Parts One and Two of this essay can be read here and here respectively.
It may seem ironic that the State is the last, and perhaps least, important filter through which we will be looking at something called The Republic. This anomaly has more to do with the part of that work under examination as the full task of constructing this ideal society actually begins in Book Three. That is not to say however that ideas about the State do not figure into the dialogues of Books One and Two. There are several ideas about the State that surface before the focus of the dialogue as a whole turns specifically to it.
The first inquiry into the nature of Justice (begun by Cephalus and then defended by Polemarchus) concerns itself with the ways in which a person may be just. The second one, born from Thrasymachus’ argument that Justice is merely a euphemism for the stronger exerting their will over the weaker, turns its attention almost immediately to the broader expression as it relates to the way that humanity rules itself. After establishing that there are different forms of government (tyrannies, democracies, and aristocracies listed in particular), Thrasymachus provides us with our first description of the State and its function.
...the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests; and these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they punish as a breaker of the law and unjust. And that is what I mean when I say that in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger. [301]
What we find in Socrates’ examination of his claims, however, is a curious tendency of any conversation about States as a whole degenerating into a conversation about the particular ruler or rulers that govern that state. The dialogue, begun as an inquiry into the just action of a person, first references the State as the arbiter of the punishment due to that person should they behave in a criminal manner.
Socrates begins his rebuttal to the argument by asking Thrasymachus if he believes that “it is just for subjects to obey their rulers” [302]. Each of the three types of government being considered (aristocratic oligarchy, tyranny, and democracy) employs its own mechanisms for first crafting those laws and then enforcing them. It is also worth noting that other types of governance like imperial, monarchical, or theocratic (all extant prior to, during, and after the classical Greek civilizations rose and fell) are not considered. Regardless of the type of government under consideration, the actual act of creating, enforcing, and obeying or not obeying the Law is strictly a matter of human behavior. The State, in this sense, is not a person and so while it may be said to foster or stifle Justice, the success or failure of this effort is to be found not in abstractions, but in human behavior.
The issue of the State is largely ignored until mid-way through the second book as Socrates begins his rebuttal to Glaucon and Adeimantes’ lengthy defense of injustice as an value widely praised by gods and men alike. After raising again the idea that Justice may be thought of as both a human virtue as well one related to the State, Socrates argues that, as the State presents a wider-range of concerns that of a single human being, it makes sense to consider Justice first as virtue of a State and then draw analogies from the greater to the lesser. He then lays out his plainest argument for the existence of the State, suggesting that it arises, “out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.” [316].
The following paragraphs are a careful construction of the various facets of the population of a State, based on the aforementioned premise that all complexity arises from human want. After demonstrating that merely providing for the basic staples of human existence (food, clothing, shelter) gives rise to a surprisingly diverse population, Glaucon suggests that a truly civilized state would also include as many luxuries and entertainment as its population could support which, again, adds whole new classes and subsets of laborers. This concession leads Socrates to a startling conclusion.
SOCRATES: Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is no longer sufficient. Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want…And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will be too small not and not enough?
GLAUCON: Quite true.
SOCRATES: Then a slice of our neighbors’ land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth.
GLAUCON: That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
SOCRATES: And so we shall go to war…without determining whether war does good or harm, thus much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evil in States, private as well as public.
His premise here, stated more plainly, is that while the State arises from the needs of its members, those unjust aspects of the State arise from their unnecessary wants. It also stands to reason that as a State is successful in its fulfillments of those, more superfluous interests (whether by conquest, trade, or a potent mixture of the two) the more unsustainable that enlarged and entitled population will become. This is the story of Empire, played out time and time again in the human experiment but always with the same inevitable outcome of utter ruin for all.
Showing posts with label Socrates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Socrates. Show all posts
Monday, May 25, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Great Books: Plato's Republic Books One and Two (Part Two)
The first part of this essay can be read here
To appreciate how an extended conversation presumably only about Justice might include inquiry related to Virtue and Vice, we must appreciate that Justice is recognized throughout (at least by Socrates) as a type of virtue or, perhaps more specifically, as a component of human virtue. Virtue (from the Greek arete) was considered the complete fulfillment of a thing or potential. If that thing was a Greek man, he might exhibit a number of virtues including excellence in sport and war, able management of his inheritance without resorting to something so crass as labor or mercantilism, and a wide variety of other measurements of a man’s cut (including his desire to behave justly) that all contributed to his overall Virtue or successful fulfillment of his ultimate purpose. So as the conversation turns towards a discussion of individual behavior, the question of Virtue and Vice become central to the inquiry.
Near the conclusion of his argument with Thrasymachus, Socrates draws an analogy between that which is just and good with virtue and, conversely, that which is unjust and evil with vice. This idea becomes magnified in the beginning of Book Two when Glaucon, playing the Devil’s Advocate, takes up the vanquished Thrasymachus’ argument that injustice is, in fact, good and virtuous. Glaucon begins his argument by retelling the story of Gyges, a shepherd who discovers a magic ring that renders him invisible. In the story, Gyges uses the ring to first gain advantage over his fellow shepherds and, ultimately, to murder the King and take his kingdom. Glaucon ties this story in with their current inquiry by taking it one step further.
Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that we would stand fast in justice…Then the action of the just would be as the actions of the unjust…And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. [312]
Glaucon’s argument is carried one step further by his brother, Adeimantus who points out that “the universal voice of mankind is always declaring that justice and virtue are honorable, but grievous, toilsome, and that the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of attainment and are only censured by law and opinion” [313].
In order to test the validity of their argument (something Socrates himself doesn’t get to in books one and two of the Republic), we must have some certainty about the meaning of the terms under consideration. Virtue and Vice are too easily mistaken for doing good or doing bad. The trouble with the shallow, contemporary reading is that good and bad are merely polar markers that delineate a wide range of behavior that is rarely all one to the exclusion of the others. A man who, for example, robs a bank in order to feed his family has clearly committed a crime but his actions are neither fully good nor fully evil; if, then, the road to hell is paved with good intentions so also would the banister on the stairway to heaven be gilded with evil.
Fortunately, Virtue, in the Greek mode of thinking, has nothing to do with any of these nebulous and unknowable quantities. When Plato speaks of Justice being a Virtue, it is understood that he is saying Justice is but one component of the state of Human Virtue. Justice alone will not make someone virtuous but it may be said that no true Virtue might be complete without it. If we are to accept the proposition that humanity is somehow unique among the animal kingdom from which we arose (hardly a settled matter but I think Socrates and Plato would agree), then we must also accept that the Virtue of a Human Being is unique as well and might well be recognized, as someone once said, by the fruit that it bears. When humanity does as Thrasymachus and the sons of Ariston suggest, practice injustice in whatever degree it can be perpetuated without being punished, it is no different from the law of the jungle where the strongest and smartest flourish at the expense of the weaker and not-so-smartest. If one can suppose that all culture, all faith, all love, all art, all whatever makes us human, can be boiled down to mere elaborations on our biological scripts (the same scripts that every other living thing on Earth is exercising right alongside us), then perhaps this is the more persuasive argument. In fact, regardless of what other baggage we may or may not have picked up along our evolutionary journey, those impulses certainly still exist within us and, at times, may still dominate our behavior.
If, however, we are to consider ourselves as something other than just unusually adaptive primates that exploited the right niche at the right time and accidentally wound up dominating the entire planet, we must also accept the possibility that our Virtue, the full expression of our purpose, might reflect the awesome responsibility of this higher consciousness. These components of Virtue (Justice, Mercy, Love, Reason, pick three of your own, etc), in contrast to the Virtue of any given animal, including the one we used to be, would seem alien and counterproductive. Their relative youth in comparison to the many calls of the wild that reside within in would also render them relatively fragile. Plato quotes Hesiod in observing that “Vice may be had in abundance without trouble; the way is smooth and her dwelling place is near. But before Virtue the gods have set toil.”
The message is clear. Virtue is an attainment of distinctly human potential while Vice, in whatever form it might take, embraces the old laws of survival that come so easily to us but which we execute with a savagery and wanton destructiveness without peer among forms of life we consider to be less evolved.
To appreciate how an extended conversation presumably only about Justice might include inquiry related to Virtue and Vice, we must appreciate that Justice is recognized throughout (at least by Socrates) as a type of virtue or, perhaps more specifically, as a component of human virtue. Virtue (from the Greek arete) was considered the complete fulfillment of a thing or potential. If that thing was a Greek man, he might exhibit a number of virtues including excellence in sport and war, able management of his inheritance without resorting to something so crass as labor or mercantilism, and a wide variety of other measurements of a man’s cut (including his desire to behave justly) that all contributed to his overall Virtue or successful fulfillment of his ultimate purpose. So as the conversation turns towards a discussion of individual behavior, the question of Virtue and Vice become central to the inquiry.
Near the conclusion of his argument with Thrasymachus, Socrates draws an analogy between that which is just and good with virtue and, conversely, that which is unjust and evil with vice. This idea becomes magnified in the beginning of Book Two when Glaucon, playing the Devil’s Advocate, takes up the vanquished Thrasymachus’ argument that injustice is, in fact, good and virtuous. Glaucon begins his argument by retelling the story of Gyges, a shepherd who discovers a magic ring that renders him invisible. In the story, Gyges uses the ring to first gain advantage over his fellow shepherds and, ultimately, to murder the King and take his kingdom. Glaucon ties this story in with their current inquiry by taking it one step further.
Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that we would stand fast in justice…Then the action of the just would be as the actions of the unjust…And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. [312]
Glaucon’s argument is carried one step further by his brother, Adeimantus who points out that “the universal voice of mankind is always declaring that justice and virtue are honorable, but grievous, toilsome, and that the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of attainment and are only censured by law and opinion” [313].
In order to test the validity of their argument (something Socrates himself doesn’t get to in books one and two of the Republic), we must have some certainty about the meaning of the terms under consideration. Virtue and Vice are too easily mistaken for doing good or doing bad. The trouble with the shallow, contemporary reading is that good and bad are merely polar markers that delineate a wide range of behavior that is rarely all one to the exclusion of the others. A man who, for example, robs a bank in order to feed his family has clearly committed a crime but his actions are neither fully good nor fully evil; if, then, the road to hell is paved with good intentions so also would the banister on the stairway to heaven be gilded with evil.
Fortunately, Virtue, in the Greek mode of thinking, has nothing to do with any of these nebulous and unknowable quantities. When Plato speaks of Justice being a Virtue, it is understood that he is saying Justice is but one component of the state of Human Virtue. Justice alone will not make someone virtuous but it may be said that no true Virtue might be complete without it. If we are to accept the proposition that humanity is somehow unique among the animal kingdom from which we arose (hardly a settled matter but I think Socrates and Plato would agree), then we must also accept that the Virtue of a Human Being is unique as well and might well be recognized, as someone once said, by the fruit that it bears. When humanity does as Thrasymachus and the sons of Ariston suggest, practice injustice in whatever degree it can be perpetuated without being punished, it is no different from the law of the jungle where the strongest and smartest flourish at the expense of the weaker and not-so-smartest. If one can suppose that all culture, all faith, all love, all art, all whatever makes us human, can be boiled down to mere elaborations on our biological scripts (the same scripts that every other living thing on Earth is exercising right alongside us), then perhaps this is the more persuasive argument. In fact, regardless of what other baggage we may or may not have picked up along our evolutionary journey, those impulses certainly still exist within us and, at times, may still dominate our behavior.
If, however, we are to consider ourselves as something other than just unusually adaptive primates that exploited the right niche at the right time and accidentally wound up dominating the entire planet, we must also accept the possibility that our Virtue, the full expression of our purpose, might reflect the awesome responsibility of this higher consciousness. These components of Virtue (Justice, Mercy, Love, Reason, pick three of your own, etc), in contrast to the Virtue of any given animal, including the one we used to be, would seem alien and counterproductive. Their relative youth in comparison to the many calls of the wild that reside within in would also render them relatively fragile. Plato quotes Hesiod in observing that “Vice may be had in abundance without trouble; the way is smooth and her dwelling place is near. But before Virtue the gods have set toil.”
The message is clear. Virtue is an attainment of distinctly human potential while Vice, in whatever form it might take, embraces the old laws of survival that come so easily to us but which we execute with a savagery and wanton destructiveness without peer among forms of life we consider to be less evolved.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Great Books: Plato's Republic Books One and Two (Part 1)
The Republic, Books One and Two
Written by Plato circa 385 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Justice, Vice and Virtue, State
The complete text of the Republic can be read online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html for free. It uses the same Benjamin Jowett translation that is cited in this work, though page citations given for quoted material corresponds to the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World set.
Unlike the emotional rollercoaster of Plato’s trilogy on the Trial and Execution of Socrates, The Republic is, in many ways, more typical of Plato’s work as a whole. It presents, in written form, a fictional conversation in dialogue form between Socrates and a number of other Greek men as they ponder a variety of philosophical issues. The Republic stands out as notable, if not unique, among Plato’s writings because of the expanse of topics methodically dissected within its narrative, the universal nature of the questions under consideration, as well as the exhaustive insights it provides into the worldview of both its writer and the audiences for whom it was intended.
One of the great questions in reading the Republic is, “How fictionalized is Plato’s version of Socrates anyway?” We know that Plato was a student, admirer, and probably friend to Socrates. We also know that, as a scholar, Plato would have to have been as comfortable retaining information taken in via the oral tradition as he was learning information from written sources. Put plainly, there is more evidence suggesting the veracity of Plato’s account of Socrates’ ideas than that of the writers of the Gospels in regards to the life of Jesus Christ. If Plato’s descriptions were, indeed, intended as transmissions from his master, they would be as close to direct as possible without being penned by Socrates’ own hand.
As tempting as this idea of an untainted glimpse into the mind of one of humanity’s great thinkers may seem, we must consider the possibility that Plato does not intend these “utterings” of Socrates to be mistaken for truth nor did the original audience have any expectation that they might be. It was custom among members of a particular tradition to attribute any knowledge acquired to the source of that tradition. By this mechanism, Pythagoras continued to gain attributions to his reputation for decades if not centuries after his death. Old ideas were the most valuable and, pragmatically, ideas would circulate further under these acknowledged information brands than they would as the crackpot theory of whatever scholar might have actually had them. We know that, in addition to his studies with Socrates, Plato was trained in a number of other schools including that of the Pythagoreans and Heraclitean. So, it is not unreasonable to posit that Plato’s writing would be a filter through which the sum of his knowledge, including much of what he learned directly from Socrates might find a more permanent home than the lecture room.
The two books of the Republic under consideration here can be broken into a series of debates over the nature of justice in which Socrates is called upon to fully defend its virtues over the spoils of injustice. The bad news is that he never even comes close in these first two books (of ten) to completing that argument. His solution to the problem of first defining and the defending justice is to create an ideal state and then contrast it with existing governments in order to see justice in those differences. In all honesty, The Republic, at times, reads like a Dungeons and Dragons manual with its careful classifications of like and unlike things (a nasty habit that will only prove more intolerable in the hands of Plato’s student, Aristotle). The good news is that those first two books alone are so pithy that they provide ample material to assess what Plato might have thought about three of the Great Ideas; in particular, Justice, Vice and Virtue, and the State.
This whole imaginary conversation begins as Socrates and his companions are detained by friends after attending a public ritual and pressed into returning to their villa to rest before the night’s festivities. Upon arriving, Socrates engages in a conversation with their father, Cephalus about the process of aging, asking him, “Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?” After establishing that how someone lives (happy, sad, angry etc) is the greatest indicator of how they will approach death, Socrates suggests that Cephalus’ relative wealth may skew his impression of how life’s end is for all who approach it by age. Agreeing that a happy man with wealth fares better in the end of his life than a happy man with none, Socrates asks him, “What do you consider the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your wealth?” After some consideration, Cephalus tells him that his wealth has allowed him to deal with men in an honorable way (ie without lying to them) and keep from dying knowing that he owed someone something he was unable to pay. When Socrates challenges him on these criteria as the foundation for a just man’s actions, Cephalus gently begs out of the conversation and hands it off to his son, Polemarchus.
Before looking at what ideas regarding justice spring out of this continued debate, let’s take just a moment to see what role Plato plays in constructing this dialogue. Socrates is depicted as having great zeal in worshipping the gods, having left his home and traveled some distance to attend a new Thracian variation on a festival honoring Artemis. This supports Plato’s narrative begun in Apology that Socrates was a deeply pious man despite the charge that got him executed, advocating for the worship of foreign or otherwise improper gods. Secondly, as he arrives at Polemarchus’ house, he is met warmly by Cephalus, a respected elder who admonishes him for not coming by to teach more frequently. This also reinforces Socrates’ posthumous defense against the charge of corrupting the youth as what father would welcome a teacher into his home that he knew taught things that were unwise or untrue? If Plato’s writing is seen as building upon the reputation of his teacher, the responsibility of burnishing that legacy belongs to him as well.
Polemarchus’ defense of his father’s definition of just action is something of a rhetorical dead-end. After some positioning on semantics, Polemarchus refines it to suggest that justice is “the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a debt” [298]. This allows for justice to be given to both those deemed as friends and those as enemies. Socrates counters with the idea that committing evil against one’s enemies is not just, but unjust regardless of the circumstances, asserting that:
…if a man says that justice consists in the repayment of debts, and that good is the debt which a man owes to his friends, and evil the debt which he owes to his enemies—to say this is clearly not wise for it is not true, if, has been clearly shown, the injustice of another can be in no way just. [300]
While Polemarchus seems content to leave the inquiry at that, Thrasymachus, another visitor to the home is not. In Book One of the Republic, he gleefully plays the role of the skeptic, not merely of the nature of justice but indeed of Socrates’ method of argument. The descriptions that Plato includes to add some kind of tension to the narrative borders on hysterical. Thrasymachus (in “Socrates’” words) “came at us like a wild beast, seeking to devour us,” also noting that:
I was panic-stricken by his words, and could not look at him without trembling. Indeed, I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I should have been struck dumb: but when I saw his fury rising, I looked at him first and was therefore able to reply to him. [300]
Thrasymachus charges that none of the men have any interest in learning anything about the nature of justice, only in agreeing with one another. After mocking Socrates’ method of inquiry, Thrasymachus finally puts in his own two cents about the nature of justice, describing it as “nothing else than the interest of the stronger” [301]. When pressed by Socrates to expound on this, he goes on further, suggesting that:
…in all states there is the same principle of Justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only responsible conclusion is that everywhere there is one principle of Justice, which is the interest of the stronger. [301].
While the conversation begins with how a particular person might practice just living in relation to those in his community, Thrasymachus steers it now towards how the idea of Justice might define not only the relationship of the individual to his peers, but also a state to its citizenry. Once arrived, he presents a view of the world that, while cynical, is difficult to deny as too often reflecting our own.
…my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men…that is to say, tyranny, which by fraud or force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale…for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetuating any of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace…But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of this having achieved the consummation of injustice. [304].
Rather than addressing this otherwise common sense observation directly, Socrates attacks Thrasymachus’ argument at its core, that justice represents the interests of the stronger over the weaker. Using a series of analogies, Socrates proves to his own satisfaction that justice is, in fact, more concerned with the interests of the weaker over the stronger. “Governments,” he asserts:
…rule and provide for the interest of their subjects who are the weaker and not the stronger…And this is the reason…why…no one is willing to govern [without payment]; because no one likes to take in hand the reformation of evils which are not his concern without remuneration…and therefore in order that rulers may be willing to rule, they must be paid in one of three modes of payment, money, or honor or a penalty for refusing [306].
He follows this up with a second analogy that ties the qualities of the just and unjust man with that of wisdom/goodness and evil/ignorance respectively. In the former, wisdom and goodness are predisposed towards cooperation with their like and conflict with that which they are unlike. In the latter, evil and ignorance will attempt to vanquish all competitors, good and evil alike. Socrates finishes the analogy by demonstrating that justice also cooperates with its like and against its unlike, whereas injustice seeks injustice for all. Seeing no way out of the rhetorical trap that Socrates has put him in, Thrasymachus concedes the point with as much grace as he can muster and leaves the discussion.
As a final point before continuing on to Book Two’s focus on justice and injustice in human behavior (considered in this context as Virtue and Vice), it is worthwhile to note that Plato chooses three very different kinds of people to verbally spar with Socrates in this opening book. While they are no doubt based on real people that may have been well known to the Athenians who first read this work, they also function as convenient archetypes suggesting how Socrates himself was received in his lifetime by his community. Cephalus, as a man shown as nearing the end of his life, lends authority to Socrates’ teaching through his approval but also represents the kind of traditional wisdom in the Greek culture that Socrates, and Plato after him, are trying to move beyond. Polemarchus is among the generation of younger men supposedly corrupted by Socrates’ teachings and presents an amiable, if half-hearted response to his teacher’s dissection of his half-baked argument. Thrasymachus is openly hostile to Socrates at the beginning of his discussion and derides not only his arguments but his methods for arriving at them. Only after the verbal battle begins turning distinctly against him does Thrasymachus regain his sense of courtesy and exhibits something resembling begrudging respect as he leaves the conversation. While he may not agree with Socrates, the text suggests, he leaves with more respect for Socrates’ methodology and cunning debate skills.
Written by Plato circa 385 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Justice, Vice and Virtue, State
The complete text of the Republic can be read online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html for free. It uses the same Benjamin Jowett translation that is cited in this work, though page citations given for quoted material corresponds to the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World set.
Unlike the emotional rollercoaster of Plato’s trilogy on the Trial and Execution of Socrates, The Republic is, in many ways, more typical of Plato’s work as a whole. It presents, in written form, a fictional conversation in dialogue form between Socrates and a number of other Greek men as they ponder a variety of philosophical issues. The Republic stands out as notable, if not unique, among Plato’s writings because of the expanse of topics methodically dissected within its narrative, the universal nature of the questions under consideration, as well as the exhaustive insights it provides into the worldview of both its writer and the audiences for whom it was intended.
One of the great questions in reading the Republic is, “How fictionalized is Plato’s version of Socrates anyway?” We know that Plato was a student, admirer, and probably friend to Socrates. We also know that, as a scholar, Plato would have to have been as comfortable retaining information taken in via the oral tradition as he was learning information from written sources. Put plainly, there is more evidence suggesting the veracity of Plato’s account of Socrates’ ideas than that of the writers of the Gospels in regards to the life of Jesus Christ. If Plato’s descriptions were, indeed, intended as transmissions from his master, they would be as close to direct as possible without being penned by Socrates’ own hand.
As tempting as this idea of an untainted glimpse into the mind of one of humanity’s great thinkers may seem, we must consider the possibility that Plato does not intend these “utterings” of Socrates to be mistaken for truth nor did the original audience have any expectation that they might be. It was custom among members of a particular tradition to attribute any knowledge acquired to the source of that tradition. By this mechanism, Pythagoras continued to gain attributions to his reputation for decades if not centuries after his death. Old ideas were the most valuable and, pragmatically, ideas would circulate further under these acknowledged information brands than they would as the crackpot theory of whatever scholar might have actually had them. We know that, in addition to his studies with Socrates, Plato was trained in a number of other schools including that of the Pythagoreans and Heraclitean. So, it is not unreasonable to posit that Plato’s writing would be a filter through which the sum of his knowledge, including much of what he learned directly from Socrates might find a more permanent home than the lecture room.
The two books of the Republic under consideration here can be broken into a series of debates over the nature of justice in which Socrates is called upon to fully defend its virtues over the spoils of injustice. The bad news is that he never even comes close in these first two books (of ten) to completing that argument. His solution to the problem of first defining and the defending justice is to create an ideal state and then contrast it with existing governments in order to see justice in those differences. In all honesty, The Republic, at times, reads like a Dungeons and Dragons manual with its careful classifications of like and unlike things (a nasty habit that will only prove more intolerable in the hands of Plato’s student, Aristotle). The good news is that those first two books alone are so pithy that they provide ample material to assess what Plato might have thought about three of the Great Ideas; in particular, Justice, Vice and Virtue, and the State.
This whole imaginary conversation begins as Socrates and his companions are detained by friends after attending a public ritual and pressed into returning to their villa to rest before the night’s festivities. Upon arriving, Socrates engages in a conversation with their father, Cephalus about the process of aging, asking him, “Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?” After establishing that how someone lives (happy, sad, angry etc) is the greatest indicator of how they will approach death, Socrates suggests that Cephalus’ relative wealth may skew his impression of how life’s end is for all who approach it by age. Agreeing that a happy man with wealth fares better in the end of his life than a happy man with none, Socrates asks him, “What do you consider the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your wealth?” After some consideration, Cephalus tells him that his wealth has allowed him to deal with men in an honorable way (ie without lying to them) and keep from dying knowing that he owed someone something he was unable to pay. When Socrates challenges him on these criteria as the foundation for a just man’s actions, Cephalus gently begs out of the conversation and hands it off to his son, Polemarchus.
Before looking at what ideas regarding justice spring out of this continued debate, let’s take just a moment to see what role Plato plays in constructing this dialogue. Socrates is depicted as having great zeal in worshipping the gods, having left his home and traveled some distance to attend a new Thracian variation on a festival honoring Artemis. This supports Plato’s narrative begun in Apology that Socrates was a deeply pious man despite the charge that got him executed, advocating for the worship of foreign or otherwise improper gods. Secondly, as he arrives at Polemarchus’ house, he is met warmly by Cephalus, a respected elder who admonishes him for not coming by to teach more frequently. This also reinforces Socrates’ posthumous defense against the charge of corrupting the youth as what father would welcome a teacher into his home that he knew taught things that were unwise or untrue? If Plato’s writing is seen as building upon the reputation of his teacher, the responsibility of burnishing that legacy belongs to him as well.
Polemarchus’ defense of his father’s definition of just action is something of a rhetorical dead-end. After some positioning on semantics, Polemarchus refines it to suggest that justice is “the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a debt” [298]. This allows for justice to be given to both those deemed as friends and those as enemies. Socrates counters with the idea that committing evil against one’s enemies is not just, but unjust regardless of the circumstances, asserting that:
…if a man says that justice consists in the repayment of debts, and that good is the debt which a man owes to his friends, and evil the debt which he owes to his enemies—to say this is clearly not wise for it is not true, if, has been clearly shown, the injustice of another can be in no way just. [300]
While Polemarchus seems content to leave the inquiry at that, Thrasymachus, another visitor to the home is not. In Book One of the Republic, he gleefully plays the role of the skeptic, not merely of the nature of justice but indeed of Socrates’ method of argument. The descriptions that Plato includes to add some kind of tension to the narrative borders on hysterical. Thrasymachus (in “Socrates’” words) “came at us like a wild beast, seeking to devour us,” also noting that:
I was panic-stricken by his words, and could not look at him without trembling. Indeed, I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I should have been struck dumb: but when I saw his fury rising, I looked at him first and was therefore able to reply to him. [300]
Thrasymachus charges that none of the men have any interest in learning anything about the nature of justice, only in agreeing with one another. After mocking Socrates’ method of inquiry, Thrasymachus finally puts in his own two cents about the nature of justice, describing it as “nothing else than the interest of the stronger” [301]. When pressed by Socrates to expound on this, he goes on further, suggesting that:
…in all states there is the same principle of Justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only responsible conclusion is that everywhere there is one principle of Justice, which is the interest of the stronger. [301].
While the conversation begins with how a particular person might practice just living in relation to those in his community, Thrasymachus steers it now towards how the idea of Justice might define not only the relationship of the individual to his peers, but also a state to its citizenry. Once arrived, he presents a view of the world that, while cynical, is difficult to deny as too often reflecting our own.
…my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men…that is to say, tyranny, which by fraud or force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale…for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetuating any of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace…But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of this having achieved the consummation of injustice. [304].
Rather than addressing this otherwise common sense observation directly, Socrates attacks Thrasymachus’ argument at its core, that justice represents the interests of the stronger over the weaker. Using a series of analogies, Socrates proves to his own satisfaction that justice is, in fact, more concerned with the interests of the weaker over the stronger. “Governments,” he asserts:
…rule and provide for the interest of their subjects who are the weaker and not the stronger…And this is the reason…why…no one is willing to govern [without payment]; because no one likes to take in hand the reformation of evils which are not his concern without remuneration…and therefore in order that rulers may be willing to rule, they must be paid in one of three modes of payment, money, or honor or a penalty for refusing [306].
He follows this up with a second analogy that ties the qualities of the just and unjust man with that of wisdom/goodness and evil/ignorance respectively. In the former, wisdom and goodness are predisposed towards cooperation with their like and conflict with that which they are unlike. In the latter, evil and ignorance will attempt to vanquish all competitors, good and evil alike. Socrates finishes the analogy by demonstrating that justice also cooperates with its like and against its unlike, whereas injustice seeks injustice for all. Seeing no way out of the rhetorical trap that Socrates has put him in, Thrasymachus concedes the point with as much grace as he can muster and leaves the discussion.
As a final point before continuing on to Book Two’s focus on justice and injustice in human behavior (considered in this context as Virtue and Vice), it is worthwhile to note that Plato chooses three very different kinds of people to verbally spar with Socrates in this opening book. While they are no doubt based on real people that may have been well known to the Athenians who first read this work, they also function as convenient archetypes suggesting how Socrates himself was received in his lifetime by his community. Cephalus, as a man shown as nearing the end of his life, lends authority to Socrates’ teaching through his approval but also represents the kind of traditional wisdom in the Greek culture that Socrates, and Plato after him, are trying to move beyond. Polemarchus is among the generation of younger men supposedly corrupted by Socrates’ teachings and presents an amiable, if half-hearted response to his teacher’s dissection of his half-baked argument. Thrasymachus is openly hostile to Socrates at the beginning of his discussion and derides not only his arguments but his methods for arriving at them. Only after the verbal battle begins turning distinctly against him does Thrasymachus regain his sense of courtesy and exhibits something resembling begrudging respect as he leaves the conversation. While he may not agree with Socrates, the text suggests, he leaves with more respect for Socrates’ methodology and cunning debate skills.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Author Sketch- Plato (Part 2)
The first part of the Author Sketch for Plato can be read herePlato-
Works Under Consideration: The Republic: Books One and Two
Place: Athens, Greece
A mere seven years after Aristophanes daydreamed about a peaceful end to the Peloponnesian War in Lysistrata, Athens found itself facing utter ruin and, ultimately, surrendered to Sparta and her allies in 404 BCE. Stripped of its former glory and wealth, Athens began a slow descent that merely scouted ahead on the route of Greece’s overall decline in importance in relation to world affairs, ceding its sovereignty first to Alexander and later, to Rome.
Herma of Plato, Musei Capitolini, Rome
taken by Ricardo André Frantz
This is the Athens in which Plato would write his works; still benefiting from the concentration of learning and inquiry present in the first decades after the fall but marginalized by the ever-escalating tensions and complexities of civilization as it waded into every inlet and onto every isthmus of the Mediterranean.
Yet, even as its fortunes in world affairs begin to diminish, Greece would remain a dominant force in culture for centuries to come. Around 385 BCE, Plato founded a school just outside of Athens in a place sacred to Athena and, in so doing, laid the foundation for The Great Conversation to truly develop beyond its mostly Greek origins. The final incarnation of the Academy would not be shuttered until nearly 800 years later, having attracted minds from all over the known world in pursuit of knowledge.
Plato’s trilogy about the trial and execution of Socrates (comprised of Apology, Crito, and Phaedo) are among his earliest and most accessible works. Perhaps it is for this reason that Plato is often read (or misread) as merely the ideas of Socrates, an oral teacher, into writing. Of course, Plato doesn’t discourage this notion by using Socrates, as a character, at the core of his most widely read works including the one under discussion here, The Republic. This device, however, should not tempt us into overlooking at least two other streams important to Plato’s contribution to the Great Conversation.
The Republic is, at its simplest, an attempt to use philosophy as the means to discover the best ways for humanity to govern itself. While Plato no doubt drew upon the teachings of Socrates, most notably in his method of inquiry, he was not, as it turns out, the first person to try this sort of thing. For that honor, we must turn to the first philosopher, Pythagoras who, himself, founded a school of learning that outlived him by several centuries and, indeed, used the principles of his philosophy to intervene into politics with somewhat disastrous results. Because Pythagoras, like Socrates after him, also insisted on the primacy of oral teaching but did not, like Socrates, have someone like Plato to write some of his ideas down after his death, history offers very little credible information about what exactly Pythagoras himself may have believed or taught. His influence must be reverse-engineered from the transmission of that influence through the course of ancient philosophy until it runs, smack dab, into Plato in the early 4th century BCE.
There is every reason, however, to suspect that, in his time, Plato was perceived as a Pythagorean and his writing was read in context of that tradition. The Republic, in this sense, can be seen as Plato, still devastated from the loss of his teacher and the defeat of his city, returning to first principles and working out the fundamental relationships between people and the city-nation-states that develop in their massing just as Pythagoras had before him.
Their efforts are differentiated (as Plato and Socrates are differentiated) by the contrast between abstract philosophical inquiry, captured for posterity in the act of writing, and applied philosophical inquiry, as practiced by Socrates and Pythagoras that would ultimately get them both killed. The third important influence within the Republic is that of Plato himself, having seen the dangers in the applied school of political philosophy in action and deciding that there had to be a better way. While it may be nigh impossible to truly parse what ideas belonged first to whom, it is in this melding of three minds that we see the potential for the Great Conversation develop and, ultimately, blossom into something unlike anything that world had ever known.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' The Clouds (Part 3)
Parts One and Two can be found here and here respectively.
Of the three Great Ideas considered within this discussion of The Clouds, Custom and Convention is the most important because the first two, Knowledge and Justice, may be read as subsets within a broader discussion about the importance of tradition. While we have already looked at the tensions between Faith and Fact and Justice and Law, Aristophanes includes some interesting tidbits about the nature of these shifts in other areas. One that sticks out repeatedly is the contrast that Aristophanes presents between the Rural and the Urban.
It begins early in the play as Strepsiades recalls, with deep regret, the circumstances that led to his marriage, describing himself as having “a life without worries in the country” and “happy with my bees and my sheep and my olives.” He reiterates this idea just a few passages later while bemoaning his wife’s bad influence on his son.
STREPSIADES: When she was holding him and fondling him she used to say something like, “When you’re a big boy and ride in procession to the Acropolis in your chariot, wearing a lovely yellow coat, like your Uncle Megacles…” I did what I could; when it was my turn, I said, “No my son, when you’re a big boy and drive the goats, home from the hills, like your daddy did before you, wearing your good old leather smock…”—but it never did any good. He never took any notice of anything his father said.
The argument presented by the Right during the big debate provides an extended articulation of what values Aristophanes allies with tradition. He begins with education, extolling the virtues of order and solemnity among students. Older styles of music are emphasized over “modern” innovations as is sexual modesty and physical fitness. It should be noted that Aristophanes presents the Right’s argument in a less than flattering light. While extolling the virtues of chastity and modesty in the youth, Right makes licentious comments about the young men that suggest he himself is not above enjoying the more relaxed modern atmosphere. By its end, Right’s argument never presents any meaningful observations about why the traditions of the past were better, only that Athens of the past produced better men than those currently occupying her walls.
If anything, it is this ambiguity that makes The Clouds such a difficult piece of satire to mine for any sense of what Aristophanes himself might have thought about any given issue. While traditional values are extolled, mythologized and, finally, entombed in the course of the play, it is the audience (or in our case, the reader) that must decide for the most part what those might be. It is a cunning device that enables the Clouds to be relevant some 2500 years after its original performance as each new generation has met its obligation to produce a segment of people convinced that the solution to today’s problems is the re-application of yesterday’s values—a description that, for some, might include the writers of this blog!
Given this ambiguity, what are we to make of The Clouds? The humor of The Clouds that endures comes from the lengths that Strepsiades is willing to traverse in order to deny his own culpability in indulging his son’s vices in the first place. His error, Aristophanes seems to suggest, is in going up into his head (or up into the Clouds) to concoct an over-elaborate solution to a simple problem. Despite the eventual damage it may have done to his public reputation, Socrates is a secondary target and is satirized in the broadest strokes as a stand-in for teachers and philosophers as a whole. Aristophanes’ treatment of Strepsiades is much more pointed and the full consequences of his error made plain within the course of the play’s action. The playwright’s inability or unwillingness to prescribe a remedial action for this cultural shift towards laxity suggests that Aristophanes, like Strepsiades, may have felt equally paralyzed by the complexity of the changes that occurred in his lifetime. The fact that these tensions between the values of the past and the future continue to surface in social and political dialogue to this very day indicate that Aristophanes may have correctly identified it as an irreconcilable difference and, wisely, refused to pick a side.
Of the three Great Ideas considered within this discussion of The Clouds, Custom and Convention is the most important because the first two, Knowledge and Justice, may be read as subsets within a broader discussion about the importance of tradition. While we have already looked at the tensions between Faith and Fact and Justice and Law, Aristophanes includes some interesting tidbits about the nature of these shifts in other areas. One that sticks out repeatedly is the contrast that Aristophanes presents between the Rural and the Urban.
It begins early in the play as Strepsiades recalls, with deep regret, the circumstances that led to his marriage, describing himself as having “a life without worries in the country” and “happy with my bees and my sheep and my olives.” He reiterates this idea just a few passages later while bemoaning his wife’s bad influence on his son.
STREPSIADES: When she was holding him and fondling him she used to say something like, “When you’re a big boy and ride in procession to the Acropolis in your chariot, wearing a lovely yellow coat, like your Uncle Megacles…” I did what I could; when it was my turn, I said, “No my son, when you’re a big boy and drive the goats, home from the hills, like your daddy did before you, wearing your good old leather smock…”—but it never did any good. He never took any notice of anything his father said.
The argument presented by the Right during the big debate provides an extended articulation of what values Aristophanes allies with tradition. He begins with education, extolling the virtues of order and solemnity among students. Older styles of music are emphasized over “modern” innovations as is sexual modesty and physical fitness. It should be noted that Aristophanes presents the Right’s argument in a less than flattering light. While extolling the virtues of chastity and modesty in the youth, Right makes licentious comments about the young men that suggest he himself is not above enjoying the more relaxed modern atmosphere. By its end, Right’s argument never presents any meaningful observations about why the traditions of the past were better, only that Athens of the past produced better men than those currently occupying her walls.
If anything, it is this ambiguity that makes The Clouds such a difficult piece of satire to mine for any sense of what Aristophanes himself might have thought about any given issue. While traditional values are extolled, mythologized and, finally, entombed in the course of the play, it is the audience (or in our case, the reader) that must decide for the most part what those might be. It is a cunning device that enables the Clouds to be relevant some 2500 years after its original performance as each new generation has met its obligation to produce a segment of people convinced that the solution to today’s problems is the re-application of yesterday’s values—a description that, for some, might include the writers of this blog!
Given this ambiguity, what are we to make of The Clouds? The humor of The Clouds that endures comes from the lengths that Strepsiades is willing to traverse in order to deny his own culpability in indulging his son’s vices in the first place. His error, Aristophanes seems to suggest, is in going up into his head (or up into the Clouds) to concoct an over-elaborate solution to a simple problem. Despite the eventual damage it may have done to his public reputation, Socrates is a secondary target and is satirized in the broadest strokes as a stand-in for teachers and philosophers as a whole. Aristophanes’ treatment of Strepsiades is much more pointed and the full consequences of his error made plain within the course of the play’s action. The playwright’s inability or unwillingness to prescribe a remedial action for this cultural shift towards laxity suggests that Aristophanes, like Strepsiades, may have felt equally paralyzed by the complexity of the changes that occurred in his lifetime. The fact that these tensions between the values of the past and the future continue to surface in social and political dialogue to this very day indicate that Aristophanes may have correctly identified it as an irreconcilable difference and, wisely, refused to pick a side.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' The Clouds (Part 2)
Part One can be read here
While Aristophanes exaggerates the tension between faith and fact on the surface of the Clouds, what he intends to convey about Justice is done so with more subtlety. Though Strepsiades is afforded more likeable qualities than the other characters in the Clouds, the story’s genesis lies in his desire to avoid Justice; that is, to avoid paying debts that he otherwise legally incurred. In order to avoid Justice (a Great Idea still conceived of by the Athenians as one governed by the divine if implemented by human hands), Strepsiades must turn to Socrates who, in turn, reduces it from a matter of divine sanction to one of human sophistry. This transition can be seen most plainly when the great debate between the argument known as Right and the argument known as Wrong unfolds with predictable consequences. Speaking to Socrates about his son, Strepsiades opens this debate with a final statement of his ambition.
STREPSIADES: Well, anyway, see that he learns your two Arguments, whatever you call them—oh yes, Right and Wrong—the one that takes a bad case and defeats Right with it. If he can’t manage both, then at least Wrong—that will do—but that he must have.
SOCRATES: Well, I’ll go and send the Arguments here in person, and they’ll teach him themselves.
STREPSIADES: [calling after SOCRATES as he goes out}: Don’t forget, he’s got to be able to argue against any kind of justified claim at all.
[Enter RIGHT, dressed in the good old Attic style. He is followed by the smirking figure of WRONG, dressed similarly to PHEIDIPPIDES except that his tunic is embroidered with tongues.]
That brief description tagged on to the end of their exchange is valuable because it frames the real parameters for this debate along the same lines as Aristophanes' dialogue. The struggle between Right and Wrong is presented as a generational one, which spills over into the third Great Idea, Custom and Convention and parsing Aristophanes’ views on one from the other in this passage proves difficult. Still, after basing his entire defense of the Right on adhering to proven traditions, Right offers, as the summation of his argument, a final warning in verse to Pheiddipides and the audience
RIGHT:
If contrariwise you spurn my society and turn
To these modern ways, you’ll get a pale complexion
And with two exceptions, all your limbs will be too small
The exceptions are the tongue and the e-lection;
You will sing the trendy song, “Wrong is right
And right is wrong,
There’s no difference, there’s no Justice, there’s no God,”
And you’ll catch the current craze for Antimachus’ ways—
Or in plainer language, you’ll become a sod.
Here, Right asserts a causative link between the existence of Justice and reverence of the Divine. Borrowing, for just a moment, from Plato’s depiction of Socrates in Apology, Wisdom, which is the sole province of the Divine except in humanity’s ability to recognize that it has none, can be seen as in harmony with Aristophanes’ view of Justice. As these lofty ideals, once integrally intertwined with the idea of Divine influence on mortals, are relegated to the province of human achievement, both seem to suggest, they become a weapon in the hands of the self-assured and, invariably, incapable.
Later, after his son has been thoroughly trained in the argument for the Wrong, Strepsiades learns the awful consequences of subverting Justice when his son beats him and then uses the argument to defend his actions.
STREPSIADES: But look at the laws! Can you name a city where the law allows you to do this to your father?
PHEIDIPPIDES: But what is a law anyway? It must have been made at some time, and made by a man just like you or me; and he must have persuaded his people by argument to accept it. Why shouldn’t I now make a new law allowing sons to beat their fathers in return?
Even in this comedic setting, we can hear the supposed words of Pontius Pilate ringing hollow at the feet of a Jewish teacher who also believed, unlike the Romans of his time, that Justice was the sole province of the Divine; its very existence, the proof of Divine influence over the affairs of humanity. Athenian law was transformed from a matter of tradition to a matter of human avocation (a skill that might be learned) by the increasing demands on its social structure brought on by rapid population growth and the concentration of human learning. While most modern readers would cite a preference for being judged by human laws rather than Divinely inspired ones, there are few among us attesting to the ease with which Justice might be sought and found, in those times or these, whether inside a court or out.
While Aristophanes exaggerates the tension between faith and fact on the surface of the Clouds, what he intends to convey about Justice is done so with more subtlety. Though Strepsiades is afforded more likeable qualities than the other characters in the Clouds, the story’s genesis lies in his desire to avoid Justice; that is, to avoid paying debts that he otherwise legally incurred. In order to avoid Justice (a Great Idea still conceived of by the Athenians as one governed by the divine if implemented by human hands), Strepsiades must turn to Socrates who, in turn, reduces it from a matter of divine sanction to one of human sophistry. This transition can be seen most plainly when the great debate between the argument known as Right and the argument known as Wrong unfolds with predictable consequences. Speaking to Socrates about his son, Strepsiades opens this debate with a final statement of his ambition.
STREPSIADES: Well, anyway, see that he learns your two Arguments, whatever you call them—oh yes, Right and Wrong—the one that takes a bad case and defeats Right with it. If he can’t manage both, then at least Wrong—that will do—but that he must have.
SOCRATES: Well, I’ll go and send the Arguments here in person, and they’ll teach him themselves.
STREPSIADES: [calling after SOCRATES as he goes out}: Don’t forget, he’s got to be able to argue against any kind of justified claim at all.
[Enter RIGHT, dressed in the good old Attic style. He is followed by the smirking figure of WRONG, dressed similarly to PHEIDIPPIDES except that his tunic is embroidered with tongues.]
That brief description tagged on to the end of their exchange is valuable because it frames the real parameters for this debate along the same lines as Aristophanes' dialogue. The struggle between Right and Wrong is presented as a generational one, which spills over into the third Great Idea, Custom and Convention and parsing Aristophanes’ views on one from the other in this passage proves difficult. Still, after basing his entire defense of the Right on adhering to proven traditions, Right offers, as the summation of his argument, a final warning in verse to Pheiddipides and the audience
RIGHT:
If contrariwise you spurn my society and turn
To these modern ways, you’ll get a pale complexion
And with two exceptions, all your limbs will be too small
The exceptions are the tongue and the e-lection;
You will sing the trendy song, “Wrong is right
And right is wrong,
There’s no difference, there’s no Justice, there’s no God,”
And you’ll catch the current craze for Antimachus’ ways—
Or in plainer language, you’ll become a sod.
Here, Right asserts a causative link between the existence of Justice and reverence of the Divine. Borrowing, for just a moment, from Plato’s depiction of Socrates in Apology, Wisdom, which is the sole province of the Divine except in humanity’s ability to recognize that it has none, can be seen as in harmony with Aristophanes’ view of Justice. As these lofty ideals, once integrally intertwined with the idea of Divine influence on mortals, are relegated to the province of human achievement, both seem to suggest, they become a weapon in the hands of the self-assured and, invariably, incapable.
Later, after his son has been thoroughly trained in the argument for the Wrong, Strepsiades learns the awful consequences of subverting Justice when his son beats him and then uses the argument to defend his actions.
STREPSIADES: But look at the laws! Can you name a city where the law allows you to do this to your father?
PHEIDIPPIDES: But what is a law anyway? It must have been made at some time, and made by a man just like you or me; and he must have persuaded his people by argument to accept it. Why shouldn’t I now make a new law allowing sons to beat their fathers in return?
Even in this comedic setting, we can hear the supposed words of Pontius Pilate ringing hollow at the feet of a Jewish teacher who also believed, unlike the Romans of his time, that Justice was the sole province of the Divine; its very existence, the proof of Divine influence over the affairs of humanity. Athenian law was transformed from a matter of tradition to a matter of human avocation (a skill that might be learned) by the increasing demands on its social structure brought on by rapid population growth and the concentration of human learning. While most modern readers would cite a preference for being judged by human laws rather than Divinely inspired ones, there are few among us attesting to the ease with which Justice might be sought and found, in those times or these, whether inside a court or out.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' The Clouds (Pt 1)
The Clouds by Aristophanes
Time: Written towards the end of the Fifth Century BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Knowledge, Justice, Custom and Convention
[The complete text of The Clouds may be accessed online at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/clouds.html though the translation is slightly different than the Alan Sommerstein translation used in the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World from which I'm quoting]
The Clouds is a play, written by Aristophanes in the Greek tradition of Old Comedy, that appears on its surface to be a straight-forward satire directed at the Socratic school of inquiry in particular and at philosophy in general. As one of only eleven plays written by Aristophanes that have survived into modern times, the reader is tempted to place special significance on Aristophanes’ relentless lampooning of a figure revered by Plato among others for his thoughtfulness and humility; not unlike eavesdropping in on an East Coast/West Coast MC battle from which we are removed in time and culture by almost 2500 years. In this sense, The Clouds provides a vital and complementary voice to Plato’s own on Socrates that sketches a much detailed picture of how the average Athenian might have viewed the obstreperous philosopher—as a polarizing figure and a man about whom it was difficult to be ambivalent.
That opposing balance, however, is not The Clouds most valuable contribution to our understanding of Aristophanes’ Athens or insight into the human condition. Under cover from his relentless lampooning of Socrates, Aristophanes constructs a haunting picture of a culture on a fulcrum between its more pastoral past and its increasingly complex urban future. While he hangs this paradox on a comedic frame, thus muting its medicinal flavor, his unity of action is pointed specifically at suggesting a bleak moral for which he neither provides nor, one assumes, knows a remedy. Though Aristophanes touches on a wide number of the Great Ideas in this and other plays, his themes in the Clouds address most directly the notions of Knowledge, Justice, and Custom and Convention.
The Clouds is the story of Strepsiades, an Athenian citizen whose son, Pheidippides, has run up a lot of debt due to his fixation with horse racing. Strepsiades decides that the only way he can avoid being sued is to enroll his son in the Thinkery, a school nearby overseen by Socrates where, “if you pay them well, they can teach you how to win your case—whether you’re in the right or not”. When Pheidippides shows little interest in this new-fangled learning, Strepsiades enrolls in the school, hoping to find out for himself what this argument known as “Wrong” is all about.
When Strepsiades meets Socrates, this fictionalized rendition of history’s most silent teacher lives up to his reputation of exposing how little men know but quite differently than Plato’s no-less fictionalized version. Aristophanes introduces him suspended above the stage “like a god in tragedy, in a contrivance like the gondola of a balloon.” It becomes clear quickly that the two men barely speak the same language.
SOCRATES: Why call’st me, O thou creature of a day?
STREPSIADES: Well, for a start, I’d be very interested to know what you’re doing up there.
SOCRATES: I am walking upon air and attacking the mystery of the sun.
STREPSIADES: Well, if you must attack the Mysteries of the gods why can’t you do it on the ground?
SOCRATES: Why, for accurate investigation of meteorological phenomena it is essential to get one’s thoughts into a state of, er, suspension by mixing small quantities of them with air—for air, you know, is of very similar physical constitution to thought—at least, to mine. So I could never make any discoveries by looking up from the ground—there is a powerful attractive force between the earth and the moisture contained in thought. Something similar may be observed to happen in the case of watercress.
While the comedic value of having Socrates address his newest student in a manner normally reserved for the gods in the theatre is obvious, there is a precision to Aristophanes’ language here that suggests he may not be merely kidding around. Though Socrates explains that he is attacking the “mystery” of the sun, Strepsiades immediately conflates that with attacking the “Mysteries of the gods.” In passage after passage, Aristophanes suggests that Socrates is, in effect, blaspheming against the gods by engaging in inquiry about phenomena once relegated to their authority.
After introducing Strepsiades to the Clouds (the Chorus but costumed “with dresses shaped and colored like clouds”), he brashly announces that they are, in fact, “the only divine beings—all the rest is just a lot of fairy tales.”
STREPSIADES: What on earth—! You mean you don’t believe in Zeus?
SOCRATES: Zeus? Who’s Zeus?
STREPSIADES: Zeus who lives on Olympus, of course.
SOCRATES: Now really, you should know better. [Confidentially] There is no Zeus.
STREPSIADES: What? Well, who sends the rain, then? Answer me that.
SOCRATES: Why, our friends here do that, and I’ll prove it. Have you ever seen it rain when the sky was blue? Surely Zeus, if it was him, would be able to send rain even when the Clouds were out of town.
STREPSIADES: That certainly backs your argument. I wonder why I was so naïve as to think that rain was just Zeus pissing into a sieve. Well, that’s one thing; but who is it that thunders and sends shivers up my spine?
SOCRATES: The Clouds do that too—when they get in a whirl.
STREPSIADES: I can see I’m never going to trip you. But what do you mean, a whirl?
SOCRATES: Well, being suspended in the air, you see, when they get swollen with rain they are necessarily set in motion, and of course they collide with one another, and because of their weight they get broken and let out this great noise.
STREPSIADES: “Necessarily set in motion,” you say. Ah, but who sets them in motion? Now that’s got to be Zeus!
SOCRATES: Not a bit of it; as I say, it’s a whirl in the sky.
STREPSIADES: A whirl!—ah, I get you. That I must say I hadn’t been told before. I get it. Zeus is dead and now a whirl is the new king. But you still haven’t told me what causes the thunder.
SOCRATES: Didn’t you hear? I said that it occurs when Clouds swollen with rain collide with one another, and is caused by their density.
The spookiest thing about this passage is how accurate even this Bizarro-Socrates’ explanation of rain as a natural phenomena rather than a supernatural one is. I find myself torn between two readings; one which assumes that the audience would have found these explanations laughable despite the fact that they were, in time, proven to be essentially correct and the second, which assumes that the audience would have recognized the paradigmatic shift that these explanations represented and yet found themselves, like Strepsiades, clinging to a supernatural explanation despite evidence mounting to the contrary. This tug-of-war over causality (ie do things just happen or do they happen for a reason?) is one that science, religion, and philosophy have continued to wage for over two millennia since Aristophanes wrote The Clouds. That alone may be enough to justify the assumption that the second interpretation is the more accurate.
[To be Continued]
Time: Written towards the end of the Fifth Century BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Knowledge, Justice, Custom and Convention
[The complete text of The Clouds may be accessed online at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/clouds.html though the translation is slightly different than the Alan Sommerstein translation used in the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World from which I'm quoting]
The Clouds is a play, written by Aristophanes in the Greek tradition of Old Comedy, that appears on its surface to be a straight-forward satire directed at the Socratic school of inquiry in particular and at philosophy in general. As one of only eleven plays written by Aristophanes that have survived into modern times, the reader is tempted to place special significance on Aristophanes’ relentless lampooning of a figure revered by Plato among others for his thoughtfulness and humility; not unlike eavesdropping in on an East Coast/West Coast MC battle from which we are removed in time and culture by almost 2500 years. In this sense, The Clouds provides a vital and complementary voice to Plato’s own on Socrates that sketches a much detailed picture of how the average Athenian might have viewed the obstreperous philosopher—as a polarizing figure and a man about whom it was difficult to be ambivalent.
That opposing balance, however, is not The Clouds most valuable contribution to our understanding of Aristophanes’ Athens or insight into the human condition. Under cover from his relentless lampooning of Socrates, Aristophanes constructs a haunting picture of a culture on a fulcrum between its more pastoral past and its increasingly complex urban future. While he hangs this paradox on a comedic frame, thus muting its medicinal flavor, his unity of action is pointed specifically at suggesting a bleak moral for which he neither provides nor, one assumes, knows a remedy. Though Aristophanes touches on a wide number of the Great Ideas in this and other plays, his themes in the Clouds address most directly the notions of Knowledge, Justice, and Custom and Convention.
The Clouds is the story of Strepsiades, an Athenian citizen whose son, Pheidippides, has run up a lot of debt due to his fixation with horse racing. Strepsiades decides that the only way he can avoid being sued is to enroll his son in the Thinkery, a school nearby overseen by Socrates where, “if you pay them well, they can teach you how to win your case—whether you’re in the right or not”. When Pheidippides shows little interest in this new-fangled learning, Strepsiades enrolls in the school, hoping to find out for himself what this argument known as “Wrong” is all about.
When Strepsiades meets Socrates, this fictionalized rendition of history’s most silent teacher lives up to his reputation of exposing how little men know but quite differently than Plato’s no-less fictionalized version. Aristophanes introduces him suspended above the stage “like a god in tragedy, in a contrivance like the gondola of a balloon.” It becomes clear quickly that the two men barely speak the same language.
SOCRATES: Why call’st me, O thou creature of a day?
STREPSIADES: Well, for a start, I’d be very interested to know what you’re doing up there.
SOCRATES: I am walking upon air and attacking the mystery of the sun.
STREPSIADES: Well, if you must attack the Mysteries of the gods why can’t you do it on the ground?
SOCRATES: Why, for accurate investigation of meteorological phenomena it is essential to get one’s thoughts into a state of, er, suspension by mixing small quantities of them with air—for air, you know, is of very similar physical constitution to thought—at least, to mine. So I could never make any discoveries by looking up from the ground—there is a powerful attractive force between the earth and the moisture contained in thought. Something similar may be observed to happen in the case of watercress.
While the comedic value of having Socrates address his newest student in a manner normally reserved for the gods in the theatre is obvious, there is a precision to Aristophanes’ language here that suggests he may not be merely kidding around. Though Socrates explains that he is attacking the “mystery” of the sun, Strepsiades immediately conflates that with attacking the “Mysteries of the gods.” In passage after passage, Aristophanes suggests that Socrates is, in effect, blaspheming against the gods by engaging in inquiry about phenomena once relegated to their authority.
After introducing Strepsiades to the Clouds (the Chorus but costumed “with dresses shaped and colored like clouds”), he brashly announces that they are, in fact, “the only divine beings—all the rest is just a lot of fairy tales.”
STREPSIADES: What on earth—! You mean you don’t believe in Zeus?
SOCRATES: Zeus? Who’s Zeus?
STREPSIADES: Zeus who lives on Olympus, of course.
SOCRATES: Now really, you should know better. [Confidentially] There is no Zeus.
STREPSIADES: What? Well, who sends the rain, then? Answer me that.
SOCRATES: Why, our friends here do that, and I’ll prove it. Have you ever seen it rain when the sky was blue? Surely Zeus, if it was him, would be able to send rain even when the Clouds were out of town.
STREPSIADES: That certainly backs your argument. I wonder why I was so naïve as to think that rain was just Zeus pissing into a sieve. Well, that’s one thing; but who is it that thunders and sends shivers up my spine?
SOCRATES: The Clouds do that too—when they get in a whirl.
STREPSIADES: I can see I’m never going to trip you. But what do you mean, a whirl?
SOCRATES: Well, being suspended in the air, you see, when they get swollen with rain they are necessarily set in motion, and of course they collide with one another, and because of their weight they get broken and let out this great noise.
STREPSIADES: “Necessarily set in motion,” you say. Ah, but who sets them in motion? Now that’s got to be Zeus!
SOCRATES: Not a bit of it; as I say, it’s a whirl in the sky.
STREPSIADES: A whirl!—ah, I get you. That I must say I hadn’t been told before. I get it. Zeus is dead and now a whirl is the new king. But you still haven’t told me what causes the thunder.
SOCRATES: Didn’t you hear? I said that it occurs when Clouds swollen with rain collide with one another, and is caused by their density.
The spookiest thing about this passage is how accurate even this Bizarro-Socrates’ explanation of rain as a natural phenomena rather than a supernatural one is. I find myself torn between two readings; one which assumes that the audience would have found these explanations laughable despite the fact that they were, in time, proven to be essentially correct and the second, which assumes that the audience would have recognized the paradigmatic shift that these explanations represented and yet found themselves, like Strepsiades, clinging to a supernatural explanation despite evidence mounting to the contrary. This tug-of-war over causality (ie do things just happen or do they happen for a reason?) is one that science, religion, and philosophy have continued to wage for over two millennia since Aristophanes wrote The Clouds. That alone may be enough to justify the assumption that the second interpretation is the more accurate.
[To be Continued]
Monday, February 2, 2009
Great Books: Plato's Apology
Apology by Plato
Time: generally thought to have been written by Plato in the first decades of the 4th century BCE.
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Wisdom, Truth, and Life and Death
The unabridged text to Plato’s Apology can be found online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/Apology.html
Plato’s Apology is an account of the public trial of his teacher, Socrates that famously resulted in a death sentence. Even as Apology avoids Plato’s more familiar dialogue form in favor of a monologue delivered essentially in soliloquy to the reader, Socrates’ defense, as Plato describes it, is not typical of a man working diligently to save his own life. The question of whether Apology was read in its time as an journalistic account of a recent historical event, a polemical screed against those who had wronged an influential teacher, or a meticulously crafted piece of propaganda ignores the possibility that it may have been read, at once, as all three and more, against the complex cultural background of 4th century Athens and beyond. Given that knowing Plato’s own intention for writing the piece is impossible, it seems prudent to acknowledge the indisputable historicity of Plato’s eyewitness account of Socrates’ trial while recognizing that he, like all writers, was in possession of a particular worldview and a particular agenda through which his interpretation of what he saw must have been filtered. For this reason, we should remember that it is ultimately Plato who addresses the Great Ideas here, regardless of how much the doctrine considered is informed by that of his teacher.
Apology is broken into three sections; the first, Socrates’ defense, being considerably longer than the second, the Penalty Phase and the third, Socrates’ final rebuttal to the court. The monologue begins after the prosecution had already made its case and Socrates is called upon to defend himself against charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and being, at once, loyal to foreign gods and an atheist. Plato opens this defense by invoking the first of the Great Ideas that dominates Apology, Truth. Having heard the jury warned against his gifts as an orator, Socrates contrasts his relentless quest for the Truth against the tools of persuasion which his accusers suppose are the source of his influence. Truth is also unique among the Great Ideas central to this piece in that it is presented as something that humanity can actually understand, whereas Wisdom and the meaning of Death, if they can be said to exist at all, are property, if not, properties of the Divine.
Socrates begins his defense in earnest by segregating his accusers into two camps and the distinction between them begins an explicit conversation within Apology about the tension between the spoken and written word. Though his life has been placed in jeopardy by a very real set of angry folks in the here and now, Plato shows Socrates as addressing his reputation among Athenians as the most difficult obstacle to overcome in clearing his name.
"Far more dangerous are the others, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above and searched the earth beneath and made the worse appear the better cause. The disseminators of this tale are the accuser whom I dread; for their hearers are apt to fancy that such enquirers do not believe in the existence of the Gods." [18:13-21]
The importance of Truth takes a greater precedent in the second half of his defense when he addresses the specific charges facing him. It is clear from the manner in which Socrates presents his own defense that he is more concerned with uncovering truth than he is in proving his innocence. Should his Socratic method of inquiry reveal that he was, in truth, corrupting the youth and, in truth, magically encouraging both the worship of strange gods and atheism, one gets the impression he would demand for the harshest penalties allowed under the law. Yet, even after the guilty verdict is rendered and Apology moves into its second phase of Penalty Negotiation, Socrates is portrayed as unwilling to cede the moral ground to his now vindicated accusers that the Truth affords him, willing only to admit that he “sought to persuade every man among you that he must look to himself and seek virtue and wisdom before he looks to his personal interests and to the state before looking to the state’s interests…What shall be done to such an one? Doubtless some good thing [36:26-33].”
It seems only natural that the reenactment of a trial should be interested, if not fixated, on a quest for Truth. Socrates, in contrast, spends more of his defense talking about Wisdom, his star character witness who never shows up to testify but whose presence is amplified by its absence. In answering the critics of his reputation, Socrates tells the jury a story that demonstrates his piety but also implicates the Gods in his endless quest for Wisdom, the very same quest that earned him enough enemies in Athens to lose his life over words. A friend, he explains, went to the Oracle at Delphi and asked if any man were wiser than Socrates to which the Oracle responded that there was, in fact, none wiser. This declaration from the Oracle (an historically difficult assertion to prove as true or false from this distance) presents Socrates with a moral dilemma that involves both Truth and Wisdom. As Apollo is a God and cannot lie, then his assertion that there is no man wiser than Socrates must be true. Socrates, who insists that he is the bearer of no wisdom beyond that which comes from knowing that one has no wisdom, devises an ingenious solution to his problem by deciding that he will question men who are considered wise by reputation and, when he finds one, present him to the Oracle as a rebuttal of their claim.
Hilarity ensues as Socrates goes through a wide-range of purportedly wise people and finds none that convince him of their wisdom or impress him with their anger at being so exposed. Socrates’ very premise ranges over absurd ground. Suppose that he is successful and finds a wiser man to present to the Oracle. What, then, has he proven along with the idea that Gods cannot lie? He would have proven that either that Gods may not lie but their knowledge is not infallible or that the Oracle itself was an imperfect instrument of Apollo’s valued advice for mortals below. He is lucky, given this logical extension of his premise, that he is unable to find anyone in possession of wisdom, thus sanctifying not only his quest to continue his practice of inquiry (as Apollo has instructed in presenting him with his paradox) but his piety in obeying the Gods over the protestation of the aggrieved parties.
It is Socrates’ almost Taoist interpretation of Wisdom, though, that proves his greatest obstacle in infecting the jury with the urgency of his mission. Wisdom, it seems, is apparently in such short supply among mortals that is nearly impossible to describe. Though he invokes its absence relentlessly throughout his defense, Socrates offers very few insights as to what Wisdom might look like so the jury (or the reader) might know whether or not they might have some, thus refuting his argument. His final interpretation of the Oracle’s meaning offers a more descriptive passage on its nature, asserting that “God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the Wisdom of men is worth little or nothing” [23:5-7].
Later, in expounding the virtues of doing what is right over what is safe, he insists that “the fear of death is the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown” [29:6-9]. One might infer from this statement that the Socrates divides reality up into two categories, the knowable and the unknowable and assigns mortal knowledge to the former and divine wisdom to the latter. Whatever portion of the jury was present to pass judgment based on the merit of the arguments presented (a portion we are led to believe may have been quite small) might have found it difficult to acquit Socrates on the basis that no form of mortal wisdom exists whatsoever. By tying his fate into that philosophical argument instead of refuting the otherwise ridiculous charges he was facing, Socrates offers up his life as a wager that humanity (as represented by Athenians serving as his jury), when confronted with Truth about Wisdom, will recognize it as such and spare him accordingly. This makes for an excellent moment to recall that this is Plato, a masterful writer, creating a sympathetic fictional character based on someone well-known to the public. Socrates was dead before Plato began shaping even the first words of Apology and we must not ignore his influence on our interpretation of a foregone conclusion, namely Socrates’ execution.
As this trial is a capital trial, questions about Life and Death become progressively important; receiving at first only a few token acknowledgments in Socrates’ defense before taking greater precedence in the negotiation over his punishment and, finally, an almost central role in his capitulation to a sentence of death. It isn’t until Socrates is nearly finished with his defense when he describes the ideal life as one not wasting, “thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul” [30:8-12]. While cagey in his initial defense about precisely how one might enact said improvement or by what criteria it might be measured, Socrates elaborates further in his Penalty negotiation phase, noting that “daily discourse about virtue…is the greatest good of man and that the unexamined life is not worth living” [38:2-5].”
With the threat of a death sentence looming, Socrates is inspired to comment more directly on death and dying. Proclaiming the dignity of his defense at the expense of his freedom, Socrates exhorts the jury, explaining that the “difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness” [39:6-8]. Consoling those on the panel who voted against his conviction and then against the death penalty, Socrates mentions for the second time the presence of an inner oracle that tells him the difference between right and wrong. Though it is now obvious that he was fated to die, Socrates proclaims that his inner voice never once told him of an impending wrong, leading him to believe that “what has happened to me is a good and that those of us who think that death is an evil are in error” [41:1-4]. It is only through the authority of his inner (perhaps divine) voice that Socrates is able to defend this claim as, by his own admission, what happens to us beyond death is unknowable and in his worldview, the province of divine wisdom and not mortal knowledge.
In surveying the two possibilities that his knowledge and his belief present, death is either a permanent and absolute unconsciousness (which he sees as akin to a good night’s sleep that never ends) or death is journey to a place where Divine wisdom reigns in place of its feeble mortal counterfeit. Both, in his humble estimation, seem alluring in comparison to the tragedy that has befallen him right here on Earth and Socrates resignedly accepts his sentence noting that “[t]he hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die and you to live. Which is better God only knows” [42:3-5].
Plato’s account of Socrates’ final hours on Earth continue into Crito and Phaedo but it is the unique narrative qualities of Apology that makes it stand out among the three. By having Socrates address the jury (and thus the reader) directly, Apology enjoys an urgency quite unlike the greatest portion of Plato’s writing. It is a compelling story beyond its historical significance; a man of great virtue and careful deliberation arguing for his life against a government of laws that finds itself at odds with his socially subversive message. It is also a familiar story that we will hear again (in quadruplicate) in the Trial of Jesus before Pilate though Plato is, in nearly every way, a more reliable narrator than the authors of the Gospels. There is also a provocative parallel between Socrates and Plato and Paul and Jesus that can already be seen, from this vantage, in Apology. Socrates and Jesus were both informal teachers that, for whatever reason, disdained to write down their message in favor of transmitting it orally. There is little evidence that either man was illiterate so the decision to speak, rather than write can be assumed to be one of choice and not of necessity. In both cases, it was the hearsay nature of what they’d said and done, coupled with their unwillingness to argue for their life on the merits of the cases presented against them that doomed them both to execution. Finally, the only reason that we have the ability to ponder on the virtue of their lives and deaths today is because a writer seized upon the vacuum of permanence left by their oral teaching and bound it into written form for the ages. The precariousness of this transaction invites one to wonder how many other oral teachings, perhaps no less profound, perhaps no less transformative, never found a way to pen or chisel and remains suspended somewhere back there in time.
Time: generally thought to have been written by Plato in the first decades of the 4th century BCE.
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas: Wisdom, Truth, and Life and Death
The unabridged text to Plato’s Apology can be found online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/Apology.html
Plato’s Apology is an account of the public trial of his teacher, Socrates that famously resulted in a death sentence. Even as Apology avoids Plato’s more familiar dialogue form in favor of a monologue delivered essentially in soliloquy to the reader, Socrates’ defense, as Plato describes it, is not typical of a man working diligently to save his own life. The question of whether Apology was read in its time as an journalistic account of a recent historical event, a polemical screed against those who had wronged an influential teacher, or a meticulously crafted piece of propaganda ignores the possibility that it may have been read, at once, as all three and more, against the complex cultural background of 4th century Athens and beyond. Given that knowing Plato’s own intention for writing the piece is impossible, it seems prudent to acknowledge the indisputable historicity of Plato’s eyewitness account of Socrates’ trial while recognizing that he, like all writers, was in possession of a particular worldview and a particular agenda through which his interpretation of what he saw must have been filtered. For this reason, we should remember that it is ultimately Plato who addresses the Great Ideas here, regardless of how much the doctrine considered is informed by that of his teacher.
Apology is broken into three sections; the first, Socrates’ defense, being considerably longer than the second, the Penalty Phase and the third, Socrates’ final rebuttal to the court. The monologue begins after the prosecution had already made its case and Socrates is called upon to defend himself against charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and being, at once, loyal to foreign gods and an atheist. Plato opens this defense by invoking the first of the Great Ideas that dominates Apology, Truth. Having heard the jury warned against his gifts as an orator, Socrates contrasts his relentless quest for the Truth against the tools of persuasion which his accusers suppose are the source of his influence. Truth is also unique among the Great Ideas central to this piece in that it is presented as something that humanity can actually understand, whereas Wisdom and the meaning of Death, if they can be said to exist at all, are property, if not, properties of the Divine.
Socrates begins his defense in earnest by segregating his accusers into two camps and the distinction between them begins an explicit conversation within Apology about the tension between the spoken and written word. Though his life has been placed in jeopardy by a very real set of angry folks in the here and now, Plato shows Socrates as addressing his reputation among Athenians as the most difficult obstacle to overcome in clearing his name.
"Far more dangerous are the others, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above and searched the earth beneath and made the worse appear the better cause. The disseminators of this tale are the accuser whom I dread; for their hearers are apt to fancy that such enquirers do not believe in the existence of the Gods." [18:13-21]
The importance of Truth takes a greater precedent in the second half of his defense when he addresses the specific charges facing him. It is clear from the manner in which Socrates presents his own defense that he is more concerned with uncovering truth than he is in proving his innocence. Should his Socratic method of inquiry reveal that he was, in truth, corrupting the youth and, in truth, magically encouraging both the worship of strange gods and atheism, one gets the impression he would demand for the harshest penalties allowed under the law. Yet, even after the guilty verdict is rendered and Apology moves into its second phase of Penalty Negotiation, Socrates is portrayed as unwilling to cede the moral ground to his now vindicated accusers that the Truth affords him, willing only to admit that he “sought to persuade every man among you that he must look to himself and seek virtue and wisdom before he looks to his personal interests and to the state before looking to the state’s interests…What shall be done to such an one? Doubtless some good thing [36:26-33].”
It seems only natural that the reenactment of a trial should be interested, if not fixated, on a quest for Truth. Socrates, in contrast, spends more of his defense talking about Wisdom, his star character witness who never shows up to testify but whose presence is amplified by its absence. In answering the critics of his reputation, Socrates tells the jury a story that demonstrates his piety but also implicates the Gods in his endless quest for Wisdom, the very same quest that earned him enough enemies in Athens to lose his life over words. A friend, he explains, went to the Oracle at Delphi and asked if any man were wiser than Socrates to which the Oracle responded that there was, in fact, none wiser. This declaration from the Oracle (an historically difficult assertion to prove as true or false from this distance) presents Socrates with a moral dilemma that involves both Truth and Wisdom. As Apollo is a God and cannot lie, then his assertion that there is no man wiser than Socrates must be true. Socrates, who insists that he is the bearer of no wisdom beyond that which comes from knowing that one has no wisdom, devises an ingenious solution to his problem by deciding that he will question men who are considered wise by reputation and, when he finds one, present him to the Oracle as a rebuttal of their claim.
Hilarity ensues as Socrates goes through a wide-range of purportedly wise people and finds none that convince him of their wisdom or impress him with their anger at being so exposed. Socrates’ very premise ranges over absurd ground. Suppose that he is successful and finds a wiser man to present to the Oracle. What, then, has he proven along with the idea that Gods cannot lie? He would have proven that either that Gods may not lie but their knowledge is not infallible or that the Oracle itself was an imperfect instrument of Apollo’s valued advice for mortals below. He is lucky, given this logical extension of his premise, that he is unable to find anyone in possession of wisdom, thus sanctifying not only his quest to continue his practice of inquiry (as Apollo has instructed in presenting him with his paradox) but his piety in obeying the Gods over the protestation of the aggrieved parties.
It is Socrates’ almost Taoist interpretation of Wisdom, though, that proves his greatest obstacle in infecting the jury with the urgency of his mission. Wisdom, it seems, is apparently in such short supply among mortals that is nearly impossible to describe. Though he invokes its absence relentlessly throughout his defense, Socrates offers very few insights as to what Wisdom might look like so the jury (or the reader) might know whether or not they might have some, thus refuting his argument. His final interpretation of the Oracle’s meaning offers a more descriptive passage on its nature, asserting that “God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the Wisdom of men is worth little or nothing” [23:5-7].
Later, in expounding the virtues of doing what is right over what is safe, he insists that “the fear of death is the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown” [29:6-9]. One might infer from this statement that the Socrates divides reality up into two categories, the knowable and the unknowable and assigns mortal knowledge to the former and divine wisdom to the latter. Whatever portion of the jury was present to pass judgment based on the merit of the arguments presented (a portion we are led to believe may have been quite small) might have found it difficult to acquit Socrates on the basis that no form of mortal wisdom exists whatsoever. By tying his fate into that philosophical argument instead of refuting the otherwise ridiculous charges he was facing, Socrates offers up his life as a wager that humanity (as represented by Athenians serving as his jury), when confronted with Truth about Wisdom, will recognize it as such and spare him accordingly. This makes for an excellent moment to recall that this is Plato, a masterful writer, creating a sympathetic fictional character based on someone well-known to the public. Socrates was dead before Plato began shaping even the first words of Apology and we must not ignore his influence on our interpretation of a foregone conclusion, namely Socrates’ execution.
As this trial is a capital trial, questions about Life and Death become progressively important; receiving at first only a few token acknowledgments in Socrates’ defense before taking greater precedence in the negotiation over his punishment and, finally, an almost central role in his capitulation to a sentence of death. It isn’t until Socrates is nearly finished with his defense when he describes the ideal life as one not wasting, “thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul” [30:8-12]. While cagey in his initial defense about precisely how one might enact said improvement or by what criteria it might be measured, Socrates elaborates further in his Penalty negotiation phase, noting that “daily discourse about virtue…is the greatest good of man and that the unexamined life is not worth living” [38:2-5].”
With the threat of a death sentence looming, Socrates is inspired to comment more directly on death and dying. Proclaiming the dignity of his defense at the expense of his freedom, Socrates exhorts the jury, explaining that the “difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness” [39:6-8]. Consoling those on the panel who voted against his conviction and then against the death penalty, Socrates mentions for the second time the presence of an inner oracle that tells him the difference between right and wrong. Though it is now obvious that he was fated to die, Socrates proclaims that his inner voice never once told him of an impending wrong, leading him to believe that “what has happened to me is a good and that those of us who think that death is an evil are in error” [41:1-4]. It is only through the authority of his inner (perhaps divine) voice that Socrates is able to defend this claim as, by his own admission, what happens to us beyond death is unknowable and in his worldview, the province of divine wisdom and not mortal knowledge.
In surveying the two possibilities that his knowledge and his belief present, death is either a permanent and absolute unconsciousness (which he sees as akin to a good night’s sleep that never ends) or death is journey to a place where Divine wisdom reigns in place of its feeble mortal counterfeit. Both, in his humble estimation, seem alluring in comparison to the tragedy that has befallen him right here on Earth and Socrates resignedly accepts his sentence noting that “[t]he hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die and you to live. Which is better God only knows” [42:3-5].
Plato’s account of Socrates’ final hours on Earth continue into Crito and Phaedo but it is the unique narrative qualities of Apology that makes it stand out among the three. By having Socrates address the jury (and thus the reader) directly, Apology enjoys an urgency quite unlike the greatest portion of Plato’s writing. It is a compelling story beyond its historical significance; a man of great virtue and careful deliberation arguing for his life against a government of laws that finds itself at odds with his socially subversive message. It is also a familiar story that we will hear again (in quadruplicate) in the Trial of Jesus before Pilate though Plato is, in nearly every way, a more reliable narrator than the authors of the Gospels. There is also a provocative parallel between Socrates and Plato and Paul and Jesus that can already be seen, from this vantage, in Apology. Socrates and Jesus were both informal teachers that, for whatever reason, disdained to write down their message in favor of transmitting it orally. There is little evidence that either man was illiterate so the decision to speak, rather than write can be assumed to be one of choice and not of necessity. In both cases, it was the hearsay nature of what they’d said and done, coupled with their unwillingness to argue for their life on the merits of the cases presented against them that doomed them both to execution. Finally, the only reason that we have the ability to ponder on the virtue of their lives and deaths today is because a writer seized upon the vacuum of permanence left by their oral teaching and bound it into written form for the ages. The precariousness of this transaction invites one to wonder how many other oral teachings, perhaps no less profound, perhaps no less transformative, never found a way to pen or chisel and remains suspended somewhere back there in time.
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