Having confronted his main accuser and refuted to the best of his abilities the charges against him, Socrates now provides a positive account of his life. He imagines the jury offering to acquit him if he will just give up his practice of philosophy. He then gives to the imaginary offer a long, impassioned reply:
Men of Athens, I appreciate and love you, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and have the ability, I will not stop philosophizing and exhorting you and appealing to any one of you I happen to meet, saying what I always say, “Good sir, since you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city and the one most renowned for wisdom and power, aren’t you ashamed of yourself for devoting yourself to maximizing your wealth, your reputation, and your rank, while you show no interest at all in how to improve your wisdom, your honesty, and the state of your soul?”
And if any of you protests and says he does care about these things, I won’t just quit and go away, but I will ask questions, examine, and cross-examine him. And if I find he hasn’t acquired virtue, but claims he has, I’ll accuse him of valuing the most important things the least and the least important things the most. I will do this to anyone I meet, young or old, foreigner or citizen, but especially to you citizens, since you are my kindred. Know well that this is what the god commands, and I believe that no greater good has ever come to this city than my mission for the god. For I spend all my time doing nothing else but urging you, both young and old, not to worry about your bodies or your possessions in preference to or as much as your soul, how it may be as good as possible, declaring, Goodness does not come from wealth, but from goodness comes wealth and every good thing that men possess, whether in private or public life.[1]
If this is corrupting the youth, he concludes, I am guilty. “I cannot do otherwise, even if I am to die many deaths.” The jurors burst into an uproar.
The usually cryptic Socrates here spells out his aims and identifies them as a mission from God. Earlier he spoke of the importance of remaining at one’s post. Here he reveals the god as his commander. He takes a stand of conscience, like Martin Luther at Worms. He will obey the god rather than the people of Athens. With his statement of conviction comes an uncharacteristic note of bravado and defiance, what Xenophon calls megalēgoria, literally ‘talking big.’[2] He answers to an authority higher than that of the Athenian people. Whether the citizens recognize it or not, his philosophical activities confer the highest good on the state.
Socrates’ self-evaluation raises some fundamental questions. In the Platonic dialogues we never (well, almost never) see Socrates reproaching his interlocutors for their moral failures (though this does happen in some of Xenophon’s dialogues). Typically Socrates’ philosophical conversations focus on the definition of a virtue. The effort to arrive at a satisfactory definition usually fails, and Socrates tries to rally the interlocutor to continue the quest, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Though there seems to be ample room for Socrates to point out the intellectual shortcomings of his interlocutors to their faces, he almost never does this. Instead, he often berates himself for his own limitations in the inquiry.
Certainly we don’t see Socrates accuse his interlocutors of moral deficiencies (with the exception of the Gorgias, where Socrates pours out a good deal of bile). How then does Socrates’ pursuit of what appears to be theoretical knowledge of ethical terms translate into a program of moral reform? Socrates doesn’t address the disconnect between his everyday practice and his self-professed aims in his courtroom speech. But here where his life is under public scrutiny, he offers a rare glimpse into what appears to be his own understanding of his life’s work. He sees himself not as a logical quibbler but as a moral reformer carrying out a religious mission.
[1].Plato Apology 29d2-30b4. Burnet’s reading (1924 ad 30b3) makes agatha in b4 the predicate (“goodness renders wealth and everything that men possess, whether in private or public life, valuable”); but this requires changing the syntax of the second clause in the middle of a parallel construction.
[2].Xenophon Apology 1, compare 32.