AKEN - Plato Kills Socrates
Of course, Plato did not kill Socrates -- at least<br>not physically.
We know the story of Socrates' end: his trial, his<br>self-defense<br>(recorded in The Apology by Plato), and his<br>execution by drinking hemlock while being surrounded by his<br>students.
Note: This post is largely inspired by Karl Popper's<br>The Open Society and Its Enemies, a book I had the pleasure<br>of reading after stumbling upon it by chance in a<br>second-hand store. Lucky me!
Plato was around 28 years old when his teacher, Socrates,<br>was sentenced to death. Roughly 25 years<br>later, he wrote The Republic, perhaps the<br>most influential work of political philosophy ever<br>produced.
Although written as a series of dialogues featuring<br>Socrates, The Republic is not a historical record.<br>The conversations never took place. Plato uses Socrates as a<br>literary character to present his philosophical ideas.
That distinction matters.
The historical Socrates is remembered as someone who<br>questioned everything -- including his own beliefs. He<br>claimed that his wisdom consisted in knowing that he knew<br>nothing (after the Delphic oracle proclaimed him the wisest<br>of men, Socrates didn't believe her and set out to prove her<br>wrong by finding someone<br>wiser than himself! Instead, he found that those regarded as<br>wise were often the least aware of their own ignorance, a<br>fault that Socrates didn't have). He was known to challenge<br>assumptions<br>wherever he found them<br>and treated philosophy as a conversation rather than a<br>doctrine.
Ancient sources also portray him as egalitarian for his<br>time, arguing that education should not be reserved for a<br>privileged few. In Plato's Meno (written<br>around a decade before The Republic), we arguably<br>get a better look at the "real" Socrates, who tries teaching<br>a young slave a version of the Pythagorean theorem to prove<br>that even an uneducated slave can grasp abstract problems!
The Socrates of The Republic is strikingly<br>different.
There, "Socrates" argues for a rigidly stratified society<br>divided into permanent classes. Plato proposes natural<br>rulers, natural auxiliaries, and producers, each assigned<br>their place in society. Crossing these class boundaries is<br>not merely discouraged, it is treated as one of the gravest<br>injustices against the city!
Education is tightly controlled<br>by the<br>rulers. Oh and, by the way, the working class -- the vast<br>majority<br>of<br>the population -- is denied education entirely! Meaning that<br>education is reserved only for those who have the right (by<br>being born to the right class, of course) to receive it. The<br>cherry<br>on top is that this ideal state is<br>governed by philosopher-kings -- individuals supposedly<br>capable of knowing what is objectively best for everyone<br>else.
What happened to the Socrates we know?
A man who built his life around questioning certainty is<br>made to defend rulers who possess it. A philosopher<br>remembered for intellectual humility becomes the advocate of<br>political certainty. A figure associated with open inquiry<br>is transformed into the spokesman for an ideal state whose<br>stability depends on strict social hierarchy and centralized<br>authority.
It is well known that Socrates criticized Athenian<br>democracy. That alone, however, does not make him an enemy<br>of democracy. Socrates questioned nearly every assumption<br>presented to him, whether political, moral, or<br>philosophical. It is therefore difficult to imagine him<br>accepting any form of government uncritically. We cannot<br>know his political beliefs with certainty. But I would<br>venture to guess that even if Socrates lived under an<br>authoritarian regime, he would've also critiqued it (given<br>that he wasn't executed immediately for it).
The "Socrates"<br>of The Republic, by contrast, speaks with a<br>confidence and political certainty that seem difficult to<br>reconcile with that character.
Here I borrow an excerpt from Popper:
"The Platonic 'Socrates' of the Republic is the embodiment of an unmitigated authoritarianism. (Even his self-deprecating remarks are not based upon awareness of his limitations, but are rather an ironical way of asserting his superiority.) His educational aim is not the awakening of self-criticism and of critical thought in general. It is, rather, indoctrination -- the moulding of minds and of souls which (to repeat a quotation from the Laws) are 'to become, by long habit, utterly incapable of doing anything at all independently'. And Socrates' great equalitarian and liberating idea that it is possible to reason with a slave, and that there is an intellectual link between man and man, a medium of universal understanding, namely, 'reason', this idea is replaced by a demand for an educational monopoly of the ruling class, coupled with the strictest censorship, even of oral debates."
Even Plato's idea of philosopher-kings stands in stark<br>contrast to Socrates's beliefs. Instead of a humble seeker<br>of truth (philosopher -- "lover of wisdom"), we have a proud<br>possessor of truth, who approaches both omniscience and<br>omnipotence....