Educating Glaucon

Mary’s question Thursday about Glaucon’s equating value with effort got me thinking. We have witnessed Socrates gently poking at the Athenian habit of answering a moral question by remembering a line of poetry – e.g. his critical analysis of Simonides in Book I. One reason the Athenian jury was not crazy to condemn Socrates for corrupting the youth is that he radically called into question what most people thought was the right procedure for deliberating about things. Critical thinking did not supplant appeal to (poetic) authority without a fight.

But as we will see, Socrates also challenges the central content of Athenian morality by questioning the signal aspiration of the Homeric ethos: to accomplish something so great as to be worthy of acclaim and commemoration. The Greek term for this is kleos, meaning ‘glory’ and ‘fame,’ but also the song that tells of one’s accomplishments. So someone who has kleos is extraordinary, singably memorable and praisworthy, to a degree sufficient to make him godlike (that is, immortal. Indeed, to be remembered forever for one’s extraordinary accomplishments is the only sort of immortality the Greeks took seriously.). 

Interestingly, Socrates does not completely reject this ethos of the extraordinary, but he redefines it dramatically. Instead of the blustering, self-absorbed heroism of an Achilles or Odysseus, the Socratic hero is a critical thinker. “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being,” Socrates says at his trial, at a moment in the proceedings calculated to give maximum offense to his judges’ deepest sensibilities.

So we might say that one thing Socrates hopes to teach Glaucon is to turn his ambition in a radically different direction – not to challenge the proposition that great accomplishment takes great effort, or even the assumption that he should aspire to greatness, but deeply to problematize the forms of greatness that attract him..