Socrates: The Archetypal Authentic Leader

• In Event: Learning From Authentic Leader Role Models

Short Description

Socrates is one of the most celebrated authentic leader in the West, speaking and teaching truth to the future leaders of Athens. Through an examination of Plato’s earliest dialogues, this paper examines Socrates’ call to build a beautiful life, speak the truth, care for the psyche, and, if necessary die, for one’s truth.

Detailed Abstract

Socrates is the most celebrated authentic leader in the West and the founder of a movement we now call philosophy, the love of wisdom, which is quite different, in Plato’s telling, than a gathering of facts and information. Socrates told his truth to any and all who would hear it, but especially to the young men of Athens who would eventually become leaders themselves in the polis. He taught them through stories and arguments and refused to charge fees for his services. Plato presents Socrates as an artful weaver of words who had the courage to speak truth to power. Through an examination of the Laches, Alcibiades, Crito, Euthyphro, Phaedo and the Apology, this paper examines what Michel Foucault has called “the aesthetics of existence,” the drive in Socrates’ teaching for his interlocutors and students to build a beautiful life (2008, Courage of Truth, p. 164). Foucault also presents Socrates as a parresiast—one who speaks all the truth—even and especially if it means endangering one’s life, which much art and literature has sought to do through the ages. But the truth is best told ironically, and Socrates, according to Vlastos, is a life long ironist (p. 31). But one cannot speak truth to others if s/he does not speak the truth to one’s own soul, and this, according to Foucault constitutes the life-long task of the care of the soul, which requires self-examination and accountability to others. Finally, Socrates is the first celebrated martyr—one who bears witness to the truth and dies for the same—an important, though disturbing, pattern for contested social and political movements throughout the history of the Western civilization.
Socrates can indeed be identified as the archetypal authentic leader in the West, even though he never held political office, nor ever aspired to such. In fact, his daimon prohibited him from even considering such a direction since it would keep him from realizing his calling to the people of Athens. Gregory Vlastos argues that Socrates position “is demophilic, though not strictly democratic: we should not credit Socrates with a democratic political theory,” but he does have “profoundly democratic” “sentiments” and “loyalties” as opposed to Plato’s “crypto-oligarchic ideologue” of the Republic. (p. 18). Whether one accepts Vlastos’ sharp distinction between the Socrates of the early dialogues and Socrates of the middle dialogues (Plato’s mouthpiece essentially), it is true that Socrates invited all people, high and low, rich and poor, to the philosophical life when he claimed that the “unexamined life is not worth living by a human being” (Ap. 38A, cited in Vlastos, p. 18). Socrates is not an intellectual and philosophical elitist, he rubs shoulders with the hoi polloi, dialogues with soldiers, artisans, craftsmen, and statesmen as he wanders the streets of Athens looking for a good conversation. This qualifies him as a true grass roots leader.
In this paper I confine myself primarily to the five dialogues which deal with the trial and death of Socrates—the Laches, Alcibiades, Crito, Euthyphro, Phaedo and the Apology —for a number of reasons. First, at least three of these dialogues are among the earliest of Plato’s dialogues and may, therefore, reflect Socrates’ actual words and ideas, as Vlastos argues. Second, even if Vlastos is wrong, Plato wished to present different sides of Socrates during his trial and death to his posterity. Third, these dialogues claim to capture the last days and words of Socrates, which should be of interest to all who study organizations and leadership, since ones last words supposedly capture the essence of a life lived, and Plato claimed that Socrates was the best and wisest of all men he had known. Finally, the discussions in these dialogues center on building a beautiful life, speaking the truth (even if ironically), and caring for one’s soul (psyche) and the souls of others, all relevant topics for those who study leaders and organizations. Finally the paper explores Socrates’ refusal to escape his harsh and hyperbolic sentence—a sentence of death—for speaking the truth for speaking what he perceived to be the truth.

Participant

• A.J. Grant, Robert Morris University