Unmourned Funeral: Chapter 7

5,103 words

Chapter 7
SHADOWPLAY

Escaping Plato’s Cave

In the shadowplay,
Acting out your own death,
Knowing no more.
Joy Division, Shadowplay

We have seen the death of philosophy, or at the very least her mysterious disappearance, and thus the demise of the philosopher, who is now at best a BBC guest, a collector of amusing Stoic sayings, or a mild-mannered snake-oil merchant trying to sell a book. What happened to the cultural outsider, the samizdat-printing dissident, the truth-seeker, the one who dares to look at the sun? Before going underground, like Orpheus, to find him in Plato’s cave, we will first examine one of philosophy’s key texts and ask it that very question, as we will see philosophy literally sentenced to death.

By a great cosmic coincidence, the Platonic corpus went, if not underground, then certainly on the run in the mid-15th century. In 1463, the great Italian Renaissance scholar Marcilio Ficino was surprised to be interrupted in his preparatory work in translating the Platonic dialogues when his ageing master Cosimo de’ Medici – 74 and anxious to read Plato before he died – presented him with another classical treasure, the so-called Corpus Hermeticum, attributed to the mythical Hermes Trismegistus. This shows the priorities of a civilization still partly mired in occult superstition. The Corpus Hermeticum turned out to be a hoax, as uncovered by Isaac Casaubon in 1597. It is amusing that the grave scholar of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch is named Casaubon. But the Platonic corpus was home, back in the West which produced it and where it belongs. The Dialogues have been placed in various sequential orders by Plato scholars, but we will begin, in terms of Socrates’ life, almost at the end.

 

The man… has equipped himself with many things for his journey.
Franz Kafka, Before the Law

Plato’s Apology is effectively the court report of the trial of Socrates with Plato as stenographer. The arraignment and trial of Plato’s friend and mentor was in 399BC and, although he was sentenced to death by the dicasts of the Athenian Senate (a dicast being the ancient Athenian combined role of both judge and juror), technically Socrates committed suicide by drinking hemlock. He didn’t need to, Athens having given him an easy route to freedom. But, like a man crucified almost exactly 400 years later on similar charges to those of Socrates, he recognized his destiny and the responsibility it bestowed on him. The Athenian military veteran was offered the judicially sanctioned option to pay a fine he could set himself, but rejected the offer. Both Socrates and Christ were offered the chance to escape their fate. It appears that neither had to die. But that appearance is deceptive; of all men, these two had no choice.

The Apology is, in many ways, the most straightforward of Plato’s works, and yet it is not strictly a work of philosophy. Its subject is really the relationship between philosophy and the state, and to what extent the latter will tolerate the former. It is also fine theatre. Benjamin Jowett, the great 19th-century theologian, teacher and translator of Plato and Thucydides, describes the Apology with a moving simplicity:

“The conversational manner, the seeming want of arrangement, the ironical simplicity, are found to result in a perfect work of art, which is the portrait of Socrates.”

Socrates has been brought to trial as a result of a petition by three citizens, the poet Meletus, the politician Anytus, and the orator Lycon. One might fancifully think that grudges were born because Meletus overheard Socrates’ opinion of poets in his Republic monologue, Anytus (like today’s politicians) purported to sniff a threat to democracy, and Lycon resented Socrates’ dismissive attitude towards Sophists such as Protagoras, but the charges were unanimous. Socrates was tried for the related crimes of the “importation of novel divinities”, and the subsequent corruption of youth. The Apology is in three parts: Socrates’ defence against the charges, the verdict and discussion of a possible penalty, and Socrates’ final, accusatory speech against an Athenian state who would, he said, regret their decision, even though Socrates himself did not. Socrates never grovelled, never begged for his life, never backed down. And he never denounced philosophy, quite the opposite:

“While I have life and strength I shall never cease from the teaching and practice of philosophy.”

Socrates’ indifference towards and even welcoming of death can be parsed into three separate aspects. He tells his friend Hermogenes that he has no wish to continue living. He reports that his divine sign or daimonion – Socrates’ inner voice which only ever dissuaded him from action – had been silent, and that he considered his whole life to have been a preparation for his death at that moment. He will say this explicitly in the death-cell scene of the Phaedo. But, most importantly for our understanding of this wisest of men, Socrates accepted his death sentence because it was the law and thus the will of the state. The underlying maxim is that although you may not agree with the results of due process, you must believe in due process.

Socrates considers the charges against him as an almost proto-Maoist suspicion of the state towards anything straying from the norm. He sketches opinions held about him:

“Socrates is an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into things under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrine to others.”

Despite Socrates recalling Aristophanes’ play The Clouds, in which he is ridiculed by the playwright, the pair get on very well together in Plato’s Symposium. But it is not so much Socrates’ philosophical methods which cause the state such unease as the fact that he is teaching this method to youth. It is not Socrates the philosopher who is put to death but Socrates the educator.

 

Oh teacher I need you,
Like a little child.
Elton John, Teacher

Both Socrates and Christ were (and remain) educators, and unsanctioned education is a dreadful danger to the repressive state, a fact known to Xenophon’s Socrates when he replies to Meletus that “I am prosecuted by you on a capital charge because there are people who think I am an expert at education, which is the greatest of human goods.” (Conversations of Socrates, in which Xenophon wrote an alternative account of Socrates’ trial). Today, in the West, home-schooling is illegal in some countries and becoming more difficult in the ones where it remains legal.

That Socrates believes himself qualified to be an educator is due, paradoxically, to the revelation made by a Pythian priestess during Socrates’ friend Chaepheron’s famous visit to the Delphic Oracle. Socrates, says the oracle, is the wisest of men because he knows that he knows nothing. Of course, this is a notoriously problematic formula, and we should treat it simply as the emblem of Socratic method, by which apparent certitudes are shown to be undermined by the simple expedient of patient and gradual questioning of premises and outcomes.

Indeed, Socrates is able to show his signature dialectic in court as he cross-examines Meletus, easily bamboozling the poet and coming to an acerbic verdict of his own:

“Nobody will believe you, Meletus, and I am pretty sure you do not believe yourself.”

Patient reasoning, the teasing out of answers hidden behind truths which are merely apparent, is anathema to power, which prefers coercive and incontrovertible, ex cathedra statements backed by force. Orders, in short. Socrates also takes careful aim at the acquisition of wealth and reputation, a tendency not traditionally unconnected with power. Again, individuals with these priorities have already put themselves in Socrates’ sights:

“You, my friend – a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens – are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regarded at all? And if the person with whom I am arguing, says: Yes, but I do care; then I do not leave him or let him go at once: but I proceed to interrogate and examine and cross-examine him…”

The last thing a city which is the epicentre of global power needs is a conscience. Socrates describes himself as a gadfly, buzzing and stinging the great beast of state to keep it on its guard:

“I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me…”

“I am a mischievous person,” he adds. And there is also something else the state and its representatives find to their distaste in Socrates’ inquisitory behaviour in the market square; mockery. Just as Thomas More’s proud devil cannot endure to be mocked, neither can the state. Particularly if the people decide to join in the fun:

“But I shall be asked, Why do people delight in continually conversing with you? I have told you already, Athenians, the whole truth about this matter: they like to hear the cross-examination of the pretenders to wisdom; there is amusement in it.”

There will always be deserved amusement in the deflation of the pompous, but if the values of pomposity nestle Venn-like with those of the state, the mocker must keep one eye on the door unless he is to end up at 70 years old and in a court of law for the first time in his life, as Socrates informs us is his position. Could you not have held your tongue? Socrates imagines someone asking him, and his answer is a simple one; no. It would be disobedient to God. This is philosophy as a divine imperative.

And so Socrates is given the death penalty although he had, apparently, two ways to escape his fate. Firstly, as Xenophon writes in the Memorabilia, Socrates might have gained an acquittal from the Senate had he “in any moderate degree… conciliated the favour of the dicasts”. There is also a suggestion that Socrates’ friends could have had him released during a delay in his execution of 30 days while a sacred ship returned from Delos, an annual ritual pledged by the Athenians to thank the gods for the deliverance of some Athenian youths during a storm. Socrates, of course, would hear of no such thing. The law had spoken.

We are no longer in the time of Athens nor of Roman rule of the Middle East, but just as the triangle had the same sum of internal degrees at the time of Socrates, and of Christ, as it does now, so too it seems that to speak truth to power is still, as it was then, only permissible when that truth has been sanctioned by the state. To speak unsanctioned truth may not lead to hemlock or the cross, but there are social punishments available to the modern state which can act as a less fatal but still effective disincentive to free speech which is deemed too free. Speech is important to Socrates:

“I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.”

In an age such as our own, which in terms of principled political behaviour makes the court of the Medicis look like a showplace of virtue, the Apology is a manual of probity, integrity and honesty. Socrates was always going to die, no matter how many chances he was given to be spirited away by the friends who will grieve for him in the Phaedo, and for a reason far greater than considerations of mortality or immortality:

“The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.”

And so the world says farewell to Socrates, as he ascends to heaven. And so will we, although our next port of call is in the other direction. Like Orpheus, like philosophy, we are, once again, going underground.

 

Down, down, down, down.
Yeah, I’ll take you down on the underground.
Sex Pistols, I Wanna be Me

Plato’s Republic contains a famous pronouncement on the relationship between philosophy and political leadership:

“Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is until political power and philosophy entirely coincide… cities will have no… rest from evils nor, I think, will the human race.”

How can that level of philosophy, that love of wisdom, be attained and consummated? The Republic takes as its subject the ideal state, and is probably based on what Plato knew of Sparta. Many of its ideas are well known: the communal upbringing of children, the expulsion of the poets, metempsychosis (reincarnation), the tripartite roles of guardian, auxiliary and worker (the myth of the metals), the noble lie or necessary falsehood, and the famous myth of the cave.

At the start of the Republic’s Book VII, Plato’s perennial mouthpiece Socrates invites us to consider the following scenario:

“Imagine human beings living in an underground, cave-like dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets.”

Socrates supposes that there are people on the wall “carrying all kinds of objects”, statues of people and other animals which, from the light of the fire, cast shadows on the wall in front of the shackled prisoners, shadows which are all they are able to see.

Unable to see their genuine cause, the prisoners take these shadows as reality, and the familiar Platonic division between the real and the ideal is played out in this subterranean drama. Plato believed that the things of this world are second-order shadows or copies of ideal realities, a metaphysics which would later fund Christianity via Roman neo-Platonism.

Concerning the myth of the cave, Plato scholars have always taken the master at his word; we are temporal creatures who see only the shadows of the ideal, Plato’s ultimate reality. The meaning of the allegory of the cave, it is generally accepted, has to do with our actual perception of reality, our sensory experience of the world, flawed and illusory as it is compared with the realm of the Platonic ideal. Plato states as much. But Socrates’ student and amanuensis, as we shall see, may have had his reasons for disguising political comment as philosophy.

The Republic has concerned itself, right up to the scenario in the cave, with politics. Why the sudden switch to epistemology? Why not, rather, see the story of the cave as an unpacking of another famous Platonic concept, albeit one which occurs only twice in the Republic; the noble lie or necessary falsehood?

Of course, there has been endless wrangling over translation from Plato, but the necessary or noble myth or falsehood is made explicit:

“[I]t looks as though our rulers will have to make considerable use of falsehood and deception for the benefit of those they rule.”

Smuggled into the debate during a discussion of how to tidy up the behaviour of the Homeric gods to make them suitable for young and impressionable minds, the necessary falsehood is now exposed as political spin avant la lettre, and its apparatus, the actual mechanics of subverting reality and replacing it with mere shadowplay, is nowhere better dramatised than in the depths of Plato’s cave. But the action in the cave myth is not confined to the prisoners chained there. Someone gets out.

 

I want to break free.
Queen

Before we search for Plato’s reasons for disguising his political analysis in an ontological mummer’s play, intended to divert, it is worth remembering that the story of the cave does not end with the silhouettes on the wall. There is another small chapter to read in which one of the prisoners escapes, and is taken up and outside of the cave:

“When one of [the prisoners] was freed and suddenly compelled to stand up, turn his head, walk, and look toward the light, he’d be pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he’d seen before.”

The prisoner is taken out of the cave, sees the light of the sun – dazzling at first and then illuminating – and experiences reality for the first time. So far, so Platonic; metaphors of sun and light accompany the truth throughout the dialogues, indeed throughout philosophy. The Cartesian lumen naturale is the master-metaphor presiding over the truth, it is Descartes’ ‘natural light of the mind’ by which we read the world. We still speak of ‘seeing’ the truth even if that truth is abstract.

But this prisoner is about to become very special, and his life is about to become that bit more dangerous. Inside the cave, he is one more chained observer of flickering images (which many have noted are televisual) without access to the ultimate reality of the world. Now, outside and in the light of the sun, the master-metaphor and illuminator of the truth, the truth is what he sees. But the escaped prisoner is not just a nuisance, he is the ambassador of dissidence, and thus a marked man. He is dragged back to the cave…

 

“Who is Number 1?”
“You are Number 6.”
Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner

We will continue tracking our prisoner, putting him under surveillance in a thoroughly modern way. If what the prisoner sees is the real, the true order subverted by the object-carriers below in the cave, those same inventors of experience may have other plans for the enlightened escapee on his return from the overworld with revolutionary news concerning reality. The escapee has looked at the sun and must be punished, for the evil man hates the light. But those who operate the strange conceit of Plato’s cave will not carry out the execution themselves, but rather – as is in the nature of power – they will out-source the work, commissioning others to do it for them:

“[A]s for anyone who tried to free [the other prisoners] and lead them upward… wouldn’t they kill him?”

The prisoner who has stared at the sun – an action which became a classic sign of insanity – might be the very person the other prisoners fear, with his subversive tales of reality from above ground. We recall the Athenian court room we visited at the start of this chapter.

Perhaps there is no secret order behind the suppressio veri of the Republic, which has travelled from the low wall of the cave to the news managers and spin-doctors of the 21st century. One only has to note the treatment today of whistle-blowers, counter-jihadists, satirists and cartoonists, dissident non-MSM journalists, gender realists, anti-vaxxers, and other pariahs to suspect what happens if one stares too long at the sun. As for our dissident prisoner, staring as he is at the sun of truth, the true identity of this escapee of the Republic may be possible to name.

There is a clue as to the identity of this refugee from the cave in Plato’s Republic in the disputed Seventh Letter, written to the associates of Dion, the ruler of Syracuse whom Plato would try – and fail – to teach statesmanship after he left Athens in disgust at the effective execution of his teacher Socrates. Plato recalls an episode from his youth, when his city was under the tyrannical rule of the so-called Thirty:

Among their other deeds they named Socrates, an older friend of mine who I would not hesitate to call the wisest and justest man of that time, as one of a group sent to arrest a certain citizen who was to be put to death illegally, planning thereby to make Socrates, whether he wanted it or not, a party to their actions. But he refused, risking the utmost danger rather than be an associate in their impious deeds.

The utmost danger was, of course, the death sentence eventually passed on Socrates when, as we saw, he was charged with and convicted of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. Even then, the Athenian court, in passing judgement before a feast day, offered Socrates the chance to escape. Loyal to his principles, the old man stayed and drank his hemlock, as recounted in the most moving of Plato’s dialogues, the Phaedo. The hemlock worked on the body of Socrates from the feet upwards, killing the brain last. The great ‘gadfly’, the irritant of Athens, had both shown his captors the value of truth, and showed them that their regime had a moral fault line running through its centre, as Plato echoes in the Republic:

“Don’t you think that cities that are badly governed behave exactly like this when they warn their citizens not to disturb the city’s political establishment on pain of death?”

Socrates’ trial was followed, some 430 years later, by another, in which the defendant was also being tried for his life. They are linked by more than merely the circumstances of their respective predicaments.

 

Does anything befall you? It is good. It is part of the great destiny of the universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web of the universe.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

For both Socrates and Jesus, there is no defence because there is no need to defend. Their fates are pre-ordained, part of their respective teachings and the bringing to fruition of a deeper magic than the shallow intricacies of men and their legal systems, Marcus’ “great web of the universe”. Jesus’ death was the fulfilment of a vital prophecy, the core of which is that he should suffer for all mankind, and thus his death is the completion of a cycle of virtuous behaviour guaranteed by his Father, an adherence to an unshakeable principle. This mirrors Socrates’ preparation for death as outlined in the death-cell scene of the Phaedo, divinely sanctioned not by virtue of Socrates being the son of God, but justified and instructed by him in the only way of life Socrates knows, a way of life he tells the senate they could not expect him to change even if they freed him because to live any other way is not virtuous and thus negates its purpose. It is not, ultimately, the Athenian dicasts or the Sanhedrin priests who desire the deaths of Socrates and Christ; it is the two men themselves.

These two world-historical figures share much, then, in the circumstances of their martyrdom. Why are they relevant to us, two and a half millennia after the death of the first and two after the second? The answer is simple; what they were saying was a danger to the state, and this is one of the greatest tales of the Western world. Without comparing Robert Redeker with Socrates or Christ, what he wrote in Le Figaro, the result of which forced him into hiding. was deemed dangerous to the state. It just happened to be the Islamic State.

And the only true substantiation of this willingness to speak the truth, this unwillingness not to speak the truth, is what finally unites Socrates and Christ. They will die first. Indeed, they must die to defeat the state. Their deaths prove them, and the truths they represent, to be greater than the state, and to escape the hemlock and the cross would be to betray truth. “What is truth?” Pilate famously asks. His answer he washes his hands of. Athens will rid itself of the Socratic “gadfly”, which spurs the beast of the state to action, and thus they too wash their hands of truth.

Christianity and Platonism have carried their kinship into the 21st century. Christianity is under attack from the Alt. Left in Europe and the USA, and from Islam elsewhere in the world, one attack ideological and cultural, the other literal, religious, and very, very bloody. Platonism – from which we still have much to learn, having exhausted Aristotle – is under siege in the guise of philosophy. The Alt. Left are again the aggressors as they seek to “decolonise” the curricula of universities.

Finally, the hemlock and the cross fail in their task to expunge truth, or the access to truth, which is the ultimate aim of the authoritarian state. Socrates and Christ have a more powerful force with which to defeat untruth; as well as devoting their lives to the truth, they also devoted their deaths.

For Plato himself and his hero Socrates, philosophy itself was always the sum of its etymology, whose provenance is sophōs, or wisdom, and the verb philēin, meaning to love. Philosophy; the love of wisdom. And wisdom must, perforce, seek the truth, seek to walk in the light.

And the search for the truth can never end for Socrates, and thus he is and will remain more than just the gadfly to Athens he describes himself as at his trial. His own caricature of the charges against him hint at the political risk involved to the state in letting him live.

In the end, it is never philosophy which disappoints but its practitioners. Plato would be as disgusted by the modern political warping and manipulation of the truth as he was by Athens’ treatment of his mentor and his own subsequent adventures in Syracuse, where he tried and failed to teach Dion, that country’s ruler, the finer points of political acumen.

It should be noted that the capillary point of Platonic philosophy, the synaptic transmission of Platonism is Socrates’ interaction with the male youth of Athens. The audience for Platonism was very small to begin with, as was that of Christ. Neither men had the chance to go viral.

And Socrates is once again compounding the case of his accusers. All the dicasts wanted was a humiliating climb-down, and the price you receive for that is your life. Recantation, that hideously powerful shadow cast over the great and morbid history of man which still incarnates via social media. But not Socrates. He is a recidivist preacher. Put him back on the street, he’ll be explaining justice or virtue or pain vs. pleasure or the greatest good in the market square and before his many admirers before you even have time to do the paperwork. He is fascinated by the total experience of intellectual social interaction plus the pure practice of philosophy. Meeting a stranger far from Athens in the Charmides, Socrates prioritises his questions about his literal and spiritual home:

“Then, when there had been enough of this, I, in my turn, began to make enquiries about matters at home – about the present state of philosophy. And about the youth.”

However, in the Theaetetus, the extent of the philosopher’s interest in his home town is made clear:

“Whether any event has turned out well or ill in the city, what disgrace may have descended to anyone from his ancestors, male or female, are matters of which the philosopher no more knows than he can tell, as they say, how many pints are contained in the ocean.”

 

And I was forced to say, when praising true philosophy that, it is by this that men are enabled to see what justice in public and private life really is.
Plato, Seventh Letter

So, long before the death of philosophy we have considered, we have seen another death, that of Socrates, and a new life, that of philosophy. Death is the end of temporal life but associated with new beginnings, the negation of winter by spring, death bringing new life. The traditional Tarot deck shows the 13th card, Death, as a reaper, using his scythe to lop at the heads and limbs of frail, born-to-die mortals as well as the corn.

For Allan Bloom, also, the life of philosophy begins with death, with a death. Plato’s Apology is, as noted, the court report on the trial of Socrates. For Bloom it is also:

“[T]he first appearance of philosophy, [whereby] we can apprehend the natural, or at least primitive, responses to it, prior to philosophy’s effect on the world. This provides a view of the beginning at a time when we may be witnessing the end, partly because we no longer know that beginning.”

And we fail in this quest because, as Bloom directly states, we fail to give our lives up for and to philosophy, as Socrates did. For we philosophers, Socrates is our Christ. “Philosophy is not a doctrine”, writes Bloom, “it is a way of life.”

 

We say that the one and many become identified by thought, and that now, as in time past, they run about together, in and out of every word which is uttered, and that this union of them will never cease, and is not now beginning, but is, as I believe, an everlasting quality of thought itself.
Plato, Philebus

The Platonic Dialogues represent an original style of philosophizing. The pre-Socratics had asked ti esti; What is this thing? Plato asks, who are we that are asking? We are, to begin with, social animals, political animals in the sense of being animals who belong collectively to the polis, the res publica.

Plato’s legacy is philosophy itself, philosophy in its purest form as wonder and the need for rational enquiry that accompanies that wonder. Plato’s philosophy recognizes not just a universal harmony, but the false notes and decadence in that same harmony.

Gentle, Platonic debate should be hard-wired into philosophers with a reverence earned and given precisely because the Dialogues are human and social. Plato portrayed not a Socrates who sat alone in some hermitage writing essays, but went out on to the streets of Athens to discover what of wisdom lurked in the hearts of his fellow men just as the principles of mathematics lay unsuspected in Meno’s slave boy. Plato, as Emerson wrote, is Western philosophy.

But that was then and this is now. Well over two millennia later, Plato would make a philosophical enemy in 19th century Germany who defined the philosophy that would come after him just as much as had the Athenian. Despite the lifelong reverence of a Lutheran pastor’s son for the Hellenic Greeks, Plato would find an opponent in Friedrich Nietzsche.