Review

Reviewed Work(s): Socrates and Self-Knowledge by Christopher Moore

Review by: Agnes Callard
Source: Classical Philology , October 2017, Vol. 112, No. 4 (October 2017), pp. 496-501
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

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496 BOOK REVIEWS

done to himself and his household are very much still present.7 A. criticizes Herman for
generalizing too easily from Euphiletus’ “dispassionate” execution and denial of enmity,
seeing his stance here as driven by his legal necessities; but the challenge to the notion
of a full-scale surrender to a dispassionate civic role needs to go further.
Similarly, A. agrees with Herman that in Against Neaira the emphasis in Theomnestus’
introductory speech on the motive of revenge for the attacks inicted by Stephanus on
Apollodorus and his family has completely disappeared by the end of the speech, where
Apollodorus concentrates on the wrongs done to the city and the gods by Stephanus’ il-
legal marriage (pp. 71–75). But here too timoria, again perceived as both revenge and
punishment, is strongly present: Apollodorus concludes that he has brought the prose-
cution “as an avenger [ωω̃] both for the gods and for myself,” so that “each of you
(the jury) may vote for what is just and bring revenge/punishment [ω̃ ] both for
the gods and also for yourselves” ([Dem.] 59, 126).
Occasionally, A.’s grip on texts or scholarship slips. On [Demosthenes] 53, Against
Nicostratus (pp. 75–78, 123; also 46 and n. 139 on Pasion), it is a pity that he is unaware
of the recently published and remarkable lead letter written by Pasion at some point be-
fore his death circa 370, in which he instructs a friend or underling Satyrion to “take re-
venge on and pursue” the same Nikostratus and Arethousius whom Apollodorus would
prosecute in the courts some years later. It thus appears that this enmity with Pasion began
much earlier, and hence that Apollodorus made seriously misleading statements about
their earlier close friendship and the origin of the hostilities.8 On [Demosthenes] 47, A.
describes the trierarch’s freedwoman who was fatally assaulted by his enemies as a slave-
woman, which misses the vital point that this status meant that prosecution for her ho-
micide was not an option (p. 149). On Lysias 1, Stephen Todd is less condent than A.
claims that Euphiletus and Eratosthenes were members of the same deme (Oe) (pp. 89,
140).9 Finally, casual handling of the text at the nal stage has left a large number of
cross-references in the telltale form “see pp.ooo–ooo.”
In conclusion, this book will not put to bed the debate about prosecutors, revenge, and
justice, but it is to be warmly welcomed as a substantial, innovative, and well-argued con-
tribution, both to the topic, and more generally to the study of Athenian law, rhetoric, and
social and political values.

Nick Fisher
Cardiff University

Socrates and Self-Knowledge. By CHRISTOPHER MOORE. Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 294.
Christopher Moore traces Socrates’ reception of the command to “know thyself ”
(ΓΝΩΘΙ ΑΟΝ, henceforth “GS”) inscribed at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. M.
sets the stage by discussing what (little) evidence we have regarding the pre-Socratic
meaning of the Delphic inscription. He argues that the common interpretation of the in-

7. See also Kucharski, review of Herman (n. 3 above), 90–91; Cairns, “Revenge” (n. 5 above), 660–64.
8. See David Jordan, “A Letter from the Banker Pasion,” in Lettered Attica: A Day of Attic Epigraphy, ed.
David Jordan and John Traill (Toronto, 2003), 22–40.
9. Stephen Todd, “The Rhetoric of Enmity in the Attic Orators,” in Kosmos, ed. Paul Cartledge, Paul Millett,
and Sitta von Reden (Cambridge, 1998), 165.

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BOOK REVIEWS 497

scription as enjoining recognition of one’s merely mortal status—I’ll call this “the humil-
ity reading”—is not supported by the accounts of it we nd in ancient authors (Plutarch,
Plato, Xenophon, Diogenes Laertius, Diodorus Siculus, Proclus). The best piece of evi-
dence M. presents against the humility reading is Platonic: at Charmides 164c–165c,
Plato has Critias offer an idiosyncratic account of the GS as a phrase of greeting akin to
“χα̃ ” (“hello”). The fact that Critias does not see the need to dismiss the humility reading
suggests that no such meaning was, at that time, widely accepted. Indeed, as M. points
out, the unapologetic strangeness of Critias’ story leads one to conclude that the GS was,
by the dramatic date of the Charmides, already shrouded in mystery.
Having, as it were, cleaned the interpretative slate, M. is free to take the Socratic ac-
count of the GS on its own terms. M. discusses early (Charmides), middle (Phaedrus),
and late (Philebus) Platonic dialogues, and dialogues which many (Alcibiades 1) or most
(Rival Lovers, Hipparchus) would hesitate to ascribe to Plato, as well as Xenophon’s
Memorabilia 4.2. There is also a brief but excellent discussion of Aristophanes’ Clouds
(pp. 11–12): M. argues that Aristophanes was the rst to associate the GS with Socrates.
In this large and varied textual material he identies a single account of self-knowledge as
self-improvement, or, as he calls it, “self-constitution.” He understands the call to know
oneself as an injunction to acquire a (real, stable, consistent) self, a self that can become
both an object of knowledge and a source of moral responsibility. He pairs this aspira-
tional reading of “know thyself ” with a social understanding of the mechanism of such
self-knowledge: we come into ourselves through conversation, self-knowledge being
therefore inextricable from knowledge of others.
Let me give a brief overview of the book. After his introductory chapter, M. turns, in
chapter 2, to the Charmides. He argues that the dialogue’s negative conclusions regarding
self-knowledge—that it is impossible to achieve and, even if it were possible, useless—
should not be read at face value. The negative arguments serve but to expose Critias’ im-
poverished conception of self-knowledge. When integrated into a reading of the dialogue
as a whole, one which pays special attention to Critias’ odd analysis of the GS, mentioned
above, they point to an alternative, social, progressive conception of self-knowledge. In
chapter 3, M. reads Socrates of the Alcibiades as encouraging rather than inhibiting Al-
cibiades’ desires and ambitions: he suggests that Alcibiades’ best route to getting what he
wants will be to examine himself through conversation with Socrates. Chapter 4 is about
the Phaedrus. M. takes Socrates’ description of myth-rectication as a model for his own
lifelong process of self-rectication: correcting his beliefs and desires, one by one, with
the help of his interlocutors who function, as the lover does to the beloved, as a kind of
sounding board. M.’s discussion of the Philebus in chapter 5 focuses on the importance
of knowledge for pleasure: he takes Socrates’ insistence on the worthlessness of pleasure
without knowledge to be a way of marking the importance of pleasure-ownership: the
person with self-knowledge is able to ascribe his pleasures to himself, acknowledging
them as his own. Xenophon’s Socrates is usually taken to gloss self-knowledge as simply
the knowledge of one’s own powers. In chapter 6, M. reveals another layer to Xenophon’s
Socrates through a detailed analysis of a line in which Socrates compares self-knowledge
to horse-buying. He draws on the self-ownership claims of the previous chapter to con-
nect the concerns of the Xenophontic Socrates to those of Plato’s Socrates: both are con-
cerned with the process by which one’s attitudes become truly “one’s own.”
M.’s book locates in each text a picture of self-knowledge as rational self-cultivation,
a focus that often proves unexpectedly interpretatively fertile. For instance, consider Soc-

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498 BOOK REVIEWS

rates’ concern, in the Phaedrus, over whether he is like the monster Typhon (230a). M.
plausibly analyzes this, by way of Aeschylus’ description in Prometheus Bound, as a doubt
about his own susceptibility to self-cultivation: Typhon represents the possibility that the
self is unchangeably unsuited for knowledge. And, as mentioned above, M. is in a posi-
tion to make something of Critias’ bafing analysis of the GS. Critias analyzes the GS as
a greeting, and M. connects the act of greeting to the process of self-cultivation embodied
in the conversation promised by such a greeting. Complementing and supporting his
detailed attention to the text are some perceptive freestanding phenomenological discus-
sions, for instance, of greeting. M. notes that greeting signals openness to communica-
tion, which contrasts neatly with the reception Charmides encounters at the opening of
the dialogue: when he enters, the assembled company fails to greet him. They are so
struck by his beauty that they cannot recognize a common conversational project. Thus
greeting someone contrasts with objectifying him.
M. has a air for capturing the experiential qualities of the phenomena Socrates is de-
scribing and reecting them back to us in a recognizably Socratic manner. Consider his
elucidation of the problem of the eye seeing itself, an image that shows up, in one form or
another, in several of the dialogues he discusses: “were the eye looking at itself in a mirror
never to have seen itself before, it would have to seek itself out. It would not know what
on the reective surface—various facial features the face itself, the body, background ob-
jects—corresponds to itself ” (p. 152). He is thus able to construe the eye’s seeing of itself
as a temporally extended project, and thereby to connect the various discussions of “sight
seeing itself ” that show up in the Charmides, Alcibiades, and Phaedrus. This is but one of
a number of such connections: for instance, he ties the concern with self-location of plea-
sure in the Philebus to the conception of self-knowledge as self-ownership that he nds in
Xenophon. In this way, M. often nds the means of making sure that his nice observations
are not stranded, but woven together into a larger story that spans multiple dialogues. With
all of this said, I want to raise two concerns with the framework he uses to tell the story.
The rst concern is that M.’s real topic is not Socrates and self-knowledge, but Socrates
and self-investigation. As M. in at least one place acknowledges, the activity correspond-
ing to the command GS—as least, on Socrates’ interpretation of that command—is that
of inquiry (̃ /̃ ; see, e.g., pp. 84, 163). Such inquiry, as he conceives it, in-
cludes both an examination of what one currently believes, and a determination of whether
one ought to have those beliefs; which activity results in the possession of beliefs that are
truly “one’s own” as opposed to merely absorbed from one’s environment (p. 147). The
result of such an activity might be self-knowledge, but the process itself can at best be
self-coming-to-know. Knowledge is not a process but a state (hexis); and self-knowledge
presupposes the existence of a self, which is merely nascent through the process M. is de-
scribing.
I believe that much of what M. has to say would remain standing if we were to replace
every instance of “self-knowledge” in the book with “self-investigation” or “self-cultivation.”
The terminological shift would matter most to those places where the texts themselves
suggest or require a distinction between the process and the product. Let me use rst
the Philebus and then the Charmides to illustrate this point.
When Socrates, famously and problematically, claims that the person who is pleased
without phronēsis does not know whether he is pleased (Phlb. 21b7–9), M. reads that not
as a claim about the person’s unawareness of his pleasure, but rather about his inability to
locate himself as the seat of the pleasure. This is a promising new avenue of interpreta-

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BOOK REVIEWS 499

tion, but one that is confused by his gloss on the argument as describing a process of “in-
tegration of pleasure into one’s life” (p. 52), and by his importing into discussion of the
passage the descriptions of self-investigation from other texts. For what is described in
the Philebus argument, if M. is right, is not the process by which the pleasure comes
to be one’s own, but the successful conclusion of that process. The Philebus argument
would, on this reading, be about (the successful attainment of ) self-knowledge, rather
than the self-investigative process that is elsewhere M.’s focus.
Recognizing his topic as self-investigation would also be a corrective against the harsh
language (“abdicated his humanity,” “dehumanized,” p. 213) M. uses when he goes on to
describe the self-ignorant person who is the butt of comedy at Philebus 48–50. Given that
self-knowledge is a process, we are all, to some degree, self-ignorant. We shouldn’t think
of ourselves as being at the end point, only as being (perhaps) further along than the ob-
ject of comedy. Identifying the Socratic activity as one of self-investigation rather than
self-knowledge mitigates our tendency to demonize the self-ignorant.
The terminological shift I propose would, I think, be of greatest benet to M. with ref-
erence to his reading of the Charmides, for it would relieve some of the pressure to dis-
solve the skeptical conclusions of that dialogue. Those conclusions really are about the
possibility and usefulness of self-knowledge understood as knowing what one knows, ̀
̓ έα ἃ ἶ (167b2–3), rather than self-investigation or self-inquiry. To my knowl-
edge, Socrates never explicitly casts doubt on the latter. Doubts about the possibility
or usefulness of self-knowledge do, of course, bleed over into doubts about the process
directed at them, but the shift nonetheless opens interpretative space: for perhaps the end
point of the process is only properly understood and valued by those who, unlike Socrates
and Critias, have arrived at it. Thus, the fact that Socrates and Critias cannot articulate the
value or even the possibility of self-knowledge does not show that they should not strive
for it (cf. Meno 86b–c). M. would still be required to show that the arguments of the
Charmides do not decisively tell against the value or possibility of self-knowledge,
but this is a smaller interpretative task than that of identifying a particular, positive, alter-
native account hiding, as it were, in the shadows of the dialogue.
And this would, in turn, put M. in a position to remedy what strikes me as a missed
interpretative opportunity. The centerpiece of the Charmides is the denition of sophro-
sunē as self-knowledge to which Critias moves after the failure of the denition of
sophrosunē as minding one’s own business. The latter was originally mooted by Char-
mides, who ascribed it to Critias. Critias disowns it, but does attempt to defend it; upon
its collapse, he proclaims that what he really thinks is that sophrosunē is self-knowledge.
But is that denition really Critias’ own? M. assumes so, and reads its collapse as depen-
dent on Critias’ abstract, impersonal, and non-conversational picture of self-knowledge.
The confusion with which M. faults Critias here stands in some tension with the insight he
wants to attribute to Critias in discussing the latter’s interpretation of the GS as a greeting.
M. argues persuasively against the prevailing interpretation of that passage as mere so-
phistical display. On M.’s interpretation, Critias’ account of the GS as a kind of greeting
reects a genuinely Socratic insight about the relation between conversation and self-
knowledge. How, then, can it be that Critias’s conception of self-knowledge misses this
very point?
M. is driven to see Critias as making some obvious anti-Socratic mistake because he is
on his guard against the fact that Socrates’ refutation of that denition seems like an em-
barrassment to his project: the one Socratic dialogue about self-knowledge sheds doubt

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500 BOOK REVIEWS

on its existence and possibility. Armed with the distinction between self-knowledge and
self-investigation, we can acknowledge the dialogue’s aporetic ending, and entertain the
possibility that Socrates is the origin of the denition of sophrosunē as self-knowledge.
(Compare Laches, in which Nicias gives, and Socrates refutes, a “Socratic” denition of
courage.) This would add an interpretative layer to the dialogue quite favorable to M.’s
thesis: the view of self-knowledge that Critias helps Socrates investigate and nds want-
ing is Socrates’ own. Read thus, the Charmides would vindicate rather than threaten to
undermine M.’s conception of Socratic philosophy as self-investigation.
My second concern is about M.’s description of Socratic self-cultivation as “self-
constitution.” M. draws on Christine Korsgaard1 not only for the term, but for the asso-
ciated account: a person constitutes herself by adopting a critical reective distance from
her beliefs or desires to select some for endorsement and reject others. He speaks of “judg-
ing which of one’s commitments are worthiest of acknowledgement, and making those,
rather than others, the commitments on which one acts” (p. 158), “determining which
commitments to retain” (p. 178), and says that “self-knowledge winnows and integrates
one’s beliefs and desires” (p. 187). In one place he goes so far as to say that what Socrates
is after is “second-order knowledge” (p. 100). This picture of reective winnowing and
endorsement—which I’ll abbreviate as “reective endorsement”—is not, I think, ideally
suited as a model for the process of self-investigation he nds in the Socratic texts.
If we take the process of self-investigation to be reective endorsement, it must be dis-
tinguished both from a process by which we come to be acquainted with ourselves (so as
to discover which attitudes we have) and a process by which we converse with others (so
as to gure out which attitudes to winnow/endorse). The rst would have to be prepara-
tory for self-winnowing, the second instrumental to it. So, before I decide which beliefs
and desires I want to “keep,” I have to investigate myself to see which ones I have. This
investigative process would lay the groundwork for the winnowing/endorsing process,
which I might use conversation to facilitate. The problem is that M. wants both self-
inspection and the conversational process to be, rather than to be ancillary to, Socratic
self-cultivation. In one place he describes investigation of, conversation about, and uni-
cation of one’s desire as “three faces” of one process (pp. 131–32) —but he does not tell
us how these faces are themselves unied, and if the reader tries to take her cue from the
reective self-endorsement model, she will be inclined to understand them as three faces
of three different things.
So, for instance, he wants to deny that one’s beliefs and desires are unproblematically
available for introspection; rather, he holds that the process of self-cultivation is precisely
what makes them “visible.” The self at the end of the process is the one that can be known;
once it has been made visible, no work of winnowing or endorsement remains to be per-
formed. And, though he is at times inclined to instrumentalize Socratic conversation, re-
ducing “conversation and reciprocal testing” to the status of “the most effective way” to
come to know oneself (p. 100), I take it that his considered view is represented by pas-
sages in which he says that we “require someone else’s help even in making sense of the
request” to know ourselves ( p. 112).

1. Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford, 2009). The main discus-
sion of Korsgaard is to be found in pp. 36–40 of M.’s book, where he also references work in this vein by Tamar
Schapiro, Harry Frankfurt, and Richard Moran.

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BOOK REVIEWS 501

When M. is at his best, immersed in the details of a specic passage, he transcends the
connes of the reective endorsement framework. Consider two examples. In his discus-
sion of the Alcibiades, M. rightly emphasizes, against other interpreters, both the fact that
Socrates amplies rather than tamps down Alcibiades’ desires, and the value of his doing
so. (Note the lack of t between the idea of self-amplication and the reective endorse-
ment model, on which the self seems only to shrink or condense around “core commit-
ments.”) M. is attuned to the way in which Socratic inquiry must plug into the person’s
antecedent motivations in such a way as to extend them rather than to step back from
them: “Admonishing Alcibiades to seek self-knowledge means urging him to grow into
his desires, making those desires realizable” (p. 133).
In his analysis of the Charmides, M. deftly traces the changes in Socrates’ formulations
of self-knowledge to Critias. Socrates begins by characterizing such knowledge as akin to
geometry and house-building in terms of being the knowledge of an impersonal “some-
thing” (, 164c5). He moves to pointing out that the something known is “oneself ”
(165c7), and, nally, to characterizing the person who has it as knowing what one knows
and does not know (161a7) (pp. 86–88; here I simplify M.’s six stages into three).
M. notes that the nal reference to ignorance personalizes the knowledge: knowledge of
“something” could refer to a science picked out without describing its possessor; igno-
rance, by contrast, has to be someone’s ignorance. It is not quite right to say that Socrates
is “testing” Critias’ beliefs, in the sense of helping him see what he does or should commit
to; rather, he seems to be unraveling the thread of Critias’ own thought, displaying for
him the idea of self-knowledge that was his from the start.
I have levied these criticisms precisely because I am so persuaded by M.’s insight into
the GS as a description of what Socrates was doing when he was talking to people. The
texts M. discusses mostly lie outside the mainstream of Socratic studies, either because
they are simply neglected, or because, like the Phaedrus and the Philebus, they are con-
sidered too late to serve as the best sources for understanding the character or motivations
of the historical Socrates. Perhaps failure to attend to them explains the fact that some
counterpart of what I have called “the humility reading” of the GS underlies a common
way of thinking about Socrates’ conception of himself and his philosophical activity. M.
makes a signicant contribution to the eld of Socratic ethics by showing us that when we
read these neglected texts with the GS as our guiding thread, they reveal to us a Socrates
who is not, in the rst instance, ironic, self-doubting, elenchtic, or skeptical, but an am-
bitious, brave, and optimistic striver after knowledge: of himself, of the good, and of
others.

Agnes Callard
The University of Chicago

A Reading of Lucretius’ “De Rerum Natura.” By LEE FRATANTUONO. Lanham, Md.:

Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. [xii] 1 505.
Readers of Lucretius have been without an up-to-date English scholarly commentary
on the whole of De rerum natura (hereafter DRN ) since Cyril Bailey’s 1947 opus.1 Lee

1. Cyril Bailey, ed., trans., comm., Titi Lucreti Cari: De rerum natura, libri sex, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1947; corr. 1949,
repr. 2001).

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