It might be unfair to call this volume ‘too cute by half’; T. would likely prefer it to be called ‘cool’, the term he chooses as a translation of the Greek aretê, ‘virtue’, particularly in the context of the Meno.
T.'s strategy is to make Platonic dialogues more current and relevant by recasting them as stories with a different setting and updated characters, though the text is in many places loosely similar to the original. In that way present-day students need not be distracted and burdened by all the references to ancient Greek persons and events, allusions and more that so often seem significant for Plato's points. In that way ‘we can use Socrates as a guide for understanding our contemporary dilemmas and choices, just as if he were living among us today’ (p. 13). There are of course those of us who say that we can do that using the originals.
In T.'s version of the Crito – his first chapter, ‘Is it Good to Die for One's Country?’ – Socrates receives a draft notice to fight in a senseless war in which his country – and no pretence that it might be Greece – has intervened on one side of a civil war, guilt and responsibility to share on all sides. A young Socrates has protested this war, but now is approached by his friend Chris, who did not want to wake him up because he was asleep like a ‘neutral Swedish baby’ (p. 17). Cute, perhaps, but it completely misses the irony of Crito's concern when Socrates was soon to die; and do Swedish babies indeed have the precocious self-knowledge to be aware of their country's neutrality? The discussion moves on to the meatier ‘The Immoral Majority and Public Opinion’ and ‘Justice, the Rule of Law, and Democracy’. And in a run-away argument, Socrates: ‘“If I run away now, I will feel as ridiculous as if I took a subprime mortgage, without a job or other assets, and then suddenly, facing foreclosure, sought to annul the mortgage agreement and keep the house”. “Think about Canada”, whispered Chris’ (p. 38).
‘The Essence of Cool (After the Meno)’ features Miles, ‘the coolest guy around’ (p. 45), with wealthy parents, relatives and friends, a student at Skidroll College of Professor Georgie, one of the highest paid philosophy professors anywhere (p. 45). Gorgias? some sarcastic Brit might ask. Comparison to the torpedo fish stands more or less as in text (p. 63), but with the odd non-textual, ‘Pretty boys like it when they are compared to animals’ (p. 64). The excursus with the slave is replaced by Socrates' appeal to his grandmother and great aunt, the Pythagorean prohibition of beans (with a lame joke about Mexican restaurants) and, finally, introduction of Miles's chauffeur. Finally the role of Anytus is taken by Ronald Drumb, son of a self-made millionaire.
‘Good, Evil, and God (After the Euthyphro)’ has Socrates teaching at the religious Agora Preparatory School for Boys in Virginia, where concerned parents brought charges. The Euthyphro role is played by televangelist Hugh Thrip (p. 99). Enough said.
Chapter 4, ‘Your Children Will Condemn You. Socrates’ Defense Speech (After the Apology)', takes up the charges of corruption made by Agora Preparatory parents. He charges his older accusers: ‘You may remember the Broadway production of … Skyscrapers, in which a character named Socrates climbed up high-rises, attempting to study the stars and then trying to use antigravity …’ (p. 127). He goes through his knowledge of ignorance, his talks with plumbers and engineers, his conclusions – and the contrast with ‘the group of parents who … gang up on me on behalf of all the financial advisers, lawyers, politicians, artists, religious leaders, and engineers I have ridiculed over the years’ (p. 133). Cross-examination of the accuser is with Mel Etuxor – Get it? – and reaches to Hawking, Dawkins and Darwin.
The final segment, ‘Death and Liberation (after the Phaedo)’, is set in a proto diner on I-81, just south of Binghamton. Not a prisoner, Socrates is an ALS patient in a hospice, the jailer replaced by a nurse. As in the Phaedo itself, there is a large cast of characters and Socrates here composes a variant on Sleeping Beauty. Arguments about death, suicide, the relation of body and soul follow, roughly in the order, but not with the orderliness of the original.
The obvious question about this book is ‘Why?’. Supposedly it is to make the ancient material more accessible to today's undergraduates or lay philosophical readers. But why is it more direct to talk about a play called the Skyscrapers, where everything we are told is modelled on Socrates' references to Aristophanes' Clouds, than to talk about Aristophanes' Clouds in the first place? Why is it more direct to talk about the Vietnam War and its relation to the Peloponnesian War and to Socrates, than to talk about the latter and leave it to students to come up with the many possible relations to the former and to many other things? If Plato wrote with a clear realisation that his examples from his own contemporaries might be lost on future readers, but would remain examples of general relations in political and social life, then the specification of a particular set of modern examples narrows the possibilities. It does not open up potential windows.
T. does stick closely to the arguments of the texts he is recasting but the settings often distort rather that illuminate the points Socrates is making. The five dialogues usually linked to the account of Socrates' trial and death are, with the exception of the Meno, dramatically continuous. All that is lost in this volume, for Socrates is hopping from one place to another engaging in very different projects. At least for this reader the central message that Plato conveys in this set of dialogues is lost; we do not meet a Socrates who is engaged in the project of the examined life and who is willing to die (not from ALS but) because he has been condemned to death by the Athenians for this engagement.
