One reason for this change is that Socrates seems to many people to be tainted by his association with the dead-white- male western tradition. The death of Socrates is no longer often cited in calls for tolerance and civil liberty, as in the days of Voltaire, Condorcet, John Stuart Mill or even Martin Luther King.
Socrates is an unlikely icon for an age of gender equal- ity. An exception will help illustrate the rule. Elsie Russell is the only woman known to me to have painted a 'Death of Socrates'. Russell's Socrates is a tired old man sitting in a dark, under-lit prison. The painting is suggestive less of calm than of stagnancy: a dead white patriarch has had his day. But there are sympathy and softness in the depiction of Socrates' and Crito's sagging breasts. Russell manages to domesticate and feminise the scene. It almost seems like a group of quiet old ladies preparing to drink a nice hot cup of tea. Socrates earns his place in the tableau only at the cost of losing his heroic stature.
More generally, modern culture has often doubted the value or relevance of antiquity. Socrates, as the most famous of all the ancient Greeks, has fallen out of favour along with the decline of classical learning. Again, the exceptions are revealing. For a few avant-garde artists and composers in the twentieth century, Socrates' antiquity and irrelevance have been precisely the reason for his attraction. A so-called dramatic symphony (for four female voices and a small orchestra) about the death of Socrates, composed by Erik Satie (Socrate, 1916), evoked the death of Socrates by setting to music three passages from Plato, culminating in the death scene from the Phaedo. Satie viewed Socrates as a representa- tive of the 'purity' of antiquity. He prepared to write this piece by eating only white foods: he hoped to produce 'white emotions' in the listener, including wonder and tranquillity. The music itself achieves a beautifully clean minimalism. The dying Socrates was an attractive subject because it was almost meaningless. Antiquity in general, and Socrates in particular, have beome pure white nothing. John Cage adapted Satie's Socrate to make it even more minimalist, in his Cheap Imitation (finished in 1969): he eliminated the human voices and set the entire work for piano.
In the works of both Satie and Cage, the individuality of Socrates - that goggle-eyed old ironist - no longer matters at all. His attraction, for both composers, lies partly in the fact that he died peacefully. But even more important is the fact that he lived and died a very long time ago - and can therefore represent an almost abstract human experience. The point is clear in a striking painting by the Belgian artist Jan Cox that was inspired by Satie's work, De Dood van Socrates (1979). The solitary figure represented here is barely recognisable as a man. Pain triumphs over reason, and even over humanity.
If we move from high to low culture, Socrates is used to mean anything or everything. He can take on an enormous number of banal meanings, since his actual character is almost entirely undefined. Those searching to add a little extra cultural capital to a self-help manual by invoking the ancient world can always appeal to Socrates as an authority for any old truism. William Bodri's Socrates and the Enlightenment Path (2001) treats Socrates as a figure who unites western and eastern wisdom, and can guide us in the West towards Buddhist or Confucian enlightenment. Mark Forstater's The Living Wisdom of Socrates (2004) offers an account of how Socrates, through 'personal struggle', achieved 'a life infused with spirit'. The spiritual side of Socrates is also emphasised in Dan Millman's semi-autobiographical novels Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1980), Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior and The Journeys of Socrates, in which a teacher named 'Socrates' appears as a New Age guru.
In Alain de Botton's enjoyable book The Consolations of
18. The Belgian artist Jan Cox painted this disturbing, semi-abstract Death of Socrates in 1979, a year before he killed himself. To the right of Socrates is a bushy-tailed cockerel - an allusion to Socrates' last words.
Philosophy (2000), the death of Socrates is a reminder that we should not worry too much about popularity. What other people think of us matters only if they are right: truth is always more important than opinion. The lesson is a good and useful one. But, as de Botton himself recognises, its application is doubtful. Perhaps the death of Socrates teaches modern democratic governments and juries to look without prejudice at social minorities and socially unpopu- lar opinions. But perhaps it only teaches de Botton himself not to worry so much about whether strange policemen will like and approve of him. De Botton's chapter on the death of Socrates begins by juxtaposing two drinks: the hemlock in David's painting and the Nesquik chocolate milk enjoyed by de Botton himself after viewing The Death of Socrates. Moral seriousness and heroism can hardly be maintained for more than a few words in a world where adults consume mass- produced children's drinks.
All these books try to reclaim Socrates from academic philosophy and put him back in the marketplace. But the quest risks denying some of the most well-attested facts about Socrates: that he was clever, provocative and liked asking questions. As in the Middle Ages, Socrates is often turned into a representative sage or wise man. Plato's ironic, questioning Socrates is abandoned in favour of Xenophon's bland advocate of traditional morality. These versions of Socrates reveal how little tolerance our culture has for genuine moral or political dissent.
There have been a few attempts to bring Socrates the gadfly into the modern world. But these versions of Socrates often seem severely restricted in the issues they are willing to address. One example is Christopher Phillips's inspiring but oddly limited Socrates' Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy (2002). In coffee shops all over America, Phillips raised big questions about life, such as 'What is love?' and 'What is work?', and talked them through with whoever happened to be in the cafe.
But Phillips's version of the Socratic gadfly is always ter- ribly careful to avoid offending people. He combines Socratic questioning with the charming geniality of the Oprah Winfrey show. If only he could have asked the workers and managers of the Starbucks chains he patronised, 'What is global consumer capitalism?' This is a Socrates without ide- ology, and in fact Socrates without the death: it is a Socrates whom nobody would ever want, or bother, to kill.
The thriller writer Walter Mosley - one of Bill Clinton's favourite writers - has come much closer to creating a modern Socrates whose moral choices really do matter. Socrates Fortlow, who appears in Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Walkin' the Dog, is a contemporary black man. Out of prison after serving a life sentence for murder, Socrates walks the dirty streets of downtown LA, trying to find a way to be good and redeem himself for his crimes. He is a murderer-cum-philosopher, living on extra time, who needs to examine his life again every day - and, if possible, avoid killing any more black people.
In the Socrates Fortlow books, Mosley claims for the black community this icon of white western culture. But in doing so, he shows why it is not possible for a modern Socrates to be a citizen of America in the way that the old Socrates was a citizen of Athens and of the world. Socrates Fortlow feels loyalty only to his own people. The worst of his crimes, in his own eyes, is the fact that the people he killed were black. Mosley's Socrates lives in a world which is so deeply divided by race and class that his quest for human wisdom can be relevant only to himself.
alternative histories
It is hard not to wonder what the cultural and intellectual history of the West would have looked like if Socrates had died in his bed. Would the world record on human rights and toleration have turned out better, worse or much the same? Would our notions of reason, truth, heroism and the soul be radically different without the image of this death? Or has our culture changed so much, since the time of ancient Athens or even since the eighteenth century, that Socrates' death no longer matters to us?