Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  His jurors were citizens chosen by lots who were drawn from every segment of Athenian society. It’s probable that most of them would have been farmers or shopkeepers—in any case not aristocrats, since the aristocracy composed the smallest proportion of the citizenry. But that doesn’t mean that the jurors, as well as the many who gathered to watch, wouldn’t be offended by the suggestion that they didn’t partake of a certain portion of superiority just in virtue of being Athenian citizens. In countries in which nationalist exceptionalism still flourishes today it is by no means the most privileged classes who feel the most strongly that their sense of superior worth derives from their citizenship.

  Socrates was able to trip up a Meletus who could not articulate his sense that Socrates was, somehow or other, impious. But certainly Meletus was justified—Socrates’ own performance in the Apology supplies plenty of justification—that Socrates was attacking the Athenian normative framework—its structure of values—at a fundamental level. It’s not only Socrates’ performance at his trial, but his performance throughout his whole life that shows his dissent from the Athenian value system. Is it any wonder that Meletus feels the normative affront as impiety? “Recall how closely a Greek community’s sense of its own identity and stability is bound up with its religious observances and the myths that support them. If Socrates rejects the city’s religion, he attacks the city. Conversely, if he says the city has got its public and private life all wrong, he attacks its religion; for its life and its religion are inseparable.”28

  And then enormous changes had taken place in Athens since the days of Pericles, which would put the assumptions that went into its sense of identity under intense threat. Athens’ claim to extraordinariness, especially now that its empire was no more, its great wealth squandered in hubristic overreaching, lay in its claim to cleverness, its rationalism, as demonstrated by the amnesty, as well as its continued celebrity in the rhetorical arts. But here was one of Athens’ most famous talkers, an endlessly inventive channeler of disputatious energy, who was intent on turning his talent for talk against the city’s sense of itself. Throughout his speech he is careful to couch his claims in terms of the rhetoric of the Athenian law courts and the civic values that prevailed there, while at the same time subverting them and reversing them, playing fast and loose with conventions that were meant to pin everything down.

  Socrates is not overly concerned in his trial to go after Meletus, an insignificant person trying to jump the queue in order to become a footnote to history. Socrates wields his dialectic prowess to swat his prime accuser away as if he were an annoying gnat.

  Well, actually, it’s he himself whom he compares to an insect, telling the jurors, before they have yet put to a vote the question of his innocence: “[I]f you kill me you will not easily find another like me. I was attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred by a kind of gadfly.… I never cease to arouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you all day long and everywhere I find myself in your company” (30e–31a). It hardly seems a self-aggrandizing description that Socrates is offering here, a bothersome bug buzzing incessantly around the city. But the real insult is delivered to the polis of Athens, described as a great lazy horse, dozing in its complacent moral obtuseness. Socrates knows full well how profoundly disturbing he is being, knows that, in challenging the normative preconceptions of his city, he is outraging those who are about to vote on whether he lives or dies.

  He could not be more explicit in denying the fundamental assumptions of those normative fortifications, the politicizing of aretē. Aretē, as Socrates conceives it, requires individuals’ thrashing through the moral complexities as honestly as they know how, taking responsibility for their own beliefs and actions, not picking them up ready-made in some public place, like pottery you can buy in a stall of the agora. This kind of thrashing has been what he’s been trying his whole life to provoke, which means smashing the assumptions that seem to settle such matters, making his fellow citizens think anew about what would make their lives worth living.

  He actually, outrageously, states that engagement in Athenian politics—no matter whether under the democrats or the oligarchs—is inconsistent with virtue: “The true champion of justice,” he tells them, “if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone” (3Ie). And again: “Do you suppose I should have lived as long as I have if I had moved in the sphere of public life, and conducting myself in that sphere like an honorable man, had always upheld the cause of right, and conscientiously set this end above all other things? Not by a very long way, gentlemen; neither would any other man” (32e–33a).29

  Eschew the public life of the Athenian polis in order to be just? Socrates is choosing his words in the same spirit with which the late Christopher Hitchens chose the title of his book God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything. They are the words of a professional provocateur. And provoke he does. Several times, they try to shout him down, to judge by Socrates’ repeated admonishments to the crowd to let him speak his piece: “As I said before, gentlemen, please do not interrupt” (21a); “Do not create a disturbance, gentlemen, but abide by my request not to cry out at what I say but to listen, for I think it will be to your advantage to listen, and I am about to say other things at which you will perhaps cry out. By no means do this” (30c).

  Many who have looked back on that day in 399, trying to deconstruct its drama, have thought first and foremost of politics. Of course, it had to be politics, because what else could have been so important as to demand the life of the man? The serious designs are always the political designs, and that’s where the savvy minds know to look. Socrates is anti-democratic, and that’s why he must die. Socrates was soft on Sparta, and that’s why he must die. This is political payback for Alcibiades or Critias or both, and that’s why he must die. The irony of these political readings is excruciating. In prioritizing the political, such interpreters make themselves part of the Athenian crowd that Socrates is trying so desperately for one last time to arouse from out of their normative stupor.

  And he keeps hammering it home. He doesn’t hold back from quoting the Delphic oracle, who had declared that no man was wiser than Socrates, reporting that he, too, had been dubious when he first heard this report, since he was so keenly aware of his ignorance. And so, in order to prove the oracle wrong, he had gone about questioning the citizens of Athens, starting with the most prominent citizens first, the politicians, the sophists, the poets. All of them satisfied the conditions for the concept that Harry Frankfurt would analyze several millennia later. Socrates concluded that the oracle had bestowed her kind words on him because he alone didn’t pretend to a knowledge he didn’t have. Or to put it in Frankfurtian terms: Socrates cared, as his fellow Athenians did not, about what the truth-conditions of his statements were, even if, for a great number of those statements, he couldn’t determine whether those truth-conditions held or not.

  And then he simply comes out and says it, at a point when he’s been judged guilty and is supposed to be negotiating a penalty to counterpose against the death penalty that Meletus is demanding. He’s expected to offer to go into exile or to pay a heavy fine. And this is the juncture in the proceedings when he makes the most provocative statement a man in his position could make: A life in which he would cease questioning the value of his society would be a life not worth living, implying that the people about to judge him are living exactly such lives. “If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying the god [Apollo, the god of the Delphic oracle], you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss aretē every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you
will believe me even less” (37e–38a).

  Not worth living? What harsher words could he have used to those who hold the fate of his life in their hands? What more horrifying counter-condemnation could he have voiced to his condemners? Not worth living? This is to speak the unspeakable right into the open, to rip the bandages off the shame-provoking wound, like the legendary open wound of Philoctetes, the Greek who was left behind on an island by his comrades-in-arms on their way to Troy because of a festering wound that reeked to high heaven.

  But it’s not Philoctetes who’s called out by name during Socrates’ defense, but rather Achilles (28c–d). This is the hero with whom Socrates draws a comparison. Achilles was given the chance to choose a long and ordinary life or a short and extraordinary one, and chose the latter. Achilles is the poster boy for the Ethos of the Extraordinary, the very apotheosis of the hero. And at least one person who hears Socrates that day fully accepts the comparison.

  Socrates assumes the shape of a hero for Plato, even though he hadn’t achieved the knowledge at which his examined life had been aimed. Plato doesn’t think Socrates had achieved that knowledge, since for him the answers will require the metaphysical conception of the True-the Beautiful-the Good in terms of which human virtue can be formulated. Plato’s approach to the question of aretē will require him to raise up the whole submerged continent of philosophy. Nevertheless, the way Socrates had lived—and certainly the choice he made on that day in 399—lifts Socrates, for Plato, into the sphere of the extraordinary.

  After he has been voted guilty by his fellow Athenians, Socrates considers what penalty he ought to request. “I have deliberately not led a quiet life—ouk hēsychian ēgon” (36b), and by pronouncing hēsychian he is distancing himself from the Athenian elite, many of whom maintained a tradition of quietism either because they were afraid of being misunderstood or they had genuine oligarch sympathies.30 “I have neglected what occupies most people: wealth, household affairs, the position of general or public orator or the other offices, the political clubs and factions that exist in the city. I thought myself too honest to survive if I occupied myself with those things.” He cannot stop rubbing it in. All the political activity and intrigues by means of which people make themselves important in the city run counter to his scruples. And he has singled out two hallmarks of the elite, including their factions (staseis) and secret societies (sunōmosia).3132

  And now he moves on to another outrageous flouting of Athenian sensibilities: “What do I deserve for being such a man? Some good, men of Athens, if I must truly make an assessment according to my deserts, and something suitable. What is suitable for a poor benefactor (anēr penēs eurgetēs) who needs leisure to exhort you?” By emphasizing his poverty and yet claiming himself as a benefactor, he is again disrupting Athenian expectations about the typical benefactor, a wealthy member of the elite. And then comes the coup de grâce: “Nothing is more suitable, gentlemen, than for such a man to be fed in the Prytaneum, much more suitable for him than for any one of you who has won a victory at Olympia with a pair or a team of horses. The Olympian victor makes you think yourself happy. I make you be happy. Besides he does not need food, but I do. So if I must make a just assessment of what I deserve, I assess it as this: free meals in the Prytaneum” (36e). As one classicist put it to me in discussing this passage, “Plato/Socrates is so shrewd in his manipulation of Athenian values. There is a subtle process of transvaluation at work in every sentence.”

  In the midst of that transvaluation, the most famous slogan of philosophy emerges: the unexamined life is not worth living. Some—like Cheryl, Plato’s media escort at the Googleplex—might bristle at a sensed elitism. But Socrates’ statement is only elitist if one assumes that only the few have it in them to examine their lives. The democracy that became again, in the eighteenth century, the most daring political experiment on earth embodies the hope that we many have it in us as well.33 Instead of an indictment of his city’s daring experiment in democracy, Socrates’ statement can be read as putting forth the stringent condition that alone would allow democracy to flourish. Perhaps Plato did eventually come to a viewpoint that excluded the many from being capable of thinking through their lives in the light of the True-the Beautiful-the Good; but the entire life of Socrates, including that day of his trial as it’s presented by Plato, is evidence of the fact that Socrates continued to cling to hopes for us many. He says that, if only he had more than the one day that Athens allows for such cases, he knows that he could have prevailed in convincing his jurors of his vision of the examined life.

  The unexamined life is not worth living. What is supposed to follow from this? Is the examined life merely necessary for a life worth living, or is it sufficient as well? And is it even really necessary? Could you live a life worth living, the life of aretē, by fortunate accident—that is without living the examined life? Socrates is saying no. The examined life is, at the very least, a prerequisite for living a worthwhile life. Aretē can’t happen by happy accident, no more than knowledge can. Aretē, like knowledge, requires an accounting, a logos. This is a theme that will resonate through all of Plato’s dialogues. There is no such thing as just happening to get it right—not when it comes to beliefs and not when it comes to actions. Having the good fortune to be born an Athenian, or any other such contingency—including one’s religious affiliation, as Plato powerfully argues in the Euthyphro—does not add up to an accounting, a justification, a logos. And without an accounting there can no more be virtue than there can be knowledge. Indoctrination, even should the doctrines be happily right, can’t produce the life that is most worth living.

  At the end of the Republic, Plato presents yet another myth of his own devising, the Myth of Er. Plato has Socrates telling the myth to Glaucon, whose sophisticated game-theoretic reworking of politicized aretē the preceding dialogue has subverted with its image of the kallipolis. Now he tells a story of a warrior, Er, resuscitated after twelve days of seeming death, about to be burned on the funeral pyre, though his corpse remains “quite fresh.” Er reports what he has experienced while apparently dead, rather a bit like those near-death experiences that have become familiar to us from our improved medical technologies able to revive comatose patients. Er leaves out any mention of a bright light or a black tunnel. Instead he tells of a “marvelous place, where there were two adjacent openings in the earth, and opposite and above them two others in the heavens, and between them judges sat. These, having rendered their judgment, ordered the just to go upwards into the heavens through the door on the right, with signs of the judgment attached to their chests, and the unjust to travel downward through the opening on the left, with signs of all their deeds on their backs. When Er himself came forward, they told him that he was to be a messenger for human beings about the things that were there, and that he was to listen and look at everything in the place” (614b–d).

  The sojourns upward and downward are only the first phase. After the souls of the departed have spent their allotted thousand years in the places to which they’d been sent, they return and journey to the center of the universe. Plato pauses for a vision of this unearthly beautiful center of the universe. Here the mathematics of perfect proportion and harmony, which lies at the core of the True-the Beautiful-the Good, becomes audible in the music of the eight spheres, spinning one within the other and turned by the spindle of Necessity. “And up above and on each of the rims of the circles stood a Siren, who accompanied its revolution, uttering a single sound, one single note. And the concord of the eight notes produced a single harmony” (617b). In 1619, Johannes Kepler, who, like so many of the new physicists of the seventeenth century, found his inspiration in Plato, will publish his Harmonices Mundi. Kepler had discovered that the difference between the maximum and minimum angular speeds of a planet approximates a harmonic proportion, and with this discovery he tried to provide a physical reality to Plato’s poetry of the “music of the spheres.”

  But eventually Plato gets back to the
point of the myth. A prophet appears and has the assembly of souls choose their new lives, having first drawn lots to decide the order of the choosing. And the outcome is not as one would predict based simply on the experiences these souls have had in the thousand years they have spent above or below. The very first who gets to pick—who has the greatest variety of options—chooses, “out of his folly and his greed” (619c), the life of a tyrant.

  He was one of those who had come down from heaven, having lived his previous life under an orderly constitution, where he had participated in virtue through habit and without philosophy. Broadly speaking, indeed, most of those who were caught out in this way were souls who had come down from heaven and who were untrained in suffering. (619c)

  An interchange of good lives and bad lives. Neither the lives they have lived nor the supernatural rewards or punishments they have endured edify them so that they’re prepared to make good choices. Many of those who suffered in their earthly lives automatically choose lives that are diametrically opposed. Orpheus, hating women because of how he had died, chooses to be a swan so that he won’t have to be born of a woman (620a). Agamemnon, reacting to his last life with a hatred of all men, chooses to be an eagle (620c). And Odysseus, who is the last to go, so recoils from his last life, filled with enough kleos-worthy adventures to fill yet another Homeric epic, searches around until he finds a perfectly ordinary life and says that even had he chosen first, this ordinariness is what he would have chosen. Plato is hardly endorsing ordinariness here; there is nothing ordinary about the kind of life that he has been at pains to depict throughout the Republic as the one that fully realizes aretē. In fact, just before introducing the closing Myth of Er, he describes a person who lives such a life—chosen for his mettle, intelligence, and love of truth, and then vigorously trained so as to be able to absorb into himself the True-the Beautiful-the Good—as one “who makes himself as much like a god as a human can” (613a). That’s hardly ordinary. Odysseus, like all the others who have just been named, is making an unreflective choice, a mechanical action of recoiling from the circumstances of his former life, and Er, watching the souls making their choices, says it makes for “a sight worth seeing, since it was pitiful, funny, and surprising to watch” (619e–620).