Art, Politics, and the Limits of Reason
Art, Politics, and the Limits of Reason
A talk delivered at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, Lancaster, New Hampshire, June 19, 2024.
A show of hands, please: How many people in this room, if they were sentenced to death by the state for bogus charges, would not only accept the verdict without dispute but wouldn’t complain about it, even if the authorities required them to administer the execution themselves? I’m lowering my hand because I sometimes cry when I catch a cold. But I begin with a man who did just that: Socrates.
Plato recounts the touching words of fellow traveler Phaedo in the dialogue named for him:
I had a singular feeling at being in his [Socrates’s] company. For I could hardly believe that I was present at the death of a friend, and therefore I did not pity him, Echecrates; he died so fearlessly, and his words and bearing were so noble and gracious, that to me he appeared blessed. I thought that in going to the other world he could not be without a divine call, and that he would be happy, if any man ever was, when he arrived there, and therefore I did not pity him as might have seemed natural at such an hour. But I had not the pleasure which I usually feel in philosophical discourse (for philosophy was the theme of which we spoke). I was pleased, but in the pleasure there was also a strange admixture of pain; for I reflected that he was soon to die, and this double feeling was shared by us all; we were laughing and weeping by turns, especially the excitable Apollodorus—you know the sort of man?… He was quite beside himself; and I and all of us were greatly moved.
By what power was Socrates able to maintain his composure? Not just composure— indifference. Crito relays instructions from the court attendant that Socrates shouldn’t talk too much: “Talking, he says, increases heat, and this is apt to interfere with the action of the poison; persons who excite themselves are sometimes obliged to take a second or even a third dose.” Socrates answers, “Let him mind his business and be prepared to give the poison twice or even thrice if necessary; that is all.”
The power was reason, a word that appears fifty-six times in Phaedo in one sense or another. Reason is the active exercise of a saving grace, love of knowledge, literally and etymologically philosophy.
…each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below, but is always infected by the body; and so she sinks into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple.
If you’ve not encountered this language before, the soul is referred to as feminine throughout the Dialogues. Socrates continues:
[This] is the reason why the true lovers of knowledge are temperate and brave; and not for the reason which the world gives…. The soul of a philosopher will reason in quite another way; she will not ask philosophy to release her in order that when released she may deliver herself up again to the thraldom of pleasures and pains, doing a work only to be undone again, weaving instead of unweaving her Penelope's web. But she will calm passion, and follow reason, and dwell in the contemplation of her, beholding the true and divine (which is not matter of opinion), and thence deriving nourishment. Thus she seeks to live while she lives, and after death she hopes to go to her own kindred and to that which is like her, and to be freed from human ills.
Reason for Socrates is a divine state, close to what the historical Buddha described as equanimity. (Socrates and Siddhartha Gautama may have died within a year of each other.) It entails clear consideration of all matters, applied with such psychological force that the world even at its worst brings the practitioner no upset. Not even state-ordered execution is enough of an occasion to abandon calm and dialogue.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but does this describe any libertarian you know?
I ask because we libertarians supposedly value reason highly, if not above everything. We even have a magazine called Reason. Our party is the Party of Principle. From what do our principles derive? Reason. Via what mechanism do our positions derive from our principles? Reason. But if our reason was the reason of Socrates, an attitude of cordiality, self-restraint, and Buddha-like insight would emanate from all of our souls, right down to their expressions through the LPNH X account.
The fact of the matter is that hardly anyone aspires to reason. At best we achieve rationality, and even that remains elusive. We’re not Socrates in this picture. We are the gesticulating disciples around him. We are the guy with his head sliding down the wall. This painting is the real subject of my talk. With apologies, I have deceived you into attending an art history lecture.
Displayed is a work by the French painter Jacques-Louis David, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The date is 1787, which means that it resembles the actual scene from 22 centuries years earlier vaguely at best. Though it wasn’t for not trying—David consulted the best historians of his time to visualize the details of clothing and architecture. But some of it is a pastiche—the arched hallway on the left was based on an architectural study that David had drawn in Rome. And obviously we don’t know what any of these people looked like. But The Death of Socrates was immediately recognized as a masterpiece upon being displayed in the Salon of 1787, with one critic deeming it the best painting in the exhibition and calling it “superb.” That astute critic was Thomas Jefferson.
We can only be somewhat certain of the identities of a few of the figures besides Socrates. The man with his hand on Socrates’s knee is thought to be Crito, who figures prominently in the Dialogues. Crito, in the chapter of that name, offered to finance Socrates’s escape from prison. Socrates replied with an argument that one should not answer an injustice with an injustice. If the principle resulted in the death of the principled, so be it. Crito grips Socrates’s leg as if reluctant to release his friend to the next world.
Socrates’s wife Xanthippe is being led away up the stairway out of the prison. The seated figure hanging his head in resignation at the foot of the bed is Plato. Socrates’s star student was in his 20s when Socrates died. Plato is sitting in a future time, recalling this scene as if he were included in it. One way to read this painting is as a view directly into Plato’s mind.
There are some interesting dramatic details. There are abrasions of red on the ankle of the extended leg, indicating that it was only recently released from the cuff and chain on the floor. The attendant bearing the poison looks away in evident shame, knowing that he is participating in a great injustice. A lyre on the bed refers to an earlier discussion in the Dialogues, concerning the question of whether the body and the soul could be likened to an instrument and its music.
Crucial to the effect of the painting is the composition itself. Even before you receive the illustrative content, by which I mean these important story elements I’m describing, you get a spinal cord-level impact of the visuals themselves. The right side of the arch plunges into the painting from the upper-left corner. The upraised arm of Socrates is echoed by another figure at the right edge, gripping the bridge of his nose as if overcome with a migraine. Not at all coincidentally, the crosslight on the prison wall meets this figure’s lifted wrist and carries the attention back to the top edge of the rectangle. A parade of drapery-wrapped shoulders, elbows, and knees creates a similar chain downward and leftward from the same figure. The hood of Plato’s robe lines up with the right foreleg of the attendant. The rest of his pose angles equally the other way, forming an X shape that becomes hard to unsee once you’re aware of it. We can determine the vanishing point of the painting by following the receding edges of the stones on the floor. It is right over Plato’s head, reinforcing the impression that this scene is emanating from Plato’s imagination. All of this is deliberate, part of the stage magic that has long been part of the artist’s repertoire.
Why would someone with taste in the late 18th century have wanted an image of Socrates on his deathbed? Even 250 years later we have a good idea in this case. The patron was Charles-Michel Trudaine de la Sablière, whose father was a parliamentarian and had a highly cultured circle around him. Socrates was a favorite figure among this group for exemplifying what had become known as Enlightenment values. The Enlightenment was still relatively new at this point and is the source of the esteem of reason and individualism and the disdain of superstition that we libertarians continue today. We ought to regard this patron as one of our philosophical ancestors.
Sadly for Trudaine, seven years after this painting was completed, he was guillotined in the Reign of Terror by Robespierre and the Jacobins. Two days after his execution, the political winds shifted. Robespierre was arrested, along with men associated with the Jacobins. One of them was David. In the last speech that Robespierre was able to deliver to the Jacobins, he told them that he would drink hemlock on behalf of his principles. David is reported to have replied, “I will drink it with you.”
The details of the death of Robespierre are gruesome but worth recounting in light of our subject. To avoid capture by the gendarmes who gathered to put an end to the terror, he jumped from the building where he was holed up, and somehow landed on someone with a bayoneted rifle. This resulted in several wounds including a pelvic fracture. A compatriot with two pistols handed one to Robespierre and killed himself with the other. Due to interference from a gendarme Robespierre succeeded only in mangling his jaw. He was imprisoned, and a doctor was belatedly summoned to pull some teeth and fragments of mandible out of his head. When he was finally placed in the guillotine, the executioner removed the bandage holding his face together, and let him scream in agony for fifteen minutes, while the crowd cheered, before dropping the blade on his neck. His death at the hands of the state could not have contrasted more with that of Socrates, and neither could his demeanor. (David extricated himself from legal trouble, at least mortal legal trouble, and died an old man.)
There are several conclusions or inspirations that we might take from this painting.
For one, we might consider whether we’re fulfilling the promise of reason. Reason is not just rationality and clear-sightedness, though it includes them. Reason is additionally a refinement of temperament that lets us face adversity with patience and calm. To my mind, libertarians ought to exemplify the love of reason by exhibiting thoughtfulness and self-control on all occasions.
Another regards principle. To us, it seems obvious that Socrates was in the right. It’s difficult for us contemporary people to imagine that the youth of Athens were so endangered by Socrates’s ideas that it was necessary to kill him. But it was not so obvious to that Athenian jury. Both David and Trudaine thought themselves to be on the side of reason, and yet the former patron and artist found themselves on opposite sides of a political conflict. Somehow even Robespierre saw himself as walking in the footsteps of Socrates. The lesson here is that we are colossal fools. It was Socrates who was famously deemed wise because he knew that he did not know. It is possible to be both principled and wrong, not only from the standpoint of principle but also within the context that the principle is operating.
Another regards this professed and actual willingness to drink poison. We libertarians are right to esteem reason and value principle but it occurs to me that Socrates’s decision to take poison is not very Jewish. We Jews have a pretty low opinion of martyrdom. Suicide is regarded as a grave sin, on the premise that our lives were given to us as a great favor by God and He will take them back when He’s ready. I don’t judge Socrates on this point but I’m glad that David found a way to live and keep painting, in disregard or at least relinquishment of his principles, or we wouldn’t have The Oath of the Horatii and the Death of Marat to admire. The summary notion is that principles are of great importance but it is not usually desirable, especially for us moderns, to follow them off a cliff.
Another is a reminder that reason is surprisingly easy to pervert. The French Revolution was reason drawn to inhuman conclusions. The whole enterprise was thought scientific, right down to organizing a new and famously ridiculous calendar with a ten-day week that zero-indexed to the storming of the Bastille instead of the birth of Jesus. Much of what goes on in progressive politics now is temperamentally similar to Jacobinism, with vaunted experts professing to “follow the science” as they reorganize society according to a vision that does not at all make concessions to real human lives. The Jacobins were the enemy of our Enlightenment ancestors and the contemporary Jacobins remain our chief enemies now. Principles aside, we must judge the tree by the fruit: are they producing nobility, grace, beauty, prosperity, and happiness or their opposites?
Last but not final is the importance of good memes. The grand tradition of history painting has long concluded but we have our own culture of political imagery, namely the memeplex. The ultimate purpose of art is to serve as a repository of visual quality. But one has to admire its communicative power, particularly in the case of this painting, which reinvokes the importance of the Enlightenment and the best of our Greek heritage. Memes don’t rise to the level of David but they’re handily equivalent to the many engravings that were made of The Death of Socrates and distributed with commentary. This image-making is a crucial aspect of applied politics and we should study it as a manifestation of real and consequential power. Think of David and make based memes.
Thank you for listening.
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