First, your questions.
Georgeanna:
So, if you are reading this, how are you reading it ?
I am familiar with the Platonic texts and the way Smith reads them, and I am in general agreement. So, I read the lectures with an eye to what I can contribute to the discussion here.
Is that really the case?
Because of the victories of philosophy the tensions may not be so obvious.
how compatible is freedom of mind with political life ?
I do not think that there are many who understand what the freedom of mind is. Most take it to be the freedom to accept whatever opinion they want or to to escape the world in idle metaphysical speculation.
However, Smith asks: is this the reading that Plato intended ?
I address this below.
He refers to a previous teacher who had this reprimand :
" You read Plato your way, I'll read him his way."
I suspect that this may have been said in exasperation by someone who could not provide an adequate defense of their reading of Plato. I don’t think this is how Smith thinks Plato should be read.
What was Plato's way ?
The way of many philosophers, to hide. To present a salutary public teaching and a private skeptical teaching. I touch on this below but cut much of what I originally was going to say in order to stay on topic.
And why can't there be any other interpretation ?
There can and must. More below.
Lecture 2: The focus remains on the Apology as a symbol for the violation of free expression, with Socrates justifying his way of life as a philosopher and defending the utility of philosophy for political life.
I think the fundamental question here is not free speech but the relationship between the philosopher and the city:
And, secondly, the Apology demonstrates also the vulnerability of political philosophy in its relation to the city, in its relation to political power. The Apology puts on trial not merely a particular individual, Socrates, but puts on trial the very idea of philosophy. From its very beginnings, philosophy and the city, philosophy and political life, have stood in a sort of tension with one another. (Lecture 2, Chapter 1 - L2, C1)
So, it is not simply a matter of freedom of speech but:
the necessary and inevitable conflict, between the freedom of the mind and the requirements of political life. (C1)
This, however, should not be understood simply as a matter of individualism:
Socrates’s defense speech, like every platonic dialogue, is ultimately a dialogue about education. Who has the right to teach, who has the right to educate? (C1)
This is a question that we still face in the issue of private versus public education.
Smith claims:
It is the question of really who governs or maybe put another way, who should govern, who ought to govern. (C1)
Although Plato eschewed political life there is a sense in which he is the most political of men in that he has ruled the minds of men for millenia. I do not mean by this the minds of philosophers but the minds of the public, and this, via Christianity. Nietzsche knowingly called Christianity Platonism for the masses.
Alongside the question of how to rule is the question of how to educate. Plato’s answer in the Republic is very interesting but getting into details will take us too far off track at this point. I will only say at this point that his answer is not a public education in philosophy. It is, rather, a public or exoteric education with the appearance of being esoteric, an image of truth accessible to those who escape the cave and gain knowledge in the light of the good. In line with the theme of the Republic and against the background of the Apology , the goal is not to make men wise but to make them just (see the end of C1, beginning of C2). But having heard the story of transcending the cave of opinion they are now of the opinion that they are wise.
There is another tension that comes to the fore - the “old quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, with the accusations the comic poet or playwright Aristophanes brought against Socrates. Smith puts in the form of the question:
… who is best equipped to educate future generations of citizens and civic leaders. Are the philosophers or are the poets, you might say, the true legislators for mankind …
He continues:
The virtues endorsed by the poetic tradition of which Aristophanes is the great representative here, the great inheritor and representative, the virtues of this tradition were the virtues of a warrior culture, of war-like peoples and men at war. These were the qualities that had guided the Greeks for centuries and contributed to their rise to power.
In addition:
The poets are oracular … By contrast, you could say, the method of Socrates is not oracular. It is not story telling; it is conversational, it is argumentative, if you want to use the word he applies to it, it is dialectical. (C3)
But Socrates does tell stories too. In chapter 5 we find two of them - his questioning the oracle at Delphi and his “turn” from examination of the natural world to the human and political things. But these are stories of human things. His diamonia, however, is not so easy to categorize.
Plato certainly was a story-teller and made use of myths. Smith may have more to say about this in the lecture about the Republic. I touch on it with regard to the Phaedo below.
Socrates is presented as exhibiting kind of a corrosive skepticism which is at the core of Aristophanes’ charge against him. (C4)
Did Aristophanes’ misrepresent Socrates? Is Socratic skepticism corrosive? It can be, and this helps explain why Socrates is said to have spoken differently to different people. And why, since Plato could not choose his readers, what he seems to be saying is often quite different than what he appears to be saying upon closer examination. Aristophanes held to the acceptance of traditional beliefs. If skepticism undermines tradition what will replace it? Again, we return to the question of education. The last dialogue of Socrates’ life, the Phaedo, asks about the fate of the soul. Socrates presents a variety of stories, but even though some of his followers accept one version or another, some see that none of them stands up to scrutiny. This can lead to what he calls “misologic”, hatred and distrust of logical argument, and those at greatest risk are those who had been the greatest lovers of philosophy, those whose expectations were that philosophy will yield the answers to their questions. It is in answer to the question of what will replace tradition that Plato offers in the Republic a public, salutary teaching about the philosopher who comes to know the truth itself, free of opinion, existing unchanged and unmixed. But this is, although certainly not identified as such, what he calls in the Republic, a noble lie.