Before CHAPTER IX. APOLOGY OF SOKRATES.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Grote, George
Emphatic assertion by Sokrates of the right of satisfaction for his own individual reason.
Never before (so far as we know) had the authority of King Nomos been exposed to such an enemy as this dialectic or cross-examination by Sokrates: the prescriptive creed and unconsciously imbibed sentiment (“ratio ex fide, casu, et puerilibus notionibus”) being thrown upon their defence against negative scrutiny brought to bear upon them by the inquisitive reason of an individual citizen. In the Apology, Sokrates clothes his own strong intellectual œstrus in the belief (doubtless sincerely entertained) of a divine mission. In the Gorgias, the Platonic Sokrates asserts it in naked and simple, yet not less emphatic, language. “You, Polus, bring against me the authority of the multitude, as well as that of the most eminent citizens, all of whom agree in upholding your view. But I, one man standing here alone, do not agree with you. And I engage to compel you, my one respondent, to agree with me.”77 The autonomy or independence of individual reason against established authority, and the title of negative reason as one of the litigants in the process of philosophising, are first brought distinctly to view in the career of Sokrates.
Aversion of the Athenian public to the negative procedure of Sokrates. Mistake of supposing that that negative procedure belongs peculiarly to the Sophists and the Megarici.
With such a career, we need not wonder that Sokrates, though esteemed and admired by a select band of adherents, incurred a large amount of general unpopularity. The public (as I have before observed) do not admit the claim of independent exercise for individual reason. In the natural process of growth in the human mind, belief does not follow proof, but springs up apart from and independent of it: an immature intelligence believes first, and proves (if indeed it ever seeks proof) afterwards.78 This mental tendency is farther confirmed by the pressure and authority of King Nomos; who is peremptory in exacting belief, but neither furnishes nor requires proof. The community, themselves deeply persuaded, will not hear with calmness the voice of a solitary reasoner, adverse to opinions thus established; nor do they like to be required to explain, analyse, or reconcile those opinions.79 They disapprove especially that dialectic debate which gives free play and efficacious prominence to the negative arm. The like disapprobation is felt even by most of the historians of philosophy; who nevertheless, having an interest in the philosophising process, might be supposed to perceive that nothing worthy of being called reasoned truth can exist, without full and equal scope to negative as well as to affirmative.
The same charges which the historians of philosophy bring against the Sophists were brought by contemporary Athenians against Sokrates. They represent the standing dislike of free inquiry, usual with an orthodox public.
These historians usually speak in very harsh terms of the Sophists, as well as of Eukleides and the Megaric sect; who are taken as the great apostles of negation. But the truth is, that the Megarics inherited it from Sokrates, and shared it with Plato. Eukleides cannot have laid down a larger programme of negation than that which we read in the Apology of Sokrates, — nor composed a dialogue more ultra-negative than the Platonic Parmenidês: nor, again, did he depart so widely, in principle as well as in precept, from existing institutions, as Plato in his Republic. The charges which historians of philosophy urge against the Megarics as well as against the persons whom they call the Sophists — such as corruption of youth — perversion of truth and morality, by making the worse appear the better reason — subversion of established beliefs — innovation as well as deception — all these were urged against Sokrates himself by his contemporaries,80 and indeed against all the philosophers indiscriminately, as we learn from Sokrates himself in the Apology.81 They are outbursts of feeling natural to the practical, orthodox citizen, who represents the common sense of the time and place; declaring his antipathy to these speculative, freethinking innovations of theory, which challenges the prescriptive maxims of traditional custom and tests them by a standard approved by herself. The orthodox citizen does not feel himself in need of philosophers to tell him what is truth or what is virtue, nor what is the difference between real and fancied knowledge.
On these matters he holds already settled persuasions, acquired from his fathers and his ancestors, and from the acknowledged civic authorities, spiritual and temporal;82 who are to him exponents of the creed guaranteed by tradition:—
“Quod sapio, satis est mihi: non ego curo Esse quod Arcesilas ærumnosique Solones.”
He will not listen to ingenious sophistry respecting these consecrated traditions; he does not approve the tribe of fools who despise what they are born to, and dream of distant, unattainable novelties:83 he cannot tolerate the nice discoursers, ingenious hair-splitters, priests of subtleties and trifles — dissenters from the established opinions, who corrupt the youth, teaching their pupils to be wise above the laws, to despise or even beat their fathers and mothers,84 and to cheat their creditors — mischievous instructors, whose appropriate audience are the thieves and malefactors, and who ought to be silenced if they display ability to pervert others.85 Such feeling of disapprobation and antipathy against speculative philosophy and dialectic — against the libertas philosophandi — counts as a branch of virtue among practical and orthodox citizens, rich or poor, oligarchical or democratical, military or civil, ancient or modern. It is an antipathy common to men in other respects very different, to Nikias as well as Kleon, to Eupolis and Aristophanes as well as to Anytus and Demochares.
It was expressed forcibly by the Roman Cato (the Censor), when he censured Sokrates as a dangerous and violent citizen; aiming, in his own way, to subvert the institutions and customs of the country, and poisoning the minds of his fellow-citizens with opinions hostile to the laws.86 How much courage is required in any individual citizen, to proclaim conscientious dissent in the face of wide-spread and established convictions, is recognised by Plato himself, and that too in the most orthodox and intolerant of all his compositions.87 He (and Aristotle after him), far from recognising the infallibility of established King Nomos, were bold enough88 to try and condemn him, and to imagine (each of them) a new Νόμος of his own, representing the political Art or Theory of Politics — a notion which would not have been understood by Themistokles or Aristeides.
Source notes
76 Bacon, Nov. Org. Aph. 97. I have already cited this passage in a note on the 68th chapter of my ‘History of Greece,’ pp. 612-613; in which note I have also alluded to other striking passages of Bacon, indicating the confusion, inconsistencies, and misapprehensions of the “intellectus sibi permissus”. In that note, and in the text of the chapter, I have endeavoured to illustrate the same view of the Sokratic procedure as that which is here taken.
77 Plato, Gorgias, p. 472 A. καὶ νῦν, περὶ ὧν σὺ λέγεις, ὀλίγου σοὶ πάντες συμφήσουσι ταὐτα Ἀθηναῖοι καὶ οἱ ξένοι, ἐὰν βούλη κατ’ ἐμοῦ μάρτυρας παρασχέσθαι ὡς οὐκ ἀληθῆ λέγω· μαρτυρήσουσί σοι, ἐὰν μὲν βούλῃ, Νικίας ὁ Νικηράτου καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοὶ μετ’ αὐτοῦ — ἐὰν δὲ βούλῃ, Ἀριστοκράτης ὁ Σκελλίου — ἐὰν δὲ βούλῃ, ἡ Περικλέους ὅλη οἰκία ἢ ἄλλη συγγένεια, ἥντινα ἂν βούλῃ τῶν ἔνθαδε ἐκλέξασθαι. Ἀλλ’ ἐγώ σοι εἶς ὣν οὐχ ὁμολογῶ· οὐ γάρ με σὺ ἀναγκάζεις, &c.
78 See Professor Bain’s Chapter on Belief; one of the most original and instructive chapters in his volume on the Emotions and the Will, pp. 578-584. [Third Ed., pp. 505-538.]
79 This antithesis and reciprocal repulsion — between the speculative reason of the philosopher who thinks for himself, and the established traditional convictions of the public — is nowhere more strikingly enforced than by Plato in the sixth and seventh books of the Republic; together with the corrupting influence exercised by King Nomos, at the head of his vehement and unanimous public, over those few gifted natures which are competent to philosophical speculation. See Plato, Rep. vi. 492-493.
The unfavourable feelings with which the attempts to analyse morality (especially when quite novel, as such attempts were in the time of Sokrates) are received in a community — are noticed by Mr. John Stuart Mill, in his tract on Utilitarianism, ch. iii. pp. 38-39:—
“The question is often asked, and properly so, in regard to any supposed moral standard, What is its sanction? What are the motives to obey it? or more specifically, What is the source of its obligation? Whence does it derive its binding force? It is a necessary part of moral philosophy to provide the answer to this question: which though frequently assuming the shape of an objection to the utilitarian morality, as if it had some special applicability to that above others, really arises in regard to all standards. It arises in fact whenever a person is called on to adopt a standard, or refer morality to any basis on which he has not been accustomed to rest it. For the customary morality, that which education and opinion have consecrated, is the only one which presents itself to the mind with the feeling of being in itself obligatory: and when a person is asked to believe that this morality derives its obligation from some general principle round which custom has not thrown the same halo, the assertion is to him a paradox. The supposed corollaries seem to have a more binding force than the original theorem: the superstructure seems to stand better without than with what is represented as its foundation.… The difficulty has no peculiar application to the doctrine of utility, but is inherent in every attempt to analyse morality, and reduce it to principles: which, unless the principle is already in men’s minds invested with as much sacredness as any of its applications, always seems to divest them of a part of their sanctity.”
Epiktêtus observes that the refined doctrines acquired by the self-reasoning philosopher, often failed to attain that intense hold on his conviction, which the “rotten doctrines” inculcated from childhood possessed over the conviction of ordinary men. Διὰ τί οὖν ἐκεῖνοι (οἱ πολλοὶ, οἱ ἰδιῶται) ὑμῶν (των φιλοσόφων) ἰσχυρότεροι; Ὅτι ἐκεῖνοι μὲν τὰ σαπρὰ ταῦτα ἀπὸ δογμάτων λαλοῦσιν; ὑμεῖς δὲ τὰ κομψὰ ἀπὸ τῶν χειλῶν.… Οὕτως ὑμᾶς οἱ ἰδιῶται νικῶσι· Πανταχοῦ γὰρ ἰσχυρὸν τὸ δόγμα· ἀνίκητον τὸ δόγμα. (Epiktêtus, iii. 16.)
80 Themistius, in defending himself against contemporary opponents, whom he represents to have calumniated him, consoles himself by saying, among other observations, that these arrows have been aimed at all the philosophers successively — Sokrates, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus. Ὁ γὰρ σοφιστὴς καὶ ἀλαζὼν καὶ καινότομος πρῶτον μὲν Σωκράτους ὀνείδη ἦν, ἔπειτα Πλάτωνος ἐφεξῆς, εἶθ’ ὕστερον Ἀριστοτέλους καὶ Θεοφράστου. (Orat. xxiii. p. 346, Dindorf.)
We read in Zeller’s account of the Platonic philosophy (Phil. der Griech. vol. ii. p. 368, ed. 2nd):
“Die propädeutische Begründung der Platonischen Philosophie besteht im Allgemeinen darin, dass der unphilosophische Standpunkt aufgelöst, und die Erhebung zum philosophischen in ihrer Nothwendigkeit nachgewiesen wird. Im Besondern können wir drey Stadien dieses Wegs unterscheiden. Den Ausgangspunkt bildet das gewöhnliche Bewusstsein. Indem die Voraussetzungen, welche Diesem für ein Erstes und Festes gegolten hatten, dialektisch zersetzt werden, so erhalten wir zunächst das negative Resultat der Sophistik. Erst wenn auch diese überwunden ist, kann der philosophische Standpunkt positiv entwickelt werden.”
Zeller here affirms that it was the Sophists (Protagoras, Prodikus, Hippias and others) who first applied negative analysis to the common consciousness; breaking up, by their dialectic scrutiny, those hypotheses which had before exercised authority therein, as first principles not to be disputed.
I dissent from this position. I conceive that the Sophists (Protagoras, Prodikus, Hippias) did not do what Zeller affirms, and that Sokrates (and Plato after him) did do it. The negative analysis was the weapon of Sokrates, and not of Protagoras, Prodikus, Hippias, &c. It was he who declared (see Platonic Apology) that false persuasion of knowledge was at once universal and ruinous, and who devoted his life to the task of exposing it by cross-examination. The conversation of the Xenophontic Sokrates with Euthydêmus (Memor. iv. 2), exhibits a complete specimen of that aggressive analysis, brought to bear on the common consciousness, which Zeller ascribes to the Sophists: the Platonic dialogues, in which Sokrates cross-examines upon Justice, Temperance, Courage, Piety, Virtue, &c., are of the like character; and we know from Xenophon (Mem. i. 1-16) that Sokrates passed much time in such examinations with pre-eminent success.
I notice this statement of Zeller, not because it is peculiar to him (for most of the modern historians of philosophy affirm the same; and his history, which is the best that I know, merely repeats the ordinary view), but because it illustrates clearly the view which I take of the Sophists and Sokrates. Instead of the unmeaning abstract “Sophistik,” given by Zeller and others, we ought properly to insert the word “Sokratik,” if we are to have any abstract term at all.
Again — The negative analysis, which these authors call “Sophistik,” they usually censure as discreditable and corrupting. To me it appears, on the contrary, both original and valuable, as one essential condition for bringing social and ethical topics under the domain of philosophy or “reasoned truth”.
Professor Charles Thurot (in his Études sur Aristote, Paris, 1860, p. 119) takes a juster view than Zeller of the difference between Plato and the Sophists (Protagoras, Prodikus, Hippias). “Les Sophistes, comme tous ceux qui dissertent superficiellement sur des questions de philosophie, et en particulier sur la morale et la politique, s’appuyaient sur l’autorité et le témoignage; ils alléguaient les vers des poètes célèbres qui passaient aux yeux des Grecs pour des oracles de sagesse: ils invoquaient l’opinion du commun des hommes. Platon récusait absolument ces deux espèces de témoignages. Ni les poètes ni le commun des hommes ne savent ce qu’ils disent, puisqu’ils ne peuvent en rendre raison....... Aux yeux de Platon, il n’y a d’autre méthode, pour arriver au vrai et pour le communiquer, que la dialectique: qui est à la fois l’art d’interroger et de répondre, et l’art de définir et de diviser.”
M. Thurot here declares (in my judgment very truly) that the Sophists appealed to the established ethical authorities, and dwelt upon or adorned the received common-places — that Plato denied these authorities, and brought his battery of negative cross-examination to bear upon them as well as upon their defenders. M. Thurot thus gives a totally different version of the procedure of the Sophists from that which is given by Zeller. Nevertheless he perfectly agrees with Zeller, and with Anytus, the accuser of Sokrates (Plat. Menon, pp. 91-92), in describing the Sophists as a class who made money by deceiving and perverting the minds of hearers (p. 120).
81 Plato, Apol. Sokr. p. 23 D. ἵνα δὲ μὴ δοκῶσιν ἀπορεῖν, τὰ κατὰ πάντων τῶν φιλοσοφούντων πρόχειρα ταῦτα λέγουσιν, ὅτι τὰ μετέωρα καὶ τὰ ὑπὸ γῆς καὶ θεοὺς μὴ νομίζειν καὶ τὸν ἥττω λόγον κρείττω ποιεῖν, &c.
Xenoph. Memor. i. 2, 31. τὸ κοινῇ τοῖς φιλοσόφοις ὑπὸ τῶν πολλῶν ἐπιτιμώμενον. The rich families in Athens severely reproached their relatives who frequented the society of Sokrates. Xenophon, Sympos. iv. 32.
82 See this point strikingly set forth by Plato, Politikus, 299: also Plutarch, Ἐρωτικός, c. 13, 756 A.
This is the “auctoritas majorum,” put forward by Cotta in his official character of Pontifex, as conclusive per se: when reasons are produced to sustain it, the reasons fail. (Cic. Nat. Deor. iii. 3, 5, 6, 9.)
The “auctoritas maiorum,” proclaimed by the Pontifex Cotta, may be illustrated by what we read in Father Paul’s History of the Council of Trent, respecting the proceedings of that Council when it imposed the duty of accepting the authoritative interpretation of Scripture:—“Lorsqu’on fut à opiner sur le quatrième Article, presque tous se rendirent à l’avis du Cardinal Pachèco, qui représenta: Que l’Écriture ayant été expliquée par tant de gens éminens en piété et en doctrine, l’on ne pouvoit pas espérer de rien ajouter de meilleur: Que les nouvelles Hérésies etant toutes nées des nouveaux sens qu’on avoit donnés à l’Écriture, il étoit nécessaire d’arrêter la licence des esprits modernes, et de les obliger de se laisser gouverner par les Anciens et par l’Église: Et que si quelqu’un naissoit avec un esprit singulier, on devoit le forcer à le renfermer au dedans de lui-même, et à ne pas troubler le monde en publiant tout ce qu’il pensoit.” (Fra Paolo, Histoire du Concile de Trente, traduction Françoise, par Le Courayer, Livre II. p. 284, 285, in 1546, pontificate of Paul III.)
P. 289. “Par le second Décret, il étoit ordonné en substance, de tenir l’Edition Vulgate pour authentique dans les leçons publiques, les disputes, les prédications, et les explications; et défendre à qui que ce fut de la rejeter. On y défendoit aussi d’expliquer la Saint Écriture dans un sens contraire à celui que lui donne la Sainte Église notre Mère, et au consentement unanime des Pères, quand bien même on auroit intention de tenir ces explications secrètes; et on ordonnoit que ceux qui contreviendroient à cette défense fussent punis par les Ordinaires.”
83 Pindar, Pyth. iii. 21.
Ἔστι δὲ φῦλον ἐν ἀνθρώποισι ματαιοτατον, Ὅστις αἰσχύνων ἐπιχώρια παπταίνει τὰ πόρσω, Μεταμώνια θηρεύων ἀκράντοις ἐλπίσιν.
84
(Euripides, Bacchæ, 200.)
Illud in his rebus vereor, ne forté rearis Impia te rationis inire elementa, viamque Endogredi sceleris. (Lucretius, i. 85.)
Compare Valckenaer, Diatrib. Eurip. pp. 38, 39, cap. 5.
About the accusations against Sokrates, of leading the youth to contract doubts and to slight the authority of their fathers, see Xenoph. Memor. i. 2, 52; Plato, Gorgias, 522 B, p. 79, Menon, p. 70. A touching anecdote, illustrating this displeasure of the fathers against Sokrates, may be found in Xenophon, Cyropæd. iii. 1, 89, where the father of Tigranes puts to death the σοφιστὴς who had taught his son, because that son had contracted a greater attachment to the σοφιστὴς than to his own father.
Xenophon, Memor. i. 2, 9; i. 2, 49. Apolog. So. s. 20; compare the speech of Kleon in Thucyd. iii. 37. Plato, Politikus, p. 299 E.