The Socratic ideal of the good citizen

From: Dricim Kulla

Plato was disappointed by the Athenian democracy, guilty according to him of the death sentence of its most just citizen, Socrates. Precisely for this reason, the basic inspiration of the Platonic philosophy is of a political nature and aims at the realization of the best government, the ideal state, in which the just man can be considered for what he deserves. On the other hand, Socrates, thanks to a tragic paradox, is also known as the personification of the righteous man who became a victim of the law.

And such an event immediately raises the question: wouldn't it be better for Socrates, convicted on the basis of false accusations, to avoid capital punishment in respect of true justice? In this regard, Plato seems almost ready to justify the fact of disobedience to a state that, like the Athenian democracy, leads to death its best citizen.

And, this is due to the fact that the good citizen is not, according to him, the one who humbly submits to the positive law, but the one who follows the right law, the moral one, dictated by the vision of the good. For Plato, then, it seemed intolerable that positive law should appear so far removed from true justice. For the same problem, Socrates had taught that the duty of people is to respect both positive and moral law.

When it happens that a citizen must contest or disobey a law issued by the state. because the "devil" inside him reveals that the law is unjust, he must do this by agreeing to pay the penalty that this action brings. However, Plato tries to go beyond this teaching; in order to prevent a law from punishing a man like Socrates, a way must be found to make the moral law compatible with the positive law. Based on this perspective, the search for which is the best government, human or legal, has been the central question of the entire history of political thought.

However, what must be clearly understood is the fact that this is not a question about the law and the form of government, but about the manner of this government. And, over the centuries, the two criteria of a good government have been: the government of the common good that opposes private interests and the government according to the laws established against a bad government.

According to Plato, the government of the "ideal city" must necessarily be aristocratic (according to the meaning of the Greek word aristevein, which means to act to become better"), that is, led by honest people with integrity, from the "perfect guardians" who possess the sense of the state and the idea of ​​the common good.

These are, precisely, the righteous people who do not need laws to act and do good, and thanks to these qualities they are presented as the right people to create righteous laws. It has often been repeated that Plato's "Republic" is a utopia, likewise the maxim just mentioned in our times does not find much consensus, as it seems better to leave the formulation of laws to the collectivity which often what was considered right by the side of some legislators has brought it out as harmful for the whole community (the most emblematic case would be the waste law, or the maritime shelf agreement with Greece, to mention the two most important in today's Albanian reality).

Therefore, according to political theory, the priority in this debate is the education of legality, and as a result, the ideal of the "exemplary citizen" seems to belong to Socrates, who puts his sense of justice and his moral conscience at the service of the city's laws , and does not claim, as does his great disciple, Plato, to be the depository of truth and the source of law. However, what is most important to understand in Socrates' position, in addition to the need to respect legality, is also the determination of the facts that enemies of democracy can be both citizens who are not interested in the Good, as well as those ( whoever) who claim to possess a complete and finished idea of ​​it.

Democracy is an immense framework of possibilities, which must be filled with an ethos. From ancient history to the modern era, starting from Xenophon, Machiavelli, Erasmus and many others, many treatises on the education of princes have been written. It seems that there are no analogous works for the education of the democratic citizen. At a time when they are necessary, as democracies in certain conditions and circumstances can "suicide" from this deficiency.

Good laws and constitutions are not enough, "good people" are needed to live with the democratic spirit of the constitutions. And this is because the ultimate goal is not to understand what democracy is, but to be democratic, or in other words, the capacity to incorporate democracy into your behavior as an ideal, as a virtue to be honored and to be translated into practice. In this sense, that is, in the direction of filling this great gap in the existence of a specific pedagogy for this purpose, we can mention the contribution of the well-known American philosopher Marta Nussbaum.

Paraphrasing her highly acclaimed book Cultivation of Humanity (2006), we can safely say that her analyzes of Socratic and contemporary university education are cultivated in the light of the Socratic ideal of the "good citizen". to the point that it manages to become the objective of an honest moral debate and the pedagogical model of the evolution of public rationality.

Becoming a "good citizen", according to her, does not only mean strengthening the knowledge base and the understanding of reasoning techniques, which are nevertheless fundamental to learn, but it means something more, it means learning to be able to love, to use imagination and thus to participate imaginatively in the lives of others. This, of course, cannot be magically extracted from nothing without being freely incorporated as an essential part of education.

"We are in the middle of a crisis of unheard of proportions and a global scope", she explains. Here I am not referring to the worldwide economic crisis that started in 2008. For it, all appropriate measures were taken and continue to be taken to face it in the most favorable way, since the consequences for the respective governments will be really serious. I refer, on the contrary, to a crisis that goes unnoticed by many, that works silently, like a cancer, a crisis destined to be in perspective, much more harmful to the future of democracy: the world crisis of teaching.

The imperative of economic growth has prompted most European governments to review the entire university education system, in the forms of teaching and learning, oriented according to the respective lines of economic development of each country, asking each of the scientific disciplines to contribute effectively to economic growth. Democracies possess great resources of intelligence and imagination.

But, on the other hand, they are open to a series of dangers such as insufficient reasoning capacity, provincialism, haste, inertia, selfishness and poverty of spirit; these qualities, which in a hybrid democracy like Albania's, are aggravated and magnified to the extent of a deep crisis. All the more so that education, which takes into account the demands of the global market, frightfully "abyssizes" these lacks, producing with a gentleness and dark desire, obedient and submissive (tamed) technicians, who in the end manage to they also threaten the very life of democracy, irreversibly preventing the creation of a culture of a "rightly lived life", as taught by Socrates and the classics of Stoicism.

On the other hand, even the politicians during the exercise of their activity do not let any good sign appear on the horizon regarding the education system. They have to prepare for the elections in relatively short intervals of time and moreover in periods of economic crisis, so they need to present themselves to the voters with concrete results of the type "I have generated so many jobs and increased the GDP by so many percent" . Meanwhile, less concrete results such as "I laid the foundations for the preservation of democracy in a long-term perspective", it seems, are no longer explained in the election campaigns.