Ep. 90: Not Worth Living

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2022

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In The Apology of Socrates, Plato exposes the pretensions of self-styled experts and authorities. Socrates was the only man in Athens who admitted he was not wise—and neither was anyone else. This didn't make him very popular, but he was willing to die rather than give up the truth.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the truth of the matter, gentlemen of the jury.
0:03.8	Wherever a man has taken a position that he believes to be best, or has been placed by his commander,
0:11.0	there he must, I think, remain and face danger, without a thought for death or anything else, rather than disgrace.
0:21.0	Those are the words of Socrates. I decided we couldn't just leave him accused, as we did last week.
0:32.6	We read the clouds together, talked about Aristophanes' accusation against Socrates,
0:37.3	lumping him in with the sophists and the relativists and the natural philosophers,
0:42.2	and all of the dark, pernicious things that Aristophanes said those, you know, eggheads we're doing.
0:49.2	And I mentioned I read a little bit of Socrates' apology, his speech before the jury, in defense of himself, in 399 BC.
0:58.2	He was called to trial and sentenced to death, but Plato writes this, beautiful, probably semi-imagined,
1:05.3	but incredibly articulate, defensive Socrates, against the accusations not only of the Athenian citizenry,
1:11.9	he has three official accusers, Anatis Maletus and Lycon.
1:16.5	But as we'll get into, in a second, he's also defending himself against Aristophanes, against the court of public opinion,
1:22.5	against all the rumors and whispering that have been going on in the background during his whole life.
1:29.5	And it's a great time to be reading the apology, because it turns out that it is the manifesto for life in a time or a period
1:40.0	when free speech is under assault.
1:43.6	Socrates defends himself here by saying essentially that when you expose the foolishness of the rich and powerful,
1:51.4	they try to shut you down by just making any accusation against you that they can plausibly grab from the out of thin air.
1:57.8	They lumped him in, he says, with all the other softest, because he showed that they didn't know as much as they claimed.
2:03.7	The poets, that is the artists, the technicians, that is the makers of things, or we might today say the scientists, and the politicians.
2:10.5	He exposed them all, showed they had no clothes, showed that the emperor had no clothes, and exposed them for frauds.
2:15.6	This does not make people happy.
2:17.5	And we may think today about the kinds of things that people say, for example, about the accusers of Dr. Fauciam.
	...

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