The Consolations of Philosophy Read online

  I shall go on saying in my usual way, ‘My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?’ And should any of you dispute that, and profess that he does care about such things, I won’t let him go straight away nor leave him, but will question and examine and put him to the test … I shall do this to everyone I meet, young or old, foreigner or fellow-citizen.

  It was the turn of the jury of 500 to make up their minds. After brief deliberation 220 decided Socrates wasn’t guilty; 280 that he was. The philosopher responded wryly: ‘I didn’t think the margin would be so narrow.’ But he did not lose confidence; there was no hesitation or alarm; he maintained faith in a philosophical project that had been declared conclusively misconceived by a majority 56 per cent of his audience.

  If we cannot match such composure, if we are prone to burst into tears after only a few harsh words about our character or achievements, it may be because the approval of others forms an essential part of our capacity to believe that we are right. We feel justified in taking unpopularity seriously not only for pragmatic reasons, for reasons of promotion or survival, but more importantly because being jeered at can seem an unequivocal sign that we have gone astray.

  Socrates would naturally have conceded that there are times when we are in the wrong and should be made to doubt our views, but he would have added a vital detail to alter our sense of truth’s relation to unpopularity: errors in our thought and way of life can at no point and in no way ever be proven simply by the fact that we have run into opposition.

  What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it. It may be frightening to hear that a high proportion of a community holds us to be wrong, but before abandoning our position, we should consider the method by which their conclusions have been reached. It is the soundness of their method of thinking that should determine the weight we give to their disapproval.

  We seem afflicted by the opposite tendency: to listen to everyone, to be upset by every unkind word and sarcastic observation. We fail to ask ourselves the cardinal and most consoling question: on what basis has this dark censure been made? We treat with equal seriousness the objections of the critic who has thought rigorously and honestly and those of the critic who has acted out of misanthropy and envy.

  We should take time to look behind the criticism. As Socrates had learned, the thinking at its basis, though carefully disguised, may be badly awry. Under the influence of passing moods, our critics may have fumbled towards conclusions. They may have acted from impulse and prejudice, and used their status to ennoble their hunches. They may have built up their thoughts like inebriated amateur potters.

  (Ill. 4.1)

  Unfortunately, unlike in pottery, it is initially extremely hard to tell a good product of thought from a poor one. It isn’t difficult to identify the pot made by the inebriated craftsman and the one by the sober colleague.

  (Ill. 4.2)

  It is harder immediately to identify the superior definition.

  Courage is intelligent

  endurance.

  The man who stands in the ranks

  and fights the enemy is courageous.

  A bad thought delivered authoritatively, though without evidence of how it was put together, can for a time carry all the weight of a sound one. But we acquire a misplaced respect for others when we concentrate solely on their conclusions – which is why Socrates urged us to dwell on the logic they used to reach them. Even if we cannot escape the consequences of opposition, we will at least be spared the debilitating sense of standing in error.

  The idea had first emerged some time before the trial, during a conversation between Socrates and Polus, a well-known teacher of rhetoric visiting Athens from Sicily. Polus had some chilling political views, of whose truth he wished ardently to convince Socrates. The teacher argued that there was at heart no happier life for a human being than to be a dictator, for dictatorship enabled one to act as one pleased, to throw enemies in prison, confiscate their property and execute them.

  Socrates listened politely, then answered with a series of logical arguments attempting to show that happiness lay in doing good. But Polus dug in his heels and affirmed his position by pointing out that dictators were often revered by huge numbers of people. He mentioned Archelaus, the king of Macedon, who had murdered his uncle, his cousin and a seven-year-old legitimate heir and yet continued to enjoy great public support in Athens. The number of people who liked Archelaus was a sign, concluded Polus, that his theory on dictatorship was correct.

  Socrates courteously admitted that it might be very easy to find people who liked Archelaus, and harder to find anyone to support the view that doing good brought one happiness: ‘If you feel like calling witnesses to claim that what I’m saying is wrong, you can count on your position being supported by almost everyone in Athens,’ explained Socrates, ‘whether they were born and bred here or elsewhere.’

  You’d have the support of Nicias the son of Niceratus, if you wanted, along with his brothers, who between them have a whole row of tripods standing in the precinct of Dionysus. You’d have the support of Aristocrates the son of Scellius as well … You could call on the whole of Pericles’ household, if you felt like it, or any other Athenian family you care to choose.

  But what Socrates zealously denied was that this widespread support for Polus’s argument could on its own in any way prove it correct:

  The trouble is, Polus, you’re trying to use on me the kind of rhetorical refutation which people in lawcourts think is successful. There too people think they’re proving the other side wrong if they produce a large number of eminent witnesses in support of the points they’re making, when their opponent can only come up with a single witness or none at all. But this kind of reputation is completely worthless in the context of the truth, since it’s perfectly possible for someone to be defeated in court by a horde of witnesses who have no more than apparent respectability and who all happen to testify against him.

  True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning. When we are making vases, we should listen to the advice of those who know about turning glaze into Fe3O4 at 800°C; when we are making a ship, it is the verdict of those who construct triremes that should worry us; and when we are considering ethical matters – how to be happy and courageous and just and good – we should not be intimidated by bad thinking, even if it issues from the lips of teachers of rhetoric, mighty generals and well-dressed aristocrats from Thessaly.

  It sounded élitist, and it was. Not everyone is worth listening to. Yet Socrates’ élitism had no trace of snobbery or prejudice. He might have discriminated in the views he attended to, but the discrimination operated not on the basis of class or money, nor on the basis of military record or nationality, but on the basis of reason, which was – as he stressed – a faculty accessible to all.

  To follow the Socratic example we should, when faced with criticism, behave like athletes training for the Olympic games. Information on sport was further supplied by See Inside an Ancient Greek Town.

  (Ill. 4.3)

  Imagine we’re athletes. Our trainer has suggested an exercise to strengthen our calves for the javelin. It requires us to stand on one leg and lift weights. It looks peculiar to outsiders, who mock and complain that we are throwing away our chances of success. In the baths, we overhear a man explain to another that we are (More interested in showing off a set of calf muscles than helping the city win the games.) Cruel, but no grounds for alarm if we listen to Socrates in conversation with his friend Crito:

  SOCRATES

  : W
hen a man is … taking [his training] seriously, does he pay attention to all praise and criticism and opinion indiscriminately, or only when it comes from the one qualified person, the actual doctor or trainer?

  CRITO

  : Only when it comes from the one qualified person.

  SOCRATES

  : Then he should be afraid of the criticism and welcome the praise of the one qualified person, but not those of the general public.

  CRITO

  : Obviously.

  SOCRATES

  : He ought to regulate his actions and exercises and eating and drinking by the judgement of his instructor, who has expert knowledge, not by the opinions of the rest of the public.

  The value of criticism will depend on the thought processes of critics, not on their number or rank:

  Don’t you think it a good principle that one shouldn’t respect all human opinions, but only some and not others … that one should respect the good ones, but not the bad ones?… And good ones are those of people with understanding, whereas bad ones are those of people without it …

  So my good friend, we shouldn’t care all that much about what the populace will say of us, but about what the expert on matters of justice and injustice will say.

  The jurors on the benches of the Court of the Heliasts were no experts. They included an unusual number of the old and the war-wounded, who looked to jury work as an easy source of additional income. The salary was three obols a day, less than a manual labourer’s, but helpful if one was sixty-three and bored at home. The only qualifications were citizenship, a sound mind and an absence of debts – though soundness of mind was not judged by Socratic criteria, more the ability to walk in a straight line and produce one’s name when asked. Members of the jury fell asleep during trials, rarely had experience of similar cases or relevant laws, and were given no guidance on how to reach verdicts.

  Socrates’ own jury had arrived with violent prejudices. They had been influenced by Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates, and felt that the philosopher had played a role in the disasters that had befallen the once-mighty city at the end of the century. The Peloponnesian War had finished in catastrophe, a Spartan–Persian alliance had brought Athens to her knees, the city had been blockaded, her fleet destroyed and her empire dismembered. Plagues had broken out in poorer districts, and democracy had been suppressed by a dictatorship guilty of executing a thousand citizens. For Socrates’ enemies, it was more than coincidence that many of the dictators had once spent time with the philosopher. Critias and Charmides had discussed ethical matters with Socrates, and it seemed all they had acquired as a result was a lust for murder.

  What could have accounted for Athens’s spectacular fall from grace? Why had the greatest city in Hellas, which seventy-five years before had defeated the Persians on land at Plataea and at sea at Mycale, been forced to endure a succession of humiliations? The man in the dirty cloak who wandered the streets asking the obvious seemed one ready, entirely flawed explanation.

  Socrates understood that he had no chance. He lacked even the time to make a case. Defendants had only minutes to address a jury, until the water had run from one jar to another in the court clock:

  (Ill. 4.4)

  I am convinced that I never wronged anyone intentionally, but I cannot convince you of this, because we have so little time for discussion. If it was your practice, as it is with other nations, to give not one day but several to the hearing of capital trials, I believe that you might have been convinced; but under present conditions it is not so easy to dispose of grave allegations in a short space of time.

  An Athenian courtroom was no forum for the discovery of the truth. It was a rapid encounter with a collection of the aged and one-legged who had not submitted their beliefs to rational examination and were waiting for the water to run from one jar to the other.

  It must have been difficult to hold this in mind, it must have required the kind of strength accrued during years in conversation with ordinary Athenians: the strength, under certain circumstances, not to take the views of others seriously. Socrates was not wilful, he did not dismiss these views out of misanthropy, which would have contravened his faith in the potential for rationality in every human being. But he had been up at dawn for most of his life talking to Athenians; he knew how their minds worked and had seen that unfortunately they frequently didn’t, even if he hoped they would some day. He had observed their tendency to take positions on a whim and to follow accepted opinions without questioning them. It wasn’t arrogance to keep this before him at a moment of supreme opposition. He possessed the self-belief of a rational man who understands that his enemies are liable not to be thinking properly, even if he is far from claiming that his own thoughts are invariably sound. Their disapproval could kill him; it did not have to make him wrong.

  Of course, he might have renounced his philosophy and saved his life. Even after he had been found guilty, he could have escaped the death penalty, but wasted the opportunity through intransigence. We should not look to Socrates for advice on escaping a death sentence; we should look to him as an extreme example of how to maintain confidence in an intelligent position which has met with illogical opposition.

  The philosopher’s speech rose to an emotional finale:

  If you put me to death, you will not easily find anyone to take my place. The fact is, if I may put the point in a somewhat comical way, that I have been literally attached by God to our city, as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of a gadfly … If you take my advice you will spare my life. I suspect, however, that before long you will awake from your drowsing, and in your annoyance you will take Anytus’s advice and finish me off with a single slap; and then you will go on sleeping.

  He was not mistaken. When the magistrate called for a second, final verdict, 360 members of the jury voted for the philosopher to be put to death. The jurors went home; the condemned man was escorted to prison.

  5

  It must have been dark and close, and the sounds coming up from the street would have included jeers from Athenians anticipating the end of the satyr-faced thinker. He would have been killed at once had the sentence not coincided with the annual Athenian mission to Delos, during which, tradition decreed, the city could not put anyone to death. Socrates’ good nature attracted the sympathy of the prison warder, who alleviated his last days by allowing him to receive visitors. A stream of them came: Phaedo, Crito, Crito’s son Critobulus, Apollodorus, Hermogenes, Epigenes, Aeschines, Antisthenes, Ctesippus, Menexenus, Simmias, Cebes, Phaedondas, Euclides and Terpsion. They could not disguise their distress at seeing a man who had only ever displayed great kindness and curiosity towards others waiting to meet his end like a criminal.

  (Ill. 5.1)

  Though David’s canvas presented Socrates surrounded by devastated friends, we should remember that their devotion stood out in a sea of misunderstanding and hatred.

  To counterpoint the mood in the prison cell and introduce variety, Diderot might have urged a few of the many prospective hemlock painters to capture the mood of other Athenians at the idea of Socrates’ death – which might have resulted in paintings with titles like Five Jurors Playing Cards after a Day in Court or The Accusers Finishing Dinner and Looking Forward to Bed. A painter with a taste for pathos could more plainly have chosen to title these scenes The Death of Socrates.

  When the appointed day came, Socrates was alone in remaining calm. His wife and three children were brought to see him, but Xanthippe’s cries were so hysterical, Socrates asked that she be ushered away. His friends were quieter though no less tearful. Even the prison warder, who had seen many go to their deaths, was moved to address an awkward farewell:

  ‘In your time here, I’ve known you to be the most generous and gentlest and best of men who have ever come to this place … You know the message I’ve come to bring: goodbye, then, and try to bear the inevitable as easily as you can.’
And with this he turned away in tears and went off.

  Then came the executioner, bearing a cup of crushed hemlock:

  When he saw the man Socrates said: ‘Well, my friend, you’re an expert in these things: what must one do?’ ‘Simply drink it,’ he said, ‘and walk about till a heaviness comes over your legs; then lie down, and it will act by itself.’ And with this he held out the cup to Socrates. He took it perfectly calmly … without a tremor or any change of colour or countenance … He pressed the cup to his lips, and drank it off with good humour and without the least distaste. Till then most of us had been able to restrain our tears fairly well [narrated by Phaedo]; but when we saw he was drinking, that he’d actually drunk it, we could do so no longer. In my own case, the tears came pouring out in spite of myself … Even before me, Crito had moved away when he was unable to restrain his tears. And Apollodorus, who even earlier had been continuously in tears, now burst forth into such a storm of weeping and grieving, that he made everyone present break down except Socrates himself.

  The philosopher implored his companions to calm themselves – ‘What a way to behave, my strange friends!’ he mocked – then stood up and walked around the prison cell so the poison could take effect. When his legs began to feel heavy, he lay down on his back and the sensation left his feet and legs; as the poison moved upwards and reached his chest, he gradually lost consciousness. His breathing became slow. Once he saw that his best friend’s eyes had grown fixed, Crito reached over and closed them:

  And that [said Phaedo] … was the end of our companion, who was, we can fairly say, of all those of his time whom we knew, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.