As the heir of a wealthy Athenian sculptor, Socrates used his financial independence as an opportunity to invent the practice of philosophical dialogue.
Since he wrote nothing of his own, we are dependent upon contemporary writers like Aristophanes and Xenophon for our information about his life. After dignified service as a soldier in the Peloponnesian War, he lived for the rest of his life in
Socrates declined to accept payment for his work with students, many of whom were fanatically loyal to him. Their parents, however, were often displeased with his influence, and his association with opponents of the democratic regime made him a controversial political figure.
Our best sources of information about Socrates's philosophical views are the early dialogues of his student Plato, who attempted to provide a faithful picture of the methods and teachings of the master. Here the extended conversations of Socrates aim at understanding and, therefore, achieving virtue through the careful application of a dialectical method that uses critical inquiry to undermine the plausibility of widely-held doctrines.
Socrates systematically refutes the superficial notion of piety or moral rectitude defended by a confident young man. Plato's Apologhma (Apology) is an account of Socrates's unsuccessful speech in his own defense before the Athenian jury; it includes a detailed description of the motives and goals of philosophical activity as he practiced it.
During Socrates's imprisonment he responded to friendly efforts to secure his escape by seriously debating whether or not an individual citizen can ever be justified in refusing to obey the laws of the state.
Socrates investigated the nature of virtue, defending the doctrine of recollection as an explanation of our most significant knowledge and maintaining that knowledge and virtue are so closely related that no human agent ever knowingly chooses evil.
Improper conduct is a product of ignorance rather than of weakness of the will.
Socrates despite his foundational place in the history of ideas, actually wrote nothing.
Most of our knowledge of him comes from the works of Plato.
The Apology of Socrates
The most accurate of Plato's writings on Socrates is probably the The Apology. It is Plato's account of Socrates's defense at his trial in 399 BC the word "apology" comes from the Greek word for "defense-speech" and does not mean what we would think of as an apology. It is clear, however, that Plato dressed up Socrates's speech to turn it into a justification for Socrates's life and his death. In it, Plato outlines some of Socrates's most famous philosophical ideas: the necessity of doing what one thinks is right even in the face of universal opposition, and the need to pursue knowledge even when opposed.
Socrates wrote nothing because he felt that knowledge was a living, interactive thing. Socrates' method of philosophical inquiry consisted in questioning people on the positions they asserted and working them through questions into a contradiction, thus proving to them that their original assertion was wrong. Socrates himself never takes a position; in The Apology he radically and skeptically claims to know nothing at all except that he knows nothing.
Socrates and Plato refer to this method of questioning as elenchus, which means something like "cross-examination"
The Socratic elenchus eventually gave rise to dialectic, the idea that truth needs to be pursued by modifying one's position through questioning and conflict with opposing ideas. It is this idea of the truth being pursued, rather than discovered, that characterizes Socratic thought and much of our world view today.
The Western notion of dialectic is somewhat Socratic in nature in that it is conceived of as an ongoing process. Although Socrates in The Apology claims to have discovered no other truth than that he knows no truth, the Socrates of Plato's other earlier dialogues is of the opinion that truth is somehow attainable through this process of elenchus .
The Athenians, with the exception of Plato, thought of Socrates as a Sophist, a designation he seems to have bitterly resented. He was, however, very similar in thought to the Sophists. Like the Sophists, he was unconcerned with physical or metaphysical questions; the issue of primary importance was ethics, living a good life.
He appeared to be a sophist because he seems to tear down every ethical position he's confronted with; he never offers alternatives after he's torn down other people's ideas.
Philisophy
The one positive statement that Socrates made is a definition of virtue:
"virtue is knowledge if one knows the good, one will always do the good. It follows, then, that anyone who does anything wrong doesn't really know what the good is.”
This, for Socrates, justifies tearing down people's moral positions, for if they have the wrong ideas about virtue, morality, love, or any other ethical idea, they can't be trusted to do the right thing.
The trial
The trial of Socrates took place in 399 BC when he was nearly 70. The charges were that he refused to recognise the official gods of the state, that he introduced new gods and that he corrupted the young.
There was a vivid political background to the trial, but this does not mean that the charges were a sham and that the trial was really a political one. Politics, religion and education were all intertwined in the matter, and, however you looked at it, Socrates was saying the wrong things at the wrong time.
In 404, five years before the trial, a 27-year war between
It was felt that intellectuals were weakening Athenian society by undermining its traditional views and values. Well might a man who captivated idle youths with his questioning about justice have aroused suspicion. And whatever truth there was to the rumour that Socrates disbelieved in the traditional gods - he seemed to deny the charge, but not convincingly - there was no doubt that he had an unorthodox approach to divinity.
The way he talked about his daimonion, his "guardian spirit'' or personal "divine sign'', gave reasonable cause for concern that he did indeed "introduce new gods'', as the indictment put it. That would have been a grievous sin against the shaky democracy. The state alone had the power to say what was a suitable object for religious veneration; it had its own procedures for officially recognising gods, and anyone who ignored them was in effect challenging the legitimacy of the democratic state.
All of this Socrates was up against when he faced the 500 Athenian citizens who were to judge him.
Plato was at the trial; the Apology or defence-speech of Socrates which he wrote a few years afterwards was probably his first work.
Socrates knew that his judges were already prejudiced against him and set out to correct these false impressions. He is not, he says, a man who teaches for money, like the professional "Sophists''. This seems to have been true enough: he did not charge a fee. He also dismissed the slander that he taught people how to win arguments by trickery when they were in the wrong. Far from it.
This is the main theme of the Apology, which is more of a general defence of his way of life than a rebuttal of the official charges. The nub of this defence is Socrates's claim that he has positively benefited the Athenians by subjecting them to his philosophical cross-examinations, but that they have failed to realise this and merely been angered by it, which is why he has ended up on trial for his life.
Socrates says that he is fulfilling the wishes of the gods when he goes about and argues with people.
The Oracle
A friend of his once went to the oracle at
For he always held that he was not wise at all. "After puzzling about it for some time, I set myself at last with considerable reluctance to check the truth of it.''
He did so by interrogating all sorts of people who had a reputation for wisdom or specialised knowledge. But he was always disappointed, because it seemed that there was nobody whose alleged wisdom could stand up to his questioning. He was always able to refute the efforts of others to establish some thesis of theirs, usually by highlighting some unwelcome and unexpected consequences of their views. He also questioned poets, but they could not even elucidate their poems to his satisfaction.
After one such encounter:
I reflected as I walked away, Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of, but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.
Then it dawned on him what the Oracle must have meant: whenever I succeed in disproving another person's claim to wisdom in a given subject, the bystanders assume that I know everything about that subject myself.
But the truth of the matter, gentlemen, is pretty certainly this, that real wisdom is the property of God, and this Oracle is his way of telling us that human wisdom has little or no value.
Wisdom
In other words, the superior wisdom of Socrates lies in the fact that he alone is aware of how little he knows. He aptly describes himself as an intellectual midwife, whose questioning delivers the thoughts of others into the light of day.
But this skill in elucidation and debate, which he obviously has in abundance, is not a form of real wisdom so far as Socrates is concerned. Real wisdom is perfect knowledge about ethical subjects, about how to live.
When Socrates claims ignorance, he means ignorance about the foundations of morality; he is not asserting any general sort of scepticism about everyday matters of fact. His concern is solely with ethical reflection, and he cannot with a clear conscience abandon his mission to encourage it in others:
If I say that this would be disobedience to God, and that is why I cannot "mind my own business," you will not believe that I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me.
Nevertheless that is how it is. His pious references to the wisdom of God are apt to disguise how unconventional his attitude to divinity was.
When he says that only God has wisdom. The Delphic oracle was as authentic a voice of God as any available: yet Socrates did not just accept what it says but instead set out "to check the truth of it''.
He says elsewhere that "it has always been my nature never to accept advice from any of my friends unless reflection shows that it is the best course that reason offers"; he seems to have adopted exactly the same approach to the advice of God.
Presented with the divine pronouncement that no man is wiser than Socrates, he refuses to take this at face value until he has satisfied himself that a true meaning can be found for it.
He seems to be speaking in a roundabout way when he refers to his mission as divine, because the Delphic oracle did not explicitly tell him to go forth and philosophise. He does at one point say that his mission to argue and question was undertaken "in obedience to God's commands given in oracles and dreams and in every other way that any divine dispensation has ever impressed a duty upon man''. He probably came closest to the heart of the matter when he said "I want you to think of my adventures as a sort of pilgrimage undertaken to establish the truth of the oracle once for all''.
It was his conscience and intelligence which told him to interrogate those who believed themselves to be wise. He could claim that this "helps the cause of God'' because such activities do help to confirm the Delphic pronouncement that nobody is wiser than Socrates. But the talk of God is largely a gloss, which serves to mark Socrates' high moral purpose and to win the approval of his hearers. His basic motive for philosophising was simply that it was him the right thing to do.
Guardian Angel
Socrates says he is influenced in his actions by what he calls his daimonion, a guardian spirit or voice which has been with him since childhood. This seems to have been the unorthodox divinity or "new gods'' referred to in the charges against him.
Once again the advice of the daimonion is treated as advice to be reasoned with before it is endorsed, like the counsel of friends or the words of the Delphic oracle. The voice of the daimonion is pretty clearly what we would call the voice of cautious conscience. He says that "when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on''.
The guardian spirit warned him off any involvement in politics, he says, because if he had made a public figure of himself, he would have been killed long before he could have done much good. That is why he chose to minister to the people privately:
I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your first and chief concern not for your bodies nor for your possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls, proclaiming as I go, Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state.
This persuasion seems to have been rather strident at times. He implies that the Athenians should be "ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul''. He must have particularly annoyed them when he said, during his trial, that he thought he was doing the Athenians "the greatest possible service'' in showing them the errors of their ways.
This was at a stage of the proceedings when he had already been voted guilty and was required to argue for a suitable penalty, to counter the prosecution's proposal that he be put to death. Typically, he treats this responsibility with irony.
What he actually deserves for doing the Athenians such a service, he says, is not a punishment but a reward.
He suggests free meals for life at the expense of the state. Such an honour was usually reserved for victors at the Olympic games and suchlike; he has earned it even more than they have, he says, because
"these people give you the semblance of success, but I give you the reality''. He ends this part of the speech by suggesting a fine instead, at the instigation of Plato and other friends who offer to pay it for him. But the Athenians had already lost their patience. They voted for the death penalty by a larger majority than that by which they had found him guilty. This means that some of them, having previously found him innocent, were so enraged by his cheek that they either changed their minds or else decided to get rid of him anyway.
One story has it that as Socrates was leaving the court, a devoted but dim admirer called Apollodorus moaned that the hardest thing for him to bear was that Socrates was being put to death unjustly. What? said Socrates, trying to comfort him. Would you rather I was put to death justly?
Socrates Spirituality
Socrates thought that what happens after death in the Phaedo, which purports to give Socrates's last words before he drank hemlock in prison, he produces an array of proofs for the immortality of the soul.
He thought that the soul was separable from the body, that it existed before birth and that it would definitely continue to exist after death. Under Pythagorean influence, he held that while it was tied to a physical body during life it led a defiled and inferior existence from which it needed to be "purified'' and "freed from the shackles of the body''. What the good man can hope to enjoy after death is reunification, or at least communion, with those incorporeal higher forms of existence that are conventionally called "the divine''.
The philosopher, in particular, should regard the whole of his life as a preparation for the blissful release of death. As we have seen, Socrates lived a poor and unconventional life that was certainly unworldly.
Socrates pursued the virtues because he felt morally obliged to, here and now. Earthly life imposed its own duties, brought its own blessings and was not simply a preparation for something else. One belief about virtue is that the pursuit of goodness is not only a matter of acting in certain ways but also an intellectual project.
Socrates believed that coming to understand the virtues was a necessary precondition for possessing them. A man could not be truly virtuous unless he knew what virtue was, and the only way he might be able to get this knowledge was by examining accounts of the particular virtues. That is why Socrates went around questioning people and arguing with them.
Socrates saw the search for definitions as a means to an end, namely the exercise of virtue. Socrates' questioning really amounted to and what it ought to aim at.
Socrates had a egalitarian approach to knowledge and virtue. His most famous quote would have to be “The unexamined life is not worth living“.
This is not a fate to which he meant to condemn all but a chosen few. Anybody could examine his own life and ideas and thus lead a worthwhile existence.
Socrates would happily question and argue with anybody, cobbler or king, and for him this was all that philosophy was.
In one of his dialogues, uses a geometrical example to argue that knowledge of the Forms, which for him meant all the important sorts of knowledge, is acquired before birth. The truths of pure reason, such as those of mathematics, are not discovered afresh but are painstakingly recollected from a previous existence in which the soul was disembodied and could encounter the Forms directly.
Thus one does not strictly speaking learn these truths at all: one works to remember them. When a soul is born into a body, the knowledge which it previously enjoyed slips from memory: as Wordsworth wrote in his Intimations of Immortality, "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting''.
Socrates' questions to the slave are indeed leading ones (and the diagrams help, too), yet it is nevertheless true that the slave comes to see the answer for himself. He has not simply been told it as one might be told how many feet there are in a yard or what the capital of
At present these opinions [of the slave’s] being newly aroused, have a dreamlike quality. But if the same questions are put to him on many occasions and in different ways, you can see that in the end he will have a knowledge on the subject as accurate as anybody's...
This knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning. He will recover it for himself.
Repeated doses of Socratic questioning are called for. In other words, what the slave needs is exactly the sort of treatment that the real Socrates offered the largely ungrateful Athenians. As he says in the Apology, if anyone claims to know about goodness "I shall question him and examine him and test him''. Thus in his fanciful story of assisted recollection, Plato has given us a striking illustration of the sort of thing Socrates was doing when he claimed to help other people deliver their own opinions. It is as if Socrates were drawing out and firming up some knowledge that was already there.
Socratic Way of Life
For Socratic strength of mind was needed for the pursuit of happiness and held that happiness was to be found not in satisfying desires, but in losing them. As demonstrated by Socrates' indifference to wealth and comfort, and turned this into an ascetic philosophy. Socrates, after all, had said that nothing could harm a good man and that so long as one was good, nothing else in life mattered at all. Socrates never denied that wealth or possessions were, in their proper place, a better thing to have than to lack.
His apparent indifference to them was largely a by-product of the demanding search for virtue and a healthy soul.
While Socrates was quite prepared to ignore ordinary ways and values when his principles demanded it. If something was neither virtuous nor wicked, then it did not make the slightest difference whether one did it or not.
As can be imagined, this was a powerful recipe for freedom, freed of the desire for possessions, and liberated from conventional behaviour, the wise man could wander around declaiming against society's matesialistic ways..
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