"Socratic Thought on the Individual in
Society in Plato's Early Period"
Spring, 1993
(This is word-for-word as I wrote it in the Spring of 1993 for an
introductory Philosophy course at William Carey College, except for a
rewrite of the last paragraph. When I retyped this paper on February
13, 2003, I thought my original closing paragraph was too insipid to
reproduce. My writing style was pretty over-the-top, but it was based on quite a bit of research.)
There is some dispute regarding just how much Socratic thought is
actually to be found in the writings of Plato. One may believe
safely, though, that the dialogues written earlier on would suffer
less from memory lapse and synthesis of Socratic and Platonic ideas
than would the later works. Bertrand Russell does well to point out
in his history that Plato's skill in writing and ability to create
characters of great depth makes him more suspect of fictionalizing to
some extent. However, one may verify some general facts about
Socrates by considering comments made by some of Socrates'
contemporaries, such as Xenophon and Aristophanes.
Socrates does appear to have been, to some extent,
the man represented in Apology, Crito, Euthyphro,
and Phaedo. Although The Republic is Plato's most
thorough treatment of what he appears to have considered the ideal
commonwealth, and Laws is a far more thorough treatment of
social and political ideas, it is in the earlier works that the most
reliable representation of the views and life of Socrates can be
found.
The reason it may be valuable to consider the
historical Socrates is that, while Plato actually wrote about matters
of concern to the individual in society, Socrates actually appears to
have died as a direct result of living according to his values. Even
if he did not die as gloriously as Plato would have one suppose,
Socrates was willing to choose death over exile or repentance.
Although such behavior has never been popular, considering the
popularity of nihilism in the world today, one would do well to
consider this man, as well as his thought.
PLATO'S PURPOSE IN WRITING
Plato had been a student of Socrates for a time, and
had developed quite a love for the man. Young men tend to be
extremely critical of the ways and laws of the generations preceding
them, and Plato was no different. But the execution of the man he had
come to admire so for his wisdom and life pushed him over the edge of
dissatisfaction into the chasm of personal revolution. Just as
Socrates prophesied in Apology, those who had unjustly
condemned him to death would soon be assaulted by the criticisms of
the young Plato in a far more blatant manner than Socrates ever would
have. Plato constantly referred to the men of Athens responsible for
the demise of Socrates as worthless dogs, unjust and corrupt, and
mere fools. In the long run Plato got his wish, for this one isolated
incident of injustice has marked those men as just that, despite the
far more heinous deeds of others before and since.
THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES
In a sense, Socrates was tried more than once. In a
very literal sense, he was accused and convicted of civil crimes and
sentenced to death in one day by the men of Athens. In another sense,
he constantly tried himself to determine if indeed his actions were
just. The exact nature of his trial of self, called dialectic, will
be examined in more detail below.
Exactly how the man came to be placed on trial and
condemned to death has been the subject of no little debate, but it
is clear that he offended many men of the city who were in positions
of prominence and authority by performing his method of dialectic on
them, thereby revealing their lack of knowledge and acts of
injustice. (The systematic practice of dialectic can be traced back
at least as far as Zeno, but Socrates practiced and developed the
method enough to make a great many enemies.)
Socrates was charged with doing evil, being curious,
searching into matters below the earth and above the heaven, making
the worse causes appear to be the better, and teaching these things
to others. He was accused of attempting to replace the accepted gods
of the commonwealth with new ones (and, remarkably, of being an
atheist all the while) and generally corrupting the young men of the
polis with full knowledge and intention. The charges Socrates
revealed during the trial to be unfounded at best and in some cases
flatly self-contradictory.
With due haste, he was convicted. And when he was
given an opportunity to offer some other sentence than death to be
considered, he asserted that it would be unjust of him to admit to
deserving punishment when he had committed no crime, and indeed
suggested that he should be rewarded with a pension from the polis in
return for his faithful service through exposing the evils of the men
of Athens. His friends pooled together their common funds and offered
to pay a small fine in his behalf, and he was readily sent away to
await execution.
While in prison, his friends concocted a plot to
arrange for his safe escape in a manner that would not get them into
any trouble. Crito spoke to Socrates as the plan's representative,
urging Socrates to consider that his family needs him alive and that
his friends will not only deeply grieve at his loss, but that they
will suffer terribly in the eyes of the public for not arranging for
his safe removal from danger. Socrates argued that if his friends
could be counted on to care for both him and his family after his
escape, then they should be equally reliable to care for his family
in the event of his death. And death was exactly what Socrates had in
mind, for he had no intention of escaping. Such a move on his part
would be tantamount to an attempt to destroy the polis, and thus he
would become guilty of the charges he had been falsely accused of by
attempting to escape punishment that he didn't deserve. No, he would
stay in prison, thank you.
METAPHYSICS
One cannot hope to possibly understand the ethics of Socrates
without an adequate understanding of his metaphysics. He was a strict
dualist, believing that the only substantive existence is spirit,
which is infinite and eternal. The physical world he saw as a
grotesquely corrupted distortion of reality, which can only be known
mystically and rationally.
The body, he felt, is a prison in which the soul is
confined for a time. The soul then returns to the ideal reality upon
physical death. Death he considered a good, a release from trouble.
In fact, he called philosophy the practice of death, for philosophy
was, for him, the way to purify the soul through minimizing or
eliminating contact with the corrupting physical realm. If a soul
leaves its body uncorrupted, he believed, it would be able to spend
eternity with the gods. If, however, some degree of corporeal
corruption weighed down the soul, it would remain in a cycle of
body-imprisoned lives until and if it ever purified itself through
the pursuit of philosophy.
It is for this reason that even though in certain
dialogues Socrates found no suitable answers to questions concerning
such concepts as friendship, courage, piety, and temperance (Lysis,
Laches, Euthyphro, and Charmides, respectively),
Socrates believed it is necessary to give thought to these matters.
In fact, it is the distortion of reality in the corporeal realm that
makes such concepts so difficult to understand. Socrates explicitly
referred to the practice of dialectical philosophy as the greatest
good of man, and stated that no life lacking such thorough
examination was worth living at all. The method of dialectic referred
to is one of question-and-answer debate or analysis, serving to
reveal any corruption in the form of self-contradiction or failure to
correspond with known reality or failure to cohere with known true
statements.
In the realm of reality and spirit are the gods and
the souls of those who have freed themselves from the prison of
physical bodies. In that realm there is no corruption, ignorance, or
lack of freedom. It is a place of ideal form and harmony. In the
physical body, one should seek to grasp the ideal forms of the real,
and should seek to emulate these qualities, seeking knowledge,
purity, justice, and separation from the desires and corruption of
the physical realm and the physical body. To do otherwise merely
prolongs the imprisonment of the soul.
The community, state, or commonwealth represents, in
a way, the harmony of the spirit realm, for it consists of the
cooperating members of the populace. To disobey the laws of the
commonwealth, then is to rebel against harmony and justice, worsening
the condition of one's soul. If one feels that the laws of the state
are unjust and violate the commands of the gods, one owes it to
oneself and to one's people to point this out, so that all may be
improved. So first in priority are the commands of the gods, and
second are the laws and well-being of the state. One should never
give any thought to the satisfaction of one's physical desires.
REASON
Socrates felt that all men possess the ability to use reason. In
this way, difficult concepts such as justice may be grappled with. He
felt that it is much better to admit ignorance than to uphold the
pretense of wisdom. Reason and God, he felt, act as guides. He
believed that lack of reason and perversion of justice go
hand-in-hand. Passion, thoughtlessness, and carelessness lead to lack
of or errors in reason. Opinions, he believed are of no real
importance. What is truly important is the wisdom of the gods.
Opinions are often swayed easily by insignificant things, and tend to
produce envious and hateful slander, which causes men to condemn
others unjustly. Only reasoned opinions are worth considering.
What is truly important, though, is maintaining an
examined life. Through careful examination of one's actions, one may
improve the soul by increasing knowledge and justice. This
improvement of the soul develops virtue, from which come all kinds of
good. Opinion, even majority opinion, cannot affect that which is
actually true.
Gadflies are important in a commonwealth, for they
provoke men toward good. A gadfly is a horsefly, an animal possessing
a singularly remarkable ability to motivate one to change one's
plans. And Socrates was called the gadfly of Athens. What the local
citizens may have found annoying (to say the least), Socrates felt
was for their own good. He would pester people constantly in an
attempt to save their souls. And he believed that he and his
pestering were gifts from Zeus (one assumes Zeus from context, but at
this point it is not a pivotal assumption), who desires that people
set themselves free from bondage to the physical. He believed that
once one knew the truth, one would happily abide by it, but people
need to be reminded of the truth.
Actions such as returning injustice for injustice or
evil for evil are bad, for they harm the soul. In fact, to injure
another only brings harm to one's own soul, for the only way to truly
harm another would be to make him foolish, which is not possible. If
one could harm (corrupt) another, it would only increase the injury
that the individual would do in return. And one cannot harm a better
under any circumstances.
However, disobedience to a better and perversion of
justice in other ways are possible. To emotionally sway a jury from a
just, reasonable verdict is unjust and attempts to harm the
commonwealth through violating the integrity of the laws and harmony
of society. Justice ranks among excellence, virtue, and laws as one
of the most valuable things people can have. It is more important
than children, life, or anything else.
ANALYSIS
Because Socrates had a rigid ethical code based on a metaphysic
that would be difficult to verify at best, much of his ethical
teaching has been questioned or simply dismissed by philosophers who
represent differing schools of metaphysics. This is not merely a
phenomenon isolated to twentieth-century material nihilism, either.
Even Aristotle criticized Plato's writings for this problem. However,
there is little opportunity for active criticism of his metaphysics
in this analysis.
One can, however, question the relevance of Greek
virtues in a radically different time and place, such as Hattiesburg,
Mississippi in 1993. Most have rejected the old gods, and many have
no developed concept of deity at all. The state is also not
considered even by politicians, lawmakers, and political philosophers
to be quite so impervious to attack.
Gods and governments alike suffer from the cancerous
effects of being labeled sociological phenomenon instead of
substantive entities with whom people interact. The sociological and
psychological theories against the existence of the gods, and the
social compact theories of government have not been challenged
adequately, as of yet, to rescue god and country as anything more
than institutions. Although religion and government are still
formally around, neither can be said to hold much respect in the eyes
either of the masses or the intelligentsia.
This reveals the inherent weakness in most
philosophical positions, including those of Socrates and Plato:
verifiability of assumptions. Socrates, at least, proved himself far
superior to most by openly reminding those with whom he engaged in
dialectic that if, at any point, they disagreed with his assumptions,
he was hapless to persuade them of the validity of his arguments.
One does well, though, to give Socrates the benefit
of the doubt on some of his more palatable assumptions, for his
argumentation by analogy is fascinating. Once he has one agreeing to
a few basic assumptions that all but a few radical Descartes-types
would agree with, he asks a question that is based on an entirely
different set of assumptions, but is cloaked in similar wording to
the series of questions he just asked. If one goes along with this
line of questioning without catching him in the act, one will very
quickly be saying something that one does not believe at all. The
problem with this little trick is that once one (if one) notices the
subtlety in argumentation, one may totally reject conclusions that
might have been reached in a less objectionable manner. One may find
many such incidents of "sleight-of-tongue" in Plato's
writings.
Another difficulty with Socrates is that it is not
clear whether he really does believe that men are really
well-meaning, but stupid by choice, or if he actually believes that
men are selfish, evil retches, and he is merely arguing otherwise out
of sarcasm. The radical swings between sarcasm, humor, mystical
references, and bouts of reason (mixed with a little trickery) cast
shadows of doubt on his entire approach at times. Socrates seems to
be a character that is too colorful for the movie he is in.
And one questions whether or not his ethics are very
practical. Face facts: "doing the right thing" made his
wife a widow. He does respond to this criticism in Crito, but
most people would have difficulty accepting the answers he gave. The
idea of an absolutely neutral god who is somehow metaphysically bound
to reject those who don't make the grade, and yet will not allow
souls imprisoned in physical bodies to at least make a few exceptions
in order to care for loved ones is exactly where the problem of evil
argument against the existence of gods is inspired. Some question why
one would want to spend eternity with someone like that.
All in all, though, if one accepts the basic
metaphysical position of Plato, one finds a fairly functional, if a
bit ascetic, ethical system. Even if one does not, one will not find
too much that is blatantly wrong with his ideas in a pragmatic sense.
One may even feel that such a high degree of personal and social
morality could do the world some good, as sort of a reaction against
nihilism and collapsing standards of morality in the world today.
Aristotle, for one, disagreed. He argued that
extremism in any form serves only ill ends. Multiculturalists today
would also adamantly disagree, arguing that such a closed-minded
system of values based on assumptions and values not shared by all is
a preposterous idea. Even many neoplatonists who actually hold dear
the old gods disagree, believing that spirit and matter are not so
radically different, nor are many of his other assumptions as
universal as he believed.
Consider, though, one significant point in Plato's
defense: he did appear to desire a better world that held true to
what he believed to be reality. One should always consider, when
critiquing another's most intimate beliefs, not only the absolute
verifiability of the claims made, nor even just the process involved
in the production of the positions. Two other things should also be
considered: (1) Did he mean well? and (2) Did any good come
of it? As members of the academic community, it is quite tempting
to shred someone to pieces without giving any thought to the humanity
of the individual or the consequences of his or her gift to the
development of available ideas.
Did Plato mean well? Yes, in that he desired to see
more justice and harmony in the lives of individuals and in the
commonwealth. The fact that there appears to be more than a hint of
revenge-motive in the fact that he ever began writing at all, hoping
and expecting to completely discredit the prominent men of Athens and
completely replace its democracy with a "more just"
republic, does not speak well of him. One is reminded of his
humanity.
Did any good come of it? Most Western philosophers
seem to agree with Alphred North Whitehead's comment (in Process
and Reality), "The safest general characterization of the
European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of
footnotes to Plato." Plato's image of a man who urged a "life
worth living" and for whom the ultimate wisdom is asking the
question of how one should live one's life is even today a model of
nobility. And by setting so many examples of rational dialectic into
print, he laid a considerable part of the foundation of Western
critical thought.