Modern Political Philosophy

If philosophy did, indeed, originate with the Greeks and if Thales, who lived from about 636 to about 546 b.c., was the first of those to whom the appellation “philosopher” applies, then that origin appears at some point in his lifetime, some moment late in the seventh or early in the sixth century. In the Ionian cities and the other cities of southeastern Europe and western Asia Minor where it began, philosophy appeared as a discordant element. As Plato makes Socrates show us in the allegory of the cave in Book Seven of the “Republic,” all cities are necessarily such that their denizens are immersed in darkness and are therefore suffused with prejudices, believing that the shadows they see are the truth itself. As for the denizens of those cities we call “Greek,” their understandings of the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, and the noble and the base were fashioned for them by the poets, the great creative geniuses, beginning with Homer who lived perhaps in the ninth century b.c. or, if the historian Herodotus is right, perhaps as early as the twelfth century b.c. Philosophy appeared as discord because it countered the settled opinions, the prejudices, the shadows within any and all of the cities, that is, the opinions promulgated by the poets. With the advent of philosophy there came to be a natural suspicion of it in the minds of the cities and their peoples. The philosophers appeared as impious and disturbing. The suspicion of philosophers pervaded all the cities. As was said earlier in this volume, Anaxagoras (c.500–c.428 b.c.) was the first to be prosecuted at Athens for philosophizing. The next and the more celebrated case of the tension between philosophy and the city was Socrates. As we showed, Socrates was portrayed by the poet Aristophanes in the Clouds as being an unsavory character who looked down on the gods and who corrupted the youth by teaching them to do the same. The culmination of that comedy is that Socrates’ pupil, Pheidippides, along with his father, Strepsiades, accompanied by the god Hermes, the very god Hermes, himself, burn down the thinkery where Socrates holds school and drive Socrates and his pupils away. At his trial, about twenty-three years later, in which he was charged with not believing in the gods believed in by Athens, believing in other divinities, and corrupting the youth, Socrates blamed long-standing envy of and slander against him for the fact that he had been put on trial. The ground of that envy and slander lay, he said, in “a certain comic poet.” He formulates the slander as a resuscitation of the old accusations against philosophers, namely that he looked into the things aloft and the things below – that is, that he was a physiologist or a natural philosopher. He denied at that trial that he had ever been interested in such things, but in the prison after his conviction, he admitted to friends that he had once been concerned with such things but then had embarked on a “second voyage.” That is, as the Roman philosopher, Cicero, tells us, Socrates was the originator of political philosophy. That origination would then have taken place some time between that comic play by Aristophanes and the trial of Socrates.