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Virtue Is Knowledge
The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy
By Lorraine Smith Pangle The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-13668-4
CHAPTER 1
Education and Corruption: Apology
Socrates' argument that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance occurs in a number of Platonic dialogues, but perhaps the best place to begin our investigation of it is the Apology, the dialogue that stands as the traditional portal to the Platonic corpus and that takes as its central themes the philosophic life and the deadly conflict between philosophy and the classical city. Here, in his cross-examination of Meletus on the charge of corrupting the youth, Socrates argues that at least concerning the crime in question, no one who knew what he was doing would ever commit it voluntarily, as it invariably redounds to the harm of the perpetrator. He argues further that the proper remedy for one who has committed this crime involuntarily is instruction and not punishment. The question that this manner of presenting the virtue-is-knowledge thesis immediately raises is this: Why should a charge of corrupting the youth in a capital trial, in a crowded, hostile, noisy courtroom, provide the proper setting for Plato to introduce to us this fundamental and far-reaching theme of Socratic thought?
The Corruption Charge in Context
Socrates' cross-examination of Meletus, which constitutes his only direct rebuttal of the charges against him, is rapid, far-ranging, and highly compressed in its reasoning. It will be helpful, therefore, to consider how Socrates sets the stage for this surprisingly brief response to the charges against him before examining it in detail. In the version of his defense speech that Plato gives us, Socrates begins with a discussion of rhetoric. Socrates in some sense clearly has welcomed the opportunity the trial presents to make a major statement to the world about himself and what his philosophic activity is all about. But this occasion is a most dangerous one, for he must make his speech to an angry mob already predisposed to condemn him—a situation that not only any defense attorney but any citizen of even ordinary capacities would immediately recognize as calling for a careful selection of evidence and carefully constructed appeals to the better sentiments of the audience to counter the inflammatory rhetoric just deployed by the prosecution—at least if the defendant wishes to be acquitted. It is fitting, therefore, that this man who has spent his life constructing speeches should at the outset of his trial be reflecting deeply on the rhetorical demands of this situation, silently if not openly. But to our surprise, we find Plato's Socrates taking up the theme of rhetoric only to make a most implausible cascade of assertions and suggestions: He is an inept speaker who does not know how to put his thoughts in order; he is wholly ignorant of the proceedings of a law court and the manner of speech required there; he is indeed utterly naïve. For he tells the jury that "what you will hear will be spoken at random in the words that I happen upon, for I trust that the things I say are just" (17c1–3), as if he is so trusting in the power of virtue to protect him, and so innocent of the ways of the world, as to believe that against clever accusers and violent passions one need only state the unadorned truth, in whatever words first come into one's head, and one is certain to find justice. For, he adds, it is the virtue of an orator simply to speak the truth without guile and of a judge to judge fairly without guile. Virtue is aligned perfectly, then, with truth, simplicity, and trust: Socrates evidently trusts that the jurors need only be reminded of their duty and they will do it, for he indicates that knowledge of his own duty is reason enough to do his, and he seems confident that one need only do it and all will come out well. At the outset, then, we have a strong statement on the power of truthfulness that looks somehow at once deadly serious and rather less than serious. Many commentators have observed the irony in these, as in other statements in the Apology.
With this peculiar self-presentation, Socrates makes rhetoric a central theme of the Apology, not just his rhetoric on this day in court but his lifelong strategy for defending himself and his philosophic activity from a potentially hostile city, and perhaps vice versa. Socrates alludes to his ongoing preoccupation with defensive rhetoric when he tells his audience not to be surprised when they "hear me making my defense with the same speeches I am accustomed to speak both in the marketplace at the money-tables, where many of you have heard me, and elsewhere" (17c7–9). He will use not only the same manner of speech, but the very same arguments he has been making for years. Has he nothing specific to say in his defense? Or have all of his speeches perhaps in some sense been conceived with a view to his defense? This dialogue contains recurring reflections on the aims and techniques of Socratic rhetoric as well as vivid examples of that rhetoric at work. Socrates' cross-examination of Meletus on the corruption charge is but one such example. As is often the case with Socratic rhetoric and is often complained of by Socratic interlocutors, this cross-examination is in fact an egregiously slippery, incomplete, illogical defense of a thesis that is paradoxical and in need of much defense. Why does Socrates, a most careful thinker, engage so often in slipshod argumentation? How is his strange use of rhetoric in confronting Meletus connected to his strange claims about his rhetoric at the beginning of his speech? I would make this suggestion: the Apology truly is unusually frank in revealing the nerve of Socratic thought, but it is at the same time quite artfully deceptive. The framing Plato gives to the exposition of his virtue-is-knowledge thesis will help show that argument's potentially explosive power. In doing so, it may shed light on Socrates' curious rhetorical strategy, his underlying thought, and his complex intentions.
In the cross-examination of Meletus, Socrates addresses the charges on which Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon have indicted him, but this exchange is preceded by a long discussion of charges that no one but Socrates has brought into court on this day, the charges of the so-called old accusers, among whom Aristophanes figures prominently. These old accusers, Socrates says, got hold of many of the jurors from childhood, persuading them "that there is a certain Socrates, a wise man, a thinker on the things aloft, who has investigated all things under the earth, and who makes the weaker speech the stronger" (18b6–c1). This account is in itself not a charge of any crime at all but merely a description that might well have been made by an admirer. But it is dangerous, Socrates says, for this reason: not precisely he himself, nor precisely his first accusers, but their listeners "hold that those who investigate these things also do not believe in gods" (18c2–3). Students of natural science (among whom Socrates elsewhere quite openly includes himself, at least as a young man) were engaged in an effort to explain the world in terms of natural necessities that would admit of no exceptions; such a project must either assume or prove the nonexistence of providential gods who at any time might, for example, intervene to spirit their favorites out of battle and make them reappear instantly in other places. For if there are no natural necessities, there can be no rigorous account of what must be, but only a description of what usually is or usually has been the case hitherto: there can be no science, but only history.
To assume that the world is governed by natural necessity, however, is an act of faith and not science, and to show in the case of every purported miracle that it has a wholly natural cause is a task that can never be completed and one that ultimately must assume what it sets out to prove. At the opening of the Phaedrus Socrates remarks on this problem. Asked if he believes a certain miraculous tale, he indicates that he finds a natural explanation for the phenomenon more plausible, but he adds that he has no leisure to try to explain every purported miracle one by one, and that such a procedure would perhaps anyhow be "too clever." Instead, he says, he follows the injunction "know thyself," inscribed in the temple to Apollo at Delphi, and in particular he seeks to determine whether his unusual perspective on things is a monstrosity or whether his nature is in fact somehow divine (Phaedrus 229b–30a). In the Apology, Socrates similarly turns from a discussion of his purported investigations into the order and necessities of nature to an account of his obedience to what he presents as an injunction by the god at Delphi, and again what is at issue is self-knowledge, or more precisely, the relation between something Socrates already knows about himself and something he has yet to learn about the knowledge or the experience of others. As he tells the story in the Apology, his companion Chaerephon once asked the Delphic Oracle if there was anyone wiser than Socrates and the oracle said there was not; Socrates strangely interpreted this answer as an injunction to try to refute everyone who seemed to be wise in order to refute the oracle; yet the result was that Socrates confirmed the oracle's claim that no one was wiser and thereby came to a deeper knowledge of the significance of his own ignorance. Strangely, Socrates presents his attempt to refute the god and thereby to confirm what he does not know, and his attempt to confirm his wisdom and thereby vindicate the oracle, as one and the same quest. Could these be not two subsequent activities but a single project? In the accounts of both the Phaedrus and the Apology, Socrates combines apparent reverence for the god Apollo with an implicit or explicit challenge to the claims of purported revelations. Under both accounts, the second, "Delphic" investigation is perhaps not simply a new investigation but a new way of addressing the deepest concern that underlay the old investigation of natural phenomena—the desire to know where we stand in the cosmos and what the status is of the knowledge accessible to us as human beings. And at the heart of his new investigation as Socrates elaborates it in the Apology is an attempt to determine whether anyone knows what he is talking about when he makes claims about what is "noble and good" (kalos kagathos), an attempt that begins from Socrates' knowledge that he himself knows of no such thing (20a6–c2; 21d1–6). An investigation into the moral phenomena, not the physical beings, is perhaps the key to understanding the whole. But by the same token, the moral things that play such a central role in the Apology seem not to have been Socrates' first concern and may or may not ever have been the object of his deepest theoretical interest.
Socrates' story turns, then, on the question of what he and others know and do not know (eidenai) or have knowledge (episteme) of, and the question of whether he or others are wise (sophos) or have wisdom (sophia) or practical or active wisdom (phronesis). There is, as we have suggested, a significant if subtle difference between knowledge and wisdom, the neglect of which has led to the widespread but erroneous notion that Socrates, in disavowing wisdom in the Apology, is claiming to know nothing whatsoever except the fact of his own ignorance. Socrates does explicitly profess to lack knowledge of a number of things, including the things under the earth and in the heavens (19c), the things in Hades (29b), and the fate of the soul after death (37b); but he does claim to know other things—for example, what would have happened if he had tried to be politically active (31d), what will happen if he accepts the punishment of exile, and that it will be bad (37b and d). In all these cases, Socrates uses the word episteme or its cognates: knowledge pertains to particular facts and particular skills.
By contrast, Socrates uses the word sophia or wisdom in the Apology to characterize the understanding that Chaerephon and the oracle both attribute to Socrates himself and that he reluctantly comes to acknowledge he possesses, as well as for the sovereign understanding of human affairs that the leading statesmen were thought to possess but did not. Wisdom, then, is a higher-order capacity than ordinary knowledge. Its meaning is by no means merely theoretical as opposed to practical, as it tends to be in Aristotle's writings. By the same token, phronesis, most often translated as "practical wisdom" or "prudence," is by no means merely practical in Plato: it ranges from a synonym for wisdom (Apology 22a) to the slightly more specific knowledge of how to live well that a wise person will place great value upon (29e; 36c). Plato's Socrates uses it and sophia as such close analogues, especially in the Meno, that I have chosen to translate phronesis as "active wisdom." Neither here nor elsewhere does Plato's Socrates, any more than Xenophon's, suggest that anyone can have sophia without phronesis or phronesis without sophia. Socrates' choice of which term to use seems at least sometimes dictated by the proclivities of his interlocutor: he speaks especially of sophia with the sophist Protagoras, for example, and phronesis with the future warrior Meno. In the Apology, Socrates denies that he is at all wise, either much or little (21b), and maintains that he has at best only "human wisdom" (20d), which perhaps is worth "little or nothing" (23a). Socrates deliberately provokes puzzlement about what he claims to know, but these statements are not contradictory if we attend to the difference between knowledge and comprehensive wisdom: he knows some things and not others, but wisdom he has only in a qualified, merely human form.
Now within the context of his trial, Socrates' whole account of his old accusers and his Delphic quest is a digression, allegedly required because he claims he must combat old prejudices. The effect of the digression is of course to bring those prejudices more vividly to mind; it can help his defense only if he shows the old accusations to be baseless, which he by no means does. The tale he tells to explain how the old charge of natural science and the implied charge of atheism ever arose, the uncorroborated tale about Chaerephon and the Delphic Oracle, is circular in that it fails to explain how Socrates ever came to be reputed wise in the first place. For anyone who reads carefully, it in fact deepens rather than dispels the suspicion that he was indeed involved in studying natural science and may have been an atheist. But then, having blown all these suspicions in our faces and having made us wonder about the truth behind them, Socrates wafts them away. All the charges, old and new, he claims, are due to the humiliating refutations to which he has subjected Athens' reputedly wisest men and especially to his having inspired many of the young to imitate this irritating activity. In their anger, Socrates says, the examinees have charged him with corrupting the young. "And whenever someone asks them, 'By doing what and teaching what?' they have nothing to say, but are ignorant. So in order not to seem to be at a loss, they say the things that are ready at hand against all who philosophize: 'the things aloft and under the earth' and 'not believing in gods' and 'making the weaker speech the stronger'" (23d2–7). From among these men, Socrates now asserts, Meletus and Anytus and Lycon have arisen to prosecute him (23e). The old accusers have disappeared behind the new accusers; at the root of his troubles is not impiety at all but only Socrates' effect on the young.
When he turns to taking up the indictment of the new accusers, Socrates obliquely raises again the question of whether he really has had one set of accusers or two, as well as the question of which of the two charges against him is most important.
So concerning the things about which my first accusers made their accusations, this is a sufficient defense speech before you. But against Meletus, the "good and patriotic" as he says, and the later accusers, I will try to speak next in my defense. Now again, just as if these were other accusers, let us take up in turn their sworn statement. It is something like this: "Socrates," it says, "does injustice by corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other novel daimonia." The charge is of this sort. But let us examine each one of the parts of this charge. (24b3–c3)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Virtue Is Knowledge by Lorraine Smith Pangle. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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