11 Oct Socrates Was Guilty
Socrates, as any schoolboy knows, is considered the “father” of Western philosophy, a man whose towering intellect forever altered how men think about and relate to the natural world, to the supernatural, and to each other. Without Socrates – and his students – “Western Civilization” itself might not exist.
Given this, most people take for granted that Socrates was unjustly accused, tried, and sentenced to death. He was in the right, we collectively assume, and his accusers – Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon – were obviously wrong. They were jealous of and misunderstood the great man and sought to have him put to death out of pettiness.
This account, mostly derived from Plato’s Apology, may well be true. I wasn’t there, after all (the lack of pigment in my hair and beard notwithstanding), while Plato was.
Nevertheless, it occurs to me that the deference paid to Socrates and the consequent assumption that he was unjustly tried and condemned might be unwarranted. A couple of weeks ago, in my American Greatness column, I noted that history has shown that civilizations not only rise with their gods but fall with them as well. Specifically, I wrote:
[C]ivilizations tend not to survive without their religions, without their gods. Ancient Israel’s struggles, wars, defeats, and exiles were, as the Old Testament makes clear, associated with periods of waning faith and religiosity. Likewise, Rome could not survive for long once Christianity had settled solidly among its population. The old rules—and the old justifications for the rules—lost their authority. And in time, so did the secular rulers.
In the West—the civilization formerly known as Christendom—our founding faith has been under profound and unrelenting attack for almost three centuries. The unique blend of Mediterranean influences—ancient Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity—combined to create a civilizational ethos largely unprecedented in human history and entirely unprecedented in its delivery of cultural, political, economic, and personal liberties to its denizens. The Enlightenment and its aftermath, however, killed the Western God, as Nietzsche rightly noted, and set in motion the slow-motion destabilization of that ethos.
Given this, and given that the principal crime for which Socrates was tried was asebia – i.e. impiety and irreverence to the gods – one can be forgiven for questioning the common knowledge. Is it inarguable that Socrates was right and just and falsely accused? Or might one be forgiven for wondering if, perhaps, the Athenian judges and jury were right, and that Socrates had overstepped his bounds.
Plato, of course, defended Socrates and insisted that he was more faithful to the gods than were his accusers. Moreover, Socrates didn’t exactly preach a new faith or broadcast his atheism. Indeed, the debate over his actual impiety (or lack thereof) has raged for literally millennia, with countless scholars lining up on both sides of the question.
In the end, however, I’m not really sure any of that really matters.
Like Plato and Aristotle after him, Socrates was a virtue ethicist who believed man’s end (telos) was to pursue eudaimonia, the good life, through the practice of virtue. Unlike his successors, however, Socrates believed in a very narrow definition of virtue. He believed that virtue is knowledge. This, in turn, made the pursuit of knowledge his singular aim. And as Irwin Edman put it in his famous 1953 essay The Atlantic Monthly, this, essentially, made Socrates a proto-rationalist:
Socrates’ trial, his refusal of a chance to escape, his serene behavior up to the very moment of his execution, constitute a high moment in the history of civilization. The scenes at the trial and in the prison, as we find them in essence accurately reported in Plato, capped and closed a life that had been long devoted to rigorous analysis about ultimate things and above all about ultimate good. In those final hours, Socrates deliberately chose reason as over against public opinion, duty as over against pleasure. It was a moment in the history of mankind which was to have enormous consequences. For it was the first challenging affirmation of the sovereignty of mind.
Socrates was on trial, it must be understood, not only for his life but for his way of life. It is important to understand what that mode of being consisted in. It is important to understand what was basically at issue, what one may say is always basically at issue, and why Socrates’ life and death have become a parable for those who hold the life of reason precious. For despite Socrates’ modest disclaimer (like all his denials in part at least ironic) he clearly felt that his trial and his sentence were a parable for mankind. The examined life, he declares, is the only life worth living. His one pursuit is knowledge, and the one object of knowledge the good — which reason alone discloses. He could not accept any other deliverances save those of mind, uncorrupted and unconfused, nor could he live by any other standard.
It is, perhaps, unfair to judge Socrates by modern philosophers’ interpretations, yet it is clear that Edman and countless of his contemporaries saw Socrates’ rebellion and undermining of the Athenian gods as a metaphor for and precursor to the Enlightenment. The old order was ruled by fear, superstition, and irrationality. The new order was to be ruled by reason, knowledge, and “rigorous analysis.” Socrates, like the Enlightenment thinkers, killed the old gods and set “reason” loose upon the world.
The difference between Socrates and the Enlightenment thinkers, I would argue, is that the former had brilliant and influential students who helped correct his excesses, while the latter did not. The problem with the Enlightenment, as we have long argued, echoing Alasdair MacIntyre, is that it destroyed the old moral order and didn’t create a new moral order to replace it. It relied exclusively on the presumption that “reason” was, in and of itself, the ultimate good and would suffice to guide man’s actions even in the absence of a definable moral code. Reason being essentially subjective, however, that’s not how things worked out, and moral chaos was unleashed it the Enlightenment’s wake.
It is no mere coincidence that MacIntyre, the ultimate critic of the Enlightenment and its reason-based pseudo-morality, is also an enormous fan of Aristotle, around whose virtues he has built his own ethics platform. Plato and Aristotle took Socrates’ stilted notion of virtue and built upon it. They assumed that the old moral order (the Athenian gods) must be replaced with a new moral order, one based on more than knowledge and reason. And they built it.
In any case, the MacIntyrian-Aristotelean advocacy of virtue inculcation and practice in small, local, and community settings presents a far more sensible and eudaimonic prescription for what ails modern man than anything Socrates or the Enlightenment delivered. Man thrives in community and with the practice and application of community-based and stipulated virtues.
Socrates was lucky that Plato was his student and that Aristotle was Plato’s. Nevertheless, asebia is far more than a serious accusation. It is a serious crime.
