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Arguing, Obeying and Defying
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments are among the most influen-

tial and controversial scientific studies ever conducted. The experi-
ments are commonly understood to have shown how easily people can
be led into harming another person, simply as a result of following
orders. Recently, however, Milgram’s studies have been subjected to a
sustained critique and re-evaluation. This book draws on the vast stock
of audio recordings from Milgram’s experiments to reveal how these
experiments can be understood as occasions for argumentation and
rhetoric, rather than showing how passive subjects can be led into
simply doing as they are told. In doing so, it reconsiders what we
understand by ‘obedience’ and extends how social psychologists have
understood rhetoric itself.
s t e p h e n g i b s o n is a social psychologist based at York St John

University, UK. His research interests are in the areas of social influ-
ence, social identity, peace and conflict, citizenship and rhetorical/
discursive psychology.
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Arguing, Obeying and Defying
A Rhetorical Perspective on Stanley Milgram’s
Obedience Experiments
Stephen Gibson
York St John University
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DOI: 10.1017/9781108367943
© Stephen Gibson 2019
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First published 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gibson, Stephen, 1980- author.
Title: Arguing, obeying and defying : a rhetorical perspective on Stanley
Milgram’s obedience experiments / Stephen Gibson.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035970| ISBN 9781108421331 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781108431811 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Milgram, Stanley. | Obedience. | Social psychology. |
Rhetorical criticism.
Classification: LCC HM1031.M55 G55 2019 | DDC 302–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035970
ISBN 978-1-108-42133-1 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
To my mother and the memory of my father
Contents
Acknowledgements page viii
Introduction 1
1 The Obedience Experiments 14
2 Re-Evaluating Milgram 41
3 A Rhetorical Perspective 72
4 From Standardised Procedure to Flexible Rhetoric 99
5 From Proximity to Argumentation 123
6 From Passive Agents to Active Rhetoricians 148
7 From a Physical to a Rhetorical Metaphor 169
Conclusion 199
Appendix: Transcription Conventions 209

References 210
Index 229
vii
Acknowledgements
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments are a staple of psychology

textbooks and introductory courses. Like many students in the English
education system, my first encounter with them came during my A-Level
studies. Over 20 years ago at Scarborough Sixth Form College, Dave Bell
introduced me to the experiments and piqued my interest in psychology
more generally. It is easy to forget one’s debts to one’s teachers, but
without Dave’s splendidly open-minded teaching back then, I would
never have thought about studying psychology at university (I was set
on being a historian at the time), let alone developed an interest in
Milgram.
When I got to university, I was somehow able to write both of my first
two coursework essays on the obedience experiments. Despite this,
I almost switched to studying philosophy early on in my studies as the
largely cognitive-experimental flavour of psychology didn’t really grab
me. But then I began to come across a set of ideas that might loosely (and
probably rather unsatisfactorily) be described as ‘critical social psych-
ology’. As a student at Lancaster University from the late 1990s to the
mid-2000s, I was fortunate to be taught in a department that emphasised
eclecticism and encouraged the questioning of what, following Fran
Cherry (1995), might be called the discipline’s ‘stubborn particulars’.
The social psychology group at Lancaster was a vibrant place to under-
take one’s academic apprenticeship. Susan Condor, John Dixon, Mark
Levine and Jackie Abell created a challenging but always supportive
intellectual environment. Susan in particular, as my PhD supervisor,
taught me what social psychology could be. The late John Shotter spent
a year in the department, and to learn from him about social construc-
tionism was a privilege. Beyond the social psychology group, Alan
Collins, Charlie Lewis and Mary Smyth also provided a great deal of
intellectual nourishment that has helped to shape the way that I think
about psychology. At the time I didn’t realise how fortunate I was, but as
the years have passed and the English university system has come to
viii
Acknowledgements ix
resemble a hotchpotch of half-baked marketization and constant revolu-

tion that makes the careful nurturing of such intellectual environments
increasingly difficult, I have become ever more conscious of my debt to
those wonderful scholars. We used to talk about ‘the Lancaster way’ of
doing social psychology, and I hope that something of that spirit has
made its way into this book.
One of the great pleasures of studying the obedience experiments in
such detail over the last decade or so has been the opportunities to
discuss Milgram’s work with a group of fellow scholars who have also
been questioning, re-evaluating and reawakening the study of obedi-
ence. As I will note in Chapter 2, Tom Blass’s excellent biography of
Milgram has been a key influence on this work, and my thinking about
Milgram has also been shaped through numerous conversations and
email exchanges with colleagues such as Megan Birney, Gus Branni-
gan, Alex Haslam, Matthew Hollander, David Kaposi, Kathryn
Millard, Ian Nicholson, Art Miller, Gina Perry, Steve Reicher and
Nestar Russell. They won’t all agree with my analysis, but that is
precisely the way it should be; the level of constructive critical engage-
ment with competing ideas on obedience is a large part of what has
made being involved in the debates around Milgram’s experiments so
rewarding and stimulating.
A number of individuals and organisations have directly facilitated the
research on which this book is based. I have been fortunate to receive
funding from the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. RF-2015–431) and the
Nuffield Foundation (grant no. SGS/36502). I have also benefitted from
the expertise and helpfulness of Mary Caldera, Cynthia Ostroff and
Stephen Ross in the Manuscripts and Archives Service at Yale Univer-
sity. I am particularly grateful to Alexandra Milgram for permission to
quote from conditions 02, 04, 07 and 20 of the obedience experiments,
and to use images from the experiments; and I am grateful to Michele
Marques for organising the permissions. Michael Billig and Graham
Hamilton provided some much-needed encouragement in the early
stages of the writing process, and Maarten Derksen provided some
valuable comments both on the original proposal for this book, and on
an earlier version of the full manuscript. Janka Romero of Cambridge
University Press has been a valuable source of good-natured prompting –
as well as vast reserves of patience – as I have been completing the book
over a rather lengthier period of time than would have been ideal.
Needless to say, for all that this book could never have been completed
without the support of all these others, the responsibility for any errors
and omissions is all mine.
x Acknowledgements
Chapters 1 and 4 include modified versions of material first presented

in the following journal articles:
Gibson, S. (2013). Milgram’s obedience experiments: A rhetorical analysis.

British Journal of Social Psychology, 52, 290–309.
(2013). ‘The last possible resort’: A forgotten prod and the in situ standardiza-
tion of Stanley Milgram’s voice-feedback condition. History of Psychology, 16,
177–194.
(2017). Developing psychology’s archival sensibilities: Re-visiting Milgram’s
‘obedience’ experiments. Qualitative Psychology, 4, 73–89.
I would like to thank the publishers of these articles (BPS Wiley and
the American Psychological Association) for allowing me to reproduce
this material.
Finally, but most importantly, I would like to thank Emily, Hannah
and especially Aimee, who have had to put up with too many lost
evenings and weekends during the writing of this book.
Introduction
What more can be left to say about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experi-
ments? Surely by now, well over 50 years after Milgram completed his
final experimental session in 1962, we know all there is to know about
them. Those of us who teach social psychology will continue to be
grateful that we have the obedience experiments – grainy black and white
footage and all – to draw in our students, but surely we don’t actually
need to do any more work to understand what they mean because that
was done and dusted long ago.
Any psychology student could recite the basic details. In their most
well-known variants, the experiments featured a participant arriving at
Milgram’s laboratory to take part in what they thought was a study of the
effects of punishment on learning. This required them to take on the
role of ‘teacher’ alongside a ‘learner’ who appeared to be just another
participant, but who was actually a confederate employed by Milgram.
The teacher was to punish the learner, who was apparently seated in an
adjoining room, by giving him an electric shock every time he made a
mistake on a memory test. The shocks, which were administered via an
imposing-looking shock generator, started at 15 volts and rose in 15-volt
increments all the way up to 450 volts. The learner made lots of mistakes
on the memory test and so the teacher had to give him increasingly severe
shocks. As the shocks got stronger, the learner began to protest, with his
yelps of pain being played back on tape from the next room. Ultimately,
he demanded to be released, before refusing to answer any more ques-
tions. Subsequently, he fell silent, with participants being left to wonder
if he had lost consciousness, or worse.
Unbeknownst to the participants, the electric shocks were, of course,
not real. Understandably, many participants hesitated or refused to con-
tinue, and Milgram’s aim was to see if participants would obey orders to
keep giving the shocks. The experimenter could use a series of four ‘prods’
to try and keep the participants administering the shocks. These were the
orders that Milgram was interested in seeing whether participants would
obey. Beginning with ‘Please continue’, the culmination of these prods was
1
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2 Introduction
‘You have no other choice, you must go on’, and if participants still
refused to obey after hearing this then the experiment was ended. Under
these conditions, around 65 per cent of participants obeyed fully and
administered shocks all the way up to 450 volts. These results are typically
held to show that people are much more susceptible to the commands of
authority than we might have expected, or hoped, they would be.
The obedience experiments have always been controversial and the
subject of much debate and commentary (e.g. Baumrind, 1964; Miller,
1986; Orne & Holland, 1968). This shows no sign of abating as recent
years have, if anything, seen an exponential increase in the amount of
scholarly work devoted to them (for summaries see Burger, 2017; Miller,
2016; and see Chapter 2). They are a staple of undergraduate education
in psychology (Griggs, 2017; Griggs & Whitehead, 2015a, b), and are
influential in disciplines ranging from law to history, business to
sociology and nursing to criminology (Miller, 2016). Moreover, the
experiments continue to be cited in discussions of abuses and atrocities
ranging from the Holocaust to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses (e.g.
Fiske, Harris & Cuddy, 2004; Lankford, 2009; Miller, 2004; Zimbardo,
2007), in which they chime with the well-worn (but now largely refuted)
idea that the Holocaust was the result of ordinary people ‘just following
orders’ (Mandel, 1998). Unusually for an academic study, the obedience
experiments have also had a considerable cultural impact, ranging from a
1970s miniseries starring William Shatner, to the recent Hollywood film
Experimenter. The experiments have been covered and discussed in
documentaries and news items too numerous to mention (a simple
YouTube search should suffice for any readers who need convincing),
and continue to provide fodder for textual media of both the more
traditional (e.g. newspapers) and the ‘new’ (e.g. blogs) variety.
Given all this coverage and commentary, you would indeed be for-
given for thinking that there is little to learn about the obedience experi-
ments that isn’t already known. In this book, however, I will suggest that
we have barely even begun to scratch the surface of the obedience experi-
ments, and will propose a new way of thinking about them that fore-
grounds the role of argumentation. In doing so, I will suggest that our
view of Milgram’s experiments has, in some important respects, become
rather one-sided, and that we can reorient our understanding of the
experiments by conceiving of them as occasions for rhetoric.
Arguing and Thinking

Any attempt to highlight the extent to which a debate has become too
one-sided, or even that one side of the argument has been silenced
Arguing and Thinking 3
altogether, will be strengthened by the recognition that there are two

sides to every argument. As Billig (1996) has highlighted in his rhetorical
approach to social psychology, there is always the possibility of recover-
ing counterarguments, however dominant one side of the debate has
become. Indeed, in some circumstances we not only need to appreciate
the theoretical possibility of recovering absent arguments, but we should
actively seek to do so.
Billig (1996) highlights the one-sidedness of many psychological
theories. Categorisation is highlighted at the expense of particularisation;
tolerance is neglected in theories that foreground the human capacity for
prejudice; a preference for consistency suggests that contradiction
cannot be tolerated. Drawing on the classical tradition of rhetorical
scholarship, and in particular on Protagoras’s maxim that there are
always two sides to every argument, Billig emphasises the value of
noticing this one-sidedness and of seeking to balance the traditional
focus of such theories with a counterweight. Rather than focussing on
categorisation, psychologists should pay just as much attention to
particularisation; if we wish to avoid slipping into the unpromising pos-
ition of implying that prejudice is inevitable, we should also concern
ourselves with the capacity for tolerance, and so on. It is my contention
that we have got used to thinking of Milgram’s obedience experiments in
a rather one-sided way. We think of them as showing how easily people
can be led into doing something that they really ought not to; how
dangerous the commands of an authority figure can be; of how alarm-
ingly simple it might be for another Holocaust to be perpetrated at any
time, in any place. These are important lessons, and it would be foolish
to argue that people are never easily led by the demands of authority, just
as it would be dangerously complacent to argue that another Holocaust
was beyond the realms of possibility. But if we focus on this side of the
argument to the neglect of the alternative, then something equally dan-
gerous occurs: we create the impression that resistance is impossible, that
orders will automatically be obeyed, and that atrocity and genocide are
inevitable. Clearly, that is not the case either.
Of course, one of the reasons for this one-sided impression of
Milgram’s work is that Milgram himself saw his experiments as address-
ing obedience. He saw the nature of the problem to which he applied
himself as one of unthinking obedience, with an individual being
subsumed under the authority figure via a psychological process he
called the agentic shift. Indeed, the very name used to refer to Milgram’s
experiments tells us how we should see them: the obedience experiments.
It is thus necessary to highlight defiance, resistance and disobedience as
much as obedience. Milgram’s experiments not only show us people
4 Introduction
obeying and going along with the orders of an authority figure, they
show us people challenging and resisting. In doing so, they are also
frequently arguing. Participants in Milgram’s experiments often argued
their way out of the experiment, and in those conditions in which the
majority of participants did complete the procedure, the defiance of the
significant minority who were able to argue their way out of the situation
should be foregrounded more greatly than it has been. Moreover, as we
will see, the experimenter didn’t simply issue orders in any straightfor-
ward fashion, but also argued with participants that they really should
continue with the experiment. The experiment was as much about
persuasion as it was about coercion.
We might therefore want to consider whether ‘the obedience experi-
ments’ is any longer an appropriate shorthand term for the studies
(Gibson, 2015a), perhaps suggesting an alternative such as ‘the resist-
ance experiments’ (Kaposi, 2017). But to do this might also risk moving
things too far in the other direction. As Billig (1996, p. 161) notes of
Protagoras’s maxim, ‘the reversal does not replace the original but
complements it’. Any attempt to highlight defiance at the expense of
obedience would risk missing the still puzzling and troubling finding that
many people did indeed continue with Milgram’s experiments. Some of
these people did – albeit unsuccessfully – challenge the experimenter.
Many others did not. Many participants kept going with minimal
attempts at protest or resistance. If the defiance of those who extricated
themselves from the experiment in conditions featuring high obedience
rates is all the more impressive for being the actions of a minority, so the
obedience of those who went on without dissent may be all the more
troubling in conditions where most were able to defy.
Rhetoric in the Obedience Experiments

The only reason that the analytic project proposed here is possible is
because Milgram made audio recordings of his experimental sessions,
most of which are held in the Stanley Milgram Papers collection at Yale
University’s Manuscripts and Archives Service (Kaplan, 1996). A few
years ago I was fortunate enough to be able to purchase copies of some of
these recordings, and I began to develop an analysis of the experiments
based on Billig’s (1996) rhetorical perspective (Gibson, 2013a, b, 2014,
2017; Gibson, Blenkinsopp, Johnstone & Marshall, 2018). My analysis
built on some scattered observations of the importance of interaction in
the obedience experiments (e.g. Darley, 1995; Lunt, 2009), and a single
previous empirical study that sought to unpack what might be going on in
these interactions (Modigliani & Rochat, 1995). In turn, this rhetorical
Rhetoric in the Obedience Experiments 5
perspective has itself been built on in recent years by Matthew Hollander

(2015; Hollander & Maynard, 2016) who has applied the even more fine-
grained analytic lens of conversation analysis (Sacks, 1995; Schegloff,
2007) to the interactions that took place in Milgam’s lab.
Indeed, it is worth noting that Milgram (1974) himself made some
initial moves towards grasping the importance of interaction in the
experiments. He discusses the role of politeness and impression
management, citing Goffman’s (1959) then relatively recent work that
has subsequently been influential in the development of what has been
termed the ‘turn to discourse’ in the social sciences. Hidden away in a
footnote, Milgram (1974, p. 209) even refers to Garfinkel’s (1964)
breaching experiments, which are direct antecedents of the ethnometho-
dologically oriented conversation analytic tradition. We should be wary
of trying to make too much of these connections – any attempt to project
back onto Milgram some hesitant and ill-formed concern with the
rhetorical and interactional nature of the experiments is likely to come
to grief once it encounters his preferred approach to summarising his
empirical findings (obedience rates and mean shock levels) and his
theoretical explanation of these findings (the agentic state). Trying to
warrant the analytic project undertaken here with reference to Milgram’s
own concerns would thus be tenuous at best. Yet over the course of his
career, Milgram’s eclecticism was notable (Blass, 2004), and in some
important respects his work did not follow the narrow confines of the
experimental approach that has come to dominate social psychology.
A sense of Lewinian exemplification can be identified in Milgram’s work
(Gibson, 2013b), and the obedience experiments are good examples of
this. He did not set out to test specific hypotheses derived from theory,
but rather used the experimental method to dramatise and illustrate
particular conceptual issues that he saw as being of social importance.
In outlining a rhetorical perspective, therefore, I have not been con-
cerned to position my analysis as following directly from Milgram’s
own concerns, but rather as a different way of exploring the experiments
based on conceptual and analytic perspectives that were simply not
available to Milgram during his lifetime.
In this book, I develop this account by providing an extended concep-
tual foundation for the rhetorical perspective, as well as a more extensive
empirical analysis. However, the development of the rhetorical perspective
on Milgram’s experiments is not simply a matter of outlining in greater
detail arguments that have been made elsewhere. As noted above, the
recovery of defiance and dissent in Milgram’s experiments has been an
important endeavour, but it risks becoming too one-sided itself. I therefore
want to consider something that analysts – myself included – who have
6 Introduction
recently sought to highlight the defiance typically obscured in accounts of

Milgram’s experiments have not thus far confronted: the nature of obedi-
ence in Milgram’s experiments. Specifically, this is not only a matter of
reminding ourselves of the bare statistical fact that in many of the most
well-known conditions obedience was the most common outcome; it also
requires a confrontation with the observation that, as we will see in
Chapter 7, many of those participants who proceeded all the way to the
end of the shock scale in fact did so with little attempt at defiance.
In seeking to highlight resistance in Milgram’s experiments, it has
often been remarked that defiance – even amongst obedient participants –
has been hidden in plain sight all along. Milgram’s (1965c) film of his
experiments features a particularly well-known example in the form of a
participant – later given the pseudonym Fred Prozi (Milgram, 1974) –
who, despite repeatedly remonstrating with the experimenter, neverthe-
less goes on with the procedure and administers the 450-volt shock. Prozi
stands as an apparent refutation of the idea of obedient participants
simply going along passively with the experimenter’s instructions. He
argues, queries and challenges; he is visibly agitated and tense; and yet he
goes on. Defiance was there all the time, even when the ultimate outcome
was obedience. And yet, as I will show, Prozi was in some important
respects atypical. Most obedient participants appear not to have engaged
the experimenter directly in argument and confrontation, and as a result
the experimenter often did not need to use any of the prods other than
‘please continue’. These prods have typically been seen as fundamental
to the obedience observed in Milgram’s experiments, and yet we can now
see that whatever it was that was keeping those participants shocking the
learner, it wasn’t the prods. As a result, we need to radically reconsider
how we understand both the experiments and the nature of rhetoric.
Indeed, the absence of explicit verbal argumentation appears to cause
problems for any attempt to conceptualise the experiments in terms of
argumentation. I will suggest, however, that this does not, in fact, illus-
trate the limited reach of a rhetorical perspective, but that it highlights the
need for an expansion of that perspective. Part of this expansion is
grounded on the notion of metaphor, and indeed the theme of metaphor
will crop up time and again throughout the book.
Rhetoric as Metaphor
The role of metaphor in thought has been appreciated for some time (e.g.
Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and indeed there is a fascinating literature on
the metaphorical nature of psychology itself (e.g. Leary, 1990a; Richards,
1989; Soyland, 1994):
Rhetoric as Metaphor 7
Different psychological approaches suggest different images of the person. In

cognitive psychology the person seems to be a rather unimaginative bureaucrat,
whereas in the field of artificial intelligence, the human mind has become a
complexly programmed computer. Old fashioned behaviourists continue to see
us all as poor laboratory rats, chasing after the rewards of life. Game theorists
view our activities as just so many games, whilst role theorists note the theatrical
side of our endeavours. By contrast, a rhetorical approach argues for the
oratorical image of the person. (Billig, 1996, p. 186)
In some important respects we can understand Billig’s model of the
person-as-rhetorician in metaphorical terms; as yet another model of
human thought that proceeds through analogy with some other domain.
The aim is thus not to set up the rhetorical perspective as the way of doing
social psychology, or as the single route to absolute truth. Rather, having
identified the assumptions of other, more firmly entrenched perspectives,
and highlighting what is missed in viewing the world from these perspec-
tives, Billig is essentially alerting us to the alternative view afforded to us
by taking a different perspective. Although he has generally avoided
framing his work in explicitly postmodern terms,1 there is nevertheless
an identifiably postmodern orientation to this way of conceiving of the
purpose and scope of enquiry. Gergen (2001, pp. 807–808) has outlined
the implications of postmodernism for what he describes as ‘the domin-
ant tradition’ within psychology of ‘empirical research devoted to testing
hypotheses typically of universal scope.’ Gergen argues that,
it is essential to point out that although they are highly critical – on both
conceptual and ideological grounds – there is nothing within the postmodern
critiques that is lethal to this tradition. . . . the postmodern critiques are
themselves without foundations; they constitute important voices but not final
voices. Empirical psychology represents a tradition of discourse, practice, and
politics that has as much right to sustain its existence as any other tradition. The
point of postmodern critique, in my view, is not to annihilate tradition but to give
all traditions the right to participate within the unfolding dialogues. (Gergen,
2001, p. 808)
In another sense, however, Billig (1996) does indicate that he offers the
image of the person-as-rhetorician in a more than merely metaphorical
sense. He argues that ‘the image of the orator is slightly different from
some of those other images to be found in psychological theory. . . . In
our everyday lives we do not merely resemble orators, but, quite literally,
we are orators, as we offer up our daily excuses and send forth our
1
Although see the introduction to the 2nd edition of Arguing and Thinking for Billig’s
(1996, pp. 11–12) subsequent identification of the themes of postmodernism in his
own work.
8 Introduction
accusations’ (Billig, 1996, pp. 188–189). Nevertheless, as Billig has

remarked elsewhere, the danger in asserting that something is the truth
is that it inevitably misses something, and as such ‘any orthodoxy in
academic life should become the target for critique’ (Billig, with Locke,
2008, p. 23). Thus, in typically contrarian fashion, Billig suggests that ‘if
everyone in social psychology became a qualitative practitioner, then I’d
start doing experiments again’ (Billig, with Locke, 2008; see also Billig,
2000, 2012, 2013).
This contrarian impetus is important and clearly follows from an
appreciation of rhetoric. The argument is never over; anything can, at
least in principle, be opened up for debate. This applies as much to the
arguments of scholarly life as to the arguments of everyday life and
politics. And yet Billig (1995, 1999) has also been concerned with how
arguments are closed down or are avoided altogether. These observa-
tions provide a point of departure to explore how we might need to think
about things as rhetorical that are not typically understood in this way. In
this respect I will seek to extend the rhetorical metaphor to encompass
objects, institutions and procedures. But in so doing I am perhaps a little
more content than Billig to settle for the idea that the rhetorical model is
only a metaphor, although the idea that anything is ‘only’ a metaphor is
in fact problematic. Given the centrality of metaphor both to human
thought and psychological knowledge, we can frame this move not as a
resigned settling, as if it will do in the absence of a ‘proper’ theory, but as
a positive and self-conscious commitment. I will not be suggesting that
objects that are incapable of using language are rhetorical in the sense
that they weave arguments from the building blocks of words and
phrases. Rather, emphasising the rhetorical nature of that which at first
appears nonrhetorical enables us better to sustain the rhetorical image of
the person.
To do this, however, is to argue against a different metaphorical way of
seeing the world, which is the physical metaphor used by many of the
‘situationist’ social psychologists of the ‘classical’ tradition of social
psychology that reigned supreme from the 1950s to the 1970s (Branni-
gan, 2004). Milgram’s experiments, which were in many respects the
zenith of this tradition – and certainly the most influential and (in)famous
example of experimental social psychology from this (or any other)
period in the discipline’s history – stand as prime examples of the
physical metaphor. Individuals in Milgram’s laboratory are typically seen
as having been buffeted by forces beyond their control. Milgram himself
talked of the ‘binding factors’ which pressed people into remaining in the
experiment, and of the ‘sources of strain’ which weighed on them, making
their resistance more likely.
Rhetoric as Metaphor 9
The individual is thus essentially the passive victim of these forces.

Agency – even in those participants who manage to extricate themselves
from the experiment – is merely a function of the quasi-physical relations
that obtain in the immediate situation. Such accounts have potentially
troubling political and moral implications insofar as they suggest that, in
certain situations, we are helpless in the face of social pressures, and if
those pressures tend in a certain direction, then atrocities and abuses of
all kinds will be the outcome (Reicher & Haslam, 2006). It is here that
the rhetorical metaphor has some unique advantages in enabling us to see
obedience and defiance in a quite different way in Milgam’s experiment.
Rather than the passive body on which forces weigh, the individual-as-
arguer is persuaded to a greater or lesser degree by the arguments
presented, whether or not these arguments are explicitly articulated.
Participants can thus argue back, though sometimes of course they
will not.
It is in this sense that the approach outlined here can ensure that
the focus on rhetoric and argumentation does not lead to a one-sided
neglect of obedience. It is quite true that a dominant view of Milgram’s
experiments as being demonstrations of overwhelming, passive obedi-
ence has crystallised over the decades and is now well-established
in social psychology textbooks (Griggs, 2017; Griggs & Whitehead,
2015a, b). In seeking to challenge this orthodoxy, a great deal of excit-
ing, creative and scholarly work has been undertaken. Much of this work
has drawn attention to defiance and disobedience in Milgram’s experi-
ments as a way of seeking to overturn the orthodoxy. This is a vital task,
and one to which the present volume also seeks to contribute. But there
is a danger in seeking to set up a new orthodoxy that simply takes the
place of the previous one. In foregrounding defiance and disobedience,
the danger is that we miss something. And what we miss is essentially
that with which Milgram was most concerned – that which, at first
glance, appears to be passive obedience – those participants who do
not resist; those who continue without trying to challenge or argue with
the experimenter. How do we account for such participants in a perspec-
tive that emphasises rhetoric?
My solution is to apply the rhetorical perspective to those experimental
sessions where argumentative discourse appears to be conspicuous by its
absence; where things run smoothly and the participant administers
shocks without needing to be ordered to do so. In so doing, we will not
only need to rethink the obedience experiments, but we will also have to
consider what, precisely, we understand as rhetorical. I will suggest that
not only does a focus on argumentation necessitate a focus on what is not
argued (Billig, 1999), but that we can extend the rhetorical metaphor to
10 Introduction
identify how arguments are embedded in that which at first appears to be

nonrhetorical: in the fabric of the experimental apparatus, in the experi-
mental procedure; in the bodily movements of those in the laboratory. In
this sense, rhetoric is not only to be found in the words used in the
obedience experiments, but in the walls of the laboratory.
Overview
Chapter 1 summarises Milgram’s original programme of research on
obedience, some of the classic lines of critique that it provoked, and
some of the early extensions and replications. In providing an overview
of the most well-known findings from Milgram’s studies, I also highlight
some of the frequently neglected aspects, such as the high rates of
disobedience across the series of experiments as a whole. The chapter
then considers issues concerning the ethics of Milgram’s experiments,
early methodological critiques (e.g. around demand characteristics) and
theoretical issues, noting that even many of Milgram’s most enthusiastic
supporters are not convinced by his theoretical explanation concerning
the ‘agentic state’. Drawing on the oft-noted observation that empirical
work inspired by Milgram ceased in the mid-1980s (Blass, 2004, 2012;
Burger, 2009) and didn’t really get going again until the middle years of
the 2000s, Chapter 1 reviews what we might call the ‘first wave’ of
extensions and replications of Milgram’s studies.
If Chapter 1 dealt with the ‘first wave’ of work inspired by Milgram’s
studies, Chapter 2 considers the more recent work on obedience. Along-
side attempts at partial replication, there have been a number of novel
experimental paradigms and conceptual replications, and renewed
attempts at theorising the phenomena captured in Milgram’s lab.
A novel strand to this ‘new wave’ of critical engagement with the obedi-
ence experiments has come from researchers drawing on the materials
available in Milgram’s archive held at Yale University. This has led to
new insights regarding the ethical, methodological and theoretical issues
raised by the experiments, and has generated new lines of enquiry and
debate. In particular, I will highlight the fascinating insights into the
experiments that can be gleaned from paying attention to the audio
recordings of the experiments. With considerable foresight, Milgram
recorded his experimental sessions, the majority of which survive in the
archives. These provide a rich resource for researchers, and it is these
recordings that form the data for the analyses outlined in Chapters 4–7.
Before getting to the analytic chapters, however, Chapter 3 provides a
detailed overview of the analytic perspective from which I view these
data. Drawing on Michael Billig’s rhetorical approach to social
Overview 11
psychology, as well as key ideas from the related discursive psychology

(Edwards & Potter, 1992; Wiggins, 2017), I focus initially on the value of
paying attention to the explicitly verbal rhetorical aspects of the archived
audio recordings of the experimental sessions, but will also sketch a
preliminary outline of the value of moving towards a wider sense in which
the experiments can be understood as ‘rhetorical’, which while still being
centrally concerned with language use also acknowledges the importance
of nonlinguistic processes. In this chapter I also provide details of the
data used in my analyses. Given the wealth of materials in the archives, it
will be noted that the aim is not to present a comprehensive analysis of all
of Milgram’s conditions, but rather to present a framework for analysis,
together with some of the findings that have been identified through the
use of this framework. Much of the work of analysing Milgram’s data
remains to be done, and my aim here is to provide an impetus to future
work rather than to suggest that I have done all that needs doing myself.
Chapter 4, the first analytic chapter, begins the process of exploring the
data by foregrounding the role of the experimenter. Most treatments of
Milgram’s work have followed Milgram’s own gloss on the experimenter
as having used a restricted and standardised series of ‘prods’ in his efforts
to compel participants to continue with the experiment in the face of the
learner’s protests. However, analysis of the archived audio recordings
suggests a rather more complex picture. The standardised prods were
used far more flexibly than is typically assumed, and indeed many other
verbal and nonverbal tactics (e.g. going to check on the learner in the
next room) were used in an attempt to keep the participant in the experi-
ment. Moreover, the experimenter’s utterances – whether based on the
scripted prods or not – were tailored to the specific context of their use. It
is suggested that this necessitates a reorientation of our understanding of
the experimenter’s role: he was not an impassive authority figure, but
rather his role can be understood as involving persuasion.
The role of the learner has not been foregrounded in extant analyses of
Milgram’s archived data. This is in no small part due to the fact that in
many conditions the learner’s responses during the memory test were
prerecorded on tape. The interaction between experimenter and teacher
therefore unfolded against a backdrop of relatively consistent responses
from the learner. In Chapter 5, however, I argue that things are a little
more complex. By using data from the ‘touch proximity’ condition – part
of Milgram’s ‘proximity’ series of conditions in which the learner was
present in the same room as the experimenter and teacher during the
experimental session – it is shown how the learner’s persistent objections
to his treatment stand in contrast to his more minimal engagements in
other conditions. Specifically, it is shown how in this condition the
12 Introduction
learner could tailor his protests to the precise requirements of the situ-
ation, how he could directly address both teacher and experimenter, and
how the teacher and experimenter could address him. That none of these
behaviours were possible when the learner’s responses were recorded on
tape highlights the oddity of the rhetorical situation in which participants
found themselves, and suggests that Milgram’s findings concerning
proximity miss the important differences in the rhetorical affordances
of the conditions in this series.
Chapter 6 focusses on the arguments employed by naïve participants
as they sought to extricate themselves from the experiments, and on how
different conditions made different rhetorical affordances for partici-
pants. For example, in a condition where naïve participants were joined
by additional confederates whose role involved withdrawing from the
experiment at a predetermined point, these individuals and their acts of
defiance became available as rhetorical resources on which the partici-
pants could subsequently draw in negotiating their own exit from the
experiment. The chapter then considers how participants tailored their
arguments to the specific context in which they found themselves.
Finally, the chapter explores how some strategies that might not ordinar-
ily be thought of as rhetorical can be recast as performing particular
argumentative functions. These include displays of emotion, breaking
conversational norms, and articulating doubts concerning the ‘reality’ of
the experiment. This necessitates moving from a view of Milgram’s
participants as being passive subjects of psychological forces, to one that
conceives of them as being able to actively engage in negotiating the
continuation of the study, and also begins to hint at the necessity of an
expanded conception of rhetoric.
Chapter 7 develops this line of argument by considering how the entire
situation created by Milgram can be understood in rhetorical terms, and
in so doing moves away from considering the way in which defiance was
enacted in order to consider those experimental sessions in which
participants proceeded with the experiment with little or no attempt at
disobedience. This involves highlighting the metaphorical nature of
psychological discourse, and suggesting that existing interpretations of
Milgram’s experiments have tended to use a primarily physical metaphor
in which participants are subject to a number of ‘binding factors’ that
make it difficult for them to extricate themselves from the situation. In
contrast, it will be suggested that the rhetorical conception of the
experiments can be expanded to encompass that which is not said. What
Milgram conceived of in terms of physical forces buffeting a largely
passive participant (e.g. the institutional context of Yale University; the
impressive-looking shock generator; even the experimental procedure
Overview 13
itself ) can instead be understood as rhetorical in that they were geared

towards persuading participants to keep shocking the learner. When the
arguments for continuation were changed in Milgram’s numerous
variations of his experimental procedure, their persuasiveness changed,
too. This is more than merely a cosmetic change in our understanding of
the Milgram experiments, for it involves a key conceptual shift: In
emphasising rhetorical processes over physical ones, this perspective
emphasises agency over passivity. Even those participants who appeared
to go on with the experiment without arguing back can be seen as agents
who have been persuaded, rather than as dull automata engaged in
drone-like behaviour.
Finally, in the Conclusion, I draw together my arguments and analyses
to highlight three conclusions: first, I suggest that social psychology
needs an expanded conception of obedience that takes into account the
extent to which power and authority typically operates through more
banal processes than the issuing of direct orders; second, I build on the
ideas outlined in Chapter 7 to suggest that our expanded conception of
obedience necessitates an expanded conception of rhetoric that allows
for that which may appear to be beyond argument to be conceived of in
rhetorical terms; third, I conclude by summarising some implications for
social psychology itself, with particular attention to what has become
known as the ‘replication crisis’, in which a number of notable social
psychological findings have seemingly failed to survive an encounter with
that cornerstone of the scientific method, replication. The discipline has,
understandably, busied itself with a number of initiatives to try and
address this problem. However, it will be suggested that there is a
narrowness to these initiatives, and indeed to the way in which this latest
‘crisis’ is understood. It will be suggested that rather than simply con-
cerning ourselves with conducting more replications, and with reforming
our disciplinary structures to incentivise this (however valuable this may
be in its own right), the encounter with the recordings of Milgram’s
obedience experiments highlights the extent to which rhetoric and inter-
action are at the heart of experimental practice. Until this is more fully
understood and woven into the disciplinary practice of social psychology,
we can expect more crises to be declared as our idealised view of the
psychology laboratory comes to grief as it encounters the inescapably
social-contextual nature of rhetoric and interaction.
1 The Obedience Experiments
Milgram conducted his obedience experiments from 1961–1962 at Yale

University, and published his first academic paper reporting his findings
in 1963. The reaction was almost instantaneous, with Baumrind’s
(1964) critique and Milgram’s (1964b) response setting the tone for
decades of debate and research. As Kaposi (2017) has suggested, the
reaction to the obedience experiments can be loosely divided into two
‘waves’. A first wave of reaction involved important ethical, methodo-
logical and conceptual debates, and can (again, loosely) be said to have
lasted until the 1980s. Subsequently, there was something of a hiatus,
with a relative paucity of work – especially empirical work – in the 1990s.
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, there was a
reawakening of interest in the experiments, stimulated in part by the
increasing availability of material from the experiments in Milgram’s
archive. In Chapters 1 and 2 I will provide an overview of this work.
In Chapter 2 I will focus on the ‘new wave’ of critique, commentary
and analysis. First however, the present chapter will review the initial
wave of post-Milgram scholarship, as well as providing a summary of
Milgram’s experiments themselves.
In reviewing Milgram’s experiments and the first wave of extensions,
replications and critiques, the aim is not to be comprehensive but rather
to survey the main themes and arguments that are apparent in this rich
literature. Arthur G. Miller (1986) provided the definitive account of the
first 20 or so years of scholarship provoked by Milgram’s studies in his
comprehensive and scholarly book, The Obedience Experiments: A Case
Study of Controversy in Social Science. Miller, of course, has his own
position on the experiments, and it would not be unfair to describe
him as essentially – though not uncritically – of the view that Milgram’s
studies were, and remain, valuable and important contributions to
psychology and the wider social sciences (for a restatement and updating
of his position, see Miller, 2016). Regardless, however, of one’s own
take on the obedience experiments, Miller’s (1986) book remains a
valuable resource.
14
The Experiments 15
In contrast, my approach in the present chapter is necessarily some-

what more selective. In one respect, this is because the job of summary
and review of this work has been made much easier by the simple fact
that others have done it so well elsewhere. In another, equally import-
ant, respect, this is because the burgeoning of a renewed primary and
secondary literature on the obedience experiments has moved things
along considerably. This is not to say that the arguments made in the
first 20 of 30 years of what we might term ‘Milgram scholarship’ are no
longer relevant, and we should always be mindful of ignorance lest we
slip it merely pouring old wine into new bottles. However, as will be
suggested in Chapter 2, the renewed attempts to revisit Milgram empir-
ically, coupled with the increasing focus on the lessons to be drawn
from close scrutiny of Milgram’s archives, add layers of complexity to
the story of the obedience experiments that were simply not possible
until recent years.
A similar argument is necessary in relation to the obedience experi-
ments themselves. Whatever else he was or was not, Milgram was a fine
writer who combined accessibility with gravity in order to produce a
highly readable account of the obedience experiments (Milgram, 1974).
This, together with a handful of earlier empirical papers (Milgram, 1963,
1965a, b), replies and commentaries (1964b, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1983),
and – in a slightly different vein – his documentary film of the experiments
(Milgram, 1965c), constitutes the ‘official’ version of the obedience
experiments. The purpose of providing an introductory summary of
Milgram’s experiments here is not so much to orient readers to what
the experiments were, or what ‘happened’ in them, for – as will be argued
in subsequent chapters – archival researchers have highlighted several
problems with relying on Milgram’s account of the studies. Rather, they
are summarised precisely to provide an overview of Milgram’s account as
an account of his studies. As Griggs and Whitehead (Griggs, 2017; Griggs
& Whitehead, 2015a, b) have recently shown in their analyses of textbook
coverage of the obedience experiments, this account is remarkably
resistant to change and continues to frame the way in which the obedience
experiments are understood. With this is mind, I will now turn to outlin-
ing what we might call the ‘standard story’, or the ‘received account’
of Milgram’s studies. I will begin by outlining the most well known of
Milgram’s experiments.
The Experiments
Milgram’s participants took part in what they were led to believe was a
study of the effects of punishment on learning. Shortly after a participant
had arrived at the laboratory, a second person arrived, and was intro-
duced to them as Mr Wallace. Although it appeared that ‘Mr Wallace’
was another naïve participant, he was in fact a confederate – Jim
McDonough – employed by Milgram. The experimenter – played by
John Williams – explained to the naïve participant and ‘Mr Wallace’
that one of them would take the role of teacher and the other the role of
learner. A rigged selection process took place in which the naïve par-
ticipant was always allocated the role of teacher, and the confederate the
role of learner. The learner was taken to an adjoining room where, as
the teacher looked on, the experimenter strapped electrodes to him in
order that he would be able to receive punishment in the form of
electric shocks.
Returning to the main laboratory, the experimenter asked the teacher
to sit in front of an imposing machine for generating electric shocks. This
machine featured a series of levers for administering the shocks, begin-
ning at 15 volts and rising in 15-volt increments to 450 volts. The
experimenter administered a sample shock of 45 volts to the teacher (this
was the only genuine shock used in the whole experiment), and explained
how the experimental procedure was to work.
The teacher was to read a series of word pairs into a microphone.
These would be heard by the learner in the next room, who would try to
remember the word pairs. The teacher would then need to test the
learner on the word pairs, and would do this by reading the first word
of each pair in turn, followed by four choices. The learner had to indicate
which of the four choices was correct by pressing one of four buttons
which would light up the corresponding response on a box in the main
laboratory. If the response was correct, the teacher was to move on to the
next item in the test. If, however, it was incorrect, he was to administer an
electric shock as punishment for the error. To do this he had to say
‘wrong’, then state the voltage to be delivered, press the appropriate
shock lever, and then read the correct answer to the learner.
The learner provided his responses according to a preset order that
ensured that he would get many of the word pairs incorrect. As the
experiment unfolded, it therefore quickly became apparent to the naïve
participants that the learner was going to require increasingly strong
shocks. At 75 volts the learner began to yelp following the administration
of the shock, and the intensity of these exclamations escalated until he
demanded to be released following the 150-volt shock. If participants
continued, the protests continued, becoming more aggravated until the
learner refused to answer following the 300-volt shock. From 345 volts
onwards, each successive shock was met only with silence, leading
participants to assume that the learner was unconscious, or worse.
The Experiments 17
If at any point during the experimental session the participant hesitated

or refused to continue, the experimenter had a series of ‘prods’ at his
disposal that he could use in an attempt to get the participant to continue
with the experiment. Four of these were sequential prods, and were to be
used in order and started afresh for each new attempt at resistance:
Prod 1: Please continue, or, Please go on.
Prod 2: The experiment requires that you continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: You have no other choice, you must go on.
(Milgram, 1974, p. 21, italics in original)
Only when a participant had successfully defied the fourth prod was an
experimental session terminated. In addition, the experimenter could
use two ‘special’ prods to answer specific queries from participants as
appropriate. These were: ‘Although the shocks may be painful, there is
no permanent tissue damage, so please go on’ (Milgram, 1974) and
‘Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned
all the word pairs correctly. So please go on’ (Milgram, 1974, p. 22). If
participants continued to 450 volts, the experimenter continued with the
test until they had administered this shock three times and then discon-
tinued the experimental session. Such participants were recorded as
obedient, with those who managed to resist sufficiently to draw the
experiment to a close recorded as disobedient.
Other Experimental Conditions

The procedure outlined above is well known, in no small part due to its
prominence in Milgram’s (1965c) film of his experiments. It was used as
the basis of four conditions of the experiments: ‘voice-feedback’, ‘a new
baseline’, ‘change of personnel’ and ‘women as subjects’. The ‘new base-
line’ and ‘change of personnel’ conditions added a heart condition for the
learner, which he raised with the experimenter while having the electrodes
strapped to his arm, and then again as he was protesting at various points
during the experiment. ‘Change of personnel’, as its name implies, used
the same procedure but featured different confederates in the roles of
teacher and learner, and ‘women as subjects’, again as implied by its (now
rather dated) name, was the only condition in which women took part.
However, this well-known procedure is only one of many variations
used by Milgram. In an attempt to identify and test several factors
that may influence obedience, Milgram ran numerous variations of
his experiment. His first publication on the obedience experiments
(Milgram, 1963) outlined what became known as the ‘remote’ condition.
Table 1.1 Summary of obedience rates in Milgram’s (1974) experimental

conditions
Condition number and name Obedience % (N)
1. Remote-victim 65 (26/40)
2. Voice-feedback 62.5 (25/40)
3. Proximity 40 (16/40)
4. Touch-proximity 30 (12/40)
5. A new baseline 65 (26/40)
6. Change of personnel 50 (20/40)
7. Closeness of authority 20.5 (9/40)
8. Women as subjects 65 (26/40)
9. The victim’s limited contract 40 (16/40)
10. Institutional context 47.5 (19/40)
11. Subject free to choose shock level 2.5 (1/40)
12. Learner demands to be shocked 0 (0/20)
13. An ordinary man gives orders 20 (4/20)
13a. The subject as bystander 68.75 (11/16)
14. Authority as victim: An ordinary man commanding 0 (0/20)
15. Two authorities: Contradictory commands 0 (0/20)
16. Two authorities: One as victim 65 (13/20)
17. Two peers rebel 10 (4/40)
18. A peer administers shocks 92.50 (37/40)
In this version, the experiment proceeds along similar lines to those

described above, but instead of the repeated verbal protests from the
learner, there is instead only a pounding on the walls following the 300-
volt shock.
Table 1.1 presents a summary of obedience rates in Milgram’s (1974)
experimental conditions. The signature findings from Milgram’s studies
are typically identified as the initial finding of 65 per cent obedience in
the ‘remote’ condition (Milgram, 1963), and the finding that the add-
ition of repeated verbal protests did not reduce obedience, yielding 62.5
per cent obedience in the ‘voice-feedback’ condition, and 65 per cent in
the ‘new baseline’ condition, which was replicated in the only condition
in which women took part (‘women as subjects’), also yielding a 65 per
cent obedience rate.
The number of conditions in which defiance was more common than
obedience is notable. In 11 out of the 19 conditions (or 10 out of 17 if we
discount conditions 11 and 13a, in which the dependent measure was
not really comparable with that used in the other conditions), defiant
participants outnumbered obedient ones. The mean rate of obedience
was thus 39.17 per cent (or 39.59% excluding 11 and 13a), and the total
number of obedient participants was 265 out of 636 (or 253 out
The Experiments 19
of 580 excluding 11 and 13a; see also Haslam, Loughnan & Perry, 2014
for a meta-analytic overview of Milgram’s experimental conditions). We
should be wary of making too much of this given that Milgram explicitly
aimed to vary the factors that would make obedience more or less likely,
and as such the observation that most participants across all conditions
were actually defiant does not stand as a challenge to the basic finding
that in the ‘standard’ conditions obedience rates were rather high, but
nevertheless it serves as a useful reminder that there is much more to the
experiments than the classic 65 per cent finding.
Milgram (1974) outlined the results of his experimental conditions in
four thematic stages: conditions 1–4 deal with the proximity of the
victim, conditions 5–11 deal with ‘further variations and controls’
(p. 55), conditions 12–16 with variations in the experimental roles and
conditions 17–18 with the influence of group processes. In order to
contextualise the information provided in Table 1.1 it is worth briefly
outlining each of these four sets of conditions.
Proximity
The proximity series consisted of the remote condition first outlined by
Milgram (1963), together with the voice-feedback, proximity and touch-
proximity conditions. The results of this series of experiments was first
reported by Milgram (1965a), and is typically held to show how bringing
the learner physically (and psychologically) closer to the teacher increases
the pressure on the perpetrator and thus results in reduced obedience.
The remote and voice-feedback conditions were outlined above, and it
was also noted that the introduction of verbal protests in the voice-
feedback condition did not notably reduce obedience from the remote
condition. However, arguably the key conditions in this series are the
proximity and touch-proximity conditions. In both these conditions, the
learner was seated in the same room as the teacher, and thus the teacher
was more immediately confronted with the learner’s apparent pain and
anguish. In the touch-proximity condition, the teacher also had to phys-
ically hold the learner’s hand down onto a shock plate in order that the
punishment could be administered. These conditions resulted in
reduced levels of obedience (see Table 1.1).
Further Variations and Controls

As Milgram (1974) notes, he had to move laboratories during his experi-
ments. Condition 5 (‘a new baseline’) represents his attempt to replicate
what he by now appeared to consider the baseline finding against which
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Platoons
Phaidoon
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you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Platoons Phaidoon

Uit het Grieksch overgebracht
Author: Plato
Translator: P. C. Boutens
Release date: August 26, 2023 [eBook #71489]
Language: Dutch
Original publication: Amsterdam: Maatschappij voor Goede en

Goedkoope Lectuur, 1919
Credits: Wouter Franssen and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The
Hague)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLATOONS

PHAIDOON ***
PLATOONS PHAIDOON
WERELD BIBLIOTHEEK
Onder leiding van L. Simons.
UITGEGEVEN DOOR:
DE MAATSCHAPPIJ VOOR GOEDE EN GOEDKOOPE LECTUUR ·
AMSTERDAM
PLATOONS PHAIDOON
UIT HET GRIEKSCH OVERGEBRACHT
DOOR
P. C. BOUTENS
1919
GEDRUKT TER DRUKKERIJ „DE DEGEL” — AMSTERDAM
PERSONEN
Echekrates
Phaidoon
Apollodoros
Sokrates
Kebes
Simmias
Kritoon
Dienaar der Elfmannen.
PLATOONS PHAIDOON
57 Echekrates: Zijt gij zelf, o Phaidoon, bij Sokrates geweest
dien dag waarop hij het gif dronk in de gevangenis? Of hebt gij het
van iemand anders gehoord?
Phaidoon: Ik ben er zelf bij geweest, o Echekrates.
Echekrates: Welke dingen heeft de man dan wel gezegd vóor
zijn dood? En hoe was zijn sterven? Mij zoû het een genot zijn dit te
vernemen. Want het komt tegenwoordig niet veel voor, dat een
mijner medeburgers uit Phlioes te Athenai zich ophoudt, en ook is
B langen-tijd-aan-éen geen gastvriend vandaar aangekomen, die
ons iets zekers omtrent deze dingen zoû hebben kunnen berichten,
—behalve dan dat hij gif gedronken had en zoo gestorven was. Maar
verdere bizonderheden kon hij ons niet geven.
58 Phaidoon: Hebt gij dan ook niet van het geding gehoord, hoe
het daarmeê geloopen is?
Echekrates: Zeker, dat heeft iemand ons bericht. En, o ja, wij
verwonderden ons, dat hij veel later, lang nadat het geding
afgeloopen was, gestorven blijkt te zijn. Hoe kwam dat, Phaidoon?
Phaidoon: Een uitzonderlijk toeval, o Echekrates. Juist toch op
den dag vóor het proces was de achtersteven bekranst van het schip
dat de Atheners naar Delos zenden.
Echekrates: Wat is daarmeê?
Phaidoon: Dat is het schip waarop, naar de Atheners zeggen,
B Theseus indertijd naar Kreta die bekende zeven paren wegvoerde
en weêr behouden mede-terug-bracht. Aan Apolloon nu deden zij,
zooals verhaald wordt, toen de gelofte om, als zij behouden zouden
terugkeeren, elk jaar uit dankbaarheid een feestgezantschap naar
Delos te zenden, dat de Atheners van-toen-af ook nu nog altijd
jaarlijks den god plechtig sturen. Wanneer zij nu een aanvang
gemaakt hebben met de feestzending, moet, naar een wet van hen,
de stad in dien tijd rein zijn en mag men niemand van-staats-wegen
ter-dood-brengen, vóordat het schip in Delos en weêr terug is
aangekomen. Daarmeê gaat nu-en-dan een lange tijd heen,
C wanneer winden hen bij-geval van de vaart houden. De aanvang
der feestzending is het oogenblik wanneer de priester van Apolloon
den achtersteven van het schip bekranst heeft. En dat, zooals ik zeg,
was juist op den dag vóor het rechtsgeding geschied. Daarom heeft
Sokrates ook langen tijd in de gevangenis doorgebracht, tusschen
geding en terechtstelling.
Echekrates: En hoe is het bij zijn dood zelf toegegaan, o
Phaidoon? Wat is er gesproken en gebeurd, en wie van ’s mans
bekenden waren tegenwoordig? Of lieten de bewindvoerders hun
niet toe erbij te zijn, maar is hij eenzaam van vrienden gestorven?
D Phaidoon: Geenerwijs. Er waren erbij tegenwoordig, en wel
velen.
Echekrates: Wees dan zoo vriendelijk ons van dat alles zoo
nauwkeurig mogelijk verslag te geven, of gij moest eenige andere
bezigheid hebben.
Phaidoon: Wel ik hèb den tijd, en zal beproeven het voor u te
doorloopen. Want om mij Sokrates te herinneren, zoowel als ik zelf
over hem spreek als wanneer ik dat een ander hoor doen, is mij
steeds van alles aangenaamst.
Echekrates: Gij kunt ervan op-aan, Phaidoon, dat gij ook zulke
luisteraars zult hebben. Doch tracht zoo nauwkeurig als gij kunt,
alles uiteen te zetten.
E Phaidoon: Ziet, ik-voor-mij heb onder het bijwonen eene
wonderlijke ervaring gehad. Want aan den éenen kant kwam geen
gevoel van medelijden bij mij op als men verwachten zoû bij den
dood van een bevriend man. Want gelukzalig kwam mij de man voor,
o Echekrates, zoowel van gedraging als van woorden: hoe
onbevreesd en eêlgemoed hij eindigde. Zoodat ik den indruk kreeg,
dat hij óok nu hij naar het huis van Hades ging, niet ging buiten
goddelijke beschikking, maar dat hij ook wanneer hij daar gekomen
59zoû zijn, het goed zoû hebben zoo nog ooit eenig ander. Daarom
had ik heelemaal geen gevoel van deernis als natuurlijk zoû lijken in
den bijwoner van een rouwtooneel. Maar anderszins ontbrak ook de
genieting van bezig te zijn met wijsbegeerte gelijk wij die plachten te
hebben—de gesprekken toch waren van die soort—, maar een
eenvoudigweg onverbeeldbaar gevoel was mij bij en een ongewone
menging uit genot tegelijk samengesteld, en uit smart, zoo vaak ik
bedacht dat hij op het oogenblik zoû moeten sterven. En alle
B aanwezigen waren wij vrijwel in dien toestand, nu-eens lachend,
dan-weêr weenend, en éen van ons zelfs onderscheidenlijk,
Apollodoros. Gij kent den man immers wel en zijn aard?
Echekrates: Hoe zoû ik niet?
Phaidoon: Hij dan nu was geheel in dien staat, en ook ik zelf was
geschokt en de overigen.
Echekrates: En wie waren zoo al tegenwoordig, Phaidoon?
Phaidoon: Deze dan, Apollodoros, was erbij van de menschen uit
de stad, en Kritoboelos en zijn vader, en verder Hermogenes en
Epigenes en Aischines en Antisthenes. En ook was er Ktesippos uit
den demos Paiania en Menexenos en eenige andere der
landgenooten. Platoon, meen ik, was ziek.
C Echekrates: En waren er sommigen van buiten?
Phaidoon: Ja, Simmias uit Thebai en Kebes en Phaidoondes, en
uit Megara Eukleides en Terpsioon.
Echekrates: Hoe nu? Waren Aristippos en Kleombrotos niet
tegenwoordig?
Phaidoon: Neen, bepaald niet. Want men zeî nog, dat zij op
Aigina waren.
Echekrates: Was er nog iemand anders?
Phaidoon: Ik denk dat dat vrijwel zijn wie tegenwoordig waren.
Echekrates: Hoe dan verder? Welke, zegt gij, waren de
gesprekken?
D Phaidoon: Ik zal alles met u van het begin af trachten door te
gaan. Voortdurend namelijk, ook de voorafgaande dagen, waren wij
gewoon Sokrates te bezoeken zoowel ik als de overigen. Wij
kwamen dan ’s morgens vroeg bijeen in de gerechtszaal waar ook
het geding plaats gehad had; want die was vlak bij de gevangenis.
Wij wachtten daar dan telkens tot de gevangenis geopend werd, en
onderhielden ons met elkander; want zij ging niet vroeg open. En
wanneer opengedaan was, gingen wij naar binnen tot Sokrates en
brachten meest den heelen dag met hem door. Ook waren wij dien
dag vroeger samengekomen. Want den vorigen dag toen wij ’s
E avonds uit de gevangenis gekomen waren, hadden wij vernomen
dat het schip uit Delos aangekomen was. Wij spraken derhalve met
elkander af om zoo vroeg mogelijk naar de gewone plaats te komen.
Toen wij er dan waren, kwam de deurwachter die ons placht open te
doen, naar buiten en zeide ons te wachten en niet eerder te komen
aankloppen, totdat hij zelf ons binnennooden zoû. Want, zeî hij, de
elfmannen zijn bezig Sokrates te ontboeien en kondigen hem aan,
hoe hij dezen dag zal moeten sterven. Niet langen tijd nu wachtte hij
60 van te komen en verzocht ons binnen te gaan. Wij traden
derhalve binnen en vonden Sokrates pas ontboeid en Xanthippe—gij
kent haar immers?—naast hem gezeten, met zijn zoontje bij zich.
Toen nu Xanthippe ons zag, jammerde zij luide en zeide dergelijke
dingen als vrouwen gewoon zijn: o Sokrates, dit is nu de laatste
maal, dat gij en uw vrienden elkander zult toespreken! En Sokrates
zag naar Kritoon en zeî: o Kritoon, laat iemand haar naar huis
brengen. En haar leidden enkele van Kritoons mannen weg, terwijl
B zij luid weende en rouwmisbaar maakte. Onderhand ging
Sokrates op zijn bed overeind zitten en trok zijn been op en wreef
het met de hand, en zeide al wrijvende: Wat een vreemd ding, o
mannen, lijkt dat te zijn wat de menschen ’t aangename noemen!
Hoe wonderlijk verhoudt het zich van-nature tegenover zijn
algemeen erkend tegengestelde, het smartelijke, dat beide tegelijk
niet bij den mensch willen wezen, maar dat als men het éene
najaagt en krijgt, men zoo goed als gedwongen wordt ook het
tweede te krijgen, alsof zij hoewel zij twee blijven, met éen toppunt
C aan elkander zijn vastgemaakt. En mij komt het voor, zeide hij, dat
Aisopos, als hij op hen bedacht ware geweest, er een fabel van zoû
samengesteld hebben, dat de godheid met de bedoeling om hen in
hun vijandschap te verzoenen, toen hij dat niet kon, hunne
toppunten aan-éen heeft geknoopt, en dat daarom bij wien het éene
gekomen is, later ook het tweede volgt. Zooals het nu ook bij mij
zelven lijkt: nadat tengevolge van de boei in mijn been het pijnlijke
was, blijkt nu daar-achteraan-vast te komen het aangename.
Kebes nam nu het woord en zeide: Bij Zeus, o Sokrates, dat is
D goed van u, dat gij er mij aan herinnert! Want omtrent de verzen
toch, die gij gemaakt hebt door de fabelen van Aisopos op maat te
brengen en het proëem te dichten op Apolloon, hebben mij sommige
anderen reeds gevraagd, doch een paar dagen geleden ook
Euenos, met welke bedoeling gij, nadat gij hier gekomen waart, hen
vervaardigd hebt, terwijl gij vroeger nog nooit iets gedicht hebt. Als
gij er derhalve belang in stelt, dat ik Euenos antwoord kan geven,
wanneer hij het weêr vraagt—want ik weet wel dat hij het vragen zal
—, zeg mij wat ik moet zeggen.—Zeg hem dan de waarheid, o
Kebes, dat ik die niet gemaakt heb met den wil om een kunst-
E mededinger te zijn van hem en zijne gedichten. Want ik wist dat
dit niet gemakkelijk zoû zijn. Maar om zekerheid te hebben omtrent
de bedoeling van bepaalde droomen en een onbezwaard geweten te
hebben, indien misschien dit de moezische kunst was, welke die
droomen mij herhaaldelijk opdroegen te vervaardigen. Zij waren
namelijk van den volgenden aard. Vele malen bezocht mij dezelfde
droom in mijn voorbije leven, nu onder dit, dan onder dat gezicht
verschijnende, maar met dezelfde boodschap: o Sokrates,
vervaardig moezische kunst en houd u daarmeê bezig. En ik
61 veronderstelde in den voorafgaanden tijd, dat de droom mij
aanspoorde en bijval toeriep om dat te doen waarmeê ik bezig was,
evenals toeschouwers in de renbaan de loopers aanmoedigen,—dat
ook zoo de droom mij toejuichend aanspoorde te doen wat ik al
deed, moezische kunst maken, daar philosofie, als ik meende, de
grootste moezische kunst was, en ik mij daarmede bezig hield. Maar
nu, nadat het proces afgeloopen was, en tegelijk het feest van den
god verhinderde dat ik stierf, meende ik dat, indien de droom mij
weder herhaaldelijk mocht opdragen die moezische kunst, nu-dan
naar de gemeene volksopvatting, te vervaardigen, ik den droom niet
ongehoorzaam mocht wezen, maar behoorde te dichten. Want ik
B dacht, dat het veiliger was niet heen te gaan, vóor ik mij gereinigd
had van de verplichting om gedichten te maken, en zoo den droom
gehoorzaam te zijn. Zoo heb ik dan in de eerste plaats een lied
gemaakt op den god wiens offerfeest het was, en na den god heb ik,
bedenkende dat een dichter, zal hij werkelijk dichter zijn, verzinselen
en geen feiten behoort te dichten, omdat ik zelf geen fabelverzinner
was, de fabelen die ik bij de hand had en uit mijn hoofd kende, de
fabelen van Aisopos, op maat gebracht, de eerste waar ik op kwam.
Zeg dit derhalve, o Kebes, aan Euenos, en dat het hem welga, en
C dat hij, als hij verstandig is, mij zoo spoedig mogelijk volge. Want
ik zal, naar het schijnt, vandaag heengaan. De Atheners toch
gebieden het.—En Simmias zeide: Wat is dat voor eene aanmaning,
o Sokrates, aan Euenos?... Want reeds vele malen heb ik den man
ontmoet. Uit wat ik nu waargenomen heb, is het vrijwel zeker, dat hij
uit-eigen-wil geenerwijs uw raad zal opvolgen.—Wat zegt gij daar? Is
Euenos geen wijsgeer?—Mij dunkt van-wel, zeide Simmias.—Dan
zal hij dat gaarne doen, zoowel Euenos als ieder die daaraan
waardiglijk deel heeft. Toch zal hij niet waarschijnlijk geweld aan
zichzelf plegen; want dat is niet geoorloofd, zegt men.—Onder ’t
D zeggen van deze woorden liet hij zijn beenen op den grond neêr,
en van dat oogenblik voerde hij zoo gezeten het gesprek.—Kebes
nu vroeg hem: Hoe bedoelt gij dit, Sokrates, dat het niet geoorloofd
is geweld aan zichzelf te plegen, maar dat toch de wijsgeer met den
stervende graag zoû meêgaan?—Wat, Kebes, hebt gij en Simmias
die bij Philolaos in de leer zijt geweest, hieromtrent niet gehoord?—
Niets zekers tenminste, o Sokrates.—Ook ik-voor-mij praat er maar
van-hooren-zeggen over. Doch wat ik bij-geval gehoord heb, heb ik
geen enkele reden te verzwijgen. Immers, past het wel, vooral nu ik
E op het punt sta daarheen af te reizen, eens verstandelijk na te
gaan en in woorden uit te beelden, wat-voor meening wij hebben
omtrent de reis daarheen. En ook—wat zoû men anders doen in den
tijd tot den ondergang der zon?
—Op welken grond dan toch wel beweert men, dat het niet
geoorloofd is zichzelf te dooden, o Sokrates? Want ik heb (waarnaar
gij mij zoo-even vraagdet) ook van Philolaos, toen die bij ons
verkeerde, en ook al van verscheidene anderen gehoord, dat men
dit niet mag doen. Maar iets beredeneerd-nauwkeurigs heb ik nog
62 nooit van iemand erover gehoord.—Houd maar goeden moed,
zeide hij, want misschien zult gij het nog wel hooren.... Het zal u
evenwel denkelijk wonderlijk schijnen, dat dit alleen onder alle
dingen eenvoudig vaststaat en nooit voor den mensch van
omstandigheden afhangt zooals de andere dingen wel: het zal u
misschien wonderlijk voorkomen, zeg ik, dat, hoewel het
verscheidenen op verscheidene tijden beter is dood te zijn dan te
leven, het dien menschen wien het beter is dood te zijn, niet oorbaar
is zichzelf wel te doen, maar zij een anderen weldoener moeten
afwachten.—En Kebes glimlachte even en: Dat weet Deus, zeide hij
B in zijn eigen tongval.—Het zoû ook om-zoo-te hooren, zeide
Sokrates, onverklaarbaar kunnen klinken, maar niettemin heeft het
wellicht eenigen grond. De verklaring nu die ons hieromtrent in de
oude mysteriën gegeven wordt, dat wij menschen in een soort van
gevangenschap zijn, en dat men zich uit deze niet mag bevrijden en
niet wegloopen, lijkt mij een groote-bewering te zijn en niet
gemakkelijk om te doorzien. Doch in-elk-geval schijnt mij het
volgende terecht beweerd te worden, dat het de goden zijn, die voor
ons zorg dragen, en dat de menschen voor de goden een hunner
C bezittingen zijn. Of denkt gij er niet zoo over?—Ja zeker, zeide
Kebes.—Zoudt nu ook gij niet, indien een uwer slaven zichzelf
doodde zonder aanwijzing van u dat gij dit wildet, boos op hem zijn
en hem straffen als gij kondt?—Voorzeker.—Misschien is het dan op
dezelfde wijze niet ongegrond, dat men zelf zich niet eerder mag in
den dood begeven, vóor de godheid een-of-andere noodzakelijkheid
op ons afzendt, zooals nu in ons geval.—Wel, dit althans komt mij
waarschijnlijk voor. Wat gij evenwel daar-straks zeidet, dat de
D wijsgeeren reede zouden willen sterven, dat lijkt vreemd,
Sokrates, indien wat wij zoo-juist beweerden steek houdt, dat het
namelijk de godheid is die voor ons zorgdraagt, en dat wij zijne
bezittingen zijn. Want dat het den verstandigsten geen leed zoû
doen heen te gaan uit deze dienstbaarheid waarin over hen gesteld
zijn die de beste toezieners zijn van alle bestaande, de goden, heeft
geen zin. Want zoo-een meent allicht niet, dat hij, vrij geworden, zelf
beter voor zich zorgen zal. Maar een ònverstandig mensch
waarschijnlijk zal dit denken, dat hij weg moet loopen van zijn heer,
E en zal niet berekenen dat men van zijn góeden heer tenminste
niet mag wegloopen, maar boven-al bij hem behoort te blijven,
omdat het onzinnig zoû zijn weg te loopen. Doch een verstandig
man zal allicht begeeren voor altijd bij zijnen betere te zijn. En toch,
zoo schijnt het tegenovergestelde waar te zijn van wat daarnet
beweerd werd: de verstandigen behooren bedroefd te zijn bij hun
sterven, de onverstandigen blij.—Op het hooren hiervan had
63 Sokrates, kwam mij voor, genoegen in Kebes’ gevatheid. Hij
wierp ons een blik toe en zeide: Altijd toch spoort Kebes een-of-
andere tegenwerping op, en wil zich nooit erg gauw laten overtuigen
van wat men ook beweert.—En Simmias sprak: Maar nu toch, o
Sokrates, vind ik ook zelf, dat Kebes iets van belang beweert. Want
met welke bedoeling zouden naar-waarheid wijze mannen heeren
die hun beteren zijn, willen ontloopen en zich lichtvaardig van hen
ontdoen? Ook komt het mij voor, dat Kebes in zijn woorden op ù
B doelt, dat gij het zoo licht opneemt, zoowel om ons te verlaten als
goede bestuurderen, zooals gij zelf toegeeft, de goden.—Gij vraagt
uw recht, zeide hij. Want uwe bedoeling is, meen ik, dat ik mij
daaromtrent behoor te verdedigen als voor een gerecht.—Ja juist,
zeide Simmias.
—Welaan dan, zeide hij, laat ik trachten met meer overtuigenden
uitslag mij tegenover u te verdedigen dan tegenover mijne eerste
rechters. Indien ik namelijk, o Simmias en Kebes, niet meende te
zullen komen vooreerst tot andere goede en wijze goden, en verder
tot gestorven menschen, betere dan die hier zijn, zoude het zondig
van mij wezen niet bedroefd te zijn om mijn dood. Maar nu, weet
C wel, dat ik hoop te zullen komen tot goede menschen,—en dit wil
ik nog niet zoo zeker beweren,.... dat ik evenwel tot goden zal
komen, die zeer goede heeren voor mij zullen zijn, weet wel dat ik,
zoo eenig ander ding van dien aard, dit zoû durven verzekeren.
Zoodat ik daarom geen reden heb bedroefd te zijn, maar welgemoed
ben, dat er voor de menschen na hun dood nog iets bestaat, en
zooals ook vanouds overgeleverd wordt, iets dat veel beter is voor
de goeden dan voor de slechten.—Hoe dan, Sokrates, zeide
D Simmias, zijt gij van-plan heen te gaan en deze overtuiging voor
uzelf te houden, of zult gij ons haar mededeelen? Want het komt mij
voor, dat dit een goed is, waar ook wij recht op hebben, en tegelijk
zal het u voor verdediging gelden, wanneer gij ons overtuigt van wat
gij zegt.—Ik zal het beproeven, zeide hij. Maar laten wij eerst zien
wat Kritoon hier wil. Het komt mij voor, dat hij al geruimen tijd iets te
zeggen had.—Niets anders, o Sokrates, zeide Kritoon, dan dat de
man die u het gif zal toedienen, mij voortdurend zegt, dat ik u moet
beduiden zoo weinig mogelijk te praten. Want, zegt hij, bij het praten
maken de menschen zich warm meer dan goed is, en zoo-iets mag
E heelemaal niet gebeuren bij het drinken van den giftbeker, en als
men niet naar hem luistert, zijn menschen die zoo-iets doen,
somtijds gedwongen twee-, ja driemaal te drinken.—En Sokrates
zeide: Laat hem praten. Als hij maar zijn eigen werk in orde brengt,
alsof hij dan tweemaal, of als het noodig mocht zijn, zelfs driemaal
zal moeten toedienen.—Ik wist uw antwoord al vooruit, zeî Kritoon.
Maar de man is lastig.—Laat hem, zeide hij.
Maar tegenover u dan, mijne rechters, wil ik nu mijne
verantwoording afleggen, dat ik op goede gronden meen, dat een
man die zijn leven inderdaad in wijsbegeerte heeft doorgebracht,
64 goedsmoeds is op het oogenblik van zijn dood en goederhoop,
dat hij daarginds de grootste goede dingen zal behalen, wanneer hij
gestorven is. Hoe dit zoo komt te zijn, o Simmias en Kebes, zal ik
trachten u duidelijk te maken. Het heeft er namelijk veel van, dat van
allen zoovelen zich ordelijk toeleggen op wijsbegeerte, de overigen
niet bemerken, dat zij-voor-zich niets anders bestreven dan sterven
en dood-zijn. Indien dit nu de waarheid is, zoû het natuurlijk
ongerijmd zijn van hen, in hun geheele leven niets anders dan dit te
bestreven en dan, wanneer juist datgene komt, waarvan zij al-lang
hun dagelijksch streven maakten, mistroostig te zijn.—En Simmias
B zeide lachend: Bij Zeus, o Sokrates, ik ben op het oogenblik niet
erg tot lachen gestemd, maar gij doet mij lachen. Want ik meen, dat
de gemeene luiden die dit hoorden, zouden vinden, dat juist dit erg
van pas gezegd was aan het adres der wijsgeeren, en het zouden
beamen, de menschen bij ons vooral, dat inderdaad de wijsgeeren
naar den dood hunkeren, en verdienen zoo te varen, en dat zij dit
heel goed van hen merken.—Dan zouden zij de waarheid zeggen, o
Simmias, behalve de bewering, dat zij het zouden merken. Want het
ontgaat hun, hoe naar den dood hunkeren en hoe en welken dood
C verdienen de waarachtige philosofen. Doch laten wij dien anderen
vaarwel zeggen en praten alleen lettend op onszelven.
Meenen wij, dat de dood iets bepaalds is?—Zeker, gaf Simmias
daarop ten antwoord.—Wel iets anders dan de scheiding der ziel
van het lichaam? En dat dood-zijn dit is, dat éenszijds het lichaam
van de ziel afgescheiden iets op-zich-zelfs komt te zijn, en
anderszijds de ziel van het lichaam gescheiden op-zich-zelf is?
Bestaat er soms kans, dat de dood iets anders zoû zijn dan dit?—
Neen, dit alleen, zeide hij.—Ga dan even na, mijn waarde, of ook gij
over het volgende denkt als ik. Want hiervan uitgaande zullen wij tot
D beter inzicht komen in de dingen waarover wij redeneeren.... Lijkt
het u eens wijsgeers bezigheid te zijn ernst te maken met zulke
zoogenaamde genietingen als die van eten en drinken?—Allerminst,
o Sokrates, zeî Simmias.—En verder de lusten-in-liefde?—
Geenerwijs.—En verder,.... lijkt u de zoodanige de overige
dienstplegingen betreffende het lichaam van-waarde te houden, als
de verwervingen van keur-onderscheiden opperkleederen en
schoeiselen en de overige uiterlijk-vermooiingen betreffende het
E lichaam?.... denkt gij, dat hij ze van-waarde zal achten of
waardelóos voor-zoo-ver er geen groote noodzakelijkheid bestaat er
deel aan te hebben?—Ik denk, dat hij ze waardeloos acht, tenminste
de waarachtige wijsgeer.—Dunkt u dan niet over-’t-geheel de
leefbezigheid van den zoodanige niet te gaan om het lichaam, maar
zooveel als kan, zich daarvan op een afstand te houden en naar de
zijde der ziel gericht te zijn?—Ja.—Valt het derhalve soms (in de
65 eerste plaats in dergelijke zaken) van den wijsgeer in ’t licht, dat
hij zooveel mogelijk de ziel tracht los te maken van hare
gemeenschap met het lichaam op een van de overige menschen
verschillende wijze?—Het schijnt zoo.—En daarom natuurlijk lijkt
het, o Simmias, aan de groote menigte der menschen, dat hij wien
niets van dergelijke dingen genot geeft en die geen deel aan hen
heeft, niet waard is te leven, maar dat heel dicht aan dood-zijn reikt
de man die zich niet kommert om de lusten die door het lichaam
heen ons bereiken.—Gij zegt de volle waarheid.— —Maar hoe staat
het dan met de verwerving zelve van inzicht? Is het lichaam een
B voetstoot of niet, wanneer men het bij het zoeken daarnaar als
speurgenoot met zich medeneemt? Ik bedoel bij-voorbeeld het
volgende: Heeft gezicht en gehoor voor de menschen wel eenige
waarachtigheid? Of zijn maar praatjes-voor-den-vaak, ook van de
dichters, diergelijke beweringen die zij ons aldoor houden, dat wij
met nauwkeurigheid noch iets hooren noch zien? Toch, als van de
lichamelijke waarnemingen deze niet nauwkeurig en niet zeker zijn,
zijn de andere het niet-licht; want alle zijn zij wel gebrekkiger. Of
vindt gij van-niet?—Neen, bepaald van-wel.—Wanneer derhalve
beroert de ziel de waarheid? Wanneer zij immers in gezelschap van
het lichaam iets tracht te onderzoeken, dan wordt zij, dat is duidelijk,
C daardoor misleid.—Gij spreekt de waarheid.—Wordt derhalve
niet, zoo ergens anders, in het denken iets van de werkelijkheid haar
eigen?—Ja.—En denkt zij misschien dan schóonst, wanneer niets
van deze dingen haar hindert, noch gehoor, noch gezicht, noch pijn,
noch eenige lust, maar wanneer zij zooveel mogelijk op-zich-zelf
komt te zijn en het lichaam aan zijn lot overlaat en, zooveel zij kan,
daar geen deel aan neemt en er niet meê in aanraking is, en dan
naar de waarheid reikt?—Dat is zoo.—Schat derhalve ook daarbij de
ziel van den wijsgeer het lichaam niet ten zeerste waardeloos en
D vlucht er vandaan en zoekt op-zich-zelf alleen te zijn?—Dat is
helder.——En wat dunkt u verder van het volgende: Beweren wij dat
het begrip rechtvaardig iets bestaands is of niets?—Voorzeker bij
Zeus.—En het begrip schoon en het begrip goed?—Hoe niet?—Hebt
gij dan wel ooit eenig van diergelijke dingen met uw oogen gezien?
—Geenszins, zeide hij.—Maar hebt gij met eenige andere der door
het lichaam heengaande waarnemingen hen beroerd? Ik bedoel alle
E dingen als grootte, gezondheid, kracht, in-éen-woord het wezen
van de gezamenlijke overige dingen, wat elk afzonderlijk eigenlijk is.
Wordt door het lichaam heen hun waarachtigste wezen
aanschouwd? Of is het er zóo meê: wie van ons zich toelegt om het
wezen van elk ding afzonderlijk waar hij onderzoek naar doet, meest
en nauwgezetst met de gedàchte te doorgronden, zal díe wel het
naast komen tot de bewustwording van elk afzonderlijk?—Volslagen
zoo.—Zal derhalve die man dat het zuiverst doen, die zooveel
mogelijk met de gedachte zelve op elk ding afgaat zonder het
66 gezicht bij het doordenken erbij te nemen, noch eenig ander
zintuig bij de overweging erbij te halen, maar die met de
zonnezuivere gedachte op-zich-zelf ieder ding zonnezuiver op-zich-
zelf tracht na te jagen van de bestaande dingen, na zich zooveel
mogelijk ontdaan te hebben van oogen en ooren en om-zoo-te-

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Textbook Arguing Obeying and Defying A Rhetorical Perspective On Stanley Milgrams Obedience Experiments Stephen Gibson Ebook All Chapter PDF

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Arguing, Obeying and Defying: A

Rhetorical Perspective on Stanley

Arguing, Obeying and Defying: A Rhetorical Perspective

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Designing Experiments and Analyzing Data: A Model

Introduction to Aerospace Engineering with a Flight

On Call Neurology 4th Edition Stephen A. Mayer

The Eclipse of Equality Arguing America on Meet the

Becoming Rhetorical: Analyzing and Composing in a

Perspectives on the Introductory Phase of Empirical

Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments are among the most inﬂuen-

s t e p h e n g i b s o n is a social psychologist based at York St John

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Acknowledgements page viii

Appendix: Transcription Conventions 209

Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments are a staple of psychology

resemble a hotchpotch of half-baked marketization and constant revolu-

Chapters 1 and 4 include modiﬁed versions of material ﬁrst presented

Gibson, S. (2013). Milgram’s obedience experiments: A rhetorical analysis.

Arguing and Thinking

altogether, will be strengthened by the recognition that there are two

Rhetoric in the Obedience Experiments

perspective has itself been built on in recent years by Matthew Hollander

recently sought to highlight the deﬁance typically obscured in accounts of

Different psychological approaches suggest different images of the person. In

accusations’ (Billig, 1996, pp. 188–189). Nevertheless, as Billig has

The individual is thus essentially the passive victim of these forces.

identify how arguments are embedded in that which at ﬁrst appears to be

psychology, as well as key ideas from the related discursive psychology

itself ) can instead be understood as rhetorical in that they were geared

Milgram conducted his obedience experiments from 1961–1962 at Yale

In contrast, my approach in the present chapter is necessarily some-

If at any point during the experimental session the participant hesitated

Other Experimental Conditions

Table 1.1 Summary of obedience rates in Milgram’s (1974) experimental

Condition number and name Obedience % (N)

In this version, the experiment proceeds along similar lines to those

Further Variations and Controls

Title: Platoons Phaidoon

Release date: August 26, 2023 [eBook #71489]

Original publication: Amsterdam: Maatschappij voor Goede en

Credits: Wouter Franssen and the Online Distributed Proofreading

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Onder leiding van L. Simons.

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