Innocent or Guilty: Apology 17a-35d

Athens’s democracy did not distinguish between civil and criminal courts. When someone committed a crime, it fell to individual citizens, not the state, to pursue punishment. When Socrates was finally brought to court, it was by two individuals, Anytus and Meletus, who likely had powerful allies behind them. This system also lacked a set code for what punishment fit what crime. Instead, trials went in two rounds. In the first, a jury of 501 citizens voted on the defendant’s innocence or guilt. If he was found guilty, a second round would ensue as the defense and prosecution suggested alternative penalties for the jury to decide between.

In this system, each side went after what they could reasonably get away with. Typically, this would encourage moderation on both sides, since juries typically shied away from radical proposals. But little about Socrates’s trial was typical. We do not have verbatim transcripts from the trial, but Plato’s Apology gives a literary version of Socrates’s self-defense.¹ Given how fond Athenians were of taking each other to court, sophists and other authors produced a large number of speeches and theoretical works on rhetoric. To judge by these, any normal person would begin a defense speech by trying to capture the goodwill of the jury. Socrates begins by refusing to submit to the conventions of the court (17a-d) and proceeds to lecture jurors on how they should do their job: listening for truth, not how it is expressed (17d-18a). With this, we are off!

Socrates is also atypical in that he breaks the case against himself into old and new charges. The so-called old charges are not part of the formal case at all. Rather, they are rumors that people have been repeating for years that Socrates “studies all things in the sky and beneath the earth, and makes the weaker argument the stronger” (18b). This alludes to Aristophanes’s comedy Clouds, which depicts Socrates as a sophistic quack who trades in mad-scientist theories and will teach how to win any argument to anyone willing to pay. In articulating and then denying these rumors, Socrates is attempting to uproot bias among the jurors. Apart from pointing out that no one present has actually heard him talk about such things, the best evidence he brings in his defense is his poverty (31c). Still, one wonders where such rumors started. This is where things get really unusual.

Socrates recounts a time his friend Chaerephon—the one who was excited to see Charmides naked—visited the oracle at Delphi (20e-21a). This religious center, sacred to Apollo, had an extensive palaistra-gymnasion and hosted the Pythian Games, named for the mythological Python slain by Apollo. Like the Olympic Games, this was a crown competition in which victors would be awarded a crown woven from a simple branch. This was such a coveted honor that cities such as Athens would pay their victors by giving them free meals for life. Unlike the Olympics, the Pythian Games included a musikos agōn in which musicians would compete alongside other athletes in a massive amphitheater next to the racetrack.² Visits to the oracle happened in a nearby temple. When people came seeking Apollo’s advice, a priestess breathed fumes from a thermal vent believed to house the Python’s rotting corpse. This would put her into an altered state of consciousness, and she would proceed to ramble incoherently. Priests standing by translated these ramblings into short poems for those who came seeking advice. While the oracle was well respected, it was also notoriously ambiguous. In Socrates’s case, Chaerephon asked who was wiser than Socrates. The oracle responded, “No one.” Having been handed down this message from a god, Socrates set out to refute (elenchō) it.

To this end, Socrates started questioning politicians who were famous for their wisdom. What he found was that neither he nor they knew anything worthwhile. Still, he concludes, “I am likely to be wiser than they to this small extent: I do not think I know those things that I do not know” (21e). After the politicians, he turned to poets and playwrights, only to discover that they were terrible at interpreting their own works (22b). The one place he found a bit of wisdom was in lower-class craftsmen who actually did know something about their respective crafts. Even here, though, he found that the limited knowledge they had made them overestimate their knowledge of things they did not in fact know about (22c-e).

Socrates concludes that the god meant that human wisdom is pretty worthless, and the best a mortal can do is to be like Socrates and acknowledge this fact (23a-b). “Human wisdom,” therefore, consists in not thinking you know what you do not. This is contrasted with “divine wisdom” which is actually worth something and would, presumably, provide actual answers to Socrates’s questions about virtue and the good life (20d-21d, 23a-b, 29b).

Socrates’s project of refuting his fellow citizens in an attempt to refute an oracle might seem like a quirky activity born of Socrates’s overfondness for questioning. Socrates presents it as a “service to the god” (23b, 28e) and himself as “god’s gift to the city” (30a, 30e, 31b). Running with this idea, Socrates suggests that the city should worry about its own welfare: given its size, it is like a “sluggish horse” that needs to stirred up by a heaven-sent “gadfly” (30e). While Socrates may appear to be merely annoying, he is in fact serving god and country, and his incessant questioning is meant to get his fellow citizens to “care for virtue” (31b). In sum, Socrates is god’s gift to the city, and the city would shoot itself in the foot by killing him. There is a lot going on here. But let us focus on one particular oddity: How did Socrates get from the oracle’s simple message, “No one is wiser than Socrates,” to a divine mission of rousing his fellow citizens to care for virtues by questioning them about moral terms? The two things seem simply unrelated. Modern psychology, I suggest, can help us connect the dots.

Psychologists distinguish between interest (things we like doing) and purpose (the needs of the world that individuals can meaningfully attend to).³ One way of making sense of Socrates’s story is to see him as having a deep-seated interest in asking questions and examining people. This seems to have arisen before the oracle’s message to him. Yet that message, if we take his account at face value, set him off on a project that he found engrossing. Over time he discovered that what he was doing was actually useful for others. While individuals might not enjoy having their flaws pointed out, such confrontations can serve as a reality check. For the powerful and famous who believed their own press, encounters with Socrates provided opportunities to reflect on what actually matters in life. As we have seen time and again, Socratic examination gets his companions, or at least most of them, to “care for virtue.” With this, Socrates’s interests found a purpose. Since the oracle, which was famous for being cryptic, sent him down this path, why not see the whole thing as a divinely appointed mission?⁴

The other upshot of Socrates’s mission is that it won him fans. If there is anything that today’s politics shows us, it is that seeing politicians humiliated is really entertaining. As we have seen in Lysis and Charmides, the young men of Athens’s gyms all know who Socrates is. Some of them even started imitating his methods for questioning others (Apology 23c). It is for this reason, Socrates argues, that the city’s leading figures cooked up the prosecution’s “new charges”—namely, “Socrates is guilty of corrupting the youth and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things” (24b). Socrates’s response to the charge of impiety is a bit limp (26b-28a). As one scholar argues, Socrates’s ideas about the gods as perfectly moral beings is more in line with Judeo-Christian monotheism than Greek polytheism: his fellow citizens were right to feel threatened!⁵ That said, Socrates’s aligning himself with the god Apollo in particular might be significant. Rather than quote Homer about the gods or claim direct inspiration, as he does elsewhere, Socrates presents a message handed down from a religious site famous for hosting one of Greece’s most important games. As a patron deity of athletics, music, and medicine, Apollo represents ideals pursued throughout the gyms of Greece. In turn, Socrates presents himself as a doctor for the soul (Charmides) with a concern for bringing harmony to one’s character (Laches) through a spirit of collaborative competition spread throughout the dialogues. Read against these works, Apology’s invocation of Delphi may make a better case for Socrates’s traditional, Greek piety than Socrates’s direct response to the impiety charge does.

What of Socrates’s corruption of the youth? If he has done so unintentionally, Socrates argues, then he should be corrected not punished (26a). But if he has done so intentionally, then he has made them wicked, and given that wicked people harm the people around them, it would make no sense for Socrates to have put himself in harm’s way intentionally (25c-e). As he did in Lysis, Socrates invites us to think about toxic friends. Would anyone willingly create toxic relationships? We might talk playfully about corrupting people. Still, typical antics at the club will not turn people toxic. If anything, they can give rise to war stories that help build bonds of friendship. For corruption, we might think of convincing friends to try steroids or heroin. Which of these is closer to the fate of Socrates’s companions: harmless antics that might be beneficial in the long run or toxicity that destroys individuals and those around them?

Judging by Plato’s account in Apology, Socrates was a mischievous but positive influence. None of his younger friends spoke out against him. More importantly, none of their fathers or older brothers did either (33d-34b). On the contrary, Socrates’s younger friends as well as their fathers are grateful for how he helped shape these young men’s lives. This fits again with modern psychology, which has shown that one of the keys to developing a sense of purpose in one’s own life is to have purposeful role models.⁶ It does not even matter whether the particular purpose of one’s models lines up with one’s own. What young people need is to see what it looks like to structure a life around meaningful service to the wider world. In this respect, Socrates was a rock star. He ends the first round of his defense by showing how his eccentric behavior stems from his commitment to his divine mission (31c-35d), and he insults the conventions of the courtroom by telling the jury that they would harm themselves if they got rid of him.

Setting a Penalty: Apology 35e-42a

Given Socrates’s efforts to insult his jury, it is perhaps surprising that they voted him guilty by a margin of only thirty votes (36a-b). It is now time to decide the penalty, and Meletus suggests death (36b). Any normal defendant would suggest exile or a hefty fine. The system is set up for moderation, after all, and such fines provide the jury a way to retain a clean conscience. But this is not a normal trial. True to form, Socrates suggests that what he really deserves for his service to the state is to be fed for life at state expense as the winner of an Olympic chariot race would be. After all, “the Olympic victor makes you think you are happy. I make you be happy” (36d-e). Socrates’s singling out chariot races may be significant. Winning an event at Olympia or Delphi was seen as an outward manifestation of one’s inner excellence (aretē). Chariot races were a possible exception insofar as it was the owner of the team, not the driver or horses, who was crowned victor. This opened up the possibility for someone with enough money to buy his way to an Olympic victory. Socrates seems to have this in mind, as he immediately goes on to say, “Besides, he does not need food but I do.”⁷ After insulting the jury a bit more, he suggests a fine that is so low that his friends rally and increase it thirtyfold (38b). The jury is not amused and votes for his death.

With this, the world’s first democracy sentenced the father of Western moral philosophy to death by poison. Before we are too quick to condemn them, note that it was standard practice in Athens for people on death row to bribe their way out of jail and flee to a neighboring city. The jury likely had this in mind. Plato’s dialogue Crito even shows Socrates’s friends showing up at his jail cell, bribe in hand. Socrates responds with a philosophical reflection on whether it would be right to break the laws he has lived his life by. In the end, he decides to go through with the death sentence that his jurors likely thought would never actually happen.

It seems safe to say that Socrates went out of his way to annoy the jury. But to what end? Is he merely spiting them? Has his pride gotten the better of him? Or is he teaching Athens and posterity a lesson? How individual readers answer this question will likely line up with how they respond to dialogues that end in perplexity. After three or more failed attempts at defining a term, do you conclude that there is no answer? Do you throw up your hands and say that bravery and the rest are whatever you want them to be? Or do you buckle down and decide that we need to put serious work into figuring out what we are actually doing with our lives?

The end of Apology gives some of the most direct advice we find in Plato’s Socratic works: “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (38a). “It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen. It is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for wickedness runs faster than death” (39b). “A good person cannot be harmed in either life or death” (41d). It is not clear that any of this amounts to divine wisdom. None of these quotes answers Socrates’s questions about defining virtues. If anything, he is using terms like “good” and “wicked” without defining them! Is this part of human wisdom, then? As with “If I do not know something, I do not think that I know something,” Socrates’s final words of wisdom are heavier on process than on content. In the end, Socrates’s human wisdom amounts to a provisional way of getting through life when divine wisdom still escapes us.⁸

The Life of Inquiry

It is not such a stretch to see the United States as a big sluggish horse in need of the occasional gadfly. But who in our culture performs this service? As people isolate themselves in echo chambers and tune out ideas they disagree with, who is providing reality checks and making people care about virtue? Furthermore, we live in a time of cultural pluralism the likes of which Socrates and his neighbors never imagined. While the examined life might make a nice motto for an inspirational bracelet or a T-shirt, can we really proceed by way of provisional, processed-based values when we find ourselves seriously in doubt about which moral standard to follow?

Our survey of Socratic philosophy drove home the importance of the virtues, particularly for guiding education, as well as the difficulty in actually defining them: bravery (Laches), temperance (Charmides), friendship (Lysis), justice (Republic 1), and wisdom (Apology). While Socrates set out this philosophical agenda, he never provided answers to his own questions. Nevertheless, Socrates models a certain way of life. In tracing how he goes about his divine mission, we looked at these Socratic dialogues through the lens of current psychology. Given the requirements of modern empirical science, positive psychology tends to study a set of big ideas in isolation from each other: flourishing, friendship, mindset, interest, purpose, and so on. Our survey of Socratic dialogues provides a framework for connecting the dots and seeing these big ideas as part of an organic whole. Socrates thus provides us with a model for a way of life that integrates insights of current science into a coherent whole.

Socrates’s life of inquiry, as we may call it, starts with personal interest in pursuing the truth through rigorous questioning. In today’s age of standardized testing, this is highly countercultural. As we have seen, though, Socrates seems to be having a good time: he surrounds himself with bright and beautiful younger men, skipping the small talk and going straight to what makes them tick. Students engaged in discussion-based courses may get a taste of this joy of shared inquiry. Those who are not lucky enough to have had this sort of education can perhaps think back to B.S. sessions with their friends, or late-night conversations that “got real.” In the closing lines of Apology, Socrates imagines an afterlife in which he could question famous figures from history. How great would it be to spend eternity engaged in inquiry (40d-41c)!

Socrates is not merely playing games, however; he is providing a service to his community. In terms of cognitive behavioral therapy, Socratic cross-examination gets people to rethink their self-talk (Laches). If all goes well, such people will be more careful when using value-laden terms to evaluate situations. Or, to put it in terms from Charmides, “stripping away” pretentions gets people to “care about virtue” rather than wealth, power, popularity, or whatever else culture says will make people happy. This, all by itself, can help get people out of quite a few bad situations. In this, Socrates embodied the tough love typically found in coaches (Lysis), and he clearly found a purpose, a life project, that he was willing quite literally to die for. If his tactics in Apology seem miscalculated, then we should ask what he hoped to accomplish. If it was to escape death, he did a terrible job. If it was to provide a model for posterity, then he put on a performance for the centuries!

Socrates also provided a model of growth mindset (Laches). Most people dislike being told that they are wrong. Yet, to take him at his word, Socrates delights in having his faults and false opinions pointed out to him. This enthusiasm is contagious as Lysis, Menexenus, Nicias, and even a couple of “loser fathers” get on board with the idea that with hard work we can make progress. Still, is this enough? Can people today actually build a life around a dogged and unending pursuit of knowledge? Most, though not all, philosophers who followed Socrates in antiquity thought not.

As we move forward in our survey of Greek ethics, we will explore how different figures, and, increasingly, different schools, gave their own answers to Socrates’s questions about human flourishing and the virtues. Insofar as subsequent thinkers offered competing theories, we will move from having no answers to having too many! We will thus enter into a new kind of perplexity. At the same time, we will keep tracing big ideas from modern psychology, watching each school combine them into different organic wholes. This fusion of ancient ethics and modern science provides readers with a multitude of competing frameworks to try out as they wrestle with life’s challenges today.