Is the unexamined life worth living? - considering Aristophanes’ The Clouds
Though often crude and unfair the Greek dramatist’s sendup of Socrates and his school raises important questions about the wisdom of the philosopher’s vocation
The Greek dramatist Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds is notorious as one of literature’s most unjust portrayals of a historical figure. First performed in 423 BC, the play is believed to have prejudiced Athenian public opinion against the great philosopher Socrates, contributing to his trial and death in 399 BC on charges of ‘corrupting the young and denying the gods’.
Is that verdict just? Reading the play for the first time recently, it seemed to me hard to believe such a seemingly throwaway farce, driven by slapstick and scatological humour, could have been of such consequence. The Socrates pictured here bears little resemblance to the venerable founder of modern philosophy enshrined in Plato’s dialogues.
Set in its historical context, however, The Clouds can be appreciated as a more biting satire than a casual reading might suggest. And though the comedy, in its ruthless pursuit of quick laughs and visual gags, is careless of the real Socrates’ philosophy, it seeks to articulate the nature of the real doubts harboured by ordinary Athenian citizens regarding the potentially corrosive impact of philosophic scepticism on the integrity of the city state. For Socrates, the truth is synonymous with the good, and the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’. But is that true? As a lover of philosophy I wrote this post to help work out my own response to the play and the questions it raises.
Enrolling in ‘The Thinkery’
Aristophanes’ entry for the drama prize at the city’s annual Festival of Dionysus, The Clouds is a blunt, and frequently crude, satire. But its impact seems to have been potent, helping cultivate an image of Socrates in the Athenian public mind that culminated in his trial 24 years later. According to The Apology, Plato’s account of Socrates’ defence speech, the philosopher himself referenced the play during his trial, testifying to its lasting effect.
The Clouds depicts Socrates as the head of a community of ethereal intellectuals cloistered within the grounds of ‘The Thinkery’, Aristophanes’ sendup of the philosophical schools that were to culminate in Plato’s Academy. There, they undertake freewheeling research across every manner of subject, including astronomy, geography, natural history, acoustics, measurement, and grammar.
But they are not wholly unworldly. Like the sophists, in Aristophanes’ day an emerging class of itinerant intellectuals who claimed expertise in ‘politikē technē’, the craft of navigating public life through skilled argument and rhetoric, they are quite willing to sell their expertise to those prepared to pay. Certainly, the play’s lead character Strepsiades has no interest in knowledge for its own sake, joining the school to acquire just enough rhetorical skill to persuade his creditors to waive the debts run up by his spendthrift son Pheidippides.
The school’s activities confirm his worst prejudices about the decadence of the intellectual life unmoored from wider society. Here, the agency of the gods of Athens is denied, replaced by a stark materialism that attributes the workings of the world to natural causes. The philosophers venerate the clouds, not Zeus, rain and thunder being caused by a nebulous ‘aerial Whirlwind’ rather than commands from Olympus. ‘Being full of water, and forced to move along,’ says Socrates, ‘they are of necessity precipitated in rain, being fully distended with moisture from the regions where they have been floating; hence they bump each other heavily and burst with great noise.’
The philosophers delight in debunking the city’s honoured poets, preferring the avant-garde productions of Euripides to the ‘incoherence, bombast and turgidity’ of the venerable Aeschylus. Indeed they seem to celebrate novelty for its own sake, spinning and following exotic threads of argument wherever they might lead, without, as Aristophanes sees it, any sense of their obligations to the wider community in which the school is embedded, or plain common sense.
They sharpen their facility for debate in discourse with personifications of the two sides of Argument, Right and Wrong, that stalk the Thinkery’s grounds. Right represents the perspective of Athenian conservatism, the old ways of virtue, ‘justice and truth’, ‘good order’ and ‘modesty’ that sound with the ‘solemn tones of the ancient harmony’. Aristophanes is too sharp a commentator to give the old guard a free pass: Right’s rhapsodies for the good old days betray the pederastic tendencies for which Athenian education was notorious. ‘Never was a child rubbed with oil below the belt’, he salivates, ‘the rest of their bodies thus retained its fresh bloom and down, like a velvety peach. They were not to be seen approaching a lover and themselves rousing his passion by soft modulation of the voice and lustful gaze.’ But Right insists, with Aristophanes seeming approval, that ‘by suchlike teaching I built up the men of Marathon.’
For Wrong, however, teaching serves no particular purpose. He is prepared to put reason to purely instrumental use: ‘Let it be my opponent, he has my full consent; then I shall follow upon the very ground he shall have chosen and shall shatter him with a hail of new ideas and subtle fancies; if after that he dares to breathe another word, I shall sting him in the face and in the eyes with our maxims, which are as keen as the sting of a wasp, and he will die.’
Wrong’s self-appointed freedom from obligation to the truth allows him to argue without restraint, giving his words a certain dark charisma. His power is demonstrated when the undistinguished Pheidippides, forced to join the school after Strepsiades is expelled, soon becomes an accomplished sophist under Wrong’s tutelage, able to justify even the beating of his own father, just about the worst offence that an Athenian could commit. Aristophanes’ dialogue is a fine parody of the sophistic art:
Pheidippides: And first, answer me, did you beat me in my childhood?
Strepsiades: Why, assuredly, for your good and in your own best interest.
Pheidippides: Tell me, is it not right, that in turn I should beat you for your good, since it is for a man’s own best interest to be beaten? What! must your body be free of blows, and not mine? am I not free-born too? the children are to weep and the fathers go free? You will tell me, that according to the law, it is the lot of children to be beaten. But I reply that the old men are children twice over and that it is far more fitting to chastise them than the young, for there is less excuse for their faults.
Strepsiades: But the law nowhere admits that fathers should be treated thus.
Pheidippides: Was not the legislator who carried this law a man like you and me? In those days be got men to believe him; then why should not I too have the right to establish for the future a new law, allowing children to beat their fathers in turn? We make you a present of all the blows which were received before his law, and admit that you thrashed us with impunity. But look how the cocks and other animals fight with their fathers; and yet what difference is there betwixt them and ourselves, unless it be that they do not propose decrees?
Strepsiades: What say you, all here present? It seems to me that he is right, and I am of opinion that they should be accorded their right. If we think wrongly, it is but just we should be beaten.
Appalled by what his son has become, Strepsiades brings the play to an end by burning down the Thinkery, just as Aristophanes believes theatregoers would have wanted. The original version of the play, now lost, ended with the triumph of the sophists, Strepsiades using his newly acquired rhetorical skills to hoodwink his creditors. When that proved unpopular — The Clouds was voted the least popular drama at that year’s festival — Aristophanes amended the text to give his audience, comprised mainly of plain spoken farmers and tradesmen from the villages of Attica in town for the festival, something more satisfying: an uncompromising sendoff for Socrates and his school of idlers.
The true ‘skeptikos’
But the Socrates remembered by history is the great founder of modern philosophy as portrayed by Plato and Xenophon, not the indulgent dreamer of The Clouds. In a useful little book introducing Socrates’ thought Oxford academic C.C.W. Taylor writes that when professors at his university were asked by auditors to say what new teaching methods they had developed in recent years, they simply responded that ‘Socrates had discovered the right way to teach philosophy 2,500 years ago, and nobody had ever been able to make any significant improvements to it since.’ And of course Socrates is remembered for his moral example as well as his thought. Willing to drink the hemlock rather than compromise his integrity, Socrates like Christ, has gone down in history as a supreme example of the just martyr.
For Plato, contra Aristophanes, Socrates’ importance consists precisely in his opposition to sophistry. Immortalised as the great philosopher’s interlocutors in the Platonic dialogues, sophists such as Hippias, Protagoras, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus presented themselves as experts on the fundamental question of how one should live. But Socrates pressed them to demonstrate true expertise, the kind of systematic, hard-won knowledge exhibited by master craftsmen such as builders and shoemakers, acquired through disciplined apprenticeship. For him, whatever expertise the sophists had was fragmentary, better described as rhetoric rather than philosophy, a rag-bag of techniques for presenting an argument to reach a desired conclusion. In contrast to such ‘sophistry’, the instrumental use of logic in service to a preordained conclusion, true philosophy was a disciplined open-ended enterprise oriented to truth.
Plato’s Socrates tested the beliefs held by those who claimed to have knowledge by means of the ‘Socratic elenchus’, a forensic probing of rival arguments for coherence and consistency which insisted on the clarification of the terms of the debate from the outset, an imperative still fundamental to the practise of philosophy. Socrates conceived his quest in moral terms, a ‘divine mission’ to care for the souls of his fellow citizens, whose integrity was damaged by unfounded claims to conclusive knowledge. ‘For this reason,’ he said, ‘I go about to this very day in accordance with the wishes of the god seeking out any citizen or foreigner I think to be wise; and when he seems to me not to be so, I help the god by showing him that he is not wise.’
Notoriously, the Socratic dialogues are inconclusive, exposing poor arguments but making few claims to the discovery of new truths. But that does not mean Socrates was content to believe in the ‘Aerial Whirlwind’, like Aristophanes’ nihilists. Plato presents him as a true ‘skeptikos’, one who searches for knowledge in the belief it can be attained, however arduous the quest. Those prepared to follow reason where it leads must be prepared to be sceptical about scepticism itself.
Another Socrates?
So — was Aristophanes simply unfair? The overwhelming force of Plato’s testimony compels the conclusion that the playwright wilfully grouped Socrates with the sophists, or simply did not understand the distinction: he was a dramatist, not a philosopher. But The Clouds reminds us that Plato’s account is not the only one we have. In Socrates in Love, a bold attempt to construct a plausible biography of Socrates, Armand D’Angour points to evidence hidden in plain sight indicating that Aristophanes quite possibly knew the real Socrates rather well.
According to Plato the dramatist was one of the guests at the famous Symposium attended by Socrates and other Athenian luminaries, where he gave one of the most ingenious accounts of the origins of love in western culture: the story of the androgynous beings, with two faces, four hands, and four legs, splint asunder by the gods, forever in search of their other half. And another of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedo, says that the younger Socrates took an interest in the investigation of nature, offering further evidence for his portrayal in The Clouds.
D’Angour suggests Aristophanes intended the comedy as a warning to Socrates that he should not try the patience of the city state too far. Indeed, it is entirely possible that Socrates attended the play. One legend, recorded by the Roman author Aelian, claims that Socrates was present, standing throughout the performance to identify himself as its subject. D’Angour writes:
The earthy comedy of Clouds reminds us that, for all his genuine virtues, Socrates was not a saint, but a flesh and blood man whose ideas and behaviour risked making him unpopular with his fellow Athenians. His flaws, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies will have been more apparent to contemporaries than to subsequent generations, who must rely almost entirely on the selective and mostly admiring accounts provided after his death by his supporters and advocates.
For all its crudity and occasional clumsiness, The Clouds is alert to philosophy’s notorious bias to abstraction, to follow a thread of logic to absurdity, culminating in Pheidippides blithe willingness to beat his father And it resurfaces in ever new guises through the history of philosophy, notably in the metaphysical knots into which thinkers have tied themselves in seeking to prove their own existence, or, more seriously, the blueprints for political utopias that have generated such false hope and contributed to so much destruction. Plato presents a Socrates who sought to bring rigour to intellectual thought, for whom the pursuit of truth was synonymous with the good. But as his fellow Athenians feared, it was a rigour that threatened to disturb the hard-won pieties on which the city state depended.
The Xanphippic Dialogues: Aristophanes’ rebooted?
Something like Aristophanes’ case is taken up with rather more subtlety in Roger Scruton’s latter-day satire, Xanthippic Dialogues, a reimagining of the Athenian philosophers from the perspective of the women in their lives, notably Socrates’ wife Xanthippe, and Plato’s mother Perictione.
Perictione’s dialogue with Plato probes the limits of Socratic scepticism when confronted with the human need for stories to live life by. For Perictione, we cannot but help cultivate myths to make sense of our place in the world. And the great myths, she says, tell a similar story, of fall and redemption, conceiving of life as ‘a journey, which beings from wholeness, passes through alienation, only to arrive at last at some higher and more glorious form of the original innocence’. The Athenians told it through the tale of Demeter and Persephone, a story of death and rebirth passed down the generations through the observance of the sacred Eleusinian Mysteries:
[R]rational beings spontaneously attach themselves to myth — calling them beautiful, consoling, sublime, holy — even though, in some part of themselves, they know how few grounds they have for believing these stories. I mean the stories of salvation, of Elysium, of a final return, a nostos, like that of Odysseus to Ithaca, but a return in which a man’s ancestors gather to welcome him, his transgressions atoned for, his debts paid, his sufferings rewarded. Or stories, like that of Demeter and her holy daughter Persephone, of a final triumph over death, a reward in which we may all join by virtue of the mysteries.
Such myths reconcile us to our earthly condition, binding communities together in faith and hope. But the perennial temptation of the philosopher is to expose them as illusions, and to seek to rebuild society on the solid foundation of reason. But for Perictione the philosopher’s capacity to stand in judgement is itself an illusion. For he too is human, subject to the same desire for redemption. The radical simply replaces the old myths with his own.
The fact is, however, that when such philosophers step into the arena of life, and invite us to leave desire and follow ‘reason’ instead — to prefer the unchanging to the fleeting and the eternal to the temporal, to seek ultimate reality rather than conditional appearance, to join with them in some intellectual journey … which has truth and wholeness and unity as its goal … they are not appealing to rational argument at all … this ‘reason’ of theirs is no more than an ‘appearance’ of reason. For what guides them in their quest is the very thing they denounce — epithumia — and it is by touching our passions that they capture their callow following.
And those new myths can lead to dangerous places, not least, perhaps, the ideal state envisaged in Plato’s Republic. For Scruton’s Xanthippe, the philosopher who steps outside the cave is as likely to be blinded as illuminated by the light he perceives. Perhaps those who live in the darkness of the cave, the world of appearances, better able to govern than ’the one who yearns for the sphere of light, who constantly ventures into it, and who returns from time to time in blinking confusion … he who begins to examine his life may cease after a while to live it. Life depends upon faith, and faith is destroyed by philosophy. If you ask me, Socrates, the examined life is not a life for a human being.’ The institutions and traditions painstakingly developed in this world, the only world we know, provide surer guides than the abstractions with which the philosophers would seek to replace them.
Here Xanthippe and Perictione, of course, are vehicles for Scruton’s conservative philosophy, and Socrates and his followers for his characteristic aversion to radicalism. But his dialogues illuminate why Aristophanes’ satire continues to bite, nearly two-and-a-half millennia on. The true philosopher’s scepticism must extend to philosophy itself. If we are to believe Plato Socrates’ purity of intention was obscured by the scattergun satire of The Clouds. But that purity, which lit the flame that was to guide the western philosophical tradition, can, as Aristophanes saw, destroy as well as illuminate.
Image: Detail from ‘Figures Strolling by a Dutch Canal’ (1859) by Charles Henri Joseph Leickert.
