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The Suicide of Socrates, 399 BC

On a day in 399 BC the philosopher Socrates stood before a jury of 500 of his fellow Athenians accused of "refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state" and of "corrupting the youth." If found guilty; his penalty could be death. The trial took place in the heart of the city, the jurors seated on wooden benches surrounded by a crowd of spectators. Socrates' accusers (three Athenian citizens) were allotted three hours to present their case, after which, the philosopher would have three hours to defend himself.

Socrates

Socrates was 70 years old and familiar to most Athenians. His anti-democratic views had turned many in the city against him. Two of his students, Alcibiades and Critias, had twice briefly overthrown the democratic government of the city, instituting a reign of terror in which thousands of citizens were deprived of their property and either banished from the city or executed.

After hearing the arguments of both Socrates and his accusers, the jury was asked to vote on his guilt. Under Athenian law the jurors did not deliberate the point. Instead, each juror registered his judgment by placing a small disk into an urn marked either "guilty" or "not guilty." Socrates was found guilty by a vote of 280 to 220.

The jurors were next asked to determine Socrates' penalty. His accusers argued for the death penalty. Socrates was given the opportunity to suggest his own punishment and could probably have avoided death by recommending exile. Instead, the philosopher initially offered the sarcastic recommendation that he be rewarded for his actions. When pressed for a realistic punishment, he proposed that he be fined a modest sum of money. Faced with the two choices, the jury selected death for Socrates.

The philosopher was taken to the near-by jail where his sentence would be carried out. Athenian law prescribed death by drinking a cup of poison hemlock. Socrates would be his own executioner.

"What must I do?"

Plato was Socrates' most famous student. Although he was not present at his mentor's death, he did know those who were there. Plato describes the scene through the narrative voice of the fictional character Phaedo.

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"When Crito heard, he signaled to the slave who was standing by. The boy went out, and returned after a few moments with the man who was to administer the poison which he brought ready mixed in a cup. When Socrates saw him, he said, 'Now, good sir, you understand these things. What must I do?'

'Just drink it and walk around until your legs begin to feel heavy, then lie down. It will soon act.' With that he offered Socrates the cup.

The latter took it quite cheerfully without a tremor, with no change of color or expression. He just gave the man his stolid look, and asked, 'How say you, is it permissible to pledge this drink to anyone? May I?'

The answer came, 'We allow reasonable time in which to drink it.'

'I understand', he said, 'we can and must pray to the gods that our sojourn on earth will continue happy beyond the grave. This is my prayer, and may it come to pass.' With these words, he stoically drank the potion, quite readily and cheerfully. Up till this moment most of us were able with some decency to hold back our tears, but when we saw him drinking the poison to the last drop, we could restrain ourselves no longer. In spite of myself, the tears came in floods, so that I covered my face and wept - not for him, but at my own misfortune at losing such a man as my friend. Crito, even before me, rose and went out when he could check his tears no longer.

Apollodorus was already steadily weeping, and by drying his eyes, crying again and sobbing, he affected everyone present except for Socrates himself.

He said, 'You are strange fellows; what is wrong with you? I sent the women away for this very purpose, to stop their creating such a scene. I have heard that one should die in silence. So please be quiet and keep control of yourselves.' These words made us ashamed, and we stopped crying.

Jacques-Louis David, 1787

The Death of Socrates

Socrates walked around until he said that his legs were becoming heavy, when he lay on his back, as the attendant instructed. This fellow felt him, and then a moment later examined his feet and legs again. Squeezing a foot hard, he asked him if he felt anything. Socrates said that he did not. He did the same to his calves and, going higher, showed us that he was becoming cold and stiff. Then he felt him a last time and said that when the poison reached the heart he would be gone.

As the chill sensation got to his waist, Socrates uncovered his head (he had put something over it) and said his last words: 'Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Do pay it. Don't forget.'

'Of course', said Crito. 'Do you want to say anything else?'

'There was no reply to this question, but after a while he gave a slight stir, and the attendant uncovered him and examined his eyes. Then Crito saw that he was dead, he closed his mouth and eyelids.

This was the end of our friend, the best, wisest and most upright man of any that I have ever known"

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“To know yourself, think for yourself” ~ Socrates

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Friedrich Nietzsche: The truth is terrible

Brian Leiter examines Nietzsche's conception of what makes life worth livingBRIAN LEITER

Footnotes to Plato is a TLS Online series appraising the works and legacies of the great thinkers and philosophers

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) pursued two main themes in his work, one now familiar, even commonplace in modernity, the other still under-appreciated, often ignored.  The familiar Nietzsche is the “existentialist”, who diagnoses the most profound cultural fact about modernity: “the death of God”, or more exactly, the collapse of the possibility of reasonable belief in God. Belief in God – in transcendent meaning or purpose, dictated by a supernatural being – is now incredible, usurped by naturalistic explanations of the evolution of species, the behaviour of matter in motion, the unconscious causes of human behaviours and attitudes, indeed, by explanations of how such a bizarre belief arose in the first place. But without God or transcendent purpose, how can we withstand the terrible truths about our existence, namely, its inevitable suffering and disappointment, followed by death and the abyss of nothingness?

Nietzsche the “existentialist” exists in tandem with an “illiberal” Nietzsche, one who sees the collapse of theism and divine teleology as tied fundamentally to the untenability of the entire moral world view of post-Christian modernity. If there is no God who deems each human to be of equal worth or possessed with an immortal soul beloved by God, then why think we all deserve equal moral consideration?  And what if, as Nietzsche argues, a morality of equality – and altruism and pity for suffering – were, in fact, an obstacle to human excellence? What if being a “moral” person makes it impossible to be Beethoven? Nietzsche’s conclusion is clear: if moral equality is an obstacle to human excellence, then so much the worse for moral equality. This is the less familiar and often shockingly anti-egalitarian Nietzsche.

Nietzsche grew up in the belly of God and Christian morality. His father, and his grandfathers on both sides of his family, were Lutheran pastors, and Nietzsche himself went to university planning to study Theology. Theological studies has perhaps never had such a spectacular dropout – one who later ridiculed Luther as a “boor” and declared himself to be the “anti-Christian” par excellence. The young Nietzsche switched after one year at university to Classical Philology – the study of the texts and culture of the ancient Greek and Roman world – where he excelled, earning appointment to the University of Basel in 1869, even before completing his doctoral thesis. He soon met the composer Richard Wagner, and was briefly a disciple, imagining that Wagner’s music would redeem European culture from the ill effects of Christian morality. His enthusiasm for Wagner subsided after a few years, as Nietzsche’s mature philosophical views coalesced, and he grew disillusioned with Wagner’s rabid anti-Semitism.

Nietzsche’s classical training had educated him about ancient philosophy; the Presocratic philosophers (with their simple naturalistic world view) were his favourites, while his disagreements with Socrates and Plato persisted throughout his corpus. But it was only by accident that he discovered contemporary German philosophy in 1865 and 1866 through Arthur Schopenhauer and, a year later, the neo-Kantian Friedrich Lange. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (which was first published in 1818, but only came to prominence decades later, contributing to the eclipse of G. W. F. Hegel in German philosophy) set Nietzsche’s central existentialist issue: how can life, given that it involves continual, senseless suffering, possibly be justified? Schopenhauer offered a “nihilistic” verdict:  we would be better off dead. Nietzsche wanted to resist that conclusion, to “affirm” life, as he would often put it, to the point that we would happily will its “eternal recurrence” (in one of his famous formulations) including all its suffering.

Lange, by contrast, was both a neo-Kantian – part of the “back to Kant” revival in German philosophy after Hegel’s eclipse – and a friend of the “materialist” turn in German intellectual life, the other major reaction against Hegelian idealism after 1831. The latter, though familiar to philosophers today primarily by way of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, actually received its major impetus from the dramatic developments in physiology that began in Germany in the 1830s.  Materialism exploded on the German intellectual scene of the 1850s in such volumes as Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter, a publishing sensation which went through multiple editions and became a bestseller with its message that “the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings”. (Think of Büchner as the Richard Dawkins of the nineteenth century: a popularizer of some genuine discoveries, while also an unnuanced ideologue.)  Nietzsche, who first learned of these “German Materialists” from Lange, wrote in a letter of 1866, “Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange – I don’t need anything else”.

Nietzsche soon soured on Kant, though Kant and Plato remain his most frequent “philosophical” opponents in his writings, even if “philosophical” may mislead as to Nietzsche’s critical method. For Nietzsche’s distinctive writing style is notably anomalous in the canon of great philosophers: he writes aphoristically, polemically, lyrically and always very personally; he can be funny, sarcastic, rude, scholarly, scathing, often in the same passage. He eschews almost entirely the rationally discursive form of philosophical argumentation. In the course of examining philosophical subjects (morality, free will, knowledge), Nietzsche will invoke historical, psychological, philological and anthropological claims, and never appeal to an intuition or an a priori bit of knowledge, let alone set out a syllogism (“Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect”, he quips in Twilight of the Idols).

Nietzsche, under the influence of the Materialists and also Schopenhauer, took consciousness and reason to play a rather minor role in what humans do, believe and value; far more important are our unconscious and subconscious instinctive and affective lives. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that what inspires “mistrust and mockery” of the great philosophers is that,

They all pose as if they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic . . . while what really happens is that they take a conjecture, a whim, an “inspiration” or, more typically, they take some fervent wish that they have sifted through and made properly abstract – and they defend it with rationalizations after the fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such . . . .

Even Kant, recall, finally admitted that his goal was to put limits on reason to “make room for faith” – in God and in morality. But Nietzsche will not partake in this charade of offering post hoc rationalizations for metaphysical theses that are really motivated by “the moral (or immoral) intentions” of the philosopher which “constitute the real germ from which the whole plant [i.e., the philosophical system] has always grown”. Nietzsche’s motivations are, by his own admission, “immoral” ones.

Superficial readers who think Nietzsche defends a “metaphysics of will to power” must ignore his own “mistrust and mockery” of such philosophical extravagance: achieving a “feeling of power” is an important human motivation, as he argues in On the Genealogy of Morality, but that is a psychological, not metaphysical, claim. For Nietzsche the psychologist, the moral views of a philosopher also “bear decided and decisive witness to who he is – which means, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other”. But non-rational drives can be influenced and redirected primarily by non-rational means: if you provoke, amuse and annoy the reader, you thereby arouse his affects (drives are, on Nietzsche’s view, dispositions to have certain kinds of affective responses). Thus, Nietzsche’s mode of writing grows out of his view of what humans, including philosophers, are really like.

On this view, our conscious selves are largely illusory – “consciousness is a surface” Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo, one that conceals the causally efficacious, but unconscious, drives. “The greatest part of our spirit’s activity . . . remains unconscious and unfelt” (The Gay Science), while “everything of which we become conscious . . . causes nothing” (The Will to Power).  When we speak of the “will” or of the “motive” that precedes an action, we are speaking merely of “error[s]” and “phantoms”, “merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness – something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deed than to represent them” (Twilight of the Idols).  Humans are, on Nietzsche’s view, neither free nor morally responsible for their actions.

But the illusion of free will is not the main reason he rejects Judeo-Christian morality. “It is not error as error” as he says in his stylized autobiography Ecce Homo that he objects to in such morality.   Nietzsche’s central objection to morality is more radical and illiberal: any culture dominated by Judeo-Christian morality, or other ascetic or life-denying moralities, will be one inhospitable to the realization of human excellence. What if, as he says in On the Genealogy of Morality, “morality itself were to blame if the highest power and splendor possible to the type man was never in fact attained? So that morality itself was the danger of dangers?”

Consider his objection to moral views that demand that we eliminate suffering and promote happiness.  In Dawn, he writes, “Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your ideal, you heralds of the sympathetic affections?” In Beyond Good and Evil a few years later, he objects to utilitarians that, “Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible . . . . ”

Continue reading: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/friedrich-nietzsche-truth-terrible/