I teased last week that I'm having trouble understanding Socrates motivations. Let me lay this out now. (And remember, I'm taking Plato's word here which may or may not be the smart thing to do.) Let me construct the timeline.
A. Our story starts with a question to the Oracle at Delphi. Socrates had a friend that asked the Oracle if there was anyone wiser than Socrates. The Oracle answered that no one was wiser.
B. Socrates takes this answer and decides to talk to various wise and accomplished people of Athens and see if they are indeed wiser than he. He discovered that no, they really weren't wise so he became 'odious' to him and all others present. My reading of this is that he systematically started angering the powerful men of Athens.
C. While he was doing this, some of his students tagged along and watched. Then they started copying him and delighted in making fools of even more people.
D. Socrates is then charged with corrupting the youth of Athens. He's also charged with not believing in the city gods but that seems like more of a general charge. It is an especially easy thing to say of philosophers because of the prevalent belief that they looked into the nature of things only so they could confound others.
E. Socrates goes to court and defends himself from the charges. He apparently had some choice in this. I'm guessing that the other choice would have been to flee Athens and live in exile. He went, believing he would be condemned to death saying during the trial that "to fear death is nothing else than to appear to be wise, without being so; for it is to appear to know what one does not know." Are these simply brave words or does Socrates (through Plato) really not fear death?
F. As part of Socrates defense he says, "I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know." Got that? Socrates is the wisest because he simply declares that he doesn't really know anything. All of the other guys who think they do know things are ignorant for doing so. Can he really believe this? If so he is simply different than any other smart man that I have ever known, read or even heard of. I can't help but tag this as dubious.
G. Socrates defends himself from the charge of corrupting youth with a hard to believe defense that good people wouldn't want to harm others for fear that they would return that harm. (This part deserves it's own post and will get one.)
H. Socrates catches his accuser in a contradiction regarding his atheism. The charge of not believing in the city gods is pretty easily parried.
I. He declares that he does not fear death nor will he stop teaching. So don't even think about leveling that as a penalty, jury! He states that he can't be injured because he does 'not think it is possible for a better man to be injured by a worse [man]'. Which I don't understand. And also that he does not fear for himself but for the rest of Athens for they would not find his like again. He is speaking of his use as a 'gadfly' but is the pride in his position or in himself? It's hard for me not to believe that is pride in self.
J. After he concludes his defense he is found guilty. He is threatened with death but Athenian law allows the accused to suggest an alternative. Socrates suggests that he be given a spot in the Prytaneum, a special building of the Greeks in which prominent citizens and athletes were honored and fed. Instead of being punished he should be rewarded! Why a reward? Because he never injured anyone so he won't accept an injury as a punishment. And he reminds them that he doesn't fear death. So that wouldn't be a punishment. In this he seemly goads the assembly to condemn him to die.
K. After they uphold the death penalty he speaks again. One of the things he says is "neither in a trial nor in battle is it right that or anyone else should employ every possible means whereby he may avoid death". But surely some means are acceptable, aren't they? Socrates could very well have taken a different penalty without sullying himself.
L. He goes on to tell his accusers that they will suffer a more severe fate. They will be judged and accused by others. And boy howdy, I'm sure that has proved true. It would be very sobering to be on a jury that would be second guessed for more than two thousand years. On this point, I don't have any questions whatsoever about motivation . . .
M. And then Socrates tells his supporters not to worry because the gods never warned him away from what he was doing or saying. Therefore "there is a great hope that death is a blessing". This seems to be almost literally whistling past the graveyard.He also says that this will give him a chance to talk with great people who have died in the past. Doubtlessly he'll also expose them as fools.
To sum up, I don't understand why Socrates talked himself into dying. It seems to me that he got into this mess in the first place because he was going out of his way to be a jerk. Not only that but showing his students how they too could be jerks. His reasons for gauging the wisdom of others don't add up and I can't credit his position that he is only wiser because he knows that he doesn't know things. (And frankly, if he really did believe that, then I'm even more confused.)
Once he was in the mess he could have gotten out of it by swallowing a bit of pride and simply said that perhaps he should have talked with the other men privately. Or come to the conclusion that it may not be all that important to have loud contests of wisdom. And if his pride was too much for that he could have simply allowed for some smaller penalty. Socrates mentions that he has no money to pay a fine but he had to have known that he would have help from various supporters.
Instead he chose to die. For the life of me I can't understand what lessons he was trying to pass on. Even worse, I can't understand what lessons Plato is passing on. Is he saying that truth is so important to a philosopher that they would risk, nay welcome, death if that is the price for telling it? But what truth was told here? That some important people are blowhards? What a cheap truth! And it seems there must have been an easier way to convey that than to goad those same blowhards into killing you.
But maybe I've missed the point somewhere. If so, fellow readers, please help me find it!
Having just finished Crito, my opinion is that the Apology and Crito should be published as one piece as Crito compensates for, in my mind, any weaknesses of the Apology. In Apology I find myself unmoved and unimpressed by a lot of Socrates argument (granted, I have had 2,500+ years of follow on Western philosophy to compare his foundational work to, so that isn't exactly a valid criticism). However, his logic is essentially unassailable in Crito (as unassailable as I who have no way to really judge actual logic can declare it is) and reads like a modern day political science debate. I finish Crito feeling like Crito, convinced that there is no other way and hoping I would be noble enough to follow my convictions and commitments to the very end like that. Of course, I would have tried to not argue myself into the death penalty first...
ReplyDeleteHmmm. Crito is more straight forward but I still had issues with it. Today got eaten up with kid stuff but I'll have something up on it tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteI'm taking a stab at the question of Socrates's ignorance in my January 16th post. See you there! :-)
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to it, Stan!
ReplyDeleteA couple of years ago we hosted a symposium of community leaders at our university where we discussed the Apology and King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." There was at least one person there (a city councilman from a nearby town) who said he thought Socrates deserved what he got and would have voted for that penalty, too! Pretty scary.
ReplyDeleteYikes! I guess the idea of battle to freely express ideas isn't over yet.
ReplyDeleteAlright, I know everyone else has moved on to other works, but it's still January so I'm still pretty pleased with myself. Anywhoo . . . my thoughts on Plato's Apology:
ReplyDeleteFirst, I have to point out that this re-reading has been substantially colored by a reading of the Apology I did with Connett and Benjamin last spring. I highly recommend tackling it with two pre-teens (especially of a sarcastic nature). In studying it in the past, the humor of the piece entirely escaped me. But, through their eyes, I think I have a better understanding of Socrates' intentions.
My first contention is that Socrates is doing very little philosophy here. When you compare it with any of Plato's other dialogues, you see that his tactic is entirely different. (I'd like to think that that comparison, not merely a desire to "finish the story" is why Adler has us read Crito as a follow-up). In the Apology Socrates doesn't have a sincere interlocutor, and isn't attempting to engage in a dialectic discovery of truth. He lays out a few arguments for his behavior, but I think these are more for explanation than learning. In other words, he isn't casting his pearls before swine, he is simply trying to illustrate how very many swine are in the room.
As to the question of his intentions behind these illustrations, I don't think it's either to be a jerk, but simply an extension of living as he sees best, which includes bringing to people's minds their own assumptions. I don't think he did this publicly in an effort to humiliate them (though I very much think that that's the goal in the courtroom, but, again, I think he's engaged in a completely different activity here). In order for it to be effective, it had to be public, as he was effecting societal change. He genuinely believed (by his own account) that doing so was the best possible good, and therefore, the only virtuous way to live his life. This only strikes us as disingenuous today because we now have some (awkward, in my opinion) divisions between philosophy and the divine.
As to the question of his wisdom in being the only who knows what he doesn't know . . . I obviously look at this question too simplistically. I read it simply as the beginnings of epistemological questioning, and therefore not at all problematic. Stan has a more in-depth take on it, but I think, when we place him within the history of western thought, Socrates position is a fairly simple one. He was the only man he'd encountered who understood that the proposition of "knowing" was thorny.
Regarding what it was he was willing to die for, I have a few thoughts, but I still have a page or two of the Crito left. I'll leave them on that post when I finish. My one real observation, though, about this piece is why on earth don't we dramatize it more often? Or at all--are there live productions of the Apology? There really should be. I'm no Greek drama scholar, I think the total that I've read will almost double by the end of the month. But, I'd say the Apology is the best dramatic piece I've read in that era. Socrates' tongue-in-cheek responses literally brought my 11 year old to his knees in laughter. I mean, he starts with the words, "I do not know what effect my accusers have had upon you, gentlemen, but for my own part I was almost carried away with them--their arguments were so convincing" and wraps things up by suggesting that his punishment be an annual salary at the state's expense. I would love to see this preformed with a really strong Socrates who gets the range between these satiric moments and his very genuine professions of belief and reasoning. And of course, you'd need a Meletus who could read between the lines enough to pull off his terse responses that speak volumes. I think this would be a fantastic project.
Micah, I'm really looking forward to your further thoughts once you're done with the Crito. I think you're exactly right about the dry humor that Socrates employs and if done correctly would be devastating.
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