even social animals but individualistic and selfish ones. Thence sprang the now familiar notion that the purpose of government is artificially to impose restraints, by means of weighty incentives and physical compulsion, on the nasty and brutish behavior to which we resort in the absence of actively enforced law. Locke, insisting that the rulers, too, must be expected to act upon the basest motives, recommended the separation of executive and legislative powersa recommendation keenly heeded by the American founders, who famously set out to devise a system of government in which ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The benefits of frustrating the selfish desires connected with political ambition were judged to be worth the cost of blunting its civic-spirited dimension.