Socrates and the Politics of Association
Robin Phillips – September 2002
The figure of Socrates has
always particularly fascinated me. This may largely be do to the association Socrates
will always have with my first exposure to him. I was in my young teens and my
family was travelling across America for one of my father's speaking
engagements. We were staying with some fans of my fathers who had given my
brothers and I were the upstairs floor on which to sleep. There happened to be
lots of book shelves in that room and on one of the shelves there happened to
be one of the Dialogues of Plato. I had never heard of Plato before, let alone
read him, yet I opened the book anyway and was immediately excited by what I
saw. It was written as a dialogue, something completely new to me. The Socratic
method contained a certain excitement for me since I was continually being
punished for practicing a similar sort of device on my parents. In Socrates I
found a fellow ‘partner in crime’, someone who's mind seemed to tick similar to
my own and who's heart also longed for truth as I did and who, as I was later
to find out, was also punished for his stance.
In
the morning when we had to leave these people’s house and carry on with our
journey, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find that book again. I
wanted to finish the Meno and to further explore this new world that Plato had
opened up to me. I carefully wrote the title down on a piece of paper - “The
Dialogues of Plato” – and hoped to someday be able to buy a copy of the book. I
kept the paper safe and when we returned to Eureka I took it to the manager of
my father's bookstore. “Can you order me a copy of this book?” I said, handing
him the paper on which was written the title. The manager took the piece of
paper, looked at it, then looked me silently for a few seconds, then handed
back the paper saying, "Try the local library." It had never occurred
to me that the library might have a copy of this book - most of the books I
wanted I could never find in the library. The library did have a copy and later
I purchased my own set. Even now whenever I read Plato it possesses something
of that magical excitement of my initial exposure to him.
It
has been observed that all Western philosophy is really just a footnote to
Plato. Though at first such a statement may seem like an exaggeration of
Plato’s contribution to Western philosophy, it nevertheless remains true that
all subsequent philosophical inquiry has been in Plato’s wake. By this I do not
just mean that he was the first of the great philosophers and so that anything
that post-dates him historically is, by definition, in his wake. I mean,
rather, that he defined the questions, gave us the language and set the tone
that was to characterize philosophical debate until comparatively quite
recently. Now that Western philosophy is finally departing from Plato’s
footprints - and indeed, because it is thus departing - I believe that
we have more to learn from Socrates and Plato today than ever before.
We
also have much to learn about our own culture from a consideration of why
Socrates was executed. At first this may seem like a strange statement, seeing
that the execution of Socrates, like the burning of martyrs in the middle-ages
or the burning of books in fascist Germany, is often taken as an antidote to
the intellectual civilization we have reached in our own age. Such
over-confidence is not only unwarranted, it is naïve. In my next essay I shall be
arguing that the factors which led the Athenian democracy to want to execute
Socrates are even more apparent in our own society. In this essay, however, I
would like to focus on the reasons for Socrates’ execution, beginning with the
historical, political and sociological context of his indictment. We will look
first at the Sophists to help us see how that affected Athenian attitudes
towards philosophers.
The
Sophists
The
latter half of 5th century BC saw a number of private teachers/philosophers
flock to Athens to find work. These teachers, known as Sophists, taught the
entire spectrum of subjects from astronomy to law to mathematics, though they
are especially associated with the teaching of rhetoric. Unfortunately we know
very little about the Sophists because most of the relevant documentation was
later destroyed and we are left only with secondary sources or fragments from
primary sources. However, we can still piece together certain features as being
characteristic of the general movement. One such feature was an emphasis on
'eristic technique' or argument for argument's sake. The Sophist Protagoras
taught that on any subject there were two logoi opposed to each other
meaning that one might construct valid arguments (or, rather, persuasive arguments)
on either side of a given question.
Young
people who could afford for the Sophists to teach them had much to gain by
learning rhetorical skills. This was because the Athenian government was not a
representative democracy like our own where the citizens vote for leaders to
make their decisions. It was a direct democracy where the people voted directly
on policy. Anyone could stand up in the assembly and make a speech or become a
leader. Power was directly related to the ability to deliver persuasive speeches.
This is one of the main reasons why the Sophists found an open market in their
teaching of rhetoric.
Furthermore, given the Athenian
obsession with litigation (caused partly through the lack of any police force)
the number of cases of litigation was phenomenal. Consequently, you wanted to
always be ready to defend yourself if someone took you to court. The Sophists
taught people how to do just that. For example, one Sophist called Antiphon the
Orator (480-11) wrote model speeches for pupils called Tetralogies. One
of them involves cunning and apparently logic-tight proofs both in prosecution
and in defence of the same man charged for murder. The implication was that it
didn’t matter if you were innocent or guilty, as long as you knew the right
argumentative techniques you could persuade the people to vote in your favour.
Some
Sophists enjoyed constructing persuasive arguments on the most untenable
propositions and actually did this in front of fee-paying audiences at the
Olympic games like you might now pay to watch a magician perform. The Sophist
Gorgias believed that rhetoric did possess a kind of magic, forcing someone to
be persuaded even if the proposition in question might be false. Gorgias is
famous for his treatise on non-existence in which he proved that nothing
exists, then went on to prove that even if something did exist we couldn’t know
it, and then proved that even if something did exist and we could know it we
still could not communicate it to anyone.
Athenian
Frustration
Towards
the end of the 5th century the Athenians started to get pretty fed
up with the Sophists. This was due to a number of factors. Athens had been at
war with Sparta for many years with the result that the Athenian empire was
waning. The older generation would have looked longingly back to the time when
Athens was at her height. Those were the days of the victory at Marathon, the
building of the Acropolis and the affluence brought in through the Athenian
navel power. This greatness was gradually waning and eventually culminated in
Athens defeat at the hands of Sparta. The worse things became the more hostile
the public became to any sort of change. There was a polarization of the
'generation gap' that heightened the tension between the old traditional ways
with the new and radical ones represented with the Sophists. This polarity
between the two worlds, heightened by the ongoing weariness of the war with
Sparta, necessitated a skape goat - someone or some group of people that could
be blamed for the changes. The Sophists were the perfect candidates.
There is evidence (of
debatable reliability) that there was a series of prosecutions of Sophists
beginning began after the 430's with a decree that allowed for the public
prosecution of those who did not admit the practice of religion or taught
rational theories about the heavens. Both these things – religious scepticism
and cosmological speculation - were associated with Sophistic teaching.
Not all scholars accept
the historicity of the stories about public prosecutions of Sophists. But that
is really beside the point, for it is clear from enough literary sources that
there was a widespread antagonism towards the Sophists as 5th
century BC drew towards a close. One of the best sources for giving us such
information about what the ordinary man on the street thought about the
Sophists is a comedy written by Aristophanes in called The Clouds.
The comedies that were performed in the Greek
theatre often had some political point to make or else were intended to point
the finger at someone. The Clouds points the finger at the Sophists by
using the figure of Socrates as a caricature of the Sophist. Though this play
was performed twenty years before Socrates’ indictment, he was still a public
figure at that time. One can imagine what must have gone through Socrates’ mind
as he watched himself mocked in this play! (It was not the only play that
mocked Socrates, but by far the most influential.)
This hilarious play
begins with a widower Strepsiades moaning about the way in which his son
Pheidippides has landed him in such debt through the purchasing of race horses.
Strepsiades brightens up when he gets the idea of sending his son to the
Thinkery next door to be taught rhetoric by the famous Socrates. As he says to
his son,
They say they have two
Arguments in there – Right and Wrong, they call them – and one of then, Wrong,
can always win any case, however bad. Well, if you can learn this Argument or
whatever it is, don’t you see, all those debts I’ve run into because of you, I
needn’t pay anyone an obol of then ever.[1]
Strepsiades refuses
whereupon Strepsiades decides to go there himself to learn to dodge his debts.
He first meets Socrates suspended in the air in an attempt to mix small
quantities of thought with fresh air. Other experiments of Socrates involved
measuring the jumping distances of fleas, as well as the usual religious
scepticism and cosmological speculation associated with the Sophists. The long
and the short of the story is that Socrates finds Strepsiades impossible to
teach. As Socrates says,
“It’s not going to be easy to teach him to win
cases and make good debating points that don’t actually mean anything.”
Strepsiades decides to force
his son Pheidippides to come and be taught at the Thinkery, hoping that he will
have better success learning the argument that allows one to cheat the
creditors. Socrates summons the personified Right Argument and Wrong Argument
to debate in front of Pheidippides. Right Argument argues that Wrong Argument
is corrupting the youth by teaching them that
…‘Wrong
is right and right
is
wrong,
There’s
no difference, there’s no Justice, there’s no
God.’
Wrong Argument agrees,
saying,
“Anyway there isn’t any such thing as Justice.”
“I was the one who invented ways of proving anything wrong, laws, prosecutors,
anything. Isn’t that worth millions – to be able to have a really bad case and
yet win?”
Right Argument is a bumbling hypocrite who concedes the debate when Wrong Argument convinces him to become a homosexual. Pheidippides is convinced by Wrong and allows himself to be taught how to prove anything. When Strepsiades learns of this he is glad at first, thinking that his son will be able to help him wrangle his way through a forest of litigation. However, his optimism soon turns to despair when his son starts proving other sorts of things, like that it is right for a son to hit his father! Strepsiades realizes his folly too late. The comedy ends with Strepsiades burning down the Thinkery.
By caricaturing
Socrates with all that was despised about the Sophists[2]
(i.e., making the worse argument to appear the better, impiety,
scientific inquiry to the point of absurdity, atheism, etc.) we get an idea of
what the ordinary man in the street imagined the Sophists to be like. We also
get some idea of what popular opinion must have thought about Socrates. Though
it may be hard to imagine anyone taking such a silly comedy seriously, if we read
between the lines of Plato’s Apology it becomes more than clear that
even twenty years later Socrates still could not shake off the association he
had with the figure portrayed by Aristophanes.[3]
In the Apology
Plato’s Socrates begins his defence by replying to the "older
charges." The fact that he did this first before addressing the actual
indictment suggests he realized that the fundamental issues went far deeper and
were the real reason for public antagonism against him. This older charges
included the representation of Socrates is one who
speculated about the
heaven above, searched into the earth beneath, and made the worst appear the
better cause."
Such could not be a
more direct reference to the activity of the Sophists, and particularly that
Sophist which Aristophanes' portrayed by the name of Socrates. Socrates goes on
to say,
That is the nature of
the accusation, and that is what you have seen yourselves in the comedy of
Aristophanes, who has introduced a man whom he calls Socrates, going about and
saying that he can walk in the air, and talking a deal of nonsense concerning
matters of which I do not pretend to know either much or little…[4]
Socrates emphasizes
that "I have nothing to do with these studies" in an obvious attempt
to disassociate himself from the Socrates of Aristophanes.
One might think that
because Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds got last place and was
twenty-five years old that it would exercise little influence at the time of
Socrates' indictment. Nevertheless, the fact that Aristophanes comedy is
referred to both directly and indirectly by Plato's Socrates does suggest that
it had been influential in caricaturing Socrates in the minds of the public.
In the opening of the Apology
Plato has Socrates disclaim any ability at eloquence. This disclaimer of
eloquence was a common strategy in 5th century speeches and no doubt resulted
from people trying to distance themselves from the Sophists.[5]
Plato has Socrates responding to his opponents words of warning that the people
not be persuaded by his eloquence. It is quite easy to suppose that such words
of warning would have been issued by Socrates' accusers since the impression
they must have been trying to foster was an association between him and the
Sophists.
Remember that the
Sophists emphasized the pragmatic function of rhetoric in the advancement of an
individual. Plato’s Socrates, on the other hand, seems like he couldn’t care
less about what happened to him. As he says,
“…a man who is good for anything ought not to
calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in
doing anything he is doing right or wrong – acting the part of a good man or of
a bad.”
As Socrates says
elsewhere in the Apology, "But I have no particular liking for
anything but the truth." By ‘truth’ Socrates does not mean something
relative to the observer as Sophists like Democritus and Protagoras had
apparently suggested but something absolute that can (in theory if not in
practice) be elicited through racionation.
Philosophy was not a game to Plato's Socrates nor a means for personal
advancement and it is impossible to imagine Plato’s Socrates discoursing before
crowds at the Olympic Games like Gorgias.
The question of why Socrates was executed must be preceeded by the question of why he had enemies in the first place? It is not hard to imagine that anyone who spends his career going round from morning to evening proving “that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish” (as did Socrates if we accept Plato's presentation of him) is naturally going to make a lot of enemies over the years and even disturb the peace. The fact that Socrates, like the Sophists, was a disturber of the peace would only have reinforced the association between him and the Sophists.
To the ordinary man in the
street Socrates must have seemed the same as the Sophists especially since he
originated from the same broader intellectual movement. Hence, when Socrates
was brought to trial it hardly mattered that he may have differed from the
Sophists in many aspects. We may suppose that the jury lacked the philosophical
sophistication to distinguish the subtle differences between Socrates'
teachings from that of other Sophists, but more essentially we must suppose
that they would not have wanted to recognize such distinctions since they
unconsciously needed someone on whom to vent their frustration. Remember that
this was a time of great frustration. When the democracy was restored after the
oligarchic coup the Athenian government was particularly sensitive and
reactionary and was ready to fix upon any skape-goat. I would suggest that
Socrates’ enemies would have exploited this climate of frustration to Socrates’
disadvantage. They would also have exploited the associations that Socrates had
with the Sophists in general and the Socrates of Aristophanes in particular.
The issue gets more complex when we realize that just as there was an association between Socrates and the Sophists there must similarly have been an association between him and the ultra right-wing, oligarchic, even pro-Spartan, political group. This would be as a result of the kinds of people who collected around Socrates. The fact that Socrates was himself disintested in politics and exercised no control over who gathered round him would have carried little weight to a jury predisposed as it was by the socio-political mentioned earlier. Since opposition to the policies of Pericles could often be the real reason behind certain impiety indictments, it is not difficult to image these political associations being exploited by those who were indicting Socrates. When the Sophist Gorgias taught that rhetoric possessed a magic that compelled one to accept a certain point of view, he should perhaps have also noted something about the magic of associations. Associations can be very compelling. After all, the association of ideas forms the fabric of our memory. I am told that one can memorize lists of things on the stop up to a hundred through using a technique that exploits the association of ideas. My wife tried this successfully up to twenty in front of an audience – not at the Olympic games, however.
An Abiding Example
Socrates furnishes us with an example to which we
can all aspire, for he embodies the principle of not loving one’s life unto
death, of loving the truth more than personal safety and caring little for
favourable reputation. Like Socrates, we should all be prepared to stand for
what is right, come what may and heedless of what the world around us thinks.
Let the world mock us, it does not matter. Let the world kill us, that also
does not matter. Like Socrates, we may find that those around us create false
association in order to discredit us. That too does not matter. What matters is
faithful obedience to the degree of light that we have been given. If we do this then like Socrates we should expect
to encounter hostility and accumulate enemies throughout life. I would say,
in fact, that we can expect to find the hostility against us to be
proportionate to the degree that our lives are true. I am reminded of a poem by
Charles Mackay that goes as
follows:
You have no enemies, you say?
Alas, my friend, the boast is poor.
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes. If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You've never turned the wrong to right,
You've been a coward in the fight.
I think Socrates would
agree.
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[1] The Clouds in Aristophanes, Translated with an Introduction by Alan H. Sommerstein (Penguin Books, 1973), p. 116.
[2] Actually Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates reaches beyond the confines of just caricaturing the Sophists for as The World of Athens suggests, the Socrates of Aristophanes was a composite figure of all modern movements rolled into one. P. 294.
[3] The question of whether the Apology corresponds to Socrates’ actual defence is irrelevant here, for even if it was entirely an invention of Plato, it still gives us an idea of what Socrates needed to be defended against.
The attempt to distinguish the historical Socrates from the Socrates of
Plato is a worthwhile and not wholly impossible task. Such a task is made more
difficult from the account of Xenophon who portrays Socrates in a very
different way to that of Plato’s portrayal. Yet even if Xenophon's Socrates is
closer to the Sophists than Plato's Socrates, there are still important
differences. For example, Xenophon's Socrates says "that the gods opposed
my studying up my speech" which stands in contrast to many Sophists'
obsession with persuasive rhetoric. Also Xenophon's Socrates emphasizes (again
in contrast to many Sophists) that he is not interested in speculation
concerning the nature of the universe, which tallies with Plato's Socrates and
also that of Aristotle.
Plato's later dialogues seem to abandon any attempt to portray the historical Socrates, for we may guess that Socrates never concerned himself with metaphysical speculation about the theory of forms (which was Plato’s own way of trying to find one rather than two logoi to unite the particulars of the world). As Xenophon emphasized, Socrates concerned himself with questions relating to piety, beauty, virtue, etc., and didn’t go in for metaphysical speculation. As for politics, we don't have to look any further than Plato's own testimony to know that Socrates was unconcerned with politics, though in the Republic Plato has Socrates arguing for the ideal state. The fact that we know that Plato's later dialogues departed from any representation of the historical Socrates (apart from their use of the 'Socratic method' of discourse of course) should not cause us to wholly doubt the accurately of his earlier dialogues in their representation of his master. Ultimately we don't know how accurate these earlier dialogues were, though we can assume from certain similarities between Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle that there is at least a core of accuracy.
[4] P. 104.
[5] Thucydides' representation of the Mytilene debate comes to mind and the paradoxical irony of Kleon's sophisticated anti-rhetorical rhetoric.