Alone in the World: The Existential Socrates in the Apology and Crito
| Author | Emanuele Saccarelli |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00672.x |
| Published date | 01 October 2007 |
| Date | 01 October 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Alone in the World: The Existential Socrates
in the Apology and Crito
Emanuele Saccarelli
San Diego State University
The story of Socrates’ life, and in particular the circumstances of his death,has been a nearly obligatory
referent for the development of Western political thought. Contemporary political theorists such as
Hannah Arendt and, more recently, Gerald Mara and DanaVilla have presented Socrates as a model of
political engagement for our times. Against the background of these accounts, I develop an existential
interpretation of Socrates as he appears in the Apology and Crito, focusing on the singular, private,
experiential and incommunicable character of Socrates’ truth. In doing so,I discuss some important and
contentious issues in Socratic studies, such as his disavowal of knowledge, his allegiance to theAthenian
polis and the apparent tension between his defiance during the trial and his willingness to submit to the
resulting death sentence.My inter pretation reveals a Socrates that we should not strive to understand, let
alone emulate politically,particularly if we wish to respect his own sensibilities.
The story of Socrates’ life, and in particular the circumstances of his death, has
been an almost obligatory referent for the development of Wester n political
thought. St Augustine, Hegel, Mill and Nietzsche, to name a few outstanding
examples, felt the need to look to Socrates in order to find their bear ings.In the
difficult journey of political thought Socrates has been perceived as a pole star,
projecting his indispensable light, reaching diverse and distant interpreters, illu-
minating the worlds they inhabited and orienting them. Contemporary political
theorists continue to look to Socrates in such a way. Some seek to extract from
his story a model of political engagement for our times – a way to negotiate the
difficult relationship between individuality and collectivity, speech and action,
philosophy and politics. This article is an attempt to resist such a move. To resist
it not as an obligatory genuflection to a prevailing ‘incredulity toward metanar-
ratives’, or because ‘classic texts are concerned with their own quite alien prob-
lems’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv; Skinner, 1988, p. 66). To resist it, rather, because
Socrates is a poor model of political engagement – allergic to institutional and
organizational settings, inept once drawn into them against his will and incapable
of relating to and mobilizing the many. To resist it, further,because his real value,
that which is worthy of enduring curiosity and respect, is consciously and
fundamentally removed from politics. Socrates’ truth is anti-political, and to
impress upon it a political character,even as a secondary or indirect effect, would
be not merely to look for political models in strange and dubious places, but to
violate his own sensibilities.
I will begin this article by examining briefly some instructive attempts to find in
Socrates a model of political engagement (Arendt, 1990;Mara, 1997; Villa,2001).
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00672.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007 VOL 55, 522–545
© 2007The Author.Jour nal compilation © 2007 Political StudiesAssociation
These texts, though concerned with their own pursuits, are all animated by a
desire to put Socrates to political use.While dealing in a sophisticated manner
with the challenges posed by some stubborn facts about Socrates’ hostility toward
politics as it existed in Athens, they ultimately recuperate the negations and
refusals characteristic of Socrates’ behavior as a political and even democratic
practice. Socrates emerges from these arguments as a model – indeed the most
important, pioneering one – of how to maintain the delicate union between
philosophy and politics.
To this I oppose a consistently and radically anti-political Socrates. I sketch out a
Socrates that, at the risk of gross anachronism, I call ‘existential’. This label is
useful in pointing to the experiential, incommunicable, alienated character of his
truth. The existential inspiration for my argument is found in Albert Camus’ The
Stranger (1989). The protagonist Meursault, like Socrates, faces a trial. The force
of his story has nothing to do with computing and balancing the political
relations and obligations connecting the individual to the laws, or extracting,
through any other procedure, a model of political engagement. Meursault is not
this kind of individual. He can only appear as a flat surf ace that, we suspect,
conceals an inscrutable and incomparable subjectivity. His story is compelling not
as a political model or, conversely, a cautionary tale. It is compelling because it
exposes the abyss that separates the laws (their arguments, procedures and logic)
from the internal world of his lived experience.1In this sense,like Meursault, the
existential Socrates is more of a black hole than a pole star – something that can
be observed in its external physical boundaries, but whose fundamental nature is
inevitably concealed by the very laws that shape it.
Socrates’ immense gravitational force has pulled toward him hosts of ‘Socratic’
followers. In his own times, each of them, from Aristippus’ hedonism to Antis-
thenes’ asceticism, had a wildly different notion of just what the master was trying
to teach. Socrates was destined to remain obscure even to those who lived
alongside him. This is also true of Plato, of course. Indeed, if persuaded by my
argument, one could say that it was Plato who, by daring to trap Socrates’ lived
experience in a textual cage, disfigured Socrates most terribly. Yet, paradoxically,
Plato’s representation is the obligatory passage to arrive at the existential Socrates.
Neither Xenophon’s insufferable bore nor Aristophanes’ mumbling charlatan
could sustain such a figure. This paradox need not be a disabling one. Alexander
Nehamas expressed this intuition well when he wrote that:
we should not assume that Plato understands what enables Socrates to be the type
of person he was.Plato has no deep account of the paradox Socrates constituted for
him. His early portrait of Socrates exhibits the paradox and lays it out for our
inspection (Nehamas, 1998, p. 85).
In this article I will not address the difficult questions regarding the relationship
between Socrates and Plato or the full corpus of the latter’s writings.2I will
instead inspect, in an existential vein, Socrates as he appears in the Apology and the
THE EXISTENTIAL SOCRATES 523
© 2007The Author.Jour nal compilation © 2007 Political StudiesAssociation
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(3)
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