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ENGLISH 101. ACADEMIC WRITING |
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Lane, Melissa. "Was Socrates a Democrat?" History Today 52.1 (2002): 42-47. Lane looks at the reputation of Socrates, from the time of his death to subsequent debates about democracy. Dr G has added boldface labels in brackets to reveal the essay structure. Yellow highlighting is added to show the "identification of the problem." Gray highlighting is used to show the sources in the "body" or "discussion of the data." Blue highlighting has been added to show important transitional words between the parts. |
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Was Socrates a democrat? [BACKGROUND, Socrates' life] Born
to a humble artisan family in fifth-century democratic Athens, Socrates
(469-399 BC) attracted a circle of prominent disciples, with whom he
pursued the question of how to live well. His conversations with
all-comers in search of knowledge, on the grounds that "the
unexamined life is not worth living" (Plato, Apology 38a); his ugly
face, which concealed the beauty of his soul; his legendary
self-control, which enabled him to stand for hours in the cold while
meditating; his rejection of the commitment to retaliation which was
central to Greek ethics: these are among the characteristics ascribed to
him by his closest disciples. [MORE BACKGROUND, Socrates' death]
But the life of Socrates might never have become resonant were it not
for the manner of his death. Indicted in 399 BC at the age of seventy on
the charges of neglecting the Athenian gods, introducing new gods, and
corrupting the young, Socrates was tried before a popular jury,
convicted and sentenced to death. When ordered to do so, he obediently
drank a cup of poisonous hemlock and calmly died, having declared that
he did not fear death since he could not know it to be an evil (Plato,
Apology 29a). [INTRODUCTION] The fact that Socrates lived and died at the behest of the
pre-eminent democracy of the ancient world has posed an enigmatic
challenge to every generation since. Was Socrates a democratic patriot,
or a justly condemned traitor to democracy? Must reason and
democracy--philosophy and the city--be at odds?
For centuries, the issue seems to have been settled in Socrates' favor.
Roman Stoics, Christian Fathers, Enlightenment anti-clericalists--all
concurred that Athens had been in the wrong, though they differed as to
the merit and nature of Socrates' beliefs. But modern admiration for
Athens and affection for its democracy as a precursor of our own has
made the status of its most famous judicial victim newly problematic. If
we now consider ourselves to be democrats, and imaginatively ally
ourselves with democrats "then," must we too condemn Socrates?
How have changing historical perspectives about Athens colored our view
of Socrates? [BODY] It
is best to begin by asking why
the Athenians convicted Socrates. Our evidence from the trial comes
almost exclusively from Plato
(c.429-347 BC) in his Apologia of Socrates, which literally meant in
Greek "defense speech." Plato's
Apology describes the charges and the accusers, gives the results of the
two votes taken (the first to decide guilt, the second to decide the
punishment), and gives a version of the two defense speeches given by
Socrates. That this was a version is made very likely by the existence
of a rival Apology by Xenophon (c.428-354 BC), which agrees with Plato
about the charges and accusers and some elements in Socrates' speech,
but not others. We know that writing Socrates' "apology"
became a popular literary pastime after his death, so that Plato's
version of it cannot be taken to be (or perhaps even to have been
intended as) a verbatim transcription; on the other hand, it is the most
extensive source we have and is generally trusted with regard to the
nature of the charges and the results of the votes. [BODY] Each
of the charges, brought by three citizens (Meletus, Anytus and Lycon),
is salient. `Not worshipping the city's gods' is a rough translation of
asebeia, impiety; the civic centrality of religious festivals and
sacrifice counted as a political offence. According to Plato, Socrates
protests that he did carry out the sacrifices, so the best way to
understand this first charge is in light of the second: introducing new
gods. This was itself a common practice, given the syncretic shifting
deities of the Greek cities. But the idea that Socrates introduced a
"new god" was probably a reference to his daimon, an internal
individual guiding spirit which he claimed always stopped him when he
was about to do something wrong. Appeals to this daimon may have struck
his fellow citizens as dangerously individualistic in contrast to the
public gods of the city. Viewed together, these two charges suggest that
Socrates was seen as failing to follow accepted traditions. Twenty-four
years earlier, Aristophanes in his play Clouds had lampooned
Socrates as a sophist who taught his pupils to scorn parental authority
and subvert civic justice for their own gains. The idea of Socrates
representing a dangerous wave of intellectual gamesmanship may have
lingered in Athenian minds. [BODY] A sense of paternal, religious and civic subversion is also expressed in the third allegation of `corrupting the young'. But there was an explosive political dimension here. Five years before the trial in 399, Athens had lost the Peloponnesian War, and the victorious Spartans had encouraged a bloody oligarchical coup led by the Thirty Tyrants who had briefly seized control of Athens. They had killed, exiled and expropriated thousands until democratic loyalists succeeded in re-conquering the city and re-establishing its democratic regime. Two of the Thirty, Charmides and Critias, were close friends of Socrates. Charmides, who was Plato's uncle, features in one of his nephew's Socratic dialogues. Moreover, the most notorious traitor of the whole preceding war with Sparta had been Alcibiades: the self-proclaimed lover of Socrates in Plato's Symposium. [BODY] Was
this association with tyranny and treachery the cause of Socrates' trial
and conviction? Officially, it could not be so, as a general amnesty for
crimes committed during the reign of the Thirty had been passed. But
several seemingly political trials were brought under cover of other
charges, and some evidence suggests that the case against Socrates was
one of them. Consider the orator Aeschines (c.398/7-c.322 BC), who in the next generation
declared: Gentlemen
of Athens, you executed Socrates the sophist because he was clearly
responsible for the education of Critias, one of the Thirty
anti-democratic leaders (Against Timarchus). [BODY] The
Roman historian Plutarch (c. AD 50-120) in his Lives
reported a similar condemnation from the conservative Roman moralist
Cato the Censor some hundred and fifty years later: Socrates had
"attempted ... to be his country's tyrant, by abolishing its
customs, and by enticing fellow citizens into opinions contrary to the
laws." This was clearly not a universal view in Athens--Socrates
was found guilty by 281 votes to 220-- and there was also evidence
against it. Socrates had carried out the minimally required democratic
duties as council member and soldier faithfully throughout his life. But
in the way of ancient Greek trials, what mattered was whether a case
could be made convincing to the jury, and a majority of the democratic
jury in question was persuaded that Socrates had indeed introduced new
gods (and perhaps failed to worship the existing gods) and corrupted the
young--both crimes against the democratic order of the city. [BODY] Perhaps
the best evidence to suggest that many of Socrates' contemporaries
believed him to be no democrat, is the fact that his admirers, in
particular Plato
and Xenophon, later worked so hard to argue that he had been. In
their surviving writings both seek to show that Socrates not only never
harmed the city, but also--in a new and unorthodox sense-- served the
democratic regime itself. Such a defense forced the authors to expand
the meaning of the notion "serving the democracy." Both Plato
and Xenophon conceded that Socrates did not behave in the manner
conventionally expected of a good democratic citizen. He did not
voluntarily take part in the Assembly's debates (though he took his turn
on the Council when required to do so); he did not flock to the popular
law-courts to act as prosecutor or to sit on juries. Instead, they
suggest, his seemingly "private" pursuit of conversational
enquiry into the nature of virtue and how to live was in fact a public
benefit, even a public necessity. Xenophon suggested that although not
himself engaged in political life the philosopher was educating others
to be good politicians: he has Socrates saying, Should I
play a more important part in politics, by engaging in it alone or by
taking pains to turn out as many competent politicians as possible (Memorabilia
1.6.15)? [BODY] Similarly,
in Plato's Gorgias Socrates calls himself the only true politician. More
subtly, in Plato's Apology, Socrates declares that he has been a
necessary 'gadfly' to the `great and noble' but 'sluggish' horse of
Athens, performing a necessary function by his provocative questioning.
Plato's Socrates even proposes that his 'punishment' should consist of
free meals and housing like those given to the Olympic victors. Thus the
city should be brought to recognize his contribution to civic welfare.
(This hubris seems, according to Plato, to have alienated many of those
jurors who initially found him innocent: the second vote, on whether he
should suffer the death penalty, swung to 361-140 against Socrates.) [BODY] For both Plato and Xenophon, Socrates' way of living had been a boon to his native city and its democracy, and Athens' murderous ingratitude had been an unconscionable mistake. But Aeschines' observation as quoted above, assuming that Socrates was executed for having taught the anti-democrat Critias, implied that their rehabilitation (some would say 'whitewash') of Socrates remained a defensive maneuver for as long as the democratic regime continued in Athens. [BODY] Alexander the Great changed all that. One consequence of the fall of Athens in 322 BC was the demise of the whole debate. With the end of Athenian independence, there was no one left to argue the standard view of Socrates as a traitor to democracy, and no need, therefore, for the Platonic-Xenophontic response defending him as a true, though unconventional, democrat. For the Hellenistic period that followed, Socrates became a model not of `the only true politician' in Athens but of the true philosopher (whether interpreted as Stoic sage, Cynical dog-man, or Academic Skeptic). And for some of the Christian writers after this, Athens was herself simply to be condemned for having condemned the model philosopher. Meanwhile, liberty came to be modeled on `Roman virtue' rather than Athenian `mob rule'. From the fall of Athens to the fall of the Bastille, the prevailing assumption was that if Athens' condemnation of Socrates proved that Socrates was no democrat, so much the worse for democracy. Socrates was seen as a hero, as a martyr or as a sage; democracy was seen as merely a nasty, pernicious and mainly defunct political regime. [BODY] Two
major upheavals in political and intellectual life converged to overturn
this assumption. The first, taking sides in the pan-European
"quarrel of the ancients and the moderns," was the tidal wave
of enthusiasm for the art and culture of ancient Greece unleashed by the
German critic J.J.
Winckelmann (1717-68). His passion for Greek sculpture inspired
the Romantic poets and philosophers. It also informed the German
philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) in his admiration
for the Greeks as the beautiful 'children' of the human race, noble in
their bearing and their ethical particularity, though doomed to fall
before the universalizing empire of Alexander, Rome and then
Christianity in the forward march of the world-spirit. But if what
mattered about the Athenians was not their peculiar democratic
institutions so much as their embodiment of Greek culture, then as a
dissenter from that culture, Socrates became a suspicious character. [BODY] Such suspicion of Socrates was developed unforgettably by the German philosopher and classical philologist, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who despite rejecting Hegel's dialectical scheme of historical progress, only heightened his predecessor's elegiac love for the Greeks as the best of all human types. Nietzsche saw the pinnacle of Greek culture in tragedy and the pre-Socratic philosophers. To Nietzsche, by the time Socrates came along, the intuitive balance of his predecessors' "pessimism of strength" had begun to erode. To replace the crumbling tragic sense of the irrational, Socrates proposed a new and optimistic equation between reason, virtue and happiness. Reason alone could tell one how to live, giving a prescription that was inherently universal in claiming authority over everyone. In this way, Socrates was the ancestor of the Enlightenment, the "theoretical man" par excellence. In the words of Nietzsche: "he believed that he was obliged to correct existence ... he, the individual, the forerunner of a completely different culture, art and morality steps with a look of disrespect and superiority into a world where we would count ourselves supremely happy if we could even touch the hem of its cloak in awe." [BODY] Thus
Socrates was "the nub and turning-point of so-called world
history." Nietzsche went so far as to suggest that Socrates had
deliberately sought his own death, either to become a martyr to the
cause of reason, or (in a later account) because he realized that his
own rationality had only served to make himself sick of life. In either
case, Socrates' relation to Athenian democracy was cast aside in favor
of his relation to Greek culture as a whole. [BODY] Led
by Hegel and Nietzsche, many nineteenth-century continental thinkers
such as Georges Sorel applauded not "Athenian democracy" but
"Greek culture," and most often condemned Socrates for
destroying the latter. In contrast, the gradual and bitterly contested
British transition to a democratic franchise put the issue of Athenian
democracy squarely at the center of intellectual and political life. The
old dismissal of Athenian democracy as mob rule--coupled with a
comfortingly simple picture of Socrates as hero--would no longer do if
democracy were to be intellectually legitimated. That old stereotype had
had new life breathed into it briefly by the French Revolution;
Robespierre's outspoken admiration for Athens had provoked British
historians such as William Mitford (1744-1827) to condemn Athenian
democracy ever more strongly. But the political developments which led
to the English Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 made such responses look
hackneyed and out of date. As the political climate slowly thawed toward
democracy, the path was open for a thawing of the intellectual climate
as well. [BODY] The
ice was broken most decisively by the radical, liberal-utilitarian
banker and sometime MP, George Grote (1794-1871), in his monumental History
of Greece (1845-56). Athenian democrats had long been condemned as
fickle in their allegiances, emotional and volatile in their decisions.
Grote argued that the democrats had been cool and reflective judges,
changing their minds only when new evidence or arguments gave them good
reason to do so. Ancient democracy had been condemned as a cover for
class rule by the poor. Grote defended the poor sailors of the Athenian
fleet as the backbone of the democracy and, moreover, as having forced
the rich to accept the "constitutional morality" which was the
condition of free government in England, the United States and the Swiss
cantons in his own day. Appealing to English pride in the jury system,
he urged that Athenian juries had been run along the same principles.
Theirs was not a form of mob rule, rather a system of constitutional
self-government of which modern liberals could and should approve. Yet
Grote refrained from converting his defense of Athens into an attack on
Plato and Socrates. Far from it: his next major work was a critical but
admiring evaluation, Plato, and the Other Companions of Sokrates
( 1865). [BODY] Here
Grote defined philosophers as "individual reasoners" who
"dissent from the unreasoning belief which reigns authoritative in
the social atmosphere around them." Though the Athenians were
politically capable, they were, like any other society, entangled in a
tissue of prejudices enforced by the drastic sanctions of public
opinion. "The community hate, despise, or deride, any individual
member who proclaims his dissent from their social creed, or even openly
calls it in question" With these words Grote indicted his fellow
Victorians along with the ancient Athenians, and ranged himself and his
utilitarian comrades with the dissenter par excellence, Socrates. The
latter's death had been due to the sheer suspicious stupidity that
infects every community. Society, not democracy, was to blame. Democracy
as such was (or should be) friendly to the free thought and
conscientious dissent that Socrates had pioneered. But all democracies
had to learn to resist their own worst instincts. To borrow an
expression from Grote's friend John Stuart Mill, it was the tyranny of
the majority--usurping the legitimate concerns and methods of
democracy--that killed Socrates. [BODY] There
is a sense in which Grote adopted the Platonic-Xenophonic solution to
the problem of Socrates and democracy, by arguing that democracy needs
and should embrace dissent, and that the Athenians were mistaken in
failing to recognize this. Yet, while adopting Plato's solution to the
problem of Socrates, Grote coped with the antidemocratic elements in
Plato's dialogues by ascribing them not to "Socrates" but to
Plato himself. In other words, Grote partially sacrificed his admiration
for Plato in order to save the democratic face of Socrates. His claim
was that Plato in the Republic committed a "great betrayal" of
Socrates by establishing his character "Socrates" as no longer
a dissenter, but as the "infallible authority" himself. As
Grote wrote: Neither
the Sokrates of the Platonic Apology, nor his negative Dialectic, could
be allowed to exist in the Platonic Republic. [BODY] With
these words Grote inaugurated a peculiarly British tradition, in which
the democratic celebration of Socrates has gone hand in hand with the
democratic vilification of Plato. Whereas the ancient democrats had
attacked Socrates for questioning the mores of the city and its
political regime, modern democrats celebrated him for contributing a
culture of critical self-awareness to democratic politics. On the other
hand, these liberals seemed loath to give up the sense of a great
contest between democracy and philosophy that Athens had witnessed. As a
result they transferred the anti-democratic stain from Socrates to
Plato. Despite the fact that much of what we know of Socrates - and most
of what scholars since the nineteenth century have taken most seriously
- comes from Plato, they discerned a pure and unsullied figure behind
the ambitious machinations of his pupil and scribe. Thus Plato was seen
as the villain, the evil prophet of metaphysics or totalitarianism, so
that Socrates could remain pure, the hero whose faith in reason could
still inspire. [BODY] Not
everyone after Grote adopted this position; some scholars stuck to the
older view that Socrates had been a straightforward opponent of the
democracy. However, two powerful books published just before and during
the Second World War reinforced Grote's stance in the minds of
twentieth-century readers of Plato. One was by the Austrian Jew Karl Popper, who wrote his passionate denunciation
of Plato in the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies,
as a wartime refugee in New Zealand. Popper declared his credo thus: It is hard
... to conceive of a greater contrast than that between the Socratic and
the Platonic ideal of a philosopher. It is the contrast between two
worlds--the world of a modest, rational individualist and that of a
totalitarian demi-god. Popper himself had been influenced
by an earlier heir of Grote, the liberal Oxford don Richard Crossman, who would become a Labour MP and
eventual minister. [BODY] In
Plato Today (originally delivered on the radio and published in 1937),
Crossman described Plato as a dangerous partisan of what would
inevitably become "a polite form of fascism/" Plato was the
real enemy of democracy. Socrates, in contrast, was the victim of a
tragic misunderstanding. He was himself democracy's friend--critical,
undoubtedly, but then criticism was the life-blood of democracy. For
Crossman, Socrates was an independent-minded liberal, committed to free
enquiry and social progress: "Socrates showed that philosophy is
nothing else than conscientious objection to prejudiced unreason'. He
had been tragically misunderstood by the Athenian democrats whom he
sought to serve, and then betrayed by his student Plato, the
self-deluded would-be architect of an illiberal regime. [CONCLUSION 1, all sources are biased, "for further
study" or qualifications about the conclusion]
In
light of so many conflicting views, how should one judge
the checkered history of Socrates and democracy? The best way to
characterize the ancient evidence is to understand that it is inherently
and irresolubly divided. Some friends of Socrates turned democratic
traitors (though Plato tries to suggest that Alcibiades at least did not
adequately understand or follow Socrates), but others remained loyal
democrats. Socrates played his part in the democratic institutions but
did not actively defend them when threatened. The jury itself was not
unanimous but was deeply divided. In other words, the
question "was Socrates a democrat?" has been opaque from the
moment it was first posed. With no writings of his own to go by, with
only the memories created by bitter opponents to help us decide, we find
ourselves swayed by our own ideological commitments in judging his.
[CONCLUSION 2] What seems clear is that the complex and painful nature of the relationship between Socrates and Athens should not be oversimplified to serve our own ideological needs. The effort to show that Socrates' intellectual commitments constituted a healthy and useful criticism of democracy, rather than a challenge to it, came about only after his death, first by his ancient followers and then by their modern descendants. But ancient Athenians did not hold such a functionally differentiated view of democratic virtue. For them, commitment to democracy involved commitment to the fundamental value of the equality of citizens to rule, and this is something that Socrates questioned in discussion, although he did not challenge Athenian institutions in practice. The modern notion that dissent is valuable for democracy is not something that the ancients would have recognized. In their terms, Socrates may have abided by the rule of a democratic city, but he showed himself to be rather a critic of democratic presuppositions than a champion of them, and some of his students radicalized that criticism into outright opposition. To claim Socrates as a democrat is to apply an anachronistic standard to the democracy of his day. It makes better historical sense to affirm that democracy is not the only thing we value from the Greek inheritance, and to value the Socratic life of philosophy not as a backhanded contribution to democracy but as an independent good in itself. FOR
FURTHER READING Grote, George, A History of Greece: From the
Time of Solon to 403 BC. Ed. J.M. Lane, Melissa. Plato's Progeny: how
Socrates and Plato still captivate the modern
mind. Stone, I.F. The Trial of Socrates. New
York: Anchor, 1989. Where's
the works cited? Dr G's Note: Melissa Lane is a University Lecturer in
History and Fellow of King's College at Cambridge University, so why
didn't this academic provide a works cited for her article? History Today is not an academic
journal but a monthly magazine for amateur history buffs. The magazine's
editors deleted Lane's academic citations and replaced the works cited
with "for further reading," to suggest a few books that might
interest readers of the article. The
replacement of a lengthy works cited with a brief reading list saved
space in the magazine. (Indeed
the editors also butchered the text of the article itself, chopping
parts of Lane's discussion of sources. As a result the published article
is not in the form that Lane intended it. This illustrates a common
problem in popular media sources.) You can see how this magazine's citation
format isn't suitable for researchers. If you are interested in looking
up any of Lane's sources (let's say Plutarch or Hegel or Nietzsche),
you don't have a works cited to guide you to a specific book and
specific page number so that you can read the source evidence for
yourself. You will waste a lot of time trying to find the exact passages
that Lane is writing about, all because the editors removed the critical
information. Lane's article is shown here only to
illustrate essay structure or form, how she organized the findings of
her research to form a fairly balanced and coherent essay--not that it
succeeds in proving its point. |
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gutchess@englishare.net Academic writing home page Gary Gutchess © 2003 |
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