Eudaimonia e protrettica socratica in Platone, Senofonte ed Eschine

rendere migliori gli altri per essere felici?

Abstract

Eudaimonia and Socratic protreptics in Plato, Xenophon and Aeschines: Making others better to be happy?

In this paper I deal with a set of specific features of Socrates’ protreptic activity as outlined in the writings of Xenophon, Aeschines, and Plato. In these three authors, protreptics is an activity through which Socrates makes his interlocutors better by a synousia, a “being together” that impacts on both their cognitive and emotional backgrounds. The improvement of Socrates’ interlocutors modifies their epistemic condition, which is followed, after a moment of painful disorientation, by an increase of happiness (eudaimonia) and in some cases also of pleasure (hedone). This process occurs in a number of dialogical units portrayed by the first-generation Socratics. Among the most evident examples are the famous speech of Alcibiades that concludes Plato’s Symposium; several fragments of Aeschines’ Alcibiades in which Socrates forces Alcibiades to engage a cognitive and emotional transformation fraught with consequences; and the story of Euthydemus, a young hopeful whose learned notions are put in crisis by Socrates in an important chapter of Xenophon’s Memorabilia. In all of these cases the other-oriented aspect of Socrates’ protreptic activity is related to the self-oriented features of his protreptics. I claim that this very relationship accounts for a peculiar trait of Socrates’ eudaimonia, which is not only a rational and/or a psychological state, but also a self-reflexive relationship with an entity that dwells in his interiority and does not coincide with his subjective consciousness.