The death of Socrates, Hannah Arendt observed, continues to traumatize philosophy. I found out how right she was when I wrote two books on the damage done to philosophy by raging anti-Communists in the Twentieth Century. Their accusations against academics (corrupting the youth and failing to honor the gods of the city) echoed the charges made against Socrates two millennia earlier.
But Socrates was different from modern American philosophers, indeed downright inspiring, for he was willing to die for philosophy. This fact alone confronts us today as a mystery, for philosophy has changed in the meantime. What sane person would die for formal semantics, or for deconstruction? But if philosophy has changed so much, what right do these disciplines have to call themselves by its ancient name? Are they trading on their ancestors, like some feckless fourth-generation heir to a major fortune? Socrates stares at us today as coldly as he stared at that jury who convicted him; and like them, we do not know where to hide.
It’s hard even to say who really killed him. Certainly not the odious Anytus and Meletus—they merely brought the charges. So was it the jury—approximately 5000 of his fellow Athenians? He could have escaped them on a couple of occasions. For one, he was allowed, as were all defendants sentenced to death, to propose an alternative penalty. Juries in Athens often accepted such alternatives, if they were painful enough—something like lifelong exile. But Socrates didn’t even try: his “alternative” was that he and his family should be put up at public expense while he resumed the activities that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.
So was he himself responsible for his own death, de facto committing suicide by jury? Well, in the Phaedo he condemns suicide: we are the possessions of the gods, and a possession should not destroy itself unless its master indicates that it should (61b-d). Socrates’ master, he says, is god (singular but not capitalized, not the monotheistic God but a sort of generalized divine realm, perhaps a “godhead”); and what god wants him to do, clearly, is not to kill himself but to philosophize: to inquire, together with others, into the nature of things.
This brings us to Socrates’ other chance to escape death, which is presented in the Crito. There, he refuses the escape his friends have arranged for a number of reasons, one of which is that escaping would discredit his whole life. The people to whom he flees (the Megarians) to will not allow him to resume his work because they will not take him seriously when he says that what really matters is virtue and justness and institutions and laws, not individual lives. And the people of Athens whom he leaves behind will decide that he didn’t really mean it when he said that a life without philosophy wasn’t worth living: when the chips were down and he had to choose, life was more important to him than philosophy. The two should never have diverged in the first place.
Socrates’ escape would discredit him, to be sure—but more importantly, it would discredit philosophy itself. So he has to accept death for the sake of the future of philosophy, which means for the sake of the future philosophers, to whom he will inevitably serve as an example of the philosophical life.
And the need to die holds for any teacher: teachers must pass away so that their students can be freed from their very teachings and investigate on their own. So Socrates dies for the sake of his students; they are the ones who force death upon him. They are his murderers.
But what about those students in their turn? They, too, if they really are philosophers, will have to die for their students. Socrates dies for his students so that they will be able to die for theirs. And theirs. And theirs….
Back when I still taught Plato, I would end this part of my lecture by saying, “Who killed Socrates? I am looking at his murderers, sitting at their desks. He stayed in Athens and died for your sake.”
And so in general, to study philosophy you have to be ready to kill your teacher. There are several ways to do this; not all deaths are physical. Socrates’ willingness to die for his teaching mission snows that he identified with that mission: he was a philosopher, and nothing more.
You can, therefore, also kill a philosopher by killing their philosophy—by refuting it. Each generation of philosophers has to be willing to do this. Plato did it to Socrates when he abandoned Socratic skepticism and started teaching a positive doctrine, the Theory of Forms. Aristotle did it to Plato when he rejected the “separation” between forms and sensibles. We will look at these things shortly. But for the moment: philosophy moves ahead by magistricide—the killing of one’s teachers.