Ask a philosopher to name a superhero. The response won’t be the famous brain in a vat. The likely response will be the centerpiece of a new play at The Public in New York City: Socrates – the embodiment of “the heroism of the philosophical life,” according to Nicole Loraux.
Tim Blake Nelson of O Brother, Where Art Thou? authors the new production depicting Socrates as inspirational freedom fighter willing to pay the ultimate price to question authority. This Captain Marvel for wannabe intellectuals won’t don Gaga-esque costumes nor dazzle villains with gadgetry. No Tom Cruise-like parkouring through Athens as the enemies of the dialectic pursue Socrates. The play’s 2,500-year-old cerebral celeb is a shoeless, overweight, unattractive (so his friends say) white guy.
Classicist Jasper Griffin writes, “Socrates must certainly have been one of the most remarkable men who ever lived.” Socrates appeared at the parties of the posh and powerful. His companions were famous, rich, well-connected “influencers.” The most strikingly handsome man of the time, Alcibiades, jonesed for Socrates. To this day, people associate Socrates with figures like Jesus Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Similarly, people aiming to elevate a relative unknown will call the person “the Socrates of X.” In a recent book, Pedro Henríquez Ureña is labeled “The Socrates of the Caribbean.”
What about the Socrates of The Public? Lauren Alexander at The Public arranged for me to pose a few questions to one of the play’s actors, Dave Quay.
What is the most satisfying scene in the play for you personally?
“It’s definitely cool and unusual to get to play Hades in a show. But the best thing about acting in a true ensemble play like this, where almost all of us play several roles, is to be a part of the storytelling in so many ways. It’s fun to play Meletus the accuser, and to play Diokles, one of the ‘corrupted youth’ of Athens, and eventual tyrant, who is largely responsible for the accusations in the first place.”
In what ways do you expect, or want, the play to speak to the lives of audiences who come to the play?
“As much as this is a play about ancient Athens, it is also about a citizen who refuses to stop asking questions, and who refuses to accept the current political and social reality as the only one possible. As powerful and as influential as Athens was, less than 10% of the city’s population was afforded the full rights of citizenship, or any political voice. There are always more questions to be asked.”
In his own time, not everyone viewed Socrates as a superhero. In his play Clouds, Aristophanes ridicules Socrates. That comedy would still have been fresh in many Athenians’ memories when Socrates came to trial in 399 B.C.E. Aristophanes’s portrayal of Socrates mirrors the abuse Plato heaps on the Sophists, teachers of public speaking who – horrible dictu – took money for their instruction. More than once in Clouds, Aristophanes mentions Socrates and his disciples receiving pay for teaching others how to be successful in speech, though the more serious claim is that Socrates makes weak arguments win the day. Socrates’s student Plato has been successful in erasing Aristophanes’s portrayal of Socrates, supplanting it with a picture of a noble philosopher who has no truck with sophistry or filthy lucre. See Håkan Tell’s work for the evidence.
Worse for Socrates’s reputation has been his circle of companions, several of whom, including Alcibiades (Kōjin Karatini calls Alcibiades “a prototypical demagogue who earned the applause of the masses with bellicose, imperialistic rhetoric”), were involved with the savage oligarchical regime of the Thirty Tyrants, installed by Sparta after the Peloponnesian War. One of Socrates’s students, Critias, was one of the Thirty.
Sparta’s ideology influenced Athenian life well after democracy’s restoration. Anton Powell tells how “the shadow of Sparta” filtered into Plato’s Laws, with directives that children should be trained in hierarchy, and that no one should ever be without a commander. Recently in The New York Times, Yung In Chae and Johanna Hanink offered up a Socrates-endorsed cleaning regimen that is straight out of Sparta: “A city needs guardians in the same way that a household needs an overseer (i.e., a wife.)” Readers will find similar assertions in The Republic. Plato’s ideal state is one of rulers and those ruled. Philosophers don’t mind that, since Plato intends the rulers to be the “philosopher-kings.”
It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating Plato and Socrates as identical twins, forgetting Plato as ventriloquist. Socrates is Plato’s character. When considering Socrates, it’s important to adjust the clout of Plato’s Socrates, what Walter Benjamin calls “the legend of Socrates.” Unlike the Plato of the Seventh Letter, Socrates showed little interest in public politics. As Karatani points out, Socrates’s realm is the agora, not the assembly.
Karatani reminds us that Socrates asks questions that would have elicited unpredictable results. Plato’s Socrates avoids conversation in favor of monologues clearly directed toward a conclusion. To talk to Socrates is to be subject to cross-examination. Karatani relies on Diogenes Laertius’s picture of the Socratic method: “Because in discussing points that arose he often argued with great force, it often happened that [Socrates] was beaten with fists, and pulled about by the hair, and laughed at and ridiculed by the multitude. But he bore all this with great equanimity. So that once, when he had been kicked and buffeted about, said, ‘Suppose an ass had kicked me. Would you have had me file suit against him?’” Not exactly superhero banter on the level of “Hasta la vista, baby!”
Quay is as sensitive as Karatani to the perception of Socrates-as-Interrogator: “What Socrates describes in the play as a relentless search for truth, others interpret as pointless harassment or worse.”
The Public’s play is partly about Socrates as martyr, a Socrates resembling Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, a Socrates of truth, justice, and the American way, appearing at a time of “alternative facts,” disinformation, and people punching each other out in public in ways Diogenes Laertius would recognize. Audiences might hesitate before applauding that Socrates, especially if theatergoers miss what’s important about the Socratic project: its failure.
Two testimonials about the failure. First, Nicole Loraux points out that Socrates is “dead” long before downing the hemlock. Socrates teaches his disciples denial of the body in favor of the soul. What does this look like? “Socrates, barefoot in the snow, standing for hours in meditation without the slightest bother, drinking the night through without getting drunk, spending the night in bed with the most beautiful man in Athens [Alcibiades] without getting an erection” (Gerald Bruns in On Ceasing to Be Human channeling Martha Nussbaum’s description). This is, as Bruns says, a “horror show.” Socrates is not one of us, not human. He’s living not humanly, but philosophically. Is that a life to be applauded?
Second, according to Hans Blumenberg, the cave parable in Book VII of The Republic shows the philosopher’s failure to get people to leave the cave, locus of illusion. In fact, the cave-dwellers desire to kill the person who seeks to free them. Just as Plato is unable to represent life in a cave from inside a cave, Socrates’s logos doesn’t win people over (even when his life is at stake at his trial). The only way to get people out of the cave is by force.
The collective talents at The Public might object to the notion of Socratic failure. Socrates was and is a disputed figure. Dave Quay emphasizes that the new play doesn’t try to decide the issue for the audience. “The audience at the Public Theater, in the role of the arbitrating dikasts, is encouraged to come to their own conclusions.”
Bruce J. Krajewski
Bruce J. Krajewski is a translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender's Kant for Children (forthcoming in 2024 from De Gruyter).
