Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [75]
In light of these similarities, it’s worth asking: Is Stephen Colbert America’s Socrates? Or, as Colbert would no doubt prefer us to ask, was Socrates Athens’s Stephen Colbert? As much as Colbert might insist on the second question because it suggests that he is more important than Socrates, some might disagree. They might even reject the comparison altogether. For one thing Socrates seems to have had more “balls,” Colbert’s own ironically chauvinistic metric for measuring a person’s worth. How so? Simple: Athens executed Socrates because the Athenian political establishment considered him a threat, whereas Colbert was President Bush’s invited guest and entertainer at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Moreover, as most Colbert fans are well aware, James Fowler recently discovered that political guests have received a considerable “bump” in campaign contributions after appearing on the Colbert Report.133 Socrates was never so cozy with Athens’s power brokers. He was considered more of a heretic than a must-do pre-election interview. If Socrates was “a gadfly on the neck of man,” as Friedrich Nietzsche once said, Colbert seems to be a fluffy Pomeranian curled up on the lap of Uncle Sam, a Hamlet who loves Claudius. The point of this chapter, then, is to figure out whether Colbert has enough “balls” to be compared to Socrates.
Socrates the Social Critic
Let’s look more closely at what Socrates was all about: the kind of philosophy he was interested in, the point of his inconclusive conversations with others, and what he ultimately wanted for Athens. Once we know the answers to these questions, we will be in a much better position to compare Socrates with Colbert and figure out who has more “balls.”
Before Socrates, ancient Greek philosophy was mostly concerned with grand metaphysical questions. What is reality? What is it made out of, and where did it come from? These questions were revolutionary and exciting for their time: they broke away from traditional Greek religious beliefs and myths, and they seemed to promise omniscience to anyone who answered them. If you could know the most basic material constituent of the cosmos (what Aristotle called the archê), you could know what reality is made of, where it came from, and how it came to be what it is. You could literally know everything. Or so the pre-Socratic philosophers hoped!
Socrates wasn’t so sure. In Plato’s Phaedo, a dialogue about death and immortality, Socrates says that as a young man he was extremely interested in these early philosophical questions about the nature and origins of the cosmos. Initially he was captivated by the pre-Socratic philosophical view that the entire cosmos was governed by a divine mind. But the more he considered the idea, the less confident he became that it could help him discover answers to the questions he cared about most, questions such as: What is the best life to live? What is happiness, and how does one go about becoming happy? No amount of metaphysical speculation about the ground of being could provide the answers Socrates sought. A new kind of philosophy was needed, a practical philosophy that aimed to make our lives better, to inform and transform us. Socrates produced this new philosophy. He lived it. He made his life, a life committed to the cultivation