Apology: Themes, and How to Answer on It

In one line

The Apology's themes are conscience against the State, the value of knowing that you do not know, the duty of a citizen to criticise, and the question of whether a court that follows its own procedure can still do an injustice.

Theme one: conscience against the State

The proposition. Where the law of the city and the command of conscience conflict, Socrates obeys conscience, and accepts the city's punishment for doing so.

Where it is worked. He tells the court that if they offered to acquit him on condition he gave up philosophy, he would obey God rather than them. He compares himself to a soldier ordered to a post, who may not desert it out of fear of death. And he does not run: he stays, is convicted, and is executed.

The distinction that earns marks. He disobeys the command and submits to the penalty. He does not deny the court's authority to try him, does not escape, and does not ask his friends to rescue him. That combination, disobedience plus submission to punishment, is what later writers call civil disobedience.

The forward link that MU's own syllabus invites. Two topics later this syllabus sets Gandhi, who developed exactly that combination into a method. A sentence connecting the two is worth making, and the chapter on Gandhi supplies the other half.

Theme two: wisdom is knowing that you do not know

The proposition. Human wisdom is worth little, and the wisest person is the one who is aware of their own ignorance.

Where it is worked. The oracle story, and its conclusion: "he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know." The politicians, poets and artisans each fail the same way. And the argument about death, where he says that to fear death is to think oneself wise when one is not, because nobody knows whether death is a good or an evil.

Theme three: the critic as a service to the State

The proposition. A person who forces a community to examine itself is doing it good, however irritating the process.

Where it is worked. The gadfly and the great noble steed. His poverty as proof that he never did it for money. And the warning that if they kill him they will sleep on for the rest of their lives.

The complication to acknowledge. The image concedes that he is a nuisance. He does not claim to be pleasant, and he predicts, correctly, that they will strike out at him as a sleeper struck out of temper.

Theme four: the trial itself

The proposition, for a law student. Every rule of the Athenian procedure was followed, and the result is still remembered as an injustice.