Why Socrates stood so long at Potidaea (Symp. 220c-d)

Alcibiades tells a story about Socrates’ remarkable activity while on campaign in Potidaea:

Immersed in some problem at dawn, he stood in the same spot considering it (συννοήσας γὰρ αὐτόθι ἕωθέν τι εἱστήκει σκοπῶν); and when he found it a tough one, he would not give it up but stood there trying. The time drew on to midday, and the men began to notice him, and said to one another in wonder: ‘Socrates has been standing there in a study (φροντίζων τι) ever since dawn!’ The end of it was that in the evening some of the Ionians after they had supped—this time it was summer—brought out their mattresses and rugs and took their sleep in the cool; thus they waited to see if he would go on standing all night too. He stood till dawn came and the sun rose; then walked away, after offering a prayer to the Sun. (Symposium 220c-d, tr. in Loeb 1925)

Jonathan Lear, in his recent The Case for Irony (Tanner Lectures, essay here, Harvard, 2011), thinks Alcibiades doesn’t understand Socrates (33-4). Alcibiades, Lear thinks, supposes that Socrates is so captivated by a problem—”perhaps the proof of an especially difficult geometrical theorem”—that he cannot both walk and think. Lear offers a different interpretation. Socrates “cannot walk, not knowing what his next step should be… longing to move in the right direction, but not knowing what that direction is. He is uprooted only by the conventional religious demands of a new day.” That is, Socrates (and only Socrates) recognizes his profound ignorance about his task as a human being. His self-doubt transcends the reflectiveness that is compatible with, indeed institutionalized within, most other social roles. As a soldier, for example, it is natural, even expected, that one might wonder about one’s cause, one’s constitutional capacity to fight for that cause, and one’s expectations in the cases of victory or defeat. But these moments of questioning, Lear claims, are part of the social role, and so are far from debilitating; they might even be constructive. The deeper kind of doubt Lear links to irony moves outside the institutionalized modes of reflection and gives an external critique: “Who am I to be a soldier?” or “What does it mean that I take myself to be a soldier?” This is the sort of question that Lear thinks Socrates is asking himself at this point. It is a debilitating question, for it is not naturalized to any practical activity.

Christine Korsgaard, in her comments on these Tanner Lectures, disagrees (82-3). She claims that Socrates reveals here his utter self-possession. “Anyone else would have become embarrassed and moved off if those around him made a spectacle of him in the way that Socrates’ companions did on that night.” Likewise the threat of death. She does perhaps agree with Lear that “Socrates’ awareness of the possibility that none of us quite knows what we are doing is part of what enables him to proceed with such confidence. … He knows that every human action is a kind of leap of faith, but he also knows that the condition is so utterly universal that is can’t be a reason for hesitation or half-heartedness.”

Bettany Hughes, by contrast, takes a psychiatric view in her Hemlock Cup (Knopf, 2010), claiming that Socrates had “curious cataleptic seizures, when he stared into the distance for hours on end” (xviii).

Ryan Balot (Courage in the Democratic Polis), says that Alcibiades reports Socrates’ “working on a philosophical problem” to demonstrate Socrates’ “courage as ‘standing fast'” (337).