BOOK REVIEWS 241

Christopher Moore
Socrates and Self-knowledge. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press,
2015. xvii + 275 pp. $99.99. ISBN 9781107123304 (hbk).

Just how seriously did Socrates take the Delphic injunction ‘γνῶθι σεαυτόν’?
Some scholars have argued that it was of peripheral interest, serving perhaps
as a first step in Socrates’ longer philosophical project regarding the knowledge
of good and evil. With this book, Christopher Moore joins those interpreters
who maintain that the Delphic injunction was actually of central importance
to Socrates’ understanding of the goal of philosophical inquiry. But Moore
does not simply fall in line with some other position that has been staked out
in the literature. Instead, he defends a new and remarkably modern view of
how Socrates understands the Delphic injunction and attempts to satisfy it.
According to Moore, for Socrates self-knowledge is not a matter of knowing
one’s limitations, or being modest, or even knowing into what ontological cat-
egory the soul falls. Moore’s Socrates sees self-knowledge as an awareness of
what is required to become a self, and what it is to be a self turns out to be
a mature, responsible moral agent with unified desires and the right orienta-
tion toward moral understanding. If Moore is right, Socrates thought that the
pursuit of self-knowledge is really something very akin to the modern notion
of agency constitution.
To those who believe that such an understanding of self-knowledge is too
far removed from the actual Delphic injunction to be what Socrates could have
had in mind, Moore argues persuasively that there were in antiquity widely
divergent interpretations of the god’s intent and so the Greeks themselves had
not settled on what the Delphic injunction meant. We see Critias, for example,
in Plato’s Charmides, insisting that ‘γνῶθι σεαυτόν’ is not an injunction or
admonition at all; it is really a greeting from the god and an encouragement to
be temperate. Plato would not have even suggested that such an interpretation
receive scrutiny were it plainly at odds with the settled, common understanding
of the god’s words. Moreover, Moore points out that there is scant evidence of
special interest in the injunction before Socrates, as there are only four authors
(we know of) who even mention the γνῶθι σεαυτόν before its appearance in the
Socratic literature: Ion of Chios, Heraclitus, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. In fact,
Oedipus Tyrannos may not even be referring the injunction. This is important
for Moore’s story because we simply cannot say that some established
understanding of the injunction makes the self-knowledge as self-constitution
interpretation unlikely on its face. What we must do then to get at Socrates’
understanding of the god’s wish is to look at what the Socratic literature tells us.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/20512996-12340150

242 BOOK REVIEWS

This material, Moore argues, yields a remarkably coherent and philosophically

sophisticated view of self-knowledge.
The ‘authors of Socratic literature’ from whom Moore draws together his
account of Socratic self-knowledge are perhaps not surprising. First, there
is Aristophanes, who, in what is likely the earliest reference to the philosopher’s
interest in self-knowledge, unmistakably links his Socrates to the γνῶθι σεαυτὸν
in the Clouds. Plato, of course, is the principal source. (Some readers will be
surprised to see the Alcibiades, whose authorship is still disputed, playing such
a prominent role in Moore’s story.) Also discussed, in the final chapter, are two
works, rarely attributed to Plato himself but which may tell us something of
what was discussed in Academic circles in Plato’s time and the decades fol-
lowing: The Rival Lovers and Hipparchus. The final source is Xenophon, whose
interest in Socratic self-knowledge is front and center in Memorabilia 4.2.
Moore is keenly aware of the obstacles facing attempts to attribute much of
anything to the historical Socrates. Nonetheless, he argues that

there are remarkable similarities in their ideas associated with self-

knowledge about their respective Socrateses. This is despite differences
among the texts’ descriptive, protreptic, analytical, or defensive goals.
These similarities justify speaking of a relatively constant set of ‘Socratic’
ideas about self-knowledge, even against hermeneutic worries about
identifying a single ‘character’ called Socrates across this range of works.
(p. xii)

After all, Moore points out, precisely the same reasoning leads scholars
commonly to refer to Socrates’ irony, Socrates’ method of questioning, Socrates’
interest in virtue as the supreme good, and so forth. The Socratic sources, or
even the Platonic sources, however, do not build up to an account of self-
knowledge that represents Socrates’ final thoughts on the matter. In no single
source do we find the Socratic position on self-knowledge laid out for us. Indeed,
no single work stands out as the richest source or even the most important
source. Moore’s project, accordingly, is to tease out, interpret, develop, and
stitch together these ‘remarkable similarities in their ideas associated with self-
knowledge’. The picture that results is that of a Socrates keenly interested in
self-knowledge as knowledge of a unified, responsible, morally informed self.
Moore starts with the Charmides. Critias’ inability to defend his understand-
ing of self-knowledge leads to the thoroughly pessimistic conclusion that self-
knowledge is either impossible to acquire or that it is useless. Because this
conclusion conflicts with the obvious importance the god himself assigns to
the γνῶθι σεαυτόν, Moore argues that we should be deeply suspicious of the

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arguments and assumptions that lead to such a dark outcome. The problem is
not with the value – or lack thereof – of self-knowledge itself but with Critias’
view that knowledge of the self is some kind of inner perception, a looking
inside of mind and cataloguing its contents. Moore thinks Plato really wants
us to diagnose the problems that doom Critias’ account and that if we do, we
come to the conclusion that self-knowledge is knowing what we know and
don’t know about what constitutes the good life and how to acquire it. The real
message of the Charmides is that, far from being either unattainable or useless,
self-knowledge is the most valuable knowledge one can acquire.
Unlike the Charmides, the Alcibiades never raises doubts about the value
of self-knowledge. On the contrary, in this work, which may or may not have
a Platonic provenance, Socrates encourages Alcibiades to accept the value of
self-knowledge as a prerequisite for the political career Alcibiades is seeking.
Here Socrates wants Alcibiades to understand what desires he has and what
desires he ought to have, something that can only be achieved through dia-
lectical conversation with another. Led in the right way through such conver-
sations, anyone, Socrates believes, can, over time, become self-reflective and
self-consciously interested in what is truly good.
In the Phaedrus Socrates claims that he himself is still searching for self-
knowledge, his lack of success owing, at least in part, to the need to align
his non-rational desires with the better part of the soul. Moore sees crucial
evidence for his thesis that self-knowledge is really self-construction in the
discussion of myth-rectification. Like the myth-rectifiers, who do not aim at
merely negating what is false or implausible in myths but who instead try to
make myths match reality, so the seeker after self-knowledge must not merely
rid himself of false beliefs and errant desires but assiduously labor to under-
stand the good and reform his desiderative states accordingly. Since mortality
prevents us from knowing in any absolute way, the lesson of the Phaedrus is
that the task of self-knowledge for mortals is never complete. The best one
can do in this life is to subject one’s beliefs to rigorous testing, a task most
profitably carried on with others. Hence, the emphasis in the Phaedrus on
developing an authentic loving relationship with another in whom one can
see oneself.
The Philebus reveals yet another crucial feature Socrates’ view of self-
knowledge as self-constitution. The good life, of course, requires pleasure, but
most people fail to lead a good life precisely because they pursue pleasures
mixed with pains. True, unmixed pleasures come only through the exercise of
those cognitive activities, guided by reason, that make one’s life unified and
measured. These, as Socrates implies at the end of the dialogue, are the most
important features a good life can have.

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The chapter on Memorabilia 4.2. treats Socrates’ interest in whether

Euthydemus possesses self-knowledge. Some scholars have faulted this par-
ticular picture of Socrates at work on the grounds that it shows him to be con-
cerned only with Euthydemus’ failure to know what powers he has and thus it
reveals Xenophon’s Socrates’ limited and relatively unhelpful understanding
of philosophy as moral improvement. If Moore is right, the standard assess-
ment simply misses what Xenophon’s Socrates is really up to. Euthydemus is
actually being urged to make himself just by coming to reflect on what justice
is and thereby to become a true self. Moore writes: ‘If you do not know about
goodness, justice, and beauty, you cannot use these as reasons to act. You
instead follow your impulses, suspicions, and self-images as guides for action.
These are not really up to you; they are whatever you have absorbed’ (p. 235).
Authentic agency, then, requires knowledge of moral qualities. Here we see
that Moore’s Socrates believes in a self that is as fully autonomous as mortals
can make themselves. It is a self that is expressed in action and that reflects
what one has created through rigorous reflection about what is best.
Moore’s study concludes with a very brief treatment of Rival Lovers and a
somewhat longer discussion Hipparchus, neither of which, Moore concedes,
are likely to have been written by Plato. The first straightforwardly picks up
themes introduced earlier. Philosophy is concerned centrally with true self-
benefit, which of course is what Moore’s Socrates thinks self-knowledge yields.
The brief discussion poses no problems for – but adds little to – the case for
self-knowledge as self-constitution built in the preceding chapters. What Rival
Lovers does show is that the theme of philosophy as self-knowledge acquisition
was a topic of discussion in platonic circles. The Hipparchus, by contrast,
appears to question directly the value of the Delphic γνῶθι σεαυτόν. Moore’s
primary reason for taking up the Hipparchus is that it invites readers to question
for themselves the importance of the knowing who one is. Self-knowledge,
apparently, does not exempt itself from scrutiny. The absence of such an
important notion is puzzling.
That the different ‘Socratic’ sources warrant the claim that the historical
Socrates was interested in self-knowledge, there can be little doubt. Moore’s
short but fascinating discussion of the Clouds alone is sufficient for this con-
clusion. But Moore can claim that he has given us an account of Socratic self-
knowledge only if he has located certain ideas about self-knowledge that, in
his words, ‘remain stable’ across the different sources considered (p. xii). To be
sure, some ideas about self-knowledge are clearly common to more than one
work. But some readers may question whether there is a ‘remarkably stable’
set in each or even most of the sources, as opposed to ideas about aspects of
self-knowledge that, when pieced together, yield a philosophically attractive

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account of what it is to know oneself. If the latter, Moore loses the claim that
he has uncovered the Socratic account. After all, the historical Socrates may
well have rejected some or all of those ideas.
Even if Moore does capture the essence of Socrates’ thinking about self-
knowledge, some readers may question the extent to which it was really as
central to Socratic philosophizing as Moore would have us believe. Of course,
in one way Moore has to be right. On the assumption that he has indeed
captured Socratic self-knowledge, because the notion that self-knowledge
requires (important) belief-rectification, thinking critically about anything of
philosophical importance turns out to be a form of self-knowledge-acquisition.
So, virtually everything Socrates considers turns out to be a form of coming
to know oneself. Still, as Moore himself points out (p. 245), self-knowledge
appears to play no role whatever in the Apology, the Symposium, the Gorgias,
or the Republic. Indeed, it is rarely even mentioned outside of the Platonic
writings Moore uses as his sources. And even in the works he analyzes, with
the exception of the Alcibiades, explicit reference to the famous Delphic saying
is rarely made.
Even those who are not entirely convinced that Moore achieves his ambi-
tious goal will benefit greatly by working through the book’s many discussions.
But although the book is a treasury of information about the use of the γνῶθι
σεαυτόν in the ancient world and is chocked full of arguments about Socrates, it
is not intended only for classicists and philosophers interested in Socrates, his-
torical or fictive. Moore clearly believes that his Socrates has much to teach
us today about how to become persons and to achieve moral agency and that
contemporary students of the self will learn much from the ancient philoso-
pher about what it is to be a self and how being a self is required for a living a
life worth living.

Thomas C. Brickhouse
Lynchburg College
brickhouse@lynchburg.edu

Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 35 (2018) 237-327