Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 2 Transcript

Socratic Citizenship: Plato apology.

September
13, 2006
Professor Steven Smith: Today we start with Plato, Plato's Apology of Socrates. This is the best introductory text to the
study of Political Philosophy. Why? Let me give you t wo reasons. First, it shows Socrates, the reputed founder of our
discipline, the founder of Political Science, and I will say a little bit more about that later on today, explaining himself and
justifying himself, justifying his way of life before a jury of his peers. It shows Socrates speaking in a public forum, defe nding
the utility of philosophy for political life. And, secondly, the Apology demonstrates also the vulnerability of political philosophy
in its relation to the city, in its relation to political power. The Apology puts on trial not merely a particular individual, Socrates,
but puts on trial the very idea of philosophy. From its very beginnings, philosophy and the city, philosophy and political life,
have stood in a sort of tension with one another. Socrates is charged, as we will see, by the city for corrupting the youth a nd
impiety toward the Gods, right? In ot her words, he's accused of treason, a high capital offense. No other work of which I am
aware helps us better think through the conflict. I would even say, the necessary and inevitable conflict, between the
freedom of the mind and the requirements of political life. Are these two things, are these two goods as it were, freedom of
mind and political life, are they compatible or are they necessarily at odds with one another? That seems to me to be, in
some ways, the fundamental question that the Apology asks us to consider. Okay?
Now for generations, the Apology has stood out as a symbol for the violation of free expression. It sets the case for the
individual committed to the examined life over and against a bigoted and prejudiced multitude. The clearest statement of this
view of, again, the individual set against the mob in some ways, is found in a work of a very famous civil libertarian of the
nineteenth cent ury, a man named John Stuart Mill. In his famous tract called simply On Libert y, Mill wrote, "Mankind can
hardly be too often reminded that there was once a man named Socrat es between whom and the legal authorities of his time
there took place a memorable collision." Over and again, and Mill is a kind of a famous case of this, Socrates has been
described as a martyr for freedom of speech and he has been somewhat extravagantly compared at various times to Jesus,
to Galileo, to Sir Thomas More and has been used as a role model for thinkers and political activists from Henry David
Thoreau, to Gandhi, to Martin Luther King. So, Socrates has become a very central symbol of political resistance and
resistance to political power, and, of the dangers to the individual of unchecked rule.
But, this reading of the Apology as you might say, is a kind of brief for freedom of ex pression and a warning against the
dangers of censorship and persecution. Although this has been enormously influential over the centuries, at least over the
last century and a half, you have to ask yourself: is this the reading that Plato intended? Did Plato want us t o read the
dialogue this way? As a teacher of mine used to say, "You read Plato your way, I'll read him his way." But, how did Plato
intend this dialogue to be understood? Note that Socrates never defends himself by reference to the doctrine of unlimited
free speech. He doesn't make that claim. He doesn't make the claim about the general utility of freedom or unlimit ed speech.
Rather, he maintains as he puts it near the end of the defense speech, that the examined life is alone worth living. Only
those, in other words, engaged in the continual struggle to clarify their thinking, to remove sources of contradiction and
incoherence, only those people can be said to live worthwhile lives. "The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates
confidently, defiantly asserts to his listeners, to his audience. Nothing else matters for him.
His, in other words seems to be a highly personal, in many ways, highly individual quest for self perfection and not a doctri ne
about the value of freedom of speech in general. But, even though you might say, Socrates seems to be engaged in, again,
this highly personal quest for self perfection, there is something, which one can't avoid, deeply political about
the Apology and about his teaching. At the heart of the dialogue or at the heart of this speech rather is a quarrel, a quarrel
with his accusers over the question, never stated directly perhaps, but over the question of who has the right to educate
future citizens and statesmen of the city of Athens. Socrates ' defense speech, lik e every platonic dialogue, is ultimately a
dialogue about education. Who has the right to teach, who has the right to educate? This is in many ways for
Socrates the fundamental political question of all times. It is the question of really who governs or maybe put another way,
who should govern, who ought to govern.
Remember also that the city that brought Socrates to trial was not just any city, it was a peculiar kind of city, it was Athe ns.
And Athens was, until only fairly recent times in human history, t he most famous democracy that ever existed. I say fairly
recent times until, you know, the American democ racy. But it was, until at least the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the
most famous democracy that ever existed. The speech of Socrates before the j ury is perhaps the most famous attempt to
put democracy itself on trial. It is not merely Socrates who is on trial. Socrates intends to put the democracy of Athens its elf
on trial. Not only does the Apology force Socrates to defend himself before the city of Athens, but Socrates puts the city of
Athens on trial and makes it defend itself before the high court of philosophy. So, the ensuing debate within the dialogue ca n
be read as a struggle again over who has title to rule. Is it the people? Is it the court of Athens, the dẽmos, to use the Greek
word for "the people," or is it Socrates the philosopher-king who should be vested with ultimate political authority? That is, of
course, the quest and it's taken up in a very vivid way, much more explicit way in the Republic, but it runs throughout
the Apology and you can't really understand the Apology unless you see that this is the question that Socrates is posing
throughout.
So, I have some names put on the board and some dates, because I want to talk a little bit about the political context of this
dialogue. One can of course read, there's nothing wrong with reading the Apology, again, as a kind of enduring symbol of the
plight of the, you might say, the just individual confronted with an unjust mob, or an unjus t political rule. It's, again, a question
that Plato takes up in the Republic when a character in the book named Glauc on who happens to be, as it were, the brother
of Plato, asks Socrates if it is actually better to be just or simply to have the reputation for justice? And Socrates says it is
better to be just, even if that results in pers ecution and death. But the trial is not, again, just an enduring symbol of jus tice
versus injustice, it is an actual historical event that takes place in a particular mome nt of political time and this bears, I think,
decisively on how we come to understand the case both for and against Socrates.
Let me talk a little bit about that context. The trial of Socrates takes place in the year 399 and all of these refer to befo re the
common era, 399. Some of you will know that that trial follows very quickly upon the heals of the famous Peloponnesian
War. This was the war related by Socrates' slightly older contemporary, a man named Thucydides who wrote the history of
the Peloponnesian War, a war that took place bet ween the two great powers of the Greek world between the Spartans and
their allies and Athens and its allies. The Athens that fought this war against Sparta was an Athens at the height of its
political power and prestige under the leadership of its first citizen Pericles, whose name is also up there at the very top.
Under Pericles, Athens had built the famous Acropolis. It had established Athens as a mighty and redoubtable naval power
and it created an unprecedent ed level of artistic and cultural life, even today known simply as Periclean Athens.
But Athens was also something completely unprecedent ed in the world, it was a democ racy. And, again, even today the
expression "Athenian democracy" connotes an ideal of the most complete form of democratic government that has ever
existed. "We are the school of Hellas." This is what Pericles boasts to his listeners in the famous funeral oration told by
Thucydides. "We throw our city open to the world and never exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning and
observing, even though the eyes of an enemy may profit from our liberality," Pericles boasts once again. The question
maybe you want to ask about this is how could the world's first freest and most open society sentence to d eath a man who
spoke freely about his own ignorance and professed to care for not hing so much as virtue and human excellence? Now, at
the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Socrat es was just under 40 years of age. And, we learned from the speech that
Socrates himself served in the military and served in defense of his count ry. The war, the Peloponnesian War, was fought as
you can see over a considerable length of time, on and off for almost a period of 30 years and was concluded in the year 404
with the defeat of Athens, the installing of a pro -Spartan oligarchy, a pro-S partan regime known simply as the Thirty Tyrants
who ruled Athens for a year. The next year, 403, the Tyrants, The Thirty as they were called, were driven out and a
democratic government was once again reestablished in Athens.
Just three years later, three men named Anytus, Meletus and Lycos, all of whom had been part of the democratic resistance
movement against the Spartan oligarchy, brought charges against Socrates. The charges against him were: corrupting the
young and disbelieving in the Gods that the city believes in. So, you can see that the charges were brought by people who
were themselves, again, part of a democratic resistance movement and the names of Anytus and Meletus as you've re ad,
you know, appear in the speech itself. So, the charges brought against Socrates did not simply grow out of thin air. Maybe
we should rephrase the question. Not why did the Athenians bring Socrates to trial? But, why did they permit him to carry on
his practice of challenging the law and the authority of the law for as long as they did? Okay? Add to this the fact that when
Socrates was brought to trial again, the democracy had only recently been reestablished but that many friends and former
students of Socrates had been themselves implicated in the rule of the hat ed Thirty Tyrants.
Among the members of The Thirty was a man named Critias, and there's actually a platonic dialogue named after him, a
man named Critias, who was a relative of Plato's and another man named Charmides whose name is also the title of a
platonic dialogue, Charmides who is Plato's uncle. Plato himself, he tells us much later in life in his famous Seventh Letter ,
Plato himself was invit ed by his relatives to help to form a part of the government of The Thirty and later Plato said, "That so
abhorrent did they become that they made the older democracy look like the Golden Age." So, the point I'm suggesting is
that many of Socrates' students and associates, including Plato himself, had some connection with this oligarchical
government that had ruled Athens for a brief time. And, Socrates was himself not above suspicion. We often, don't we even
today yes, we often judge teachers by their students, by the company they keep, yes, don't we? No one is above suspicion.
Socrates himself had been a close associate of a man named Alcibiades, probably the most prominent Athenian in the
generation after Pericles. Alcibiades was the man who engineered the disastrous Sicilian expedition and later ended his life
as a defector going to Sparta. His complex relationship with Soc rates is, by the way, recounted in the drunken speech that
Alcibiades gives in Plato's dialogue, Symposium.
So, you can see that the trial of Socrates, the little speech that you have read, takes place in the shadow of military defeat, of
resistance, of cons piracy and betrayal. Socrates was 70 years old at the time of the trial. So, this was a highly charged
political environment. Far more volatile than for example the kind of partisan quarrels we see today in our republic, I hope.
Okay? So, let me talk about the accusations, let me move from the political context of the speech to the accusations. And, I
say accusations because there, as you read, if you read closely you will see there were actually two sets of accusations
leveled against Socrates. Early in the speech Socrat es claims that his current accusers Anytus and Meletus, again, the
democratic resistance fighters, the charges they have brought against him are themselves the descen dants of an earlier
generation of accusers who were responsible for, he claims, maligning and creating an unfavorable prejudice against
Socrates. "These charges are not new," he tells the jury, and many members of the jury, he says, will have formed an
unfavorable opinion about him. This was the day before there were intense forms of jury selection, where they would ask
people: "Do you have a view of the case?" Many of the jurors would have known Socrates, or certainly would have heard of
him and, he says, would have had already an unfavorable opinion formed about him by this earlier generation of accusers.
Reference he makes to a comic poet, yes, a comic poet, an unequivocal reference to the playwright Aristophanes, whose
name I have put up on the board. Aristophanes is the one who created the original or the initial prejudice against Socrates.
What was that prejudice that Aristophanes, this comic poet, had created? The allusion to Aristophanes and the comic poet is
a part of what Plato calls in Book X of the Republic, the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry. This quarrel is a staple of
Plato's dialogues, is a central theme, not only of the Symposium in which Aristophanes and Socrates are actually shown at
the same dinner table with one anot her. But, it is also a key feature of the Republicwhich we will be reading in a week, where
Socrates offers an elaborate proposal for the censors hip and control of poetry, if it is to be made compatible with the
demands of political justice. In fact, in a way you cannot understand theRepublic unless you understand the poetic backdrop
to it and Socrates' long standing engagement with the poetic tradition and this back and forth bet ween himself and the man
he calls this comic poet.
The core of this quarrel between the philosopher and the poet, between Socrates and Aristophanes is not just an aesthetic
judgment or it is not simply an aesthetic quarrel it is, again, deeply political or at least has something very political abo ut it. It
gets to the essence of the question of who is best equipped to educate future generations of citizens and civic leaders. Are
the philosophers or are the poets, you might say, the true legislators for mankind, if you want to use Shelley's dictum? Whic h
one legislates for mankind at the time of Socrates? The Greeks already had a century's long tradition of poetic education,
going back centuries to the time of Homer and Hesiod that set out certain exemplary models of heroic virtue and civic life.
The Homeric epics were to the Greek world what the Bible is to our world that is to say, in some respects the ultimate
authority, regarding the way of the Gods, their relation to the world and the type of virtues appropriate to human beings. Th e
virtues endorsed by the poetic tradition of whic h Aristophanes is the great repres entative here, the great inheritor and
representative, the virtues of this tradition were the virtues of a warrior culture, of war -like peoples and men at war. These
were the qualities that had guided the Greeks for centuries and cont ributed to their rise to power. It contributed to Athens' as
well as Sparta's rise to greatness from a small dispers ed people, to a great world power and, again, allowed them to achieve
a level of artistic, intellectual and political accomplishment akin to Renaissance Florence, Elizabet han England and Thirties
Weimar.
So, what is at stake in this quarrel between Socrates and the poetic tradition that he alludes to? First, Socrates' manner of
teaching is markedly different from the poets, right? Does anyone k now here the opening line of the Iliad? Homer'sIliad, does
anyone know the first line? Anyone remember that from high school? "Sing Goddess the wrath of Achilles," right ? "Sing
Goddess the wrath of Achilles." The poets are oracular, right? They call on Gods and Goddesses to inspire them with song,
to fill them with inspiration to tell stories of people with super -human strength and courage and anger. By contrast, you could
say, the method of Socrates is not orac ular. It is not story telling; it is conversat ional, it is argumentative, if you want to use
the word he applies to it, it is dialectical. Socrates makes arguments and he wants others to engage with him, to discover
which argument can best withstand the test of rational scrutiny and debate. There are no arguments in
Homer's Iliad or Odyssey. You hear strong and compelling stories but no arguments. Socrates makes, in other words,
continual questioning and not the telling of stories and the recitation of verses, the essence of this new political educ atio n.
He questions the methods of teaching of the poets.
But, secondly, again, Homer and the poets sing the virtues of men at war. Socrates wants to replace the warrior citizen with
a new kind of citizen, a whole new set, you might say, of citizen virt ues. The new Socratic citizen, let's call him that for a
moment, the new Socratic citizen may have some features in common with the older Homeric warrior. But, Socrates
ultimately wants to replace military combat with a new kind of, you might call it, verbal facility, verbal combat, in which a gain
the pers on with the best argument is declared to be victorious. The person with the best argument, let the best argument
prevail. The famed Socratic method of argumentation is basically all that remains of the older pre-Soc ratic culture of struggle
and combat. The new Socratic citizen is to be trained in the art of argument and dialectic, and we will talk a little later about
what that means. So, it is a challenger to the poets and all they stand for, the century -long tradition of poetic education that
Socrates asserts himself, that Socrates presents himself. The Apology shows Socrates as offering a new model of
citizenship, a new kind of citizen.
His challenge to the poets is in a way the basis for the resentment that is built up against him, in that Aristophanes and wh at
he calls the earlier accusers have brought to bear. In fact, you might say, so seriously was Socrates taken by Aristophanes
and the poets, that Aristophanes devot ed an entire play, he wrote an entire play, about Socrates called the Clouds, devoted
to debunking and ridicule Socrates' profession of learning. Aristophanes' play sometimes is even included in certain editions
of the book you're reading, like this one, it has the edition of Aristophanes' Clouds in it, along with the Apology and Crito. The
existence of that play shows to all of us just how seriously Socrates was taken by the great est of his contemporaries and
Aristophanes was, along with Sophocles and Euripides and others, among the greatest of the Greek play wrights. The
mockery, you might say, mockery of Socrates, remains one of the sincerest forms of flattery; they took him very seriously.
Let me just say something about the Clouds, this comic play, this satire on Socrates, because it is part of that initial
accusation that Socrates says is leveled a gainst him. Here, Aristophanes presents Socrates as an investigat or, and this is
part of the first charge, remember an investigator of the things aloft and the things under the earth and who makes the
weak er argument the stronger. That's the argument that Socrates says Aristophanes brings against him. In this play,
Socrates is presented as the head, the leader, the director of what we might think of as the first think tank known to human
history. It's called in the play itself the Phrontisterion which means , or is sometimes translat ed as the Thinkery or the
Thinketeria or simply a kind of think tank where fathers, Athenian fathers, bring their sons to be indoctrinated into the
mysteries of Socratic wisdom. And in the play Socrates is shown hovering, flying a bove the stage in a basket in order to be
able to better observe the clouds, the things aloft, right? But, also in many ways symbolizing Socrates', at least on the
Aristophanes' account, Socrates' detachment from the things down here on earth, the things t hat concern his fellow citizens.
Socrates is a kind of what in German people would call Luftmensch. He's a man up in the air, you know, he's so detached,
he doesn't have his feet on the ground.
And Socrates is shown not only mocking the Gods in doing this, but he is shown by Aristophanes to teach incest and to
teach all of the things that violate every decent, human taboo --incest, the beating of one's parents, all these kinds of things.
Socrates is presented as exhibiting kind of a corrosive skepticism whic h is at the core of Aristophanes' charge against him.
To make a long story short, the play concludes with Socrates' think tank being burned to the ground by a disgruntled disciple .
An object lesson for all later professors, I would say, who teach nonsense [chuckles]. Right? Don't get any ideas. Take a
match to the department. So, how accurate is that picture of Socrates, the man who investigates the things aloft and the
things under the ground? The Clouds was written in 423 when Socrates was in his mid-forties and the Aristophanic Socrates
is essentially what we call a nat ural philosopher. Again, investigating the things aloft, under the ground. He is what we wou ld
call today a scientist, a natural scientist. But, this seems quite removed, doesn't it, from t he Socrates who is brought up on
charges of corrupting the young and the impiety.
In the Apology and here is where Socrat es actually tells the story, very important in the course of this speech; he provides a
kind of intellectual biography of an incident that occurred long before the trial and set him on a very different path. He recalls
the story, don't you remember, of a man named Charephon, a friend of his, who had gone to the Delphic Oracle, who had
gone to Oracle of Delphi, and asked if there was anyone wiser than Socrates and was told there was not. Socrates tells us
that when he was told this he expressed disbelief in the Oracle. He didn't believe it and in order to disprove the Oracle's
statement, he says he began a lifelong quest to find someone wis er than himself. A quest, in the course of which lead him to
interrogate the politicians, the poets, the craftsmen, all people reput ed to be knowledgeable, and his conversations lead him
to ask questions, not about natural scientific phenomena, but questions about the virt ues, as he tells us, the virtues of a
human being and a citizen, what we would call today perhaps moral and political questions.
That incident that Socrates tells here represents what one could call the famous Socratic turn, Socrat es' seco nd sailing so to
speak. It represents the moment in the life of Socrates where he turns away from the investigation of natural phenomena to
the study of the human and political things, the moral and political things. The Delphic story for what it's worth m arks a major
turning point in Socrates' intellectual biography. The move from the younger, we could call him, Aristophanic Socrat es, the
Socrates who, again, investigates the things aloft and under the earth, to the later, what we could call plat onic Socra tes. The
founder of political science, Socrates is the founder of our discipline who asks about the virtues of moral and political life.
Socrates' account of this turn, this major turn in his life and career, leaves a lot of questions unanswered, that mayb e even
occurred to you as you were reading this dialogue, reading this speech. Why does he turn away from the investigation of
natural phenomena to the study of human and political things ? The Delphic Oracle is interpreted by Socrates, at least to
command engaging with others in philosophical conversation. Why does he interpret it this way? Why does this seem the
proper interpret ation to engage in these kinds of conversations?
It is this Socrates who is brought up on charges of corruption and impiety, yet none of this quite answers the question of
what is the nature of Socrates' crime. What did he do? What did corruption and impiety mean? To try to ans wer those
questions we would have to look a little bit at what is meant by this new kind of Socratic citizen. Who is this citizen? The
charges brought against Socrates by Anytus and Meletus we see are not the same exactly as those brought against him by
Aristophanes, the comic poet. Anytus and Meletus talk about impiety and corruption, not investigating the thin gs aloft and
making the weaker argument the stronger. What do these terms mean? Impiety and corruption, in what sense are these civic
offenses? What could impiety have meant to his audience and his contemporaries? At a minimum, we would think the
charge of impiety suggests disrespect of the gods. Impiety need not be the same thing as atheism, although Meletus
confuses the two, but it does suggest irreverence even blasphemy toward the things that a society cares most deeply about.
Yes? To be impious is to disrespect those things a person or a society cares most deeply about. When people today, for
example, refer to flag burning as a desecration, as desecrating the flag they are speaking the language of impiety, right.
They are speaking the language of some kind of religious or quasi-religious desecration. Meletus, whose name in Greek
actually means care, accuses Socrates of not caring properly for the things that his fellow citizens care about. So, the
question is: "What does Socrates care about"? What does he care about?
Consider the following: every society, which we know, operates within the medium of belief or fait h of some kind. Take our
founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, all men are created equal, that we are endowed
with inalienable rights that all legitimate government grows out of consent and the like. These beliefs form something like a
kind of national creed, you might say, American, national creed, what it means to be an American and not someone els e.
Yet, how many people could give a kind of reasoned account of what makes these beliefs true, or what grounds these
beliefs? Most of us, most of the time, hold these beliefs as a matter of fait h, as a matter of belief, because we have learne d
about them from childhood, because they were written by Thomas Jefferson or some other reputed high aut hority. To
question those beliefs would seem to exhibit a kind of lack of civic faith, faith in our ruling opinions. In short you might say a
lack of civic piety or respect.
Socrates clearly believes that piety or faith is the natural condition of the citizen. Every society, no matter of what kind
requires a kind of faith in its ruling principles, in its fundamental beliefs. But belief seems to be threatened from at leas t two
sources. One is simple disbelief or unbelief, a kind of rejection of ruling opinion simply because you don't like it. You know,
when you see the bumper sticker on the car "Question Authority," this kind of rejection of ruling opinion. But the other sour ce
of conflict with ruling opinion is from philosophy. Philosophy is not the same thing as simple disbelief or rejection, but the two
can be easily confused. Philosophy grows out of a desire to replace opinion with knowledge, opinion or belief with reason.
For philosophy, it is not enough simply to hold a belief on fait h, but one must be able to give a rational account, a reasoned
account for one's belief, its goal again is to replace civic faith with rational knowledge. And, therefore, philosophy is
necessarily at odds with belief and with this kind of civic faith. The citizen may accept certain beliefs on faith because he or
she is attached to a particular kind of political order or regime. But, for the philosopher this is never enough. The philos o pher
seeks to judge those beliefs in the light of true standards, in the light of what is always and everywhere true as a quest for
knowledge.
There is a necessary and inevitable tension between philosophy and belief, or to put it another way, between philosophy and
the civic pieties that hold the city together. From this point of view, I want to say, was Socrates guilty of impiety? On the face
of it, the answer to that seems yes. Socrates does not care about the same thing his fellow citizens care about. His opening
words to the jury seem to convey this, "I," he says, "am simply foreign to the manner of speech here." This seems to be a
statement of his alienation or disaffection from the concerns of his fellow Athenians. I know nothing about what you do or
what you care about. Yet it certainly doesn't seem right to say that Socrates does not care at all. He claims to care deeply,
perhaps more deeply than anyone has ever cared around him, before or since. And among the things he cares deeply about,
he says, is this calling to do nothing as he says "To do nothing but persuade you, both younger and older, not to care for
bodies and money, but, how your soul will be in the best possible condition." That concern with the state of one's soul, he
tells the jury, has lead him not only to impoverish himself, but to turn himself away from the public business, from the things
that concern the city to the pursuit of privat e virtue.
And, here are the words of his that I want to leave you with today from section 31d of the Apology. Socrates writes, "This is
what opposes my political activity. And, its opposition seems to me to be all together noble for know well, men of Athens, if I
had long ago attempted to be politically active I would long ago have perished and I would benefited neither y ou nor myself.
Now do not be vexed with me when I speak the truth. For there is no human being who will preserve his life if he genuinely
opposes either you or any other multitude and prevents many unjust and unlawful things from happening in the city." Ra ther,
he says, "if someone who really fights for justice is going to preserve hims elf even for a short time, it is necessary for hi m to
lead a private, rather than a public life." Think about that, if someone who really fights for justice is going to prese rve himself,
it is necessary for him to lead a private, not a public life. How are we to understand Socrates ' claim that the pursuit of ju stice
requires him to turn away from public to private life? What is this new kind of citizen, again, concerned with t his kind of
private virtue, this concern for the virtue of one's soul? That's the question I want us to consider again for next week as w e
finish the Apology and move our way up to the Crito. Okay? We'll do that for next week.