Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2006 Socrates as citizen?: the implications of Socratic eros for contemporary models of citizenship Jeremy John Mhire Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Mhire, Jeremy John, "Socrates as citizen?: the implications of Socratic eros for contemporary models of citizenship" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 348. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/348 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. SOCRATES AS CITIZEN? THE IMPLICATIONS OF SOCRATIC EROS FOR CONTEMPORARY MODELS OF CITIZENSHIP A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and M echanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Political Science by Jeremy John Mhire B.A., University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2000 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2002 August 2006 Acknowledgments All too often acknowledgments fail to acknowledge the true gravity of the debt owed by an author to others. This will be no different. I can do no more than to admit my indebtedness to a great number of family, friends, and colleagues who, each in their own way, contributed to this project. It would be a great injustice on my part, however, if I failed to mention four special individuals without whom none of this would have been possible. From Dr. Cecil Eubanks I always received the warmest compassion and soundest advice, no matter the occasion. From Dr. G. Ellis Sandoz I was gifted with a spiritual and intellectual home at LSU, as well as a shelter from a great many storms. Because of Dr. James Stoner I found my voice, no matter how meek, while learning the greatest of virtues along the way – courage. And in Simone Mhire I found my other half, and learned to love my own all over again. Each of you has my eternal gratitude. ii Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................ii ABSTRACT ................................................................ iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: SOCRATES AS A MODEL FOR CITIZENSHIP? ..........1 2 THE ARISTOPHANIC SOCRATES .....................................28 3 SOCRATES’ APOLOGY...............................................79 4 CREATION IN THE BEAUTIFUL: THE COINCIDENCE OF POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY......................................................132 5 THE LOVE OF THE GOOD AS ONE’S OWN FOREVER: THE POLITICAL NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY..........................................186 6 EROS, RHETORIC, AND WRITING ....................................237 7 PLATONIC STATESMANSHIP – THE LAWS AS MINISTERIAL DRAMA . 297 8 CONCLUSION......................................................357 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...........................................................371 VITA .....................................................................379 iii Abstract This dissertation evaluates the appropriateness of using Socrates as a model for contemporary citizenship. I examine the question of Socrates’ civic character by inquiring about the relation of the philosopher (or political scientist) to the city (that is, to political life) without taking for granted that they share a common aim or purpose. Instead, I prepare the discussion with an examination of the treatment of Socrates by the comic poet Aristophanes in the Clouds. I suggest that Socrates’ famed eros, his unwavering love of wisdom, was a problem, one that threatened the very foundations of political society. By conceiving of Socrates, the first of the political philosophers, as a political problem, I hope to open up a new approach to this most pertinent of political questions. Moreover, I seek an answer to this question by re-evaluating the importance of the lone fact that separates Socrates from his student Plato, who, in contrast to his teacher, left a written collection of his thoughts. It is in the nature of the written dialogue itself that we find the reconciliation between philosophy and politics, or between the good and one’s own. With this reconciliation, we see what is essential to political life and civic virtue, as well as why Socrates cannot be a model for contemporary citizenship. iv Chapter 1: Introduction: Socrates as a Model for Citizenship? Framing the Question of Citizenship Was Socrates a good citizen? One would certainly hope so, for was it not Plato who remarked of Socrates that he was, “. of all those whom we knew in our time the bravest and also the wisest and the most just.”1 There is a certain symmetry between Socrates’ philosophizing and his civic life, one that suggests an essential relationship between thought and action, speech and deed. How could anyone be more civically oriented than he who made the virtue of citizen and city alike his life-long preoccupation? We are inclined to think of Socrates as a hero, as one whose way of life was dedicated to those things most important to human beings, and hence, as a person to whom we may look for guidance and wisdom. And this for good reason, as it is Socrates who is willing to stand by his moral principles in the face of adversity, unshakeable in his resolve when faced with the prospect of death. Few compare favorably with this level of civic and moral integrity, leading to the oft made and not altogether inappropriate 1Plato, Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 118a10 - 12. Compare also Plato, Epistle VII, trans. Glenn R. Morrow (New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1962), 324e1-3. 1 comparison of Socrates and Christ.2 The question of Socrates’ citizenship is then a simple one, and demands in turn a simple answer: yes. It might seem odd that a question as simple as this should begin a dissertation, for what is left to say about an immortal icon? Socrates’ status is firmly entrenched in the history of western civilization, and this due in no small part to the efforts of his best students to immortalize his legacy. M aybe it is because of this iconography that scholars continue to inquire about Socrates, if only to reconnect with their own past. Learning something about a philosophical hero teaches us about ourselves as heirs of that heroism. However begrudgingly, philosophers have always felt a debt to Socrates and his heroic philosophizing, a debt that makes Socrates’ life, if not the relationship of his philosophizing to civic life, a perennial issue. Rousseau, one of the first of the philosophers who attempts to reformulate modern civic life with a view to greater depth and virtue, recognizes the legacy if not the usefulness of Socrates in history: There you have the Wisest of men according to the Judgment of the Gods and the most learned Athenian according to the opinion of all Greece, Socrates, Eulogizing ignorance. Can it be believed that if he were reborn among us, our Learned men and Artists would make him change his mind? No, Gentlemen, this just man would continue to scorn our vain Sciences; he would not help to enlarge that mass of books by which we are flooded from all sides; and, as he did before, he would leave behind to his disciples and our Posterity no other precept than the example and memory of his virtue. Thus is it noble to teach men!3 2Those interested in this comparison will find a great litany of scholarship. One would do well to begin with Paul Gooch’s work Jesus and Socrates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), and compare it to other works on the same subject, such as those by John Adams Scott, Joseph Priestly, or even Karl Jaspers. 3Jean-Jacques Rousseau, First Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 2, ed. Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), p. 10. 2 The importance with which Rousseau treats Socrates is indicative of a great many philosophers, if only because one sees in Socrates a purity of purpose the likes of which is unrivaled in western intellectual history. For Rousseau, Socrates is a symbolic reminder of what it means to be committed unequivocally to the life of the mind. Following in Rousseau’s footsteps is Hegel, who sees in Socrates the birth of subjectivity, and hence, the origins of morality and conscience: Socrates, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, first freely expressed the principle of inwardness, of the absolute independence of thought in itself. He taught that man has to discover and recognize in himself what is right and the good, and that this right and good is in its nature universal. Socrates is celebrated as a teacher of morality. The Greeks had ethics, but Socrates undertook to teach them what moral virtues and duties, etc., were. T he moral man is not he who merely wills and does that which is right, not the naive man, but he who has the consciousness of what he is doing.4 Hegel has great esteem for Socrates, the person in whom human agency becomes self-aware of itself and its own moral depth. And who can forget Nietzsche, who single-handedly wages war on Socrates because of Socrates’ overwhelming influence on western thought: With Socrates, Greek taste takes a turn in favor of dialectic. What is really happening there? Primarily, a noble taste is thereby defeated; with dialectic, the rabble rises to the top. Before Socrates, dialectical manners were rejected in good society. They were taken to be bad manners, they were a compromising exposure. The youth were warned against them. And all such presentation of one’s reasons was mistrusted. Respectable things, like respectable people, just don’t carry their reasons around on their sleeves like that.