Suffering & Doing Injustice: The Political Continuity of the Socratic Maxim

• In Event: Justice, Education, and Human Flourishing in Plato and Aristotle

Abstract

The Socratic maxim that it is better to suffer than to do injustice is emblematic of a Socratic moral inflexibility, perhaps born from Socrates’s well-known moral intellectualism. Indeed, this maxim has frequently been accused of a kind of pathological rationality that shows at best a tin ear for practical realities and at worst a wanton apathy. Whether one forgives or condemns Socrates’s practical daftness, this maxim ostensibly stands as a testament to his high-minded and unyielding commitment to excellence. This paper will confound that reputation.

Paying due credence to Socrates’s claim that this maxim is bound by iron and adamantine arguments (Gorgias 509a), this paper argues that this maxim is in fact continuous with political principles. The maxim is admittedly difficult to maintain, but this difficulty is proportionate to a difficulty within the nature of the political itself. In other words, pace Arendt who claims that the maxim is an example of a philosophical truth in contradistinction to a political fact, the paper makes the case that the maxim is responsive to the conditions of political reality rather than an idealizing normative claim detached from a practical context. To make this argument, the paper considers the counter-positions of Polus and Callicles and the political presuppositions they assume. In the context of Polus’s anterior conception of the political, Socrates’s claim contradicts the political necessity of punishment. In the context of Callicles’s conception of the political, Socrates’s maxim contradicts the essence of human nature and power. The paper shows that Socrates’s maxim relies on a conception of the political that does contravene those assumed by Polus and Callicles but is nevertheless genuinely political. The commitment to justice that motivates the Socratic maxim may be an ideal, but it is one that the city must hold for itself.

Author

• Mary Elizabeth Halper, Hertog Foundation