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Canonball
Canonball
Discussing "Apology" By Plato
In this episode of Canonball we discuss "Apology," which is one of the dialogues of Plato, who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.
The cover art for this episode is Plato as depicted in a portion of the oil painting The Death of Socrates, which French painter Jacques-Louis David completed in 1787.
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Today we're going to be talking about the apologia or apology of Socrates, which is the second dialogue in this large, hardcover, complete works of Plato published by Hackett Publishing. And the first thing to note about the apology is that it's not an apology at all. It's instead a defense speech in a legal proceeding. This is Socrates defending himself in front of 501 male Athenian jurymen. That's who the audience would likely have been. And here Socrates is 70 years old, indicted for breaking laws against impiety. And apparently another thing that was going on here, perhaps the more important thing, was that Socrates was associated with some people like the general Alcibiades, who through their actions, Alcibiades switched sides in the Peloponnesian War, were viewed as having contributed to Athens' loss in that war. And so the trial of Socrates may have been more about retribution for that than these charges of impiety. But Socrates would have had a good sense of what was going on at the time, why he was being brought to trial, and whether he thought the real reason was something else or not. The way that he frames his defense is related to impiety and what he was doing with his philosophy, not anything having to do with the Peloponnesian War. Though of course there is no record of the real speech given at this trial, nor is there any way of knowing whether this is accurate even in spirit. Early on Socrates says, quote, For me you will have the whole truth, though not, by Zeus' gentlemen, expressed in embroidered and stylized phrases like theirs, but things spoken at random and in the first words that come to mind. For I put my trust in the justice of what I say, end quote. So Socrates says he's going to improvise his speech. He hasn't prepared a speech and he's not going to speak in a very embellished way. He's going to speak straight from his heart because he trusts in the justice of what he has to say. And as we looked at last week, Socrates is being charged by Miletus, a younger guy who says that Socrates is corrupting the youth. And one of the angles that Socrates uses throughout this dialogue is how Miletus and other people don't even have a clear idea of what corruption or wisdom are. And one of the groups that Socrates mentions almost in passing is sophists charging a modest fee and purporting to teach wisdom. They're these guys giving wisdom classes and they charge a small amount for them. I think Socrates even sort of makes a little joke saying you'd think that they would charge more if they're giving away something so valuable. And he implies that they're not able to teach wisdom at all. But then he gets into the story of how and why he came to be doing what he's doing. And he says that somebody else went to the oracle and asked the oracle, who is the wisest? And the oracle said, Socrates is the wisest. And this person came and told Socrates this. And Socrates says he couldn't understand it because he knows that he is not wise. And so then he sets out on this quest to refute the oracle by finding a man who is wiser than he is. And I'll read a section from that. This is Plato writing as Socrates, he writes, quote, for a long time, I was at a loss to his meaning. Then I very reluctantly turned to some such investigation as this. I went to one of those reputed wise thinking that there, if anywhere, I could refute the oracle and say to it, this man is wiser than I, but you said I was. Then when I examined this man, there's no need for me to tell you his name. He was one of our public men. My experience was something like this. I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result, he came to dislike me. And so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself, I am wiser than this man. It is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not. Whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know. So I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent that I do not think I know what I do not know. After this, I approached another man, one of those thought to be wiser than he, and I thought the same thing. And so I came to be disliked both by him and by many others, end quote. So he goes to test people to see if they are wiser than him so that he can prove the oracle wrong. And what he finds is that neither of them know anything, but at least he knows that he does not know anything. This is the conclusion that he comes to. And the point is not to claim Socrates for this or that philosophical camp, but I like this as a very early skeptical idea. And he is going to talk about this more, but it might seem like some kind of defeatism or something, but there is great value in it.in knowing what you do not know. In fact, thinking you know something when you don't cannot only cause you to waste a lot of time, but it's very dangerous, depending on your circumstances. So if there are two people who don't know something and one of them thinks they know it and the other one doesn't, then the one who doesn't think that they know that thing is in a much better position. Not only are they wiser in the abstract, but they are much better suited to solve whatever problem that is. And I'm now a couple dialogues ahead of this one in my reading and the one that I'm reading now actually, hopefully we'll be able to talk about it, creates some problems for the development of knowledge and of science. But this thought right here is extremely useful for what would eventually become the Renaissance, close to 2000 years later. Because as we've talked about before, what you often are dealing with when you look at ancient Greek thought is competing assertions. Anaxagoras says the universe is composed in this way and Democritus says no, no, it's composed in that way. And they are reaching these conclusions primarily through abstract reasoning and nobody is conducting any experiments. That won't happen until Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon in Galileo. Takes a long time to get to experimentation. But so in antiquity, they had this problem of a crowded field of explanations and no universally accepted standard by which to evaluate those explanations. But if you take Socrates's baseline here, him having reached this conclusion that he doesn't know anything worthwhile, and then him going around looking for people who do and finding that as we'll see, nobody knows anything worthwhile. In the individual case, this maybe is kind of grim. And I wouldn't say that Socrates thinks that knowledge is impossible and it's not worth the bother to try to acquire it. But individually, while this outlook might look a little pessimistic at the national and civilizational level, this is an extremely useful starting point because you don't have any reason to get something like experimentation until you clear the deck and say, none of this is useful. We have to figure out something else. And that's not quite what Socrates is saying here, but establishing a high standard for knowledge and what he calls wisdom is a prerequisite for that. And so he continues to ask other people and he finds that actually those who had the greatest reputation were the most deficient and those who were thought to be inferior were often more knowledgeable. And he doesn't really expand on why that might be, but it's easy to see in our own lives periods where we were hungry, where we were working really hard because we were under a lot of pressure. And then maybe some other times where we coasted a little bit because things were more comfortable or maybe because we were focusing on other things in our lives. But it's easy to imagine how that same principle can apply to people in their careers is that if you gain a reputation, you gain some fame, and then you don't have to work for people to give you praise and attention, if that's what you're interested in, then many or most people will stop working. They will more or less coast. Whereas when they were younger, when they were unknown, when they were still trying to establish themselves in some way, they were working harder. And the people who remain unknown, maybe continue to work at that early level. Whereas those who achieve some level of notoriety drop off in their work. This is conjecture. I have no idea if this is the cause of this. It's just one possible explanation of something that he was talking about. So he talks to some politicians in this way to try to find out if they're wise and he goes and he asks them questions. And then he moves on to the poets and he says that he found that the bystanders could explain their poems better than the poets could. And while we certainly still have poets today, we also have something that Socrates wasn't really talking about, but is in the same category, which is novelists. And if you read a book and then you read some of the commentary on the book, this is certainly not true in every case, but you can definitely find examples of a reader of a book writing such a detailed and thoughtful commentary on a book that when you look at the writer of the book, you think there's no way that that person was thinking of all that when they wrote this book. And often the writer will tell you the same thing. And that's one of the mysteries of writing and of art in general is you are making something with whatever thoughts that you have about it, but then somebody with their own collection of experiences and associations, they can see something in it that you didn't put there. But that also has something to do with how art criticism and art making are not the same thing. Many artists are also critics. They will write about their own art or somebody else's art, but those are separate skills that you have to practice separately. The examples that I usually give here, I'm sure we've talked about this before, are people often think that if you are a very good chess player, then that somehow translates to being a good business manager or God help us, a good general.in a war. And the thing is, being a good chess player just makes you a good chess player. And there's nothing wrong with that. Chess is a very fun game. It's very admirable if people are very good at it. And it also doesn't need to translate to anything else. But that's good because people have done research that shows that it doesn't really. It doesn't even translate really to general IQ. And so this is a reason to practice whatever it is that you want to be good at. That if you're somebody who wants to make paintings, then it's definitely useful to study the paintings of other people. But you have to spend a lot of time making paintings. Otherwise, what you're going to be good at is studying paintings. Or the example that I personally have the most experience with is, if you're learning a foreign language, I divide it into basically four categories. There's reading, writing, speaking, and listening. And you will be as good at any of those four categories as you spend time on them. If you spend a lot of time listening, then that doesn't necessarily make you better at speaking. It'll make you better at listening. But you have to practice speaking in order to be good at speaking. And if you're speaking a lot, you have friends with whom you can speak this foreign language, you can practice, that will not directly improve your ability to read the language, especially if it's in a non-Latin script. Now, of course, reading and writing a language are more closely related than playing chess and managing a business. Those are much more distant. So there is more overlap in the language example than in some other ones. But I give that example because I see people in learning a language making the mistake of only, for example, watching TV shows in the language that they want to learn. That may help a little. I think it's a little bit of an evasion in certain ways. I couldn't comfortably watch TV shows in Turkish until I had been studying it for like seven years. So I think that watching a TV show or a movie is something you do much later. And there are much more efficient ways to study the language early on. But if you're doing it in a low-key way as a hobby, it certainly can't hurt. But the thing is, if you do that, you will at best get a little bit better at listening. You won't get better at speaking. You won't get better at reading. You won't really get better at writing. And to bring all that back to Socrates, it might be that it's okay that the bystanders are better able to comment on the poetry than the poets themselves are because writing or composing poetry and commenting on poetry or interpreting it are two separate things. So unless the poet spends his time doing commentary, then he might not be very good at doing commentary. He might be good at writing poetry. But the angle that Socrates might have been taking here is that people in his time, and certainly many people today, and even us if we don't think about it, may assume that a poet is a wise person, which they certainly cannot simply be assumed to be. They might also be wise, but being a poet doesn't make one wise any more than being a politician does. And maybe part of what we're doing when we read old books and old works of fiction is we are trying to gain some of the wisdom of that writer. We're sort of assuming that there's something there worth gaining, and then we're trying to go in there and see what it is. Though it's not always necessarily philosophical truth. It might be aesthetic beauty or simply an interesting thought. But so then he moves from the poets onto the craftsmen. And Socrates says, quote, So he goes to the craftsmen, and they're able to build things and make things that are very beautiful and useful. And he doesn't specify what kind of craftsmen, but these are probably builders and sculptors and smiths. And they have this very interesting knowledge of how to make these things. But then because they can do that, they think that they know other things also. They make this mistake of the transferability of their knowledge, or maybe it's unconscious, the esteem that they have in their workshop. They then leave their workshop and they think that they are masters of whatever other space that they enter into just as they are in their workshop. And the other people in that space that they come into might make the same mistake. I'm using space here kind of metaphorically. I am talking about a physical space and that a guy does have a workshop and he might then go to a town meeting. But there's also a metaphorical space in that there's the area where his knowledge is extremely relevant and he is the most knowledgeable in that area. And then you could go into another area of thought where that knowledge is not relevant at all, or not nearly as relevant as it was otherwise. So a master builder might be involved in a discussion about how to set up a farm. And because building a building and setting up a farm are sort of related, they both involve buildings and positioning things advantageously. The builder might be very confident and give some...victim about how he thinks the farm should be laid out. And if this guy has enough of a reputation, the other people in the room might say, oh, we should listen to him. But he might be completely neglecting something that farmers learn in the first two years, which is that the well can't be downhill from the pigsty or whatever it is. Because there's a kind of both reputational and self-esteem overflow. The person who is accomplished in one area has an excess of both self-esteem and of reputation so that they trust themselves and other people trust them on other things on which their knowledge is not actually any more useful than anybody else's. And this one is very easy to see in modern life. You have people appointed to political positions because they were successful in some private sector area that seems related to that position. And then a few years later, we find that they didn't perform any better than anyone else would have because what they didn't have is a lot of experience in dealing with political maneuvering and the madness of government bureaucracy, which just the way that poetry and poetry criticism or art and art criticism are different, navigating a private sector industry and managing a government bureaucracy that's related to that industry are not the same. Certainly the private sector person will have knowledge that's relevant to the position much more than somebody who has no experience either in the private sector industry, nor in the government position related to it, because there'll be familiar with laws and processes and practices, but there will be a whole other wing of knowledge that they don't have at all. And that's not their fault. It just requires different experience to gain that knowledge. But so Socrates asks himself whether he would rather have both their technical knowledge, their technical skill, and the ignorance of thinking that that skill applies to other fields or unthinkingly acting as if it does, or to have neither of those things, neither the technical skill nor that ignorance, but to have only the knowledge of one's ignorance, a term that Nassim Taleb uses is anti-knowledge, what one doesn't know, to have knowledge of one's anti-knowledge. And Socrates says he would rather have the latter. He would rather have neither the technical knowledge nor the ignorance that comes with it. And that's not an argument for avoiding gaining technical knowledge. Obviously, the best thing would be to have the technical knowledge and none of the ignorance that goes with it. Maybe it's setting up that ideal that the best thing is to try to cultivate some knowledge, but to know the limits of that knowledge, to know exactly where it starts and stops. And Socrates might say, yeah, that's what I tried to do. And what I found is that I don't know anything. But anyway, so two of the side effects of this project that he's working on, of trying to find somebody wiser than him, which put that way, it sounds a little bit vain, but he's trying to disprove the Oracle as we talked about. Two of the side effects are that he becomes very unpopular, both with the people whose ignorance he has exposed and with their supporters. And then also the bystanders think that he has the wisdom that his interlocutor lacks, yet because he was able to show that this other person doesn't have wisdom, then he must have it, which he never claims. And at one point, Socrates speculates that the Oracle probably meant that God is wise and that human wisdom is worthless. And that the wisest man is the one who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless. And as a result of this project of his, he lives in poverty and he can't participate in public affairs because he's so busy with this, what he calls a service to God of showing people that they are not wise. And he talks about how there are young guys who follow him around and listen to him question others, and then they also try to imitate him. They try to learn his method of questioning and of logic and to go apply it to other people themselves. And I think we can reasonably infer from this that Plato is in that category. But then the people whom these young guys go and question, they also get mad and blame Socrates because they view him as turning these intellectual troublemakers loose on the city. And there's a short passage I want to read here purely for historical value. I'll read it and then we can talk about it a little bit. Sometimes in his defense of himself, Socrates is questioning Miletus, the guy who's accusing him. Socrates says, quote, you're a strange fellow, Miletus. Why do you say this? Do I not believe, as other men do, that the sun and the moon are gods? And Miletus says, no, by Zeus, gentleman of the jury, for he says that the sun is stone and the moon, earth. And then back to Socrates, my dear Miletus, do you think you are prosecuting Anaxagoras? Are you so contemptuous of these men and think them so ignorant of letters as not to know that the books of Anaxagoras of Klausamani are full of those theories? And further, that the young men learn from me what they can buy from time to time for a drachma at most in the bookshops and ridicule Socrates.if he pretends that these theories are his own, especially as they are so absurd." And Anaxagoras is, of course, an older Greek philosopher. But details about him are not terribly important for the point I want to make, which is that Socrates here is answering Miletus, who says that Socrates says that the moon and the sun are this and that way. Socrates says, you're insulting the jury men by acting as if they don't know that not only are those the ideas of Anaxagoras and Socrates thinks they're absurd, but they can be bought from time to time for a drachma at most in the bookshops, is the phrase. And that stood out to me for a couple reasons. One is he says bookshops plural. So in Socrates' time, there were lots of bookshops around and the writing of Anaxagoras was readily available in them and the books could be bought for a drachma. So what is a drachma? It's an ancient Greek currency that for a while apparently was the daily wage of a laborer or of a hoplite, of an infantryman with a shield and a spear. Apparently in the Peloponnesian War, there was some inflation. So the value of the drachma would have dropped a little. But let's say that it was at the time that Socrates was speaking or Plato was writing about the day wage of a laborer. Federal minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. If we take an eight hour day, then we could estimate in a very rough way, if we're trying to do purchasing power parody or something, that one drachma is about $58. Or we could say that this passage suggests that a book in Plato's time from the bookshops to buy a book of Anaxagoras would have cost about $58. And this was very interesting to me because it changes my perception of the availability of books at that time. That's not that expensive. We have a perception of the past that books were, because they were produced by hand, impossibly expensive and only very rich people had them. And at some point five years ago or so, I tried to figure out how much a book would have cost in the middle ages. And I don't remember exactly how I reached this point, but I got to some calculation that somebody else had done. There was something like a book in the middle ages, I think it was like the 12th century, cost about the same as 50 cows or some number of heads of cattle. It was in that range. And that kind of calculation might in part be why we have that perception of books in the past. And again, the 12th century is still before Gutenberg. So we're still talking about handwritten books. But let's take these two estimates. One of them is Plato writing in the early 4th century BC. And the other one is this vaguely remembered estimate that I have in my mind. Obviously, if we want it to be very exhaustive, we would really pin that down. But let's just take that as true for now, because probably something like it is kind of true. So what that means is you have a much older period in time at which books are much cheaper, more than a millennia earlier. How did that happen? There might've been some small change in technology. I don't know exactly the history of parchment and vellum or whatever they were writing on in the middle ages. But you would expect that any technological development would favor the later date and would make books cheaper to produce. And this is purely speculation, but my suspicion is that the reason why books would have been cheaper in ancient Greece is because there was both a greater supply and a greater demand. Probably in part because there were higher literacy rates, or possibly because of that. This is again, conjecture at this point. The only data point we have is books being cheaper in ancient Greece. But one possible explanation is that more people could read, so they wanted to buy more books. There were more scribes, there were more people able to write, and so they could prepare more books. And the result was these books were more or less available at bookshops, plural, in one city, Athens. There's a lot of fuzziness there, but I was interested to find that one thing we can take away, books were probably more readily available in ancient Greece than I had thought they were. Later talking about slander destroying good men, Socrates says, quote, I do not think men of Athens that it requires a prolonged defense to prove that I am not guilty of the charges in Miletus' deposition, but this is sufficient. On the other hand, you know that what I said earlier is true, that I am very unpopular with many people. This will be my undoing if I am undone. Not Miletus or Aenidus, but the slanders and envy of many people. This has destroyed many other good men and will, I think, continue to do so. There is no danger that it will stop at me, end quote. In the supposed free speech environment in the United States, talking about slander often seems a little bit old-fashioned. But Socrates would argue that his is a case, of which there are many, of slander eventually becoming lethal, even or especially toward good men. And continuing on from the same spot, he talks about how risking deathDeath is not a problem, it's only a matter of evaluating one's own actions and seeing that they're right. And in this passage he talks about the son of Thetis, and that's of course Achilles in the Iliad. Socrates says, quote, someone might say, are you not ashamed, Socrates, to have followed the kind of occupation that has led to your being now in danger of death? However, I should be right to reply to him. You are wrong, sir, if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death. He should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting like a good or a bad man. According to your view, all the heroes who died at Troy were inferior people, especially the son of Thetis, who was so contemptuous of danger compared with disgrace. When he was eager to kill Hector, his goddess mother warned him, as I believe in some such words as these, my child, if you avenge the death of your comrade Patroclus and you kill Hector, you will die yourself, for your death is to follow immediately after Hector's. Hearing this, he despised death and danger and was much more afraid to live a coward who did not avenge his friends. Let me die at once, he said, when once I have given the wrongdoer his desserts, rather than remain here a laughingstock by the curved ships, a burden upon the earth. Do you think he gave thought to death and danger? This is the truth of the matter, men of Athens. Wherever a man has taken a position that he believes to be best or has been placed by his commander, there he must, I think, remain and face danger, without a thought for death or anything else, rather than disgrace." And later he says, quote, to fear death is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, end quote. And quote, it is the most blameworthy ignorance to think one knows what one does not know, end quote. He explains that he either can never or will never stop doing what he's doing. He says, quote, if you said to me in this regard, Socrates, we do not believe Anidus now, we acquit you, but only on condition that you spend no more time on this investigation and do not practice philosophy, and if you are caught doing so, you will die. If as I say you were to acquit me on those terms, I would say to you, men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the God rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet, good sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power. Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth or the best possible state of your soul? Then, if one of you disputes this and says he does care, I shall not let him go at once or leave him, but I shall question him, examine him, and test him, and if I do not think he has attained the goodness that he says he has, I shall reproach him because he attaches little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things. I shall treat in this way anyone I happen to meet, young and old, citizen and stranger, and more so the citizens, because you are more kindred to me. Be sure that this is what the God orders me to do, and I think there is no greater blessing for the city than my service to the God, for I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul. As I say to you, wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively." And skipping ahead a little, whether you believe Anidus or not, whether you equip me or not, do so on the understanding that this is my course of action, even if I am to face death many times. Do not create a disturbance, gentlemen, but abide by my request not to cry out at what I say but to listen, for I think it will be to your advantage to listen, and I am about to say other things at which you will perhaps cry out. Skipping ahead, be sure that if you kill the sort of man I say I am, you will not harm me more than yourselves." And just a bit later he says, quote, neither Miletus nor Anidus can harm me in any way. He could not harm me, for I do not think it is permitted that a better man be harmed by a worse. Certainly he might kill me or perhaps banish or disenfranchise me, which he and maybe others think to be great harm, but I do not think so, end quote. And I think in Seneca, there is pretty much the same line. It's one of the Stoics and all of the Stoics are 500 years later. So that makes me think they must've gotten it from right here, that somebody can kill you, but they can't harm you. And this is where the spiritual side of Socrates or Plato is required for that to make any sense. But what I think they're getting at is that you can't be harmed in your soul, in your virtue, in your sincerity. They can kill you, they can banish you, they can take your money, but they can't harm you in the ultimate sense, which is somewhere beyond physical danger and death. Though the caveat that Socrates...puts on it here that I don't remember from Seneca is that he says, I do not think it is permitted that a better man be harmed by a worse, that you're only spiritually indestructible in this way. If you are better than the person that's harming you or would harm you if they could. And Seneca and the Stoics then take this principle and make a whole philosophy just out of that, that the world can do all kinds of things to you, but he can't harm you in an ultimate sense. And maybe that extraction and expansion of this one line of Socrates or Plato into Stoicism, not that that's all that Stoicism is, but that might be an example of what Alfred North Whitehead said about European philosophy being footnotes on Plato. And later Socrates says, quote, a man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public life if he is to survive for even a short time. End quote. That is being in politics. You can't be honestly fighting for justice. And he gives his own poverty as proof of his honesty. And he also says that he has quote, neglected what occupies most people, wealth, household affairs, the position of general or public order or other offices, the political clubs and factions that exist in the city. End quote. And later, quote, I went to each of you privately and conferred upon him what I say is the greatest benefit by trying to persuade him not to come for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible, not to care for the city's possessions more than for the city itself and to care for other things in the same way. End quote. And he says, even if he were exiled and sent to another city, then the young men in the other city would be listening to him too. And then they would drive them out of that city as well. And on the passages I'm going to read, we can close out with this one. He says, quote, if I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying the God, you will not believe me. And we'll think I'm being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others for the unexamined life is not worth living for men. You will believe me even less. End quote. And the apology is one of the dialogues of Plato that you're likely to be assigned. If you took a survey course on European philosophy, it would certainly have some Plato in it. And the apology would likely be one of the texts that comes up. And that's in part because here Socrates or Plato is or are explaining and defending what Socrates was doing and why. And I think you'll agree that there's a lot of very moving and inspiring stuff in there, but I'll leave it there for now. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.