⩩ 50
In the Apology, Socrates defends himself — his habit of questioning, his practice of examining, his way of life, philosophy — against criminal charges.
The defense is an immediate failure — Socrates is found guilty and condemned to death — but is ultimately a success. Socrates convinced the broader public of subsequent generations, becoming a fountainhead of a whole flood plain of thinking: literatures, traditions, disciplines, institutions. Half the world looks up to him. Ben Franklin’s shorthand for practicing humility is “imitate Jesus and Socrates,” and with that he sums up a good chunk of all spiritual and practical reflection.
Even after he was condemned by law, Socrates could easily have avoided death by leaving Athens. He had friends willing to help him get away, and no one was stopping them. But he didn’t go because he understood the underlying dynamic.
If he had fled Athens, it would have undermined his whole career; it would have hollowed out all his previous questioning and exhorting and encouraging. Again and again he had argued that more than anything else — money, property, opinion, office — we should care for ourselves, our souls, improving ourselves and thereby improving our friends, families, and cities too. We should seriously endeavor to know ourselves and to become good human beings. We do this by stopping, questioning, detaching, listening to the arguments. We have to see something as strange or unusual or out of place to be able to question it. We have to be able to detach from it, and there is a little death in that detachment. But we shouldn’t be afraid of it, he would say. We should rather be afraid of remaining ignorant and dangerous to ourselves and others. If he had fled, it would have made it look like everything he had been saying for so many years had been empty words, that when push came to shove he too would dispense with fancy arguments and save his skin. It would have undermined his conviction.
By staying in Athens, on the other hand, Socrates does just the opposite. He shows that the words have not been posturing or entertainment but are solidly founded. They are grounded in genuine conviction, and the readiness for action that comes with it. From this perspective, the trial and subsequent death sentence are a gift to Socrates, a one-of-a-kind opportunity, rhetorically speaking. Like little else could, they offer an opportunity to clinch persuasive victory by showing that his whole talk and spiel is not just rhetorical. He means what he says, what he has been saying, what, he vows in his defense speech, he will continue saying as long as he lives.
This idea has been meaningful to me and my friend Tim since we explored it together as students in Lincoln. The long argument. Socrates lost the trial in court in Athens, but that’s not what he was trying to win. He was playing a different game. His eye was turned to something far larger, his whole life. He had in mind not just the argument he was making in court, but the argument he was making with his life, the unity and the meaning of expression, word and deed, across his whole life. He was playing the long game, and making the long argument.
This interested us, I’m sure, not just as a matter of rhetorical curiosity, i.e. how to win a larger, broader argument while or by losing a smaller, narrower one. It interested us because it pointed us to an idea of unity, a kind of integrity across a life, that is probably innately interesting to anyone assigned the task of leading a life, searching for how to live well. It offered us the possibility, if not the promise, that we too could lead lives that were coherent, unified, meaningful, whole. Lives worth living.
The concept of the long argument hasn’t lost interest for me in the years since. One reason is how it has helped me to clarify what is lacking in academic philosophy, i.e. the main contemporary container for the study of philosophy. Academic philosophy exclusively recognizes theory and has no place for practice, action, deeds. Socrates’ defense speech and subsequent drinking of the hemlock, however, sit at the intersection of argument and action. In that crucial moment he funds all his theory and speeches by showing that he backs them up. This funding is entirely missing from academic philosophy, and, what’s worse, academic philosophy doesn’t examine the absence of practice in its tradition.
It happens that the life worth living, according to Socrates, and the life Socrates led, is the examined life, a life that includes questioning, the practice of questioning and answering, as an essential part. The overarching questions are simple. Basic. Who are you? What are you doing? These are the questions Socrates asked the people around him, including himself, and the point was also to question answers. The emphasis is not on answers per se but on answering, questioning and answering, the practice of asking and answering, a continual activity.
So the promise of the idea of the long argument is not only a life of integrity, a life worth living, a result, but a method for realizing it: questioning, examining, giving an account of yourself.
But giving an account to who? If philosophy as Socrates practiced it consists essentially in giving an account of yourself, who is receiving it? Who is the audience?
This connects with a question about the Apology, since there Socrates flouts the conventions of a traditional courtroom defense speech. He says outright he can’t convince the jury in the little time available to him, and doesn’t try. He adds to the accusations against himself, he declines to flatter the audience, and he praises himself. He actually suggests the city should thank him and give him special prizes. It is clear that Socrates is not talking to the jurors as jurors, nor are they the audience for his account. Instead, the audience is Athens as a whole, Athens as it appears in Socrates’ ongoing dialogue with it, as the imagined exchange with “the laws” in the Crito also shows.
Socrates’ audience, in the Apology and Crito, is the city personified and put into conversation. In other dialogues, his audience is specific individuals — he asks an account of them and he gives an account of himself. In both cases it is a dialogue, a process of clarification that requires the friction of two sides. Giving an account of yourself is not something you can do on your own. You need another party, their knowledge and point of view and contributions. Only through dialogue can you achieve accountability.
The philosophical life, then, is doing this accounting in conversation with friends, fellow citizens, the city as a whole, and through it all with ourselves. By taking stock, by giving voice to the varying parts, we put ourselves in position to identify their common basis and to harmonize them, to integrate the voices. This applies to members of a circle, constituents in a political community, and to the multiplicity of voices in oneself: e.g. by carrying out the conversation between himself and the city of Athens, Socrates’ harmonizes the parts of his own soul.
Who am I? What am I doing? I don’t say that we have to be able to answer these questions. Actually, we have to be able not to answer them, to sit with them, to see how we cannot answer them. To acknowledge the gap. It’s not that we need to be able to tell our story once and for all, but that we need to engage in telling our story as a practice. We need to live in relation with these questions. Over and over again, we need to line our experiences up, to connect the dots. Its great emphasis on this activity philosophy shares with psychotherapy and the school of public narrative.
I am grateful for Tim, who I continue to explore this topic with. I am grateful for Plato and Socrates, wonderful interlocutors. I am grateful for all the people in my life who hold me to account and contribute to my accounting. I too want a life that is coherent, unified, meaningful, whole. And it is particularly striking to me, then, in this context, that this series of essays, which is an attempt on my part to practice accounting, an attempt to bring unity to the life, begins with an image of disunity, incoherence, incomprehension. In the middle of the play, a stranger wanders onto stage…
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 50.
Mmm, thanks for this: "Who am I? What am I doing? I don’t say that we have to be able to answer these questions. Actually, we have to be able not to answer them, to sit with them, to see how we cannot answer them. To acknowledge the gap. It’s not that we need to be able to tell our story once and for all, but that we need to engage in telling our story as a practice."