Tragically Speaking: On the Use and Abuse of Theory for Life

4. Plato’s Courts: Phaedrus and Apology

119 IV Plato’s Courts Phaedrus and Apology Love and law have been long-standing adversaries in the history of literature —their most tragic battle marvelously staged in Sophocles’s Antigone, which will concern us in part 3 of the book. But if literature is quick to see the rift, philosophy seeks to bridge it. By its very name, which pronounces its task and disciplinary law, philosophy is the discipline of love: the love of truth. In this chapter, I address two Platonic texts in which Socrates, philosophy’s greatest lover, unfolds for us this necessary but often antagonistic relationship.1 First, in the Phaedrus, Socrates distinguishes love of truth from obedience to law,2 as he himself delights in the courtship of his younger pupil amid an evocative landscape. Second, in the Apology, the scene of the court of law, Socrates emerges as the emblematic parrhesiastes, accounting for his life as a lover of truth but accepting resolutely whatever unjust verdict of Athenian jurisdiction against him. Upon first glance at least, the Phaedrus and the Apology offer us two opposite versions of love’s (and philosophy’s) relation to law: where the former dialogue decries the false authority of the letter of the law, the latter presents us with a Socrates resolved to accept even an unjust death sentence, because he refuses to violate the civil process no matter what its shortcomings. He grounds this decision on the fact that it would be equally unjust of him as a citizen to profit from the laws of a city when they favor him, while rejecting those same laws whenever they turn against him. However, the resolve to accept his political fate out of respect for citizenship does not mean that the moral content of his defense is itself innocuous or acquiescent to the law’s injustice. That Socrates understands the civic necessity of lawfulness does not 120 for the love of truth stop him from mounting a staggering critique of the particular laws and the political mendacity that produces and implements them. Thus, despite their seemingopposition,thetwodialoguesdonotundoeachother.Theybothspeak in their own ways of the tragic nature of law’s self-assurance that it is always just and always good—a self-assurance solidified by its appeal to longevity and convention and not by the continuing and honest strife to approximate the just and the good. In law’s actual inability to protect the wise and the just man who, nonetheless, respects it in order to transcend its violence, we trace the visible outlines of a tragedy. Where Antigone chose to break the law for the sake of another—her brother’s dishonored corpse—and accept the fatal consequences for herself, Socrates chooses to uphold the law, since it only harmed him and not another, and accept equally the capital punishment. Interestingly, both dialogues transpire under the sign of divine presence; in both, Socrates attests to divinities inside him: he is ἔνθεος (enthusiastic), roaming around sacred groves in the former dialogue, and testifying for Apollo’s word in the latter. If, as Foucault observes, Euripides stages the passage of truthtelling from the religious to the political realm while Socrates furthers it from political to personal parrhesia, I would add that the Socratic shift is actually twofold: insofar as the personal is the seat of the philosophical for Socrates, he simultaneously relays truth-telling from religion to philosophy while retaining the spiritual quality of truth over and against cold rationalism. Philosophy may supersede the need for religious rituals and the like, but philosophical truth-telling still assumes and restores religion’s prepolitical identification of truth with the moral character of the speaker. Socrates’s divine inspiration serves as the hallmark of his moral character, which, in turn, guarantees the truth of his speech. In the following two sections, I trace the Socratic pursuit of truth and its practice of truth-telling as it unfolds from the lighthearted and flirtatious misunderstandings of the Phaedrus—the exemplary dialogue of a personal parrhesia—to the tragic theater of the Apology, where Socrates’s personal account, delivered from a public platform, meets only the deaf ears of his fellow men. 121 plato’s courts Phaedrus Here lies one whose name was writ in water John Keats Foucault offers only a fleeting comment on the Phaedrus, but a weighty one nonetheless: “The opposition of parrhesia and rhetoric also runs through the Phaedrus—where, as you know...