How Socrates Became Socrates: A Study of Plato's Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium

by Laurence Lampert

Plato dispersed his account of how Socrates became Socrates across three dialogues. Thus, Plato rendered his becoming discoverable only to readers truly invested. In How Socrates Became Socrates, Laurence Lampert recognizes the path of Plato’s strides and guides us through the true account of Socrates’ becoming. He divulges how and why Plato ordered his Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium chronologically to give readers access to Socrates’ development on philosophy’s fundamental questions of being and knowing. In addition to a careful and precise analysis of Plato’s Phaedo,Parmenides, and Symposium, Lampert shows that properly entwined, Plato’s three dialogues fuse to portray a young thinker entering philosophy’s true radical power. Lampert reveals why this radicality needed to be guarded and places this discussion within the greater scheme of the politics of philosophy. 

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

246 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 16, 2021

About the author

Laurence Lampert is a leading scholar in Nietzsche studies. He received both his master's and doctorate degrees from Northwestern University (in 1968 and 1971).

He taught at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis for over thirty years and is now a professor emeritus there.

An informative interview with Laurence Lampert, conducted by the Nietzsche Circle, can be found here (pdf).

Reviews

[Will Spohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

For about the first two thirds of this book—the sections of on the Phaedo and the Parmenides—I found Lampert to be convincing and insightful in his analysis of those two works. Though I do not think I fully understood the second part, because the Parmenides is terrifying, I think I understood the general structure of the Socratic turn as he was laying it out. In the last section, however, on the Symposium, the wheels fell off. I'm not really sure what he suggested Socrates learned in his conversations with Diotima, nor do I see how it is the fulfillment of the second two parts of his "becoming Socrates." As he sketched it out, it seemed like the Symposium would show how Eros played a role in the human mind's structuring of the world, and then how that understanding informed Socrates' turn to human opinion. That may be a bad summary, but up until then it seemed like he was making sense.

The section on the Symposium, however, didn't seem to take up the threads Lampert laid out, and on its own terms it was somewhat confusing to me (maybe I just didn't understand it, I don't know). I'm not even really sure what Lampert thinks Socrates learned. The portrait that Lampert paints culminates in him declaring that Socrates and Nietzsche were in fact the same, more or less, and that they believed the same things about the most fundamental matters (hence the Nietzschean phrase there)! That doesn't strike me as right, and in general Lampert seems to be at pains to make Plato/Socrates cohere with Nietzsche's view of them. I wonder if he could have come to a more coherent conclusion if he tried to understand them more on their own terms, and not in terms of a "Nietzschean Philosophy of History." That kind of need to make Plato/Socrates fit with Nietzsche also manifested in him trying to make them fit in with (i.e., not be fundamentally different from) people like Parmenides and Homer as well. I found those arguments more convincing, but still they rubbed me the wrong way somehow.

There is a lot in this book that is good, especially its interesting discussion of the dramatic dating of several of the dialogues, but I'm not sure a) if it accomplished what it set out to do and b) if what it wanted to do in the end made sense. I was really liking the book, and so it's a shame it went off the rails. I'd still say it is worth the read, however.

[David McBryde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, an interpretation of the Parmenides which makes sense of it. (Very heavily dependent on Benardete, but that is duly acknowledged). The Phaedo is the most depressing dialogue in Plato, not because Socrates dies in it, but because all the arguments for immortality of soul are knowingly fallacious. Lampert severely focuses on his task of explicating Socrates' second sailing, so full interpretations of the Phaedo and Symposium are not provided. Eidetic analysis seems to be the key to Socrates' mature method.