SOCRATES

Socrates was a Greek philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought exerted a profound influence on ancient and modern philosophy. Although Socrates himself wrote nothing, he is portrayed in conversation in compositions by a small circle of his admirers, the most important of whom was his student Plato. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates appears as a man of great insight, integ-rity, self-mastery, and argumentative skill.

LIFE AND PERSONALITY

Although the sources provide only a small amount of information about the life and personality of Socrates, a unique and vivid picture of him shines through, particularly in some of the works of Plato. We know the names of his father, Sophroniscus (probably a stonemason), his mother, Phaenarete, and his wife, Xanthippe, and we know that he had three sons. (In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates likens his way of philosophizing to the occupation of his mother, who was a midwife: not pregnant with ideas himself, he assists others with the delivery of their ideas, though they are often stillborn.) With a snub nose and bulging eyes, which made him always appear to be staring, he was unattractive by conventional standards. 

He served as a hoplite (a heavily armed soldier) in the Athenian army and fought bravely in several important battles. Unlike many of the thinkers of his time, he did not travel to other cities in order to pursue his intellectual interests.Socrates’ personality was in some ways closely connected to his philosophical outlook. He was remarkable for the absolute command he maintained over his emotions and his apparent indifference to physical hardships. Corresponding to these personal qualities was his commitment to the doctrine that reason, properly cultivated, can and ought to be the all-controlling factor in human life. 

Thus he has no fear of death, he says in Plato’s Apology, because he has no knowledge of what comes after it, and he holds that, if anyone does fear death, his fear can be based only on a pretense of knowledge. The assumption underlying this claim is that, once one has given sufficient thought to some matter, one’s emotions will follow suit. Fear will be dispelled by intellectual clarity. Similarly, according to Socrates, if one believes, upon reflection, that one should act in a particular way, then, necessarily, one’s feelings about the act in question will accommodate themselves to one’s belief—one will desire to act in that way. 

It follows that, once one knows what virtue is, it is impossible not to act virtuously. Anyone who fails to act virtuously does so because he incorrectly identifies virtue with something it is not.

Socrates’ conception of virtue as a form of knowledge explains why he takes it to be of the greatest importance to seek answers to questions such as “What is courage?” and “What is piety?” If we could just discover the answers to these questions, we would have all we need to live our lives well.Another prominent feature of the personality of Socrates, one that often creates problems about how best to interpret him, is (to use the ancient Greek term) his eirôneia. Although this is the term from which the English word irony is derived, there is a difference between the two. 

To speak ironically is to use words to mean the opposite of what they normally convey, but it is not necessarily to aim at deception, for the speaker may expect and even want the audience to recognize this reversal. In contrast, for the ancient Greeks eirôneia meant “dissembling”—a user of eirôneia is trying to hide something. This is the accusation that is made against Socrates several times in Plato’s works (though never in Xenophon’s). His eirôneia may even have lent support to one of the accusations made against him, that he corrupted the young. For if Socrates really did engage in eirôneia, and if his youthful followers delighted in and imitated this aspect of his character, then to that extent he encouraged them to become dissembling and untrustworthy, just like himself.

SOCRATES IN THE DIALOGUES OF PLATO

Most scholars do not believe that every Socratic discourse of Plato was intended as a historical report of what the real Socrates said, word-for-word, on some occasion. What can reasonably be claimed about at least some of these dialogues is that they convey the gist of the questions Socrates asked, the ways in which he typically responded to the answers he received, and the general philosophical orientation that emerged from these conversations.

There is a broad consensus among scholars, however, that in Plato’s early dialogues, in which Socrates insists that he does not have satisfactory answers to the questions he poses—questions such as “What is courage?,” “What is self-control?,” and “What is piety?”—Plato was attempting to convey the views of the historical Socrates. In the middle and late dialogues, in which Socrates does offer systematic answers to such questions, Plato was using the character of Socrates to present views that were largely his own, though they were inspired by his encounter with the historical Socrates and were developed using Socratic methods of inquiry.The portrait of Socrates in all of the dialogues in which he appears (the Laws is the single exception) is fully consonant with that given in the Apology, a dialogue purported to be Socrates’ speech at his trial for impiety in 399 BCE. 

In that work, Socrates insists that he devotes his life to one question only: how he and others can become good human beings, or as good as possible. The questions he asks others, and discovers that they cannot answer, are posed in the hope that he might acquire greater wisdom about just this subject.“Socratic method” in modern usage is a name for any educational strategy that involves cross-examination of students by their teacher. However, in the method used by Socrates in the conversations re-created by Plato, Socrates describes himself not as a teacher but as an ignorant inquirer, and the series of questions he asks are designed to show that the principal question he raises (for example, “What is piety?”) is one to which his interlocutor has no adequate answer. 

Typically, the interlocutor is led, by a series of supplementary questions, to see that he must withdraw the answer he at first gave to the principal question, because that answer falls afoul of the other answers he has given. This method employed by Socrates is a strategy for showing that the interlocutor’s several answers do not fit together as a group, thus revealing the interlocutor’s poor grasp of the concepts under discussion.

The interlocutor, having been refuted by means of premises he himself has agreed to, is free to propose a new answer to Socrates’ principal question. But although the new answers avoid the errors revealed in the preceding cross-examination, fresh difficulties are uncovered, and in the end the “ignorance” of Socrates is revealed as a kind of wisdom, whereas the interlocutors are implicitly criticized for failing to recognize their ignorance.It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that Socrates suspends judgment about all matters whatsoever. 

On the contrary, he has some ethical convictions about which he is completely confident: human wisdom begins with the recognition of one’s own ignorance; the unexamined life is not worth living; ethical virtue is the only thing that matters; and a good human being cannot be harmed (because what-ever misfortune he may suffer, including poverty, physical injury, and even death, his virtue will remain intact).

PLATO’S APOLOGY 

Scholars generally agree about certain historical details of the trial depicted in Plato’s Apology. They agree about what the charges against Socrates were: failing to acknowledge the gods recognized by the city, introducing other new divinities, and corrupting the young. They also agree that, having been found guilty, Socrates refused to propose a punishment that the jury would find acceptable; and that, after the jury voted in favour of the death penalty, he once again addressed the jury and expressed no regrets for his manner of living or the course of his trial.

Socrates spends a large part of his speech trying to persuade his fellow citizens that he is indeed a pious man, because his philosophical mission has been carried out in obedience to the god who presides at Delphi. But the two modes of religiosity he observes—serving the god by cross-examining one’s fellow citizens and accepting the guidance of a divine voice—are nothing like the conventional forms of piety in ancient Athens. The Athenians expressed their piety by participating in festivals, making sacrifices, visiting shrines, and the like. They assumed that it was the better part of caution to show one’s devotion to the gods in these public and conventional ways because, if the gods were not honored, they could easily harm or destroy even the best of men and women and their families and cities as well.

If Plato’s account of his philosophy is accurate, then Socrates lacked the typical Athenian’s motives for participating in conventional forms of piety. He cannot believe that the gods might harm him, because he is confident that he is a good man and that a good man cannot be harmed. In effect, then, Socrates admits that his understanding of piety is radically different from the conventional conception. But not only does Socrates have an unorthodox conception of piety and of what the gods want from the citizens of the city, he also claims to receive infallible guidance from a voice that does not hesitate to speak to him about public matters.

If there is any doubt that the unorthodox form of piety Socrates embodies could have brought him into direct conflict with the popular will, one need only think of the portion of Plato’s Apology in which Socrates tells the jurors that he would obey the god rather than them. Imagining the possibility that he is acquitted on the condition that he cease philosophizing in the marketplace, he unequivocally rejects the terms of this hypothetical offer, precisely because he believes that his religious duty to call his fellow citizens to the examined life cannot be made secondary to any other consideration. 

It is characteristic of his entire speech that he brings into the open how contemptuous he is of Athenian civic life and his fellow citizens. Here, as in so many parts of his speech, he treats his day in court as an opportunity to accuse his accusers, as well as his fellow citizens, for the way they lead their lives.In effect, Socrates uses the occasion of his trial to put his accusers and the jurors on trial. But this was a natural role for him, because he had done the same thing, day after day, to everyone he met. The impact of his life was all the greater because of the way in which it ended. Following his trial, he was sentenced to death by poisoning (the poison probably being hemlock). He died at age 70.