Talk, Tragedy, Totalitarianism: The Problem of Socrates in Modern Times

by Emily Wilson

There were heroic lives and deaths before and after, but none quite like Socrates’. He did not die by sword or spear, braving all to defend home and country, but as a condemned criminal, swallowing a painless dose of poison. And yet Socrates’ death in 399 BCE has figured large in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity — many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In The Death of Socrates, Emily Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination. Here is a brief excerpt.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) — the great historian of the French Revolution and one of the most influential writers of the Victorian age — was unimpressed by the death of Socrates. When asked whether he admired the conversation of his last hours, he commented damningly, ‘Well, in such a case, I should have made no discourse; should have wished to be left alone, to profound reflections.’ Carlyle, who recommended the ‘worship of silence’, condemned Socrates for talking too much — a complaint that would recur throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In modern times, Socrates’ death has generally been seen in two main ways: as the conflict of the individual with the state and as the downfall of rational, talkative man. Through meditating on the death of Socrates, modern writers and thinkers wrestled with their own doubts about civic disobedience, the power or limits of human reason and modernity itself. Socrates’ death was seen as an iconic moment in the formation of modernity. Many of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth century — including Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche — looked back to this moment as the beginning of modern ethical and political thought, and sometimes as the beginning of modernity itself.

Socrates’ talkativeness identified him as a modern person: like us, he talked too much. Because his main expertise lay not with the sword, but with the tongue, he was a hero for our times.

But Socrates’ chatter came under new suspicion in the nineteenth century, because he was no longer valued as a representative of intellectual friendship. Socrates now seemed to be talking, ineffectually, to himself. The Enlightenment emphasis on Socrates’ death as an image of shared mental life disappeared at the time of the French Revolution. Thereafter, Socrates was presented not in dialogue with his friends, but in conflict — set against his judges or his city, or struggling (and failing) to control his most unruly students.

The calm, philosophical death of an old man, surrounded by his devoted followers, was out of keeping with Romantic cultural ideals. Félix Auvray’s version of the theme, probably painted around 1800, shows the dying Socrates as a clean-shaven young man, expiring in a lonely garret, in the manner of Chatterton or Keats.

When Socrates is shown with his pupils, he is no longer the successful patriarch. J. B. Regnault’s painting Socrates Tears Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure (exhibited 1791) shows Alcibiades lurching drunkenly in the arms of Pleasure, while Socrates grabs his other arm. The topic was a popular one in nineteenth-century art, while Socrates’ sociable, sublime death fell from favour among visual artists. In Regnault’s painting the scowling philosopher holds up his left arm to heaven, in a mirror image of the pose of David’s dying Socrates, while with his right, he grabs at Alcibiades, trying to lead the sybarite away from the brothel to higher things.

The image is a meditation on the French Revolution: the hedonistic aristocrat is dragged from his palace by a rough, poorly dressed revolutionary. But it seems likely that the mission of this old red cap will fail. Socrates cannot teach Alcibiades self-control unless he wants to learn. The conflict can be resolved only by violence and death.

Antonio Canova’s relief of Socrates facing his judges (1794) is ostensibly very different: the figures are relatively static, and the white marble contrasts with Regnault’s colourful canvas. But in both these images from the 1790s Socrates is shown not with his friends and followers, but with his opponents. He faces the hostile jury alone. Moreover, Canova’s relief does not suggest any kind of connection or conversation. Socrates does not meet the eyes of either jury or viewer; instead, he looks upwards, perhaps seeking his own divine guidance.

Despite the vast number of images of the dying Socrates in the eighteenth century, there had been (to my knowledge) no earlier depiction of Socrates on trial. Canova’s focus of the solitary Socrates, facing the judgment of his fellow- Athenians, foreshadows the major concerns of modern readings. From this moment onwards, Socrates was always on trial. The Socratic point of view — reason, science, irony or ‘subjective’ morality — always opposes some other value (such as pleasure or traditional morality). His death was tragic not because it was unjust, but because two different and equally valid models of justice came into conflict.

Modern philosophical accounts of the death of Socrates begin with G. W. F. Hegel’s series of Lectures on the History of Philosophy, given during the years 1805 to 1830. Hegel argues that Athens was right to condemn Socrates and Socrates was also right to resist Athens: these two sides inevitably, and tragically, clashed. For Hegel, Socrates represents the beginning of modern ethical philosophy and modern theories of the self, in that he introduced a new style of ethics (Moralität) that depends on an individual’s subjective judgement. This new style necessarily conflicted with traditional morality based on social conventions (Sittlichkeit).

Hegel presents the death of Socrates as a turning point in world history, because it marks a significant shift in human attitudes towards ethics. After Socrates, it was no longer possible simply to act by the wisdom handed down from one generation to another, such as the idea that sons should honour their fathers. The Athenian jury destroyed Socrates; but Socrates even more thoroughly destroyed the Athenian culture in which he had been born, because he introduced the notion that everyone must decide what to do for themselves.

Hegel saw Socratic individualism as neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but as an inevitable development in the process of history. His treatment of Socrates is bound up both with his theory of history and his theory of tragedy. Socrates is, like Antigone, a paradigmatic tragic figure. Hegel challenges the conventional view that this death is tragic because Socrates died unjustly. Rather, he says, ‘Innocent suffering would only be sad and not tragic.’ The death of Socrates is genuinely tragic because the Athenian decision to kill him was as valid, in moral terms, as his own resistance to Athenian conventions: ‘Two opposed rights come into collision, and one destroys the other.’ This is, for Hegel, the essence of tragedy.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) was always haunted by the figure of the dying Socrates. His first book was a dissertation on Socrates that took him over ten years to complete: The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates (1841). This work partly echoed Hegel’s ideas, but Kierkegaard resisted his claim that Athens was justified in killing Socrates. Kierkegaard’s meditation on the trial and death of Socrates allowed him to come up with a new account of ethics. He argued that Hegel was wrong to invoke collective morality. For Kierkegaard, all morality was subjective. He also condemned Hegel for neglecting Socrates’ divine mission. Inspired by Socrates’ daimonion, Kierkegaard argued that morality is inseparable from spirituality.

Kierkegaard remained heavily influenced by Hegel’s vision of the death of Socrates as a tragedy. But he wanted to concentrate on the dying Socrates as tragic hero, not on the Athenian jury. He noted in Fear and Trembling that Socrates was ‘an intellectual tragic hero’: such a hero ‘always dies before he dies’. Socrates is an emblem of conscious death, a hero who is fully, albeit paradoxically, aware of his own encounter with the unknown.

The German classicist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was also obsessed with the idea that Socrates’ death was fully conscious and fully rational: an intellectual encounter with an irrational force. Nietzsche had a love-hate relationship with Socrates, whom he sometimes idolised, sometimes villainised. His changing attitudes towards Socrates were prompted by his mixed feelings about the value of reason itself.

Whereas Hegel saw the death of Socrates as a tragic event, for Nietzsche Socratic philosophy was the death knell for tragedy and the beginning of cultural decadence. He declared in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) that the philosophy of Socrates signalled ‘the death of tragedy’: ‘Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims “Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy.” In these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy.’ Socrates was too much of a rationalist to allow for tragedy. His death, in particular, suggested that reason could conquer all the dark side of life: ‘The dying Socrates as man raised above the fear of death by reason is the escutcheon which above the entrance gate of science reminds everyone of its mission: to make existence appear as intelligible and hence as justified.’ This was, for Nietzsche, the great lie.

Nietzsche’s essential philosophical disagreement with Socrates centred on the ideas that reason is the strongest motivation in human life, and that life is ultimately comprehensible. Nietzsche insists that people are not purely, or even primarily, rational: even Socrates was much less rational than he and his followers would have liked to think. Nietzsche mocks the last words as absurd: what kind of philosopher dies babbling about a rooster? The famous daimonion of Socrates was, according to Nietzsche, probably just an ear infection.

But Nietzsche’s views of Socrates were constantly changing. He acknowledges that ‘Socrates, to confess it frankly, is so close to me that I almost always fight against him’. He admired and wanted to emulate the Socrates who was ironic, funny and unpredictable. If it came to a contest between Jesus and Socrates, Nietzsche thinks Socrates would win hands down. He remarks in Human, All Too Human (1878), ‘Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in his cheery earnestness and prankish wisdom. Besides, he was smarter.’

By the time he was writing The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche again turned savagely against Socrates, treating him as the precursor to a decadent and corrupt civilisation. Nietzsche even suggests that Socrates was perhaps not really Greek at all; his famous snub nose sounds suspicious from the point of view of genetic purity. In Twilight of the Idols (1888) he tells us, ‘Socrates belonged by extraction to the lowest of the people: Socrates was rabble. We know, we can even still see, how ugly he was … Was Socrates actually really a Greek?’ The ancient problem of Socrates’ physiognomy becomes more hazardous and sinister in a period of eugenic experimentation and racial segregation. If not Greek, what was Socrates? African? Semitic? Nietzsche does not say, but his hints are dark.

Perhaps, Nietzsche seems to imply, the Athenians should not have limited themselves to exterminating just one Socrates. Nietzsche suggests not only that clever-clever non-Aryan intellectuals ought to be killed, but also that their own ultimate desire is for death: ‘Socrates wanted to die — it was not Athens but he himself who administered the cup of poison; he forced Athens into it.’ He tricked the Athenians into bringing shame on themselves by awarding him as a punishment the death that he had wanted all along.

The German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940) is a good candidate for the role of twentieth-century Socrates. A serious moral thinker whose written work is fragmentary, he killed himself while trying to escape from Occupied France. In his doctoral thesis and only finished work, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin revisits and revises Nietzsche’s distinction between the tragic hero and the dying Socrates.

Benjamin argues that the most important characteristic of the tragic hero is his silence. However much he may speak on stage, ‘tragic man’ is essentially silent and inarticulate about his relationship to the gods and his own death. Tragedy is viewed as a struggle or agon between a single, isolated figure and the ancient gods. It is a struggle that the hero is bound to lose, dying as a sacrificial victim for the onward progress of his community: tragic death is a form of atonement. The hero has to die. He shrinks before death ‘as a power familiar, personal and inherent in him’. The hero’s sublime silence marks both his limited awareness of his own situation and his defiance. There is a vast gulf between the ideals of the hero and those that hold sway in his society and his world. The tragic hero’s thoughts are, necessarily, unspeakable in his language. Benjamin observes, echoing an earlier German critic, that ‘in tragedy pagan man realizes that he is better than his gods, but this realization strikes him dumb’.

Socrates, by contrast, dies talking. For this reason, the death of Socrates is not tragic; it is ‘a parody of tragedy’. Socrates, unlike the tragic hero, understands his situation perfectly. He is fully conscious of his relationship towards death, and the gods, and his own society: ‘In one stroke, the death of the hero has been transformed into that of a martyr.’ The Phaedo reveals how far Socrates stands from the tragic hero. Socrates dies talking about immortality. Death itself is for him entirely alien, or unreal: beyond it, ‘he expects to return to himself’. The possibility of total annihilation and loss of consciousness, which is always present for the tragic hero, is impossible for the Phaedo Socrates. Instead of sacrificial death, Socrates dies to set ‘the example of the pedagogue’. The moral of his death is all on the surface, articulated by the dying man himself. It seems, in Benjamin’s account, as if Plato’s dialogues are bad art compared to Greek tragedy. Plato’s Socrates seems to make the fatal, philistine moral error of telling us what to think.