ABSTRACT
A protest by subjective lucidity, irony is valuable only in so far as it supersedes subjectivity. Socratic irony, at any rate. It intervenes in a situation. Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity The ironic Socrates famously maintained that he knew nothing, and in this way he interrogated the methods and premises of conventional knowledge. Yet did this proclamation of ignorance also involve a political gesture? Was the object of irony not merely knowledge, but also the social and historical setting that produced the conditions of knowing? In other words, did Socratic irony intervene in a situation? And what was the mode of this intervention? This essay addresses these questions through a discussion of John Stuart Mill’s translation of the Protagoras. It approaches this translation as paradigmatic of modern interpretations of the dialogue, both in terms of Mill’s treatment of irony and in terms of defining the political nature of Socrates’ teaching. Yet it also suggests that, unlike a series of other translations that followed it, this early rendering enables a radical interpretation of the Protagoras, which deploys irony to redefine the political in both the ancient and the modern tradition. While seeking to reconstruct Socrates’ teaching from the perspective of its reception, this work does not consider the latter as straightforwardly
articulating Socratic ideas. It rather suggests that Mill both engaged with and reformulated Socrates’ political heritage. On the one hand, his interpretation of Socratic dialectics questioned authority and stressed the interrelation of critical debate, persuasion and democracy. On the other hand, his treatment of irony in the Protagoras relegated to the background Socrates’ dissenting voice. By understating the text’s ironic pronouncements Mill mistook the Socratic self-critique as a mere critique against dogmatism. He hailed the philosophical enterprise in Kantian terms as man’s emergence from his selfimposed immaturity and subjection. But he stopped before reaching the Socratic conclusion that, in the realm of the political, philosophy’s fulfilment passes through – or perhaps coincides with – philosophy’s failure. In the Protagoras, Socrates points to the limits of debate and considers (without, however, affirming) the transformation of philosophy through the mediation of technê. Mill’s translation both acknowledges and negates these limits, thus attesting the complexity and ambiguity of the Socratic tradition. Translation and classical reception s tudies
This discussion follows a route that is not commonly taken by classical studies and is bound to provoke suspicion as to its methodological productiveness and value. It is therefore appropriate to explain, at the outset, how the following analysis relates to current modes of interpreting ancient texts. The study of translations falls within a field of research that is generally considered as peripheral to classical studies: the so-called reception of the classics. It is not that this subject has never pertained to academic enquiries.1 It is rather that scientific orthodoxy has fashioned a dividing line, a boundary demarcating two distinct and presumably unrelated areas of research, namely the study of antiquity and the study of reception. In this context, a curious paradox has adhered to the afterlife of classical literature. The reception of ancient texts has been regarded as simultaneously crucial to and inconsequential for classical research. On the one hand, the various forms of artistic, literary and scholarly reformulations of antiquity, studied by historians of classical tradition and scholarship, have been central in defining the transcultural value of classical works and in setting the limits of the classical canon. On the other hand, the study of such rewritings, by focusing on influences and similarities, has typically stressed the role of antiquity in creating a universal Weltanschauung; a hypothesis that not only marginalized the ideological underpinnings of the vision of shared human culture, but also dissociated the study of classical tradition from the investigation of classical literature per se. For the study of ‘influences’ is necessarily one-directional: it
examines how classical ideas and forms have shaped modern philosophical and aesthetic aspirations, but not how these aspirations may reflect back on the image of antiquity in the modern age. Hence, from Rudolf Pfeiffer’s survey of classical scholarship (1968, 1976) to the numerous investigations of Greek and Roman contributions to modern civilisation – such as R.R. Bolgar’s far-reaching work on classical influences on Western thought or Gilbert Highet’s appraisal of the literary survivals of the classics – these fields have had a vital, yet also strikingly confined role in classical studies.2 However valuable they may have been in tracing the afterlife of antiquity, they were, in Ackerman’s words, ‘primarily a kind of history, not a kind of classics’.3 Over the last few decades, this tradition has been contested by a new field, which has become known as classical reception studies. While reception studies did not constitute a single paradigm, and the term is used here more as a conventional label than a unifying concept,4 one can identify a certain general consensus among practitioners on some key premises of classical research. Of these, the most salient has been a shift of perspective. Historians of the classical tradition start from antiquity and look forward. By contrast, reception studies examine how antiquity has been articulated in the various appropriations of the classics in postclassical times. What this move indicates in methodological terms is that classical works cannot be understood irrespective of the interpreter’s presuppositions, that conceptual ‘prejudices’, as the hermeneutic tradition reminds us,5 are not an obstacle to, but the precondition for understanding antiquity. In so far as all readings and modes of cognition offer a certain construction of the past, which is ultimately conditioned by the present, then classical studies itself, it is argued, has always been a certain kind of reception, while the various developments within the field have been competing forms of interpretation, bound to different times, subjectivities, cultures and societies.6 We could observe at this point that the relationship between classical tradition and reception studies has been generally conceived as antagonistic; the former accusing the latter of futile relativism and the latter speaking of the naïve positivism implied by any claim to historical objectivity or interpretative accuracy.7 Yet the very form of this antagonism, which has developed by evoking opposing premises of historical research and thus
opposing theories for investigating the classics, seems to me to indicate more an absence of dialogue, rather than an insoluble theoretical conflict. What I mean is that the different assertions about the possibility of interpretation, our conceptual proximity to antiquity or the truth-value of our readings have been posed by the two models as two different sets of assumptions about historical knowledge, each of which has been subsequently sustained by evoking its own forms of historical evidence. That this process has precluded dialogue by relegating a metahistorical debate – the problem of interpreting the past – to the realm of evidence that is itself organised by our initial assumptions becomes manifest, when we consider how attempts to address the opposition between the two paradigms conclude by restating the dilemmas they originally set out to resolve. Hence, when the study of classical tradition is called upon to play an ancillary role in the investigation of the classics, to demonstrate the historical background of the discipline or, on fewer occasions, to recover some longforgotten insights into antiquity, then this study acts merely to sustain or broaden our perspective on the past, without ever questioning why this perspective follows almost all previous ones in defining itself as a privileged view of antiquity. Meanwhile, reception-studies models, by focusing on ‘readings’ as the only means of approaching the classics, sidestep the fact that these ‘readings’ are conceivable as a unity due to their relationship to an original. It is not that different interpretations do not also develop through affirmations and refutations within the field of reception.8 It is rather that these encounters, which form the obvious object of medieval, Renaissance or modern criticism and history, would appear natural and inexplicable, if we fail to perceive their relationship to antiquity. In other words, the choice of different eras to appropriate the classical corpus would be reduced to a selfreproducing historical canon, which is taken to stem from and remain within the boundaries of the present. Yet even if all history is, indeed, contemporary history and if all readings spring from and reside in the present, it is the present itself that cannot be taken as a self-enclosed unity. For any historical period, as Raymond Williams has aptly argued, is characterized by the co-existence of three kinds of cultural formations: the ‘residual’, which survive from earlier periods and link the present with the past; the ‘emergent’, which take shape in the present, but go significantly beyond its given terms; and the ‘dominant,’ the forms and practices that most directly relate to existing social conditions and relations.9 A moment of tension between past and future, as Arendt has described it,10 the present develops its forms and objects by deploying the multilayered sediments of
past realities, including that of antiquity, by refracting and rewriting the past to serve current intentions and future possibilities. If then, we want to make sense of this present, and thus explain the directions and boundaries of our readings, we need to explore how these readings relate not only to the immediate, but also to the remote past, how they represent, transform or manipulate those distant realities they seek to encounter and utilize. But the very move of identifying these limits, of exploring how our perspective on the past is constrained by and acts itself to constrain the present, is the move that takes us back to antiquity and requires us to retrieve the marginalized and forbidden aspects of classical literature by giving them a new voice in the present. This is not to imply that reception studies should engage in a process of recovering meanings and forms that were present in antiquity, but were lost in interpretation. What is rather suggested is that the interplay between silence and articulation, between the concealment and enunciation of concepts that was carried out by interpretations of the classics was already at work in classical texts, which helped to create the tradition that subsequently shaped their destiny. Yet as this process took on different forms in different ages – forms that expressed the specific conditions of an era – the juxtaposition of ancient texts and their reception can deploy breaks, ‘betrayals’ and manipulations, to illuminate those aspects of our tradition that were strategically left beyond our limits of comprehension. This study of translations of the Protagoras aims, therefore, to investigate the image of Socrates, not by directly examining the text which, among other ancient works, inaugurated the Socratic tradition, but by scrutinizing how this text, which has itself fashioned our access to Socrates, has been channelled throughout the ages to sustain certain readings and exclude or marginalize others. The objective of this discussion is not, however, to account for the history of this tradition, but to attempt a dual transfiguration: the reconception of classical Socrates in terms of the tradition that defined his status and the rewriting of this tradition in terms that both stem from and transcend the limits of ancient culture. Effacing irony
For Mill Socrates was the first philosopher, which is to say that he was the inventor of philosophy as the critical quest for knowledge. While his image of Socrates derived mainly from Plato, he drew a distinction between the Dogmatic and the Socratic Plato, and considered the latter’s contribution as laying ‘not in the truths which he actually arrived at, but in the improved views which he originated respecting the mode in which truth should be sought.’ It was due to Socrates’ dialectical method that Plato, Mill wrote, not
definite positions ‘on the science of the Investigation of Science, the theory of the pursuit of truth’. Mill’s emphasis on Socratic dialectics – ‘the close discussion between two persons, one of whom interrogates, and the other answers’ – entailed the inseparability of philosophy and democratic politics. It involved the collective and critical mode of sifting opinions carried out by free and equal interlocutors, none of whom is in firm possession of knowledge. In other words, a mode which ‘the mere delivery of doctrines from master to student (the practice of the Sophists) absolutely preclude’.11 It was precisely this agonistic process of critical persuasion and consent that subsequently sustained Mill’s political vision. According to Nadia Urbinati, Mill drew on the Greek paradigm – and Socrates in particular – to conceptualize a political order that thrives on publicity, speech and judgement. For these features, as Urbinati points out, guaranteed for him a form of liberty that transcended the dichotomy between negative and positive, and materialized as ‘liberty from subjection’: a condition of public debate, dissent and conscious conviction that allows citizens to understand and justify their choices, rather than to express authority or obedience.12 Yet, in contrast to this approach to dialectics, Mill’s translation of the Protagoras suppressed precisely those aspects of the dialogue which can be read as pronouncements of Socrates’ lack of authority. In 361e Socrates declares that the encounter between him and Protagoras has no real ending, since, in the course of the argument, both interlocutors have contradicted their initial positions. The only outcome that was reached, he remarks, leads to an aporia that highlights the absurdity of their enquiry:
In his rendering Mill gave only a third person paraphrase of the passage:
Mill used the same technique to translate the subsequent elaboration of this statement, in which Socrates reiterated the previous positions, so that he could illustrate the irrationality of the dialogue (361A-C). In the translation, this second passage was reduced to a brief, neutral description, which
minimized the illocutionary significance of Socrates’ remarks. The use of narrative prose deprived the text of the very quality Mill regarded as the foundation of philosophy: agonistic debate. What is more by omitting Socrates’ statement on mockery, the translation effaced the passage’s ironic overtones. In the source text, Socrates employed an ambiguous and selfcritical language to describe the dialogue in terms of a failure: the atopon of the two positions. By contrast, Mill did not so much speak of failure as of a peculiar twist in the discussion, a ‘turn’ attributable more to personal whims than to modes of philosophizing. Mill has not been the only translator to efface Socratic irony. Benjamin Jowett’s rendering, written towards the end of the nineteenth century also marginalized the ironic dimension of the passage. His translation reads:
Like Mill before him, Jowett censored Socrates’ attempt at self-critique. His translation stressed the peculiarity of conclusions (‘The result … to be singular’) and the strangeness of interlocutors, but suppressed the overall questioning of the dialogue implied by the term atopoi. The words ‘singular’ and ‘strange’ have no philosophical implications. While identifying an unusual turn of the debate, they fail to establish the aporias of its logic. Likewise, Lamb’s translation for Loeb omitted the idea of an absurd argument:
Guthrie’s translation for Penguin used the term absurd, but nevertheless weakened Socrates’ statement by personalizing the subject matter of atopia:
While Guthrie introduced into the translation the idea of logical inconsistency, he immediately qualified this statement by the phrase ‘what an absurd pair you are,’ whose formulation seems to characterize people, rather than propositions. Most significantly, with the exception of Mill’s version, all of these translations (including that by Taylor, quoted after the ancient passage) use
the words ‘result’, ‘conclusion’ or ‘outcome’ to render the term exodos. Arguably, the source phrase exodos tôn logôn conveys the idea of conclusions, and therefore illustrates the process of argumentation and persuasion that took place in the preceding sections. Yet, at the same time, exodos fits uneasily with this process, as it evokes not philosophy, but dramatic performance. Derived from the language of tragedy, exodos suggests an alternative to the philosophical traits of the dialogue, and hence the traits of philosophy as such. Far from simply criticizing the argument, as the comment on atopoi did, exodos points to an act of dissimulation: the hiding of art,18 technê behind philosophy and of public performance behind argumentative debate. Socrates reveals this dissimulation without assuming the role of an enlightened consciousness. He points towards the impure, mixed, incongruous nature of philosophy, without asserting a straight version. In this sense, he is ironic in so far as he criticizes false knowledge without making a positive claim to knowing.19 He is, in Lefebvre words, an actor in a drama of not knowing and of false knowledge. As an ironist, he plays a role. He wears a mask – the mask of philosophy – and in this way he separates actors from masks.20 Contrariwise, translators of the passage abolished Socrates’ self-questioning and declared the purity of philosophy. By rendering exodos by ‘conclusion’ or ‘result’, they missed philosophy’s allusion to what lies beyond its limits: technê, art and performance. Their work maintained the coherence of the dialogue, and by so doing, it also pronounced the coherence of philosophy. This exclusion of the artistic and performative aspect of philosophy allowed the forging of a direct link between philosophical dialogue and democratic politics. As we shall see, translations of the Protagoras defined the political in terms of critical discussion and persuasion that stands above or beyond the social sphere of technê. While Socrates’ statements partly induce this assertion, they are also critical of it. By allowing technê to interrogate the conditions of philosophy, Socrates invites us to question the purity of persuasion and thus interrogate – at least provisionally – the relation between philosophy and democracy.
