Plato's Apology & Crito (1966)

373 Pages·2017·2.64 MB·English

LEO STRAUSS

Plato’s Apology of Socrates & Crito

A course offfered in the autumn quarter, 1966

Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago

Edited and with an introduction by David Janssens

David Janssens is Senior Lecturer at University College Tilburg. He is the author of
Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy and Politics in Leo Strauss’s
Early Thought (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), co-editor, with F. Coppens and Y.
Yomtov, of Leo Strauss: A quoi sert la philosophie politique? (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2014), and has published on the relationship between
ancient philosophy and poetry.

With the assistance of Brandon Sward and Peter Walford

© 2016 Estate of Leo Strauss. All Rights Reserved.
2
Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction

Note on the Leo Strauss Transcript Project

Editorial Headnote

Session 1: Introduction 1-16

Session 2: Apol. 17a-19a 17-36

Session 3: Apol. 19a-21e 37-59

Session 4: Apol. 21e-24c 60-81

Session 5: Apol. 24c-29d 82-105

Session 6: Apol. 29d-31c 106-126

Session 7: Apol. 29b-33c 127-148

Session 8: Apol. 33c-36b 149-175

Session 9: Apol. 36b-40e 176-200

Session 10: Apol. 40e-end; Crito 43a-44b 201-220

Session 11: Crito 44b-47d 221-245

Session 12: Crito 47d-51a 246-271

Session 13: Crito 51a-52d 272-292

Session 14: Crito 52c-54e 293-316

Session 15: Xenophon, Anabasis, Hellenica, Memorabilia (selections) 317-339

Session 16: Xenophon, Oeconomicus, Memorabilia (selections) 340-365
i
Editor’s Introduction

Plato’s Apology of Socrates & Crito

D. Janssens

The Apology of Socrates occupies a central place in the thought and work of Leo Strauss. The
complex relationship between philosophy and politics, memorably dramatized in Plato’s best-
known dialogue, is a permanent theme in Strauss’s writing and teaching. Moreover, the dialogue
played a key role in his intellectual development. Strauss’s engagement with the Apology dates
back to the early 1930s. His critical study of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, published
in 1930, led him to conclude that modern rationalism had in fact failed to shake the foundations
of revealed religion, since it proved to be based on a faith in the power of autonomous reason
that matched its adversary’s faith in a God who demands loving obedience. At the same time,
Strauss found himself unable to accept a wholesale rejection of reason and a concomitant return
to faith. In an autobiographical preface to the English translation of his book on Spinoza,
published in 1965, Strauss summed up the quandary as follows:

Other observations and experiences confirmed the suspicion that it would be unwise to
say farewell to reason. I began therefore to wonder whether the self-destruction of reason
was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from premodern
rationalism, especially Jewish-medieval rationalism and its classical (Aristotelian and
Platonic) foundation.i

In a lecture on “Cohen and Maimonides,” given in 1931, Strauss showed how he had begun to
find a way to recover premodern rationalism. His point of departure was Hermann Cohen’s
suggestion that, contrary to popular understanding, the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides
had been a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. What made Maimonides a Platonist, Cohen
argued, was the primacy he accorded to ethical and political questions, a concern ultimately
rooted in the crucial question raised by Socrates, the founder of classical political philosophy:
How should I live? Although Strauss disagrees with the way in which Cohen reaches this
conclusion, the insight does constitute a breakthrough in his thinking. While as a young Jew, he
was torn between the demands of Judaism and the demands of secular modernity, he now sees
that the Socratic question underlay his struggle with the theological-political predicament
throughout.

In the lecture, Strauss spells out the ramifications of this new understanding by taking his cue
from the Apology. As he explains in a number of terse and forceful assertions, the Socratic
question regarding the right way of life is both radical and political, and as such it also points to
an answer:

i L. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books,
1965), 33.
ii
“[Socrates] wants to remain with the question. And that is because the question matters;
because a life that is not questioning is not a life worthy of man.”ii

“Socratic questioning about the just life is a questioning together about the just life
together for the sake of the just life together, for the sake of the true state. Socrates’s
questioning is essentially political.”iii

“Socrates therefore does give an answer to the question regarding the just life:
questioning about the just life—that alone is the just life. ‘The greatest good for man is
this: to converse each day about virtue and the other subjects about which you hear me
conversing as I examined myself and others; an unexamined life, however, is not worth
living for man.’”iv

In many ways, Strauss’s early interpretation of the Apology is programmatic of the dual path his
investigations will follow in the ensuing years. On the one hand, there is his critical reading of
founders of modern political philosophy such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau,
whose unquestioning acceptance of the possibility of political philosophy he reveals to be
problematic, inasmuch as it is predicated on a failure to repeat the Socratic question. On the other
hand, there is his rediscovery of the medieval rationalism of Alfarabi and Maimonides and its
roots in the classical rationalism of Plato and Aristotle, as well as its specific way of preserving
and reviving the Socratic impulse by means of the art of writing between the lines.v Both the way
up to the Ancients and the way down to the Moderns, however, are part and parcel of a lifelong
attempt to understand Socrates upon which Strauss embarked in the early 1930s.
Throughout the courses that have now become available, Strauss presents his audience with the
splendid fruits of these deep and sustained explorations. At the same time, he remains constantly
mindful of the seeds that lie at their origin. In the present course on Plato’s Apology of Socrates
and Crito, this becomes apparent at the start of the very first lecture, when he discusses the
difficulty of distinguishing between Socrates and Plato:

And we may draw this conclusion: that in this dimension one cannot make a distinction
between Socrates and Plato, and one cannot be seriously concerned with that. The
question of the sources, in other words, must be abandoned as unanswerable. So we drop
the historical question. But without a question, one cannot enter, penetrate a book. The
question need not be explicit, but it is better if it is explicit, at least in the case of an older
man. Now the alternative to a historical question is the philosophic question, or at any
rate a philosophic question. Which is that philosophic question? We can say, without

ii L. Strauss, “Cohen and Maimonides,” trans. Martin D. Yaffe and Ian A. Moore, in Leo Strauss
on Maimonides: The Complete Writings, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2013), 199.
iii Ibid., 200.
iv Ibid., 200.
v For a more extensive and more detailed account, see D. Janssens, Between Athens and
Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought (New York: State
University of New York Press, 2008).
iii
going out of bounds, that question is the relation of the philosopher classically presented
by Socrates to the city classically presented by Athens.

Strauss thus reconnects his current interpretative concern with the general philosophic concern
that has animated his thinking for more than three decades. Reading and interpreting the Apology
of Socrates and the Crito, as well as the Apology written by Xenophon, he presents and tests his
understanding of the peculiar rationalism that is founded on the Socratic question regarding the
best way of life. By the same token, he continually draws the attention of his audience to the
great differences with modern rationalism: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Kant figure
prominently in several of the lectures.

Doing justice to the wealth and depth of Strauss’s findings and observations in an introduction is
impossible. However, it may be useful to point out one overarching motive that becomes visible
throughout the lecture course. Both in discussing the Apology and the Crito, Strauss brings to
light, not only the myriad of rhetorical and poetic devices employed by Plato’s Socrates to
perplex his audience and to provoke the thoughtful awareness of the reader-spectator, but also
the particular action underlying and informing the argument of the dialogues. In the Apology, we
are able to witness Socrates’s defiance and deliberate insolence towards both his accusers and his
judges, calculated to secure both his condemnation and his future reputation. In the Crito, in
contrast, we are able to see and hear how Socrates skillfully personifies and divinizes the Laws
of Athens, in order to pre-empt the selfish rescue operation undertaken by his old friend, to
reconcile Crito with his fellow Athenians and, again, to manage and shape the image that he will
hand down to coming generations. A similar, peculiarly Socratic, combination of doing well and
faring well will inform the argument and the action of the Phaedo, in which an account of the
death of Socrates is related.

Shortly before his own death in 1973, Strauss wrote an essay “On Plato’s Apology of Socrates
and Crito,” which was published posthumously in a Festschrift for his oldest and best friend,
Jacob Klein.vi In the introduction to the essay, he stated the following: “the Apology of Socrates
is the portal through which we enter the Platonic kosmos: it gives an account of his whole life, of
his whole way of life, to the largest multitude, to the city of Athens, before which he was
accused of a capital crime; it is the dialogue of Socrates with the city of Athens [ . . . ].”vii One
cannot help but surmise that this return to the Apology may also have been a final return to the
portal through which he entered the Platonic cosmos, to the beautiful order of which he devoted
his whole life. The reader of the present transcript will find in Strauss a guide who is
exceptionally well-traveled and experienced, but whose experience has in no way impeded his
capacity to renewed philosophic wonder—and enjoyment.

vi “On Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito,” in Essays in Honor of Jacob Klein (Annapolis: St.
John’s College, 1976), 155-170. The essay was republished in L. Strauss, Studies in Platonic
Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 38-66.
vii Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983), 38.
iv

The Leo Strauss Transcript Project

Leo Strauss is well known as a thinker and writer, but he also had tremendous impact as a
teacher. In the transcripts of his courses one can see Strauss commenting on texts, including
many he wrote little or nothing about, and responding generously to student questions and
objections. The transcripts, amounting to more than twice the volume of Strauss’s published
work, will add immensely to the material available to scholars and students of Strauss’s work.

In the early 1950s mimeographed typescripts of student notes of Strauss’s courses were
distributed among his students. In winter 1954, the first recording, of his course on Natural
Right, was transcribed and distributed to students. Professor Herbert J. Storing obtained a grant
from the Relm Foundation to support the taping and transcription, which resumed on a regular
basis in the winter of 1956 with Strauss’s course “Historicism and Modern Relativism.” Of the
39 courses Strauss taught at the University of Chicago from 1958 until his departure in 1968, 34
were recorded and transcribed. After Strauss retired from the University, recording of his courses
continued at Claremont Men’s College in the spring of 1968 and the fall and spring of 1969
(although the tapes for his last two courses there have not been located), and at St. John’s
College for the four years until his death in October 1973.

The surviving original audio recordings vary widely in quality and completeness. When Strauss
moved away from the microphone the volume of his voice may diminish to the point of
inaudibility; the microphone sometimes failed to pick up the voices of students asking questions
and often captured doors and windows opening and closing, papers shuffling, and traffic in the
street. When the tape was changed, recording stopped, leaving gaps. When Strauss’s remarks
went, as they often did, beyond the two hours, the tape ran out. After they had been transcribed,
the audiotapes were sometimes reused, leaving the audio record very incomplete. And over time
the audiotape deteriorated. Beginning in the late 1990s, Stephen Gregory, then the administrator
of the University’s John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy
funded by the John M. Olin Foundation, initiated the digital remastering of the surviving tapes
by Craig Harding of September Media to ensure their preservation, improve their audibility, and
make possible their eventual publication. This remastering received financial support from the
Olin Center and was undertaken under the supervision of Joseph Cropsey, then Strauss’s literary
executor. Gregory continued this project as administrator of the University’s Center for the Study
of the Principles of the American Founding, funded by the Jack Miller Center, and brought it to
completion in 2011 as the administrator of the University’s Leo Strauss Center with the aid of a
grant from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the
Humanities. The surviving audiofiles are available at the Strauss Center website:
https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/courses.

Strauss permitted the taping and transcribing to go forward, but he did not check the transcripts
or otherwise participate in the project. Accordingly, Strauss’s close associate and colleague
Joseph Cropsey originally put the copyright in his own name, though he assigned copyright to
the Estate of Leo Strauss in 2008. Beginning in 1958 a headnote was placed at the beginning of
each transcript, which read: “This transcription is a written record of essentially oral material,
much of which developed spontaneously in the classroom and none of which was prepared with
v
publication in mind. The transcription is made available to a limited number of interested
persons, with the understanding that no use will be made of it that is inconsistent with the private
and partly informal origin of the material. Recipients are emphatically requested not to seek to
increase the circulation of the transcription. This transcription has not been checked, seen, or
passed on by the lecturer.” In 2008, Strauss’s heir, his daughter Jenny Strauss, asked Nathan
Tarcov, who had been the director of the University’s Olin Center and later its Center for the
Study of the Principles of the American Founding, to succeed Joseph Cropsey, who had
faithfully served as Strauss’s literary executor for the 35 years since his death. They agreed that
because of the widespread circulation of the old, often inaccurate and incomplete transcripts and
the continuing interest in Strauss’s thought and teaching, it would be a service to interested
scholars and students to proceed with publication of the remastered audiofiles and transcripts.
They were encouraged by the fact that Strauss himself signed a contract with Bantam Books to
publish four of the transcripts although in the end none were published.

The University’s Leo Strauss Center, established in 2008, launched a project, presided over by
its director Nathan Tarcov and managed by Stephen Gregory, to correct the old transcripts on the
basis of the remastered audiofiles as they became available, transcribe those audiofiles not
previously transcribed, and annotate and edit for readability all the transcripts including those for
which no audiofiles survived. This project was supported by grants from the Winiarski Family
Foundation, Mr. Richard S. Shiffrin and Mrs. Barbara Z. Schiffrin, Earhart Foundation, and the
Hertog Foundation, and contributions from numerous other donors. The Strauss Center was ably
assisted in its fundraising efforts by Nina Botting-Herbst and Patrick McCusker, staff in the
Office of the Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences at the University. The transcripts based
upon the remastered tapes are considerably more accurate and complete than the original
transcripts; the new Hobbes transcript, for example, is twice as long as the old one. Senior
scholars familiar with both Strauss’s work and the texts he taught were commissioned as editors,
with preliminary work done in most cases by student editorial assistants.

The goal in editing the transcripts has been to preserve Strauss’s original words as much as
possible while making the transcripts easier to read. Strauss’s impact (and indeed his charm) as a
teacher is revealed in the sometimes informal character of his remarks. Sentence fragments that
might not be appropriate in academic prose have been kept; some long and rambling sentences
have been divided; some repeated clauses or words have been deleted. A clause that breaks the
syntax or train of thought may have been moved elsewhere in the sentence or paragraph. In rare
cases sentences within a paragraph may have been reordered. Where no audiofiles survived,
attempts have been made to correct likely mistranscriptions. Changes of all these kinds have
been indicated. (Changes to the old transcripts based on the remastered audiofiles, however, are
not indicated.) Changes and deletions (other than spelling, italicization, punctuation,
capitalization, and paragraphing) are recorded in endnotes attached to the word or punctuation
prior to the change or deletion. Brackets within the text record insertions. Ellipses in transcripts
without audiofiles have been preserved. Whether they indicate deletion of something Strauss said
or the trailing off of his voice or serve as a dash cannot be determined. Ellipses that have been
added to transcripts with audiofiles indicate that the words are inaudible. Administrative details
regarding paper or seminar topics or meeting rooms or times have been deleted without being
noted, but reading assignments have been retained. Citations are provided to all passages so
vi
readers can read the transcripts with the texts in hand, and footnotes have been provided to
identify persons, texts, and events to which Strauss refers.

Readers should make allowance for the oral character of the transcripts. There are careless
phrases, slips of the tongue, repetitions, and possible mistranscriptions. However enlightening
the transcripts are, they cannot be regarded as the equivalent of works that Strauss himself wrote
for publication.

Nathan Tarcov Gayle McKeen
Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor

August 2014

Editorial Headnote

This transcript is based upon existing audio files of the course. The course had sixteen sessions,
all of which were recorded.

When texts were read aloud in class, the transcript presents the words as they appear in the
editions of the texts assigned for the course, and the original spelling has been retained. Citations
are included for all passages. Ellipses in the transcript indicate an inaudible word or inaudible
words.

The texts assigned for the course were Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito, both in the same
volume of the Loeb Classical Library edition: Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo,
Phaedrus, trans. H. N. Fowler (Loeb Classical Library, no. 36) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1914).

This transcript was edited by David Janssens, with the assistance of Brandon Sward and Peter
Walford.

For general information about the history of the transcription project and the editing guidelines,
see the general headnote to the transcripts above.
1

Session 1: October 18, 1966

Leo Strauss: 1Well, the first thing I want to do in my own name and by anticipation in the name
of the class [is] to express my happiness to see Mr. Reinken back. Mr. Reinken has been serving
as a reader in my courses for many years now, and no one could have done it better. Good.

Now let us turn to our subject. This is an introduction to political philosophy, which will be
given in the form of a discussion of Plato’s Apology of Socrates and his Crito.viii 2I assume but
do not presuppose that you have read these writings, because they are very popular and are
accessible in many inexpensive editions. But it is not presupposed; I only ask you to read the two
books, short works, carefully, while we go. The Apology of Socrates is Socrates’s formal defense
before an Athenian law court. He had been accused of not believing in the gods in which the city
believes, and3 [of] corrupting the young. Socrates claims, of course, to be wholly innocent, yet he
was found guilty and condemned to death. 4In the Crito, Socrates is presented as waiting in
prison for his execution, and there he was given the opportunity to escape yet he refused to avail
himself of this opportunity despite5 the fact that he was unjustly condemned. His reason was
[that] one must obey the laws, even if one is legally, although unjustly, condemned to die. The
bare statement of these most obvious facts suffices to arouse in us indignation, indignation about
the Athenians who murdered their best citizen and also indignation about Socrates, who demands
that one should obey every law, every judicial decision, who condemns in advance everyone who
ever tried to escape from a Nazi or communist execution chamber—because in quite a few cases
these people were legally condemned.

Now these acts of indignation are quite healthy, and I urge you to indulge them for I would like
us to have a perfectly uninhibited discussion of the issues involved. I ask you only for one kind
of restraint: propriety of speech. And by this I mean not merely that you should not use dirty
words [laughter],6 I’ll give you a better example. Do not call Socrates’s fate a tragedy, for the
murder of a man is terrible—or any other human being is terrible but not tragic in any serious
sense.7 According to the master of those who know,ix there is no tragedy without mistake,
without guilt of the sufferer.x Now if some innocent human being is murdered, there is no guilt
or mistake involved. Not destruction, but self-destruction or rather self-destruction of a certain
kind, is tragic. 8So I give this as an example of propriety of speech, not to use the word tragic
with the usual levity.

One of the greatest men who applied his mind to Socrates’s fate did describe it as tragic, and that
man was Hegel.xi But he made an assumption which is not self-evident,9 namely, that Socrates
was guilty as charged and therefore deserved his death. Yet his death was tragic and not like the
end of a common criminal, because a higher right was on Socrates’s side. The right with which

viii The edition used in the class is Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, trans. Harold North Fowler
(Loeb Classical Library, no. 36) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914).
ix Dante Alighieri, Inferno 4: 131.
x Aristotle, Poetics 1452b29-1453a45.
xi G.W.F. Hegel, “Socrates,” in Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1892).
2
Socrates came into conflict was the divine right based on immemorial tradition, the actual,
inherited, moral-religious order which lays claim to men’s obedience as a matter of course,
without advancing sufficient reasons.10 The divine right in this sense is based on the premise
(ultimately, if we cut away all frills) that the good is identical with the ancestral. Socrates,
according to Hegel, rightly questioned that primeval equation. The human mind legitimately
desires to act from insight, and that means to act freely. The human mind desires to do the right
knowing that it is right, and not merely because it is told that it is right. And as a consequence of
this, Socrates raised the question which the old Athenians had never raised, as to whether the
gods are, and what they are. Yet this freedom that I call, as it were, before the tribunal of my
reason everything which lays claims on me, is what Hegel calls the conscience, and I believe
many of us call it this11. This freedom lacks by itself content. It is a mere empty freedom,
although a very profound freedom. Hence Socrates questioned the traditional order. He subverted
it and yet was unable to put another order, the order of reason, in its place. And to that extent
Socrates was guilty. He subverted, he destroyed, without building up.

Now a sign of this inadequacy of Socrates is found by Hegel in Socrates’s recourse to his
daimonion. (Now Mr. Reinken, would you write this on the blackboard? If you have any trouble
let me know, but I’m sure not.) This daimonion—I will always use the Greek word because there
is no proper English translation; the nearest literal translation would be a “demonic thing,” the
thing which Socrates claimed to possess in himself and which gave him some guidance. This
daimonion, of which we will hear quite a bit in the Republic,xii was a kind of private oracle, not
like the famous public oracles of Delphi and other places, for it had its seat within the free
individual. But it nevertheless lacked rationality. If Socrates says, “I don’t do that because the
daimonion advises me against it,” then he doesn’t have a good reason except that this voice,
popping up as it were, speaks against it. Socrates’s fate was then necessary: he was guilty as
charged. He questioned the religious basis of the Athenian state, and he corrupted the young by
undermining paternal authority—paternal authority, of course, because the fathers are older:
good [is] equal to ancestral, that goes then through your forefathers, grandfather, father more
immediately; and by questioning it one questions paternal authority. On the other hand, Socrates
was right in saying that the Athenian state lacked a proper basis, but since he could not supply
another social order, the Athenians were right in condemning him. And so this fact that Socrates
was guilty in a very important sense, this makes his fate tragic. Yet the Athenians repented of
their verdict a few years after Socrates’s execution. They thus admitted that they, their state, had
already been affected or infected by the Socratic principle. In other words, if anyone had the
right to condemn Socrates, it was not the Athenians because they suffered from the same defect.
And this principle is the principle of free examination by the individual. Now this much about
Hegel’s view.

According to a more popular view, right was entirely on Socrates’s side. The state has no
business to prescribe its citizens what they should believe or not believe. Socrates is the classic
martyr for the freedom of questioning, the freedom of the quest for the truth, the freedom of
thought. If Socrates acted against the law of Athens, as he probably did, he acted against an
unjust law, and therefore he acted justly. But very well, but why then does he demand, as he
apparently does in the Crito, that one must obey the law of the land without any qualifications,

xii Evidently Strauss means the Apology.