The Death of Socrates. Romano Guardini
yourself, and him too, by bringing him to justice. In the present case the murdered man was a poor dependent of mine, who worked for us on our farm in Naxos. In a fit of drunkenness he got in a rage with one of our slaves, and killed him. My father therefore bound the man hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, while he sent to Athens to ask the seer what he should do. While the messenger was gone, he entirely neglected the man, thinking that he was a murderer, and that it would be no great matter, even if he were to die. And that was exactly what happened; hunger and cold and his bonds killed him before the messenger returned. And now my father and the rest of my family are indignant with me because I am prosecuting my father for the murder of this murderer. They assert that he did not kill the man at all; and they say that, even if he had killed him over and over again, the man himself was a murderer, and that I ought not to concern myself about such a person, because it is unholy for a son to prosecute his father for murder. So little, Socrates, do they know the divine law of holiness and unholiness.
In the last sentence the key-word of the dialogue has been spoken, and Socrates at once takes it up:
And do you mean to say, Euthyphro, that you think that you understand divine things, and holiness and unholiness, so accurately that, in such a case as you have stated, you can bring your father to justice without fear that you yourself may be doing an unholy deed?
EUTH. If I did not understand all these matters accurately, Socrates, I should be of no use, and Euthyphro would not be any better than other men.
SOCRATIC IRONY
The question, then, with which the dialogue is concerned is the nature of piety, interwoven with that of the fate of Socrates, who himself is charged with an offence against piety and religion. But in what a peculiar way the question is put! How inappropriate, one would think, to the deadly seriousness of the situation! For it is the prelude to a tragedy which, at the time of writing, must have been a matter not only of clearest recollection but of keenest feeling to the author of the dialogue. Plato was then still young, barely thirty; and Socrates was his master, who had shown him the way to all that was great; not only venerated, but loved, and taken away by an event in which the disciple can see nothing but injustice and evil. How is he to speak about it then? The answer seems undoubted: as the Apology speaks. Yet here is the Euthyphro, forming the introduction to the Apology—a sort of satyric drama, placed before instead of after the tragedy. This can only be because Socrates was just as this dialogue describes him. In fact he was not only the heroic philosopher depicted in the Apology, Crito and Phaedo. From these works alone his personality and his death would not stand out in their full character; another note is wanting, that of the Euthyphro. By this an air of disdain is thrown over the whole affair—though at the same time care is taken that Socrates shall remain wholly Socrates. The Euthyphro is, among the texts with which we are concerned, that in which the irony of Socrates appears most clearly. This peculiarity is shown in the other texts too, but it is overborne by the solemnity of the mood. In the Euthyphro the irony unfolds with all its effortless and redoubtable power.
What is the real meaning of it? What does a man do when he treats another with irony? He makes him ridiculous. But he could do that without irony. He could say something straight out which would put the object of his attack in a comic light; but that would not look well. It would show up the attacker as unimaginative and coarse. There is another drawback too: to attack directly shows one to be entangled in the situation, while the wielder of irony stands above it. He makes appreciative remarks, but in such a way that an unfavourable meaning appears through them. His assent only underlines the contradiction more plainly. He assumes an inoffensive air, only to wound the more surely. The ironic attack shows the aggressor in blithe security. All this could be said of irony in general; but Socratic irony is more than this. In the last resort its object is not to expose, to wound, to despatch, but to help. It has a positive aim: to stimulate movement and to liberate. It aims at serving truth. But would it not be better to teach directly, to refute, warn, challenge? Only when the truth in question can be communicated in this way. Socrates’s concern is, above all things, for an inward mobility, a living relation to being and truth, which can only with difficulty be elicited by direct speech. So irony seeks to bring the centre of a man into a state of tension from which this mobility arises; either in the interlocutor himself, or, if he is not to be helped, in the listener. But how does irony gain this positive character? By the speaker’s putting himself into the situation. He must not be one who lectures others in the consciousness of his own secure possession, but one who is himself a seeker. The wielder of Socratic irony is not satisfied with his own state. He knows—or at least suspects—what he ought to be, but has no illusions about the fact that he is not so. He has a keen sense for what is wrong in others, but he is just as keenly critical of himself. His superiority to his opponent lies ultimately in the fact that he is not only cleverer and more adroit, but that he does not delude himself. He “knows that he knows nothing”—not in a sceptical spirit, however, but conscious that this only obliges him to explore all the more resolutely, and with confidence that this exploration will one day lead to a real find.
So he provokes the man who is secure in his own ignorance; not in order to make a fool of him, but to stir him into movement. He accosts him thus: “What a strange thing it is that people think they know and are goodness knows what, and yet they neither know anything nor are anything. You have not found that out yet; I have. So laugh at men; but don’t forget that you are a man yourself, and laugh at yourself too. The moment you can do that, your eyes are opened. Mark the difference between genuine and spurious, reality and appearance. Be exacting, not in your own interest, but in that of truth; and not against others, but against yourself. The true standard lies in yourself, and the power also of subjecting yourself to it.” Thus there is in Socratic irony both a passion for the cause and a deep kindness.
One point more: it reveals a special experience of existence. Existence is powerful, splendid, fearful, mysterious and much else—but it is also odd. It is such that it excites not only the sense of great “surprise”, astonishment at its height and depth, the “amazement at the essences of things”, but also the twin feeling of this, the sense of the queer, contradictory, complicated. This too finds expression in irony. Irony is no less serious than direct speech, but it knows that life cannot really be grasped if one takes it too solemnly. It thinks that seriousness can itself be a kind of evasion—taking refuge in poses and phrases. The genuine ironical man is a man with a great heart and a sensitive soul; that is why he cannot endure direct statement for long. He is a lover, but round the corner, so to speak. Such was Socrates. Alcibiades puts it best when he says in the Symposium (215a–b) that Socrates is like one of those ugly Silenus-figures which you can open, and then golden images of the gods gleam at you from inside them. And it is a wonderful thing that Plato, himself anything but an ironical mind, but an absolutist of the purest water and tending to the doctrinaire and despotic, made this man his master.
The first of the four dialogues which extol the greatness of Socrates gives freest play to his irony.
THE MOVEMENT OF THE DIALOGUE
It is as though Euthyphro states the theme of the dialogue—the human theme behind the intellectual; the passionate emotion of the spirit called forth by the dialogue behind the logical effort—when he says in the eleventh section:
But, Socrates, I really don’t know how to explain to you what is in my mind. Whatever we put forward always somehow moves round in a circle, and will not stay where we place it.
Towards the end of the dialogue Socrates himself—and with what delightful satire—takes up the statement and confirms it:
After that, shall you be surprised to find that your definitions move about, instead of staying where you place them? Shall you charge me with being the Daedalus that makes them move, when you yourself are far more skilful than Daedalus was, and make them go round in a circle? Do you not see that our definition has come round to where it was before?
In this circular movement something vital is happening. At the beginning Euthyphro brings himself into dangerous proximity with Sócrates, as a specialist, so to speak, in prophecy and religious science addressing a colleague. This association then gets involved in the vortex of