If we were to grow angry and become enemies of each other, what would our disagreement be about? What kind of judgement (krisis) would we be unable to reach? Maybe you don’t have an answer to hand, but I suggest you consider whether it is matters of justice and injustice, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. Surely these are the issues that make us into enemies—you, me, or any other person—when we disagree about them and find ourselves unable to come to a satisfactory judgement (krisis)?

So Socrates asks the title character in Plato’s Euthyphro (7c–d). The philosopher draws our attention to matters—justice, beauty, goodness—which are of fundamental importance to ethical and political life but also fiendishly difficult to reach agreement about. Socrates’ intellectual practice brought into focus just how difficult it is for us to arrive at stable and universal definitions for abstract moral concepts like this. The Euthyphro is a case in point, a discussion of the nature of piety (to hosion) which concludes with its title character frustrated and tied in mental knots after Socrates has drawn out the logical contradictions inherent in each of his efforts to define the concept. Socrates tries in vain to keep the conversation going but Euthyphro has reached his limit (16a): “Another time, Socrates. Now I’m in a rush somewhere else and it’s time for me to leave.” The reader of the Euthyphro departs without any clear definition of “piety,” left only to ponder the implications of Euthyphro’s failed attempts and Socrates’ systematic refutations.

This inconclusiveness or aporia is a characteristic feature of Socratic philosophy, at least as it is presented by his student Plato. Plato’s Socratic dialogues thematize the difficulty of reaching any final judgement—or krisis—about important ethical issues. The Euthyphro’s discussion of piety brings into focus a raft of fundamental questions about what it means to be a good person, particularly in relation to the divine, but it refuses to offer any conclusive answers. One of Socrates’ most profound insights was that a simple statement of fact could never on its own be a sufficient basis for knowledge, no matter how self-evident that statement might seem and no matter how well it aligned with the “common sense” of social norms. It is, he insists, only through the process of actively interrogating our assumptions, ideally in dialogue with others, that we can get closer to understanding (for example) what piety is and what role it ought to play in our lives. 

Socrates’ problem was not with the process of making judgements per se but rather the temptation to arrive at them prematurely and, even more dangerously, to refuse to reassess them once made. As he will ask in Plato’s Apology (29b): “Isn’t the most shameful kind of ignorance a belief that one knows what one does not know?” Above all it was the illusion of false knowledge that Socrates sought to dispel. Much better, he thought, to recognize and accept the necessary incompleteness of our approach toward knowledge. No krisis should ever be the final word in a world as difficult to make sense of as our own. 

Socrates’ questions in the passage quoted above imply that an inability to arrive at a stable answer—to come to a satisfactory krisis—about basic moral questions could be a source of strife, turning friends into enemies. True enough, as Socrates’ own example showed. The Euthyphro is set during the weeks leading up to his trial and conviction in 399 BCE on charges of corrupting the young men of Athens and worshipping false gods. The philosopher’s destabilizing inquiry into the ethical basis of life in Athenian society, an intellectual project which exposed and encouraged disagreements about the city’s fundamental values, won him his fair share of enemies. In his trial, Socrates was placed in direct conflict with the Athenian populace as embodied in the 500-person jury who voted to convict him.

In Ancient Greek, the noun krisis, from the verb krino, to distinguish, choose, judge, decide, could refer to the process or outcome of any kind of decision-making. This included the judgements of law courts. In Socrates’ trial, the fixity and finality of legal judgement came into collision with the philosopher’s commitment to an open-ended approach toward knowledge. The law leaves little space for philosophical interrogation and insoluble ethical problems: courts cannot deal with the inconclusiveness of Socratic aporia. Socrates’ efforts to defend himself fell flat. Convicted by the krisis of the Athenian people, the philosopher was forced to make the ultimate krisis: would he accept the punishment of exile levied against him and live outside of the political community to which he had belonged? Famously, Socrates preferred suicide.

Over the millennia since he lived, Socrates has come to function as the very archetype of the intellectual in the western tradition. But he is also, more specifically, an archetype of the intellectual in crisis—and indeed, his example hints that personal and political crisis can be a favorable condition for intellectual progress, if not for the intellectual himself. Crisis is central to Socrates’ story: not only because of his trial and suicide but also because he lived through the Peloponnesian Wars, which reduced Athens from hegemony over the Aegean into a neutered second-rate power and resulted in the temporary overthrow of the democracy in 411 BCE. Socrates’ connections to leading figures in the oligarchic coup, like Critias and Charmides, are generally thought to have contributed to the climate that led to his own conviction. He himself maintained a complex and critical relationship with Athens’ democratic institutions. 

Twentieth-century French thinkers, most prominently and influentially Jacques Derrida and René Girard, have approached Socrates’ ejection from the Athenian democracy through an anthropological lens, framing it as an exemplar of the primal mechanism of the scapegoat, understood in Girard’s thought as fundamental to the operation of human society.[1] This describes a paradigmatic response to social crisis in which anxieties become focused on a charismatic individual, who is ritually and often violently removed from the community in a displaced release of tension that enables reconciliation. In this way, Socrates’ trial comes to embody an elementary kind of socio-political crisis, in which an outbreak of primitive violence renders the critic into a martyr.

The English word crisis is of course a loan word from Greek krisis, but its meaning has become quite distinct. Christianity, a tradition that emerged around the figure of a new kind of scapegoat, Jesus Christ who “died for our sins” (Corinthians 15:3), is key to this semantic shift. The Gospel of Matthew (10:15) grimly prophesies that on the Day of Judgement (krisis) those who refuse Jesus’ teachings will face a fate less tolerable than that which befell Sodom and Gomorrah, associating krisis with apocalyptic catastrophe. The distinctly negative connotations of crisis in its modern sense, a moment at which disaster seems imminent or is already present, have a clear debt to this eschatological tradition, which invests krisis with a cosmic significance. 

In Socrates’ example the two senses of krisis-crisis come into alignment. Krisis, judgement, is one of the most characteristic faculties of the intellectual, or the critic (from kritikos “capable of judgement,” particularly with respect to language and literature). Socrates was suspicious of certain kinds of krisis—judgements made too quickly, too definitively, too obstinately—but his intellectual practice amply demonstrated his own remarkable critical capacities. But crisis in the modern sense, too, is central to Socrates as an intellectual figure and historical character: his philosophical achievements and their impact are bound up in the political, military, and legal crises which shaped his life and his world. Would Socrates have been able to develop his radical critique of the foundations of Athenian ethical and political life if he had not lived through the decline of Athens’ power and the tottering of its democratic institutions? If Socrates had not been convicted, would we still remember him? 

These questions feel urgent in our own moment, when some of today’s techno-oligarchs have begun to see in Girard’s theories of social crisis less a warning than an instruction manual. If Socrates’ example teaches us anything, it is that the intellectual may not be able to escape crisis—and perhaps even that he has an ethical obligation not to. One of the intellectual’s most important roles in society may be precisely “to force the moment to its crisis,” as T. S. Eliot put it in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, playing upon the word’s ancient Greek sense. If we follow Socrates in our commitment to taking intellectual inquiry wherever it may lead, we must reckon with an uncomfortable reality: any meaningful approach toward truth and understanding poses a threat to shared norms and thus threatens to engender or intensify socio-political crises. Or, in other words: there is always a risk that the critic might become the scapegoat.

Notes

[1] Derrida’s reading of Socrates-as-scapegoat in his well-known essay “La Pharmacie de Platon,” originally published in two parts in 1967–68, was an important influence on Girard’s thinking about the scapegoat (English translation “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, Chicago, 1983). Although he had begun to publish essays on the scapegoat already in the mid-1960s (see Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, Stanford, 2004), it is only after Derrida had placed great emphasis on an obscure ancient Greek term for scapegoat, pharmakos, in his analysis of Plato that this word starts to appear in Girard’s work, beginning with his 1972 monograph La violence et le sacré (English translation Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, 1977). The pair had met at a 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University (proceedings published in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, Baltimore, 1970).