Clouds III [redux]

Of philosophy, family, and politics

As this is the last post for 2022, we would like to wish you all a Happy New Year filled with personal and professional growth and success!

Because Aristophanes is challenging Socrates to a contest of wisdom, at least in a sense, the Clouds has to be moderate, it has to meet Socrates on his own ground. Think about it, Aristophanes must write a comedy about a man without a sex life, about a man who, unlike the 40-year-old Virgin, shows no interest in obtaining sex life. Here in the play, Socrates has no wife and kids, but Aristophanes has his children – his plays. In Aristophanes’ depiction, Socrates is unerotic and acetic.  Aristophanes, moreover, is somehow like the clouds, they are sometimes women as in this play. The clouds are pious towards justice, but they’re also happy people recognize they make it rain. They respect Prodicus, but they like Socrates: he’s tough, he struts, he’s a Mensch, he’s manly. But others in the play do not see him as manly. It’s worth asking, how is Socrates manly?

Turning quickly to Strepsiades: he’s like an ordinary Athenian; he’s old but spry; he has a son who likes horses, which is taking him into debt; and he has some interesting answers to questions here and there. Furthermore, he’s from the country; he’s a country boy. So, why are they in the city? Why is he in the bed with his son and not with his wife? Why is he sleeping in the courtyard?

There is a war going on!

What does Socrates have to say about the war? It’s like he doesn’t even know that it is going on. For Strepsiades, on the other hand, the war prevents him from beating his slaves, because they could just leave. All of this serves to highlight that there is a whole new class of people in the city, a class to which Socrates has paid no attention previously.

Why is Strepsiades in trouble? We can surmise the old patricians were losing their financial security, while the peasants were getting rich. What happens as aristocracy declines? Well, they tend to marry under them. That is, they no longer marry other aristocrats but rather commoners who have acquired sufficient wealth to sustain the aristocratic way of life. If you watched Downton Abbey, this is the exact situation the drives much of the drama in the show. The problem here is the aristocrats do not care about money, as they’ve always had it; the peasants, however, consider every expenditure before making it. The previously poor can remember being poor and do not want to return to that condition.

Notice Aristophanes is not accusing Socrates of corrupting Strepsiades: the latter was already corrupt; it is he who seeks out Socrates with the intention of learning how to cheat.

That returns us to the question: why does Strepsiades end up in trouble?

Here we see the effect of eros, of erotic desires: he wanted more than just the girl next-door, he wanted a fancy lady. He would not have been satisfied with what he could find on Farmersonly.com. We also see the difficulties that can arise from parents’ love of their child: Strepsiades does not want to discipline his son (although as we later see he can). Punishing your children is difficult because you love them, and you don’t want to hurt them. The natural or more common deficiency of parenting is not severity, but indulgence.

Now what of Pheidippides? At no point does he seem overly enthused with the idea of going to study with Socrates. In fact, he doesn’t want to go to school because he doesn’t want to lose his tan. He doesn’t want to lose his rugged good looks. While Strepsiades and the older Athenians do not really know about Socrates, neither are Pheidippides and the young naturally attracted to him (unlike the Socrates in the Apology).

So why does Socrates get in trouble now? We see that Aristophanes’ Socrates teaches science and rhetoric, so why didn’t people see the damage he could do before? Note there are no problems until Pheidippides goes back to his father despite having become a devoted student. In short, so long as the students stayed within the thinker, Socrates stayed out of trouble. We can draw from this the following conclusion: the political problems for the natural philosopher begin at the point where natural philosophy intrudes upon the political community. If strict separation between politics and philosophy is not possible, then of necessity philosophy must become political so as to protect philosophy from politics and politics from philosophy.