Socrates versus Plato

We can conclude that Plato was not blind to the civic and religious dangers created by Socrates. Part of what makes his Apology so complex and gripping is that it is not a one-sided encomium that conceals the features of the Socratic way of life that lay behind the anxiety and resentment felt by many of his fellow citizens. Plato, of course, leaves no doubt that he sides with Socrates and against Athens, but in doing so he allows us to see why Socrates had enemies as well as friends. The multisidedness of Plato’s portrait adds to its verisimilitude and should increase our confidence in him as a source of our understanding of the historical Socrates. A defense of Socrates that portrayed him as an innocuous preacher of moral pieties would have left us wondering why he was sentenced to death, and indeed why anyone bothered to indict him in the first place.

Plato gives no hint in his Apology that he had any reservations about the way Socrates led his life or the doctrines that guided him; the format of the Apology prevents him from doing so. He has made the decision to let Socrates speak for himself in this work and to refrain from offering any of his own reflections on the justice or injustice of the charges against his teacher. But, in the Republic, he puts into the mouth of its principal interlocutor, “Socrates,” an observation about the corrosive power that philosophy can have when it takes hold at too early an age. When young people first hear philosophical questions about the traditional moral standards they have learned from their parents and their community, and when they see that it is difficult to defend these orthodoxies without falling into contradiction, they are prone to reject all traditional morality and to become essentially lawless. For this reason, philosophy may come to be seen as a dangerous and disreputable pursuit. The Socrates of the Republic therefore suggests that in an ideal society the young should not be exposed to ethical doubt until they are well into their maturity. This, of course, is not a restriction that the historical Socrates imposed on himself. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates prides himself on addressing his questions to every Athenian—no one, in his view, is too young or too old for the examined life—and he freely acknowledges that the young love to see their elders embarrassed when they are unable to defend their beliefs. Whereas the Socrates of Plato’s Apology assumes that there is no need to place limits on philosophical inquiry, the Socrates of the Republic—who speaks as the mouthpiece of Plato—holds that in an ideal society this kind of activity would be carefully regulated. Similarly, in Plato’s Laws, the main speaker, an unnamed visitor from Athens, praises Sparta and Crete for forbidding the young to criticize the laws of their communities. Plato’s great admiration for Socrates was all the more remarkable because it coexisted not only with a recognition of why Socrates was considered dangerous but also with his belief that Socrates was, to some degree, guilty of impiety and of corrupting the young.