Alas, Alcibiades, what condition you suffer from!

An excerpt from my new book: The Quest for Character—What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders

[If you like this excerpt, please consider getting and reviewing The Quest for Character.]

The year is 430 BCE. The place, Athens. The time, shortly after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which—twenty-six years later—will end in Athens’s defeat and a general weakening of the Greek city-states, so much so that they will soon become easy prey, first of Philip II of Macedon and then of his son Alexander “the Great.”

But that will come later. Right now, two friends are in the midst of a momentous conversation that will mark not just their lives but the future of the city they love: Socrates and Alcibiades, the philosopher and the future statesman and general. Socrates is about forty years old, while his companion has just turned twenty. Despite his youth and inexperience, or more likely because of it, Alcibiades is full of self-confidence. He tells Socrates that he doesn’t need anyone or anything. He can rely on his own strengths, from his undisputed physical beauty to his penchant for daring, from his noble ancestry to his considerable wealth.

The young man is preparing to appear, a few days later, in front of the Athenian people. He is looking forward to the occasion, which he fully believes will result in honors being showered on him the likes of which have never been granted before, not even to his adoptive father, the statesman Pericles—who will die the following year, struck by the plague that has already put Athens at a great disadvantage in its war against Sparta. A war, incidentally, that has been orchestrated in part by Pericles himself.

Socrates throws cold water on Alcibiades’s expectations. He warns Alcibiades that he will not accomplish the things he wants to accomplish without Socrates’s help. That’s bold talk! But Socrates backs it up with an observation to which his young companion readily assents: Sound advice about politics and statesmanship comes from those who actually know and have thought about such things, not from wealth, which is Alcibiades’s main asset. I hardly have to point out the relevance of this remark to us denizens of the twenty-first century, two and a half millennia after Socrates spoke.

The philosopher underscores his point in his usual way, by analogy. Suppose—he tells his young companion—you wish to give advice on food, explaining to people that a particular foodstuff is better than another one and that it should be consumed in this or that quantity. Then someone stops you and says, “Wait a minute, what do you mean ‘better’?” And your response is “I mean more healthy, of course!” But it turns out that you are not, in fact, a doctor, and you know nothing about health. Surely that would be disgraceful, though that hasn’t stopped ancient and modern charlatans alike.

The ongoing conversation isn’t about food and health; it’s about the just way to conduct the business of the state. Socrates, accordingly, asks Alcibiades how he managed, as a mere child, to distinguish between what is just and what is unjust. The young man immediately acknowledges that, well, as it turns out, he didn’t really discover the difference between justice and injustice all by himself. Instead, he learned it, just like everyone else. But Socrates is far from satisfied: Be more specific, my friend. Learned from whom? From the many, comes the response. Although Socrates does not have the tools of contemporary logic at his disposal and can’t name Alcibiades’s logical fallacy as we would today (vox populi, to be precise), he knows it when he sees it: Learning from the multitude is no guarantee of learning anything of value. Just as you would want a doctor, not the people at large, to diagnose your illness and prescribe your medicine, you shouldn’t attempt to govern a nation on the basis of popular opinion.

Contemporary commentators often refer to Socrates’s attitude as probing and humorous. Probing it certainly was, with Socrates being the self-appointed gadfly of Athens. But his sense of humor more often than not bordered on sarcasm and frequently plainly crossed that border. Sure enough, the philosopher now sarcastically addresses Alcibiades as “the beautiful,” the son of Cleinias, and one who does not understand what is just and what is unjust, yet pretends to understand and has the gall to advise the Athenian people about it! He really ought to refrain from such behavior because “it is a mad undertaking you intend to take in hand, best of men, to teach what you do not know, having taken no care to learn it.”

Socrates resumes his probing of Alcibiades by trying a different approach. He asks whether Alcibiades is ever confused about the number of his eyes. Is he sure he has only two eyes and not three? What about the number of his hands? Two or four? Alcibiades at this point is so doubtful of his own convictions that he is afraid to answer even such obvious questions, but he eventually admits that no, he is never unsure about the number of his eyes or hands. That, Socrates continues, is because Alcibiades actually knows the answers to those questions. By contrast, when Alcibiades gives first one answer and then another about what Athens’s priorities should be, that’s a sure indication that he has no knowledge to be dispensed but only very tentative and often changeable opinions. People are confused about what they don’t know, not about what they have mastered.

There are three possibilities at play. Someone has knowledge about whatever subject matter is under discussion, or they don’t have knowledge but are aware of their ignorance, or they don’t have knowledge and are unaware of their ignorance. Those with the first two types of knowledge are not likely to make mistakes, either because they actually know what they are talking about or because they are aware of their limitations. It is the third group that is likely to make mistakes, and in this scene, Alcibiades belongs to this last unfortunate class. This condition of ignorance is, Socrates claims, a contemptible type of stupidity. Socrates goes on to frankly berate not just Alcibiades but most members of the political class:

“Then alas, Alcibiades, what a condition you suffer from! I hesitate to name it, but, since we two are alone, it must be said. You are wedded to stupidity, best of men, of the most extreme sort, as the argument accuses you and you accuse yourself. So this is why you are leaping into the affairs of the city before you have been educated. You are not the only one to suffer from this; most of those who manage the affairs of the city are the same way, except a few—perhaps including your guardian, Pericles.”

This, then, according to Socrates, is the real problem with many politicians: They are fools, affected by a particular kind of ignorance—arguably best referred to as unwisdom—yet blinded by their own unwavering conviction that they actually know what they are doing. There are few exceptions, and Pericles, Alcibiades’s adoptive father, perhaps counts as one. As we can again easily appreciate, not much has changed in the intervening twenty-five centuries.

According to Socrates, Alcibiades needs to take to heart the inscription at Delphi: Gnothi seauton (know thyself). If he does, he will realize that the very things he considers to be his assets—beauty, height, family, wealth, and wits—are actually his worst enemies. And one more thing will hamper Alcibiades throughout his life: his boundless ambition. While most people, even today, think of ambition as a good thing, Socrates suggests that it leads us to do things for the wrong reasons: not because they are just, honorable, and good but only in pursuit of self-aggrandizement.

Maybe, just maybe, not all is yet lost for Alcibiades. He seems to grasp, at least in part, what Socrates is telling him. He admits that he has long been living in a disgraceful fashion without even realizing it. Socrates tells him to take heart. Had he realized this by the time he was fifty, he would have been too late. But he is young; he can still change his ways and embrace the path of wisdom. And he has Socrates, his teacher, who loves him.

Alcibiades is moved by Socrates’s loving and wise words, and he resolves then and there to abandon his earlier ways and care for justice only. But Socrates is not optimistic. Intuiting the dark fate that awaits Alcibiades and Athens, in addition to his own end, Socrates replies, “I’d like you to keep on doing that. But I am filled with dread, not because I do not trust in your nature, but because I see the force of the city and fear that it will overcome both me and you.”

The lure of the dark side is ever strong.