The Socratic Algebra[1] of
Subjectivity
Terminal Meditations on Living Philosophically
By Rajesh Kumar Sharma
Plato puts
in place some of the major parameters of the Western subjectivity in his Apology,
Crito and Phaedo,
the three dialogues that contain the last thoughts of Socrates on living
philosophically. The parameters are mortality, ethics, law, afterlife and the
transcendental experience. Apology is mainly about death as the
consummate act of living philosophically. Crito
is embedded in the paradox of Socrates’s contempt for
the rabble and his obligation to the laws of the Athenian state. Phaedo is an exposition of philosophy as “the study
of death” against the backdrop of afterlife and transcendental experience (105).
In Apology,
the sentence of death is set against the ethical imperative of living
virtuously. Rhetoric may defer the execution, but it cannot stand in for truth.
Hence, Socrates would not have recourse to rhetoric to defend himself against
the rhetoric of his accusers, though he acknowledges the power of words. At the
outset of his defence he concedes, albeit with a
sense of irony, that his accusers “made [him] forget who [he] was” (5). Indeed,
there is “nothing real” in the accusations, yet the words have fabricated a
persuasive effect (21). He understands well that words can forge identities and
cause self-estrangement. But one has to have mastered the power of words in
order to be eligible to know oneself and conduct the study of death. So it is
not that Socrates is incapable of marshalling rhetoric in defence
of his innocence and the truth, but that he has little time to undo his
enemies’ work (33) and is not inclined to speak more than the truth. The wise
man risks attracting the world’s envy, but he must stand on truth (29). And the
truth is that virtue is the supreme good (24). Between a long life and the
right life, he must choose the latter (21-22). He must forgo worldly success
for the sake of virtue (23). Socrates’s ethical
self-distancing from the multitude is almost aesthetic in its relish.
The choices
that he makes are all endorsed by the voice within. The voice forbids him to do
what is not right (26). If it is silent, he goes on to do what his reason tells
him is the right thing, for his action is then evidently in tune with God’s
will. And a person’s life belongs to God, not to himself, as Socrates says in Phaedo (73-74). Significantly, the voice within has
a certain objective existence in Socrates’s inner
world and, as such, enjoys a rather enigmatic, oracular status. It is the
articulation of reflexive subjectivity, of the critically observant but aloof
subjectivity refined to the point of being an objective entity. This is also
the basis of Socrates’s absolute intellectual
freedom, the kind that cannot bear contact with public office (Apology,
26-27). Paradoxically, the voice leads him to choose a course of action that
would effectively remove him from the world in the name of personal dignity and
honour as an Athenian citizen, for he would not
“demean” himself and weep and beg for life. He would not conduct himself in any
manner “unworthy of [himself]”. He would not do anything “common or mean”. Nor
does he regret the style of [his] defence” (29-30;
35-36). He must let death come and he must do it in style and with so good a
grace as to make death an act of art. He must accomplish philosophy as the art
of dying, the art that a philosopher cultivates all his life.
Among
people who think themselves to be wise and knowing and who are settled happily
in their ignorance, he demonstrates wisdom as the awareness of its limits.
Wisdom is the fool’s self-realization. But the demonstration would exact its
price (11-14). His wisdom is also a folly from a certain point of view, such as
Crito’s who sees him as a foolhardy philosopher bent
on suffering an undeserved and avoidable death. The paradoxical relationship of
wisdom and folly, thus, parallels that of life and dying and captures the
breaking open of the secret of philosophy as the transgressive
act between living and dying, of philosophy as the study of death. For death is
not the end, and probably it is not evil either (22; 38). Philosophy as the
pursuit of immortality implies the overcoming of the body. If death should be
accomplished as the overcoming of the body, it would be the consummation of
philosophy.
It is
interesting that Socrates employs a military metaphor to explain his position.
As a philosopher, he has an obligation to search into himself and other men. He
must not “abandon his post” for any fear, including that of death (22). The
metaphor evokes the subtext of philosophy as resistance and war in which the
enemies are smugness and “the doctrines of the multitude”, as he says in Crito (53). He would not abandon his work of
philosophical interrogation and awakening because it is God’s work and the
greatest service he has been able to do to the state has been his service to
God, whatever the officers of the state may think of it. While the Athenian
state and its people may not appreciate his work, he believes his actions are
endorsed by the voice within and thus derive authenticity from his personal
experience of God’s sign.
And yet he
would not go against the laws of the state. He is not only subject to God’s
mandate but also a subject of the Athenian state to which he owes a huge debt
of gratitude. This debt he has been trying to repay by acting as a gadfly to
the state and by respecting its laws. His political role as a gadfly integrates
the two aspects of his subjectness, for as a gadfly he
is God’s gift to
To give an
account of our lives requires that we examine them in the light of reason which
is the spring of virtue, for “the unexamined life is not worth living….” (34).
Despite the sentence of death, therefore, Socrates dispassionately examines his
long relationship with the state, to be overwhelmed with gratitude and
deference at the end. He distinguishes between the laws and the people of
Crito opens with the testimony of
Socrates living his philosophy. The man’s perfect tranquility in sleep
amazes Crito (45). The impending execution does not
perturb him in the least, so completely has he overcome the body. At the
appointed time he would discard the frame and make his exit. The appointment
with death is scheduled for after a day. This he knows from a vision in which a
female apparition has recited Homer to predict the day of his execution.
Socrates can thus see his life on earth from a vaster perspective that admits
of the existence of more than the reality known to the senses. His insistence
on a virtuous earthly life is, accordingly, sanctioned by a superior wisdom.
His contempt for the opinion of the many also may be understood in this light.
The many are really powerless: they can neither do the greatest evil, which is
to make someone foolish, nor do the greatest good, which is to make someone
wise. Through personal testimony, Socrates thus locates ethics in a
transcendental realm accessible to a person in the interiority of his
subjective world that the fears and cravings of the multitude cannot
contaminate.
Free from
the fear of death, Socrates can look at the social implications of his course
of action after the verdict and evaluate them in terms of ethics. He would not
follow the way of the multitude and repay evil with evil (54). Should he escape
from prison, he would harm the laws and the state and break “the implied
contract” into which he entered when he chose to continue to live in Athens
after his coming of age. Neither did he seek banishment during his trial. An
escape would be a betrayal of trust. Indeed the laws are like his parents and
teachers; he has been brought up and educated by them (56-58).
The laws speak to him “like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic”, prompting him to persevere in his chosen course so he may “fulfill the will of God, and … follow whither he leads” (62). Like Homer’s poetry, the laws too are emanations of the superior, transcendental wisdom that also speaks through the voice within and that redefines the territory of the subjective by spiritualizing it and opening it up to other worlds. In the process, the usual walls that divide the subjective and the objective in the rational consciousness have also ceased to exist. The fulfillment of the obligation to the laws of the state is, thus, an essential part of the ethical imperative to lead a virtuous worldly life that is necessary for a happy afterlife (Phaedo, 64-65). That the mortal life and the afterlife are a continuum that may be grasped only through an integral vision is clearly indicated also by Socrates’s insistence on the right nurture and education. The soul’s immortality is the condition that should determine what kind of persons we want to be. Education and upbringing should comprehend mortality and immortality and should be essentially spiritual (146). The true jewels of the soul, accordingly, are virtues such as temperance, justice, courage, nobility and truth (155).
Phaedo tells Echecrates that Socrates must have received “a divine call” because he “appeared blessed” before the execution (68). Moreover, in prison he had been rendering Aesop’s fables into verse and composing a hymn to Apollo. He had been doing this in order to “purge a scruple”: a recurrent dream had exhorted him to “[c]ultivate and make music” and he was not completely sure if philosophy was indeed “the highest music” (71). Reason in Socrates is thus never arrogant of itself but is spiritualized through the skepticism of the spirit and hence open to self-overcoming.
Socrates’s blessedness is the fruit of his long “practice of dying” (105) that consists in the cultivation of “the separation of soul and body” (77). The body has a tendency to “infect” the soul and persuade it to identify itself with the body (80; 109). Philosophy is in this sense the practice of the highest self-reflexivity in which “true existence” is “revealed…in thought” that is understood as the event that happens when “the mind is gathered into [the soul]” and is free from the impressions of the senses (78). The philosopher’s mind approaches everything with the clear light of pure thought uncontaminated by the senses (79). Having thus overcome the body, the philosopher “know[s] of [himself] the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth” (81). Philosophy as the state of purity, as the state of the separation of the soul from the body is, then, “the habit of the soul gathering and collecting herself into herself from all sides of the body; the dwelling in her own place alone, as in another life, so also in this, as far as she can….” (81-82). Philosophy is thus the realization of pure subjectivity in pure objectivity and of pure objectivity in pure subjectivity. Wisdom is the state, attained through this realization, of the soul in communion with the unchanging and immortal (81; 102).
Socrates’s pursuit of philosophy is motivated not by the unquenchable desire to know more, as Nietzsche thought, but by the eagerness to “learn” the supreme ethical principle that moves the world, “the principle … of the obligatory and containing power of the good”. In deferring to the laws of the state he is deferring to this principle that comprehends both the mortal and the immortal. His final counsel – “take care of yourselves” – is, therefore, an affirmation of the paradox of self-invention through submission to the ethical imperative (156).
Work
Cited
Plato. Dialogues of Plato. Tr. Benjamin Jowett. Ed. J. D. Kaplan. New York: Pocket Books, 1955.
*****
July 2004
Rajesh Kumar Sharma
Department of English
Punjabi University, Patiala – 147002
Email: sharajesh@gmail.com