Socrates a Pragmatist?

Perhaps the place where Plato/Socrates is the most pragmatic in The Apology, and by most, I mean the place where he is philosophically pragmatic is during the sentencing phase. 

Socrates has been convicted, but no penalty has been exacted. Meletus, his accuser, asks for death. Socrates is then asked to suggest a punishment he deems suitable. After musing about several alternatives, one of the most satirical passages in all the dialogues, Socrates weighs them against death and asks, “When I do not know whether death is a good or an evil, why should I propose a penalty which would certainly be an evil?” About as pragmatic a question as one could ask—at least philosophically.  

Philosophically, according to James  “The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable” (Pragmatism 25). What is the question Socrates just asked but interminable, that is, unanswerable? After he has been condemned, Socrates riffs on death at length:  

“Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.”

This passage sounds like James’s well known metaphor about the squirrel and the tree. (A man is on one side of a tree; a squirrel on the other. As the man tries to go round the tree to see the squirrel, does he go “round the squirrel or not?” (Pragmatism  25). James’s answer is to long for a blog. We’ll just summarize him by paraphrasing his take on the pragmatic method: It’s the same whether the man goes around the squirrel or the squirrel goes around the man. So, why worry about it. 

Though I self-identify as a pragmatist, I find James’s stance troubling, since I am prone to tell students in advanced writing or theory classes that the only questions that really interest  me are the ones that don’t have an answer, that are, in fact, interminable.

Socrates’s musing about death help me see that those unending questions, while unanswerable, are not metaphysical but pragmatic, because as Socrates realized, they govern how we act. Had he feared death, he would have acted much differently in The Apology than he did. Something he himself points out.

Those interminable questions are about what Socrates referred to as “virtue” and virtue affects us every day at the street level.