Socrates

by William J Prior

  Stone reaches a conclusion about Socrates that is opposed to that of Popper and many of Socrates’ defenders in the twentieth century. Stone's Socrates is no defender of democracy, but an extreme elitist, a monarchist in fact, an admirer of the Homeric king Agamemnon. Socrates had no faith in the wisdom of common people, the foundation of democracy. Stone does not accept the key point in Socrates’ critique of democracy, the claim that it puts unqualified people in charge of the government, because he does not accept the premise of Socrates’ argument, which is that qualification for office is a matter of expert knowledge, demonstrated by the ability to define the key terms of political rule, such as justice. Stone holds that the inability to define these terms is no sign of lack of virtue: didn't Socrates himself demonstrate his courage on the battlefield, though he never proved able to define the term? Stone dismisses the Socratic search for definitions as “a wild goose chase.”43

  Stone rejects the view, which Socrates states in Plato's Apology, that he was tried because he was suspected of being an atheist who practiced natural philosophy, an idea that goes back to Aristophanes. “It was the political, not the philosophical or theological, views of Socrates which finally got him into trouble.”44 Socrates was tried because the democracy had been overthrown twice, in 411 and 404, and had faced a third threat in 401. Socrates had not taken the democratic side in these revolts; he had “remained in the city” on each occasion and associated with tyrants such as Critias and Charmides. Stone accepts Xenophon's account of his motives for behaving haughtily before the jury, antagonizing them rather than trying to win their favor: that he had decided, in effect, to commit “suicide by trial” rather than face the vicissitudes of old age. He might have won acquittal by appeal to the Athenian love of free speech, by turning the tables on the prosecutors and making the trial about Athens and not himself. “When Athens prosecuted Socrates, it was untrue to itself.”45 The charges against him were vague; he was not accused for any acts, but for his beliefs. “I do not believe in your so-called freedom of speech,” Stone says Socrates might have said to the jurors, “but you do … I do not believe in democracy. But you do.”46 By convicting and executing him for speaking freely, Socrates might have argued, the Athenians were behaving like the tyrants they hated. Freedom of speech was a basic principle of Athenian democracy: the Athenians had not one but four words for it. Socrates could not appeal to free speech because neither he nor Plato believed in it; but had he done so he might have been acquitted.

  The value of Stone's work lies in part on his providing “a fresh pair of eyes” on the problem of Socrates. Stone looks at the same sources that classical scholars examine, but he reaches radically different conclusions about them. The reason is that he approaches the study of these sources from the perspective of an investigative journalist and partisan of democracy, eager to find the “true story” of the trial, convinced that Plato did not tell it. He looks at Socrates’ trial from the perspective of a twentieth-century liberal, someone we might refer to today as a democratic socialist, but he also tries to tell the story of the trial from the perspective of the democratic jurors of the fourth century. The value of this fresh perspective on texts that are so familiar to scholars that they may have come to take them for granted should not be underrated. The story Stone tells is not new, but it was new to him, and one can find his sense of discovery on almost every page. The book was generally harshly reviewed by scholars,47 and with good reason. But beyond the errors in judgment pointed out by his critics, there lies the fact that this ardent democrat, late in life, was motivated to reopen the “Socrates case” and bring his journalistic skills to bear on it. The fact that Stone pursued this quest is testament to the enduring power to awake in thoughtful people an interest in a trial that took place 2400 years ago, of a man who was as controversial in his own times as he remains in ours. As Tony Long has said, “what matters most about Socrates is the fact that we never tire of him or stop wanting to talk to him and get mad with him.”48 This was true of Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium and it remains true today.

  Notes

  1 On Xenophon's debts to Plato see Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 393–401.

  2 Gregory Vlastos once dismissed Xenophon's portrait of Socrates with these words: “Xenophon's is a Socrates without irony and without paradox. Take these away from Plato's Socrates, and there is nothing left.” “Introduction: The Paradox of Socrates,” in Vlastos, ed. The Philosophy of Socrates (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1971), 1. The characterization is apt, but overstated; the dismissal is not justified, as was shown by Donald Morrison, in “On Professor Vlastos’ Xenophon,” Ancient Philosophy 7 (1987), 9–22.

  3 A. A. Long, “Socrates in Later Greek Philosophy,” in Morrison, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 369.

  4 Ibid., 368.

  5 The story of the associates of Socrates and the dialogues they wrote is told by Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 1–35.

  6 Ibid., 7.

  7 See the discussion of the Meno argument in Chapter 5, “The Hypothesis that Virtue is Knowledge.” There was a debate among the Stoics as to whether “goods” other than virtue had any form of positive value at all; see Long, “Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy,” Classical Quarterly 38 (1988), 164–169, and Long, “Socrates in Later Greek Philosophy,” 364.

  8 Long, “Socrates in Later Greek Philosophy,” 370.

  9 Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 67.

  10 As translated by Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, Inc., 1983).

  11 As is often noted, the Academics did not refer to themselves as skeptics, as the Pyrrhonians did.

  12 According to Long, “Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy,” 157–158.

  13 James Hankins, “Socrates in the Italian Renaissance,” in Trapp, ed. Socrates from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 179.

  14 As quoted in Spiegelberg, The Socratic Enigma (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1964), 62.

  15 Ibid., 65.

  16 As Glenn Most notes: “Socrates in Hegel,” in Trapp, ed. Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007), 5.

  17 Quotations of Hegel are from the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1. E. S. Haldane, trans. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

  18 Most, “Socrates in Hegel,” 2.

  19 Ibid., 3.

  20 Christian Discourses and Journals, No. 1079 (1850), as quoted in Spiegelberg, The Socratic Enigma, 304.

  21 Ibid., 305.

  22 Ibid.

  23 He later remarked that when he wrote his master's thesis he was a “Hegelian fool.” George Pattison, “A Simple Wise Man of Ancient Times: Kierkegaard on Socrates,” in Trapp, ed. Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 20.

  24 Quotations are taken from Spiegelberg, The Socratic Enigma.

  25 On the Concept of Irony, as quoted in Spiegelberg, The Socratic Enigma, 291.

  26 Pattison, “A Simple Wise Man of Ancient Times,” 21.

  27 On the Concept of Irony, as quoted in Spiegelberg, The Socratic Enigma, 292.

  28 Ibid, 293.

  29 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, David Swenson and Walter Lowrie, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 182.

  30 Ibid., 180–181.

  31 “The Socratic Definition of Sin,” The Sickness unto Death, Walter Lowrie, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 219–221.

  32 The Point of View (1848–1849), in Spiegelberg, The Socratic Enigma, 303.

  33 C. C. W. Taylor, Socrates: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 97.

  34 James I. Porter, “Nietzsche and ‘The Problem
of Socrates,’” in Ahbel-Rappe and Kamtekar, eds. A Companion to Socrates (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009), 406, quoting “a note jotted down in 1875.” See also C. C. W. Taylor, Socrates, 97.

  35 The Twilight of the Idols, in Kaufmann, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954).

  36 The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, Francis Golffing, trans. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1956).

  37 The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume I: The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 4th edn. 1962), 189.

  38 Ibid.

  39 Ibid., 191.

  40 Ibid., 194.

  41 “‘Gadfly in God's Own Country’: Socrates in Twentieth-Century America,” in Trapp, ed. Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 207. For two scholarly treatments of Socrates which disagree on whether Socrates was democratic or oligarchic in his sympathies, see Gregory Vlastos, “The Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy,” Political Theory 11 (1983), 495–516, and E. M. Wood and N. Wood, “Socrates and Democracy: A Reply to Gregory Vlastos,” Political Theory 14 (1986), 55–86. For Vlastos, Socrates is democratic, or at least “demophilic” in his political philosophy; for the Woods, he is oligarchic.

  42 I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1988), xi.

  43 Ibid., ch. 6.

  44 Ibid., 138–139.

  45 Ibid., 197.

  46 Ibid., 212.

  47 For a (mostly) positive appreciation of the book, see Myles F. Burnyeat, “Cracking the Socrates Case,” New York Review of Books, March 31, 1988, 12–18.

  48 Long, “Socrates in Later Greek Philosophy,” 378.

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