The Apology — themes & analysis

In the penalty phase, when Socrates is asked why he could not simply agree to stop philosophizing in exchange for acquittal, he gives the answer that has carried his name down two and a half millennia: the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. He says it knowing the jury will hear it as defiance. He says it anyway, because by his own account it is the only thing he is qualified to say.

What he means by examination is not introspection in the modern sense. It is not journaling, not therapy, not self-discovery. It is cross-questioning — the patient, often humiliating work of asking yourself and others what you actually mean by the words you use, what you actually believe, whether the things you call good really are good, whether the things you say you know you actually know. The Apology is a record of Socrates doing this in public, for free, for forty years. It is also a record of how unwelcome this turns out to be.

He does not present the examined life as pleasant. He has made enemies of nearly everyone he has examined; he is poor; his family has suffered; he is on trial. But he insists that any other life would be a kind of sleep — a waking sleep in which a person is moved by opinions they have not tested, fears they have not interrogated, ambitions they have not chosen. Athens, by his account, is a city of sleepers. He has been the noise that wakes them, and they are about to silence the noise.

The line is not a slogan in the speech; it is the conclusion of an argument. A human being is the kind of animal that can examine its own life. To refuse to do so is to refuse what is distinctively human in oneself. Better, Socrates says, to die at seventy still asking the questions than to live to a hundred without having asked any.

Where to follow it: Part 1 (the oracle and the search), Part 2 (the unexamined life is not worth living).

Socrates explains in Part One where his strange reputation came from. Years ago his friend Chaerephon went to the oracle at Delphi and asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The priestess answered that no one was. Socrates was baffled. He knew himself; he knew he was not wise. But the god could not lie. So he set out to refute the oracle by finding someone wiser than himself.

He went first to the politicians. He found that the men who had the greatest reputation for wisdom were precisely the ones least aware of what they did not know. He went to the poets. He found that they could not explain their own poems — they wrote, he says, by inspiration, like prophets, without understanding. He went to the craftsmen. He found that they did know real things, but each of them, on the strength of his craft, claimed to know everything else as well. None of them could withstand questioning.

Eventually he understood what the oracle meant. The wisdom of Socrates is not knowledge. It is the awareness of his own ignorance — the refusal to claim what he cannot defend. This is the doctrine that has come down to us as I know that I know nothing, though Socrates never says it in quite those words. What he does say is that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that the god was using his name as a placeholder: the wisest among you is the one who has noticed this.

The investigation was not free. Every politician, every poet, every craftsman he exposed became an enemy. The cumulative effect is the slander Socrates is now defending himself against — that he is a clever talker who makes the weaker argument win. The Apology is, in this sense, the bill coming due for the oracle's answer. Forty years of patient questioning, paid for at the end with hemlock.

Where to follow it: Part 1 (Chaerephon and Delphi).

Late in Part One, Socrates gives the city the image that has defined philosophical dissent ever since. Athens, he says, is like a great horse — noble, well-bred, but slow; a horse of that size is always at risk of falling asleep on its feet. The god has attached a gadfly to it. The gadfly's job is to bite, to land on a different spot every day, to prevent the heavy beast from settling. The gadfly is Socrates. The horse is the city.

The image does several kinds of work at once. It explains why he has not entered politics: a gadfly cannot do its work from a high office; it has to move around, talk to one citizen at a time, ask the questions in the marketplace. It explains why he is so unpopular: a gadfly is, by design, annoying; the citizens he questions resent the questioning. And it explains what Athens will lose if it kills him. You will not easily find another, he says. The god sent one; the city, drowsy, is about to swat it.

Socrates is unsentimental about how this looks from the city's side. He understands that the people he has stung will be relieved when he is gone. He predicts they will sleep more peacefully for the rest of their lives — at least until the god, in his care for Athens, sends another. The implicit warning is that the god might not bother.

The gadfly metaphor has been picked up by every philosophical tradition that has had to defend itself against the state. Bertrand Russell invoked it; Martin Luther King Jr. cited it explicitly in the Letter from Birmingham Jail. The Apology turned the figure of the philosopher-as-irritant into a permanent role in Western political life. Socrates's argument is that this role is given by the divine, not chosen — and that a city that destroys its irritants destroys its own capacity to wake up.

Where to follow it: Part 1 (the gadfly speech).

Socrates tells the jury that his entire life's work has been a single message, repeated to whoever would listen: do not care for the body before the soul; do not care for money before virtue; first and most importantly, attend to the soul. He says this is the divine commission he was given, and that no greater good has ever come to Athens than his attempt to deliver it.

The argument behind this priority is plain. The body is a temporary instrument; the wealth and reputation it pursues are temporary too. The soul — what Socrates calls the psychē, the ruling part of a person, the place where judgment and virtue live — is the durable thing, the thing whose condition determines whether a life has been well or badly lived. To spend a life polishing the body and starving the soul is to have priorities exactly inverted.

This is also why Socrates can claim, with apparent calm, that no real harm can be done to him. Meletus and Anytus can kill his body; they cannot damage his soul, because that is in his keeping, not theirs. The just man cannot be harmed by the unjust man, because the only injuries that matter are the ones we inflict on ourselves by acting unjustly. The Stoics will spend the next four centuries elaborating this thought; Christianity will translate it into a different vocabulary; the Apology is where it is first put plainly.

Socrates's care for the soul is not private piety. It has political consequences. A city full of people tending their souls is a different city from one full of people chasing money and honor. The Apology is the speech of a man who has tried, by individual conversation, to make Athens the first kind of city — and is being executed by Athens for the attempt.

Where to follow it: Part 1 (the great speech to the city), Part 3 (no harm comes to a good man).

The Apology is the founding text of philosophy as a counter-cultural force — a way of life the city cannot quite tolerate, and that does not back down when threatened. Every later trial of a thinker by a state, from Galileo to Bonhoeffer to Havel, has been read against this template. Socrates set the shape: the philosopher does not flatter the court, does not retract the position, does not promise to behave, does not beg.

Part of what makes the trial founding is what Socrates says about death in the final speech. After the sentence is handed down, he turns to the jurors who voted for him and tells them, almost cheerfully, that he is not afraid. Death is one of two things. Either it is dreamless sleep, in which case it is a great gain — most of us would trade many troubled days for one perfectly peaceful night, and death would be a single such night, forever. Or it is a journey to a place where the souls of the dead gather. If that is true, what could be better? He could spend eternity questioning Homer and Odysseus and the heroes who suffered unjust deaths. And in that world, they certainly do not execute people for asking questions.

He does not argue that one of these is more likely. He notes that both are good, and so death cannot be feared by a person who has thought about it carefully. To fear death, he said earlier in the speech, is to pretend to know what one does not know — to claim with confidence that death is the worst of evils, when no one has any evidence that it is an evil at all. This is the same Socratic ignorance he applied to the politicians and poets, now turned on the largest fear a human being has.

The argument is the argument of someone who has taken the care of the soul seriously his whole life. Socrates is not afraid of death because he is not afraid of the verdict on his soul. The Apology ends with a sentence Plato would not have let himself invent if it had not been spoken: The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only god knows.

Where to follow it: Part 1 (no one knows whether death is an evil), Part 3 (the closing speech).