187: The Apology

Are your school days out of sight?

Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your tenth grade reading list. I'm your host, John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host. My wife, Marina McCoy. Thank you for having me as a guest. I have been had my trepidations about doing this because um normally this is a podcast where we bring people on who haven't read the book we're going to discuss. for the last ten, twenty, thirty years. But in this case we have an expert in the field.

Thank you. Yes, I am a professor of philosophy whose specialty is Plato. So but we're doing this podcast because John and I went to Athens, Greece. um over the last spring break and I'm Kinda excited to talk about something Greek with him. This time we are doing Plato, we are doing the Apology. uh, which is not a book I ever read for a class, but I did read it I believe in college I had the Penguin Book. It was called something like The Last Days of Socrates.

And it had what what are the three ones that go together? Well, it sort of depends. You could have either five. My book copy here from Hackett has the euthyphro, apology, crito, amino, and phyto, but you could also have a smaller subset of those kind of up to you. As Marina mentioned, we did go to Athens very recently and uh one of the things we did while we were there was we went to the uh Academy of Plato, what what is left of it, and we went to the agora and saw the site.

where Socrates was held prisoner, which is r uh part of what this uh W would you call this one a dialogue? It it has dialogue elements. Yeah, I would call it a dialogue a play it only wrote in dialogues. I mean the other things that we saw I should mention that were very exciting to me in the agora were

the uh well the whole location of the Agora is a place Socrates spent a lot of time talking to people about philosophy and also we were able to see places where the laws were made, including the boulet or council spaces. So That's those are places that the dialogues um reference and the apology is a dialogue that references a lot of different spaces in the agora. So that was a fun one for us to pick.

So let's give a little bit of an introduction here. I think Plato and Socrates are names that most people have heard of, whether they know anything about ancient philosophy or not. But um maybe we should lay down some uh some knowledge for the for the people out there. You want to introduce people to

who Socrates and Plato were and how we know of them? Yeah. So Socrates never wrote any philosophical treatises, but we think about him as an important philosopher. There were philosophers before Socrates or philosophers after Socrates. But he was important because he introduced a kind of method of questioning that's often shorthand called the elanket.

Socrates was often described as the teacher of Plato, but Socrates always claimed he did not have any formal students because he never took any money for his teaching. And he claimed he didn't really teach anyone anything. So probably a lot of what is important about Socrates is the way in which he encouraged people to learn what they didn't know that they thought they knew and that's a big topic in the apology. Plato, contrary wise, went on to write thirty six dialogues or so some people.

Not sure about the exact number that are authentically his, but about that many on a whole wide range of topics. And he did write We know about Socrates not only from Plato though from other sources like Xenophon. So there are other sources that talk about who Socrates is, but Yeah. They uh Socrates dies in three ninety nine B C so he's working in the seventy or so years right before that and Plato probably started writing his dialogues in the period just after that for s some decades.

And one of the things to know about Socrates is that He was active at the uh during the second half of the um the fifth century BC and this was the era of classical art. This was also the era of most of the classical drama we we know.

a lot of what we think of as Greek culture really boils down to a few decades that happened shortly after the Persian Wars and uh during a period of um economic boom in uh athension a school called the academy outside of the city of Athens where he took in students and What we have of his not of what we know about him is

the set of dialogues that remain. So one of the important things about Plato is we never actually have what Plato says. Nobody knows what Plato thought about a particular topic, although we have certain ideas that recur and are really important. to Plato's thinking, we really have the author of dialogues and the ideas that are raised by characters in those dialogues. Socrates is not the only, but a primary character that occurs in many, many of Plato's dialogues.

And he sort of memorialized and heroicized this historical figure.

And today we are going to be reading the apology. Apology in this sense does not mean I'm sorry, uh or uh you know making amends for anything. It's uh in the sense of an argument. And this is the final uh speech that Socrates gave at his trial. Um he was brought up for trial for uh on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens. and uh as as you mentioned, eventually found guilty and put to death. Um and so this is uh a dialogue that tries to capture

Uh we assume captures a lot of what the last words of Socrates would have been, although as you say, we don't we don't know. Yeah, so the word apologia or apology as it's taken from Greek means a defense. So this is if you wanted to translate it more Exactly. You could call this the defense of Socrates. But uh I think it was translated as the apology back when that word was more Likely known by

people who were probably studying Greek at prep school or something. So um and we have another account of the trial from Xenophon that has some things in common and some things that are different. And that's probably not a rabbit hole we want to go down, but We n we I think there's a sen I have a sense as a scholar that

This is not an exact transcript of what Socrates said, but it captures and Plato's view the spirit of what Socrates was about. Whereas the other dialogues are completely constructions of Plato. This one does seem to be rooted in some kind of historical reality about Socrates. This is an interesting dialogue to me because it is mostly Socrates um monologuing. There are he does have

He does post questions to a specific accuser and can you tell me a little bit about him? Militus was a leading democrat, so the Athenians had something that we don't have today, which is a pure democracy.

It wasn't actually that pure either because women and slaves were not included, but amongst the male citizens they did not have representative democracy in the usual sense. They did not elect their officials I simply had all the male citizens get together and make decisions and then by lottery some were chosen to meet more frequently yet. to make decisions that required like more nuance, for example, to actually draft laws that had to be voted on.

So uh there was still a need for a sub specialized group. They did vote for general. So Pericles, for example, was a general that was voted for by the Athenians, but on the whole Um this is a democracy that prided itself on not having any kind of oligarchic structure whatsoever to it and no representation just Um though the different twelve tribes of Athens were represented in um certain offices.

So yeah, the uh Melitus is we don't know a whole lot about him from other sources, but he seems to have been the person who one of the people who brought the charges against Socrates. Um And he's shown by Plato as sort of representing the concerns the democracy had about Socrates. I think the what I mean, what we find out in the dialogue is that

Socrates is formally on ch on trial for corrupting the youth and for impiety. Uh a kind of fun thing we found out fact we found out when we were in Athens was that the Uh we w w trace the route of one of these religious festivals when we were on a tour bus and they pointed out that more than half of the days in the Greek calendar were religious festivals of one sort or another.

And for the Greeks, piety wasn't like what did you believe or what did you think or feel? It was what did you do? What how was your did you participate in the civic practices? So uh maybe there was some concern that he didn't like put his heart into it fully or something. Um, but he he ends up saying that the charges against him were really not the real concern that they had other things that were really motivating this.

Reading it as a non specialist like me, um uh and I've only read a few things by Plato. I've read uh the Symposium, I've read a lot of The Republic. I don't think I've read it all the way through. But when I... I I always think of of Plato's dialogues as as sort of like little plays. There's a lot of more back and forth. In the symposium, there's uh long speeches that each uh participant takes and so it kind of breaks down into a series of

almost chapters where each person takes it in turn to tell their ideas about love. This is uh more just Socrates talking about it. And it also does not have any um elaborate framing devices. I mean the the symposium has like a a crazily elaborate framing device where uh two people are talking about, oh, do you remember that one big uh time we all went drinking with Socrates and then they suddenly it like does a a flashback to uh Socrates and and all his his friends

uh y hanging around talking about love and this is very s right at it, right into the middle of it. Um and actually say that much as a as a interlocutor, he's he there are questions posed by Socrates to him, but he gives like two or three word answers to most of them. Yeah, that's I mean, that happens in some dialogues and

The forms of the dialogues are very different. There are some that are narrated by Socrates, there are some that have no framing devices, there's some that have two framing devices. The content and the approach really varies. I think Something Plato does really well is he shows why people got so mad at Socrates. I mean, when I teach Plato to my undergraduates, I hope they come to love Plato over the time they spend with him.

But at the beginning, they think he's kind of a jerk, you know? Um, that is they don't if I ask them like three weeks into the course it might be different. But the first couple of days spending time with Socrates, they tend to think this guy's kind of a difficult personality that they wouldn't want to hang around with. So I think Plato shows really well through this back and forth with Meletus.

was disliked by certain people. And yet other people, hi followers like Plato, Caraphon, other people who spent time with him absolutely adored him and thought what he was doing was really meaningful. So I think Socrates is someone that people didn't necessarily get what he was about. And part of Plato's legacy is to try to write into a dialogue what he thought his teacher was really about. In this dialogue, Socrates is literally facing death.

And he comes off as uh a bit cantankerous, a bit uh Argumentative. He certainly is not in any way contrite or begging for his life. In fact, that's part of. eventually that's part of the argument he puts forth is at the end is that it's better to die and l live a just life than it is to live and have a unjust life.

I I find him crusty. I l but uh you know, I like crusty characters. I like people who are difficult and I I find it hilarious that one of the things he keeps saying over and over again is he talks about how he would talk to people and show them how their ideas were incorrect or lacking in some way, and then he'd say, and I didn't understand why they got so mad with me. Yeah, I mean so it's interesting because Socrates seems to have this unusual ability

to tolerate not knowing. And I think um so there's a word in Greek called aporea, which means no way forward. But it's this idea of being confused or puzzled or like not be able to figure it out. And that's a very uncomfortable state. And Socrates seems to think that state is a really good state, that it's a state that human beings are often in.

and that we shouldn't rush to get out of it, that actually can be damaging to avoid it for various reasons. So the big key story in the Apology in case you're listening and haven't been reading along is that Socrates thought about himself as not particularly wise, but one of his followers, friends, Caraphon, went to the Oracle at Delphi.

where essentially there's this priestess that represents the voice of Apollo, but she only speaks in riddles. So you you could like ask the qu a question to the oracle. And the oracle is gonna reply, but the reply is never clear. It's never like play the lottery number six two eight. It's always some obscure thing that you have to figure out what it means. And so when Caraphon goes and asks the Oracle whether there's anyone that's wiser than Socrates, the Oracle says, No one is wiser.

So Caraphon goes back, tells us to Socrates, Socrates did not ask for this, by the way, he's not this an egoist enough to care. But he finds himself puzzled, he said, because he said, I didn't think I was particularly wise. But the thing is, he does give credit to the oracle at Delphi, which is interesting. Some commentators, not me, but some commentators think that.

He just mentions that he cares about the oracle at Delphi in order to prove that he cares believes in the gods, to kind of get out of the charge of impiety. But I d I actually think he's exemplifying what he wants other people to do, which is If you find yourself with two contradictory sets of beliefs, like I'm not wise, oh, the God says that no one is wiser, then you need to try to somehow figure out how you can get

make sense of that. And some people make sense of things by just sticking with their own original beliefs, whatever those beliefs really were. And in this case, Socrates says, no, what I did was I was puzzled. So there's a contrast between Socrates and Melotus that's presented. I mean, Melatus is a guy who's angry at Socrates because Socrates clearly asked him questions. So what Socrates ends up seeing in this dialogue is

that when he found out that the Oracle said that no one was wiser, he couldn't believe it. So he claims, perhaps a little ironically. So I went around to the rest of the city to ask, to see if there's anyone who was wise. And he found out that none of them were wise, that the politicians

despite being so pro-democracy and thinking that they lived in the best democracy that ever existed, they all thought they were wiser than other people. They had some special wisdom. But when he asked them questions about what the basis of their beliefs were, they couldn't address them, right? So for example, you could imagine someone saying, it's just to go to war with Sparta, or it's a good idea for us to unify against the Persians, or we should spend our money on building the Parthenon.

Or we should go kill the generals who failed to bring back the bodies of our dead in the a recent battle. If you want to ask why should you do the hot? You want typically, right, as a philosopher anyway, you want people to give a justification or reason. You want people to be able to say why something is pious or impious or why something is ethical or unethical and not just to say, well, I have that belief.

This makes a philosophers very annoying to people because a lot of people would like to just have a belief and not have to justify it. But I think a kind of core thing that Socrates and Plato maintain and that I think is important for philosophers of all different stripes. is this ob kind of moral obligation we have to test our beliefs to find out if they're true.

Because if you end up doing something that's really harmful to somebody, enact a war, for example, that's unjust or participate in an unethical action, you know, because you think it's your opinion is that it's okay to do it. Um, that's not good. It's not good for your city, it's not good for your soul. So Socrates thinks about this process of questioning as a kind of soul care, but they did not experience it this way. I think what's interesting to me about this part that you mentioned about

Socrates going around and talking about going to this person or that person. He talks about them in sort of typical ways, like, I went to see uh politicians, I went to see uh uh citizens, I went to see craftspeople is that he he breaks it down into different categories. He says there's the people who just don't really know anything, but they think that they do. And then there's the people who know a lot about something

But they make the grave mistake of thinking that that means that they're wise about everything. And I find that really uh I find that really pertinent to today when a lot of our media figures are people who have had success in, say, tech.

or uh something financial and then they think that makes them an expert in everything. Yeah. I mean part of what Socrates is doing there is he's reversing a social order. So for the Greeks money making was not the aim of all life as it teams seems to be in the United States. To be political is the main aim. So if you were a free man, a citizen, the best thing you can do is to enact the laws of your city and to care for your city and community.

And so those folks who have time for that, the people who don't have to run their farms or like keep track of their goats or whatever, they ha live this life and this is the best life to be able to live. Socrates says those are actually the people who knew the least, right? And then the people who knew a little bit, kind of, were the crafts people. Now they're the people who would be seen as not bad, but like somewhat lower strata of society, the people who are making the shoes.

Right, are not gonna be seen as as high as the people living the life of leisure. But they at least knew how to make shoes.

Uh, and then the poets occupy this other kind of middle territory where they're inspired, they're speaking things that might be knowledgeable, but they can't really explain them. Like a lot of artists, right, who are really gifted artists, but when you ask them to talk meaningfully about their art, may not have the words to express fully what it is that they're doing with their artwork.

Um, yeah, but I you know, I think the thing that is great for reading this dialogue is uh yes, we can look at public figures who embody these problems, but what Socrates wants us to do, and I think what Plato wants us to do in reading this is to turn it towards ourselves. that we should be thinking, what are the views or opinions that I hold that I'm sure are correct?

that I'm unwilling to have interrogated. What happens to me when I have, let's say, someone of a different political persuasion challenge my political beliefs? Do I get angry at them? When Socrates says I should be angry at myself if I haven't fully thought through what those beliefs are. Then maybe we have f fully thought through our beliefs and justify them and give inadequate reasoning.

But Socrates seems to think that no human being is fully wise, no matter how much you think you've defended or justified an opinion. that opinion is not something you can ever let go of questioning once and for all. So and so Socrates says something that most people don't really believe, which is he says, I wish I would in the a different play, The Gorgias, uh a different rather dialogue, The Gorgias, he says

I would prefer to have my ideas to be overturned than to overturn other people's ideas. And nobody believes him because it seems like Socrates in the dialogue spends most of his time uh overturning other people's beliefs. But I think in the apology he's quite sincere when he says, like at the end, Hey, if you want to take care of my kids after I go to my death.

Ask them rigorous questions, interrogate their beliefs, make sure they're not the kind of people who think they're wise when they are not. You know, many, many years ago I worked as an evening circulation uh professional. attendant at the uh Boston University Library while I was getting my um my uh masters in art history and I had a coworker there who was

enormously enamored of the work of Jacques Derrida. And he would talk about how uh Derrida and the post structuralists and the deconstructionists had basically blown everyone out of the water and how we didn't need to study the history of philosophy because it had all been overturned by uh post structuralism. And it made me, um I I I didn't get along with this guy and it made me have, I think, a bad opinion of Gerada for many years before I actually got around to reading him. I'm like, Oh, well

Actually I shouldn't let this guy color my opinion of Der Derrida. Derrida has some very interesting things to say. But, you know, reading this through The the funny thing that occurred to me is that what Socrates is describing here is a lot of what the project of deconstruction is, which is what are the assumptions that underlie the beliefs you have? What are the what are what are the things th what are the The things you believe for which you have no proof.

And by examining those things you get to kind of question the conclusions you reach from those assumptions.

And of course one of the ironies here is of w one of the most famous things that Derek uh wrote on was Plato, so I mean I think all philosophy of all I I don't think there's any philosophy that doesn't ask us to do that. And that's why Socrates is so important. It seems to be the kind of primary project of philosophy. Now there are gonna be philosophers who think we can arrive at knowledge.

through a rigorous process of argument and that those conclusions we get to are reliable because we've gone through this process adequately and at the end of it we get to something that looks like knowledge. And there will be a lot of people who think we can get something that looks like what it's called justified opinion, which is to say an opinion that you hold and live according to that you've tested so much that you think it's probably true.

But that in principle you hold open to having rebutted at some point And then you would have to change how you live and what you do. And I think Socrates does have sympathy for that idea of justified opinion. But I think the Socrates we see in this, he's presented differently in different dialogues, and the Socrates we see in this Dialogue is highly skeptical of our ability to ever come to know the truth. And so I think since this is the dialogue we're talking about, he's

Really pointing out something important, which is aparia or not knowing is an important ethical state in which to be. In other words, It's not just that aporia or not knowing is this thing we go through so that later we can get to the good part, which is knowing things, but that there's something fundamentally good about having the ethical disposition of being able to say, I don't know.

And that is so countercultural then and it was so cul c it was so countercultural then, it's so countercultural now. You know, who I mean, I I sometimes have joked with my students, wouldn't it be really great if we had a politician who would stay a stand up and instead of saying, I have the perfect plan to fix the economy, here is what it is. He or she would say.

You know, the economy is this really complex thing that we don't fully understand and I have some ideas about how we might wanna go about it, but I don't really know what will work or we have an insurmountable problem. I have no idea how to address it. That might be more accurate, but that person will not get elected. When we get to the part um later on where Socrates addresses specific charges against him, there's a couple of interesting arguments he puts for forth.

one is he says that he's being charged with not being pious or obs or or observing any any Um v th he doesn't he doesn't uh believe in the existence of gods, but he is nonetheless uh talking about spiritual matters. And his argument is uh backed that is spirituality has to come from somewhere. And so there has to be a source for that. A lot of times today you hear the phrase, I'm uh not religious, but I'm spiritual.

And it reminds me vaguely of that. But i I don't think Socrates ever actually addresses the issue of believing in uh a god, at least a specific god, so much as he believes that there are wellsprings from which spirituality flows. Is that am I being correct about this? Well, I mean, the way I would take it is so first of all, he does mention the oracle Adolphi, who's Apollo.

And that it takes seriously what the oracle says. So I would take that to be an indication that he did take seriously what the oracle said. Now people are are i there are people who think he's just being ironic and sort of telling the story to kinda you know, like s turn the the screw in even harder on his opponent, right? But I think um

The so y there's a funny thing that Socrates had, which is a daimon or a spirit. So we think that the his historical Socrates probably experienced this. He had some kind of a we don't know what it is. He calls it his daimon or spirit. Is it conscience? Did he hear hallucinating voices? I've heard all kinds of interpretations from he was a paranoid schizophrenic to he's just describing conscience. We don't know. I think it's a good thing to say though we don't know.

He uh but it would report us that there were times in his life where the diamond would tell him not to act. The diamond never told him to do something positive, but it would restrain him from doing something. And then he wouldn't do that thing. So that he describes as a spirit. And so part of the argument here, I think, is that how can he believe in this daimon if he doesn't believe in any gods at all?

Um, but you're right. I mean, he could if he wanna okay, if you're going to the court and someone says, Hey, you don't believe in the city's gods, we're gonna put you to death for it. Most people would probably say I went to the festival where we went the Pan Athenaean festival. I offered the sacrifice. I belonged to this group of people who carried the peplos or cloak up to the top of the hill and

helped um well it would have been the women who would have put it on the top of the statue of Athena. But, you know, do you would have maybe named some things that you did that proved that you didn't ha your the charge is not valid against you and he never does that. So a lot of people think that's an indication that he wasn't really that interested in this polytheistic religion that he had

move beyond it to think about something else. But in fact what the dialogue says is that Melodus seems to be confusing him with some other other philosophers, so Anaxagoras, who thought the sun is just a really hot stone of fire, crazy to think that, right? Um he

when uh Meloda says, Well you just don't you don't believe in the gods, you don't think there is a sun god, he says, Well you confuse me with the Anaxagoras. Anybody can go down to the local bookstore. I love that there are bookstores, by the way, in ancient Greece. Um, I we did not see those when we were there, but they were there. And that you can go to the local bookstore and buy a copy of Anaxagoras' pamphlet and you can find out that that's like he who said it. So

Socrates is kind of mercilessly saying to Melodus, You've brought me to trial'cause in those days you didn't have prosecutors and defence attorneys. You just had one guy bringing another person to trial. You know, you've given this speech that I'm impious and you didn't even do your research. Like you didn't even figure out in the least thing about what I actually believe or don't believe. And in that sense he says, You're not actually exercising care for the city.

So what he tries to argue is that Melodus thinks he's caring for the Sadiq by prosecuting Socrates and getting this guy away from the youth who are going to be asking all these He also at one point I don't know if it's he's talking directly to Melitus or he's just talking more in general about charges that have people have brought uh against him, he says that um people are mistaking him for the character in the Aristophanes The Cloud. which of course has a satirical version of Socrates in in it.

He says that without um particular bitter bitterness or or he it's more like he's acknowledging, like, yeah, people make fun of me and it's that's what what what uh comedy is. And I mean Aristophanes, of course, is a character in the uh symposium and s there's no reason to think uh Socrates had any particular beef with Aristophanes other than Aristophanes made uh unflattering caricature that people uh

Yeah. Yeah. So I have a very particular take on this. So one of my uh intellectual interests is the difference between Socrates and the Sophist. I won't totally bore your audience with all the details of that argument. You can go read my book on it if you'd like, but The sophists were this group of very disparate intellectuals who offered what they thought was a better education.

to young Athenians who wanted to become the next prominent Democrat, um, influential in influential speaker in uh Assembly Uh, because they didn't really have that much. They didn't have a university system yet. Plato had yet to find the academy, you know. And these sophists said that for money I'll teach you various skills, one of them being rhetoric, one of them being able to persuade people to adhere to your views.

Socrates is presented in Aristophanes' clouds as though he's one of the sophists. So there's this house of Sophists that these other characters go to. They knock on the door. And Socrates is up in a basket saying he's up there so he can get closer to the heavens and it's ludicrous, right, that um he's in a basket to try to get closer to the heavens.

And he's sort of portrayed as like maybe a natural scientist, maybe duplicitous person, maybe just a fool. You know, he's very pale. He doesn't get like that good tanned look that Greek warriors were supposed to have. And um he's really mocked mercilessly, but Aristophanes would have mocked lots of leading i in you know, important people in the city as a way of maybe somewhat equalizing the citizens.

Um, depending on your view of Aristophanes, but Socrates is um not in Plato's view a sophist. And I think an interesting thing is that while we now today think we know what philosophy is That was what was at issue at that time. Like what is it? Who are the w it it's philosophy means love of wisdom. What is wisdom? That is a question that's being asked.

And there were people who thought that what they were doing is intellectual practice. That was philosophy. And Socrates really distinguishes between people who think they're wise, Sophists. And people like him who seek wisdom but don't think they're wise. And that's such a that's such I think it's such a peculiar place to be, right? To say I'm not wise, but I value wisdom. Cause you could go you can you could go either extreme. You could either say,

I value wisdom and I have it. You know, I've accomplished it. I am the wise person. Or you could say, you know what, human wisdom is so hard to get. Let's not care about wisdom. Let's not care about trying to find what's really truthful. what an objective truth is, we'd we had nothing but opinion. And there were other people in Plato's day that took both of those points of view. And I think Plato does not take that either of those points of view. He in the footsteps of Socrates says

that seeking wisdom is like a place we're always we're always at this in between place. We're always seeking and never fully arriving, although we can certainly come to know some things. There's another argument that Socrates makes directly to Melitus later when he's questioning Meletus about whether he is accusing Socrates of

actively uh teaching the youth to be wicked. Um and he makes this interesting argument where he he he he does this sort of uh the the the tr the what we think of the sort of the classical Socratic method of like asking a bunch of questions and then kind of throwing it back to say like, well your argument is faulty because of this

He asks Melitus, uh, do wicked people do good things to the neighbors or bad things to the neighbors? And he says, Oh, they do bad things and he says, Well, why would I teach someone to be wicked, knowing that they would do bad things to me? And it's an it's an it's an interesting argument, but it also felt to me like, you know, a as someone who who's who's again, not an expert and who's not as steeped in all this, it felt like i to play devil's advocate, you can you can teach people

wrong things and believe you're doing it for the right reasons. Now, to be fair, Socrates says, if you if if you believe that I'm mistaken, then it's incumbent upon you to take me aside and correct me Um but i I'm just saying it it could be that one actually believes that uh the that a uh series of beliefs or a school thought

is actively harmful or antisocial or corruptive to the system of government you you want. Yeah. So in this section, Socrates says I would never harm the youth of Athens willingly. If I did it willingly, they would end up harming me because if you corrupt someone intentionally, you're gonna produce this corrupt state of soul in them. And those people are terrible to live with, right? So he says, like, why would anyone ever purposely corrupt somebody else?

And then says, But if I do so unwillingly, then educate me, like tell me what I should do differently. And it's important that Melatiz is unable to respond to that. It's not like Melatiz says, well, here's exactly what you should do. When Meletis is pressed, as to who is the best educator of these young people, Melatis says, Well, everyone in Athens.

And that's such a bad answer, right? Like, I mean, if you were, you know, saying like if you're basically having a debate about education and the debate is Y I am the one bad person who's corrupting them, who who's like, what's the better alternative to education? And all you say is, well, just what everyone does. It's not a very thorough answer. But yeah, I think

So you didn't find that uh argument persuasive? The thing is I can imagine a situation in which somebody seeks to harm another person out of pure spite or m malice. And I can also imagine okay many situations where someone believes they're doing the right thing and is doing Uh the wrong thing. Well, yeah, so that's what Socrates is saying though. So it's there's a position called Socratic intellectualism, and that's the idea that

Socrates often presents in the dialogues, though not completely consistently in every single one, but often will say, Whatever we do, we do because we think it's good. The idea being that if we thought it was bad, we wouldn't do it. So let's say you steal something, you might know it's against the law, but you steal it because you think it's good to steal it. There's some part of you that thinks there's a good here. Now the good might be

My own money or, you know, I care only about my own money. I don't care about social mores. Now, objectively, what you're doing is wrong, but you still think that it's good. So Socrates suggests that people don't willingly do what they know to be wrong. They might willingly do what other people think is wrong and they might know that other people think it's wrong, but they themselves don't think it's wrong. They only act in ways they think are good.

There seems to be some evidence against this though. Right. So like St. Augustine in his confession says he stole a bunch of pears that he didn't want to eat and he did it just to be morally transgressive as a super famous example. of the a kind of counterfactual to the Socratic claim. But Socrates actually does make a kind of powerful claim in arguing that we're always acting for some kind of good, uh, in his own case, because what he's saying is

I sincerely have always gone around caring for people in the best way that I knew how to do. I really, really wanted to help people to understand. First of all, I wanted to know if people had wisdom and they turned out not to have it. And I thought it was important for them to understand about themselves. They were not as wise as they thought they were, because that's ethically important to know about oneself.

And and if I'm wrong, show me how. But don't just say you're corrupting people. Like explain what is wrong about it.

I think that you've you've put your finger on something that's very important, i which is I do believe that Socrates, at least the character in these um dialogues as as written by Plato is someone who has compassion and care for other people's well being and that's an important thing because when um

when I think about arguments that people uh are uh always behave rationally as they understand it, it reminds me of um all the sort of classical liberal ideas of capitalism or or or libertarianism, which is the this this b this belief that individuals um, will d will act in their own best interests using their intellect. And I I just don't actually see that happen in the world. I see people being driven by emotions and passions

driven driven by ignorance, driven by a desire to maintain their beliefs in the face of evidence contrary. Um and it's I feel like you have to kind of be I I I don't think that's being cynical. I think that's you've you've just got to r make allowance for that s Those are those things complicate this whole idea that people uh

are always rational actors. Yeah. And I think the wonderful thing about going back to these ancient Greek texts is to find out that it you didn't have to live in a classical liberal society or a capitalist society or an industrialized society or any particular type of society that It just seems to be a human condition that people want to hold on to their beliefs in the face of contravening evidence and that people are uncomfortable with examining their beliefs.

But I will say the plus side is that it can uh you know, philosophy is something people can really enjoy too. So the The proof that Socrates was not totally unsuccessful is Plato and everything that came after Plato. I mean, he was wildly successful, even though he was put to death. So much so that I've always found it super intriguing that Socrates is put to death for being a philosopher and then, you know, within a couple of decades Plato has a school.

that's set that's set up to do this. And then Aristotle when he was like the next generation of philosopher There's not even like any mention anywhere in Aristotle that I can think of about the worry social worry that philosophers are like big corruptors of the soul. It just seems to be the argument has been won.

Plato and Socrates were right, that it's good to just question your beliefs and to unpack everything and that this is fine to do. So I find that just really fascinating that that was the legacy of Plato. And We can't but we can actually, I think, habituate ourselves to be in a state where we do question our beliefs, where we do wonder about whether what we think is true is really true or not. And find that pleasurable, even though that's not maybe the way that most of us begin.

Well this episode has been very um very dense and very heady and very focused around big ideas. But I do want to encourage people who may be uh Plato skeptical to read uh these dialogues for enjoyment because they are also quite funny um as in at the end of this dialogue which you know i Socrates has been condemned

to death, uh by the Athenian uh rules, he has to give up his um his idea of what might be a fair alternative punishment and it's a way of allowing people to moderate, you know, maybe the uh the worst impulses of a mob or something like that. And you one would think like, oh, maybe I would be sent to exile, maybe I would have to pay this fine, maybe I would spend this much time in jail. But no, what he says is m I should g be given free lunch.

For the rest of my life. Free meals of the Britanium, yeah. So basically this place where Olympic heroes or sometimes we saw when we were in the Agora. um, that there were some politicians who would also when they had certain offices that they were assigned by lottery, they would get to have these meals for a short time. But the Olympians that won certain competitions were allowed to have free meals for life.

And so Socrates says, Well, because I'm the greatest thing that greatest benefactor ever to the city I mean, that's the thing about Socrates that does sort of drive one a bit crazy is I'm not sure he definitely comes across as compassionate He cares for people's souls, but I wouldn't necessarily describe him as the most compassionate person. And he's alternately very humble and he seems to be incredibly self-aggrandizing.

And that must have driven people absolutely crazy. But yeah, he's pretty funny. Do you have anything more you want to say or shall we end it there? Well, I just want to say that Socrates thought that the unexamined life was not worth living. And it is inspiring to see someone who was willing to stand by his belief.

And to embody those to the very end of his life. You know, I think when sa he says, you know, people fear death because they think death is the worst thing that can happen to them. But he says injustice runs swifter than death, meaning the bigger danger is that you're not gonna outrun injustice catching up to you, meaning, you know, your own it's very easy for people to turn to acting unjustly in times of stress or difficulty. And we're all gonna die. Nobody will escape death.

So the real question is can you be virtuous? Can you live a good life? Can you live a worthwhile life? And that the length of life, although, you know, not irrelevant, is not as important as the quality of the life that you live. And I think those are words to continue to value and treasure. Thanks again to my wife Marie. If you have an idea for a book, a story, a poem or a Or other reading to cover on a future episode.

Or if you have a suggestion for a guest host, or if you just want to say hi, you can write me Mm. com You can also check out my blog at JohnMcCoy.org where I discuss this podcast, literature, pop culture, anything that comes to mind. Subscribe and you'll get new posts by email. The incomparable store on the cotton beer. The sophomore lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygaard.

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