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Socrates: A Life Examined
One of the most influential thinkers in the history of the West was Socrates of Athens (469-399 BCE). Literally, thousands of books and other works of art have been devoted to him, yet his character and the tenets of his philosophy remain elusive. Even his contemporaries had very different impressions of him, and since he himself left no writings to posterity, we can only Who was this man really? What ideas and ideals can be truthfully associated with him? What is the basis for the extraordinary influence he has exerted throughout history?Philosopher Luis E. Navia presents a compelling portrayal of Socrates in this very readable and well-researched book, which is both a biography of the man and an exploration of his ideas. Through a critical and documented study of the major ancient sources about Socrates ― in the writings of Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle ― Navia reconstructs a surprisingly consistent portrait of this enigmatic philosopher. He links Socrates' conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living with Immanuel Kant's later concept of an innate moral imperative as the only meaningful purpose of human existence. He highlights Socrates' unrelenting search for the essence and value of the soul as that aspect of his philosophical journey that animated and structured all his activities. Navia also considers Socrates' relationship with the Sophists, his stance vis-à-vis the religious beliefs and practices of his time, his view of the relationship between legality and morality, and the function of language in human life. Finally, he eloquently captures the Socratic legacy, which, more than twenty-four centuries after his death, is still so urgently relevant today. Navia brings to life this perennially important philosopher, illuminating the relevance of his ideas for our modern world.
291 pages, Hardcover
Published March 14, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 1, 2022
Socrates, in many ways, is a mysterious character. As was the case with Jesus and Gautama Buddha, Socrates never wrote a single word, and so re-constructing his life and philosophy is dependent on the various, and sometimes contradictory, accounts of others, in particular Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle.
Was Socrates an ignorant and deceptive sophist concerned only with “making the weaker argument defeat the stronger,” as portrayed by Aristophanes, or the embodiment of the ideal philosopher, possessing both critical thinking skills and intellectual virtue of the highest order, as portrayed by Plato?
This book goes a long way in answering this question, and in sorting out all of the conflicting information we have about one of the more significant founders of Western philosophy. I discovered, for example, that it may in fact be Aristotle that is our most trusted source for information about the historical Socrates.
The other sources have their own distinct biases: Aristophanes was a comic playwright and clearly had a bone to pick with Socrates; Xenophon was not philosophically sophisticated enough to capture his real genius; and Plato had ulterior motives for using Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own philosophy. But with Aristotle, things were different; he was developing his own unique philosophy, and mentioned Socrates only to clarify certain points. In other words, he had no reason to distort his actual views. And if we can in fact trust Aristotle, what we get is a picture of Socrates that is far closer to Plato’s depiction than to Aristophanes’ attempt at character assassination.
As for the book itself, although there is quite a bit of repetition between the chapters, the author leaves no stone unturned, and the brilliance of the book, if you have the patience to stick with it, is that the character and philosophy of Socrates slowly and methodically emerges in full form. You will come to truly understand the philosophical legacy of Socrates after reading this book, rather than just recognizing the name as being somehow important.
Combine this book with Ward Farnsworth’s masterpiece “The Socratic method: A Practitioner's Handbook,” which provides specifics on how to use the Socratic method primarily on yourself to improve your own thinking.
Was Socrates an ignorant and deceptive sophist concerned only with “making the weaker argument defeat the stronger,” as portrayed by Aristophanes, or the embodiment of the ideal philosopher, possessing both critical thinking skills and intellectual virtue of the highest order, as portrayed by Plato?
This book goes a long way in answering this question, and in sorting out all of the conflicting information we have about one of the more significant founders of Western philosophy. I discovered, for example, that it may in fact be Aristotle that is our most trusted source for information about the historical Socrates.
The other sources have their own distinct biases: Aristophanes was a comic playwright and clearly had a bone to pick with Socrates; Xenophon was not philosophically sophisticated enough to capture his real genius; and Plato had ulterior motives for using Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own philosophy. But with Aristotle, things were different; he was developing his own unique philosophy, and mentioned Socrates only to clarify certain points. In other words, he had no reason to distort his actual views. And if we can in fact trust Aristotle, what we get is a picture of Socrates that is far closer to Plato’s depiction than to Aristophanes’ attempt at character assassination.
As for the book itself, although there is quite a bit of repetition between the chapters, the author leaves no stone unturned, and the brilliance of the book, if you have the patience to stick with it, is that the character and philosophy of Socrates slowly and methodically emerges in full form. You will come to truly understand the philosophical legacy of Socrates after reading this book, rather than just recognizing the name as being somehow important.
Combine this book with Ward Farnsworth’s masterpiece “The Socratic method: A Practitioner's Handbook,” which provides specifics on how to use the Socratic method primarily on yourself to improve your own thinking.
September 17, 2022
Socrates! The dead, white grub at the rotten heart of Western Civilization...
Just kidding. But really, who is Socrates and why does he matter (if he matters) and what is it exactly he said that was so important? ("What he said" because Socrates, famously, never wrote anything down). Before I read this fine book, I had the usual ragbag of fragments - "Know thyself" and a valiant nail squashed by the hammer of the state - history's first heroic, yet ironic, death? While we're at it - irony - did Socrates invent it? Or self-deprecation? Or the paradox of the more you know the less you know?
Luis E. Navia takes on the task of figuring out Socrates, both the man and the philosopher. To do this, he sifts through the fragments left over from antiquity in order to strip away the deep, deep patina that occludes the man and his thought through the centuries. As with all people from antiquity, this is a difficult task since so much has been lost. Who said what when; how reliable is a Roman biographical tidbit if it was written 500 years after Socrates' death? By Roman times Socrates had already become legendary, but so much of this legend is because of who might be described as the villain - Plato. More about that below. As Navia puts it:
"The circumstances and accidents of bibliographical history have brought about the irreparable loss of the bulk of the Socratic and related literature of Socrates' time." (p. 29)
This brief passage illustrates one of my few complaints about Navia's fine book - the prose is professorially clunky. How about the "accidents of history" and leave out "bibliographical"? "Socratic and related literature" - same paring required. The book is made unnecessarily ponderous because of this dissertation style throughout. Too many times I felt that I was reading the same paragraph over a few pages after first encountering it, which is to say it needed a sure editorial hand. But I'm not sure editing is like this happens much these days. But there are professorial virtues as well; if dry and ponderous, Navia spares us efforts to show how funny or clever he is, the way too many "popular" historians do. He doesn't try to goose things up with melodrama and cliffhangers - another popular history shtick. These virtues far outweigh the inelegant prose.
I read this book over a year ago, at the depth of the pandemic perhaps? So my recollections are a bit off; I marked up my copy here and there, but as usual my retention is poor. But this one is a keeper and I plan on reading it again; sometimes a second reading locks in things that are lost from my first go-around.
***
First the man. These are the main sources for Socrates' life, and the problems typically accorded each:
Socrates on the comic stage: This is the title of Chapter 2 and really, I never thought this was all that important - Aristophanes trashes Socrates in his play Clouds, in a crude, ribald way. But I did not know Socrates appears (in fragments) in some of Aristophanes' other work as well. But this clowning around, which has usually been dismissed through the centuries as mere clowning around, is important. Socrates' threat the Athenian state was seen as being very real and he was quite a celebrity.
What I did not know is that Socrates appeared in other comedies as well as Clouds. Cratinus's Bottle and Ameipsias's Connus were performed as well, all at once, during the 423 B.C. competition, when Socrates was alive. These performance-competitions were a big deal in Athens, sort of like the latest Star Wars installment combined with a presidential debate (okay, a bit of a stretch, but I never claimed to be a historian). Political-cultural passions were ferocious - something in my younger years I thought the world had outgrown, at least in the West - but think the furor unleashed at the names Biden and Trump! (Not to mention the awful attack on Salman Rushdie at Chautauqua (of all places!) - East meets West via New Jersey). Socrates is what we call nowadays a polarizing figure, always a dangerous kind of figure to be (as Socrates found out, by and by).
When I was young, I subscribed to the "bad old days" idea of history - Socrates was found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youths - how Salem Witch Trial such things seemed to me. Nothing like that would happen nowadays. But events over the past few years have stripped me of such arrogance and delusional wishful thinking. If you count some of our recent passions as religion - climate change, transgender rights, stolen elections, etc. etc. both left and right - then you can see how strong a desire to be orthodox (or overthrow someone else's orthodoxy) is still current, still dangerous. Who's our Socrates today? If we have one, would she be safe?
***
Socrates the Philosopher: Even Bill and Ted during their excellent adventure knew So-Krates was a philosopher. So what was his philosophy? As Navia ably demonstrates, this is surprisingly difficult to answer, since Socrates never wrote anything down, we have always had to rely on his students, friends and enemies to tell us what he said. Filter that down through the rest of antiquity, down to the rise of Christianity, with all the destruction and losses that took place after the Fall of Rome, and you have a very fragmented account of the man's thoughts.
Then there's Plato, who never met a parchment he wouldn't scribble over end to end. And a lot of Plato survives the wrack and ruin of Classical Antiquity, and a lot of what we know of Socrates' thought comes from Plato. Unfortunately. Navia does a commendable job of showing how the version of Socrates that came down to us through Plato is perhaps more Platonian than Socratic.
Not that this was surprising, but as a non-philosopher, I appreciated his explanation. As noted above, it has been a while since I've read this and it would take a lot of work for me to reconstruct the arguments and evidence, but Navia's book can explain all that. But the idea that Socrates as distilled through Plato has been distorted (diluted?) is important, I think, what with both these guys being so foundational to Western Civ. And to be honest, I've always been bored and mildly dismayed by Plato - I simply can't sit still for serious philosophy of this sort. Even the shadows on the wall of the cave...I just don't buy it, or, probably, I just don't get it.
***
Socrates the Person: For me, and a lot of folks I'd guess, the most appealing aspect of Socrates was Socrates the man, the runaway soldier, the brave citizen, the henpecked husband, the public gadfly. Beyond the suspect sources of the comedies and Plato, we have biographies, namely Xenophon and, centuries later, Diogenes Laertius.
"The anecdotal style of Diogenes Laertius's work has led many scholars to downgrade its value as a serious source of information. Nietzsche, however, whose doctoral dissertation of 1870 dealt with this work, concluded that we can learn from it much more than from all other classical and modern works on ancient philosophy. A philosopher, he insists, is someone who teaches by the example of his life and by every detail of his conduct, not by what he says or writes, which is precisely what we find in Diogenes Laertius's work. he brings to life the subjects of his biographies through stories and anecdotes, which, despite their perhaps dubious character, create a mosaic of living biographical portraits. If used with caution, Nietzsche argues, they succeed in revealing who the ancient philosophers truly were..." (p. 94).
I had no idea! Nietzsche! Really, I can't tell you how excited I was to read this. A few years back I blundered into Laertius via a local library discard - an old Loeb Classics edition. Unenthused at first, I got sucked in to these philosopher bio. sketches - DL is kind of trashy, more Suetonius than Tacitus, with lots of juicy personal bits, scattered higgledy-piggldy with the philosophy (which is probably why contemporary historicans/philosophers don't trust him - he doesn't seem serious). To make matters flakier, most of the biographies end with a bibliography of works (which is fine) but also lists of people who share the same name (as if we'd confuse the philosopher with a sculptor) and, worse of all, a little poem of DL's own composition, almost all of them silly (but charming) little bits recounting on how the philosopher died - the more bizarre or gruesome the better. Again, not the sort of thing to inspire scholarly confidence, but he sure is fun to read. Again, that Nietzsche did his dissertation on Laertius, took him seriously, really thrilled me.
Navia is an able guide through the sources, Xenophon, Diogenes Laertius and the other, scattered sources leftover from the ruin of classical civilization. That he's gathered all these sources together is perhaps my favorite thing about this book.
What Socratic legacy?: A long time ago, during one of Western Civilization's on-going crises among the thinking & talking & artsy classes, Ezra Pound had this to say in his long, self-pitying semi-autobiography in verse "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (Part 1, I believe):
"There dies a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books."
Which is a pretty fair way to describe World War I and the death of Victorian sureties in the aftermath. And yet those final "fors" in the concluding couplet make me wonder - have the statues always been broken? The books always battered? All those broken-nosed and armless goddesses, the Hermes and Apollos with crosses scoured into their foreheads and their penises whacked off - the wrack and ruin of Classical civilization, carefully dug up, sometimes repaired, sometimes practically re-worshiped in a paganish way (Michelangelo and Ruskin etc.). But how did they get in such poor condition in the first place (and why have we lost almost all of Sappho, preserved only by fussy late-Antiquity grammarians and the rubbish pits of Oxyrhnchus?) We like to think we'd save such things nowadays. Would we? Lots of statues being torn down these days - all for very good reasons, of course! Just as the early Christians gladly hacked away at Diana of Ephesus...
I'm not trying to get political, only to suggest that what makes Western Civ. "western" is this constant gnawing at our own entrails. Perhaps tearing down disreputable or unorthodox statues ("broken statues") is part of that process. But who criticizes the criticizers? Without this process - the constant questioning, the constant self-doubt - one orthodoxy tends to replace another. And here is where Socrates' enduring legacy comes in - he was pretty much the first person to question everything - from the gods on down - as well criticizing himself. The more he learnt, the less he knew, a fact that seemed to both dismay and amuse him at the same time. Which is to say Socrates wasn't a mere iconoclast - he wasn't trying to replace, say, the Zeus with Mithras (or Yahweh) or God with Man - he was just questioning the religion, the government, his friends, and, perhaps most importantly, himself. He was stripping away our faith, making us question our assumptions. And, terrifying to say, all we are, really, are the sum of our assumptions (Joan Didion: "we tell ourselves stories in order to live.")
And yet what are we without our stories? "Socratic," in my crude understanding, means "doubt" but also "self-doubt." Which is why there are no Socratic (successful) generals, Socratic Wall Street Sharks, Socratic...anybody, really, who accomplishes a great deal in the material world. "Believe in yourself," we tell our kids nowadays, relentlessly. And as far as it goes, it is good advice; but maybe we should teach the Socratic "know yourself" as well? But there are consequences, and Socrates, in his insistence on doubting everything - even himself - came to his doom, finally.
But there's more to it that "doubt." As I was flubbing through this review, I came across Joseph Brodsky's lecture on Auden's "September 1, 1939" in which I was surprised to find a blunt, Socratic reference:
"And the main thing about the Peloponnesian War, of course, is that it spelled the end for what we know as classical Greece. The change wrought by that war was indeed a drastic one; in a sense, it was the real end of Athens and all it stood for. And Pericles, in whose mouth Thucydides put the most heartbreaking speech about democracy you will ever read - he speaks there as though democracy has no tomorrow, which in the Greek sense of the word it really hadn't -- that Pericles is being replaced in the public mind, almost over night --- by whom? By Socrates. The emphasis shifts from identification with community, with the polis, to individualism -- and it is not such a bad shift, except that it paves the road to subsequent atomization of society, with all the attendant ills..." (Joseph Brodsky "On "September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden," lecture given at the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, published in Less Than One, Selected Essays, p. 328).
As with so much I read in Brodsky's prose, I am not sure I agree with this completely, for it strikes me a bit too pat, like Harold Bloom's contention that it was Shakespeare who gave birth to "the human" (I reviewed that book on Goodreads). But I don't disagree with this either. This "atomization of society" is perhaps the price we pay for Socratic individualism, at the expense, perhaps, of our polity and even our civilization. The next one hundred years ought to be interesting...all those "attendant ills."
Socrates and Me: What would Jesus do? What would Socrates do? Maybe it's far-fetched, but regardless of your beliefs in the divinity of the former, or the actual philosophical contributions of the latter, it might be said that both men it was their constant picking at the establishment, at orthodox views, at power structures. And they both suffered the consequences, since power doesn't like being picked at, or especially, picked apart.
Most of us are so secure in our orthodoxies, our beliefs, our grievances. To my dismay, over the past 10 or 15 years I've found that virtually all my friends and family have become stridently political. Mostly we were never a very political lot, more of the arts-n-rock n' roll sort, but now I find I am confronted by fervently Left and relentlessly Right, leaving me with very few friends with whom I can have an open-ended political discussion (thanks, Al!). I'd love to be able to pull off what Socrates did with his friends, engage them gently, but relentlessly, to show how so many of our orthodoxies are not logically held, not consistent, not even coherent much of the time. But I lack the quick-wittedness, the aplomb, the intelligence to pull this sort of thing off - and I'm lazy and cowardly to boot. And maybe I'm more political, more hair-trigger than I want to admit. IN any case, it just doesn't seem worth it - again, people don't like having their beliefs questioned. They get mad, hurt, and I don't like it when people are mad or hurt because of me. I don't like drinking cups of court-ordered hemlock either!
But even though I'm unable to directly apply what little Socratic "learning" I've acquired (much of it thanks to Navia's fine, fine book), I take some comfort in knowing that there was for a time on this earth a pug-nosed, satyr-like bald little guy, henpecked, combat-runaway, who wandered the Agora questioned...everything. Not for some cheap, nihilistic payoff (the route so many "questioners" wind up going down) but because...because I think he loved everybody. The fools, the high priests, the pompous and self-righteous and the opportunistic, the demagogues, the simple, his friends. Unlike Diogenes, who hated everyone, Socrates loved Athens, its people, its government, its possibilities. And that's not a bad way to be, is it? A lover!
At least I think it's not a bad way to be...Socrates did end up drinking that cuppa court-ordered hemlock...
Just kidding. But really, who is Socrates and why does he matter (if he matters) and what is it exactly he said that was so important? ("What he said" because Socrates, famously, never wrote anything down). Before I read this fine book, I had the usual ragbag of fragments - "Know thyself" and a valiant nail squashed by the hammer of the state - history's first heroic, yet ironic, death? While we're at it - irony - did Socrates invent it? Or self-deprecation? Or the paradox of the more you know the less you know?
Luis E. Navia takes on the task of figuring out Socrates, both the man and the philosopher. To do this, he sifts through the fragments left over from antiquity in order to strip away the deep, deep patina that occludes the man and his thought through the centuries. As with all people from antiquity, this is a difficult task since so much has been lost. Who said what when; how reliable is a Roman biographical tidbit if it was written 500 years after Socrates' death? By Roman times Socrates had already become legendary, but so much of this legend is because of who might be described as the villain - Plato. More about that below. As Navia puts it:
"The circumstances and accidents of bibliographical history have brought about the irreparable loss of the bulk of the Socratic and related literature of Socrates' time." (p. 29)
This brief passage illustrates one of my few complaints about Navia's fine book - the prose is professorially clunky. How about the "accidents of history" and leave out "bibliographical"? "Socratic and related literature" - same paring required. The book is made unnecessarily ponderous because of this dissertation style throughout. Too many times I felt that I was reading the same paragraph over a few pages after first encountering it, which is to say it needed a sure editorial hand. But I'm not sure editing is like this happens much these days. But there are professorial virtues as well; if dry and ponderous, Navia spares us efforts to show how funny or clever he is, the way too many "popular" historians do. He doesn't try to goose things up with melodrama and cliffhangers - another popular history shtick. These virtues far outweigh the inelegant prose.
I read this book over a year ago, at the depth of the pandemic perhaps? So my recollections are a bit off; I marked up my copy here and there, but as usual my retention is poor. But this one is a keeper and I plan on reading it again; sometimes a second reading locks in things that are lost from my first go-around.
***
First the man. These are the main sources for Socrates' life, and the problems typically accorded each:
Socrates on the comic stage: This is the title of Chapter 2 and really, I never thought this was all that important - Aristophanes trashes Socrates in his play Clouds, in a crude, ribald way. But I did not know Socrates appears (in fragments) in some of Aristophanes' other work as well. But this clowning around, which has usually been dismissed through the centuries as mere clowning around, is important. Socrates' threat the Athenian state was seen as being very real and he was quite a celebrity.
What I did not know is that Socrates appeared in other comedies as well as Clouds. Cratinus's Bottle and Ameipsias's Connus were performed as well, all at once, during the 423 B.C. competition, when Socrates was alive. These performance-competitions were a big deal in Athens, sort of like the latest Star Wars installment combined with a presidential debate (okay, a bit of a stretch, but I never claimed to be a historian). Political-cultural passions were ferocious - something in my younger years I thought the world had outgrown, at least in the West - but think the furor unleashed at the names Biden and Trump! (Not to mention the awful attack on Salman Rushdie at Chautauqua (of all places!) - East meets West via New Jersey). Socrates is what we call nowadays a polarizing figure, always a dangerous kind of figure to be (as Socrates found out, by and by).
When I was young, I subscribed to the "bad old days" idea of history - Socrates was found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youths - how Salem Witch Trial such things seemed to me. Nothing like that would happen nowadays. But events over the past few years have stripped me of such arrogance and delusional wishful thinking. If you count some of our recent passions as religion - climate change, transgender rights, stolen elections, etc. etc. both left and right - then you can see how strong a desire to be orthodox (or overthrow someone else's orthodoxy) is still current, still dangerous. Who's our Socrates today? If we have one, would she be safe?
***
Socrates the Philosopher: Even Bill and Ted during their excellent adventure knew So-Krates was a philosopher. So what was his philosophy? As Navia ably demonstrates, this is surprisingly difficult to answer, since Socrates never wrote anything down, we have always had to rely on his students, friends and enemies to tell us what he said. Filter that down through the rest of antiquity, down to the rise of Christianity, with all the destruction and losses that took place after the Fall of Rome, and you have a very fragmented account of the man's thoughts.
Then there's Plato, who never met a parchment he wouldn't scribble over end to end. And a lot of Plato survives the wrack and ruin of Classical Antiquity, and a lot of what we know of Socrates' thought comes from Plato. Unfortunately. Navia does a commendable job of showing how the version of Socrates that came down to us through Plato is perhaps more Platonian than Socratic.
Not that this was surprising, but as a non-philosopher, I appreciated his explanation. As noted above, it has been a while since I've read this and it would take a lot of work for me to reconstruct the arguments and evidence, but Navia's book can explain all that. But the idea that Socrates as distilled through Plato has been distorted (diluted?) is important, I think, what with both these guys being so foundational to Western Civ. And to be honest, I've always been bored and mildly dismayed by Plato - I simply can't sit still for serious philosophy of this sort. Even the shadows on the wall of the cave...I just don't buy it, or, probably, I just don't get it.
***
Socrates the Person: For me, and a lot of folks I'd guess, the most appealing aspect of Socrates was Socrates the man, the runaway soldier, the brave citizen, the henpecked husband, the public gadfly. Beyond the suspect sources of the comedies and Plato, we have biographies, namely Xenophon and, centuries later, Diogenes Laertius.
"The anecdotal style of Diogenes Laertius's work has led many scholars to downgrade its value as a serious source of information. Nietzsche, however, whose doctoral dissertation of 1870 dealt with this work, concluded that we can learn from it much more than from all other classical and modern works on ancient philosophy. A philosopher, he insists, is someone who teaches by the example of his life and by every detail of his conduct, not by what he says or writes, which is precisely what we find in Diogenes Laertius's work. he brings to life the subjects of his biographies through stories and anecdotes, which, despite their perhaps dubious character, create a mosaic of living biographical portraits. If used with caution, Nietzsche argues, they succeed in revealing who the ancient philosophers truly were..." (p. 94).
I had no idea! Nietzsche! Really, I can't tell you how excited I was to read this. A few years back I blundered into Laertius via a local library discard - an old Loeb Classics edition. Unenthused at first, I got sucked in to these philosopher bio. sketches - DL is kind of trashy, more Suetonius than Tacitus, with lots of juicy personal bits, scattered higgledy-piggldy with the philosophy (which is probably why contemporary historicans/philosophers don't trust him - he doesn't seem serious). To make matters flakier, most of the biographies end with a bibliography of works (which is fine) but also lists of people who share the same name (as if we'd confuse the philosopher with a sculptor) and, worse of all, a little poem of DL's own composition, almost all of them silly (but charming) little bits recounting on how the philosopher died - the more bizarre or gruesome the better. Again, not the sort of thing to inspire scholarly confidence, but he sure is fun to read. Again, that Nietzsche did his dissertation on Laertius, took him seriously, really thrilled me.
Navia is an able guide through the sources, Xenophon, Diogenes Laertius and the other, scattered sources leftover from the ruin of classical civilization. That he's gathered all these sources together is perhaps my favorite thing about this book.
What Socratic legacy?: A long time ago, during one of Western Civilization's on-going crises among the thinking & talking & artsy classes, Ezra Pound had this to say in his long, self-pitying semi-autobiography in verse "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (Part 1, I believe):
"There dies a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books."
Which is a pretty fair way to describe World War I and the death of Victorian sureties in the aftermath. And yet those final "fors" in the concluding couplet make me wonder - have the statues always been broken? The books always battered? All those broken-nosed and armless goddesses, the Hermes and Apollos with crosses scoured into their foreheads and their penises whacked off - the wrack and ruin of Classical civilization, carefully dug up, sometimes repaired, sometimes practically re-worshiped in a paganish way (Michelangelo and Ruskin etc.). But how did they get in such poor condition in the first place (and why have we lost almost all of Sappho, preserved only by fussy late-Antiquity grammarians and the rubbish pits of Oxyrhnchus?) We like to think we'd save such things nowadays. Would we? Lots of statues being torn down these days - all for very good reasons, of course! Just as the early Christians gladly hacked away at Diana of Ephesus...
I'm not trying to get political, only to suggest that what makes Western Civ. "western" is this constant gnawing at our own entrails. Perhaps tearing down disreputable or unorthodox statues ("broken statues") is part of that process. But who criticizes the criticizers? Without this process - the constant questioning, the constant self-doubt - one orthodoxy tends to replace another. And here is where Socrates' enduring legacy comes in - he was pretty much the first person to question everything - from the gods on down - as well criticizing himself. The more he learnt, the less he knew, a fact that seemed to both dismay and amuse him at the same time. Which is to say Socrates wasn't a mere iconoclast - he wasn't trying to replace, say, the Zeus with Mithras (or Yahweh) or God with Man - he was just questioning the religion, the government, his friends, and, perhaps most importantly, himself. He was stripping away our faith, making us question our assumptions. And, terrifying to say, all we are, really, are the sum of our assumptions (Joan Didion: "we tell ourselves stories in order to live.")
And yet what are we without our stories? "Socratic," in my crude understanding, means "doubt" but also "self-doubt." Which is why there are no Socratic (successful) generals, Socratic Wall Street Sharks, Socratic...anybody, really, who accomplishes a great deal in the material world. "Believe in yourself," we tell our kids nowadays, relentlessly. And as far as it goes, it is good advice; but maybe we should teach the Socratic "know yourself" as well? But there are consequences, and Socrates, in his insistence on doubting everything - even himself - came to his doom, finally.
But there's more to it that "doubt." As I was flubbing through this review, I came across Joseph Brodsky's lecture on Auden's "September 1, 1939" in which I was surprised to find a blunt, Socratic reference:
"And the main thing about the Peloponnesian War, of course, is that it spelled the end for what we know as classical Greece. The change wrought by that war was indeed a drastic one; in a sense, it was the real end of Athens and all it stood for. And Pericles, in whose mouth Thucydides put the most heartbreaking speech about democracy you will ever read - he speaks there as though democracy has no tomorrow, which in the Greek sense of the word it really hadn't -- that Pericles is being replaced in the public mind, almost over night --- by whom? By Socrates. The emphasis shifts from identification with community, with the polis, to individualism -- and it is not such a bad shift, except that it paves the road to subsequent atomization of society, with all the attendant ills..." (Joseph Brodsky "On "September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden," lecture given at the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, published in Less Than One, Selected Essays, p. 328).
As with so much I read in Brodsky's prose, I am not sure I agree with this completely, for it strikes me a bit too pat, like Harold Bloom's contention that it was Shakespeare who gave birth to "the human" (I reviewed that book on Goodreads). But I don't disagree with this either. This "atomization of society" is perhaps the price we pay for Socratic individualism, at the expense, perhaps, of our polity and even our civilization. The next one hundred years ought to be interesting...all those "attendant ills."
Socrates and Me: What would Jesus do? What would Socrates do? Maybe it's far-fetched, but regardless of your beliefs in the divinity of the former, or the actual philosophical contributions of the latter, it might be said that both men it was their constant picking at the establishment, at orthodox views, at power structures. And they both suffered the consequences, since power doesn't like being picked at, or especially, picked apart.
Most of us are so secure in our orthodoxies, our beliefs, our grievances. To my dismay, over the past 10 or 15 years I've found that virtually all my friends and family have become stridently political. Mostly we were never a very political lot, more of the arts-n-rock n' roll sort, but now I find I am confronted by fervently Left and relentlessly Right, leaving me with very few friends with whom I can have an open-ended political discussion (thanks, Al!). I'd love to be able to pull off what Socrates did with his friends, engage them gently, but relentlessly, to show how so many of our orthodoxies are not logically held, not consistent, not even coherent much of the time. But I lack the quick-wittedness, the aplomb, the intelligence to pull this sort of thing off - and I'm lazy and cowardly to boot. And maybe I'm more political, more hair-trigger than I want to admit. IN any case, it just doesn't seem worth it - again, people don't like having their beliefs questioned. They get mad, hurt, and I don't like it when people are mad or hurt because of me. I don't like drinking cups of court-ordered hemlock either!
But even though I'm unable to directly apply what little Socratic "learning" I've acquired (much of it thanks to Navia's fine, fine book), I take some comfort in knowing that there was for a time on this earth a pug-nosed, satyr-like bald little guy, henpecked, combat-runaway, who wandered the Agora questioned...everything. Not for some cheap, nihilistic payoff (the route so many "questioners" wind up going down) but because...because I think he loved everybody. The fools, the high priests, the pompous and self-righteous and the opportunistic, the demagogues, the simple, his friends. Unlike Diogenes, who hated everyone, Socrates loved Athens, its people, its government, its possibilities. And that's not a bad way to be, is it? A lover!
At least I think it's not a bad way to be...Socrates did end up drinking that cuppa court-ordered hemlock...
February 6, 2018
The author maintains from the outset that little can be known about Socrates as he left no writings of his own philosophy. Any information about his life and philosophy was left from his contemporaries whose assessments are so widely divergent that no cogent understanding can be made of this great philosopher. I would not recommend this book.
August 17, 2020
This book read a lot like the teachings of Socrates himself: dense and repetitious. Regardless, I found the information in the book to be quite useful.
January 26, 2010
This is listed as YA/Teen though I'm not sure why. I suppose it could be read by teens of course. Mr. Navia is an ok writer but sometimes let his prose rise to heights he would have been better to avoid. I was very put off by the frequent Jesus comparisons. I know it's not uncommon but after the stated goal of carefully attempting to find a 'real' character behind the mythologizing - the mythologizing was extremely annoying. Also I could have done without the repetitive discussions of Aristophanes and Xenophon when Mr. Navia intended, clearly, all along to adopt the standard 'early Platonic dialogs are really accurate reports of real conversations' assertion. Finally the nearly total lack of historical context and the constant references to much later philosophers to elucidate Socrates all contributed to my total disappointment with this particular offering.
February 23, 2014
"The unexamined life is not a life worth living for a human being." -Socrates, in Plato's "Apology". A beautiful and insightful book about one of the most influential thinkers in the history of the world, Socrates of Athens(469-399 BCE). A compelling study of an exceptional man and his philosophy. The whole book is awesome, but the final two chapters on the soul and on Socrates's faith are delightful, unique, and original. Highly recommended!
September 28, 2011
Without this book I would have failed my AP World History debate. What a lifesaver.
January 18, 2016
WOW, I read up to four chapters and gave up. Very hard to read.
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