Apology/Crito Lecture 1 Text used: Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Harold North Fowler. There are a few chairs probably available in the departmental ante-chambre, so if someone is thore...You know where the departmental office is? There are some chairs around and you might try to pick them up. Which nunber is it, 309? Noy 307. 306, Well, the first thing I want to do in my ow name and by anticipation in the name of the class, to express my happiness to see llr, Reinken back. ir, Reinken has been serving as a reader in my courses for many years now, and no one could have done it better. Good. Now let us turn to our subject. This is an introduction to political phi- osophy, which will be given in the form of a discussion of Plato's Apology of Socrates and his Crito. I assume but do not presuppose that you have read these livitings, because they are very popular and are accessible in many inexpensive editions, But it is not presupposed; | only ask you to read the two books, short works, carefully, while we go. The Apology of Socrates is Socrates' formal de- fense before an Athenian law court. He had been accused of not believing in the gods in which the city believes, and in corrupting the young, Socrates clains of course to be wholly innocent, Yet he was found guilty and condemned to death. In the Crito Socrates is presented as waiting in prison for his execution, and there he was given the opportunity to escape. Yet he refused to avail himself of this opportunity, despite of the fact that he was unjustly condemned. His reason was, one must obey the laws, even if one is legally, although unjustly, condemned to die, The bare statement of these most obvious facts suffices to arouse in us indignation, indignation about the Athenians who murdered their best citizen, and also indignation about Socrates, who demands that one should obey every law, every judicial decision, who condemns in advance everyone who ever tried to escape from a Nazi or Comnunist execution chamber~-because in quite a few cases these people were legally condemned. Now these acts of indignation are quite healthy, and I urge you to indulge them, for I would like us to have a perfectly uninhibited discussion of the issues involved, I ask you only for one kind of restraint-- propriety of speech. And by this I mean not merely that you should not use dirty words, but I mean that you...I'll give you a better example, Do not call Socrates" fate a tragedy. Yor the murder of a man, or any other human being, is terrible, but not tragic’ in any serious sense, For there is, according to the master of those who know, there is no tragedy without mistake, without guilt of the sufferer. Now if some innocent human being is murdered there is no guilt or mistake involved. Not destruction but self destruction, or rather self destruction of a certain kind is tragic. So I give this as an example of propriety of speech, not to use the word tragic with the usual levity. One of the greatest men who applied his mind to Socrates! fate did describe it as tregic, and that man was Hegel. But he made an assumption which is not self evident, not self evident, namely, that Socrates was guilty as charged, and therefore deserved his death. Yet his death was tragic, and not like the end of a common criminal, because a higher right was on Socrates" side, The right with which Socrates came into conflict was the divine right based on immemorial tradition, the actual, inherited, moral religious order, which lays claim to men's obedience as a matter of course, without advancing sufficientApology/Crito 1 2 reasons, This divine right is based...in this sense is based on the premise, ultimately, if we cut away all frills, that the good is identical with the an- cestral. Socrates, according to Hegel, rightly questioned that primeval equation. The human mind legitimately desires to act on insight, and that means to act freely. The human mind desires to do the right knowing that it is right, and not merely because it is told that it is right. And as a consequence of this, Socrates raised the questions which the old Athenians had never raised, as to whether the gods are and what they are, Yet this freedom, that I call, as it were, before the tribunal of my reason, everything which lays claims on me, is what Hegel calls the conscience, and I believe many of us call it this way. This freedom lacks by tself content. It is an enpty freedom, although a very profound freedom. Hence Socrates questioned the traditional. order, He subverted it, and yet was unable to put another order, at the order of reason, in its place. And to that extent Socrates was guilty. He subverted, he destroyed, without building up. Now a sign of this inadequacy of Socrates is found by Hegel in Socrates! re- course to his deimonion. Now, Mr. Reinken, will you write this on the blackboard? Tf you have any trouble with the , let me know, Well, this daimonion-~ Iwill always use the Greek word because there is no proper English translation. ‘The nearest literal translation would be a demonic thing. The thing which Socrates claimed to possess in himself and which gave him soe ae This daimonion, of which we will hear quite a bit in the Republic / Apology? _7 was a kind o: private oracle, not like the famous public oracles of Tota ‘and other places, for it had its seat within the free individual, But it nevertheless lacked rationality. If Socrates says, "I don't do that because the daimonion advises me against it,” then he doesn't have a good reason, except that this voice, popping up as it were, speaks against it. Socratest fate was then necessary, He was guilty as charged. He questioned the religious basis of the Athenian state, and he corrupted the young by undermining paternal authority. Paternal authority, of course, because the fathers are older, good equa to ancestral, that goes then through your fore= fathers, grandfather, father more immediately, and by questioning it one questions paternal authority, On the other hand Socrates was right in saying that the iithenian state lacked a proper basig, But since he could not supply another social order, then Athenians were right in condemning him. And so this fact that Socrates was guilty in a very important sense, this makes his fate tragic. Yet the Athenians repented of their verdict a few years after Socrates! exe- cution, They thus admitted that they, their state, had already been affected or infected by the Socratic principle. In other words, if anyone had the right to condemn Socrates it were not the Athenians, because they suffered from the same defect. And this principle is the principle of free examination by the individual. ‘Now this much about Hegel's view. According to a more popular view, right was entirely on Socrates! side. The state has no business to prescribe its citizens what they should believe or not believe. Socrates is the classic martyr for the freedom of questioning, the free- don of the quest for the truth, the freedom of thought. If Socrates acted against the law of Athens, as he probably did, he acted against an unjust law, and there- Yore he acted justly. But, very well, but why then does he demand, as he appar- ently does in the Grito, that one must obey the law of the land without any quali- fications, any ifs and buts? Besides, was not Athens the citadel of freedom, and in particular of intellectual freedon? Many of you have read or heard of Pericles'Apology/Crito 1 5 funeral speech in Thucydides, where Athens is presented as such a citadel of freedom, But here we see,,.The only passage where Pericles explicitly speaks of philosophy, he says "We," namely, "We Athenians, philosophize without softness, "Without softness." And this might very well be taken to imply that philosophizing with softness was strictly forbidden. And since it is very hard to draw a line between philosophy with or without softness, this explains that Athens was not the citadel of freedom in the sense in which this country with its very great freedom of speech can be called a citadel of freedom, Incidentally this infor- mation we receive from the funeral speech is confirmed by Pla to's dialogue Gorgias, where a most impressive character called Callicles blames those who philosophize when they are already mature men. ‘In other words, as long as they are lads, that's fine, but if a mature, growm up man still does this, sitting in corners and talking instead of doing a man's work, this is like...as ridiculous and disgusting as a grown up man using baby talk, or lisping, as / these examples?_/. Now these observations show incidentally that the theme of the Apology of Socrates and of ‘the Crito must be of utmost interest to everyone serious: Concerned with political matters. For even if it is true that modern liberal democracy has solved the problem which Socrates according to Hegel did not solve, namely, the establishment of a moral social order which is rational and therefore binding on reason, and not like the old divine right which was not rational and therefore unconvincing, for even if it were true that modern liberal democracy has solved the problem which Socrates according to Hegel did not solve, it is also true, according to the same Hegel, that the modern solution presupposes...presupposed the full elabor- ation in the course of history of the conflict between Socrates and the city of Athens. Simply stated, our solution, whatever we might have to think of it, would never have been reached unless there had been that tragic conflict between Socrates and the city of Athens, and the infinite consequences of this conflict--the work of Plato in the first place, of Aristotle in the second place, and all of the other philosophers who then,..and whose difficulties, and so on, led finally men toward another type of solution, of which liberal democracy is one best knom to us. Now the question concerning the conflict between Socrates and the city of Athens is in itself what we call a historical question, and therefore, being a historical question, the question becomes in the first place one of our sources, How do we know, and how well do we know of this conflict? Is Plato's Apology of Socrates , in particular, a source? It presents itself as the speech of defense Gelivered by Socrates himself, And hence we can say it is a source of the first order, since it presents the issue between Socrates and the city of Athens fron one of the two sides, We unfortunately do not have the speeches of the accusers. If we had both we would know everything we wish to know about that conflict, But is the Apology of Socrates, as we shall read it, the speech of defense delivered by Socrates himself? “No one believes this, In other words, no one believes that Plato had a kind of tape recorder or stenographer and put it down and so we read it exactly as Socrates delivered it. lveryone believes that the Apology of Socrates is a work of Plato. Yet nevertheless it presents itself as Socrates' cm speech, Now if we are..,want to make the situation quite clear and at the same time use proper speech, we must say the Apology of Socrates raises a, false claim, Tt is,to speak properly, a lie. I mean the Greek word pseudes, which I translate by lie, means every falsehood, and does not have all oie rata feasant connotation which our word lie has. Nevertheless, Plato presents Socrates as making this