Tag Archives: Aristophanes

Mental

11 November 2023 By in Books Fiction, Novel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest

By Ken Kesey

Penguin Group

Copyright: © 2012

Original Copyright: © 1962

AmazonPic

Kesey Biography:

“Since we don’t know where we’re going, we have to stick together in case someone gets there.” Kesey

FootnoteA

Ken Kesey, who died at the age of sixty-six in 2001, was a novelist, hippie, and beatnik, tuning into the counterculture movement of the sixties that renounced materialism, institutions, and the middle-class, while embracing LSD, free-sex, and carrots. Kesey, I believe, just embraced LSD, grass, and laughs.

After finishing college at the University of Oregon–go Ducks–he moved to California and enrolled in Stanford–go Tree??–to study creative writing from 1958 to 1961 while simultaneously settling into the counterculture lifestyle gripping the area and the nation.

In 1959 he volunteered for the CIA’s LSD mind experiments being run under the code name MKUltra. These experiments were conducted at a VA hospital in Menlo Park, just northwest of Stanford. At the same time in 1959 he accepted a position as an attendant in the hospital’s psych ward, working there while tripping on LSD. He began writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1959 or 60 (various sources give different dates). In 1962 Kesey published his masterpiece. The rest is history.

FootnoteB

Later, in 1964 Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, a group he and others formed in the late fifties, bought an old school bus, repainted it in the pop art and comic book style of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein respectively, and took off to survey and crash the Beatnik scene in New York City. While on the road to New York they handed out LSD in various forms, it wasn’t illegal until 1966, and held street party theater for the locals. The whole experience was recorded with microphones and cameras along with several books being written afterwards about the experience.

After returning to California in 1965 Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession. Fearing prison, he faked his suicide which didn’t really fool the police and escaped to Mexico. A few months later in 1966 he was captured and sent to an honor prison camp in Redwood City, California for six months where he cleared brush and kept a diary of his experience later publishing it as Kesey’s Jail Journal: Cut the M*********** Loose.

Upon release from prison, he gave up the bohemian lifestyle, returned to Oregon, and settled down to the life of a respectable middle-aged citizen with a little acid and weed still making recreational appearances.

FootnoteC

Defending his drug use he made the point, in an interview with Charley Rose in 1992, that doing drugs was a personal decision and if your neighbor incurred no harm, then no one need be concerned. A thoroughly libertarian position not terribly different than William Buckley’s view on pot. He also denied being a mindless drug addict stating in an interview with Terry Gross, “I’ve always been a reliable, straight-up-the-middle-of-the-road citizen that just happens to be an acidhead.”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

The story’s narrator, Chief Bromden, a 6’6″ tall member of a Columbia River Indian tribe, is a schizophrenic patient in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, passing himself off as a deaf, mute with an agreeable disposition. Bromden forms a bond of friendship with Randle McMurphy, a new psych patient who, rather than put in a few months in at a prison work farm, convinces his jailers that he is insane so he can get transferred to a no work sanitorium with better meals. McMurphy initially finds his situation much improved and installs himself as head crazy but quickly butts heads with Nurse Ratched the chief administrator for his floor. Nurse Ratched is a humorless soul sucking battle axe who quickly realizes that she is in a clash of Titans and wits with McMurphy where the winner takes all. As in Macbeth only one king, or Queen, shall live or as Shakespeare states, “if the assassination / Could trammel up the consequence”. In today’s vernacular, the Machiavellian “when you set out to kill the king, you must kill him” and damn the repercussions is more succinct.

Literary Criticism:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the best American novels written in the latter half of the twentieth century easily standing with Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Of Mice and Men, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Except for Hemingway’s novella they all explore good and evil within the context of human nature and its effect on one’s soul. Kesey’s book pokes and prods the reader with almost farcical battles of weak minds against strong minds. Wills of strength versus the will of the state. Occasional good against consistent evil.

Every literary device and human character flaw known has been applied to this novel, simile, metaphor, personification, action, protagonist, antagonist, conflict, allusion, imagery, climax, male chauvinism, misogynism, sexuality, sexual repression, fear, hate, violence, intimidation, dominance; it is all here, a masterpiece of storytelling that maybe only Dickens was capable of duplicating.

In Aristophanes’ play The Birds he invented the term “cloud cuckoo land” as the name for his bird utopia but in reality, it was the home for the absurd. Whether Kesey intended to imitate Aristophanes social criticism and sarcasm inherent in The Birds is not known but they both found their subject matter bizarre and ridiculous.

Mental Health and the Cuckoo’s Nest:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book, the play, the movie, likely accelerated the deinstitutionalization of mental patients in the U.S. and the world. It was a process that had already begun in the mid-fifties with the introduction of the antipsychotic drug, chlorpromazine, allowing mental illness to be treated outside of a hospital setting. In the sixties and seventies President Kennedy and California Governor Reagan were champions of providing mental health services without walls. In hindsight it should have been easily anticipated the inevitable negative consequences of such policies. Homelessness and incarceration, rampant use of illicit drugs and crime, the general breakdown of societal norms when the mentally ill were allowed to take charge of their own care without supervision. Assuming logical outcomes from illogical inputs is well–illogical.

In Virgil’s Aeneid he wrote, “facilis descensus Averno (the descent to hell is easy)” or as Samuel Johnson updated the proverb by stating, “…hell is paved with good intentions”. Today we just say the “Road to hell is paved with good intentions” and hell is a dystopian wasteland.

Kesey Bibliography:

References and Readings:

FootnoteA: Photo of Ken Kesey. Maybe copyrighted. Copyright is ambiguous. Possilby Vintage News 2017

FootnoteB: Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters Bus

FootnoteC: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. Amazon Picture

Comedy Tonight: Greek Style

15 October 2023 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Aristophanes: Four Plays

By Aristophanes

Translated by Aaron Poochigian

Published by Liveright

Copyright: © 2022

Aaron Poochigian – Amazon

Poochigian Biography:

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. He has authored four books of poetry and translated seven books from Greek and French. He won the Muse Book Award for his book of poetry, Manhattanite and the Richard Wilbur Award for another book of poetry, American Divine. He currently lives and writes in New York City.

In an interview with Heide Sander in 2021 she asked Poochigian to share a story about what first drew him poetry. His answer, to me anyway, was unexpected to say the least, “I had a religious experience when I was 18. Sitting outside an ivy-covered old brick building on the quad of my campus, I was looking at the opening lines of an epic poem in Latin, the Aeneid: ‘Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris. . .‘ Though I did not yet know the language, the sky became brighter, and I could feel my synapses lighting up, and it became clear to me that I was supposed to spend my life writing poetry. For better or worse, for richer and poorer, that’s what I have done.”

I find this fascinating. What strain of curiosity exists for someone to read lines of poetry, or any text for that matter, in a language one doesn’t understand. Truly beguiling or maybe closer to the point, mystifying but I’m not a poet so I’m likely missing something important.

For those that are curious, The Aeneid an epic poem written in Latin by Virgil between 29-19 BC, describes the adventures of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled Troy after it fell to the Greeks and who subsequently made his way to Italy, becoming the ancestor of all Romans. The above quoted Latin phrase in bold type is a small snippet from the opening line of the Aeneid which the entire line in English reads as follows: “I sing of arms and the man who first from the shores of Troy came to Italy and Lavinian shores, exiled by fate, that man who was tossed much both on lands and on the deep by the power of the gods because of the mindful anger of savage Juno; also he suffered many things in war until he could found a city and bring his gods to Latium, whence the Latin race and the Alban fathers and the walls of high Rome” .

Poochigian, in his introduction, feels the need to point out that slavery existed during the Golden Age of Athens, as if it ever went away. He states: “…would do well to acknowledge that the entire edifice of the glorious civilization that was fifth century Athens including its rich tradition of theatrical performance, was built on a foundation of forced, uncompensated labor. Athenians themselves may have been willfully blind to the injustice of reserving democratic self-determination for themselves and relegating their defeated enemies to abject servitude, but it is impossible for us now to ignore it.”

The “built on a foundation” and “willfully blind” are very bold assumptions whose conclusive inerrancy would improve with a smidgen of support from the historical record. Also, to translate the works of a free Athenian citizen, whose works were supposedly built on the backs of slaves, then hold out your hand for payment does seem a bit much. One may wish to consider how the future humans will look upon present-day west coast cities in the U.S. Will their view of us be judged by the abhorrent spectacle of unending tent cities and homelessness, unchecked crime, filth in the streets, untreated mental illness, rampant drug use and addiction? Should the future disparage our attempts to uplift the human condition of some because we failed to uplift all? If we cannot accept the civilizational accomplishments from 2800 years ago because slavery existed then, as it does today, do we expect the future to treat us differently?

Aristophanes — Wikipedia

Aristophanes Biography:

Aristophanes, Greek playwright, born circa 448-6 and died circa 386-5 grew up in Athens during the Age of Pericles, 461-429 BC. His early adult years on into middle age occurred during the declining period of the Athenian Golden Age due to the mounting strategic failures and monetary costs of the city-state’s losing gambles in the Peloponnesian War from 431-404 BC.

It is unknown whether Aristophanes fought in the war, but it is believed he did due to the Athenian compulsory draft of all eligible citizens during the Peloponnesian War. Then again, if he did serve in the military, it didn’t appear to impede his prodigious writing output.

Aristophanes, known as the ‘Father of Comedy’, produced thirty-six to forty plays, maybe more, of which only eleven exist in completed form while another eleven are found in fragments. He is the only writer of Greek ‘Old Comedy’ whose plays still survive.

He submitted his first play, The Banqueters to the festival in Dionysia in 427 BC, receiving second prize out of the three that were accepted for live performance. His plays went on to garner eleven prizes at Dionysia and Lenaea even managing the exceptional feat of winning first and second prize at Lenaea in 422 BC for his plays The Preview and The Wasps respectively.

Aristophanes plays, at least the eleven surviving ones, are all stylistic examples of what is now called ‘Old Comedy’, the initial form of Greek theater comedy. Old Comedy was characterized by the merciless skewering of public figures while entertaining the audience with beautiful lyrical songs, dance, ribald and licentious speech, and absurd plots. Aristophanes plots began sane and logically, centered around an imaginative hero, progressing to a preposterous but victorious heroic conclusion such as in The Birds where a middle-aged burnout from Athens, searching the wilderness for peace, stumbles into a ruling role of the bird kingdom which in the end supplants the Greek gods for supremacy.

Greek Competitive Theater:

Ancient Greeks invented theater with Greek tragedy first appearing in the late sixth century BC. It is believed that Greek theater began as songs and dances, known as the dithyramb, honoring Dionysus or Bacchus, the Greek god of all that was fun: wine, fertility, festivity, insanity, and theater. The songs and dances celebrating fertility evolved into rites of spring with theatrical plays becoming central to the festivities. The Dionysia as the festival became known was the second most important Greek celebration after the Panathenaic, the quadrennial Athenian athletic games.

The theatric festival was eventually held as a competition where three tragic poets or playwrights wrote and produced three tragedies on a common theme. Additionally, the poets were also required to produce a satyr play, a heroic tragedy with cheerful atmospherics and rural backgrounds. An award, initially believed to have been a goat, fortunately becoming a wreath of ivy and/or a bronze tripod cauldron, was given to the best tragic poet. The term “tragedy” comes from the Greek word ‘tragoidia’, which translates to ‘goat song’. From 449 BC onward the best actors, known as protagonists, were also given prizes.

Comedy was introduced at Dionysia in 486 BC with five poets initially competing for the prize. In 440 BC a minor festival to Dionysus was established in January at Lenaea where initially, only comedy was staged. Tragedy was added at Lenaea in 432 BC. Five comedies were presented yearly at Lenaea except during the Peloponnesian War when only three plays were staged. Four tragedies were presented at this winter festival but were composed by only two poets.

Aristophanes’ Theater Awards for Comedy:

  • Second prize at the Dionysia in 427 BC for The Banqueters (now lost)
  • First prize at Dionysia in 426 BC for The Babylonians (only fragments remain)
  • First prize at the Lenaea in 425 BC for The Acharnians
  • First prize at Lenaea in 424 BC for The Knights
  • Third (last) prize at Dionysia in 423 BC for The Clouds (first edition now lost)
  • First prize at the Lenaea in 422 BC for The Preview (now lost)
  • Second prize at the Lenaea in 422 BC for The Wasps
  • Second prize at the Dionysia in 421BC for Peace
  • Second prize at the Dionysia in 414 BC for The Birds
  • First prize at the Lenaea in 411 BC for Lysistrata
  • First prize at the Lenaea in 405 BC for The Frogs

Aristophanes — Four Plays Plot Summaries and Commentary:

Clouds is a tale detailing the importance of an education and the resulting moral rot that accompanies it. A spendthrift and unappreciative son Pheidippides is driving his father, Strepsiades, into bankruptcy. Strepsiades counts on the wrong argument, taught by sophists at the Thinkery school with Socrates as the headmaster, to win him a reprieve from his debts.

Symposium by Feuerbach — First version — 1869 — Socrates is in the right center facing the wall.

Sophists, in the original Greek meaning were sages or experts imparting wisdom and learning. During the Golden Age of Athens in fifth century BC, professional educators roamed the Greek empire teaching for a fee on a wide range of subjects from rhetoric, poetry, music, philosophy, and mathematics. Rhetoric or the art of apprising and persuasion was the preeminent study for the litigious Athenians. When discussing sophists, one would be remiss not to mention that Aristophanes had numerous students under his care throughout his career as a playwright, which one can assume were not instructed for free, whereas Socrates taught and lectured for free.

The Clouds that took third (last) at Dionysia in 423 BC is now lost. The one that reaches us here in the 21st century is a revised version of the play from 418 BC, which Aristophanes, it is believed, never presented to the public.

In Plato’s Apology the author claims this play was a contributing factor in the conviction and execution of Socrates for the specious crime of corrupting Athen’s youth.

Birds, taking second prize at Dionysia in 414 BC, attempts to find utopia outside of the struggles of Athens. The plot begins with a worn-out Athenian, Pisthetaerus, wandering in the wilderness with his fellow traveler, Euelpides, looking for Tereus the Hoopoe, supreme leader of the birds. Upon finding Tereus, Pisthetaerus hatches a great idea to establish a city in the sky, Cloudcuckooland and reclaim the birds’ standing as the first among gods.

Many have tried to find allegorical meaning in the play, but sometimes a fairy-tale is just that, a fairy-tale, a fantasy that entertains without it being weighed down with heavy philosophical and political interpretations.

Destruction of Athenian army at Syracuse — Davis 1900 — Wikipedia

Lysistrata, taking first prize at Lenaea in 411 BC, has Aristophanes bringing the matriarchy to the forefront of Greek society were the Athenian wives, brides, and lovers of war-locked men attempt to end the Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata and the other women of Athens hatch a plan to deny sex to the men until they end the war thus denying themselves, their one and only desire in life.

By 411 BC Athens was losing badly in the Peloponnesian War through the treachery of Alcibiades, the incompetence of military commanders in Sicily and elsewhere, and the political blunders emanating from Athens. Having lost most of their navy in 413 BC, Athens was slowing and mercilessly succumbing to Sparta and its ally, Persia, with their tightening noose around Athens’ perimeter choking off their much-needed trade and silver resources to continue the war.

The play has feminist overtones, but it is unabashedly an enactment of societal male domination designed to protect women from their baser and irrational instincts. While the play is a creed to the ethos of patriarchy, it subtly informs the Athenians that all is lost, and it was time to make peace with Sparta.

Women of the Assembly goes by more names than the devil: Assemblywomen, Congresswomen, A Parliament of Women, Women at the Assembly, Women of Ecclesia, Women in Parliament, Women in Power, and possibly others. Ecclesia, along with the plethora of previously listed names, in ancient Greece was the assembly of citizens of the city-state which included all male citizens 18 years and older. In Aristophanes time the Ecclesia was summoned by the ruling Boule of four hundred, a Greek council or senate. The assemblies were charged with debating and voting on matters presented to them by the council.

The play, presented in 391 BC, is one of Aristophanes’ weaker and rightly, less appreciative efforts, garnering no awards at Dionysia or Lenaea. The women of Athens take over the Ecclesia, dressed as men and force a communistic system of sexual equity for all, the ugly and the beautiful, and a ban on the rich. Equality of outcomes, of one ring, to rule them all.

The play on the surface is an exploration of feminist power in government whereas it is truly a rebuke of effeminate men in the halls of government. Aristophanes believed in a binary world. If men and women were interchangeable and indistinguishable then madness and sadness is everyone’s just reward.

Literary Criticism:

German poet Henrich Heine said: “There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.” Once a god is conceded all negatives melt away. I will concede the obvious–the negatives are not only trivial but possibly non-existent.

Aristophanes plays were filled not only with comedy but with fantasy and fetish, irrationalism, satire, ribald commentary, and vulgar ridicule of Athenian society. Aristophanes respected no sacred cows, skewering everyone and everything with impunity, an unrestrained destruction, fairly or unfairly, imparting a message to all comers that they were mostly fools. Open season was declared on poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics as were the famous and infamous of society such as Socrates, Cleon, fellow poet Euripides, and when he ran out of the famous, he turned his sharp swords of locution on the Athenian people. He truly was a god of Greek poetry, comedy, and theater.

Aristophanes surfeit use of vulgarity, phallic imaging, and sexual inuendo comes across as juvenile upon reading his plays but then these plays are for presentation at festivals honoring Bacchus, the Greek god of wine. It may not be unrealistic to assume that his audience, at a minimum, is slightly inebriated, in which case Aristophanes isn’t being crude but deliberately playing to his audience’s relaxed mental state.

Poochigian believes in magic. The magic of poetry, stating in 2021, “Poetry is a magic circle of sound and image in which anything can happen. Yes, poetry means magic to me, and I see the poet as a magician who, with his/her incantations, creates special spaces outside of prose and everyday life.” He is an able translator of Aristophanes plays bringing his Greek poetry into realm of the vernacular of almost blue-collar English but managing to leave the magic behind in the agoras and councils of the Athens.

Poochigian’s translation of Tereus’, king of the birds, great speech summoning his subjects is typical, “…come here, all you endowed with wings, all you who flutter over acres of fertile land, you myriad throngs who feed on grain, you swift seed-pickers who warble such delightful songs. Come all that over furrowed ground twitter, molto espressivo, this pleasant sound–tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tio...” Where is the beauty, the magic in this translation? This is prose of the common man. It is amusing though that the Italian term, molto espressivo, meaning very expressive, is used to translate the Greek to English.

An anonymous translator from the early 20th century gives us Epops summoning his subjects, “…here, here, quick, quick, quick, my comrades in the air: all you who pillage the fertile farming lands, the numberless tribes who gather and devour the barley seeds, the swift flying race that sings so sweetly. And you whose gentle twitter resounds through the fields with the little cry of tiotiotiotiotiotiotiotio…” This is poetry. This is magic.

Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys — Rubens — 1636-38

Epops, in Latin and Greek, is a hoopoe. A bird with a long beak and a crest of feathers. Why the anonymous translator called Tereus Epops is unknown. The name of the king of birds in Aristophanes play is the hoopoe Tereus. Tereus is a character from Greek mythology who was the king of Thrace and the son of Ares, the god of war, and Bistonis, a water nymph. He married Procne, the daughter of Pandion, the king of Athens. However, he also raped and mutilated his sister-in-law Philomela, who was Procne’s sister. As a result, Procne and Philomela took revenge on Tereus by killing his son Itys and serving him as a meal to Tereus. When Tereus discovered the truth, he tried to kill them, but the gods intervened and turned them all into birds. Tereus became a hoopoe. Procne became a nightingale with a beautiful song. Philomela became a swallow who could not sing.

Aristophanes’ Surviving Complete Plays Bibliography:

Poochigian’s Bibliography:

References and Readings:

A Worthy Life

17 September 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, Philosophy, Religion, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Socrates

By A.E. Taylor

Published by Forgotten Books

Copyright: © 2017

Original Publication Date: 1933

A.E. Taylor – Wikipedia

Author Biography:

Alfred Edward Taylor was born in Oundle, England in 1869, and died in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1945. He was a professor, a Greek classicist, and a philosopher of metaphysics and ethics. He spent his adult life at the ancient Scottish Universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh researching and teaching the spiritual; the immortal basis for morality and the philosophy of Plato. Plato was a student of Socrates and as such he was a concern to and within the orbit of Taylor.

Socrates’, leaving no written record, entire philosophical corpus and biography have reached us today primarily through the writings of two near contemporary Greeks: Plato and Xenophon. Taylor’s contribution to our present day understanding of Socrates was to argue that Plato’s four basic texts on Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, are accurate depictions of what Socrates said and did. Xenophon, who also wrote extensively about Socrates but later, Taylor argued, is less reliable. This may seem trivial, but this point has been and still is contested due to the immense stature of Socrates as one of the founders of Western philosophy in general and ethics in particular. The basic question among philosophers is whether Plato’s writings describing Socratic philosophy are accurate or are amalgamations of Socratic and Platonic thought? Who knows? The dispute will continue till the end of days so we will leave it as Taylor says.

Taylor’s studies within the philosophy of ethics and morality centered on what is right and good, whether the two were complementary and/or achievable. Taylor argued right and good or the moral practice of the individual is constrained and flawed without the aid of the supernatural: God. His thesis was that searching inward, within oneself for rebirth and betterment, for a moral compass, flows only in circles leading nowhere. To reach a higher level of morality or good requires looking outward to the spiritual through contemplation of the eternal good. Taylor argued that the will to reach for a better or eternal good is impetus for the eternal, the divine good to reach for you. Additionally, morality, Taylor surmises, plateaus in the human confines of a person’s physical life, requiring, unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective, death to continue the soul’s moral journey for better or worse.

Socrates:

Any biography of Socrates is going to be short. Almost all authoritative writings concerning his work, teachings, and life that have reached us in the 21st century consists of approximately two hundred written pages, in English, by Plato and about three hundred English written pages by Xenophon with the two containing significant overlap. Taylor’s biography, using Plato and Xenophon as primary sources, is no exception managing to encapsulate Socrates’ remarkable life into a quick read of 142 pages. Within these few pages concerning this most remarkable man everything has been disputed except for the Athenians putting him to death for being a royal pain in the rear, some have used the term gadfly. That is the one piece of his life that no one disagrees with. No one disputes that he was put to death in 399 BC, and it is likely that no one disputes that he was a royal pain in the posterior, a gadfly.

Socrates was born, circa 469 BC, grew up and lived in Athens until he was put to death in 399 BC at the age of seventy. He lived during the Golden Age of Athens (478-404 BC) and the overlapping Age of Pericles (461-429 BC) both now combined and known by the excessively non-descriptive non-demonym: Fifth Century Athens. (Why classical historians thought this was a useful, didactic change defies any sound, logical reasoning. Alas it was changed to avoid hurt feelings of Greeks and Athenians whose best years occurred two thousand seven hundred years ago. How you soothe pouting children should not be an instruction manual for sane adults.)

Socrates only left Athens to serve in military battles prior to and during the (second) Peloponnesian War. He was a hoplite in the Athenian army, a heavy infantry soldier outfitted with a shield, sword, and/or spear fighting in a phalanx or block-like formation. By all accounts he was a good and courageous soldier. His first recorded engagement, at the age of thirty-eight, was the battle and siege at Potidaea beginning in 432 BC. lasting until 429 BC. Potidaea was a Greek city-state, approximately 155 miles, as the crow flies, north of Athens, threatening to break free of Athenian control. This battle helped trigger the much larger and costlier Peloponnesian War beginning in 431 BC and lasting until 404 BC.

Socrates saved the life of Alcibiades, a gifted Athenian general and politician, but exceptionally duplicitous and erratic. Socrates heroic action should have garnered him the prize for valor, but Alcibiades was awarded it instead due to his higher birth and rank. A very powerful disincentive to the rank and file indeed.

Five and seven years later Socrates fought for Athens in the losing battles of Delium and Amphipolis, respectively, during the initial stages of the twenty-seven year-long Peloponnesian War. During the battle of Delium in 424 BC, Alcibiades saved Socrates’ life thus repaying Socrates’ valiant deed and cementing their life-long, but problematic, friendship.

Alcibiades recounts a story of Socrates during the engagement of Potidaea that bears on the philosopher’s power, or possibly prophetic power of thought. One morning Socrates, while contemplating an assumed perplexing problem became motionless, a state he remained in until the next morning when he said a prayer and walked away invigorated, amazing his fellow soldiers who had been watching him through the night. This story has him either being completely lost in thought, refusing to move to avoid breaking that train of thought, or as another occurrence of the ‘Sign’, voice, or daimonion that came to him, starting in his childhood and continuing throughout his adult life.

The ‘Sign’ was a voice usually described as an inner call, not to action, but to caution, a warning of future woes to come. Socrates mentioned at his trial that whenever the voice spoke to him it turned him away from something he was about to do. Some believe the ‘Sign’ was simply his subconscious speaking to him while others feel it was divine. A message from God.

To stretch a minor detail, Socrates almost never referred to the Gods, just God in the singular, a minor point yes, but a point all the same that the ‘Sign’ may have been religious vision or experience from the perspective of monotheism versus accepted Greek polytheism. At his trial he states, “It is to fulfill some function that I believe God has placed me in the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you all day long…” His ‘Sign’ did not speak to him during his trial leaving him to conclude that the sentence of death was something he should accept.

Socrates’ ‘religion’ began with his belief in the soul, and that it was immortal and unchanging. The soul existed before you were born and continued after your death. He believed the soul was your truth, your essence, your reality beyond your corporal self. He believed the soul must be looked after and kept in immaculate condition.

Socrates believed that to care for your soul required a focus on personal growth. Growth comes from the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, the study of philosophy, to further one’s understanding of not only yourself but the world around you. The pursuit of wisdom through what became known as the Socratic method, questioning and logical reasoning started with yourself: ‘know thyself’ and expanded to include the universe beyond your own flesh. To seek wisdom and knowledge by examining your life was to seek truth. Seeking wisdom and knowledge for the sake of truth is what Socrates meant when he spoke his famous line at his trial in 399 BC, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Without truth, life is not worth living. Without truth one risks living a lie.

Socrates examined and questioned everything and everyone. His thirst for knowledge and wisdom all flowed from his stated belief in his own ignorance, stating “as for me all I know is that I know nothing.” No one that knew Socrates believed this statement for a second. He was known as a sage, a philosopher, and shrewd one at that. His wisdom was even embraced by the Oracle of Delphi who said Socrates was the wisest person in Athens.

For Socrates, though, his statement professing to know nothing wasn’t an expression of humility or ignorance but a challenge. A challenge to question one’s beliefs and opinions concerning all things seen and unseen. Two plus two equals four, everything else is questionable. “All I know is that I know nothing” is an acknowledgement that the search for wisdom: truth, at a minimum is transitory, possibly imaginary, and thus one must never stop searching. This was not to say there were no truths available to the living, but the search could be difficult and deceptive.

Socrates’ quest for the truth manifested itself first through his rejection of fame, money, and power. The corollary of that rejection is he lived a life of poverty, neglected hygiene, and wore no shoes. No shoes whether with feet on burning stones or frosted rocks. Pain and discomfort did not seem to bother him.

Secondly his quest for the truth was through the spoken word, never written. Conversations with his fellow Athenians occurred throughout the city, the Lyceum and the Agora were his two favorite haunts where he questioned his victims, and they were victims, in his famous ‘Socratic Method’ style of inquisition. Below is a short description of Socratic torture from the–Explainer: Socrates and the Life Worth Living (link below):

  • Socrates engages an interlocutor who appears to possess knowledge about an idea
  • The interlocutor makes an attempt to define the idea in question
  • Socrates asks a series of questions which test and unravel the interlocutor’s definition
  • The interlocutor tries to reassemble their definition, but Socrates repeats step three
  • Both parties arrive at a state of perplexity, or aporia (ed. a philosophical puzzle), in which neither can any further define the idea in question
Socrates’ Address. Louis J. Lebrun. 1867

A humorous sketch illustrating his method from Plato’s ‘Euthyphro‘ picks up near the end of a discussion concerning the gods:

Euthyphro: Why you don’t suppose, Socrates, that the gods gain any advantage from what they get from us, do you?

Socrates: Well then, what would those gifts of ours to the gods be?

Euthyphro: What else than honor and praise, and, as I said before, gratitude?

Socrates: Then, Euthyphro, holiness is grateful to the gods, but not advantageous or precious to the gods?

Euthyphro: I think it is precious, above all things.

Socrates: Then again, it seems, holiness is that which is precious to the gods.

Euthyphro: Certainly.

Socrates: Then will you be surprised, since you say this, if your words do not remain fixed but walk about, and will you accuse me of being the Daedalus who makes them walk, when you are yourself much more skillful than Daedalus and make them go round in a circle? Or do you not see that our definition has come round to the point from which it started? For you remember, I suppose, that a while ago we found that holiness and what is dear to the gods were not the same, but different from each other; or do you not remember?

Socrates: Then don’t you see that now you say that what is precious to the gods is holy? And is not this what is dear to the gods?

Euthyphro: Certainly.

Socrates: Then either our agreement a while ago was wrong, or if that was right, we are wrong now.

Euthyphro: So it seems.

Socrates: Then we must begin again at the beginning and ask what holiness is. Since I shall not willingly give up until I learn. […]

Euthyphro: Some other time, Socrates. Now I am in a hurry, and it is time for me to go.

Socrates: Oh my friend, what are you doing? You go away and leave me cast down from the high hope I had that I should learn from you what is holy, and what is not, and should get rid of Meletus’s indictment by showing him

Socrates’ learnings in search of the truth have been passed down to us through Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Locke, and others, climaxing in Jefferson’s preamble to Western civilization’s crowning ode to self and country: the ‘Declaration of Independence‘, proclaiming the fundamental, natural rights of man: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The phrase the ‘pursuit of Happiness’ has been thoroughly misconstrued to mean something foreign and vulgar to Jefferson’s original intent. The ‘pursuit of Happiness’ was not a grant to seek earthly enrichments and pleasures but a call to a higher state of being. Epicurus provided a definition of happiness that comes closest to the meaning of Jefferson, “the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear, and once this is obtained the tempest of the soul is quelled.” Life, Liberty, and the pursuit free from pain and fear. The ‘pursuit of Happiness’ sounds better.

Epicurus seeks a soul free of pain and fear. Socrates sought a pure soul. Both pursued it through the same means. Socrates and Epicurus’ greatest pleasure in life was the pursuit of wisdom and truth. Neither sought fame, money, or power nor feared death. Epicurus did not fear death because it was the end of the body and the soul. There was nothingness after death. No greater glory. No damnation. Just nothing. Socrates did not fear death because a pure and good soul went on to something better.

Socrates, then, lived a good life. A life in pursuit of truth. A death to continue his journey to a higher plane.

Socrates died, supposedly, for impiety and corruption of the youth. Both charges were difficult to square with reality, but they achieved the desired outcome: removing an inconvenient seeker of truth. Silencing the moral inquisitor, the examiner of the soul. Extinguishing the gadfly.

At the end of his trial Socrates’ soul was at peace but still he seeks truth: “Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except God.”

The Death of Socrates. By Jacques-Louis David. 1787

Taylor’s Bibliography:

References and Readings: