The question of the relationship of philosophy to politics is bedrock for Plato, and nothing in his dialogues seems more likely to suggest answers than the friendship between Socrates and Alcibiades. In Socrates and Alcibiades, Ariel Helfer investigates their three main conversations, which appear in the Alcibiades, Second Alcibiades, and Symposium. The frame of Helfer's account is political ambition.
In the introduction and conclusion of his book, Helfer offers views of Alcibiades from a broad range of ancient sources, including Thucydides and Xenophon, and he schematizes ambition through five central characteristics: desire for renown, love of power, love of honor, desire to be a benefactor, and desire for the greatest goods. In the four chapters that constitute the body of the book, Helfer focuses on Plato's texts and organizes his account as a series of close readings of each of the dialogues he engages. There are two chapters on the Alcibiades, and one each on the Second Alcibiades (with two pages on the Protagoras) and Symposium.
Helfer's account begins with the question, Why does Socrates spend so much time and energy on Alcibiades? He argues that Socrates needs Alcibiades as a test of his wisdom. Just as one becomes visible to oneself by seeing oneself reflected in someone else's eyes, one becomes known to oneself by seeing oneself reflected in someone else's knowledge. So, Socrates needs Alcibiades, according Helfer, in order to know himself.
Socrates's main educational ambition in the Alcibiades is to weaken Alcibiades's regard for the demos. As Helfer presents it, Alcibiades begins with a simple plan: he will show himself to the demos at his very first opportunity, and they will love him. Just by appearing before them, and regardless of what he may or may not say, Alcibiades believes he will immediately garner democratic political power, which he will then use to benefit the city and himself. But Socrates does not let Alcibiades rest in this conventional ambition. Instead, he shows Alcibiades that the demos is ignorant and fickle. Their approbation is the last thing Alcibiades should seek, and his ambition to lead them is a goal beneath his promise.
Besides, Alcibiades wonders, if all Athenian statesmen (including Pericles) are successful without a philosophical education, and if he has all of the benefits of disposition and situation that anyone could hope for, why would he need Socratic education? Socrates counters Alcibiades's argument by raising his sights. His role models should be not Athenian statesmen but the kings of Sparta and Persia. This gets young Alcibiades's attention. By the end of their first conversation, Socrates seems successfully to have altered Alcibiades's ambition by elevating it. But, Helfer argues, Socrates's intentions for Alcibiades remain ambiguous throughout the dialogue and, in the end, Socrates fails. The “key ambiguity” of the dialogue, in fact, is that Socrates may or may not intend to “guide Alcibiades through a full philosophic investigation of the question of justice” (85).
The Second Alcibiades opens with its titular character gloomily headed to prayer and entirely disillusioned with the demos. We are never clearly told what Alcibiades plans to pray for, but whatever it is that he wants, he thinks he needs the gods’ help to get it. As the dialogue unfolds, self-sufficiency, piety, and the temptations to tyranny develop as central themes. Helfer presents Alcibiades as a man who no longer has any regard for the demos, but who still recognizes the authority of the gods, at least to the extent that any mention of matricide makes him deeply uncomfortable. By the end of the Second Alcibiades, however, Socrates undermines Alcibiades's religious beliefs, as well. Collectively, the Alcibiades and Second Alcibiades show Socrates releasing Alcibiades from the only two authorities he recognized: the demos and the gods.
When Helfer turns to the Symposium, he says that he struggles to find “the least similarities between the character we have been studying so far [in the Alcibiades and Second Alcibiades] and the drunken boisterous figure whose entrance signals the beginning of the end of the Symposium” (147–48). Alcibiades's dissipation seems to surprise Helfer mainly because he understands those dialogues to describe Socratic failures. If Alcibiades was impervious to Socratic critique, and also unleashed from conventional and religious constraints on his political ambition, why would he have come to this? But Helfer suggests an answer to his own question in his depiction of Alcibiades as a tragic figure of sorts: “At the core of Socrates’ failure to turn Alcibiades fully toward philosophy is the fact that Alcibiades could not ultimately tear himself away from the city and political life, even though he had become convinced of philosophy's superiority and the worthlessness of the opinion of the many” (174).
Socrates, I would argue, succeeded in both the Alcibiades and the Second Alcibiades insofar as he moved Alcibiades toward philosophy and released him from two of the main obstacles to his philosophical education: deference to convention and a simplistic understanding of piety. Helfer is right, of course, that Socrates did not ultimately succeed in turning Alcibiades toward philosophy, but this is not because the phases of his education displayed in those dialogues were failures. It may not be possible to say exactly why Alcibiades could not become philosophical, but by Helfer's own formulation, it seems to be more an issue of something like akrasia than a failure to agree with Socrates. In fact, perhaps what makes Alcibiades so interesting is that he does seem to understand Socrates so much of the time, and yet he cannot seem to temper himself at all.
There are two things, one structural and one formal, that seem problematic to me in this very good book. Structurally, Helfer has composed an introduction and conclusion that present the idea of political ambition systematically and contextualize Plato's portrayal of Alcibiades in relation to that of other ancient authors, but the body of the book is organized as a commentary. This makes the introduction and conclusion feel less well integrated than perhaps they should be.
Interpreting Plato is a speculative endeavor, and I would be the last to criticize a scholar for trying to work out interpretations that seem to follow from a synoptic look at the dramatic and argumentative elements of the dialogues. But one must take care to present speculation as speculation and argument as argument, and I think those lines get blurred a few times in Helfer's account. One important example of this is the conclusion he draws early in the book about Alcibiades's failure to understand Socrates's arguments in the Alcibiades and Second Alcibiades, which I mention above. Rather than presenting this as a speculative possibility, Helfer claims that it is clear and, in fact, that Socrates sees it and may be adjusting his hopes for Alcibiades (58). But as the argument of his book progresses, evidence mounts that Alcibiades did understand and was, in a sense, persuaded by Socrates in those early conversations, even though he continued to pursue his extraordinarily ambitious political aims. Keeping that possibility open, reconsidering it in light of the action of the Symposium, and perhaps bringing in evidence from other ancient sources could have made this good book even better.
All in all, Socrates and Alcibiades is a helpful and interesting book written by an excellent reader of Plato. The close readings of Alcibiades, Second Alcibiades, and Symposium are careful and insightful. Socrates and Alcibiades are two of the most colorful characters in Athenian history, and understanding their friendship is central to understanding Plato's political philosophy as well as Athens itself, the city that could not help but kill a philosopher. Helfer's book deftly moves readers deeper into those dynamics, and for that I am appreciative.
