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 two 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,
defending 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 and impiety toward the
Gods, right?
In other 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 century,
a man named John Stuart Mill.
In his famous tract called
simply On Liberty,
Mill wrote, "Mankind can hardly
be too often reminded that there
was once a man named Socrates
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 expression 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 to 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 unlimited 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
doctrine 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,
like 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 Athens.
And Athens was,
until only fairly recent times
in human history,
the most famous democracy that
ever existed.
I say fairly recent times
until, you know,
the American democracy.
But it was, until at least the
eighteenth or nineteenth
century, the most famous
democracy that ever existed.
The speech of Socrates before
the jury 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 itself 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 can 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 unjust political rule.
It's, again,
a question that Plato takes up
in the Republic when a
character in the book named
Glaucon 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 persecution and death.
But the trial is not,
again, just an enduring symbol
of justice versus injustice,
it is an actual historical
event that takes place in a
particular moment 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 before 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 between
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
unprecedented level of artistic
and cultural life,
even today known simply as
Periclean Athens.
But Athens was also something
completely unprecedented in the
world, it was a democracy.
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 death a
man who spoke freely about his
own ignorance and professed to
care for nothing so much as
virtue and human excellence?
Now, at the outbreak of the
Peloponnesian War,
Socrates 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 country.
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-Spartan 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 read,
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 hated 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 invited 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
Socrates 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 conspiracy 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 Socrates
claims that his current accusers
Anytus and Meletus,
again, the democratic
resistance fighters,
the charges they have brought
against him are themselves the
descendants 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 another.
But, it is also a key feature
of the Republic which we
will be reading in a week,
where Socrates offers an
elaborate proposal for the
censorship 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 the Republic
unless you understand the poetic
backdrop to it and Socrates'
long standing engagement with
the poetic tradition and this
back and forth between 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 about 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?
Which 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.
The virtues endorsed by the
poetic tradition of which
Aristophanes is the great
representative 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 contributed to
their rise to power.
It contributed to Athens' as
well as Sparta's rise to
greatness from a small dispersed
people,
to a great world power and,
again, allowed them to achieve
a level of artistic,
intellectual and political
accomplishment akin to
Renaissance Florence,
Elizabethan 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 know here the
opening line of the
Iliad?
Homer's Iliad,
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
oracular.
It is not story telling;
it is conversational,
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 education.
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 virtues.
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 again the person 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-Socratic 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 what
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 devoted 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 greatest of his
contemporaries and Aristophanes
was,
along with Sophocles and
Euripides and others,
among the greatest of the Greek
playwrights.
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 against him.
Here, Aristophanes presents
Socrates as an investigator,
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 weaker 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 translated 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 above 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 that 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 which 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.
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 natural philosopher.
Again, investigating the things
aloft, under the ground.
He is what we would call today
a scientist, a natural
scientist.
But, this seems quite removed,
doesn't it, from the Socrates
who is brought up on charges of
corrupting the young and the
impiety.
In the Apology and here
is where Socrates 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
wiser than himself.
A quest, in the course of which
lead him to interrogate the
politicians, the poets,
the craftsmen,
all people reputed to be
knowledgeable,
and his conversations lead him
to ask questions,
not about natural scientific
phenomena, but questions about
the virtues, 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, Socrates' second 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 marks a major turning
point in Socrates' intellectual
biography.
The move from the younger,
we could call him,
Aristophanic Socrates,
the Socrates who,
again, investigates the things
aloft and under the earth,
to the later,
what we could call platonic
Socrates.
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 maybe 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
interpretation 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 answer 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 things
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 faith 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 else.
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 faith, as a matter of belief,
because we have learned about
them from childhood,
because they were written by
Thomas Jefferson or some other
reputed high authority.
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 least 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 source 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 faith,
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 philosopher 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
private 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 you 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."
Rather, he says,
"if someone who really fights
for justice is going to preserve
himself even for a short time,
it is necessary for him to lead
a private, rather than a public
life."
Think about that,
if someone who really fights
for justice is going to preserve
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 justice requires him to turn
away from public to private
life?
What is this new kind of
citizen, again,
concerned with this 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 we finish the Apology
and move our way up to the
Crito.
Okay?
We'll do that for next week.
