“We are very well informed, yet, in the absence of narrative, we are without orientation.”
Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han.
It was simply something that popped up in my feed; a review on a new book on Frederick Copleston, SJ: A History of Philosophy: the Condensed Copleston (Bloomsbury), edited by Anthony Carroll.
Copleston? Copleston? Of course, there on the shelf were a handful of the 11 volumes in his series, A History of Philosophy, and a short introduction on the work of Aquinas from my days as a student in Scholastic Philosophy where he was part of the introductory course.
(It was the 1980s and the Arts were big, baby.)
Our lecturer, the late Professor James McEvoy (1943-2010), priest and philosopher, was, in layman’s terms, a genius and it was he who introduced the class to Socrates. For my own part, “introduce” carries both the meaning of guiding us through Socrates’ work but, also, in bringing Socrates to life as a man. Ever since, I have never been able to escape the feeling that Socrates was a Belfast man, someone who would have been very comfortable in my native city.
Of course – laugh if you will – but Belfast was once known as the “Athens of the North” such was its reputation in the arts back in the time of Wolfe Tone and, you know, Socrates was an Athenian. Thin, you think? Perhaps. But Socrates, the stone mason, would have fitted in with Belfast’s mill and factory workers. Yes, he was a boss but an odd boss, a little removed from the workers but still having to get his hands dirty.
For my own part, I imagine him as the sort of person who would have been interested in a pint of Guinness and hurling, hurling being the Irish game that most resembles the massed phalanxes of ancient Greece, phalanxes in which Socrates served. Would he have been a Summer Soldier in 1798 or with Pearse in 1916? Could well have been after all he had an interest in the Republic. But I still imagine him most vividly with a pint or two in his hand – a splash of Bush thrown into the mix – while holding forth on the arete of iomáint.
Perhaps that is the appeal of Socrates and the dialogues which Plato crafted around him. Academic philosophy may always face the danger of disappearing up its own dialectic but Plato’s dialogues are just that, dialogues, talk which we can, with a little effort, follow. Socrates is immediate, earthy. There is dirt on his finger nails and those worries we all carry – paying bills, building a life, staying safe in dangerous times, and the threat of war – are ones we share with him.
The Last Days of Socrates is one dialogue which still grips the imagination – Socrates on trial before a Diplock court and remanded to Crumlin Road Gaol. Or was it Mountjoy? Or Dublin Castle? Or the Tower of London? Or van Diemen’s Land? He wrote, or rather Plato wrote, a Jail Journal before our own felons.
(Socrates, of course, was a seanchaí, a talker, absolutely one of us.)
The dialogues are still immediate and intimate: a man caught up in the justice system; allegations of this and that; arguments over what you owe the State and what the State owes you. No wonder so many readers return to it for inspiration. It has not lost its relevance or urgency.
Believe it or not, it is also available in Irish – though long out of print – as Breith Báis ar Eagnuidhe. The name of the translator on the cover is one “Seoirse Mac Laghmhainn”, the pen name of George Thomson (1903-1987), an English academic and authority in Ancient Greece and Greek; a contributor to Irish-language literature, a Cambridge graduate and a communist. In short, he was a bit of a character.
My copy was printed in 1929 and bears the legend 2/6, that being the price back when the nascent Free State enjoyed a little, tiny-weeny bit of economic independence from the EU, sorry, I mean the UK, and had its own currency. A few lines in Irish inside state that the book has been assessed by the Department of Education, under the translation scheme, An Gúm, as being a suitable text for, wait for it, secondary schools. Yes, secondary schools. The Last Days of Socrates, in Irish, for secondary school pupils. The book was printed in Dublin by “Muinntir Chathail Teo” and published by “Muinntir Ch. S. Ó Fallamhain”.
There are two very human touches inside the work. There, on the inside cover, handwritten in blue ink, is the name of one “T. Ó Guinneagáin, Col. Iarfhlatha Naomhtha, Tuaim”. The name, like the book, is printed in the old Gaelic Script (An Cló Gaelach) and the older spelling, “naomhtha” where we would now have “naofa”. This book had a reader fadó fadó…
Further, at the very end of the book, there is a correction slip, neatly glued at the back cover: “Ceartúchán. L. 7, líne 6, léigh an amharclann i n-ionad an t-amharclann.” It is a small thing in a huge book, reminding the reader to read in a feminine noun that had been mistaken for a masculine one. No big deal at all but I had to laugh when I read it as I immediately thought of the old saying in Irish: “Ní bhíonn saoi gan locht/No wise man is without fault.”
Socrates would get the humour. Even the little misstep opens you up to wisdom.
An Irish-language book, printed for Irish students, printed by Irish printers and distributed by Irish publishers, subsidised by the Irish government and paid for by Irish parents with Irish currency. It has nationalist chauvinism written all over it except, of course, that the translator was English and would also have gotten a couple of punt for his troubles.
(I said Thomson translated the work into Irish but that is not entirely accurate. The book actually says “Seoirse Mac Laghmhainn do chuir i nGaodhluinn”. Gaodhluinn. Munster Irish. For Thomson, Socrates was a Blasketman.)
How did the bold student get on in his studies, I wonder? Was there much discussion of Plato in county Galway? Did the Irish and the philosophy help him along in his life’s journey or did he have to dump both in order to make a living here or, quite likely, across the water? Did he carry any of it with him; his name even, in his beautiful handwriting, written in the old way, echoing and honouring his ancestors?
Yes, one can legitimately ask questions about Irish-language policies over the years: about the lies of politicians; the incompetence of political parties and language groups; the lack of a strategic thought and planning but, still, still, there is something simply heroic about the whole venture, a simple book, binding Irish and Greek together, giving people the chance to think in their discarded native language, and tying Irish, an European ancient language, with another ancient European language and placing Éire, goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann, in the Acropolis, “an domhan thoir” of folklore.
The whole enterprise is visionary; it is noble, honourable, dignified, profoundly cultured and civilised. The translator who gave of his time and life, the editors who helped the book along, the printers, with their slugs, bringing an ancient text and language to life and being paid for their trouble, being able to put a bit of food on the table because the people of Ireland, muintir na hÉireann, supported “Muinntir Ch. S. Ó Fallamháin” and “Muinntir Chathail Teo”.
(Muintir, in contemporary spelling, a feminine noun, meaning: “household; community; family; associates; adherents; followers; party; retinue”. We are all in there somewhere.)
1929 was the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States. That gave us Steinbeck and Of Mice and Men (1937), his novel about migrant workers, Lennie and George, in California in the 1930s. The title was inspired by a Robbie Burns poem: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft a-glay”.
Burns was a great hero of, and influence on, the actual migrant workers of Donegal who spent long months in Scotland doing what had to be done to make a living. Séamus Ó Grianna (1889 – 1969), from the Donegal Gaeltacht, was one of their number and he quotes Burns in his own literary endeavours in Irish. There is food for thought; Steinbeck and Ó Grianna drinking from the same literary well.
1929? Mussolini has been in power for years in Italy and has set his people and country on a course of destruction that will see Italian soldiers die from Russia to Greece to North Africa and Italian cities bombed by the British and Americans. Also by 1929, Stalin has finally taken total control in the Soviet Union by liquidating his political opponents and is about to unleash murder, terror and famine on a scale unimaginable on the people he rules. Hitler is a year or so away from becoming a powerful political figure in Germany and a mere handful of years away from Kristallnacht, invasion and Holocaust.
And there’s the Irish, finding a scilling or two, down the back of the sofa and translating texts rather than building tanks. But, hey, old Ireland = evil.
Ireland was not without its troubles. The book is published within living memory of the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the Treaty and Civil War, partition and pogroms.
Socrates would have understood those violent times. Socrates was a soldier or, more correctly, a Hoplite, one of those who did the dirty work of war. I read him while growing up in a city with soldiers on the streets, swaddled in flak jackets and helmets. Socrates would have recognised them as representing a different city state.
(By the way, Socrates’ Athens and times are wonderfully described in The Hemlock Cup by Bettany Hughes. Well worth a read if you can find a copy.)
That was Father McEvoy’s gift to me – Socrates – and although I have a degree in Scholastic Philosophy, which included papers on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Logic and contemporary philosophy – I have never, ever, in all my years, been able to introduce myself with a straight face and say: “Hello, my name is Pól and I am a philosopher.”
Is that Socratic humility or have I been following the advice of Colossians: “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit…” Still, Scholastic Philosophy would not, I believe, fall into the category of “empty deceit” that would be the Sophists, Socrates’ sparring partners who, for him, were essentially hired guns who taught their clients how to win an argument.
Is that why we are in such trouble in the West now? The Sophists have won; the legal Sophists, the hack Sophists and the political Sophists who ‘win’ the argument but have no regard for morality or justice or the effect their ‘win’ might have on citizens and society in the long term? That certainly would fall into the category of “empty deceit”.
Here is another philosopher, Augustine, in City of God: “Remove justice and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which plunder is divided according to an agreed convention.”
Replace “kingdoms” with countries; “gangs” with political parties and “plunder” with patronage and tell me if any of this sounds familiar? City of God, by the way, is thought to have been completed around AD 432; roughly 1,600 years ago. It is quite remarkable how that line, in an old book of philosophy, an out-dated text if you will, still stands.
Larkin – who spent a while in Belfast for his sins too – wrote that “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”. He was wrong; it is Socrates who really does that because as soon as you are bitten by the gadfly you are poisoned for life. That horrid little question “Why?” will never be too far from your lips. And “why?” will get you into trouble. “Why?” is the question you are not supposed to ask. Being independently minded, without malice, is the real sin in life: “Why do you think that?”
Philosophy, though, philosophy. Yeah, I know what you mean.