Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [74]
—Colbert on Charlie Rose, December 8th, 2006
Socrates (470-399 B.C.) was famous for wandering the streets of Athens and asking prominent politicians, artists, and craftsmen questions they could not answer without embarrassing themselves. This made some people angry. Socrates was convinced his unpopularity was the ultimate reason Athens brought him to trial and sentenced him to death in 399 B.C. “I am very unpopular with many people,” he told his jury. “This will be my undoing, if I am undone” (Apology, line 28b). Others were entertained by the spectacle. Some say Socrates made philosophical argument into the new wrestling match, the new contest that appealed to the competitive impulse of Athenians.132 And, in this contest, he was the champion whom the young admired and nobody could defeat.
The young men who follow me around of their own free will … take pleasure in hearing people questioned. (Apology, line 23c)
They enjoy hearing those being questioned who think they are wise, but are not. And this is not unpleasant. (Apology, lines 33c3-4)
Socrates would ask lawmakers to define justice. Surely they must know what it is if they distinguish good laws from bad ones, or are they just making it up as they go? He asked similar definitional questions to all Athenians with great reputations for wisdom. The poets were supposed to know the nature of beauty, but they did not. The military leaders were supposed to be able to define courage, but they could not. The sophists didn’t possess sophisticated educational philosophies, despite their claims to expertise in education. And, perhaps most famously, a self-proclaimed religious expert named Euthyphro could not define a religious concept as elementary as piety, even though he claimed expertise in all spiritual matters and offered to be Socrates’s teacher.
Euthyphro is one of Socrates’s many victims, but he is a special case in Plato’s dialogues because his character flaws are so exaggerated. He insists on acting in the face of the gravest moral controversy, despite the fact that he cannot adequately explain his reasons for doing so. He feels he must act, but he cannot say why. On the one hand, he says piety demands that he take legal action against his father. But on the other hand, he has no idea what “piety” means and cannot explain why it requires him to do one thing rather than another. Socrates has no patience for Euthyphro’s lack of self-reflection. He subjects him to a barrage of questions and arguments intended to help him recognize the limits of his deliberation and the gravity of his situation. But Socrates might as well be talking to a wall. Euthyphro is ignorant, ignorant of his ignorance, and yet stubbornly committed to taking action. Nothing will persuade him to think or act differently because he isn’t really thinking, and he certainly isn’t guiding his actions with reason.
Euthyphro may have been particularly bullheaded and especially unaware of Socrates’s heavy-handed irony. But he was not alone in being stumped by Socrates. Nobody could answer Socrates’s questions satisfactorily and Socrates would expose these weaknesses in front of audiences who took pleasure in watching the city’s authority figures fail. We can think of Socrates’s “street philosophy” as an ancient precursor to the Colbert Report. Just like Socrates, Colbert uses loaded questions and irony to expose the contradictions and gaps in his guests’ reasoning, and to expose them as superficial blowhards and stewards of a broken culture and value system. If he talks to a conservative about the place of women in society, for example, he will go even further to the right than her to test the sincerity of her beliefs and expose their extremism. If he talks to a liberal about his opposition to the Iraq war, he will ask his guest whether he’d support the war if President Bush promised to bring back Saddam’s rape rooms.
This ironic rhetorical strategy is often very effective as refutation. When the audience laughs in recognition