The Curse of Socrates

A large part of Plato’s dialogues involving Socrates take place on the peripheral places in and about Athens. On doorsteps, outside the city walls, within a prison cell, at the steps of the palace of Justice, or in the suburb of Peirera, as with the case of the magnum opus, The Republic.

Socrates is often taken to such places by others to isolate him from the crowd, so that they might have his undivided attention. As in the case of The Republic, Symposium, and the Phaedrus, he is also frequently held against his will, even physically threatened by the self-chosen interlocutors. It is funny then that people consider him to be meddling when it is the people themselves who continue to drag him into the conversation, trying to refute him to show that they know more.

And, that is indeed the Curse of Socrates. The only engagement Socrates has is to ask that simple question of “do you really know more?” That does not mean facts, trivia, dates, and figures, but what special knowledge do you posses that is greater than others? For, for Socrates, there is only one knowledge that we can truly posses, self-knowledge, and that comes at a price.

To “Know Thyself” often means excluding others for periods of Time. There is sometimes a need to remove oneself from the familiar, the comfortable, the ordinary in order to achieve a sense of ex-stasis, or the virtual removal of the Soul from the Body, in essence, the origin of ecstasy. It is at those moments that the Self or Soul is exposed, stripped of its garments of job, social status, religion, gender, caste, and whatnot. All of those things are indeed part of “who we are,” but they can also limit our ability to see deeper, to see what we are without those things.

We have things that are part of us that are given to us by birth, such as gender, race, nationality, and so on, and then there are the accessories to life that we place upon our selves, such as job, social status and whatnot. But, who are we when we strip those away? Can we strip those away?

By searching to “Know Thyself” one often must alienate him or herself from others. To leave what is closest in order to find what is missing. I have done so several times in my life. Sometimes this removal has been by choice, other times by necessity, or yet other times by exigent circumstances beyond my control. Yet, not once has it been by pure indiscretion or to merely cause “chaos” in my life. Each time has been at a crucial moment, when a solution needed to be found, when I had lost touch with who I really was, when I no longer felt that I “knew myself.”

To be on the periphery can be exciting at first, a sense of liberation. But, to stay there, can be terrifying and very lonely. In the depths of that loneliness, however, sometimes, something quite profound can happen. We let go of our customary trappings and bare our Souls to the world, to say, “Here I am.” And, when we can do this, without fear, without anxiety, we can then re-enter the city walls, to go forth, and return to the marketplace with a renewed confidence and peace of mind. For each departure, there is also the prospect of a return. 

The Irony of Zen

Ten years ago, I was teaching a course called, “The Curse of Socrates” at The University of Texas at Austin. Two of the texts that I chose for the course as the primary texts were Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Plato’s magnum opus, The Republic, which is, on the surface, Socrates’ attempt to describe what the “perfect” city, would be like. He is ambushed leaving the port of Peiraeus by Polemarchus and his entourage after having attending the apparently inaugural celebration of the Thracian Atermis, known as Bendis.

Polemarchus coerces Socrates to come back to his house, where the conversation that is to be the discussion of the ideal city takes place. Plato’s own brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon were apparently present in the discussion as is the main interlocutor, Thrasymachus, who turns out to be quite hostile to Socrates’ badgering of questioning and answering. Socrates had initially been asking the aged Cephalus about what he saw as being “Justice” with the advanced wisdom of his age. The discussion goes on a bit, but is inherited by Polemarchus, his son, taking up the definition that Justice is “doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” Eventually, as Polemarchus proves to not to be up to the taxing questions of Socrates as the Athenian gadfly eventual has him admitting that Justice is only useful in being useless.

Thrasymachus, a self-proclaimed know-it-all, cannot contain himself any longer and lunges into the conversation during a lacuna, like “a wild beast” and chastises Socrates for his usual way of escaping his own method of being questioned as Thrasymarchus says that he is clever enough to know that asking questions is easier than answering them. Socrates then agrees to allow Thrasymarchus to seemingly take control of the argument and yields by saying that it is Socrates’ own lack of ability that prevents him and that he should listen to one so clever as Thrasymarchus instead and from him receive pity rather than being berated.

To this, Thrasymarchus exclaims with a burst of “sardonic laughter,” that here is the “h eiothuia eironeia Sokratous,” or, the famous Socratic Irony. Thrasymarchus’ hostility and frustration with Socrates is not uncommon with those who are most confident in their own intellectual acumen. Yet, the harder they push, the more frustrated they become with Socrates asking “the wrong questions” and badgering them and annoying them. Yet, they chose to stay in the discussion because they claim to know something based upon the words of the so-called “experts” in the field. Socrates is not asking for a book-learned answer. Also, they may leave if they wish.

The mistake that Thrasymarchus makes, as do many a frustrated reader of Plato, is rather simple. Socrates is not looking for an answer. That is the irony that they fail to see. Instead, they keep refining their original answer, or saying it louder, becoming more and more irritated at Socrates, rather than possibly thinking that perhaps their own view is the one that is being stubborn. When asking, “What is Justice?” Socrates is not asking anything more than, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” And yet, Thrasymarchus and his ilk will turn blue in the face being angry with the question, too blind with their own importance to grasp the irony of the situation. It is with little wonder that the generation of western scholars soon became known as “The Schoolmen,” preferring the apparent “scientific” answers that Plato's rebellious student, Aristotle provided and which served as a placebo for the gnawing inside them that Socrates had left them. 

What Are Friends For?

While Socrates was in his jail cell, during the day friends and family would come to see him and while away the hours with their normal discussions about virtue, justice, good and evil and whatnot. Given that Socrates now had unlimited scholia, or leisure time , to converse, his more well-to-do friends were more than happy to spend their days in the presence of their dear friend. However, to what extent were they friends, or were they more interested in being in the presence of Socrates for their own benefit is somewhat put into question with the odd, yet powerful, little dialogue known as the Crito, whose subtitle is Or, on Duty; Ethical.

Crito, the man, appears to have been in on the very inner circle of Socrates’ friends and acquaintances according to the dialogue, which bears his name. Moreover, the fact that Crito is the one to be bringing the message that he has to give to Socrates suggests that the others in this circle must have felt that he had a certain persuasion over Socrates or he wouldn’t have been chosen to confront him with the proposition that his they had been concocting.

What begins as Crito’s attempt to convince Socrates of this plan rather ends like Hopper’s demonstration to his fellow grasshopper’s when they try to convince him to stay on vacation rather than go back to Ant Island in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. Socrates is “quite the motivational speaker” as well in the Crito in an uncharacteristic monologue on the nature of duty to one’s country when one decides to stay in that country with respect to obeying the laws.

However, in addition to the blatant message of the importance of Duty to one’s country (with the provision that one has freely chosen to remain in that country and/or city, as Socrates did with Athens), there is a rather subtle subtext of the question of what is a true friend. Crito has been there all along as we are to infer from the dialogue, yet in the final moments of Socrates’ life, this loyalty as “a friend” is squarely put into question.

Crito has come to see Socrates to tell him that there has been a report that the ship with the envoy to/from Delos is returning, which in turn means that Socrates will be executed the following day as per the law. The delay of the ship had caused the month-long stay of execution for Socrates, allowing his associates to come up with a plan to break him out of jail that night as a result.

Crito had been watching Socrates sleep and when he awakes, tells him that he wished that he could be as peaceful as him in such a time of sorrow and pain. Crito says that he had always thought Socrates to be eudaimonisa (normally translated as “happy,” but I feel strongly that it is more literally such as “well-spirited,” with an emphasis on the “spirit” aspect, referring specifically to Socrates’ frequent mention of his personal daimon) to which Socrates answers that he would be a fool to just now be afraid to die after all of the discussions they had had on the nature of the soul.

Crito continues to plead that it will be embarrassing to him and the others if people started to spread rumors that Crito and the gang had not tried their best to get their friend of out jail, especially when they had the financial resources to do so. What a public shame it would be for them if public opinion were to judge them as friends who did not help a “friend in need.”

That is about all that Socrates needs to hear, then, as to what “public opinion” has to say about their actions. Socrates asks for an agreement from Crito, however, before he launches into his full answer. He sets up the condition that one must never do wrong to another, especially if one has been wronged. To requite wrong with wrong is as bad, or perhaps worse than the original wrong done. Before Socrates will agree to continue, he asks if Crito thinks that this is to be agreed upon, for the majority of people would not go so far as to say this. However, for Socrates, if two people do not agree with this condition, then “toutois ouk esti koine boule,” (there is no common desire/wish between them) and that they would be in opposition. Basically what Socrates was saying is that if Crito did not agree to acknowledge what Socrates held to be his deepest philosophical conviction, then all of their decades of friendship would be for nought.

Yet, does that mean that Socrates was asking to agree with him? Not necessarily. Socrates makes it clear  that Crito is in no danger of being executed the following day, so he should be able to make informed, rational decisions, beyond emotional prejudices. In other words, Socrates asking Crito to agree with him, but rather if what he is saying is actually right or not. For, if it is not right, then everything that Socrates believed in and in which he had rooted his life’s philosophy would be in vain.

A true friend then, for Socrates, is not merely someone who agrees with him or not, but rather, if that person is willing to become his enemy by disagreeing with him if he does not think that what Socrates is saying is right or not. Not right by Socrates, but based on what that person knows in his or her soul in relation to be what is right according to one’s prakteos, or duty in life. In Sanskrit philosophy, this is known as Dharma, and is the highest form of action that one can perform in life. Socrates was not asking Crito to agree with Socrates, but rather at the risk of losing their friendship, to follow what he knew was his duty.

How many, indeed, are willing in the face of losing a lifelong friend to contradict him or her when faced with assessing whether that friend be right or not, but based upon whether it is in line with one’s prakteos or dharma to agree or disagree?

Sweet Surrender

When Socrates was waiting for his sentence to be carried out, which had been delayed by the Delian envoy, he did a curious thing, one that has ironically spilt quite a bit of its own ink over the years. He supposedly wrote something down, more precisely, he composed music.

This in itself would not be significant, nor even noteworthy, except for the fact that, as far as we know, Socrates never wrote anything during his lifetime, or at least nothing that ever came down through the ages. All of the words of Socrates, as with Jesus and the Buddha, were written by disciples, students, chroniclers, or scholars. These three men, however, did not put pen to paper, so to speak, and write down their thoughts, ideas or teachings. They spoke, using the oral transmission wisdom as their only instrument of instruction.

However, when Socrates was in his jail cell in Athens, this may have changed. In the prologue of the Phaedo, which is Plato's chronicle of the final day of Socrates' life, Echecrates asks the eponymous Phaedo if he knows the story of the final days of Socrates and if he could relate it. Phaedo answers that he was actually there in person and the bulk of the dialogue is the fictional "memory" of Phaedo's account of the conversation in the jail cell.

When asked if he would relate the story, for Echechrates says that "sweetly" he would like to hear it, Phaedo answers that he will do his best, and the motif of bittersweet becomes rather prominent. Phaedo felt a mixture of pleasure and pain that final day with Socrates in that he was happy to have been there and to have known him, but deeply sad in that it was in fact the last day on the planet. He relates the conceit of Aesop that pleasure and pain are really one entity and that "a very curious mixture of pleasure and pain was present" while Socrates and his friends were discussing the nature of the Soul, sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping, in short, a very human affair.

When Phaedo begins his re-telling of the story, he describes what Socrates was doing. Apparently, during the final month of his life, while waiting in his jail cell and after the daily visits were over, Socrates' daimon had spoken quite distinctly to him, yet in a manner even more distinct in its aberration from the norm, than in its message. For the first time, his daimon had told him to do something, rather than the accustomed message of dissuading him from doing something. His daimon had told him to "make music."

For seventy years, Socrates had not composed anything, yet upon his imminent death, his inner voice, his daimon, or his hotline to the divinity, asked him to compose hymns to Apollo, the God who figures so prominently in Socrates' life-long quest to "Know Thyself."

Socrates obliges, and since he does not know how to compose his own, he choses to set some of the words and fables of Aesop to music as his paean to the God. For all his life, he listened to this voice tell him not to act, until Time was truly of the essence. The final directive, his soul's will and testament, was to compose hymns of praise to God.

He obeyed, and in his final act, he showed gratitude to this God and he composed. He made music. He acted. He was grateful.

The Waiting Game

I have always been a bit of a half-breed, at least when it comes to my metaphysical make-up. Basically since day one, literally, I have been a bit of at times been the odd man out, being born in the Indian (Native American) hospital in Alburquerque. Needless to say, there was no fear of a baby swapping incident happening. However, I feel that a part of New Mexico was indelibly infused into my soul here.

Sitting on a deck overlooking an unspoiled portion of the Sangre de Christo range of the Rocky Mountains, I do understand the oft-maligned metaphor of “sitting on a mountaintop,” whether physically or metaphysically to really re-charge one’s inner core, to find one's self. Sure, there are mockeries, satires, and spoofs of sitting on mountains for “enlightenment,” something that I have heard people scoff at, but I believe in it, to the very life-essence of my soul.

My friends and their kids, and my daughter, all just left to go down to the “village” below, while I am sitting up here alone, with the hummingbirds, grouse, mountain jays, ravens, crows, and unseen, but ever-present eagles. The chipmunks, (or ground squirrels), rabbits, bear, deer, wild turkeys, elk, and invisible mountain lions are around, chatting, foraging, sleeping, prowling, in short, living. But, one thing they don’t do is to wait for something, even if they are waiting.

That, I believe, is an unbreachable gap between us and the other animals on the planet, we wait for the future, but usually quite impatiently. Instead of allowing it to happen, we force it, press it, shape it, contemplate it, visualize it, and so on and are often bitter or surprised when it is not what we had imagined, and then usually seek some reason for why it was for better or for worse.


Krishnamurti, one of my metaphysical gurus, for lack of a better term, though for me, it is a perfect term, would often ask the question to his listeners, “Are you able to just sit somewhere and be alone?” Not meaning, without another person with you, but alone, truly alone? For him, the main blockage of that for people is K’s old stand-by of “fear.” We live with so much fear each day. Not fear of falling down the stairs, or getting lost somewhere, or losing our keys, but fear of being alone, completely and utterly alone, with just ourselves.

With the advances, if you wish to call them such, of technologies, it is nearly impossible to be physically disconnected from others in contemporary America for sure. Cell phones and iPads with 3G capacity allow us to be on the Internet, even on top of our mountains. To be able to call others, check Facebook, Twitter, or write blogs upon blogs upon blogs.

It makes being alone a challenge, a true effort. As it does for waiting. Often when we are waiting, we are checking our emails, surfing the Internet, posting on Facebook, writing blogs upon blogs upon blogs. Yadda, Yadda, blah, blah, blah, dribble, dribble, dribble. Same old shit we’ve been doing for years, right?

What is it that we are so afraid of when we think about the possibility of being alone then?

Something that I have contemplated quite a bit, and has been part of my academic work is the relationship between memory and death. My cousin was talking about a book she was reading the other day about an African concept of death and memory and that there are different levels of death. The truly dead are the ones that are forgotten. For as long as someone remembers you, you are not dead. This concept was also prevalent in Ancient Greece, as is seen in Homer and is played out in the trial and death of Socrates. You can die twice as a result, once physically, the other time when the last person alive on Earth has forgotten you.

When Socrates was on trial and was musing about the options of his imminent conviction, as it was clear that he was not gunning for an acquittal, he asks the court why he should be afraid of Death? Either it is nothing at all, but like a great sleep, or it is where he will be able to commune with the dead, and in his own words, to badger them with questions like he did while living on the streets of Athens. Why should he do anything different in death than he had in life? Indeed.

Many people have a “bucket list” now in America, made popular by the eponymous movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, two actors indeed showing their physical mortality. What is the impetus for a bucket list if not that one believes, that Time will soon be up. Hurry Up, It’s Time! cries the barkeep in Eliot’s Waste Land.

We are always worried about Time being Up. Done. Over.

Or, we worry about the future, because we feel that we are “waiting” for the future, waiting for Godot, waiting for someone new, waiting for something new, waiting for something old to be done, waiting for something new to begin, waiting.

 When are we going? When do we get there? What are we doing tonight? What are we doing next year for vacation? What’s for dinner? What do you want to do now?

But, it is never really, “What do you want to do NOW?” By no means do I think I am the first to make this observation, but I think that it is important enough to repeat, and ask the question, borrowing from Morrissey and The Smiths, “How Soon is Now?” Are we even in the Here and Now as Ram Dass suggested? Can we be?

“Now” is either too soon or too late, seldom, if ever, just right. Supposedly, and it is cornerstone in Joycean folklore, when James Joyce and W. B. Yeats met for the first and only time, when the former was not-yet known and the latter was at his zenith of repute, Joyce, being  cocksure and portentous, remarked to the elder Poet, “We have met too late; you are too old to be influenced by me.” As Kelso would say, “Buuurnnn.”

We are always meeting ourselves too late as well, seeing ourselves coming and going in our own lives, too old to be educated by life’s lessons. As my young daughter says if I point out something, she retorts, “I know that” (which she usually does).

We often feel that our lives are interminably plagued by the great “if” of the phrases such as, “what if?” or “if only...” or “if I had known...” and so on.

We are really only waiting for one thing, to die. That is not fatalistic, but as the saying goes, only Death and Taxes are certain. For the rest, we are waiting for an imagined future, a fabrication of desires and wants, but not reality. Some of those may become a reality, but, by and large, they will never exist, only be approximations, a calculus of disappointments or successes and/or exceeded/failed expectations, but rarely what we had convinced ourselves of what we were waiting for. And then, we blame fate, or chance, or "bad karma", but in reality, we have no one else to blame but ourselves for being uncomfortable with waiting.

When Socrates was condemned to death, in normal circumstances, the sentence would have been carried out the following day.

Instead, there was a religious holiday involving the envoy of a ship to and from the island of Delos, to propitiate the god Apollo, the one whose oracle had set Socrates on his quest of self-knowledge and making an infamous reputation for himself by becoming the Athenian gadfly. The boat’s return to Athens was delayed by bad weather, and Socrates was given a reprieve of about a month’s time to “wait” for his punishment to be carried out.

He literally then, was waiting to die.

What he did in that time is what I find to be most remarkable and to be the blood and marrow of the Curse of Socrates.

Whatness of Horseness and Horseness of Whatness

While teaching an in situ program in Castiglione Fiorentino, Italy, one of the "situ" that we were "in" was the Vatican City Galleries and Museum. For one of my classes, "The Truths in Painting," perhaps the single most important visual image for the class was the Pope's chambers painted by no less than Raphael, highlighted by his "Scuola di Atene (School of Athens)" mural.

The painting, along with Raphael's bored-looking cherubs at the base of his Sistine Madonna, is perhaps the most widely recognized work by the artist.

In the center stand Plato and Aristotle, apparently having a philosophical discussion. Plato is seen pointing upwards, investigating the things above the earth, while Aristotle points doggedly to the floor, symbolizing his insistence upon the material universe to be championed above the ethereal Ideals of his former teacher, Plato.

Plato and Aristotle are the direct inheritors of the "curse" of Socrates in that they have come to represent two main ways of viewing reality: either as a Platonist who believes that this world is a flawed, less-than-perfect embodiment of a divine original Ideal world; or as a Aristotlean, believing that more or less, "what you see is what you get."

On the one hand, I remember having a conversation with a friend who is a patent lawyer of bio-medical devices, and in the middle of a discussion, he declared, "I am an Aristotlean" but at the same time acknowledged that he had never read a word of Aristotle. Another friend, said something similar when he was defending his choice to eat veal without remorse, more or less condensing a Heraclitian "man as the measure of all things" and Aristotle's teleological stance of "happiness." Neither one of them is "wrong" for saying what they did, but it is curious how deep these distinctions go in our society.

On the other hand, Platonic has come to be associated with relationships, rather than if there is a God or not. What is rather ironic about this is that the description that many people give about a "Platonic Relationship" is often conflated with no less than Aristophanes' description of "soul mates" in Plato's Symposium, and is then likewise attributed to Socrates, who was ridiculed by Aristophanes in his comedy, "The Clouds". Oh, what a tangled net we weave.

To return to Raphael's painting, one way the distinction has been made is by James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus who contemplates the Ephinany and tries to explain it to his friend Cranly in Joyce's bildungsroman "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Is there a whatness of horseness, meaning an essence of being "a horse," or is it a horseness of whatness, in that there is a part of everything in the whole of "whatness?"

Socrates' predilection for horse analogies was not lost on Joyce. However, what happened to the "horse" of Athens, once the "gadfly" of Socrates had been swatted down once and for all?

I imagine that wannabe philosophers might have begun to think twice about such an occupation that could prove to be lethal. More than just being banned, speaking out loud your thoughts that might irk your neighbor could quite easily lead to a witch hunt and a trial for your life.

Socrates warned that the great horse of Athens was wont to be lazy, to wallow in a lethargic stupor, getting angry when stung by his stories of horses, cobblers, and incessant questioning.

Not to be so bold as to assert that the Death of Socrates was the end of Athens, but I would go so far as to say it was a pebble in the waters that began to ripple rather largely. Was the "nature" of the horse, the great city of Athens, one of inertia? Sir Isaac Newton's later works on gravity and inertia may not have been as timely as they were without the history of scientific thought initiated by Plato's student, Aristotle,  but that does not diminish there importance. Is a great force subject to die by its own inertia then? When we are not goaded and prodded and annoyed and irked into motion, would we too not more often than not, just take a metaphysical nap?

Whether pointing up or down, the question I put to my students when viewing the painting is simple, "What do you think?"

Exercising My Daimon

The charge of heresy against Socrates was largely due to his claim that he, for lack of a better word, had a hotline to the gods. Socrates asserted that he had a voice that he heard, that he called his daimon, which is an entity similar to an angel (which originally means messenger in Greek), that is something between humans and the Gods, quite like Hermes and the hermetic messages that he brought to mortals from atop Mt. Olympus.

In Plato's Apology, Socrates refers to this daimon quite a bit, and he likewise has to calm the madding crowd with his heretical remarks that this daimon is actually relating the will of God, most probably Apollo, as it was his oracle at Delphi who made the prophecy that no man was wiser than Socrates. However, as is often with Socrates, there is an ironic twist. Irony, for Socrates was not meaning what one says, (according to most scholarship on the subject, specifically Vlastos).

His daimon did not tell him what to do, but rather only told him when not to do something. So, for Socrates, the reason that he did not pursue a public political life is because his daimon never dissuaded him from not doing soon instead of urging him on to pursue one. A bit of reverse daimonology if you will.

For his closing statement, Socrates says that his daimon never stopped him from saying the things that he said during his trial, meaning that he had no regrets for what he said, nor that he felt he had given up his life without realizing the consequences. He needed to goad Athens and to annoy them and to irk them. For, as he correctly predicted, there would not be another one like him to follow. In fact, soon after his his sentencing was revealed and justice had been served cold to the Athenian population, they did in fact heavily regret their actions for putting him to death.

However, did his "curse" live on?

Demons have become a cliche in the past decade of self-help and recovery, and usually refer to something bad, a character defect, a fault, a sin.

A daimon was originally neither good, nor evil, but merely an intermediate essence or being that existed between the world of man and the world of the god/s. Daimons, soon to be demons started to become quite popular during King James I/VI of England/Scotland with his tome on Daemonologie around the time of Shakespeare. Now King James was a bit of a drama case, much like the current King James of basketball, and is more known for his Bible that his demons, but his legacy there is no less interesting.

Demons became quite a popular motif in the Flemish school of Painting around the same time,  most notably with Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" where you get some pretty psychedelic rendering of demons, mostly ghastly and ghoulish, definitely not neutral.

Socrates felt compelled to listen to his daimon which helped to exorcise his demons and to help others to work on their own demons, though that work had to be done by themselves. You cannot exorcise another person's demons.

Over the years, I have been trying to take Socrates' charge to heart and to exorcise my own demons, which I have done. Many of them show up in Indra's Net, often mockingly (because nothing pisses off a demon more than being mocked) or when necessary, with all earnestness and seriousness if my demons have caused emotional duress or pain to others.

More important, for me at least, has been learning how to exercise my own daimon, and to be guided by that voice, which is beyond good and evil, and to learn to Know My-self.