Are people at bottom motivated entirely by self-interest? Or do they act only sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for other reasons—say, to help out a friend for her own sake, with no expectation of being benefitted in return? Scholars have often thought they could discern in the works of classical Greek thinkers a commitment to psychological egoism, the thesis that one is motivated to act only by considerations of the expected benefits and harms that will accrue to oneself.Footnote ¹ For instance, a host of influential interpreters have taken Plato to be wedded to psychological egoism throughout his corpus. Often, the commitment is thought to run so deep that Plato rarely, if ever, manages to articulate it explicitly, let alone to examine it critically and defend it.Footnote ² That kind of approach obviously invites challenges, and lately there has been a small but growing resistance to the egoistic interpretation of Plato.Footnote ³ The challenges are especially welcome given the general lack of support for psychological egoism in the present intellectual climate: egoistic readings have increasingly seemed to imply a crippling weakness in the Platonic system.

Even the modest amount of recent dissent concerning Plato contrasts sharply with the state of scholarship on that other Socratic: Xenophon. Xenophon's Socrates is widely thought to commit himself to psychological egoism, and in no uncertain terms. In fact, we know of no one who dissents from that judgement, not even among those responsible for the current revival of interest in Xenophon's Socratic writings.Footnote ⁴ Strikingly, the judgement is founded on a single piece of ‘direct’ evidence, a sole passage in which Xenophon's Socrates has been taken to espouse egoism. Our goal is to show that the passage can be read in a way implying no such commitment. We shall argue that the position Socrates takes depends on a background thesis, one that Socrates acknowledges indirectly but clearly and that is alone enough to explain why he says what he does. The proponent of an egoistic reading must acknowledge the same background thesis and goes wrong in supposing that there is any clear statement of egoism in the text. Egoism is thus both superfluous and unwarranted as an interpretative device. Since it is likewise unsupported by anything else in the corpus of Xenophon's writings, the egoistic reading can and should be jettisoned.

The passage in question is Xen. Mem. 3.9.4. Since its translation and interpretation are controversial, we quote it in Greek and then discuss.Footnote ⁵

The passage begins with the narrator's contention that Socrates ‘did not differentiate wisdom and moderation’ and instead ‘distinguished a wise and moderate person in virtue of his doing what is estimable upon recognizing it and avoiding what is shameful when he knows it.’Footnote ⁸ An imagined interlocutor then pursues the issue by asking whether Socrates would consider σοφούς τε καὶ ἀκρατεῖς those people who know how they should act but do the opposite. This is effectively to offer a counterexample to the position that wisdom and moderation are not to be differentiated: here is a case in which they come apart. Socrates responds by rejecting the suggestion that the people in question are wise, and he offers by way of explanation the lines that are typically taken as a clear expression of egoism.

Three preliminary terminological comments will help forestall some possible misunderstandings as to what we think is at stake in this exchange.

1. (1) The adjective ἀκρατής does not here mean ‘weak-willed’, and the present passage is not referring to the range of phenomena that interpreters have become accustomed to discuss, following Aristotelian usage, as cases of akrasia.Footnote ⁹ Xenophon consistently uses the adjective to mean ‘self-indulgent’ or ‘dissolute’ or ‘licentious’, exactly as Aristotle uses the term ἀκόλαστος.Footnote ¹⁰ Someone is ἀκρατής just in case he is wont to engage in excessive pleasure-seeking with no concern for what is right.Footnote ¹¹

2. (2) The term σωφροσύνη designates a particular moral virtue, the one paradigmatically associated with a proper attitude toward bodily pleasure. The issue of how σωφροσύνη is related to what is designated by the term ἐγκράτεια is a complex one given the range of relevant texts. Our view is that there is no hard and fast distinction. Xenophon tends to prefer σωφροσύνη when he is stressing the intellectual component of the relevant virtue. (Besides 3.9.4, see 1.2.17 and 4.5.6–7.) Crucially, however, both σωφροσύνη and ἐγκράτεια operate on a continuum, designating anything from a partial ability for self-discipline to a relatively complete form of self-mastery.Footnote ¹² Thus σωφροσύνη is used as a virtue-term in 3.9.4, and in 1.2.17–18 it designates what Socrates was concerned to teach others; but in the latter passage we are also told that both Critias and Alcibiades σωφρονοῦντε when they were in Socrates’ company.Footnote ¹³ As for ἐγκράτεια, it can refer to the discipline practised by someone training to be virtuous.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, it is also at points used of a relatively advanced form of self-mastery. At 4.8.11, the narrator speaks of Socrates as φρόνιμος, but he also refers to him in the same context—one in which he is enumerating Socrates’ virtues—as ἐγκρατής. Elsewhere (notably 1.2.1 and 1.5.6) he likewise stresses Socrates’ ἐγκράτεια, and at 1.5.1 he calls ἐγκράτεια a καλόν τε κἀγαθὸν ἀνδρὶ κτῆμα.Footnote ¹⁵

3. (3) At the beginning of 3.9.4, we are told that Socrates ‘did not differentiate’ σωφροσύνη from wisdom. We take Socrates to be staking out an intellectualist thesis about virtue by identifying σωφροσύνη with a kind of wisdom. Thus in the opening sentence of 3.9.5 ‘justice and every other form of virtue’ are said to be wisdom. (Socrates is not there identifying the virtues with one another by way of identifying them all with wisdom any more than he would be identifying the crafts with one another if he said ‘Ship-building is knowledge, and so is every other craft’.Footnote ¹⁶ Rather, he is saying that each virtue, σωφροσύνη included, is a form of wisdom.Footnote ¹⁷) Accordingly, Socrates’ attempts to make a person σωφρονέστερος typically involve a heavy dose of dialectical argument as well as instruction by example.Footnote ¹⁸

With those points in view, let us now look carefully at the way in which Socrates defends his position in response to the interlocutor's objection that someone might be wise while lacking σωφροσύνη and instead being ἀκρατής. Socrates begins his response thus: οὐδέν γε μᾶλλον, ἔφη, ἢ ἀσόφους τε καὶ ἀκρατεῖς. That short remark has occasioned a good deal of scholarly wrangling, and addressing the controversy will be crucial for understanding the force of the position that Socrates goes on to take. In an extensive review of earlier interpretations, Delatte argued that parallel uses of οὐδέν γε μᾶλλον (ἤ) at Mem. 3.12.1 and Oec. 12.18 require one to interpret the construction as meaning ‘no more F than G’, in the sense ‘neither F nor G’.Footnote ¹⁹ The difficulty of such an interpretation is that Socrates would then seem to be saying that the people at issue are neither wise and self-indulgent nor ignorant and self-indulgent. Yet, in the final clause of 3.9.4, Socrates asserts that such people are neither wise nor moderate; and it is clear from the further discussion in 3.9.5 that he in fact considers them ignorant. In order to resolve the tension thus created, Delatte proposed emending the text of the clause governed by the οὐδὲν μᾶλλον-construction, reading ἐγκρατεῖς in place of ἀκρατεῖς: it would be just as absurd to suppose that someone can be wise and self-indulgent as it would be to suppose that he can be unwise and self-controlled.Footnote ²⁰

Delatte's proposal has met with little acceptance,Footnote ²¹ but compelling alternatives are difficult to find in the literature. Some translators and interpreters render οὐδὲν μᾶλλον ἤ as ‘no more than’ (or something similar) and thereby seem to adopt without comment a version of the reading that Delatte rightly deems unworkable.Footnote ²² Other translations are hardly more viable.Footnote ²³ We consider the correct approach to be the one adopted by Marchant in his Loeb translation: ‘No; not so much that, as both unwise and vicious.’ Against it, Seel has recently revived Delatte's contention that the meaning of οὐδὲν μᾶλλον must accord with the other instances of the same construction in Xenophon.Footnote ²⁴ However, the supposed parallels are crucially different in a way that has gone unappreciated. Both of them involve a comparison of different things. That is, they take the form either ‘x is F no more than y is F’ (Mem. 3.12.1) or ‘x can do F no more than y can do G’ (Oec. 12.18). Yet, in the present case, Socrates is comparing competing descriptions of the same thing: ‘I would think x is F οὐδὲν μᾶλλον ἢ I would think x is G.’ In a comparison of that sort, μᾶλλον ἤ can take on the meaning ‘rather than’ or ‘in preference to’, and we submit that it does so here.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, Socrates is saying, ‘I do not think the description “x is F” holds any attraction as compared with “x is G”.’ Or, filling in the relevant content: ‘I wouldn't find [your characterization] preferable to saying “unwise and self-indulgent”.’

Socrates’ response initially has the air of a paradox: how can a person who knows what it is right to do be considered unwise? The answer is, of course, that Socrates resists not only the interlocutor's judgement about the situation but also his underlying description of it.Footnote ²⁶ There cannot be a person such as the interlocutor describes: someone who is ἀκρατής cannot at the same time be wise.

Socrates proceeds to explain his position thus: πάντας γὰρ οἶμαι προαιρουμένους ἐκ τῶν ἐνδεχομένων ἃ οἴονται συμφορώτατα αὑτοῖς εἶναι, ταῦτα πράττειν· νομίζω οὖν τοὺς μὴ ὀρθῶς πράττοντας οὔτε σοφοὺς οὔτε σώφρονας εἶναι. Marchant offers the following translation: ‘For I think that all men have a choice between various courses, and choose and follow the one which they think conduces most to their advantage. Therefore, I think that those who follow the wrong course are neither wise nor prudent.’ Here we dissent, at least as regards the first sentence. All the other translations we have consulted follow much the same practice,Footnote ²⁷ and this remark is what interpreters have taken as an announcement of psychological egoism. We propose to read the remark differently, so that the participle προαιρουμένους is not coordinate with the main verb πράττειν, as the other translations have it. Instead, the participle describes the circumstances under which the action of that verb occurs. We translate the whole: ‘You see, I think that all people, when selecting from the range of possibilities those they think most beneficial for themselves, will do just those things. So I consider those who don't act rightly to be neither wise nor moderate.’ Read thus, Socrates’ point is the restricted one that in those cases in which a person is committed to pursuing her advantage, she will always act according to her best judgement of what it is. Nothing is said to deny that on other occasions she might follow different principles.

Why does Socrates restrict his remark that way? And why does he make the seemingly tautologous assertion that in cases in which a person is committed to pursuing her advantage, she will always act according to her best judgement of what it is? Here it is crucial to keep in mind the context—namely, Socrates’ concern with correcting his interlocutor's suggestion about the self-indulgent person. Someone whose primary inclination is to engage in self-indulgent behaviour just is someone who is motivated to pass over actions she takes to be somehow right in favour of those that prove immediately satisfying. She considers her behaviour to promote her own advantage, and she makes this conception of her advantage the primary consideration in her deliberations. But Socrates thinks that the self-indulgent person is wrong about her welfare, and that is why he is concerned to look at her as one instance of the broader type. The interlocutor has proposed that she is wise but self-indulgent: wise because she recognizes both what it is right to do and what is in her interest; self-indulgent because she chooses the latter in preference to the former. However, Socrates insists that she is instead unwise and self-indulgent. With his seemingly tautologous remark, he is emphasizing that her mistake is not a failure to act on the results of her deliberation: no person committed to pursuing her self-interest would do that. Instead, her mistake is a misguided conception of her interest. Despite her inability to see as much, what it is right to do and what is in her interest in fact coincide.

In support of that line of interpretation, note Socrates’ reference toward the end of his response to τοὺς μὴ ὀρθῶς πράττοντας. Coming after the comment about self-interested deliberators, it clearly refers to those who fail to assess their interests correctly; but it also picks up on the interlocutor's description of those who do not do what they should (ἃ δεῖ πράττειν), where what is in view is some general conception of the rightness of action. The self-indulgent person makes a factual mistake in prying interest apart from right conduct, and then compounds the mistake by choosing, between the two options she has set for herself, the one that is neither what is right to do nor what is really in her interest. Had she been wise, she would have recognized that there is at bottom no trade-off between interest and obligation, and thus no division between wisdom and moderation.

On that interpretation, Socrates advocates a radical thesis: doing what is right is good not simply for others but for the agent herself. Plato's Socrates is well known for holding such a view.Footnote ²⁸ Xenophon's holds a version of it no less strongly. Consider 1.5.3, where Socrates states the thesis with regard specifically to the ἀκρατής:

Bracket for the moment the issue of the greedy person's profiting at the expense of others. Socrates is clear that the self-indulgent person harms himself. In fact, that is a running theme in his conversations. One might think of the exchanges between Socrates and Antiphon (1.6), where Socrates rebuts Antiphon's characterization of him as a ‘teacher of misery’ (1.6.3). He does so precisely by defending the beneficial effects of a life of restraint and by rejecting as slavish and unhealthy Antiphon's own preference for a life of ‘delicacy and extravagance’ (τρυφὴν καὶ πολυτέλειαν, 1.6.10). Or one might think of Socrates’ lengthy conversation with his self-indulgent friend Aristippus, whom Socrates patiently encourages to cultivate self-control (2.1). In the process, Socrates undercuts Aristippus’ idea that devoting oneself to one's own desires and refraining from the trouble of political engagement is the path to a life of freedom. Instead, the more laborious path is a more promising route to a free and gratifying life—a lesson that Socrates famously drives home by recounting at length Prodicus’ tale of the Choice of Heracles. And the list of passages could go on.

In 1.5, Socrates points out more succinctly but no less emphatically how poorly the self-indulgent person fares. A person of that sort is not one to succeed at serious projects, such as leading an army, or educating children, or managing an estate. He is physically and psychologically unhealthy besides, and he is unsuited to close friendship. Whatever happiness he expects to gain by his behaviour is thus illusory.

Socrates’ comparative remark about the greedy is somewhat more difficult to interpret. Perhaps he means to emphasize that the greedy only seem to enrich themselves by robbing others. Or perhaps he allows that they really do enrich themselves. Either way, Socrates would surely deny that their unjust grasping benefits rather than harms them. It may take some effort to see precisely why. By contrast to the hangovers and failures of the self-indulgent, the actions of the greedy may not produce outward signs of their self-inflicted harm. Yet, once one realizes that wealth is no determinant of happiness, one can see how misdirected their efforts in fact are.Footnote ²⁹

In contrast to the greedy and the self-indulgent, the person who knows what is right will understand that she cannot promote her interests by vicious means, and so she will have no deliberative motivation to follow anything but the virtuous course. To be sure, Socrates does not express the point with full generality in 1.5.3 or, for that matter, in 3.9.4. In both passages he makes his point by focussing only on the paradigm case of the person who lacks ἐγκράτεια. But that he holds the thesis in broad form—as regards all the virtues—is evident from 3.9.5, which fills out the line of thinking begun in 3.9.4. There, Socrates’ views are reported as follows:

Here, Socrates asserts a general link between virtue and wisdom. The link is undergirded by the idea that virtuous actions are ‘estimable’, καλά τε καὶ ἀγαθά. What is thereby meant is that acting virtuously involves conducting oneself admirably, and so achieving the best and most proper life for a person (in so far as it is a matter of one's own conduct). That idea is reinforced in the final sentence of the passage, where Socrates emphasizes that there are no things that are καλά τε καὶ ἀγαθά outside the sphere of virtuous conduct. To know the former is to know what is virtuous. Combined with the earlier remark that virtuous actions are καλά τε καὶ ἀγαθά, this amounts to the contention that what is virtuous and what is estimable completely coincide.

Socrates declares that the person who knows what is estimable (and hence virtuous) will never choose anything over it—ἀντὶ τούτων οὐδὲν προελέσθαι. Having obliquely made the connection in 3.9.4 between self-interest and what one ought to do, Socrates is now emphasizing that there are no goals in acting which could distract the knower from the pursuit of what is estimable.

His further remark about the failure of the ignorant person is interestingly ambiguous. Does such a person fail owing to a general lack of knowledge, doing what he wrongly conceives to be estimable? Or is his failure due to an inability to stick to the right course once he resolves on it? Although both factors could well be at issue, we think that Socrates has in mind primarily the first. Thus, when he says that the ignorant are incapable of doing what is estimable, he does not mean that they can never stumble upon it. Yet, their understanding of it will be deficient, and even if they should act according to their conception of it (rather than pursuing a false idea of self-interest that they dissociate from it) they will typically fail to achieve what is truly estimable. This idea of an intellectual mistake on the part of those ignorant of the virtuous course neatly echoes Socrates’ emphasis elsewhere—in 4.5.6–8—on the way in which ἀκρασία can distort one's perception of what is good and thereby prevent one from achieving it.Footnote ³²

On the account of 3.9.4–5 we are here offering, there is no commitment to the idea that people are motivated solely by self-interest. To be sure, 3.9.4 discusses situations in which people deliberate with an eye to their interests. Yet, the remark there is conditional: Socrates is not suggesting that people always have such a goal in mind. His conditional remark is instead meant to help bring into view the reason that self-indulgent people count as unwise: they mistake their own interests. 3.9.5 then rounds out the point by stressing that everyone who knows what is estimable will do it, presumably because they see the convergence of it with their interests. Understood that way, 3.9.5 forms a tight connection with the position taken in 3.9.4.

Contrast our account with the available interpretations, which would have Socrates accept not only that acting in one's interests involves doing what is estimable, but also that one always does what one takes to be in one's interests. The latter by itself is insufficient to explain Socrates’ thought in the passage, since without the former there remains the possibility that those who behave self-indulgently are genuinely promoting their interests. By contrast, and crucially for our purposes, the idea that acting in one's interests involves doing what is estimable can do all the necessary work without any appeal to psychological egoism: anyone who knows that acting self-indulgently harms her interests will have no deliberative motive so to act. After all, what would such a motive amount to? Acting self-indulgently just is attempting to promote one's own interests with no regard for what is right—presumably, with no regard for others’ interests, or perhaps for doing one's duty in some disinterested sense. Once one recognizes that it is impossible to further one's interests in such a fashion, one has no temptation to act self-indulgently. It does not in fact matter whether one's motives are ultimately self-directed, other-directed, duty-directed, or some combination of those options. What is crucial is that no self-interested motives will compete with other motives and thereby lead one to reject what is right. Psychological egoism need not factor in the explanation here: since none of the varieties of motivation will lead someone who fully knows what is right toward self-indulgence, the mere fact that the knower is self-controlled rather than indulgent is not revelatory of the kind of motivation that prompts her behaviour. Our interpretation therefore goes the more economical route of relying solely on the idea of a coincidence between what is right and what is in one's interests, dispensing with psychological egoism as an interpretative device.Footnote ³³ To be sure, the position Socrates stakes out here is consistent with psychological egoism. Yet, it in no way presupposes the truth of egoism.

In support of the interpretation we are taking, let us here emphasize what we noted at the outset, namely that there is no other direct support for psychological egoism anywhere in the corpus of Xenophon's writings. We thus submit not only that egoism has no place in 3.9.4–5, but also that it has no role to play in the views of Xenophon's Socrates at all. Now that scholarship has cast doubt on the supposition that it was a deep-running assumption of classical thought, any naïve faith in it would be unwarranted. And dispensing with egoism relieves one of the burden of struggling to explain a number of passages in Xenophon's corpus that are at odds with egoism on their most straightforward reading. Consider just two of them.

In 3.2, Socrates converses with someone chosen to be general about the qualities of a good leader. He begins by considering why Homer calls Agamemnon ‘shepherd of the people’. As Socrates explains, a shepherd cares for the safety and the needs of the sheep, and on that basis is able to fulfil the goals for which they are reared. Since those goals ultimately concern the benefit of the humans who care for them, one might think that Socrates would follow out the analogy by declaring that the reason a general keeps his soldiers safe and provides for their needs is that they will thus contribute to his own well-being. Yet, that is not the point. Instead, the analogy concerns only the way in which care helps the care-giver to fulfil a goal; and Socrates declares that the leader's ultimate goal is to help the soldiers realize their desires for their own happiness (ἵνα κρατοῦντες τῶν πολεμίων εὐδαιμονέστεροι ὦσιν, 3.2.1). Socrates pursues the thought by asking about Homer's description of Agamemnon as ‘a good king and a strong warrior’ (βασιλεύς τ' ἀγαθὸς κρατερός τ' αἰχμητής, 3.2.2):

Here, Socrates explicitly denies that the king's actions are properly evaluated from a purely self-regarding point of view. He goes on to explain why he thinks a king should work for the common happiness: those who chose him did so for the sake of their well-being, and the ruler is thus obligated to serve them. At the end of the chapter, Socrates’ point can therefore be summed up as follows (3.2.4): καὶ οὕτως ἐπισκοπῶν τίς εἴη ἀγαθοῦ ἡγεμόνος ἀρετὴ τὰ μὲν ἄλλα περιῄρει, κατέλιπε δὲ τὸ εὐδαίμονας ποιεῖν ὧν ἂν ἡγῆται. (‘In thus reflecting on the virtue of a good leader he stripped away everything else and left in place only this: making happy those whom one leads.’)

One might just manage to give the conversation an egoistic spin. For instance, one might maintain that, while Socrates’ ideal leader focusses strictly on the good of his subjects in his capacity as leader, the reasons why he takes on a leadership role in the first place are a further issue and could well be self-interested. One might further insist that the rank-and-file soldiers exhibit purely egoistic motives: as Socrates notes explicitly in 3.2.3,Footnote ³⁴ people choose their leaders with their own interests in view, since they wage war for the sake of their own happiness.Footnote ³⁵

Although such a reading may be possible, it is difficult to see why one would be drawn to it absent any clear evidence that Socrates is an egoist. Were he considering the leader solely in his capacity as leader, one could fairly expect him to be explicit about the point.Footnote ³⁶ Instead, his remarks about the virtues of a leader seem designed precisely to be giving advice—characteristically tactful in its indirectness—to someone who already occupies that role, encouraging him to focus on his men rather than himself.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, the mere fact that Socrates casts the soldier as choosing to go on campaign for reasons that are at least in part self-interested does not mean that he allows no room for other-directed acts during this or that engagement. Nor need it rule out Socrates’ also holding that the soldier is partly motivated to go to war by a direct concern for others.

Finally, and much more briefly, consider 2.2, which discusses the care parents take for their children. In chastising Lamprocles for disrespecting his mother, Socrates underscores the trials and the risks that a mother faces during pregnancy and delivery. He goes on to stress the way in which a mother bears the rigours of child-rearing without any sense of the rewards to herself: ‘she nurtures [her baby] for a long time, enduring toil day and night without knowing whether she will reap any return’ (καὶ τρέφει πολὺν χρόνον καὶ ἡμέρας καὶ νυκτὸς ὑπομένουσα πονεῖν, οὐκ εἰδυῖα εἴ τινα τούτων χάριν ἀπολήψεται, 2.2.5). Again, a defender of egoism might insist on giving an egoistic spin to the care a mother takes for her offspring, emphasizing the satisfaction she receives from nurturing the baby, or her desire to perpetuate something of herself. Whatever one may think of such manoeuvres, it is striking that they appear nowhere in Socrates’ discussion of parenting. There is in fact not a whisper of support for egoism, and there are plenty of remarks that would be difficult to square with it.

In want of any evidence that would demand an egoistic reading of those passages and others that pose like difficulties, egoism should once and for all be set aside in discussions of Xenophon's Socrates. Once one does so, what will stand out from 3.9.4–5 are the two commitments that overtly guide Socrates’ thought: intellectualism about virtue and the idea that doing what is right is good for an agent herself. Seeing that those commitments operate independently of egoism is valuable in so far as it underscores how much more work remains to be done on the reasons why Xenophon's Socrates subscribes unwaveringly to them. Such work is especially pressing because the two theses at issue are likewise some of the most deeply held commitments of Plato's Socrates. Probing the nature of Xenophon's adherence to them will put us in a much better position to appreciate his philosophical relationship to Plato and, thereby, to think further about whether the ‘Socratic question’ is a hopeless one, as Dorion has recently argued,Footnote ³⁸ or whether instead there is some hope for uncovering a broadly consistent set of intellectual commitments from the seemingly disparate works of the two authors.Footnote ³⁹