There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be indicted for indecency. [1] The prosecutor, Euthyphro, is certain he understands what decency requires. The accused, Socrates, is not certain of anything, and says so. They talk.
Euthyphro’s confidence is striking. His own family thinks it is indecent for a son to prosecute his father; Euthyphro insists that true decency demands it, that he understands what the gods require better than his relatives do. Socrates, who is about to be tried for teaching indecency toward the gods, asks Euthyphro to explain what decency actually is, since Euthyphro claims to know, and Socrates will need such knowledge for his own defense.
Euthyphro’s first answer is: decency is what I am doing right now, prosecuting wrongdoers regardless of kinship. Socrates points out that this is an example, not a definition. There are many decent acts; what makes them all decent?
Euthyphro tries again: decency is what the gods love. But the gods disagree among themselves, Socrates observes, so by this definition the same act could be both decent and indecent. Euthyphro refines: decency is what all the gods love. And here Socrates asks a question Euthyphro cannot answer: do the gods love decent things because they are decent, or are things decent because the gods love them? [2]
If decent things are decent because the gods love them, then decency is arbitrary, a matter of divine whim. Socrates is too polite to say so, but the implication is: if decency is defined by the arbitrary whim of our betters, who are you to prosecute your father?
If the gods love decent things because they are decent, then however we know this, we already know the standard for decency ourselves and can cut out the middleman. But then Euthyphro should be able to explain the standard. He can’t.
Euthyphro tries a few more times, suggesting that decency is a kind of service to the gods, a kind of trade with the gods. Each time Socrates gently follows the definition to its consequences, and each time it collapses. Eventually Euthyphro leaves, saying he is in a hurry. Socrates’ last words are a lament: you have abandoned me without the understanding I needed for my own defense.
This is usually read as a proto-academic dialogue about definitions. It is a scene from a civilization in crisis. A man is about to use the legal system to destroy his own father on the basis of a concept he cannot define, in a courthouse where another man is about to be destroyed by the same concept. And the man who cannot define it is not unusual. He is representative.
The indecency for which Socrates was being prosecuted seems to have consisted of asking just the sort of questions Socrates posed to Euthyphro.
Athens in the late fifth century had recently become something it had never been before: the capital of an empire. This changed what it meant to speak in public. When Athens was a small city making decisions about its own affairs, leadership among Athenians involved speaking to communicate your perspective on matters of shared concern. But now that the collective decisions of Athens mattered for a whole lot of other people, those other people were quite naturally going to spend a lot of time thinking about how to get Athenians to decide their way. At the same time, being part of the leadership structure in control of considerable tax revenues became more profitable for more people, and less economically sustainable to opt out of. Now ambitious Athenians started using their speech to seem electable by showing off the quality of their “communicate their perspectives on matters of shared concern” performance.
Sophists were the professionals of this new economy. They specialized in the performance of wisdom, partly to sell their know-how, but always claiming, with some ambiguity, that they were excellent on the same criteria as the great Athenian leaders of the previous generation. And the consequences were not limited to the realm of speech. People were being imprisoned, exiled, and killed, on the basis of deliberative processes that had become unmoored from any standard anyone could articulate.
What had happened was not simply that Athenian politics had become venal. Something subtler and more devastating had occurred. People had stopped being alive to each other. They were playing characters. The sophists taught people more sophisticated scripts. Public speech, which had once been the medium through which free men actually thought together about shared problems, had become a performance of thinking. The performance could be very impressive. It could sound like wisdom. But there was no one home behind it, except an intelligent but inarticulate terrified hairless ape with no friends.
And then there was Socrates. He described himself not as a sophist, a possessor of wisdom, but a philosopher, someone who likes wisdom, who has an affinity for it.
In the Apology, Plato has Socrates report that his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser, and was told no one was. But a different tradition, preserved in Origen’s Contra Celsum, claims to quote the oracle’s actual verse. It ranked three men:
Sophocles is wise
Euripides is wiser
But of all men, Socrates is wisest
Sophocles and Euripides were not scientific thinkers like Thales or Democritus, who investigated the underlying structure of physical reality. They were not mathematicians. They were not statesmen like Pericles, who managed Athens’s rise from preeminent city to imperial capital. Sophocles and Euripides were the men who could inhabit other minds, who could construct characters who, to all appearances, each had their own distinctive interiority. They imagined all these people well enough to put words in their mouths for declamation in a public theater. They could dramatize what it is like to be Medea deciding to kill her children, or Neoptolemus discovering he cannot bring himself to trick a suffering man. If someone at Delphi had met Socrates and reached for a comparison, they did not reach for a statesman or a priest. They reached for the people who were most alive to other people’s experience.
The oracle’s pronouncement likely came before Socrates was famous for questioning people. Chaerephon, an excitable and devoted friend, likely went to Delphi on his own initiative, to get divine confirmation of something he had already noticed. And what he had noticed was not a method. It was a quality. Speaking with Socrates, one felt the presence of a living intelligence, curious about one’s situation. One felt excitingly seen and at the same time uncomfortably exposed. In a city where public life had become a drama where the actors were principally concerned with their own appearance, this was so unusual that it shone brilliantly to anyone looking for intelligent life, like a beacon ablaze on a clear moonless night.
What came after was Socrates trying to figure out what the oracle could have meant. If I am the wisest, what does that say about everyone else? So, by his own account, he went to talk to the people who were supposed to be wise, the politicians and the poets and the craftsmen, and he found that the politicians and the poets could not give a coherent account of the knowledge they claimed to possess. The craftsmen could, within their crafts. But the knowledge that was being wielded with lethal force in the courts and the Assembly, the knowledge of justice and piety and how the city should be governed, that knowledge was nowhere. The people who claimed it were performing a script, and the script could not survive contact with someone who was trying to make sense of what they were saying. The performative, advantage-seeking political culture of Athens could only make sense of their discomfiture at Socrates’s active listening, as Socrates winning debates. So, as illustrated in dialogues like the Gorgias, big-shot sophists would seek him out, eager to be seen confronting the most formidable debater in Athens. Meanwhile, in a society that would eventually produce Aristotle’s claim that slaves cannot reason, Socrates finds it the most natural thing to turn to a slave to help him work out a mathematical proof, in the dialogue Meno.
Xenophon, who knew Socrates as a person and not only as a character in philosophical dialogues, shows us what this same aliveness looked like when it met people who wanted help. During the civil war around the Thirty Tyrants, a man named Aristarchus had fourteen of his sisters, nieces, and cousins sheltering in his house as refugees. The land had been seized by enemies. There was no money, and he saw no way to borrow, because he had nothing productive to spend it on. He couldn’t feed fourteen people on nothing. Socrates noticed that the women already knew how to work wool. He told Aristarchus to borrow capital, buy materials, and put them to work. Now there was a reason to borrow, and they did. Xenophon says the suspicious glances turned to smiles, the household became productive and harmonious, and eventually Aristarchus came back to Socrates delighted, reporting that the only complaint was that he was now the sole member of the household eating the bread of idleness.
In another episode, a man is harassed by lawsuits because of his deep pockets, but has a poor friend who’s articulate and virtuous; Socrates advises him to pay his friend to start suing the people who are suing him, as a deterrent.
The cross-examination and the practical advice are not two different activities by two different Socrateses. They are both what it looks like when a living mind engages with the world: whether the world presents a man performing authority he cannot account for, or a household full of hungry refugees sitting next to a loom.
At his trial, Socrates gave his own account of what he had been doing. In the Apology, he makes his limited claim to wisdom. Craftsmen really are wise about some things, but he doesn’t think that kind of wisdom is relevant to his interests as a free Athenian trying to participate in deliberations about public matters. Others falsely claim and believe themselves to have scientific knowledge of ethical or political truths. Socrates can claim distinctive wisdom only insofar as he clearly knows himself not to know such things.
This is usually read as a philosophical thesis about the limits of human knowledge. It is a man on trial for his life, explaining to the jury that the people who condemned him are exercising lethal authority on the basis of knowledge they do not possess, which makes implementing any standard impossible; and that pointing out that the laws are incoherent cannot be a violation of the laws, because that sort of criticism is necessary if we are to have laws at all.
In the Theaetetus, set just before the Euthyphro, Socrates finally finds a young man in Athens he can respect for his intelligence and honesty. But the man is not a peer Socrates can consult for advice; he is a promising youth in need of guidance, and the conversation has to end: Socrates excuses himself to go to the courthouse to be indicted. It is my favorite of Plato’s dialogues.
Plato also responded to his beloved mentor’s death by founding the Academy, a great house in Athens where philosophical reasoning was taught methodically. We still have our Academics.
Agnes Callard, in her recent book Open Socrates, wants Socrates to be timeless. She strips out the historical situation, strips out the aliveness that preceded the method, and ends up defending a method that’s obviously inapplicable in many of the cases where she claims it applies. Aristarchus did not need his assumptions questioned at random. He needed someone who could ask probing questions about his actual problem, from a perspective that didn’t share his assumptions about what was and wasn’t possible.
Zvi Mowshowitz, in his review of Callard’s book (part 1, part 2), argues at considerable length that the decontextualized version is bad. He is right. Cached beliefs are usually fine. Destabilizing them is usually harmful. Most people do not want to spend their lives in Socratic questioning, and they are right.
But Zvi has written a long polemic in two installments on the winning side of an incredibly lame debate about whether we should anxiously doubt ourselves all the time, responding to Callard’s decontextualized Socrates, not the real one. The real one did not devise a method and then apply it. He had a quality, something the oracle reached for the language of the tragedians to describe. And what was memorialized as a “method” was what happened when that quality met a city where every other participant in public life had stopped being alive.
Socrates invokes timeless considerations like logical coherence, and committing (even provisionally) to specific claims; these are very natural things to try to appeal to when people are being squirmy, dramatic, hard to pin down, and fleeing to abstractions that resist falsification.
Spinoza, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, similarly resituated the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in their proper context. The political teachings of the Gospels to turn the other cheek, forgive debts, and render unto Caesar what is due to him, are instructions for people living under a hostile and extractive system of domination. Citizens of a free republic have entirely different duties. They have an affirmative obligation to hold each other accountable, to sue people who have wronged them, to participate in collective self-governance. The teachings are not wrong. They are addressed to a specific situation, and become wrong when mechanically transplanted into an inappropriate context.
The reason to recover the historical Socrates is not only accuracy about the distant past; it is that by seeing this relevant aspect of the past more clearly, we might see more clearly what we are up against now.
Socratic cross-examination requires an interlocutor who at least would feel ashamed not to put on a show of accountability. The people Socrates questioned were performing wisdom, but they were performing it because the culture still demanded that leaders seem accountable. They would sit for the examination, because refusing would be disgraceful, like breaking formation in a hoplite phalanx. Their scripts collapsed because the scripts were designed to look like real accountability, and real accountability is what Socrates brought.
There is a useful framework for understanding how public discourse degrades, which distinguishes between guilt, shame, and depravity. A guilty person has violated a norm and intends to repair the breach by owning up and making amends. An ashamed person intends to conceal the violation, which means deflecting investigation. A depraved person has generalized the intent to conceal into a coalitional strategy: I will cover for you if you cover for me, and together we will derail any investigation that threatens either of us.
The leaders Socrates questioned were, at worst, ashamed. They had taken on roles they couldn’t account for, and they wanted to hide that fact, but they still felt the force of the demand for accountability. When Socrates pressed them, they squirmed, they went in circles, they eventually fled. But they engaged. They felt they had to engage. The culture of Athens, even in its degraded state, still held that a man who refused to give an account of his claims was disgraced.
Depravity is a further stage, and Sartre described it precisely in his book Anti-Semite and Jew:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
The depraved person does not perform accountability. He plays with the forms of accountability to exhaust and humiliate the person who still takes them seriously. He is not running a script that is trying to pass as a perspective, collapsing only under the kind of questioning we still call Socratic. He is amusing himself at the expense of the questioner. Cross-examination does not expose him, because he was never trying to seem consistent. He was trying to demonstrate that consistency is for suckers. The Socratic method will not help him.
The Socratic method, if we can rightly call it that, was forged by the pressures confronted by a living mind in a city of the ashamed, people who still cared enough about accountability to fake it. It has nothing to say to the depraved themselves, who have dispensed with the pretense, though in a transitional period might expose them to the judgment of the naïve.
But the quality that preceded the method is something else.
What the oracle recognized in Socrates was not the ability to cross-examine. It was something closer to what it recognized in Euripides: the capacity to be present to what is happening, to see the person in front of you rather than the drama you are supposed to enact with them, to respond to the situation rather than to your script about the situation. To be alive.
We do not need a new method. Methods are what you formalize after you understand the problem, and we are not there yet. What might still help us is the quality that precedes method: the willingness to see what is in front of us, to say the obvious thing that everyone embedded in the performance is too scripted to see, and to keep reaching out to others even when the response is usually not even embarrassment but indifference, not even a failed defense but a smirk.
The oracle didn’t say Socrates had the best method. It said he was the wisest man, in a society oriented against wisdom. The “method” was just how aliveness was memorialized by a city that still cared enough to be ashamed of being dead.
The question for us is what aliveness looks like in a city beyond shame.
- ↩︎
Usually translated “impiety,” but the Greek hosion and its negation anosion are broader. “Piety” to us generally means deference, which doesn’t make sense to attribute to the gods, but Euthyphro thinks it is normal to call the gods hosion, so we might try “holiness,” since we speak both of holy gods and holy men. But the connotations of “holiness” don’t match up well with the context of a prosecution. “Decency” is at a lower register of formality than “piety” or “holiness” in a way that sounds a bit odd, but it is the best fit as far as its explicit meaning.
- ↩︎
Contemporary readers may have difficulty relating to the idea of multiple gods who might legitimately disagree about what decency requires. But one can substitute the less iconographic authorities we have now: religions, ethical systems, philosophical traditions. Someone might plausibly claim that decent behavior is whatever all the major ethical traditions recommend. Socrates’ challenge still works: if these traditions can decide arbitrarily, then what stops them from endorsing indecent behavior? If we trust that they are constituted to endorse decency, then we already have some idea what the common factor is, and should be able to say what it is.
When I first read the dialogue many years ago, my impression was that Euthyphro was a kind of proto-Christian, having the correct moral feeling that murder ought to be punished even if the murderer is your relative. And standing up for that feeling, even in the face of opposition from other relatives. I thought that was pretty cool. In comparison, the fact that he couldn’t logically explain it under cross-examination and fell back to “that’s what the gods want” doesn’t worry me so much. It isn’t a sign of decline of public life or anything; people are just bad at explaining their feelings, always have been, always will be. So yeah, pencil me in on the anti-Socrates side I guess. (Though I did upvote your post: it’s well written, even if the argument falls apart for me.)
Is Socrates implying Euthyphro must be wrong because he can’t respond adequately? Or is Socrates pushing Euthyphro to develop further clarity of thought?
When people understand how actions arise from values, they’ll be able to explain their decisions to others, and others will be able to verify their integrity.
And when people start getting sneaky, they’ll know what’s missing from the speech of “shamed”/”depraved” people.
Do you think there’s an answer Socrates would have accepted, had Euthyphro given it? Is that a crux?
I’d call that Jewish rather than proto-Christian. Christianity, at least in its canonical texts, moved away from this kind of insistence on legal accountability toward forgiveness and grace. The Hebrew Bible is much more interested in enforcing standards.
But more apropos here: What if there’s more to do here than take sides for or against Euthyphro? What if instead of deciding whether his moral feeling is correct, we’re curious about what’s going on procedurally?
Sure, I understand what you’re asking for, but that’s not a neutral question. It’s basically the heart of the whole disagreement. Either people are free to have moral feelings, even if not very explained, and act on them and try to convince others, and success in so convincing is the sole criterion; a jury of 500 Athenians can decide that they want Socrates gone, and that’s legitimate, they don’t have to have logic behind their vote. This is the democratic view. Or people have to explain and justify their morals, can be second guessed and overridden by philosophers, eventually this leads to philosopher kings. This is antidemocratic and plenty of people have pointed this out about Socrates’ lineage. I know which side I stand on.
This is typically why most specify the need for liberal democracy, which both limits the powers of the populace to arbitrarily and without argument condemn people to death, and limits the ability for one person—philosopher or no—to become king.
Socrates (/his lineage) was anti-democratic, but it should be pointed out that for the longest time both democracies and non-democracies were horrible governments to live under, so personally I forgive them. Liberal democracy has in many ways given historical democracy too good a name.
That seems like Moldbug’s opinion, that participatory republics are fundamentally incapable of standards of behavior or problem-solving and therefore wanting standards pushes you inexorably kingwards, which I’ve argued against elsewhere.
I think participatory leads to better standards than having a king. In general my views are opposite of Moldbug’s on everything.
I don’t know how to reconcile that with your previous comment, which seemed to say that the expectation that people can explain and justify their public actions is antidemocratic and leads to kings.
Moldbug thinks the choice is between first-best (a king with high standards) and second-best (a democracy with low standards). I think, like in many other things, first-best here is not a real option. The real choice is between second-best (a democracy with low standards) and third-best (an unaccountable king with even lower standards—selfish, a believer in wrong theories, a fuckup and so on). This is why Churchill said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms”.
Again I don’t know how to reconcile that with what you said before. Did you change your mind, or did I misunderstand you?
It is not clear to me this behavior is particularly christian, nor its inverse particularly a-christian. Nor even that Socrates/Plato would say Euthyphro has even come to a wrong conclusion! Indeed, in The Republic, Plato argues his perfect society would eliminate the family as a unit, so he clearly does not feel it particularly Good to treat your family different simply because they’re your family. He generally treats the institution as a competing loyalty against the Good.
Unless by “proto-Christian” you simply mean coming to occasionally correct, but mostly incorrect poorly-thought-out conclusions. If that is what you mean, then I would again argue that Plato and Socrates beat you to it, and indeed this particular mode of behavior is a human universal.
More generally, you are again falling for the Nietzscheian reading of history, which frames Christianity as much more of a novel moral innovation than it in fact was. I have argued to you previously about this the last time I noticed you peddling this particular (mis)reading of history.
There is a strong analogy to grammar here. Native speakers can very confidently determine whether a particular utterance is grammatical without being able to explain their reasoning in technical terms. Strong justified confidence in a conclusion does not require the ability to explain the underlying reasoning.
(as an example, try asking a native speaker to explain how to form English questions grammatically, including subject/aux inversion and do-insertion)
Interesting! I read the Euphythro’s politics of accountability in a nearly opposite direction: *Euphythro* is strongly anti-accountability, or, at least, accountability as it can be delivered under the circumstances of (mortals living in the world of shadows/the Athenian version of democracy/etc.)
Here’s Euphythro’s own rather tragicomic summary of the material facts of the case so far:
So in an aristocratic household, a drunken field hand kills a house slave. The master of the household takes actions that result in the death of the field hand—he has nominally deferred the decision to the gods about whether the first man is to be killed, but the message doesn’t get there in time. The master’s son then takes it upon himself to have his father executed for murder, via recourse to the Athenian court system.
There’s a companion piece of media Plato and his audience would have been familiar with that touches on cycles of revenge, filial piety, the legitimacy of the democratic courts, and disagreements among the gods: the Oresteia. The thematic parallels are so close that I don’t think this can be read as anything other than deliberate. Aggamemnon sacrifices his daughter for success in war and to appease the gods; his wife Clytemnestra kills him upon his return; their son Orestes kills his mother; the cthonic furies demand he be cursed for this; Athena intervenes by setting up the court system as a final word. Metaphorically this is a celebration of the replacement of clan feud laws by a state with a monopoly on violence. By serving as the final word against whom no revenge can be taken without simply annihilating society as a whole, the democratic state puts an end to endless cycles of revenge killings.
Plato is not a fan of democracy, and part of his indictment is to see the democratic courts as simply another avenue for revenge killing. In our modern culture there are jokes about people killing Socrates because he was annoying, and the “gadfly” language of Apology encourages this, but as @Karl Krueger earlier in the thread points out, it was more like Socrates’ circle was seen as aristocratic fifth columnists, and his execution can be considered part of a long series of political revenge killings that accompanied the aftermath of the Pelopennesian War. From his letters we know that Plato himself, who had family connections to Critias and got involved in the regime in an apparently peripheral way, was not above suspicion here.
To his credit Plato does not egg his discipline on to revenge Socrates in turn, as Critias himself no doubt would have. From the rest of his work Plato has what I see as a pretty consistent line on responsibility for wrongdoing: virtue is a kind of knowledge, and whenever someone does wrong it’s because they were ignorant of what action would in fact be correct. Wrongdoers are incompetent, rather than guilty. So the dark comedy aspects of the material case is a whole string of deaths or attempted deaths based on various forms of incompetence: the field hand is drunk, the father brings about the field hand’s death before the message from the gods arrives, the son prosecutes his father for violating justice but can’t say what justice is.
So I don’t read Plato as indicting his society as one that to bring people to account, so much as one that lacks the competence to be held accountable or to hold others accountable (but nevertheless is eager to do so anyway.)
I don’t know how much we disagree here. A lot of people use accountability as a euphemism for punishment, but I literally just mean accountability. I agree that moral competence is the core issue, although I think Plato was either naïve or self-censoring about the causes of moral incompetence. His description of tyranny as coordination around transgressiveness comes close, though.
Irreverence was one of the charges against Socrates. The other was corrupting the youth. The tyrant Critias and the opportunistic playboy-general Alcibiades had been among Socrates’ followers. So here’s this guy who’s telling people to question the Good — and his students go on to do things like defecting to Sparta and running a murderous oligarchy. Even if that’s not what Socrates meant by questioning the Good, I can see how the Athenian citizens (survivors of the murderous oligarchy) might consider him a bit of an infohazard.
I’m not aware of a clear hypothesis about what hazardous info Socrates might have had that would’ve caused that. It seems much more likely that partially organized and therefore dangerous people, moreso than empty shells of ambition, would actively seek out the fellow whom the Oracle at Delphi declared the wisest man in the world, and that his track record at dissuading them from doing crazy and dangerous things was much less than 100%.
(repost from FB comment):
There’s a lot to say in response to this, but what’s most striking to me is the gap between your interpretation of the history and mine. Your interpretation seems to be something about moral or intellectual corruption. My is a simple practical diagnosis and prescription: the Athenians should have abandoned their own empire, because it corrupted their public thinking—and did so with extreme rapidity, in the course of a few generations. I of course feel the same way about the US.
I don’t disagree with the practical recommendation, but without the collective capacity to deliberate rationally, arguments that the collective would benefit from doing one thing or another don’t generally have the desired effect. For instance, “The Sicilian Expedition would be ruinously expensive even if successful” was available obviously good advice in their recent memory, and the Athenians had responded by authorizing the ruinous expenses.
In another recent piece I discussed the moral risks of empire, i.e. ways in which it can compromise central decisionmaking.