Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ it is certainly true that each of these two very different witnesses, the philosopher and the rather more down-to-earth and unphilosophical general, brings something of his own disposition to the portrait of his teacher. There has been heated debate about the ‘real’, ‘historical’ Socrates; about the degree to which Plato’s philosophy represents an extension of Socratic teachings or a clear departure of his own; and, not least, about Socrates’s attitude to the democracy.

      The trial and death of Socrates have presented enormous problems of their own. While commentators seem, on the whole, to agree that the death sentence was a grave injustice, they differ on what it tells us about the democracy. On the one hand, there are those who see only an injustice perpetrated by a repressive democracy against a man of conscience, the model of the courageous intellectual who follows his reason wherever it takes him in defiance of all opposition and threats. On the other hand, some commentators see not only an injustice but also a beleaguered democracy, which had just come through a period of oligarchic terror and mass murder after a coup against the democratic regime; and they see in Socrates not only a philosopher of courage and principle but also a man whose friends, associates and pupils were among the leading oligarchs – a man who, as democrats fled the city, remained safely in Athens among his oligarchic friends, with every indication that they were confident of his support.

      This is not the place to rehearse all these debates.¹²We can confine ourselves to a few less controversial facts about Socrates, his life and work, and then proceed to an analysis of those ideas that had the greatest consequences for the development of political theory. All we can confidently say about his life is that he was an Athenian citizen of the deme of Alopeke, born around 470 BC, son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete; that he participated in some military campaigns, most likely as a hoplite (which required enough wealth to arm oneself and support a retainer) during the Peloponnesian War; that he took part as a member of the Council in the trial of the generals of 406 BC; and that he was tried and condemned to death in 399. There is little evidence to support the tradition that his father was a sculptor or stonemason (he may have owned slaves employed as craftsmen, as did the fathers of Isocrates and Cleon) and his mother a midwife, and even less that Socrates followed in his father’s footsteps. There is some evidence that he was a man of comfortable means, though certainly not among the very wealthiest. His friends and associates, however, were almost uniformly wealthy and well born; and the picture of Socrates regularly holding philosophical discussions with artisans around the streets and markets of Athens should be taken with a grain of salt.

      During the oligarchic coup and the regime of the Thirty, Socrates stayed safely in Athens, as one of the privileged 3,000 citizens. Some time after the democracy was restored, a charge was brought against him for not duly recognizing the gods of Athens, introducing new gods and corrupting the youth. It seems likely that these accusations were, at least in part, a substitute for more overtly political charges ruled out by the amnesty; but, in any case, there can be no doubt that Athenians looked upon the philosopher with suspicion because of his association with the enemies of the democracy. This does not detract from his dignity and courage; and the main reason given for his refusal to escape with the help of his friends – that he must honour the laws of his polis – testifies to his principled commitment to the rule of law. In this respect, he was quite different from many of his oligarchic friends. But nor do his courage, dignity and loyalty to principle make him a supporter of the democracy.

      The question then is whether the suspicions aroused by his associations are supported by what we know of his ideas. Here, again, we have little to go on. What we know with some degree of certainty is that he adopted a particular method of inquiry: engaging in dialogue with one or more interlocutors, he begins with a very general question about the nature of knowledge or the meaning of a concept such as virtue or justice, proceeding by a painstaking series of questions and answers to enumerate the manifold particular instances of ‘virtuous’ or ‘just’ actions; and, with his characteristic irony, he searches out the inconsistencies and contradictions in his interlocutor’s definitions. Although he typically professes ignorance and an inability to teach, it becomes clear that, by seeking the common qualities of all the specific instances of ‘virtuous’ or ‘just’ actions, he attempts to find a ‘real’ definition of virtue or justice – not a rule-of-thumb characterization of specific acts in the empirical world but a definition that expresses an underlying, universal and absolute principle of virtue or justice. The object of the philosophic exercise is to elevate the soul, or psyche, the immortal and divine element in human nature to which the flesh should be subordinate. Applied to politics, the object of philosophy is to fulfill the higher moral purpose of the polis.

      In itself, neither the Socratic method nor even the conception of absolute knowledge associated with it has any necessary political implications. But Socrates’s most famous paradox, that virtue is knowledge, is altogether more problematic. On the face of it, this principle simply implies that people act immorally out of ignorance and never voluntarily; and, whatever we may think of this as a description of reality, it seems at least benevolent in its intent, displaying a tolerance and humanity towards those who do wrong which appears to rule out retribution. Nor is there anything political in the admirable first principle of Socrates’s moral teaching: that it is better to suffer wrong than to inflict it. But there is more to the identification of virtue with knowledge, which has far-reaching consequences, not least political and antidemocratic implications. The combined effect of this identification and the moral purpose he attributes to the state is, for all practical purposes, to rule out democracy and even to make ‘democratic knowledge’ an oxymoron.

      The implications of Socrates’s formulation become most visible in the confrontation with the sophist Protagoras, depicted in Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras. If we can rely on Plato’s reconstruction of the sophist’s argument, he seems to have laid out a systematic case for democracy; and it is based on conceptions of knowledge, virtue and the purpose of the polis opposed to those of Socrates. What we know from Plato’s portrayal and from the very few genuine surviving fragments of the sophist’s writings is that Protagoras was an agnostic, who argued that we cannot really know whether the gods exist; that we can rely only on human judgment; and that, since there is no certain arbiter of truth beyond human judgment, we cannot assume the existence of any absolute standards of truth and falsehood or of right and wrong. Human beings, indeed every individual, must be the final judges – an idea famously summed up in his best-known aphorism, ‘Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are and of things that are not that they are not.’

      Such ideas were significant enough. But in Plato’s Protagoras, there is a discussion between Socrates and Protagoras which effectively sets the agenda for the whole of Plato’s mature philosophical work and the intellectual tradition that follows from it. Although this dialogue is no longer commonly regarded as among the earliest of Plato’s works, it has been described as the last of his ‘Socratic’ dialogues, after which he strikes out on his own, developing his ideas more elaborately and independently of his teacher. Protagoras opens up the questions to which the philosopher will devote the rest of his working life and which will, through him, shape the whole of Western philosophy.

      What is most immediately striking about the dialogue is that the pivotal question is a political one. Socrates presents Protagoras with a conundrum: like others of his kind, the sophist purports to teach the art of politics, promising to make men good citizens. This surely implies, argues Socrates, that virtue, the qualities of a good citizen, can be taught. Yet political practice in Athens suggests otherwise. When Athenians meet in the Assembly to decide on matters such as construction or shipbuilding projects, they call for architects or naval designers, experts in specialized crafts, and dismiss the views of non-specialists, however wealthy or well born. This is how people normally behave in matters regarded as technical, involving the kind of craft or skill that can and must be taught by an expert. But when the Assembly is discussing something to do with the government of the polis, Athenians behave very differently:

      . . . the man who gets up to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, merchant or shipowner, rich or poor, of СКАЧАТЬ