Plato sets up distinctions between inner truth and exter- nal means of conveying truth, such as language. But these distinctions turn out to be confused and unviable, accord- ing to Derrida. The supposedly secondary terms are used to explain the primary terms, in a whole series of key oppo- sitions: absence informs presence, play work, essence sup- plement, outer inner, language truth, representation reality, written spoken, son father.
Derrida's reading implies a new interpretation of the death of Socrates. As he notes, pharmakon is also the only word used by Plato for the hemlock that Socrates drank. Platonic metaphysics, for Derrida, is all motivated by a com- bination of mourning and guilt for the death of Socrates. Socrates, Derrida claims, functioned both as Plato's father and as his brother. Echoing Freud's account of the origins of religion in an original family murder (Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism), he notes that Plato 'repeated the father's death', writing or rewriting his death sentence even as he tries to undo it.
This relationship to the death of Socrates explains all the contradictions in Plato - including the paradox that Plato, who condemned writing and cast the poets out of his Republic, should have written so much. He writes to unwrite or overwrite the indictment of Socrates. The cost of Platonic metaphysics, the cost of rationality, is death, Derrida seems to suggest. At other moments he implies that we turn to Platonic metaphysics because, like children, we fear to die and can exorcise our fear only by the 'antidote' of dialec- tics. Derrida calls for a new kind of enlightenment, through an alternative metaphysics. This new mode of thought will be possible only if we can move beyond Plato's mode of imagining the death of our father or brother - Socrates. It is unsurprising, then, that so much of Derrida's own writing is about death, including evocations of his own dead philoso- pher friends. He tried, throughout his life, to find alterna- tives to the Platonic death of Socrates.
While Derrida insisted that Plato's Socrates must be held accountable for much of what is wrong with western metaphysics, another French theorist, Michel Foucault, tried to reclaim a less rational or 'logocentric' side of the dying philosopher. In his last lectures before he died, given in the College de France in 1984, Foucault suggested that all western thought went wrong through a misreading of Plato's Apology. Socrates is associated in this text, Foucault argued, with two central phrases: 'know yourself' and 'the care of the self'. Foucault prefers the idea of self-care over the all- too-cognitive, all-too-rational concept of self-knowledge. He argues that Plato's Apology, too, evokes a Socrates who seeks knowledge only in the service of the care of the self, not the other way around. According to Foucault, we should - like Socrates - try to look after ourselves. Knowing ourselves is of secondary importance.
Foucault's own early death perhaps prevented him from developing an account of the relationship between death and care in the Apology. But he hints that Socrates' choice of death is the culmination of his care for himself, as well as his culminating act of self-recognition. Socrates died in order to preserve his true self. Foucault's reading is in many ways a return to Stoic accounts of Socrates' death: like Seneca, Foucault thinks Socrates chose death because it allowed him to be, remain or become himself. It was the hemlock that made Socrates great.
socrates and euthanasia: the hemlock society
For many readers throughout the tradition, the essential meaning of Socrates' death lies in the fact that he died by his own choice.
The Hemlock Society was the oldest and one of the most successful 'right-to-die' or 'assisted suicide' organisations in America. It was founded in 1980 as a simple 'Mom and Pop' enterprise by one Derek Humphry, an outspoken advocate of euthanasia. Humphry's first wife, Jean, suffered from painful and terminal bone cancer and in 1975 she killed herself with his help. His book about her death, Jean's Way (1979), was a bestseller. The Hemlock Society provided literature to explain the best ways to concoct homemade suicide potions and set up a network of 'Caring Friends' to ensure 'maximum per- sonal support' in the last hours, as well as advocating legal reform to allow physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. The organisation's slogan was 'Good Life, Good Death' and it used the hemlock plant as an emblem.
To readers of Plato, the name might seem less than apt. There is, after all, an important difference between delib- erate suicide for personal reasons and submitting to state execution by poison after a legal court has passed a death sentence. Plato insists that Socrates' death was not suicide: his hero resists killing himself on his own terms in prison and instead waits patiently for the state's punishment to be carried out. Xenophon's Socrates is perhaps more readily assimilated into the model of assisted suicide for the ter- minally ill, since, you will remember, he claims to choose death in order to avoid the inevitable decline into senility associated with old age. In justifying the name, the Hemlock Society emphasised 'the principle of personal choice central to Socrates' action'. He chose death rather than exile, an
17. An American pro-euthanasia organisation, the Hemlock Society, used the poison which killed Socrates as a symbol for 'Good life, good death'. More recent incarnations of this society have dropped all allusion to the death of
Socrates.
option that was unacceptable to him, 'much like terminally ill people today' (most of whom, one might quibble, do not have the option of moving to Thessaly).
But the name proved increasingly controversial, both within the organisation and outside it. Many members of the society felt that association with Socrates was impeding their hopes of legislative reform: it carried, some said, too much 'baggage' and was too 'elitist'. The organisation has since gone through various mergers with other euthana- sia groups. After a brief phase under the name 'End of Life Choices', it now calls itself 'Compassion and Choices', and traces its roots back only as far as the beginning of the twen- tieth century, when the modern 'choice-in-dying' movement began in America. Compassion and Choices promises 'state- of-the-art care at the end of life'. Humphry himself mourned the eventual decision to change the name and condemned the ignorance that prompted it: 'Socrates' death in 329 bc [sic] was a noble and self-chosen one,' he argued, and one that had instant name recognition.
It is not clear whether the abandonment of the Socratic model will help the society achieve its legislative goals. Hostility and anxiety about legalising the 'ultimate civil right' remain strong in both the US and the UK. It is unlikely that people will worry less about the morality of suicide and the possibilities of abuse now that the name of Socrates is no longer attached to the movement.
But the change of name signifies more than simply a decline in classical education in US and UK schools. It sug- gests that our society has, even in the course of the last twenty years, moved further and further away from the idea that death is part of life, and may itself be an act of heroism. The newest name emphasises 'compassion' and 'comfort' even over that crucial buzz-word 'choices'. The dying person is conceived as weak, ill and in need of nurture, not a trium- phant fighter in the final moral struggle of life.
relevance and irrelevance: how the death of socrates can change your life
It is striking that, for much of the twentieth century, most major writers, philosophers and artists have paid rela- tively little attention to Socrates. Few of those who have cared about the death of Socrates in the twentieth century have had the intellectual and cultural stature of Erasmus, Voltaire or even Foucault. The dying Socrates seems to have fallen away from his central place in western culture.