Hello, I'm Dr. Anadale, and our text
for today is Plato's Apology.
I want you to consider three issues, three questions to
focus your mind for discussion.
The first: Socrates connects his mission
doing philosophy, questioning people
philosophically, he connects it with a
divine command. He says to the jury,
essentially: I've been commanded to do
this by the Oracle of the god Apollo.
I've discovered that it's my mission in life,
my mission from Apollo himself, to go about
questioning my fellow Athenians, trying
to get them to change their lives, trying
to change their minds about what they
value and how they behave. The suggestion
that Plato is making here is that God, or
divinity, the intelligence that governs
the universe, wants us to use our minds
in a certain way, and to avoid using our
minds in some other way. For what we're
to avoid, we get a portrait of this in
Socrates' treatment of Meletus
later in the Apology. Meletus contradicts himself
under questioning from Socrates.
In a very short space of time,
he claims Socrates is an atheist and then
claims Socrates believes in spirits or
demigods, which are the offspring of gods.
Socrates is rather withering: he says to
him, 'You have not thought seriously about
who corrupts and who improves the youth,
or about any of these charges that
you've brought,' and he dismisses him rather
with a wave of the hand. So my question
for you: What is it that is wrong about
having contradictory beliefs?
Why is it shameful and wrong to contradict
yourself in speech the way Meletus does?
I think part of the answer to
this question is connected with Socrates'
idea of the examined life, when he says
the unexamined life is not worth living.
Where Meletus has gone wrong
is somehow in the area of not examining his
beliefs closely enough, not doing to
himself what Socrates is doing when he's
philosophizing out among the people with
Euthyphro and others. My second question:
Is Socrates courageous? Now, Socrates faces
down the jury, he is on trial for his
life, and he offers his defense,
he offers a defense that is not
successful; he's convicted, and when he
has a chance to offer a punishment as an
alternative to death, instead
of proposing exile as was expected, he
proposes some punishment so light that
he is essentially daring the jury either to
execute him or let him go scot-free.
Then after he is condemned to die he doesn't
curse or plead with the jury but leaves
them with a great calmness of spirit,
saying as he parts: 'We part now, you to
live and I to die, and who has the better lot
only God knows.' Is this courage? Or maybe
we should say: How is Socrates being
courageous, what model of courage does he
offer us? How can we contrast
Socratic courage, say, with the courage
of Achilles, the great image of a warrior
Greek, or the more patient courage of
Penelope in Homer's Odyssey, or the
courage of Pericles from Athenian
history, Pericles the statesman and the
kind of martial courage that Pericles
praises in his funeral oration? Socrates
is doing something a little bit
different here, and if we're being
given Socratic courage as a model to
examine and admire, it would be well to
think about just what kind of
courage this is, this courage that
Socrates instantiates. Third question:
Socrates says towards the end of the
dialogue that it is not possible for an
evil person to harm a good person.
Now, this seems obviously false. We can
think of all sorts of ways in which evil
people can do bad things to good people.
Good people suffer at the hands of bad
people all the time, in our experience.
And Socrates says this, not meaning it to
be just sort of wishful thinking, or some
sort of wild insane statement, but
seeming to mean sincerely that this is in
fact the case, when you think about it
deeply enough. So my last question for
you: How is it that this might actually
turn out to be true?
How is it that a good person, a genuinely
good person, with virtue, with the kind of
quietness of spirit that we see in the
case of Socrates, can never actually come
to any real harm?
It's worth reflecting, in answering this
question, on just what would be meant by
"being harmed." Socrates might mean that
evil people can do things to good people
but they can't do anything that would
really genuinely count as "harm."
So, what will be the meaning of that kind of statement?
Those are three questions about the Apology
for you think about as you read it.
I look forward to talking with you
about it later on. That's all for today; bye.