Socrates On Trial

Nigel Tubbs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350053724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Antike & klassische Philosophie

Named by Rowan Williams as one of his Books of the Year (2021) in the New Statesman. Socrates On Trial tells of Socrates's return to a modern city that is plagued by prejudice, privilege and populism. On resuming his questioning in the agora he is arrested, interrogated by his prosecutors, questioned by his Judge, and confessed to by his inquisitor. On a Festival Day, he explores a new model for the just city --a city based not on mastery but on learning --before offering a new apology to the court that will, once again, decide his fate. This new/old Socrates offers the city a renewed vision of justice by reconceptualizing the meaning and significance of thinking and education. From the force of Socratic questioning, he unfolds a different logic of truth, freedom, and justice. His conversations exert a gravitational force that draws key cultural elements of the city -- property, wealth, money, family, essence, gendered and racialized identities, production, distribution and consumption -- into its educational orbit. At stake here is the vulnerability of modern democracy to authoritarian leaders and their sponsors. Influenced by sophisticated propaganda people's frustration with democracy is channeled into visceral anger on the one hand, and into disillusioned scepticism and cynicism on the other. Belief in truth and education collapses in exhaustion and fatigue, caught in the headlights of seemingly irresolvable and petrifying rational paradoxes that block all paths to social justice. Socrates On Trial, describing the return of Socrates to the modern city, heralds a new education for such a city.

Part 1

The retrial of Socrates

Book 1

The man in sandals and a long coat, looking a little dishevelled, was standing in the marketplace, listening around him intently to what he could hear of people’s everyday conversations. He knew the city, of course, and yet he felt he was again seeing it for the first time. The familiar was strangely unfamiliar, and it had taken some time before his eyes had adjusted to it.

When they did, he was confused by what he saw. Those who had once been prisoners in chains were now unbound, able to roam freely and see all of the city for themselves. They could see the shadows but also the path on which people walked carrying objects, and the fire behind them whose light cast the shadows of these objects. The world that had been hidden was now demystified. The people carrying the objects were no longer strangers to the ex-prisoners. Indeed, the emancipated city dwellers had access to the same path and were able to cast into the city shadows of their own making. Equally shocking for Socrates, when he looked past the fire at the steep ascent out of the city, no matter how hard he strained his eyes he could not see the light that marked its entrance.

It was not long before he was engaged in conversation, hoping to make sense of what he saw.

T: Socrates, you have been away a long time.

S: I have, and much has changed.

T: What surprises you most?

S: That those previously in chains now walk freely around the city.

T: The city believes it no longer nurtures ignorance. It insists that what was hidden is now open and that all are free to see it.

S: Including the production of the shadows?

T: Especially the production of the shadows. The city professes itself to be enlightened.

S: And yet the shadows still exist. This perplexes me.

T: Then you need to become familiar with the history of the city. In previous times only the few were released from their chains and dragged to the world of truth and first principles where they learned arts and sciences, dialectic, and wisdom.

S: Then they were to return to the city as philosophers to serve the public good.

T: That was your plan Socrates. But the plan failed.

S: Did they return to live and rule without families and wealth and property?

T: They returned, but they let self-interest prevail over the public good.

S: Then it did not become a just city?

T: Far from it. Often these rulers claimed benevolence. But they still ruled the city in their own interests and kept others chained as prisoners in the shadows.

S: The project for the just city made very clear that justice required each soul to be put to work doing the job for which it was best suited. If the rulers were corrupt, they were not the souls best suited to governing. Such injustice would undermine the whole city.

T: These rulers treated non-philosophical minds as barbarians and took wealth and property for themselves as their entitlement. They treated the city as their private estate, justifying and enjoying lordship over those they kept enslaved. This is the city you left behind you, a city in poor health where freedom and servitude, enlightenment and shadows, and justice and corruption existed alongside each other.

B: But the rulers were clever, Socrates. From the very beginning their injustice was authorized and sustained by the highest ideals of the city, justified according to the principles of harmony and beauty, and in living at peace with nature and the order of the cosmos.

S: You mean they ruled by the principle of tranquillity?

B: They claimed that by the power of the philosophical mind the laws of nature were absorbed into the soul without resentment. Such masterful virtue belonged to the stoical mind. But in reality, the struggle required to achieve tranquillity was self-defeating. It was like a mind at war with itself. And so, becoming sceptical that such tranquil mastery could ever be achieved for any philosophical mind, some decided to suspend judgement between competing truths altogether.

S: What happened to truth?

B: It flew into the realm of the unknowable, into the metaphysical, unable to leave its ethereal home or to return to the city.

S: Philosophical truth and political truth were separated from each other?

B: And absolute truth defied any direct contact with the finite individual mind of the citizen. It became the idea of truth as a single deity, one god, unknowable to changeable individual experience.

S: Did this idea of unknowable truth become a form of mastery in the city?

B: Yes, when injustice took a new cultural form as religion, praising mind as divine substance and chastising the body as the sinful home of material and physical desires. Non-philosophical minds, those dominated by the desires of the body, were given prophets who could bridge the gap between the human and divine. They were told that faith in the prophets would save their souls in the afterlife, while priests mediated on behalf of the divine on earth, demanding obedience from the faithful.

S: But if truth is exiled to the metaphysical and made unknowable, then the material world is free from its direct control. It might learn to enjoy this freedom.

B: This is what happened. People found innate resources by which to decide truth for themselves. And something remarkable came out of this. From within the despair of being deserted by ineffable truth, came extraordinary scientific and artistic accomplishments. And this earthly mind, newly enlightened about its own innate abilities and capacities, called itself ‘reason’.

S: Did this become a new mastery?

B: Yes. Reason announced that the city’s history and development had really been its own doing. Reason now claimed to be the creator of truth.

S: Freeing itself from religious power?

B: The heavens were seen to be the product of an unenlightened reason. Enlightenment returned truth to earth.

S: Did reason belong only to specialist philosophical minds?

B: No. And here is the reason why the prisoners now roam freely around the city. Enlightenment taught us that reason is an innate capacity of every human mind. All reasoning individuals are equal to each other. And so, rational philosophical thinking, whose truth had first justified elite masters and their slaves, now redefined truth as individuals thinking for themselves. This made a universal truth out of the activity that you started in the city, Socrates. And today the rational city has no slaves, only independent rational individuals. Even to refer to people as having been slaves risks dehumanizing the individual who was enslaved.

S: Did slaves think of themselves as slaves?

B: Yes and no.

S: Then to do justice to that struggle, perhaps we need both to undermine and to preserve the terms in which it was lived?

B: But the city has no slaves now, Socrates.

S: And yet I have seen people in the city who still appear to be enslaved to different kinds of mastery.

B: Legally no one can be defined as a slave.

C: How convenient that the chains of both body and mind become invisible behind the law. The law makes everyone equal, and the same law makes this equality actual as the inequalities of wealth, property and power.

S: Justice in the old city demanded that every person’s work best fulfilled their natural talents. Hence, the wisest souls would rule as masters, the bravest would defend and the most desiring would buy and sell what was needed for survival.

C: As you have seen, your best intentions were not realized. Desire conquered wisdom. The rulers abandoned an education in selflessness. They craved privilege and the luxuri es that come with it, and they used education to achieve this. Rather than restraining their desires, they indulged them. They turned the privilege of service into an entitlement for reward. Your model of the just city created only an elite class serving their own self-interests.

S: Who could join this elite?

C: Mostly it just reproduced itself from within. If someone did seek admission, he would be tested to ensure that his instincts were to conserve rather than to disrupt power and privilege.

S: Was this elite ever challenged by the rest of the city?

C: At times their excesses led to rebellions. But through control of trade and business the masters had the power of life and death over the poor, owning as they did the very things that people needed for survival. This meant that even when rational and legal equality was achieved, material inequality remained. Privilege was not so much challenged as rebranded. The enlightenment of the city turned into the principle of the equality of inequality.

S: Meaning that all are equal, and some are more equal than others.

C: Indeed.

S: In the old city trade was seen as barbarian by the elite.

C: Over time the city saw the two groups morph into one. Rulers rewarded traders with wealth and property, and traders ensured the market served the interest of the rulers.

S: An alliance?

C: The Janus-face of power in the city.

S: Then what is government in this city of desire?

C: It is a system that distils need into greed.

S: Who makes the things the city needs?

C: A class of producers who work for their masters.

S: Are they too ruled by desire?

C: By the desire to survive, yes. And hand in hand with this the masters eradicated any desire among such people for learning. They kept the higher education of the mind to themselves and told everyone else they should only desire the kind of education that would service their basic survival. The people were told never to forget that the purpose of education for them is to get a good and meaningful job. They were told they would gain very little advantage from having any higher education and were denied the tools by which such claims might be thought about, questioned and criticized.

S: One kind of education for the masters, another fo...