Not only was Socrates guilty, but he had to be put to death. By refusing to propose an alternative punishment (and here, as elsewhere in discussing the trial, Hegel relies on Xenophon's version more than Plato's) he refused to submit to the authority of the state: “Socrates disclaims the submission to, and humiliation before the power of the people” (442). The Athenian law, however, does not permit this, nor can any state: “the first principle of a State is that there is no reason or conscience or righteousness or anything else, higher than what the State recognizes as such” (443). In spite of this, however, “Socrates was still the hero who possessed for himself the absolute right of the mind, certain of itself and of the inwardly deciding consciousness, and thus expressed the higher principle of mind with consciousness” (444). In general heroes “appear to be violently destroying the laws. Hence individually they are vanquished, but it is only the individual, and not the principle, which is negated in punishment … His own world could not comprehend Socrates, but posterity can” (ibid.).
Socrates’ fate was thus tragic: “in what is truly tragic there must be valid powers on both the sides which come into collision; this was so with Socrates” (446). The tragedy was not just his, however, but Athens’: “two opposed rights come into collision, and the one destroys the other. Thus both suffer loss and yet both are mutually justified … The one power is the divine right, the natural morality … The other principle, on the contrary, is the right, as really divine, of consciousness or of subjective freedom” (446–7). But the subjective freedom of Socrates was actually vindicated: “for the world-spirit had raised itself into a higher consciousness” (447).
Hegel's account of the trial can certainly be criticized, and on his own principles at that. If the Athenian law cannot recognize the power of individual consciousness, and if in fact individual consciousness is a higher basis of morality than the tradition on which the law is based, then it would seem that both sides do not equally have right on their side. Socrates is, as Hegel states, the hero of the conflict, for his principle ultimately emerges victorious. The old way is submerged in a new version of the law, one that recognizes the individual consciousness. There are many other criticisms of detail that one might wish to make in Hegel's account, but Most's comment, that “Hegel's interpretation of the figure of Socrates is perhaps the only one that can be compared with Plato's, for depth of philosophical penetration and for richness of historical imagination,”18 is worth serious consideration. Most is surely correct when he states that “it is with Hegel, as much as with Socrates himself, that such nineteenth century philosophers as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are in dialogue when they write about the Greek philosopher.”19
Kierkegaard: Socrates as an Individual
Socrates is a hero for Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). He refers to him as “the simple wise man … of all men the greatest … intellectual hero and martyr.”20 “O noble, simple sage of antiquity,” he continues, “the only human being that I acknowledge with admiration as a thinker … How I have longed … for one short hour of conversation with you!”21 Kierkegaard saw his own task in Socratic terms. In one of his final writings, in 1855, he writes, “my only analogy is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task – to revise the conception of what it means to be a Christian.”22 Kierkegaard's task, as he saw it, was to awaken in the complacent minds of his fellow citizens in Copenhagen the awareness of the fact that they were not, as they thought, Christians, as Socrates’ task was to awaken in the complacent minds of his fellow Athenians the awareness of the fact that they were ignorant of the truths of ethics.
Kierkegaard began his career under the influence of Hegel, an influence he later repudiated.23 His first published work was his master's thesis, On the Concept of Irony, with Special Reference to Socrates.24 In his thesis Kierkegaard saw Socrates as an ironist: “what made up the substance of his existence was irony.”25 As Hegel had thought, Socrates rejected the traditional morality of his fellow citizens, but he had no positive moral teaching of his own with which to replace it. His stance was that of “infinite absolute negativity,” Hegel's definition of irony.26 Even in his master's thesis, however, one can discern Kierkegaard moving past the Hegelian conception of Socrates as the inventor of a new stage in the history of ethics. Socrates, thinks Kierkegaard at this stage of his life, had no positive teaching at all: “He is like a hyphen in world history … he, in a certain sense, is in world history and then again is not … he is the nothing with which the start had to be made.”27 This is not a rejection of Socrates on Kierkegaard's part: “Socrates is not minimized by my interpretation but rather becomes a hero … The old Greek civilization had outlived itself, a new principle was about to enter … The new principle has to fight for its life, world history needs a new obstetrician. Socrates fills this position.”28
Kierkegaard soon heightened his critique of Hegel. Kierkegaard objected to Hegel's view of Socrates as a world-historical person, whose life was to be understood in terms of its contribution to the unfolding of the system. Socrates, for Kierkegaard, was an individual. He did not fit into a grand scheme that depicted the growth in human society of reason or freedom. Socrates, the individual, was in fact for Kierkegaard a counter-example to Hegel's systematic understanding. Kierkegaard opposed Hegel's presentation of Christianity as a stage, albeit the highest stage, in the unfolding of the system. Christianity was not an objective truth, to be expressed in systematic terms. Christianity was a subjective truth, “an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness.”29 This inward appropriation-process is faith. With respect to the question of the immortality of the soul: “Socrates … puts the question objectively in a problematic manner: if there is an immortality … On this ‘if’ he risks his entire life … The bit of uncertainty that Socrates had helped him because he himself contributed the passion of the infinite … It is possible that there was more truth in the Socratic ignorance as it was in him, than in the entire objective truth of the System.”30 (A few pages later he makes the same claim about Socrates’ faith in God.) Socrates’ God was not the God of Christianity, who became a human being in time and suffered death on the cross, a God who is the “ultimate paradox,” but he is still a God requiring faith.
In The Sickness unto Death (1848) Kierkegaard revises the estimation of him in The Concept of Irony as an ironist pure and simple:
Socrates was certainly an ethical teacher (the Classical age claims him absolutely as the discoverer of ethics); he was the first one, as he is and remains the first in his class; … But on the other hand … Socrates is not an essentially religious ethicist, still less a dogmatic one … Socrates … never really gets to the determinant we know as sin … What determinant is it then that Socrates lacks in determining what sin is? It is will, defiant will. The Greek intellectualism was too happy, too naïve, too aesthetic, too ironical, too witty … too sinful to be able to get it into its head that a person knowingly could fail to do the good, or knowingly, with knowledge of what was right, do what was wrong.31
Kierkegaard sees Socrates’ intellectualism, with its rejection of the idea of sin, as a defect in relation to Christianity. Yet Socrates retained his status for Kierkegaard as the model individual thinker: “I for my part tranquilly adhere to Socrates. It is true, he was not a Christian; that I know, and yet I am thoroughly convinced that he has become one … I can very well call Socrates my teacher.”32
Nietzsche
Nietzsche's attitude toward Socrates is often said to be ambivalent.33 In an oft-quoted passage, he remarks, “Socrates … stands so close to me that I am practically always waging a battle with him.”34 Nietzsche discusses Socrates in the first work he published, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and one of the latest, Twilight of the Idols (1888). His estimation of Socrates’ influence does not change much, if at all, but in the earlier work it is presented in a less polemical tone than in the later. For Nietzsche the acme of Greek culture is the tragic drama of Aeschylus and Sophocl
es. He describes tragedy as the product of two forces, which he calls the Apollonian and Dionysian. He describes the Dionysian force as akin to intoxication. In Twilight of the Idols he associates it with the reproductive force and the pain of childbirth, which is represented as holy (“What I Owe to the Ancients,” sec. 435), and in general with “the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity” in the face of pain and sorrow (sec. 5). According to Nietzsche, tragedy was destroyed by the playwright usually considered the third of the three great Athenian tragedians: Euripides, with the assistance of Socrates. Socrates elevated knowledge, the product of reason, above the Dionysian force of instinct as a guide to life. Nietzsche, by training a classical scholar, describes Socrates in terms directly recalling Plato's Apology:
It was Socrates who expressed most clearly this radically new prestige of knowledge and conscious intelligence when he claimed to be the only one who acknowledged to himself that he knew nothing. He roamed all over Athens, visiting the most distinguished statesmen, orators, poets and artists, and found everywhere merely the presumption of knowledge. He was amazed to discover that all these celebrities lacked true and certain knowledge of their callings and pursued those callings by sheer instinct. The expression “sheer instinct” seems to focus perfectly the Socratic attitude. From this point of view Socrates was forced to condemn both the prevailing art and the prevailing ethics. Wherever his penetrating gaze fell he saw nothing but a lack of understanding, fictions rampant, and so was led to deduce a state of affairs wholly discreditable and perverse.
(The Birth of Tragedy,36 sec. 13)
It would be hard to imagine a better summary of the barren Socrates.
But Nietzsche's Socrates was not simply barren. Nietzsche summarizes “the Socratic maxims: ‘Virtue is knowledge; all sins arise from ignorance; only the virtuous are happy,’” which he calls “three basic formulations of optimism” and which he says “spell the death of tragedy” (sec. 14). Socrates does not simply bring an end to tragedy: “we are certainly not entitled to see in Socrates merely an agent of disintegration” (ibid.) Though Nietzsche refers to Socrates as a “despotic logician” (ibid.), he also describes him as “the prototype of an entirely new mode of existence,” the theoretical man. “His mission is to make existence appear intelligible and thereby justified” (sec. 15). “We cannot help viewing Socrates as the vortex and turning point of Western civilization,” he states; “Socrates represents the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who, strong in the belief that nature can be fathomed, considers knowledge to be the true panacea and error to be radical evil. To Socratic man the one noble and truly human occupation was that of laying bare the workings of nature, of separating true knowledge from illusion and error” (ibid.). In other words, Socrates was the prototypical scientist, “the mystagogue of science” (ibid.).
Late in his life, in The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche discusses “The Problem of Socrates.” He begins with a famous reflection on Socrates’ final words, as recounted in Plato's Phaedo: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget” (118a). Asclepius was the god of healing, and Nietzsche took the remark, the significance of which has been much debated, to be a Socratic comment on the nature of human life, namely that it was a sickness from which death was the release. Socrates, Nietzsche says, “wanted to die: not Athens, but he himself chose the hemlock; he forced Athens to sentence him” (sec. 12). Socrates, says Nietzsche, was a symbol of decline, of decadence. He launches an attack on Socrates, beginning in section 3 with his personal appearance. Behind this attack, however, is an aim which goes beyond the surface: “I seek to comprehend what idiosyncrasy begot that Socratic equation of reason, virtue and happiness: that most bizarre of all equations, which moreover is opposed to all the instincts of the earlier Greeks” (sec. 4). Socrates was, according to Nietzsche, a member of the lowest class; his use of dialectic, he suggests, was a kind of class warfare against the noble classes. “one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means” (sec. 6). For Nietzsche, Socrates’ use of dialectic was an act of violence: “does he,” Nietzsche asks, “enjoy his own ferocity in the knife-thrusts of his syllogisms?” (sec. 7) For Nietzsche, Socrates’ method was an act of revenge against the powerful in his society. (Think here of the Socratic critique of Callicles in the Gorgias.)
But this critique is only one side of Nietzsche's interpretation of Socrates. “It is … all the more necessary,” he says, “to explain his fascination. That he discovered a new kind of agon [contest], that he became its first fencing master for the noble circles of Athens, is one point. He fascinated by appealing to the agonistic impulse of the Greeks – he introduced a variation into the wrestling match between young men and youths” (sec. 8). But Socrates did not merely invent a new form of blood sport: “Socrates understood that all the world needed him … everywhere the instincts were in anarchy … ‘The impulses want to play the tyrant; one must invent a counter-tyrant who is stronger’” (sec. 9). The counter-tyrant, of course, was reason: “rationality was then hit upon as the savior; neither Socrates nor his ‘patients’ had any choice about being rational … there was danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or – to be absurdly rational” (sec. 10). Nietzsche thought this use of reason as a cure to the anarchy of the appetites was a form of self-deception. When he wrote Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche was fully on the side of instinct in opposition to reason as the key to a happy life. Socrates was not the cure to a disease, but another sign of decadence: “Socrates was a misunderstanding: the whole improvement-morality, including the Christian, was a misunderstanding. The most blinding daylight; rationality at any price, life, bright, cold, cautious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts – all this too was a mere disease, another disease, and by no means a return to ‘virtue,’ to ‘health,’ to happiness. To have to fight the instincts – that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct” (sec 11).
The Twentieth Century
Karl Popper's Socrates
One of the persistent features of appreciations of Socrates in the twentieth century is the view of him as a defender of democracy. We can see this view in Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, first published in 1945. The date of publication perhaps gives a key to the book's polemical tone. It was composed during the Second World War, when the institution of democracy was literally under attack by totalitarian forces. The “open society” of the title was the society of liberal democracy, represented by Pericles’ “funeral oration”: a society based on the free exchange of ideas and rational criticism. (Criticism was the essential feature of Popper's own philosophy of science: science advances by rational criticism of bold hypotheses.) The enemy of the open society was, of course, the closed society, which Popper interpreted as the result of a desire to return to an imagined past, a tribal society governed by a strict understanding of shared traditions. Popper saw Plato, Hegel, and Marx as the chief philosophical proponents of the closed society.
Popper saw Plato as the ancient world's great enemy of Pericles’ open society and the Republic and Laws as his expressions of that enmity. Socrates, of course, was the spokesman for Plato's antidote to the open society in the Republic; it might seem that he would be characterized in the same way as Plato, as a proto-totalitarian. Yet Popper exempts Socrates from this charge. Socrates was the greatest contributor to the “faith of the open society, the faith in man, in equalitarian justice, and in human reason.”37 True, Socrates was a critic of Athenian democracy, but “Socrates’ criticism was a democratic one, and indeed of the kind that is the very life of democracy.”38 True, Socrates was tried because of his association with people like Critias, oligarchic opponents of Athenian democracy (Popper accepts the “political” interpretation of the trial of Socrates). Yet this did not show that he shared their anti-democratic sentiments; rather, as a teacher, he hoped to convert and reform them.39 Socrates had no sympathy with the practices of the Thirty
, and he tried to show this at his trial. He proved his loyalty to Athens by remaining in prison: “his fearlessness, his simplicity, his modesty, his sense of proportion, his humor never deserted him.”40 How did Plato turn such a defender of ideal democratic values into a spokesman for totalitarianism? He betrayed him, just as Critias and Charmides had done. He may have done so out of a sincere desire to improve the lot of the Athenian democrats, but he betrayed him nonetheless.
The portrayal of Socrates as a supporter of democracy was especially prevalent in the United States. This was true of popular as well as scholarly appreciations. Socrates was seen not just as a democrat but as a liberal one: as Melissa Lane writes, “Socrates was virtually always invoked on a single side. Thus, he was cast as a resister of McCarthyism; an advocate of black civil rights; and a protestor against the Vietnam war – in the last two cases also as a civil disobedient when necessary to defend higher constitutional or moral values.”41 Socrates was a hero of free speech; free speech was a feature of democracy, the open society; therefore Socrates must have been a proponent of democracy. Socrates did not think that virtue could be restricted to a certain gender or class; therefore he must have thought virtue was, at least in theory, available to everyone. This was also seen as a democratic belief.
I. F. Stone's Socrates
One interpreter who does not buy the interpretation of Socrates as a friend of democracy is the investigative reporter I. F. Stone. In the preface to his book, The Trial of Socrates, Stone describes how, forced into retirement by health issues, he set out to write a history of freedom of thought and speech. This pursuit led him to classical Greece and the trial of Socrates. The study reawakened a youthful interest in philosophy and the classics. Dissatisfied with studying the sources in translation, he taught himself Greek. His problem was that the trial of Socrates seemed to him to have been an egregious affront to freedom of thought and speech. “It horrified me as a civil libertarian … It was a black mark for Athens and the freedom it symbolized … I could not defend the verdict when I started and I cannot defend it now … But I wanted … to give the Athenian side of the story, to mitigate the city's crime and thereby remove some of the stigma the trial left on democracy and on Athens.”42
Socrates Page 24