Second Thoughts on Socrates : Philosophy: For 30 years what Gregory Vlastos thought about the philosopher came to be what everybody thought. But now Vlastos is revising himself.

Working from his home above the UC Berkeley campus, Gregory Vlastos looks out across the San Francisco Bay as its morning fog drifts toward the city famous for its precipitous slopes.

But the philosopher’s thoughts are wandering through another renowned hilltop metropolis, that of ancient Athens, itself much obscured by nearly 2 1/2 milleniums of history.

Internationally eminent as a historian of ancient Greek philosophy, Vlastos, who recently turned 83, has pioneered current thinking about one of the city-state’s most illustrious citizens, Socrates. Roaming the marketplace in his well-worn coat, button-holing merchants and youths with his insistent questions, Socrates “brought philosophy from heaven to earth,” in the acclaimed words of the Roman orator, Cicero. At a time when other thinkers were either speculating on the nature of the cosmos or cultivating the esoterica of metaphysics, Socrates began his analyses of human conduct, and in so doing helped to lay the philosophical foundation of Western culture.

Vlastos, who is also Greek, has spent more than 30 years patiently striving to better understand the ideas of his countryman, whose life spanned 70 years from approximately 470 to 399 BC. The fruits of his labors are now twofold: Last month the octogenarian philosopher became the recipient of a $375,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, awarded for creative endeavors by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and, in the process, tied two former winners for the record of oldest honoree. In addition, next spring, his scholarly exploration will culminate in the publication of his book, “Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher” (Cornell University Press and Cambridge University Press in England).

According to specialists in ancient Greek philosophy, Vlastos, like Socrates, has done much to humanize the field at a time when emphasis is being placed on the logical validity of arguments rather than the substance of thought.

“He has shown that philosophy can speak with a public voice and address problems that are of concern to everyone,” says Alexander Nehamus, professor of philosophy at Princeton University and a former student of Vlastos.

Along with British philosopher, G.E.L. Owen, Vlastos, says Nehamus, “established Greek philosophy as a serious field of study in America.” Previously, “philosophy in America was unhistorical,” and concerned more with solving contemporary problems. Vlastos showed there was relevance in the solution of problems bequeathed by ancient philosophers, he says.

In the 1950s, Vlastos formed the generally accepted view of Socrates as a negative thinker who pointed out contradictions in other people’s thinking, says Nehamus. His new book, he believes, “is going to change the way Socrates is being seen within philosophy. It’s Vlastos revising Vlastos, but at the same time it’s Vlastos revising common sense, because what he thought about Socrates for the past 30 years came to be what everybody thought about Socrates.”

Vlastos, who regrets that scholars have come to depict Socrates as a dull moralist, now presents a dynamic positive figure whose views had a charismatic influence on the youth of his time and have an immediate relationship to our own. In the late 20th Century he would be a brilliant debunker of hocus-pocus in issues of public morality.

“We could use a whole platoon of people like Socrates,” says Vlastos, who bears on his cane to ease himself into a living room chair. Suffering from bone cancer, which has left him frail, he nonetheless speaks forcefully, with the sort of fearless assertions and brisk ironic gusts of humor that are said to have characterized Socrates.

“The most important single thing about Socrates is his insistence on clear thinking,” says Vlastos. “There’s a tremendous amount of fuzzy thinking today, particularly on the topic of morals, which allows ecclesiastical dogmas to be slipped in on us, like the questions of contraception and abortion.”

Vlastos, who attacks anti-abortion arguments with alacrity, finds “the idea that a fertilized ovum, within a day of its fertilization, is a person is simply absurd.”

Compounding the wrongness of reasoning, he says, is the fact that this dogma has been foisted off on a nation whose constitution proclaims the separation of church and State.

“Socrates would have had a field day pointing out these absurdities,” he declares.

As the critic of the public conscience, Socrates, says Vlastos, would have a plateful of issues on which to speak:

* Donald Trump: “He would really press him as to whether he can find happiness by piling up endless quantities of money and possessions.”

* The slashing of funds from social services and concurrent support for military defense: “The only way we apply modern technology, which can produce unlimited quantities of wealth, is by running into military crises and then diverting vast amounts of money to the production of ‘illth,’ which is the opposite of wealth.”

* The ethics of the Ronald Reagan era: “He was a great joker. . . . He had no compassion for others less fortunate than himself.

“These are the kinds of questions Socrates loved to address,” Vlastos states, “the problems which real human beings have to face in real life.”

Furthermore, the media would give him the opportunity to reach an audience of millions, rather than a scattering of individuals. “Socrates would be a prime subject for TV talk shows,” says Vlastos. “He had something of substance to say and he would say it with wit and irony and fearlessness.”

The most important moral lesson that Socrates taught, and one to which Socratic students have not previously given proper attention, Vlastos believes, is his rejection of the principle of retaliation.

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was a very well-established principle of morality in Greece,” he says, “far stronger” than it is in today’s society, with Greeks commonly supplicating the gods to take vengeance on their foes.

Yet Socrates held that “if your only reason for hurting someone is that that person did a nasty thing to you, that is totally unjustified,” Vlastos says. “This is the principle that wrought havoc in the ancient world,” setting Athens and Sparta in a nearly 30-year war of retaliation.

Similarly, it was to refute the principle of retaliation that Socrates, who was sentenced to death for impiety and the corruption of the city’s youth, chose to drink the poisonous hemlock, the state’s method of inflicting death, rather than accepting the escape from prison that his friends had prepared.

“The argument that was made to him was ‘the Athenians have done you dirt. They’ve condemned you unjustly. So you should feel free to do whatever is most advantageous to your personal safety,’ ” says Vlastos.

Instead, Socrates obeyed the lawful punishment of the city, which, he recognized, had allowed him the freedom to question traditional platitudes for most of his life, a freedom he would not have enjoyed in Sparta.

It is such an act of integrity that separates Socrates from American notables of our day, Vlastos thinks. Although there are some celebrated thinkers, he finds, “people with true integrity are quite rare in our society. I can’t think of a contemporary Socrates.”

His style was in diametrical opposition to popular contemporary celebrities. Considered ugly by Greek standards of aesthetics, he was slightly pop-eyed and snub-nosed with large flaring nostrils (the better to take in fresh air, he would joke, Vlastos says), though as his pupil Plato wrote, he was “all glorious within.” And rather than trumpeting his importance, says Vlastos, “he was always running himself down.”

In some ways, he invented irony, Vlastos says. “He’d come up to you and say, ‘Oh, you look like a very wise lady to me. Now what do you think about this and that.’ And pretty soon it would appear that your wisdom was a little bit over-rated.”

He was suspicious of politics, refused to become entangled with wealth, and felt his life’s mission, commanded by God, was to examine himself and provoke self-examination among the citizens of Athens.

He used language with striking virtuosity, engaging young men in debate on the benches of the city’s gymnasia, at the same time that they developed their physical powers.

But if Socrates flourished as a conspicuous celebrity, Vlastos points out, it was because he was part and parcel of a society in which intellectual prowess was highly prized. The word and the act of philosophizing, as it is known in Western civilization, are Greek in origin, as is “the idea that fundamental principles are all susceptible to rational criticism--all of them,” Vlastos says.

“The Greeks had a much livelier intellect than appears in our young people whose minds are stupefied by TV and other essentially passive entertainments which don’t call on them to exert their minds.

“The general atmosphere of the age is not critical. In our society we have this success bug.” Consequently, Vlastos says, “one adopts the conventional signs of good behavior and becomes very wary of departing from established habits.”

This, in turn, results in “the fact that people are buffaloed by all these uncritical dogmas,” which Vlastos thinks is the source of “so many of our problems today.”

Vlastos’ own critical thought was formed at an early age in the particularly Socratic manner of one-on-one tutoring, which he continues to tout in opposition to classroom instruction. Raised among the Greek minority in a Turkish village on the Bosphorus Sea, he received his schooling from his mother, proving its efficacy by entering Istanbul’s (then Constantinople) American-run Robert College at the age of 14.

Graduating three years later, he left to study for the Congregational ministry on a fellowship at the Chicago Theological Seminary. For a summer he served as pastor in the hamlet of Beverly, Mass., before earning a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard University and opting for a life studying secular morality.

Devoting so many years to the examination of Socrates’ thoughts has greatly influenced his own life, Vlastos says. “You can’t help it, living with a man like that who is a person of complete integrity.”

Like Socrates, he has spent much of his life teaching, influencing the thoughts of two generations of students. A professor of philosophy at Princeton University for 21 years, he retired in 1976 and became professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, leaving that post three years ago. He has also been a visiting professor at St. Andrews University in Scotland and Cambridge University, England, where he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.

He has also achieved a Socratic moderation in his life, which he partially credits for his longevity. “That’s one reason I’ve lived to my present age,” he says, musing that he has presently outlived Socrates by 13 years.

Having survived his wife (he has a daughter in Alhambra and a son in Iowa), he spends most of his time in his secluded hillside house, which he finds conducive to thought. Since his illness, however, days of strenuous work have given way to three hours of morning writing. He has been working on his book for a dozen years.

“I’m very pleased I finished it,” he says, allowing himself a modest measure of self-satisfaction. “I thought my illness would finish me off before I finished the book. But I won, and now I hope to write a second volume.”