Plato had defined man as a biped and featherless animal, for which he was applauded. Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into the lecture hall, saying, “Behold Plato’s Man!”
—Diogenes Laertius
WE READ PLATO because Plato’s texts are around to be read. This is, in the end, why anyone reads anything: because it’s there. Whether or not the work is worthy of keeping around so that it can be read is often beside the point. Bad things remain and good things disappear for accidental reasons. Had history taken another turn—papyrus misplaced, turned to dust, and forgotten—we philosophers, thinkers, Westerners would be an unrecognizable lot, horses of a different color, impossibly plucked chickens, real toads swamping around imaginary gardens in praise of poetry rather than finding it suspect. Say Plato’s work was lost, or another of Socrates’s students’ writings had gained more favor, or someone had studied with Diogenes long enough to want to write a series of books and dialogues about him after he died so that his thought could live on. Say we start with love of comedy over tragedy, with the superiority of the nonhuman animal, with a dogged commitment to perform our beliefs rather than talk about them. The subjunctive conditional does little logical work, but history is carried on the backs of counterfactual beasts; and it is thus that the contingencies of the past create the apparent necessities of the present.
This much is true of both intellectual and evolutionary history (if there is such a distinction). Move the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs a fraction of a degree in its ancient trajectory through our solar system, and the little mole-like creature hiding in the bushes that eventually survived and begat Socrates and Diogenes and you and me stays on its own humble course as nothing other than a mammal-snack for the lizard king. No species, no individual, no text had to be here, and this is the most important thing to remember when species and individuals and texts start speaking of necessity.
This could all have been different. That difference, no matter how one tries to suppress it, is the point at which meaning begins. Even in the dialectic, even between two characters in a dialogue, between two historical friendly enemies conversing, there is the prior difference that makes the dialectic differ from itself and thus possible. We are featherless bipeds . . . with broad flat nails, replies Plato. And this is all already different.
The soul of the tyrant will be forever driven onward by the gadfly of desire.
—Plato, Republic 577e
The philosopher desires wisdom, has a literal love for it, but what is it that drives the philosophic soul in such pursuit? Something small that nevertheless makes itself that to which we must continuously attend? Something without a mouth capable of speech yet nevertheless makes itself heard? Something insignificant that nevertheless will not be quieted, will not let us rest? It is not, perhaps, that different souls have different gadflies spurring them to action—some good, some bad, each turning us in a different direction. Rather, the same gadfly of desire comes to reside on different souls. That toward which the city of Athens will be driven forever onward will be determined not by the nature of the local gadfly but by the soul of the city.
Socrates is compared to a multitude of animals throughout Plato’s writings, but it is the moniker of the gadfly that remains the most famous and the most enigmatic. How often an Introduction to Philosophy course begins with this metaphor in an attempt to explain all of Western philosophy: Socrates is a fly that buzzes around the horse-like city of Athens, bothering and nipping at the civic body, but in the end doing good and stirring the people to action; so, too, must we philosophers ask the hard questions and make people think about important things even if they don’t want to at first. Socrates and all of philosophy are cast in the role of a pest, an annoyance, something at which one might understandably swat. But it is not just that Socrates is called a pest by others. To be sure, Plato has Socrates himself use the gadfly analogy in his Apology—proof that, at least in the mind of a man acting as his own lawyer, it is something positive and good to say. But what is it that Socrates thinks he is accomplishing by comparing himself to an animal—and a “low-level” animal, at that? Socrates, after all, does not spur his neighbors to action, as this would suggest that he is a human riding the horse that is the body of the polis. Rather, he compares himself to an insect, to a creature that can merely annoy the polis into movement. And he has, indeed, annoyed the citizens of the polis. They are moving to kill him. It is with this realization of the life-and-death stakes that Plato has Socrates announce:
At this point, therefore, fellow Athenians, so far from pleading on my own behalf, as might be supposed, I am pleading on yours, in case by condemning me you should mistreat the gift which God has bestowed upon you—because if you put me to death, you will not easily find another like me. The fact is, if I may put the point in a somewhat comical way, that I have been literally attached by God to our city, as if to a horse—a large thoroughbred, which is a bit sluggish because of its size, and needs to be aroused by some sort of gadfly. Yes, in me, I believe, God has attached to our city just such a creature—the kind that is constantly alighting everywhere on you, all day long, arousing, cajoling, or reproaching each and every one of you. You will not easily acquire another such gadfly, gentlemen; rather, if you take my advice, you will spare my life. I dare say, though, that you will get angry, like people who are awakened from their doze. Perhaps you will heed Anytus, and give me a swat: you could happily finish me off, and then spend the rest of your life asleep—unless God, in his compassion for you, were to send you someone else. (Apology 30d–e)1
Why, specifically, are the people of Athens swatting at this fly? There are charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, of course, but Socrates’s crimes are far greater. This insignificant insect has managed, with only the weapon of his mouth, to turn his fellow citizens into animals as well. It is not just that the state is a horse, but that the citizens with whom Socrates has interacted have typically become mute animals. And for this, they are striking him dead.
For the Greeks, as well as for most modern civilizations, logos understood as speech is thought to be a necessary part of our essential humanity. Simply to speak, though, is not enough according to Socrates. What is truly radical in Socrates’s claim is that the most important element of our humanity is not merely that we speak, but that about which we speak.2 Earlier in his Apology, before he compares himself to a gadfly, Socrates explains it to his accusers thus:
Perhaps someone might say, “Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?” Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you. (Apology, 37e–38a)3
To see just why this is so important—why it is not speech that makes us human, according to Plato, but philosophical speech in particular—we need to step back a bit and consider the sort of talk that will not get the job done.
The cicadas of the Phaedrus might be said to speak. They sing their words, and as such are like rhetoricians, lulling us to sleep with the beauty of how the words are said rather than the truth of what they mean. Socrates introduces the myth of the cicadas halfway through this dialogue, in fact, because it seems that Phaedrus himself has failed to be stirred appropriately by the words that have so far been spoken. They have moved him, but only as words. When Phaedrus worries about Lysias’s speeches, for instance, what concerns him is not the philosophic truths at which Lysias might point but rather how he will appear as a competitor in the art of rhetoric.4 And it is soon after that Socrates tells Phaedrus the myth: the cicadas used to be a race of men who, long ago, were bewitched by the beauty of the songs of the Muses; thus they were cursed, turned into short-lived insects that drone on all day in beautiful yet empty song, reporting back to the Muses the conversations of humans and never having anything to say themselves. To drone on—to speak of unimportant things—is to be less-than-human. One might as well not be speaking at all. The cicadas are animals that used to be men: by using their speech for nonphilosophic purposes, they have become animal. Socrates, however, is a man who emerges from the metaphor of the gadfly: by using his stinging mouth to incite others to become philosophers, he becomes fully human.
For better or for worse this is a major Platonic distinction between humans and nonhuman animals. The problem is that Socrates, if we are to be honest about it, has more or less failed at his task to care for the souls of the young men of Athens by this measure. Whenever he speaks with his fellow citizens about virtue and the examined life, it isn’t long until everyone but Socrates is beaten into silence. The finest minds, excited early on to engage Socrates in conversation, are again and again reduced to the caricature of the Socratic interlocutor, spouting only the occasional, “Yes,” or “Of course,” or “It is as you say, Socrates.” And it would be disingenuous to say that Socrates himself is not aware of this.
Consider the encounter with Thrasymachus—a dialogue that essentially is a contest to see who can silence whom. Socrates admits to being frightened of Thrasymachus at first, even saying: “if I had not looked at him before he looked at me I would have lost my voice” (Republic 336d). The allusion here is to a superstition that would have been well-known to Plato’s audience. A wolf, it was thought, could steal a human’s voice if the wolf saw the human before the human saw the wolf. Socrates thus casts Thrasymachus in the role of the wolf from the start; and by the end of their encounter in the Republic, Thrasymachus has, indeed, been reduced to animalistic silence. What makes this interaction all the more interesting is not merely that Socrates has reduced his interlocutor into bestial quiet, but that it is possible to see this animal allusion reflecting back on Socrates himself, thus casting him in the role of the wolf. There are, in fact, at least four possible readings of the wolf allusion.
The first and most obvious interpretation of Socrates’s encounter with Thrasymachus is that they are two humans and Socrates eventually just gets the better of Thrasymachus, who is forced to be silent because his logic and arguments are the weaker. The wolf allusion is just a bit of poetry. A second, more metaphorical, reading is that Socrates thinks of Thrasymachus as an animal from the start—a dangerous wolf out to steal his logos—and fears losing his own humanity (his voice) to this beast if Thrasymachus should see him first. A third reading suggests that Socrates takes Thrasymachus to be an animal from the start and then, by means of stripping Thrasymachus of his voice, ensures that Thrasymachus is truly an animal at the end. But a fourth reading sees the metaphor doubling back on itself, questioning who has been the human and who has been the wolf all along. Here, we must acknowledge that after his encounter with Socrates, Thrasymachus has surely had his voice stolen. Socrates wins the day and Thrasymachus mumbles assent here and there. Thus it is Socrates who can be seen cast in the role of the wolf—the wolf that sees the man first and thus is able to take his voice by the end of the encounter. The people of Athens are putting Socrates to death based on the third reading. That is, they have noted and taken offense at the fact that Socrates regularly strips them of their humanity by reducing them to silence and thus animality. What they fail to realize, however, is what is anamorphically hidden in plain sight in the text: that Plato is turning Socrates into the animal, and perhaps thus even the villain, in order to accomplish this. Plato’s Socrates is the wolf who steals men’s voices, the blind gadfly who annoys the polis, the bull whose insatiable appetite threatens the youth of Athens. Plato’s Socrates is not always what he seems, and is never wholly this or that.
So Socrates is swatted because he strips citizens of their humanity (though he is able to do this only by means of becoming animal himself). But why call Athens a horse? A horse can’t actually kill a gadfly. A horse is, in reality, ineffective at ridding itself of its pests, yet the city of Athens will do an excellent job of this when Socrates is forced to drink the hemlock.
Perhaps we might say that Socrates rightly sees that he has bothered Athens and not merely the individual people of Athens. The metaphor of Athens as a single beast—a horse—thus makes sense because in stripping individual citizens of their humanity by stealing their voices it is truly the idea of the polis that is being attacked. Indeed, it is the Greek ideal that one is to be measured by one’s public standing, by mere speech and not the content of that speech, that is under assault. As John Heath argues, in Ancient Greece “from Homer to Aristotle, the striving for public recognition, and the concomitant fear of public humiliation and reproach, remained undiminished. . . . There was little if anything to separate who a person was from what others thought of him.”5 It is thus the ideal of Athens at which Socrates nips, as he both humiliates individuals into stunned animal silence and calls into question whether such a sense of selfhood is truly constitutive of a proper citizen and thus a proper state.
The gadfly, after all, is not truly a pest, not something other and alien to the horse. The gadfly is part of the horse, part of what makes the horse a horse, part of what makes the horse act in a horselike way. In true Platonic fashion, we should be asking about the eidos of the horse. And in doing so we would have to admit that the head twitching from side to side, the ears flicking back and forth, the long, full, flowing tail that swishes from haunch to haunch—each is an important ingredient in Horse. But these qualities are, precisely and fully, the result of the work of the gadfly. It is the gadfly that circles the horse’s head and makes it twitch. It is the gadfly that buzzes the horse’s ears and makes them flick. It is the gadfly that, evolutionarily, caused the horse’s tail to grow thick and coarse—the gadfly that keeps the horse’s tail in perpetual motion. Without the gadfly, we would not recognize the horse as a horse. The gadfly, that is, is not an addition to the horse—parasitic and problematic. Athens as it should be—Athens if we could further capitalize the “A” in its name—is constituted by Socrates.
Oh Ferryman of the Dead, receive Diogenes the Dog who laid bare the whole pretentiousness of life.
—Diogenes’s epitaph
Socrates, especially in large doses, can seem a bit pretentious in his supposed irony. If we return to his Apology speech we will recall that, perhaps with an eye toward spicing things up and connecting with his audience, he tells the jurors that he will now make a “somewhat comical” analogy. This is how he comes to call himself a gadfly—as a joke. But hemlock is easy; comedy is hard.
The true philosopher of comedy, the funniest philosopher of antiquity, was the dog, not the gadfly. Like Socrates the gadfly, Diogenes the dog strove to bother, annoy, and shock citizens from their complacency. Plato, however, and most of the history of philosophy that follows him, see the two projects as somehow radically different. Socrates, homegrown in the city that kills him, is the godfather of all Western thought. Diogenes is an adopted, foreign footnote—a dirty, lewd, nonphilosophical addendum that is rarely mentioned and certainly far less respected. Historical accident, of course, made this so.
It is clear that Plato and Diogenes knew each other well and disrespected each other intensely. Plato, the man who put the moniker of gadfly on Socrates by putting the funny word in his mouth, was also not afraid to call Diogenes’s humanity into question. In fact, when Plato attempted to insult Diogenes by calling him a dog, Diogenes simply agreed, snapping back that the name “was correct because of his habit of staying close to those who had betrayed him.”6 Plato also reportedly said that Diogenes could be described as “a Socrates gone mad.”7 The gadfly, stripped of sanity, becomes a dog, and it is unclear—at least for Plato—who is nipping at whom.
Diogenes was a foreign beast to the Athenians, born in Sinope sometime around 412 BCE. He arrived to Athens after having been banished from his home for defacing the local currency—perhaps in collusion with his father, a minter of coins. Once in Athens, Diogenes took to heart the Delphic Oracle’s proclamation to him to keep up the good work, and so he dedicated himself to defacing the local (cultural) currency by calling on the Athenians to question their customs and most foundational assumptions concerning the city, virtue, and the meaning of life. Like Socrates, that is, Diogenes saw his animalistic mission as one of questioning what the Athenians took to be constitutive of their very humanity.
Thucydides tells us that years before Diogenes arrived, Pericles had declared: “We maintain Athens open and accessible to everybody, and we do not turn away those who flee from danger or who come to us moved by curiosity or by a desire to improve themselves.”8 Athens during, and to a certain extent after, the thirty-year rule of Pericles was known as a place that actively welcomed strangers and curiosity. But only to a certain extent. It was curiosity, after all, that later killed the cat in this place—or at least the gadfly, which has only one life to give. And yet the dog was allowed to live. Given that the particularities of this place gave rise to both philosophers, we would be remiss to ignore the historical and political realities of the times when trying to undertake an Athenian zoology.
Diogenes lived in abject poverty, begging for all that he had, taking shelter in a barrel. He reported that the idea of tub-living had come to him after observing, and consequently wishing to emulate, snails.9 And the idea of begging and living poorly yet contentedly had come from his praise of the mouse who scavenges for crumbs and lives a happy life no matter where he is.10 Diogenes tended to look to animals in order to model himself after them. Plato, however, was part of the aristocracy. He begged for nothing and lived a life of privilege, preferring to look to animals in order to model his descriptive metaphors of others after them. It is this class distinction, which we might think of as being mapped onto a species distinction as well, that formed part of the tension between the two men. Diogenes, after all, once said that there is no place to spit in a rich man’s home, so a visitor must find the dirtiest spot possible—that’s why he always spat in the rich man’s face.11 Over the years, Plato would take much abuse from Diogenes—spittle-laden and otherwise, both inside and outside his home. But the closer one looks, the harder it is to find sympathy for Socrates’s most famous student.
It was during the time of Socrates that Athenian democracy fell and the polis came to be ruled by precisely the sorts of people with whom Plato was related and friendly. The openness of Pericles’s Athens was quickly gone under the regime of the Thirty Tyrants, and though the antidemocratic aristocrats held power for only eight or nine months, it would take many years for Athens to recover—if, in fact, it ever did. Plato’s cousin, Critias, was perhaps the cruelest of the dictators among the Thirty, and Socrates had been Critias’s teacher as well as Plato’s. While it is true that Socrates’s capital crime was, philosophically speaking, calling into question the public identity (and humanity) of his fellow citizens, there is good reason to believe that part of what his accusers meant by charging him with corrupting the youth was that Socrates had spoken out against democracy and had tutored many of the sons of the established bourgeoisie who had taken part in the dictatorship. Though Socrates reportedly refused to help the Thirty carry out an arrest and execution at one point during their reign, he was never punished by them, lived comfortably in the city during and after their regime, and never spoke out strongly against them while they were in power, murdering hundreds, banishing thousands, and denying rights to all but a select few in Athens. As I. F. Stone remarks, “Socrates remained in the city all through the dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants. . . . [T]hat single fact must have accounted more than any other for the prejudice against Socrates when the democracy was restored. . . . Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, calls himself ‘the gadfly’ of Athens, but it seems his sting was not much in evidence when Athens needed it most.”12
Again, though, we are talking about Plato’s Socrates—the version of the man our narrator chooses to offer us. We can admit that it is undoubtedly the case that “the true” Socrates is not only epistemologically inaccessible but ontologically suspect as well. That is, everything—even a person—is an enmeshed, hermeneutical set of interpretations. But Plato’s particular version of Socrates is a strange sort of hybrid creature. Socrates, under the control of Plato’s narrative pen, becomes something of a domesticated beast, forced to do the bidding of his master and defend the status quo. Perhaps it is precisely in part to hide this fact that Plato refers to Socrates as the contrary—as a series of wild animals (such as a gadfly, a wolf, and a stingray) rather than a domesticated animal (such as a dog). By describing his protagonist as wild, the author’s intention to break and domesticate that protagonist is obscured. But Plato protests too much, and the obscuring cannot erase the trace of what we might see as a point of différance. Over the course of the dialogues, Plato attempts to mold Socrates into what is surely an incongruous mixture of, on the one hand, a radical revolutionary who constantly questions authority, and, on the other hand, someone who argues against the ability of the masses to rule themselves and who will thus always need a central authority figure to take charge of them. This tension, as we are beginning to see, finds its way to the surface in the animalistic metaphors with which Plato chooses to describe Socrates; and as such, the text betrays a distrust for Socrates’s teachings and a simultaneous casting of Socrates as a villainous animal.
If so much of this tension, then, is class-driven and political, it is not surprising that many of the disparate fragments we have from Diogenes are direct attacks on Plato and the upper-class values for which Plato ultimately stood. “Plato winces when I track dust across his rugs,” said Diogenes, “because he knows that I’m walking on his vanity. . . . Beg a cup of wine from Plato and he will send you a whole jar. He does not give as he is asked, nor answer as he is questioned. . . . Plato begs too, but like Telemakhos conversing with Athena, with lowered head so that others may not overhear. . . . Share a dish of dried figs with Plato and he will take them all.”13 Relentlessly, Diogenes goes after Plato’s character like a dog catching scent of a squirrel. But it is Plato’s philosophizing, too, that is the enemy—because, of course, one cannot so neatly separate the values of the author from the ends of the project. And so, Diogenes will reportedly declare, “Plato’s philosophy is an endless conversation. . . . And his lectures are tedious.”14 While as for the theory of the Forms, after visiting Plato at his home Diogenes can only say, “I saw Plato’s cups and his table, but not his cupness and tableness.”15
Though there are accounts of various texts authored by Diogenes and lost to the vagaries of history, it is far more likely that we have nothing written by Diogenes because Diogenes refused to write. Sosicrates of Rhodes and Satyrus of Callias Pontica both reported that Diogenes not only maintained a strict oral tradition of teaching and consequently refused to write “like Plato,” but that he often argued for “the futility and uselessness of reading and writing” in general.16 The style of Diogenes’s quips is thus key to their content as well. And like an animal, all we know about Diogenes is what humans have said about him. All of Diogenes’s life was lived rather than spent recording it for others to read about how it was lived.
Much has been made of Diogenes’s dogged style and catty remarks. He was, truly, doing philosophy as stand-up comedy or perhaps, better, as a sort of performance art. Caught up in an argument with a man who could not accept that Diogenes did not believe in the gods, for instance, Diogenes finally admitted that he would begin believing in them because how else could he explain someone who was so obviously godforsaken as his accuser? And another time, seeing a woman “who had flopped down before an altar with her butt in the air . . . [Diogenes] remarked in passing that the god was also behind her.”17 In comedy there is much truth. But the truth, here, is even deeper, because such a style of philosophizing and living suggests that there is a strong parallel between the gadfly and the dog.
Socrates and Diogenes are closer to each other than are Socrates and Plato. Both Socrates and Diogenes refuse to write, instead choosing to perform their philosophy. And in this way they are both similar to animals as well. Animals, too, do not write. They act, embody, and carry out their identity, emotions, desires, and thoughts. They live what they believe rather than talk about it and transcribe it. For Socrates, this meant living the life of a conversationalist who discussed philosophy with friends, strangers, and anyone willing to engage with him in a search for answers to the big questions about life. And for Diogenes it was also about interacting with the public, though in a less dialectical manner. If Socrates was the first ironist, and his most ironic claim was his interpretation of what the Delphic oracle had announced—he was the wisest man in Athens simply because he knew how little he truly knew—Diogenes happily echoed this each time he was made fun of by the citizens of Athens. “If, as they say, I am only an ignorant man trying to be a philosopher,” the dog declared, “then that may be what a philosopher is.”18
Irony, too, is the domain of the animal. Because all language fails to refer—because all words fail to denote, never mirroring the world, but instead find meaning only by means of performance and usage and instantiation in a body doing, and thus a subject meaning, this, here, now—only humans seem capable of misunderstanding logos so deeply as to need a category of “irony” to separate it from “straight discourse.” The animal lets meaning play. The animal is pre-ironized, never leashed to sense and reference, never demanding an impossible correspondence theory of truth, never separating logos from the community and from its communal performance. The animal acts as the truest philosopher.19
“I pissed on the man who called me a dog,” explained Diogenes. “Why was he so surprised?”20 Like the animal he was (called), Diogenes let his body be, and thus let his body philosophize. When Diogenes was caught “working with his hands” (i.e., masturbating) in the marketplace, rather than showing shame, the dog began begging and told the public, “If only I could rub my stomach in the same way so as to avoid hunger.”21 Here, then, is a deep philosophical claim about desire, satiation, generosity, charity, community, embodiment, and truth. When Plato lectured publically on such truth being found only in an abstract realm far away from our own material life, does it not make sense to say that a philosophic refutation might properly begin with Diogenes squatting down, lifting his toga, and evacuating his bowels?22 What else could better pull us back to the real and the present—to the political and ethical commitments our metaphysics always have already made, to the complicated filth and materiality of our shared existence—than the excrement of the dog, the argument become carnal, the fecund fact of our public embodiment suddenly exposed and made impossible to ignore?
History insists on Socrates’s and Diogenes’s ugliness. Snub animal-noses, hair in inhuman places, animal features that distorted their humanity. Aesop, too, on trial for irony and satirization, was cynically said to be canine-ugly—“dog-headed” and “like a dog in basket.”23 But what is a human’s conception of beauty to an animal? And what worth has beauty, then, at all, especially in a world in which one must watch one’s step in the agora, careful not to walk in a refutation? Isn’t the privileged human face of Plato—nose-upturned, perfumed, and judgmental—potentially more disturbing?
Like animals, Socrates and Diogenes did not court death, but neither did they obsessively fear it. Pondering the end of life, in fact, it seems the gadfly and the dog thought of each other.
Toward the conclusion of his comments to the jurors who had just condemned him to death, Socrates speaks of what is to come rather than what will pass away. He prophesizes:
I say to you who have slain me, that punishment will come upon you soon after my death. . . . For you have done this to me because you hoped that you would be spared a rendered account of your lives, but you will find the result far different. Those who will force you to give an account will be more numerous than before. They will be men whom I restrained, though you did not know it; and they will be harsher, inasmuch as they will be younger, and you will be more annoyed. (Apology 39c–d)
Earlier, in the Republic (539b), Socrates had called the young people who imitate him puppies [σκυλάκιον] that “delight in pulling and tearing the words of all who approach.” Socrates’s curse to Athens is that upon his death the dogs will descend upon the city.
And let the humans and the gadflies be gone as a whole, without remorse or apology, said Diogenes the dog that descended on Athens: for “whoever trusts us [i.e., the Cynics] will remain single. Those who do not trust us will rear children. If the human species should one day cease to exist, there should be as much cause to regret as there should be if flies and wasps pass away.”24 The fly, the dog, the human—the ugly truth that Diogenes knew is that the world can get by fine without the whole lot.
After the execution of Socrates, on rare occasions an upper-class Athenian would approach Diogenes in conversation, looking for advice, looking to be persuaded, looking for a path toward virtue that would typically not include having to sacrifice anything. Diogenes’s counsel was consistent and clear, harsher and more ruthlessly true than anything Socrates had predicted: “Hang yourself,” barked the dog.25
“And consider this also,” I said. “If [the escaped prisoner] went back down again [into the cave] and took his old place, would he not get his eyes full of darkness, thus suddenly coming back out of the sunlight?”
—Plato, Republic 516e
Before the hemlock shut his eyes permanently, the gadfly seemed to champion light. The sun, in fact, came to be associated with the Form of the Good itself. And a life in the cave, a life in shadows and darkness, was the ultimate life not worth living—one of unquestioned falsehood and illusion. Socrates, Plato tells us, could see what others could not, even if that meant that he could see just how little he truly saw clearly. But we must remember that the philosopher who escapes the cave is blinded twice: once on his assent as an explorer into the world to search for truth, and once on his descent as a revolutionary back into the cave to tell the others. Coming and going lead to blindness; the liminal spaces of transition cannot support open eyes.26
If we return to Socrates’s gadfly speech with this in mind, then something amazing comes to light. Socrates calls himself a μύωψ, that is, a gadfly, and as such what he is literally saying is that he is myopic, that he has his eyes closed, that he cannot see. The word μύωψ stems from μύειν (to shut) and ὤψ (eye). One can imagine that the Greek etymology begins in a physical reaction to the actual animal: we close our eyes, or at the very least squint, when such an insect annoyingly buzzes around us. But even if we understand “gadfly” to mean “that which makes us close our eyes” rather than simply (and more literally) “eyes that are closed,” it would mean that Socrates is saying he is someone who makes the people of Athens close their eyes—precisely the opposite of what he typically claims he is trying to do.
Perhaps Socrates is the one who cannot see. Or perhaps Socrates is making the people of Athens incapable of seeing. But in either case, why this particular animal metaphor, one with a meaning apparently contrary to Socrates’s perennially declared intentions? A gadfly would, in fact, be incapable of theory [θεωρία]—literally “a seeing, a looking at.” But of course this is all that Socrates seems to have an interest in when talking with others. He doesn’t want examples of love or justice. He wants to know what Love and Justice are in general, abstractly, theoretically. Yet the gadfly, by definition, cannot see, cannot know theory, cannot do philosophy.
So, we must pause and wait for our eyes to adjust.
When Plato’s Socrates speaks out against the written word, but Plato is writing to us to tell us about this, we pause and recognize something more complicated working itself out in the text. When Plato’s Socrates warns us about poetry and the corrupting force of art, but Plato is describing all of this in a dramatic dialogue full of metaphor and beautiful language, we pause again. And when Plato’s Socrates tells us that he champions seeing, light, and rousing people to visionary action and knowledge, but Plato puts the term “gadfly” into Socrates’s mouth, we take a final pause. Plato and Socrates are distinct, but perhaps no more distinct than Shakespeare and Hamlet. And in the tension between the two, between how they necessarily differ and how one must always defer, there is the undermining of the text that is, at the same time, the force that inflates it to meaning.
Plato is in control of his protagonist, yet only to the extent that any author finds freedom by means of being constrained by a narrative, a history, and a goal. Plato wishes to tell the story of a free, brave, wild man who inspired the youth of Athens—himself included—and was martyred for a grand cause. This is Socrates the revolutionary, the questioner of authority, the nagger of nags, the anti-spelunker who knew he was the only one who had been up into the light. This is the Socrates who might have questioned democracy but never in the name of oligarchy; the Socrates whose notions of meritocracy and a life of the mind would call the bourgeois values of his home, and his students, into question. This is Socrates as the finest man, and thus the finest human, fully in control of logos. But when that story is told, when Plato begins to commit it to papyrus, all of the ways in which it conflicts with the rest of Plato’s values and goals find a way of exposing themselves. Plato turns to the animal to describe this paradigm of humanity. And in so doing, he portrays Socrates as villain, as failed, as the antithesis of all he announces himself to be. Socrates thus becomes the wolf that steals Thrasymachus’s voice by seeing him first, though Socrates—the gadfly in wolf’s clothing—is paradoxically unable to see. The gadfly, too, is the seemingly insignificant pest that at the same time makes the larger animal what it is and what it should be. The gadfly, though he seems to be an annoyance to the horse, is what makes the horse into the horse—what makes the horse swish his tail and twitch his ears—and thus the work of the philosopher is co-opted: Athens is made Athens by having such men around—perhaps to vent the frustrations of the youth, perhaps to keep up the façade of welcoming creativity and difference, perhaps to have in stock in order to slaughter them when necessary. So the wild animal is no wild animal. Socrates is Plato’s domesticated hybrid beast, like an ox, a bull-man, tugging the plow along rows of conformity, kicking against the prick and finding the spike driven further into his flesh. In the space between the wild and the tame, the revolutionary and the aristocrat, the man and the animal, the two eyelids just barely meeting to form a squint, there is the meaning of Socrates. There is what it means to be Socrates.
The gadfly, blinded, is on his way either out of the cave or back into it. Socrates—so says Athens, so says his author—is on his way out.
At the same time, the man held out the cup [of hemlock] to Socrates. He took it, and very gently, Echecrates, without trembling or changing color or expression, but looking up at the man with wide open bull-like eyes, as was his custom, said: “What do you say about pouring a libation to some deity from this cup? May I, or not?”
—Plato, Phaedo 117b
At the end of his life, Socrates is waiting for his execution. It has been delayed due to the late return of the annual embassy sent to Delos in commemoration of Theseus’s killing of the Minotaur. Prior to Theseus’s slaying of the beast, Athens had been sending fourteen young people to be sacrificed to the “Bull of Crete” each year. Through Phaedo, Plato tells us that Socrates, in his last moments of life, was surrounded by fourteen nameable friends. Phaedo points out, however, that the fourteen did not include Plato, who was ill that day. The dialogue thus attests to being a firsthand account of the death of Socrates (“I was there myself,” says Phaedo), though it refers to its own author, the author of those very words, as not having been there. We pause. This should be the first indication that we are—once again and as always—not seeing everything that can be seen.
It is easy to see the Phaedo as an allegorical and philosophic reenactment of Theseus’s victory: Socrates is the hero who slays the Minotaur, and the monstrous bull he destroys is the fear of death itself. Socrates saves his own fourteen gathered souls by arguing, in his customary conversational way, that the soul in general is immortal and there is no reason to fear the end of the life of the flesh. It is a slaying with logos rather than a sword, though the end result is said to be the same. The youth are once again safe.
But Plato’s Socrates is no Theseus in this text. He is, instead, the bull. The victory of Theseus—the return of the celebration ship—will mark Socrates’s death, not his triumph. The gathered friends, the youth of Athens, are the ones Socrates is said to have corrupted, not saved. And with bull-like eyes, Socrates drinks down the hemlock and dies in the end like the slain Minotaur. No, it is the city of Athens that is cast as the hero Theseus in this dialogue. And Socrates, his eyes finally wide open in his last moments, is no longer myopic, no longer the pest, but Plato’s vanquished half-man, half-animal beast. Plato’s final words speak of Socrates as “the best, the wisest, the most just.” But his dialogue doubles back on itself, a labyrinth full of untrustworthy word monsters.
Socrates, the gadfly-become-the-bull, dies at the hand of Athens and of his narrator.
Diogenes, the dog, dies in a barrel outside a city wall, keeping silent by holding his muzzle shut and stopping his own breath.
Plato, the human, dies in luxury, unpersecuted, eventually a comfortable decade older than Socrates, in a warm bed, a young Thracian girl playing the flute for him—perhaps performing the tunes that Socrates himself composed in jail while putting Aesop’s animal fables to music, waiting for his delayed execution finally to commence—the sensual melody rising and falling, ensuring no one, least of all the zookeeper, could hear a fly buzz when the old man died.
And all of this could have been different.
1. Plato, The Apology, in Plato: Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro, Crito, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 45.
2. Cf. John Heath, who does an excellent job arguing just this point: “Socrates cannot be silent . . . because his divine mission is to spend each day conversing about and examining virtue: the unexamined life—that is, the life that neither inquires nor is inquired about—is not a human life (37e3–38a6). Speech is essential to lead a human life. Any Greek would agree with this, but Socrates means something rather different: this distinctly human possession must be used in philosophizing, and not for the temporal goals of politics and power. Speech in and of itself is of little use, and hardly makes one fully human.” The Talking Greeks: Speech, Animals, and the Other in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 305–306.
3. Plato, The Apology, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).
4. For an interesting commentary in line with this same interpretation, see Daniel S. Werner, Myth and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 139. Bruce Gottfried’s interpretation of the myth as being key to Socrates’s decision to continue talking at noontime even though he is aware he might incur the wrath of Pan (who sleeps at noon and punishes those who bother him) is also intriguing. In many ways, the Pan interpretation is not at odds with what I am suggesting here. Indeed, if logos is threatening to Pan, it is the content and not the form that will be the threat. The cicadas’ drone, after all, doesn’t disturb Pan. Only human speech—true human speech in service of philosophy—might. Cf. Bruce Gottfried, “Pan, the Cicadas, and Plato’s Use of Myth in the Phaedrus,” in Plato’s Dialogues, ed. Gerald A. Press (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 1993), 179–182.
5. Heath, The Talking Greeks, 267.
6. Ibid., 45. Diogenes was not the first to be called a dog, however, nor was Plato the first to use that label for the Cynics. Diogenes initially studied under Antisthenes after coming to Athens, and Antisthenes referred to himself as “The Dog” and lectured at the Cynosarges: the park of the white-swift dog. The Cynosarges was not only a dog-place, but also a place where “outsiders” in Athens gathered—bastards, foreigners, non-citizens, etc.
7. Diogenes Laertius, “The Life of Diogenes of Sinope,” in Navia, Diogenes of Sinope, 162.
8. Navia, Diogenes of Sinope, 13–14.
9. Ibid., 22. In a nice twist, this is also why the hermit crab’s official Latin name today is Diogenes.
10. Diogenes Laertius, “The Life of Diogenes of Sinope,” in Navia, Diogenes of Sinope, 154. Indeed, though I have above used the mouse as an example of a creature who is skittish and cowardly (in order to poke fun at Aristotle), Diogenes sees the mouse bravely moving through the darkness unafraid of whatever might lay ahead. Diogenes is, no doubt, the one who is correct here.
11. For a version of this story, see Diogenes Laertius, “The Life of Diogenes of Sinope,” in Navia, Diogenes of Sinope, 156.
12. “I. F. Stone Breaks the Socrates Story: An old muckraker sheds fresh light on the 2,500-year-old mystery and reveals some Athenian political realities that Plato did his best to hide,” New York Times Magazine, April 8, 1979.
13. Herakleitos and Diogenes, trans. Guy Davenport (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1976), 41, 47, 59, 47.
14. Ibid., 46.
15. Ibid., 57.
16. Navia, Diogenes of Sinope, 5 and 21.
17. Herakleitos and Diogenes, 50, 56.
18. Ibid., 53.
19. Evolution, too, is an ironic maker. It is evolution that, by chance, made beings who began to think that by design something godly had made them, chosen them, and created all of the cosmos just for them. It is evolution that, with a chaotic twinkle in its eye, let dogs domesticate humans to do their bidding but also let humans think it was the other way around. It is evolution that let the chicken develop from the fiercest dinosaurs to walk the earth. Had Plato been somewhat better at comedy (and understood evolution), perhaps Socrates’s final words should have been, “Crito, I owe Asclepius a contemporary Velociraptor. Be sure to pay the debt—carefully.”
20. Ibid., 51.
21. Diogenes Laertius, “The Life of Diogenes of Sinope,” in Navia, Diogenes of Sinope, 160.
22. Cf. Jeanne Gunner and Ed Frankel, The Course of Ideas: College Writing and Reading (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 412. In many ways, too, Diogenes was acting in much the same way as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, saying to Plato: “You have a wonderful theory . . . for me to poop on!”
23. Todd Compton, “The Trial of the Satirist: Poetic Vitae (Aesop, Archilochus, Homer) as Background for Plato’s Apology,” American Journal of Philology 111, no. 3 (1990): 344.
24. Navia, Diogenes of Sinope, 24.
25. Ibid., 27.
26. We soon learn that philosophers appear ridiculous when viewed by those still inside the cave (Republic 517a). Once back in the cave, philosophers aren’t so good at telling one shadow from the next anymore. They seem laughable to others. The wise man feels pity for such a traveler in both cases (that is, both leaving and reentering the cave). And it is thus that Socrates might look ridiculous to Thracian maids—eliciting laughter and derision. But if it is true that once you get to know Socrates and understand what he is saying, you will stop laughing and will come to admire him, how is Diogenes not potentially in the same position?