The Apology and the Crito present the reader with a contradiction and a paradox. The contradiction is that Socrates advocates resistance to political authority in one dialogue, obedience in the other. The paradox is that Socrates advocates resistance in public, before the Athenian jury, whereas he advocates obedience in the privacy of his jail cell in a one-on-one conversation with an old friend.
The contradiction is easy to resolve. Socrates advocates resistance to public authority for ones like himself, for philosophers. If the soldiers at Gettysburg died so that the nation might live, Socrates at Athens died so that philosophy may live. He provokes the Athenians to kill him so that the philosopher as a human type will be admired and defended as a man of courage and not merely as an ‘intellectual’ by spirited and influential men who may have their own reasons for resisting the sway of public opinion. such men may come to identify with philosophers, offer them protection.
Crito is just such a man—wealthy, politically connected, a born ‘fixer.’ What he is not is a philosopher. (When the Hollywood movie producer Darryl F. Zanuck heard that Ronald Reagan wanted to run for governor of California, he protested, “No, no! Not Ronald Reagan as governor! Ronald Reagan as the governor’s best friend!” Crito is, or at least wants to be, the philosopher’s best friend. A man lacking philosophic wisdom may still admire the philosopher’s wit, justice, and courage.) Socrates does not want wealthy citizens like Crito to get into the habit of evading the law. On the contrary, Socrates’ argument in the Apology depends upon his own refusal to evade the law or the punishment attached to it. If Socrates were to consent to Crito’s plan, his words before the Athenians would ring hollow: For once, the ironic smile would play on the lips of the Athenians and not on the lips of Socrates. the Athenians would be victorious over philosophy if they were cheated out of killing the philosopher.
In solving the apparent contradiction between the dialogues one also removes the paradox. Socrates defies public authority by refusing to stop philosophizing; he provokes the death sentence that will make him, as the type of the philosopher, immortal by insolently asking for a reward for his philosophizing. (He then offers to ‘negotiate down’ to the payment of a trivial fine.) “The unexamined life is not worth living” is the final insult to the Athenians: Your lives are not worth living without me, the one who examines you, the one who prevents you from drifting off into the dreamy sleep of the quotidian. “I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live.” Dying life—philosophizing is practice of how to die—is preferable to living death—thoughtless, impassioned, mistaken.
The philosophic quest, animated by the eros for the good, renders Socrates unshakable. But what might render a decent non-philosopher like Crito unshakable, even as he fulfills his role as a friend and ally of philosophers? No public opinion, which will tolerate, then condemn, then regrets its condemnation of Socrates. Crito should rather be attached to the laws, as well as to a philosopher who abides by the laws. True, the laws themselves depend upon public opinion and its mood swings, but if enough citizens can be persuaded to revere them, public opinion itself will become less fickle. If the rich and well-connected become ‘conservative’ not only inasmuch as they seek to conserve their wealth but seek to conserve the laws, their conservatism will provide ballast for a ship too much buffeted by demagogic winds, by the tyranny of the majority as incited by malicious rhetoricians. If he rich instead decide, as Crito initially has decided, to regard the man wronged by the city as free to retaliate, then the rich will undermine the city, seek to rule it on their own terms. Their contempt for the law will infect the people, and violent factional strife—leaving peaceful philosophers maximally exposed to suspicion on both sides—will roil the city forever. This is the criticism Publius makes of ancient democracies. And so Socrates pretends that the laws are his parents—surely, as Peter Ahrensdorf notes, the most extreme form of ‘conventionalism,’ so extreme as to be deliberately parodistic of conventionalism. [1] Philosophically-minded reads will see the joke. Crito will not, and that is all to the good, both for him and for the Athenians. In this, Socrates earns his title as not only a wise man but a just one.
Thomas Hobbes presents a different, sterner, and seemingly more doctrinaire view. The difference may be accounted for in terms of philosophy—his different account of nature—and in terms of politics—specifically, the advent of Christianity and its collision with secular rulership.
Far from being orderly, nature as a whole exhibits dissociation (Leviathan I. 13). Nature is atomistic. By nature, human beings war with one another, like colliding atoms. But the atoms themselves do have a certain discernible order, a structure of passions with the fear of violent death as its capstone, but also the desire for the things hat make life commodious and the hope to attain those things. Therefore, each atom obeys nineteen natural laws: among these Hobbes lists the inclination to seek peace and follow it; to defends its own existence by all available means; to seek peace by establishing “justice,” i.e., contractual agreements to recognize the “rights” of (more accurately, desires for) life, liberty, and the property that makes life and liberty sustainable.
The establishment of an effective contract for peace, with security for each one, requires that some power be instituted with sufficient capacity to enforce that security—else “every man will, and lawfully rely on his own strength and art” (Leviathan II. 17). Therefore, no right to revolution exists. For the sake of civic peace, the sovereign must be the soul judge of the actions and desires of the subjects. To challenge the power of the sovereign is to return to the dissociational nature of all objects above the ‘atomic’ level, and so to threaten the existence of the ‘atoms,’ the members of the civil society themselves. “Sovereign power is not so hurtful as the want of it” (II. 18). Civil obedience is absolute: “Nothing that the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on any pretence soever, can properly be called injustice, or injury” (II. 21); only if the sovereign fails to protect his subject, plunging the subject back into the natural war of all against all, will the subject’s obligation to his sovereign dissolve.
Hobbes lists fifteen “infirmities” of commonwealths leading to what we now call a ‘failed state.’ Central to the list is the imitation of foreign nations (II. 29), perhaps because a false prophet is one who teaches “any other religion than that which is already established” (III. 32); Jesus apparently did not do so, as Hobbes observes that He expounded the Mosaic Law (III. 42). However, Pauline Christianity, based upon Jesus’ command to take the Gospel to all nations, clearly does violate Hobbes’s rule. Evangelizing Christianity, which at bottom recognizes no nations, denying the distinction between Greek and Jew, has introduced dangerous novelties wherever it has gone. This can be seen more concretely in Behemoth, Hobbes’s dialogue on the English civil wars, “the many shiftings of the supreme authority” which occurred between 1640 and 1659. [2]
In Hobbes’s telling, seditious factions caused these bloody wars. Presbyterian ministers, Catholics, and the various ‘dissenting’ sects (central to the list being the Fifth-Monarchy men, who envisioned the imminent return of the Christ to earth); liberally-educated parliamentarians infatuated with classical republicanism; businessmen enamored of a foreign nation, commerce-minded Netherlands; the poor, avid of money; and the people, “ignorant of their duty” to obey the sovereign: all these groups, some averse to one another, fired the ambition to rebel against the monarchy and the established Church of England (Behemoth, 4). Because “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people,” heterodoxy is civic poison (16). “The Universities have been to this nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans” (40), serving as “the core of the rebellion” (58). Is it not an outrage that a man “will trouble himself and fall out with his neighbors for the saving of my soul, or the soul of any other than himself?” (63) This spiritual effort he could very well keep to himself, without disturbing the public peace. The privatization of religion divides and conquers all religion, except for the civil religion of the State, the doctrines of which are identical to the will of the sovereign. (In this matter as in others, Hobbes wastes little sympathy. To kill 1,000 Presbyterian ministers would be a “great massacre,” but the “killing of 100,000” in a civil war ignited by ministers “is the greater” [95].) “[C]onverse with these divinity-disputers as long as you will, you will hardly find one in a hundred discreet enough to be employed in any great affair, either of war or peace” (144). Better to keep them as private men.
Where does this leave the philosopher? Philosophy and divinity both yield “the advancement of the professors,” which Hobbes associates with the priestly caste throughout history. True philosophy “can never appear propitious to ambition, or to an exemption from the obedience due to the sovereign power” (96). In this, Hobbes adopts the teaching of the Crito with Socrates’ self-defense or apologia subtracted. But what of the defense of philosophy, given the fact that Hobbes is so evidently a philosopher?
For this one must turn to A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. Given the character of law as command and of philosophy as reasoning, law and philosophy might seem to be at odds, the philosopher’s supposedly unquestioning obedience to the laws of the sovereign open to question. But Hobbesian reason differs in nature from that of the common lawyers, even as it differs in character from the reason of Aristotelian philosophers, with their emphasis on prudence, an inclination the lawyers attempt to emulate. Hobbesian reason rests on ratio—that is, on proportion, on geometric certitude. Ancient philosophers suffered from “a want of method”: “there is not one of them that begins his ratiocination from the definitions, or explications, of the names they are to use; which is a method that hath been used in geometry: whose conclusions have thereby been made indisputable” (Leviathan I. 5). To treat all reason as if it were mathematics brings Cartesianism to Hobbes’s famous discovery of Euclid.
Hobbesian reason can partake of the authority of law, can in fact revise existing laws, because it alone cannot be questioned—unlike the flickering light of prudence, now seen to be unphilosophic, a thing of mere experience and not of true reasoning at all. It might be added that the certainty afforded by ‘mathematized’ reasoning applied to all of human life, the assurance of those confident of having received divine revelation finds a rival. Hobbes carefully suggests, through the person of the philosopher in the Dialogue, that the sovereign king is actually subservient to the public safety, and thus open to criticism by the true reason based on the true axiom of nature, self-preservation.
The Hobbesian political philosopher differs from the Socratic not so much in his apparent teaching of conformity to the law, but in instantiating a new kind of philosopher-king, a man who makes rigorous deductions from right axioms. The philosopher-king is no ironic construct as seen in Plato’s Republic, who ends by lording it over a population of children, but a man who holds the scientifically-irrefutable keys to the real political kingdom, whose reasonings are commands because they are accurate deductions from right axioms.
The strength of the Socratic approach is its flexibility, the way in which it can adopt philosophy to concrete circumstances, and so to enable philosophy to survive in a world that is never philosophic. The Socratic approach as dramatized by Plato exhibits the prudence so often not found among the ranks of the highly intelligent.
The weakness of the Socratic approach, at least if kept within the fairly restricted horizon of Apology-Crito, is its apparent inability to say what might be done to remedy the defects of a very bad regime. In that case, mere law-abidingness is not enough. For such considerations, one must turn to the Statesman, or perhaps to the regime analysis in Book IX of the Republic.
The strength of the Hobbesian approach is that it cuts the chatter. The seditious chatter of the Christian universities and parliaments of his time and place resembled in its virulence the seditious chatter of mosques and madrassas in our own century; the rule of such absolute monarchs as the Atatürk of Turkey, Shah of Iran, the Nasserites of Egypt, Hussein of Iraq, all their regimes replaced, all might well be preferred to the fanatics who have founded new regimes in those countries. And regarding philosophy, Hobbes distinguishes dialogue from chatter, rather as Socrates distinguishes philosophy from sophistry and rhetoric. Hobbes invites ‘intellectuals’ to a repast of humility, without requiring them to humble themselves to God.
The weakness of Hobbes’s approach is in its confidence in geometric reasoning, particularly as it might be applied to politics. Push prudential reasoning aside as irrational is imprudent, and might well undermine the very discretion Hobbes himself commends. Although Hobbes assures us that no monarch is “so inhuman” as to command a son to murder his own father (51), both prudential reasoning and experience strongly suggest otherwise. There is no real-world evidence that geometrizing despotism would remain benevolent, as distinguished from a more liberal, though far from conflict-free republican regime. There Locke was right to break with Hobbes. Whether le sage Locke would have broken with him under the circumstances Hobbes faced in England, circumstances prevailing in many parts of the world today, is a matter to be gauged by prudence, not geometry.
Notes
- Peter J. Ahrensdorf: The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Phaedo. Albany: State University of New York Pres, 1995, 171.
- Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Recent Comments