Apology

"This is Plato’s version of Socrates’ court speech. It’s very short, yet it gives us all sorts of extraordinary things. On first reading it is a brilliant piece of forensic oratory. Socrates starts out by saying ‘Oh well, my opponents are incredibly polished, and they’ve got wonderful things to say, but, of course, everything they have to say is false; whereas poor me, I’ve never done this kind of thing before, but everything I’m going to tell you is true.’ And yet it overturns all that, because it is actually an incredibly polished piece of rhetoric. That can distract the reader from the philosophical content. But when you look at it harder, it turns, I think, on two separate thoughts that Socrates puts to his accusers and to the jury that’s about to convict him. The first thought is this. Socrates says he faces two sorts of accusation, one old, one new. The old one is the pervasive feeling against him in the city, that he studies metaphysics [!] and that he ‘makes the worse argument the stronger, and teaches others how to do the same’. The actual (new) charge against him is that he corrupts the young, and fails to believe in the city’s gods. He deals with both charges at once by complaining that people assume he knows what he’s doing. But, he says, he does not know. People resent him because they think that he’s got wisdom and somehow dissembles; but he concedes only that he has the wisdom of knowing that he’s not wise. The brilliant thing about the philosophical content of the Apology is that he explains what he means by this. For, he says, he has spent his life going round talking to people who might know more than he does, and he shows the various conditions for knowledge or wisdom that each of them fails. Some of them don’t know the truth; some of them do know the truth, but only get it by inspiration; some of them know the truth because they know a craft, but think that because they know a craft they are experts about everything else. His argument is that all of these people are mere pretenders to knowledge, because they fail these conditions on knowledge, while he alone is the person who understands what knowledge is. The hair-raisingly exciting thing about this text is that on the back of the forensic oratory there is this examination of what we might think the value of knowledge is, how we might understand its dimensions, and what we might think about its scope. The philosophical content creeps up on you when you think all this is merely a rhetorical flourish: it’s completely extraordinary. “You must explain what it is for a life to have value: until you can do that, your ethical theories are void ” The second thought is ethical. Socrates recalls where in the Iliad Achilles, who had the great advantage of being the son of a goddess – which gives you some extra perks – was allowed to choose his future. He could either choose a really dull long life, go home from Troy, get married, have lots of children, be really bored but live to be very old; or he could have great glory in front of Troy, and die in the clamour of battle. Socrates imagines himself with this kind of choice, confronted by the possibility that he might be put to death by the jury. Socrates says, ‘Look, supposing you offered me the choice to survive but give up philosophy, or to carry on philosophising and be put to death. I choose the second: death is preferable to giving up philosophy.’ Again it looks as if this is a rhetorical trope. But it isn’t – instead it is a wonderful treatment of how we account for the values of the whole lives we live. Is it that life has its value when it just goes on for a very long time, without the things in it that make it valuable; or does it consist in the things that make it valuable? That’s an agenda that Socrates proposes not only for Plato, but for every ethical theorist afterwards. You must explain what it is for a life to have value: until you can do that your ethical theories are empty and void. In one sense Socrates’ choice is entirely specific to his own case: it is the choice he is going to make in that situation faced with possible execution. But he keeps saying that if they kill him, there will be nobody left to ask the questions he asks – and that this will be a great loss to the Athenians. So Socrates’ questions are generalizable. The way that this is set up gives us this philosophical content, although it appears to be a standard piece of rhetoric. That’s the genius of Plato, of course; that’s Plato’s doing. This is so much more sophisticated as writing than most philosophy written today. It’s amazing that 2,500 years ago there were writers around who were better at writing about ideas than just about anyone alive today, even though there are many more philosophers in our era. “The question is not ‘What should I do now?’, it’s Socrates’ deeper question: ‘How best to live?’” This is the question of how to read Plato . Some people think that in a dialogue like the Apology you get only a tiny bit of philosophy – something about what value is, something about what knowledge is – but that actually it is a rhetorical tour de force, and not much else. That seems to me to miss something utterly fundamental about the way that Plato writes. He writes so that the philosophy goes all the way through. For philosophical thinking, he supposes, you can’t demarcate and say ‘Today I’m going to do philosophy in my study; and tomorrow I’m going to be in court, and that’s just something different.’ Yet Plato is very often read as if the dialogues are little wagons in which you get bits of Platonic doctrine carried along, and you’ve just got to pick those bits up and let the wagon run away down the track. That, I think, is an impoverished reading of Plato that he himself gives us the material to reject. But it also ignores the view that’s put in the Apology itself, that when you talk about ethical or political matters, you talk about whole lives, not about philosophical moments whose surrounding can be ignored, and whose importance to their exponent is indifferent. So Bernard Williams, in the first chapter of his book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , insists that when you’re starting to think about the nature of ethics the question is not ‘What should I do now?’, it’s Socrates’ deeper question: ‘How best to live?’ The change in scope is really important in understanding what these ancient texts can give to contemporary thought."

"One of the fascinating things for me about this project was that I got to re-read texts in light of the concerns of people who are not part of the academic establishment, who read these texts in light of their real-life concerns. The Apology was one of the texts that I read with a group of lapsed Hasidic Jews in New York City. They lived a double life. Outwardly they kept up their ultra-Orthodox Jewish identity and were good members of the community and went to synagogue every Friday, and so forth. But inside, they were complete freethinkers who had broken away from everything. Their idea of philosophy was that it is an essentially secular project. They think once you commit yourself to reason there is no space for religion whatsoever. So we read the Apology and they were very surprised because Socrates is portrayed by Plato as a rather pious guy. His entire project is triggered by the Oracle at Delphi. He says he’s just carrying out the command of the god Apollo when he goes through Athens examining people and irritating them and provoking them. He says he has to obey God’s command and hence cannot give up philosophy, even if it’s going to cost him his life. They were very puzzled by this. One of them had a theory that Socrates took a leap of faith. He arrived at the conclusion that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing. That’s not very satisfying, so he embraced religion because reason doesn’t get you very far. But another made an even more interesting suggestion. He said, ‘Maybe Socrates died too early.’ I was very surprised, I said, ‘What do you mean, didn’t he live to seventy, or so?’ He said, ‘I didn’t lose my faith all at once, I lost it gradually, layer by layer: first, the things the Rabbis in our community would say didn’t make sense to me anymore and so I went back to the medieval commentators; then after a while the medieval commentators also didn’t make sense, so I went back to rabbinic literature; then the Talmud and the Mishnah didn’t make sense to me, so I went back to the Bible, and for a while I was proud that I was the only one in my community who stuck to the authentic word of God; but in the end the Bible also didn’t make sense to me anymore and then the bottom fell out and I fell into nihilism.’ His theory was that Socrates had not reached this final stage of repudiating religion and that’s why he remained pious, had he died a little later he would have fallen into nihilism just like this student had. I don’t know if Plato’s critique of democracy and of equality and freedom, which are the core values we were brought up with, can help with resolving conflicts. But I think reading Plato can be a Socratic exercise because you’re reading a text that is part of the canon of philosophy. Everyone reveres it but, at the same time, it advances views that are totally opposed to everything you believe in: equality, democracy, freedom. I think being faced with someone who argues throughout from positions that seem outlandish to you is a very good opportunity for you to critically reflect on your commitments. Many other medieval and ancient philosophers can have this function as well. Maimonides, for example, has an elaborate argument for coercion, imposing certain core beliefs by law on everyone. These are things that seem strange to us, but these were philosophers who were intelligent people, who thought for a long time about these things, and arrived at these conclusions. This creates a productive friction. It’s also a question that came up in Brazil . Brazil is, from a philosophical point of view, a special place because the Brazilian parliament passed a law in 2008 that makes teaching of philosophy obligatory in every Brazilian high school. The reason they gave is that philosophy is necessary for good citizenship. I liked this idea and I wanted to see what it looks like on the ground, where it’s a little less promising. There was a strong French influence on philosophy in Brazil. French professors of philosophy argued that only the history of philosophy makes sense, but the history of philosophy doesn’t lend itself to public philosophy, where you want to use it to engage in democratic discussion. I said, ‘You can actually use the history of philosophy to trigger a discussion because many of these historical texts challenge the views we have today and can be a springboard into a broader discussion about the values that we strongly feel attached to’. I used Plato as an example for that purpose. I am basically sympathetic to a law like that. One of the key ideas I advocate in the book is called a culture of debate: basically an intellectual framework where we can discuss issues that we deeply care about but also deeply disagree on across cultural and religious divides. I think the main benefit in engaging in such a culture is that we have a chance to critically think about the core convictions that we live by. I think philosophy can be useful to ground such a culture because deep disagreements in themselves will probably not generate interesting debates. They will rather generate frustration, possibly war. But if you can transform deep disagreement into this culture of debate through philosophy then I think there’s a chance that we can make these tensions and clashes and conflicts actually useful: intellectually productive. “Loving the truth more than winning an argument. That is the key philosophical virtue.” By philosophy, I mean philosophical techniques: logical and semantic tools that allow us to clarify what we mean, make an argument, respond to an argument, and certain philosophical virtues. Most importantly, I think loving the truth more than winning an argument. I think that’s the key philosophical virtue. This philosophy mandated by law is not a bad thing. It can really be a way of equipping citizens to have interesting debates and using their disagreements, and their conflicts and tensions, in an intellectually interesting way."