Will Morrisey Reviews

Seneca: Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales. Richard M. Gummere translation. 3 volumes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.

 

If happiness is liberation from care (XLIV. v.1, 191), and the study of wisdom “gives the soul liberty” (LXXVIII. 2. 349)—liberty is enslavement to philosophy—then philosophy aims at joyful wisdom for the happy few. To be truly well-born is to take the philosophers for your ancestors (XLIV. 1. 289). They are the natural aristocrats.

The liberal arts do not “bestow virtues” upon the student, as any glance around a liberal arts college will demonstrate. But they can “prepare the soul for the reception of virtue” (LXXXVIII. 2. 361). To philosophize, one mustn’t only talk but engage facts and perform acts. Philosophy is a praxis, a way of life (CXI. 2. 279); coherent praxis requires not so much adherence to a theory as cultivation of character. Plato and Aristotle “derived more benefit from the character than from the words of Socrates” (VI. 1. 23). “All study of philosophy and all reading should be applied to the study of philosophy and all reading should be applied to the study of living the happy life” (CVIII. 2. 253). Study is part of that life; thinking and acting are reciprocal events. “Philosophy is the study of virtue, by means, however, of virtue itself, but neither can virtue exist without the study of itself” (LXXXIX. 2. 383).

Syllogisms are verbal proofs, but in practice death is the most rigorous proof. Anyone can speak bravely; Socrates showed philosophers how to die bravely. He proved his philosophic ‘being’ by his philosophic ‘doing.’ A good mind must be developed into a good will (XVI. 1. 103). “A matter not of words, but of facts,” philosophy molds the human soul, ordering the philosopher’s whole life, guiding his conduct, harmonizing inner and outer (XVI. 1. 105). Harmony yields stability: “the primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company” (II. 1. 7). “Everywhere means nowhere” (II. 1. 7). The perpetual traveler has many acquaintances but no friends, reads many books instead of a few good ones. (Whispered to Aristotle: ‘Sit down, you Peripatetic.’) Standing where you are requires courage; manliness is not boyishness (IV. 1. 15). It requires one identity, not a man of a thousand faces, each of which reflecting some velleity (CXX. 2. 395).

To harmonize inner and outer, shed external superfluities. Externals are not so much goods as advantages; “the essence of goodness is not in them” (LXXIV. 2. 123). Do not chase after them. “Too rich a soil makes the grain fall flat” (XXXIX. 1. 261). The philosopher can offer good counsel, prudent counsel, because he knows nature and therefore can distinguish the needed from the superfluous (XLVIII. 1. 319). Pace Adam Smith, but natural desires are limited. The unlimited desires you mistake for natural ones spring from false opinion (XVI. 1. 109). “The wise man suits his needs to nature” (XVII. 1. 115).

The Stoic life is a joyous quest, but its joys are (famously) austere. Virtue is “the quality of not needing a single day beyond the present” (CXII. 2. 463), as liberation from burdensome desires means liberation from elaborate long-range plans against imagined future failure and for imagined future goods. The truly long life is the full life, the life full of wisdom (CXIII. 3. 7). “One who daily puts the finishing touches on his life is never in want of time” (CI. 2. 163), and seldom in want of money. Wise foresight does not plan; it prepares. “The soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence” (XVIII. 1. 119). Verum gaudium res severa est (XXIII. 1. 161). Seneca prudently appeals to Lucilius’ Romanness while preparing him for philosophy; a mere boy needs maxims but when he becomes a man “it is time to lean on himself” (XXXIII. 1. 237). Begin to write your own maxims.

Stoic joy usually precludes suicide. Seneca praises those “who approach death without any loathing for life, letting death in, so to speak, and not pulling it toward them” (XXX. 1. 221). Suicide makes sense only when pain takes up all of your life, deposing the legitimate rule of wisdom (XCVIII. 3. 129). “He who dies just because he is in pain is a weakling, a coward; but he who lives merely to brave out his pain, is a fool” (LVIII. 2. 59). The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can” (LXX. 2. 59). He will live and die well, for which activities there is no general rule, only prudence (LXX. 2. 63). The maxims you write are seldom if ever universally generalizable. There is always a counter-maxim; prudence is the umpire.

Prudence and reason generally should ally with the spiritedly irrational part of the soul instead of the appetitively irrational part (XCII. 2. 451). In this Seneca concurs with Plato’s Socrates. Seneca goes further, perhaps for ‘Roman’ rhetorical purposes, associating the good with the honorable, not the useful. He finds Aristotelians too lax in their taming of the emotions (CXVI. 3. 333); like Nietzsche’s democrats, they call moderation what is only mediocrity. To fuse goodness and honor is to take a sterner view; this is what it means to be a citizen-soldier of the universe. Seneca’s apparently apolitical thought is really cosmopolitical (not ‘cosmopolitan’ in the modern, watery, United-Nations sense). The Stoics tend toward natural law rather than natural right, although in Seneca, at least, prudence still rules over explicit regulations.

Contra Machiavelli, “no wall can be erected against Fortune which she cannot take by storm; let us strengthen our inner defenses” (LXXIV. 2. 127). Machiavelli equates nature with Fortuna. Seneca does not. Knowing nature, including our own nature, means knowing what is truly good and bad for us; the conquest of Fortuna is futile and unnecessary. Reason tames desires and calms fears—passions which react to Fortuna’s gifts and blows, not nature’s. Seneca is no less materialistic than Machiavelli. Unlike Machiavelli, however, he despises the body (see LXV) because the finest matter, the matter composing the soul, rules finally but not immediately. This is what Seneca means by ‘Providence.’ Unlike Machiavelli, Seneca formulates a materialism that can account for the life of the mind, the philosophic life.

Materialism also makes it possible for the Stoic to equal ‘God,’ who is also material. The Stoic can have the “true and never-swerving judgment” of ‘God’ (LXXII. 2. 23, 27). Stoic reason resembles Platonic technē. Stoic reason differs from Machiavellian artfulness even as its ‘God’ differs from the Biblical God: Neither Stoic reason nor the Stoic ‘God’ is creative. Nor is he providential. Equality with ‘God’ does not mean control over events (as in Machiavelli) but unperturbed self-sufficiency (XLVIII. 1. 321). Of religious souls Seneca asks: “How long shall we go on making demands upon the gods, as if we were still unable to support ourselves” (LX. 1. 123)? This is the Greek philosophers’ autarchia, translated to Rome. He who requires external good will want to control Fortuna (or nature misdefined as Fortuna) and thus either pray or prey, petition the Creator-God like a Christian or imitate Him like a Machiavellian.

The self-sufficient Stoic can say, after losing children, wife, and country, I have lost nothing (IX. 1. 53). (In contrast, Machiavelli’s Lady of Forli shouts, “I can have more children!”) Stoic self-sufficiency does not require isolation (as does Machiavelli of his prince), although it can tolerate isolation. The philosopher can do without friends, without desiring to do without them (IX. 1. 45). Human nature is social. Friendship rests on the beauty of the soul of the friend, not his utility. Friends are useful to each other only in the noble sense of “giv[ing] practice to the other’s virtues and thus maintain[ing] wisdom at the proper level” (CIX. 2. 255). Philosophic friends may engage in dialogue, oral or written. These letters are written dialogues in two ways. They are addressed to a friend, responding to his letters. They also contain seeming contradictions. In an oral dialogue (or an artful, Platonic dialogue or play) the contradictions are supplied by the dialogic partners. In a monologic work (here we never see even one letter by Lucilius) the author himself must supply the contradictions, rich complexities for the reader to work through, testing his ability to philosophize.

Human sociality does not extend to politics, where contradiction leads to violence and repression, even oppression. Political friends are undesirable. Regimes change; your friends disappear, replace by their enemies—now yours (XIV. 1. 89). More profoundly, wisdom cannot rule, simply. If Wisdom could rub out all our faults “she would be mistress of the universe” (XI. 1. 63). She can’t; she isn’t. Fortuna—randomness, stupidity—has her day. Indeed, many days. A philosopher will settle or second-best; the rule of those who preserve the public peace, the tranquillitas ordinis that will remain Augustine’s best hope for the City of Man. Philosophers particularly esteem such rulers. The more valuable the cargo, the more gratitude the sailor feels towards Neptune, who allows safe passage; the philosophic cargo is the richest treasure (LXXIII).

In peace or in civil strife, the philosopher aims for inconspicuousness. “The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn; and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the custom of our fellow men” (V. 1. 21)? They would attempt to rule the philosopher. Imperara sibi maximum imperium est (CXII. 2. 294). If your own soul is a king, not a tyrant, it needs no other kings, except for the very modest sake of preserving from tyranny the body the soul inhabits.

Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. Two volumes.

 

The two most famous philosophic schools formed after Socrates’ death were Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Much of what we know about the several other schools and their teaching comes down to us from Diogenes Laertius, who lived in the third century A.D. For Plato’s teachings we have Plato’s writings, preserved intact; for Aristotle’s teachings we have Aristotle’s writings preserved mostly intact. For other ‘post-Socratics’ we have fragments. If we had the same for Plato or Aristotle, would we consider them great philosophers? Diogenes Laertius’ accounts of their thought are much less interesting than their writings. A philosophic life had better be its own reward, inasmuch as literary immortality depends so much upon the vagaries of fortune.

Anisthenes came to Socrates after studying with the rhetorician Gorgias. Rhetoricians teach verbal combat; young philosophers tear at people like puppies. Anisthenes’ doctrine, Cynicism, combines the rhetorician’s combativeness with the open disrespect seen in those new to philosophy. (The Cynics were the philosophers Ambrose Bierce admired.) And so: “Virtue is a weapon that cannot be taken away (VI. i. 13, emphasis added), a weapon that can be acquired or taught (VI. i. 11). The many, the people, preening themselves on their autochthony, not seeing that they share this supposed virtue with snails and locusts (VI. i. 3), very often serve as that weapon’s target: vote that asses are horses as sensibly as you vote untrained men to generalships (VI. i. 9).

Not as politic as Socrates, nor as calculatedly impolitic, Anisthenes nonetheless remains recognizably Socratic, judging from several of his teachings. Do not take notes; remember. The most necessary learning is how to unlearn. “The wise man is self-sufficing, for the goods of all others are his” (VI. i. 13). His sharper-edged, more combative Socratism forms the groundwork of “the most manly section of the Stoic school” (VI. i. 15).

Plato called Anisthenes’ student, Diogenes, “a Socrates gone mad” (VI. ii. 47). Madness isn’t a bad mask for a philosopher. Unlike Socrates, Diogenes “was loved by the Athenians” (VI. vii. 45), perhaps for such wisecracks as the one he delivered upon seeing temple officials leading away a thief who’d stolen a bowl belonging to the treasurers: “The great thieves are leading away the little thief” (VI. ii. 47). The people would have admired such lesé majesté as evidenced in his command to Alexander: “Stand out of my light” (VI. vii. 45). Irreverence toward the gods may be tolerated by the people if it is accompanied by irreverence toward great men, and unaccompanied by irreverence toward the people. Diogenes let his runaway slave go (VI. ii. 57). Diogenes’ madness is the rule of natural right unmitigated by convention (VI. ii. 73). His idea of nature, unlike that of Socrates, may be materialistic or ‘democratic’; “all elements are contained in all things and pervade everything” (VI. ii. 75). If so, no meat is taboo, including human flesh.

Zeno and the other Stoics more nearly resemble ‘philosophers’ as we know them, i.e., philosophy professors. Logic applied to human life aims at “life in agreement with nature”; “life according to reason rightly becomes the natural life,” inasmuch as life according to reason corresponds to the most distinctively human capacity (VII. i. 195). More, right reason rather than the natural elements “pervades all things” (VII. i. 197; see also VII. i. 241). This conformity with nature makes virtue its own reward, so to speak. Right reason may be called ‘Zeus’; such a philosophy begins to earn not hostility, not amused toleration or affection, but respect from the Athenian people, whose religious convictions are left undisturbed, seemingly confirmed, by its pious language.

The root of ‘duty’ means ‘reaching down,’ ‘reaching as far as.’ Duty is the result of right (that is, dialectically tested) reason. The Stoic preference for self-preservation over pleasure rests on this rationalist understanding of the soul.

Stoics emphasize the rationalist aspect of Socrates, tending toward an ethics of logical rule-giving and a strong, non-ironic depreciation of the passions. They are more ‘Euthyphronic’ or universalistic than Socrates, claiming that “the wise man is passionless” (VII. i. 221). Joy, caution, and wishing remain as the only good non-rational conditions of the soul (VII. i. 221). Stoics “will take wine, but not get drunk” (VII. i. 223). They strive for godlikeness and, like much more earnest and rational versions of Euthyphro, they endorse ‘piety.’ Their definition of piety is Socratic/rationalistic; the Stoics combine Socrates and Euthyphro. They avoid Euthyphro’s disrespect for parents (VII. i. 225, 241). Socrates might worry that their ability to sustain their balancing act so might not easily be sustained.

Pyrrho is a radical conventionalist, claiming that the senses are unreliable while denying that reason can correct them. It is he, more than Bishop Berkeley, who would fall to Dr. Johnson’s stone-kicking refutation. The fact that Pyrrho lived to be ninety, supposedly getting by with the help of his friends, undermines his plausibility. No self-immolating Foucault he, as mightily as he claimed to strive against facts. “On being discovered once talking to himself, he answered, when asked the reason, that he was training to be good” (IX. xi. 477). A real philosopher, were he being honest, would say: ‘I can find no better conversation in this city.’

Skeptics generally “laid down nothing definitely, not even the laying down of nothing” (IX. xi. 487)—radicalizing Socratic knowing of knowing nothing. Their refutation of the possibility of knowing (IX. xi. 503) is self-refuting. Their refutation of natural goodness and badness (IX. xi. 513) fails because it assumes that ‘by nature’ must mean ‘uniform’—an un-Socratic error indeed. Such errors were noted by the so-called Dogmatists, impelling the Skeptics to moderate their claims (IX. xi, 513, 515). This brings them closer to common sense, farther from coherence. The feasibility of having any life at all, philosophic or not, triumphed over the beguiling extremism of the doctrines.

Epicurus combined a materialist physics with a philosophic life aiming not at politics but at tranquility savored in private. Hatred, envy, and contempt—thumotic passions—may be overcome by reason. The radical depreciation of thumos comports with the radical depreciation of politics. The Epicureans prefer country to city, garden to assembly or marketplace. The tenth “sovereign maxim” questions the value of fame, that ruling passion of the noblest, most political minds (X. 665). Natural justice is mere expediency and avoidance of harm (Sovereign Maxim #31, X. 675). Epicurean political philosophy is minimally political; although quite different from Hobbesian materialism in most ways, Hobbes’s inclination to restrict political rule to ‘the one,’ and to leave the bulk of mankind to commercial life in civil society with no share in in political rule exercised by the modern state, does have a certain quasi-Epicurean cast to it. Modern liberalism has a certain tendency to veer toward ‘epicurean’ habits and a concomitant hostility to politics.

Despite their hedonic reputation, Epicureans also reject Socratic eroticism. No love, no marriage, no family for the wise man. “He will have regard for his property and to the future” (X. 645). And he will have friends, partners “in the enjoyment of life’s pleasures” (X. 647). True pleasures come from the health of the soul, which is the most refined form of matter. What Epicureans call true pleasures are rather tepid, from the Socratic viewpoint: “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” (X. 657). Phronēsis comes to dominate philo-sophia. 

Epicureans are Socratic with respect to death, neither seeking nor fearing it. But, given their depreciation of both thumos  and eros, they must rely upon doctrine to overcome the fear of death. They make much, therefore, of their atomistic materialism and their consequent denial that there is any afterlife to fear. Given their not-strongly philo-sophic psychology they cannot as it were build it into a philosophy of life. Their philosophic doctrine in turn feeds back into the psychology of the one who holds the doctrine (Sovereign Maxim #20, X. 669). Epicurean atomism needs moral doctrines, needs maxims, in order to stabilize a life lived with its potentially nihilistic cosmological doctrine. The Epicurean soul does not so much govern itself as it is governed by maxims, rightly called “sovereign.” This soul seeks something outside of itself to rule it.

Considered as a group, these ‘post-Socratics’ do not quite have the autarchy, the self-ruling, self-sufficient, self-ordering philosophic eros of Socrates. And so they do not go out among the people so much, or, when they do (as with Diogenes) they play the buffoon and the wiseacre, not the questioner. They are less political than Socrates because their philosophic eros is weaker. Or so it seems in the account of Diogenes Laertius.

 

‘Socrates’ might mean ‘sure strength’ or ‘rule of wisdom.’ What is sure and strong about the rule of wisdom? Why should reason rule? How can it? The political execution of Socrates concentrates Plato’s mind on these questions.

 

The Euthyphro: What Should a Philosopher Believe?

1. ‘Euthyphro’ means ‘straight thought.’ But the shortest line between two points may be a dark and narrow tunnel. Euthyphro claims to have a pipeline to the gods, but he knows nothing about human beings, who laugh at his pretensions in the Assembly. Straight thought, undialectical, undialogic thought, ignores the soul that does the thinking.

2. “What is piety?” Socrates asks. Euthyphro hastily endorses Socrates’ piety, which is under attack by Meletus and the other accusers, without having a clear idea of what piety is. He does not know what the basis of his own claim to rule is. Straight Thought is stupid.

3. Why does Rule of Wisdom bother to speak with stupid Straight Thought? Because the wise must know the stupid, lest the wise imagine that they will ever be able to rule the stupid in any straight or direct way. (This is also true of the human soul. Reason can rule the stupid appetites, but only if it allies with spiritedness.

4. If piety is imitating the gods, piety is incoherent. There are many gods. They fight among themselves. Olympus is high school in the heavens. How can the gods guide the prophet? Which god will the prophet heed? By what criteria will he choose which one to heed? And even if the gods were reasonable—if they loved the good, the noble, and the just—the wise would not need them for guidance, inasmuch as the wise too are reasonable.

5. Is piety service to the gods? Why do gods need or want to be served by humans? Hegel wasn’t the first to notice the contradiction inherent in the master-slave dialectic—which is a dialectic, and not a straight thought.

6. Euthyphro is at the law court in order to prosecute his own father for a crime that was not, strictly speaking, intentional. The case is not ‘straight’ or clear-cut. Euthyphro wants his piety ‘straight from the gods,’ without the intervening authorities of the family. He governs his piety with self-proclaimed prophecies. He wants to universalize piety, arguing that murder is murder, justice justice, regardless of persons or circumstances. Piety is doing justice regardless of kinship, even as Zeus did in fathering Kronos. But was Zeus doing justice to Kronos? Or was he just doing him in, or down? As the Romans might ask, cui bono?

7. Is piety what all the gods love, a sort of divine consensus, an Olympic common denominator? This cannot be. The loved, by being loved, is not thereby defined by the lover. Socrates enters into a long, logic-chopping argument in order to unstraighten Euthyphro, to jerk him around, to split every hair on his head, to make him dizzy, to make him feel as stupid as he is—he who claims to know so much. Euthyphro wants Socrates to stop. He wants ideas to be stable. But prosecuting your father is usually no way to achieve stability, whether of family, politics, or soul.

8. With respect to the gods, Socrates distinguishes dread from awe. One might dread a disease, but not feel awe. Awe logically encompasses dread, but dread does not encompass awe. Does justice encompass piety, or piety justice? Euthyphro claims that justice encompasses piety; piety is that part of justice that serves gods. Very well then, Socrates replies, what does such service produce? cui bono? Service to the gods produces no benefits for them, who need nothing. Rather, honoring the gods is done with an eye on benefits for the pious who do the honoring. The reader will ask: Perhaps Euthyphro would honor the gods by dishonoring his father in a law court for reasons of personal gain? At this point, Euthyphro remembers that he has business elsewhere and hurries away from the philosopher who has been accused of impiety. Judging from his conduct with Euthyphro, Socrates is guilty as charged. He is impious with regard to Euthyphronic pretensions. But he seems ready to defend the conventional piety of the city, which first of all requires sons to honor fathers.

 

The Apology of Socrates: Philosophy and the Democracy

9. ‘Socrates is an atheist who corrupts our youth!’ So his accusers allege. He came to their attention by questioning their fathers, the local notables: statesmen, poets, educators. Why did he do this? Why did Socrates leave behind his cosmological studies for political philosophy? Perhaps he did so because natural science studies already implicate the beliefs, and thereby the laws, of the polis. If the moon is a rock, it is not a god. If the moon is not a god, are other beliefs of Athenian citizens equally baseless? Where does that leave the city?

10. The Delphic oracle of Apollo told Socrates’ friend Chaerephon that no man is wiser than Socrates. Socrates ups the ante, telling the jury that the oracle called him the wisest (21a-b). Socrates pretends that he intended his conversations with his fellow Athenians to be proofs of his allegiance to an oracular command. There was no command. Socrates’ dialogues with Athenians prove his impiety; he spent the rest of his life testing the truth of the oracle of the god. A pious man would say that gods test us. Only the impious test the gods. Or is Socrates merely testing the oracle, the ‘medium’ of the god? In that case, he wants to question the authority of a person who claims unquestionable authority over the city. What other authorities, divine or human, might such a man dare to question—’in front of the children,’ no less?

11. Socrates’ dialectical tests have made him hated. Statesmen, poets, artisans, and educators do not like to be tested any more than gods and oracles do. To be tested is bad enough, but to fail the test—this injures their claim to rule. Any claim to rule is at bottom a claim that you are virtuous and, particularly, wise—that you know what the good is, and that you know how to get it, maybe from the gods themselves. Socrates tests the wisdom of the most authoritative men of Athens, and finds it to be lacking. Had Socrates any power, he would be a menace. Without power, he is a gadfly who deserves swatting. But this powerless man also talks to the young. Will they question, then overthrow their fathers? That is a real menace. One of Socrates’ interlocutors was Alcibiades.

12. ‘Meletus’ means ‘caring one.’ He speaks for the highest human authorities, the poets, who in turn speak for the gods. Meletus indirectly speaks for the greatest of caretakers, the gods, who care for their own—the earth and the creatures on it. But does young Meletus know what ‘his own’ truly is?

13. Behind the law against impiety, behind all the laws, are the lawmakers. Athens is a democracy; the lawmakers are the people. Athenians want to say, ‘We make the laws here’ and ‘the laws are divinely inspired.’ Vox populi, vox Dei?

14. Meletus calls Socrates an atheist. He also accuses Socrates of believing in new daimonion. The daimonion are either gods or children of the gods, Like the Athenians, Meletus is bifurcated, his accusations incoherent. Socrates easily shows Meletus’ self-contradiction. As for Socrates himself, he appears to be equally divided: The oracle of Apollo leads him to press forward in his dangerous political-philosophic quest, whereas at least in most things his daimonion counsels caution, although never specifically to halt his quest. Perhaps this tension (if not contradiction) amount to two aspects of the same thing: philo-sophia requires daring and prudence, careful choice in philosophic companions. Socrates has his friends, and they have protected him into his seventieth year. They can protect him still, if he will let them.

15. In his dialogue with Meletus, Socrates proves that he could easily slip the noose. But he does not want to. No daimonion holds him back from accusing the people, those envious slanderers (28a). Socrates goes further, making himself a hero, comparing himself to Achilles. A hero fearlessly chooses death; in accusing the people, Socrates chooses death as surely as Achilles did, although he depends not upon divine prophecy but upon his own unassisted powers of reasonable prediction, based on his sure knowledge of human nature. But how can Socrates gain glory by insulting the people, calling them money-lovers, telling Athenians that they are no better than the citizens of other cities, saying that is he god’s gift to them (30e)—no atheist, he!—that he has been sent to awaken them from their intellectual slumber? He tells the people, the rulers of a democracy, that a just man cannot engage in politics at all—the reverse of Pericles’ teaching. What does that make them? He is no Achilles going for glory; he despises the ‘good opinion’ of his fellow citizens. In despising openly, he ensures his execution.

16. The people want the accused to beg for their mercy. But Socrates denies them their Oprahfest. He tells them he deserves not punishment but reward, having been guilty of exhorting them to care for themselves, their true selves, guilty of wanting them to be happy and not only to seem happy. Socrates publicly refuses to substitute the judgment of the people for his own. He will rule himself; they will not. How can he do this? Why is he no pragmatist seeking intersubjective confirmation in the form of consensus among the gods/people? Because, unlike Euthyphro, Socrates has already tested his own wisdom. He has engaged his fellow Athenians in dialectical argument, persistently to the point of nettlesomeness. Human beings seek the good, seek wisdom; “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (38a). But whereas the people love wisdom, they do not love it strongly enough. The people love wisdom with Unsure strength. They supinely rest assured with what they have been told and become indignant when the one of sure strength, strong love of wisdom, the one ruled by wisdom not by hearsay disturbs their repose. The many are neither very good nor very bad. They act and feel at random, swaying one way then another, in accord with their latest passion. Their life will always contradict the philosophic life. Benjamin Franklin, another old roué, wrote, “God grant that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country.” Socrates would reward him and his Enlightenment brethren with one of his ironic smiles.

 

The Crito: The Philosopher and the Few

17. Socrates’ friend is a rich man who likes to be able to ‘fix’ things for his friends. He likes having a reputation for usefulness. He has been around the block. He knows that the few who are rich had better not enrage the people, the many who are not rich. The dilemma of the rich few parallels the dilemma of the philosophic few—the truly rich, so to speak. He tells Socrates that the people can bring “the greatest of evils” upon one: death (44d). Let me pull some strings, get you out of jail and away from Athens. If I don’t, the guys at the club are going to say, ‘Couldn’t you do anything for that old philosopher? What kind of friend are you? Have you lost your touch, old boy?’ Crito is one of the several kinds of friends it is good to have.

18. What is more, Crito continues, Socrates and his friends haven’t stood up and acted like real men during this ‘trial’ business. Don’t be a chump. Don’t die for nothing. When the going gets tough, the tough get going—in this case, right out of town. Crito is a man who knows when he’s outnumbered, when circumspection is the better part of valor. But his admonitions to be both cautious and manly seem somehow ill-mixed.

19. Socrates has a different opinion of courage, justice, and prudence. He depends not upon popular opinion, no matter how it has contrived to sanctify itself. “I, not only now but always, am such as to obey nothing else of what is mine that that argument which appears to me best upon reasoning” (46b). The autarchia of Socrates, the self-government or self-sufficiency of Socrates, consists in his uncompromising exercise of human reason unassisted by public opinion or divine revelation (insofar as those may be distinguished, in a democratic regime).

20. Therefore, Crito, you should not take public opinion as authoritative, though you should take it seriously enough to examine it, to test it. It is the opinion of him who knows the subject-matter that counts. The few who are rich should heed the fewer who know, not the opinions of the people who do not know because they accuse more readily than they question. Socrates does not corrupt the young; the people corrupt the young, turning young Meletus (for example) into a demagogue.

21. Although Socrates may have been unjustly accused and punished, would it be just for him to escape punishment? No, he says: That would be returning injustice for injustice. To escape would be to violate an implicit contract between Socrates, the stay-at-home Athenian citizen, and the laws of Athens. To injure the law is to injure the city. A political philosopher is a citizen-philosopher. Of course, it is not clear that Athens has not, by electing to kill Socrates unjustly, thereby failed to hold up its end of the deal, effectively abrogating the implied contract. But Socrates doesn’t say that to Crito. Why?

22. Socrates invents the accusatory speech for the laws. ‘We provided you, Socrates, the matrix for your own begetting–the marriage laws—and for your own nurturing, your own education. A fatherland is therefore an even more honorable parent than a father or mother.’ (51a-b) This is no mean or despicable argument. Unless a regime is very defective, it does put its citizens in its debt in a thousand ways. This is why it is just that the laws, the city, require citizens to fight in wars to defend the laws, the city. Yet does not war involve returning evil for evil? Is the city unjust to Socrates’ own criterion? Socrates does not say that to Crito, either. Why?

23. Problem: The laws themselves did not condemn Socrates. The people did. True, the people also wrote a law against impiety that puts Socrates at risk, more or less reasonably assuming that the gods would suffer no derogation. But perhaps the people misapplied that law by misjudging Socrates, goaded by the gadfly’s annoying buzz. Would Socrates’ escape injure the laws, or merely rebuke the people in their error? How unjust would his escape really be? Socrates does not say that to Crito. Why?

24. There is no way to demonstrate why Socrates says what he says, leaving other crucial things unsaid. Plato writes dialogues, Socrates undertook dialogues; dialogues are very deliberately not demonstrations, geometrical proofs, deductions from first principles, specimens of the natural philosophy Socrates stopped practicing. Dialogues invite their readers to think about ideas and the persons who ‘have’ ideas, to consider things with a view to souls and not only ideas.

The following suggestions, then—open to dialectical testing:

a. For all its vices, the democracy permitted the rarest of the few, the philosopher, to go about his self-appointed rounds for a long time. How many cities other than Athens would have tolerated Socrates for so long? How many were democracies, allowing such a rich variety of human souls to flourish, to be examined and understood by Socrates?

b. Socrates knows that his ever-helpful friend, Crito, soon will not have Socrates around to advise him. Is it not better to leave Crito, who will never be a philosopher, in the hands of the laws, which are relatively stable, of surer strength, than ever-shifting public opinion? The few who are rich know enough not to enrage the many who are not, but if they bribe too many officials the stable laws that protect them may be destroyed., replaced by an openly and self-consciously tyrannical majority. The wise govern, insofar as they can govern, as if the laws are adequate guides to the good life.

c. Socrates chooses to die in Athens in order to preserve the Socratic enterprise there, that is, in a democracy. Crito will tell others how law-abiding these philosophers are. Those others will include the writer, Plato. Word will get around, not so much among the people as among the potential philosophers, the philosophers of the future, who will now know how not to resent the people and how to respect the laws in the right way—which is not to say that they will respect the laws unqualifiedly. The philosophers of the future will have before them the example of one who accepted the rule of laws over his body, which was well protected by those laws and never really injured by them. As for his soul, he does not accept the rule of law, which is after all ‘only’ a more stable form of public opinion. That is the point: The law is more stable than day-to-day public opinion.

 

The Phaedo: What Does a Philosopher Know?

25. The story of Socrates’ last day is narrated by a Pythagorean to Pythagoreans. The most mathematical/deductive, undialectical, and non-prudential philosophers cannot resist the charms of Socrates, the least ‘abstracted’ philosopher, the philosopher who embodies philosophy as a way of life, not a method or a doctrine or a formula. A mathematical philosopher deduces reality from principles. He is a secular version of Euthyphro. (So is Kant, with his noumenalist project of deducing a legalistic system of morals from a categorical imperative.) Although these philosophers are a lot more intelligent than Euthyphro, they are just as ‘straight’/deductive, and maybe not much ‘smarter’ in terms of prudence. Plato’s readers have seen Socrates taking a different road, the winding road of dialectic.

26. The philosophic life consists in the practice of dying. Socrates means that a genuinely human life corrects animal life. The soul corrects the body. The senses, the body’s information gatherers, can give only partial and often deceptive perspectives on the world. The soul—specifically, the mind—organizes sense data, discovers meaning in the information the senses perceive. Without logos there is no knowledge. Logos begins with opinions understood as opinions, not with certitude. Wisdom is knowing that you don’t know. It is a rationalism that is not afraid of uncertainty. To bring the logoi closer to the truth, to improve opinions, the bodily passions must be moderated; they will otherwise bend the mind back toward the bodily, the merely perspectival. The ‘soul’ in its noēsis never simply transcends the ‘body,’ but it does get the ‘body’ away from its own self-preoccupation. (Socrates would say of Foucault: What an earnest, loveable, but naïve young philosopher, seeking certainty by mortifying his flesh, by hypostasizing his pleasure and pain, by seeking bodily ‘limit-experiences’; he must remain imprisoned thereby in his own pansomaton).

27. Why not suicide, then” asks logical Cebes (a potential philosopher). Kill the body, set the soul free to find the truth beyond this mortal coil. Suicide is a mistake because the body serves the same function as the laws of the city. It too is a prison from which we must not escape; it affords a foundation for living philosophically. But why not die and live wisely on the Blessed Isles for all eternity, rather than merely loving sophia from afar? Because—sotto voce—I know that I do not know what death will bring. I do not fear it, or I do not fear it enough to stop philosophizing and take the sleep-inducing sedatives offered by the poets. But I do not really know that my ‘soul’ will survive the death of my ‘body,’ either. And so I rush neither to nor from death, committing no suicide but committing myself to no life of unthinking subservience to questionable opinion, either.

28. Socrates recounts his own philosophic life. He began it in the investigation of nature, of generation and decay, the stuff of life and death as such. But this investigation had its limitations, specifically, the problem of causation. Materialism in physics is inadequate for the same reason that sensualism is inadequate in what much later writers would call ‘epistemology’: It precludes understanding (including self-understanding). The turn to political philosophy is as much a necessity in physics as it is in epistemology. At the same time, Socrates resists natural teleology, the claim that nature as a whole tends toward some end. He investigates human nature, the nature of ‘souls,’ in order to supplement his understanding of ‘bodies.’

29. The soul is teleological. It aims at what it considers to be good for itself. To find the best way of life, live as if your soul is immortal. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but live that way in order to winnow out the things that go stale. Living as if your soul is immortal means discovering and cultivating the nature of the soul, its virtues or strengths. These are moderation, justice, courage, wisdom. Shed the soul’s foreign attire, such as the passion for objects. To live so is to take care of your true self, the part of you that could go on as it is forever, without surfeit, if it does. This alone is genuine self-preservation. Bodily self-preservation alone fails to preserve the true self, fails to care for the soul by loving wisdom.

30. Political philosophy is philosophy that takes account of the soul, in the sense that the political philosopher does not forget (as mathematicians and today’s ‘political scientists’ tend to do) where perceptions ‘come from.’ Political philosophy starts with opinions, with logos as affected by passions, by the body. Philosophy needs grounding in everyday life, or else it becomes speculation, abstraction, no better than the mythmaking it would supplant. (Is a ‘big bang’ really superior to a creation tale? Perhaps it is inferior.) If you fail to see that there is no thorough did-embodiment, your opinions are likely to be distorted by passions, including political passions. You will be a Euthyphro of science.

31. Political philosophy provides access to knowledge of nature by affording knowledge of the variety of souls or human ‘types.’ To know that certain human ‘types’ tend to suppose that they perceive different orders in nature is to prepare oneself to consider one’s own biases in the investigation of nature. You will perceive the ‘outside’ more acutely when you perceive your ‘inside,’ when you know yourself. The rule of wisdom means the self-government of the true self, including the self-limitation of wisdom as it deals with stupidity. Prudence or practical wisdom and sophia or theoretical wisdom are complementary. The political philosopher, the only one whose ruling desire is the love of wisdom, will distort the world less than any other human type, without supposing that he does not to some degree distort the world.

32. Socrates tells his young philosophic friends a number of noble lies. His lies or spurious arguments for the immortality of the soul are tests. Will the young men become philosophers? If they believe the lies, they will believe a doctrine that is good for ‘intellectuals’ to believe, and so will be better non-philosophers than they would be if they fell into unbelief. It they disbelieve the noble lies because they have worked through the arguments, they will philosophize, imitate Socrates. As with Crito, but in a different way, Socrates prepares his friends’ souls for his departure. Dare not to think you know, but dare to think, even when your thinking only brings you to the realization that you don’t know. In doing so, you make ‘Socrates,’ the rule of wisdom, immortal—or at least as long-lasting as they human race will be. As for himself, Socrates does not do as the people do, seeking to evade death by prolonging physical life in a somnolent state of believing whatever tales of immortality their parents told them.

 

Conclusion

Political philosophy is ‘politic’ philosophy. It watches its step. It defends itself artfully. It tells edifying tales to the non-philosophic, sometimes improving the stupid and challenging the intelligent. Political philosophy is also genuinely philosophic; it loves wisdom, seeks truth. It seeks to know what virtue is and, in that seeking, becomes virtuous. Inasmuch as virtue and the knowledge of the good are always the base of the claim to rule, the political philosopher stakes the most plausible claim to ruling the city—the city in speech, that is. For a philosopher to seek ‘more’ (less?) than that, to seek to ‘really’ rule, he would need to be too imprudent to be a god philosopher. The one who lives the philosophic life knows his own limits, and the limitations of political life.