Socrates Course Materials

Socrates Socrates is a very challenging subject for the historian. There are numerous persons concerning whom it is certain that very little is known, and other men concerning whom it is certain that a great deal is known; but in the case of Socrates the question is as to whether we know very little or a great lot. He was obviously an Athenian citizen of middling means, who spent his time in disputation, and taught philosophy to the young, but not for money, like the Sophists. He was undoubtedly tried, convicted to death, and killed in 399 B.C., at around the age of seventy. He was undoubtedly a wellknown character in Athens, as Aristophanes caricatured him in The Clouds. But beyond this point we become entangled in dispute. Two of his disciples, Xenophon and Plato, wrote voluminously about him, although they stated quite different things. Even when they agree, it has been maintained by Burnet that Xenophon is mimicking Plato. Where they dispute, some believe the one, some the other, some neither. In such a perilous issue, I shall not try to take sides, but I will bring forth quickly the many points of view. Let us begin with Xenophon, a military man, not very generously gifted with wits, and on the whole conventional in his view. Xenophon is saddened that Socrates should have been accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth; he says that, on the contrary, Socrates was wonderfully religious and had a genuinely healthy impact upon those who fell under his influence. His views, it appears, so far from being revolutionary, were very bland and conventional. This defense goes too far, as it leaves the antipathy to Socrates unexplained. As Burnet argues (Thales to Plato, p. 149): “Xenophon’s defence of Socrates is too successful. He would never have been put to death if he had been like that.” There has been a tendency to think that everything Xenophon says must be true, because he had not the wits to think of anything untrue. This is a highly flawed line of argument. A foolish guy’s description of what a brilliant man says is never correct, since he automatically converts what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest adversary among philosophers than by a friend naive of philosophy. We cannot thus believe what Xenophon says if it either includes any difficult topic in philosophy or is part of an argument to establish that Socrates was unfairly punished. Nevertheless, some of Xenophon’s reminiscences are really believable. He describes (as Plato also did) how Socrates was always engaged with the difficulty of bringing competent persons into positions of leadership. He would pose such queries as: “If I wanted a shoe mended, whom should I employ?” To which some ingenuous youth would answer: “A shoemaker, O Socrates.” He would go on to carpenters, coppersmiths, etc., and finally ask some such question as “who should fix the Ship of State?” When he fell into conflict with the Thirty Tyrants, Critias, their chief, who knew his ways from having studied under him, forbade him to continue teaching the young, and added: “You had best be done with your shoemakers, carpenters, and coppersmiths. These must be fairly well trampled out at heel by this time, considering the circulation you have given them” (Xenophon, Memorabilia, Bk. I, Chap. II). This happened under the short oligarchic rule formed by the Spartans at the close of the Peloponnesian War. But at most periods Athens was democratic, so much so that even generals were elected or selected by lot. Socrates came across a young man who desired to become a general, and persuaded him that it would be wise to know something of the art of war. The young man accordingly went away and took a brief course in tactics. When he returned, Socrates, after some humorous praise, ordered him back for more education (ib. Bk. III, Chap I). Another young guy he set to learning the fundamentals of finance. He attempted the same type of idea on many persons, including the war minister; but it was judged that it was better to silence him by means of the hemlock than to heal the problems of which he complained. With Plato’s account of Socrates, the difficulty is quite a different one from what it is in the case of Xenophon, namely, that it is very hard to judge how far Plato means to portray the historical Socrates, and how far he intends the person called “Socrates” in his dialogues to be merely the mouthpiece of his own opinions. Plato, in addition to being a philosopher, is an imaginative writer of tremendous talent and charm. No one supposes, and he himself does not genuinely pretend, that the talks in his dialogues took place quite as he recounts them. Nevertheless, at any case in the earlier exchanges, the discourse is extremely genuine and the characters quite convincing. It is the greatness of Plato as a writer of fiction that puts suspicion on him as a historian. His Socrates is a coherent and wonderfully intriguing character, well beyond the capacity of most persons to construct; yet I suppose Plato might have invented him. Whether he did so is of course another issue. The discourse which is most usually recognized as historical is the Apology. This pretends to be the speech that Socrates delivered in his own defence during his trial—not, of course, a stenographic report, but what remained in Plato’s memory some years after the event, stitched together and expanded with literary flair. Plato was there at the trial, and it definitely appears very apparent that what is written down is the type of thing that Plato recalled Socrates as saying, and that the goal is, generally speaking, historical. This, with all its limitations, is enough to offer a reasonably distinct picture of the nature of Socrates. The essential facts of the trial of Socrates are not subject to question. The prosecution was based upon the charge that “Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others.” The real ground of hostility to him was, almost certainly, that he was supposed to be connected with the aristocratic party; most of his pupils belonged to this faction, and some, in positions of power, had proved themselves very pernicious. But this premise could not be made obvious, on account of the amnesty. He was declared guilty by a majority, and it was then available to him, per Athenian law, to suggest some lighter sentence than death. The judges had to select, if they had found the accused guilty, between the sentence proposed by the prosecution and that suggested by the defence. It was consequently to the advantage of Socrates to recommend a hefty sentence, which the court may have recognized as acceptable. He, however, offered a fine of thirty minae, for which several of his companions (including Plato) were ready to go surety. This was so little a sentence that the court was angry, and condemned him to death by a higher majority than that which had found him guilty. Undoubtedly he predicted this consequence. It is apparent that he had no intention to avert the death penalty by concessions which may seem to accept his guilt. The prosecutors were Anytus, a democratic politician; Meletus, a tragic poet, “youthful and unknown, with lanky hair, and scanty beard, and a hooked nose”; and Lykon, an obscure rhetorician, (See Burnet, Thales to Plato, p. 180.) They maintained that Socrates was guilty of not worshipping the gods the State worshipped but introducing other new divinities, and further that he was guilty of corrupting the young by teaching them accordingly. Without further concerning ourselves with the intractable matter of the connection of the Platonic Socrates to the real man, let us observe what Plato makes him say in answer to this allegation. Socrates begins by accusing his prosecutors of eloquence, then rebutting the accusation of eloquence as applied to himself. The only eloquence of which he is capable, he argues, is that of truth. And they must not be furious with him if he speaks in his habitual fashion, not in “a set oration, duly ornamented with words and phrases.” * He is over seventy, and has never been in a court of law until now; they must therefore overlook his un-forensic method of speaking. He goes on to say that, in addition to his formal accusers, he has a large body of informal accusers, who, ever since the judges were children, have gone about “telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heavens above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause.” Such men, he says, are supposed not to believe in the existence of the gods. This ancient allegation by popular opinion is more hazardous than the official indictment, the more so since he does not know who are the persons from whom it comes, save in the instance of Aristophanes. * He points out, in reaction to these earlier grounds of antagonism, that he is not a man of science—“I have nothing to do with physical speculations”—that he is not a teacher, and does not receive money for teaching. He goes on to make fun of the Sophists, and to disavow the wisdom that they claimed to have. What, therefore, is “the reason why I am called wise and have such an evil fame?” The oracle of Delphi, it appears, was once asked if there were any man wiser than Socrates, and replied that there was not. Socrates claimed to have been immensely bewildered, since he knew nothing, and yet a deity cannot lie. He then went about among individuals deemed clever, to try whether he could accuse the deity of mistake. First he went to a politician, who “was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself.” He soon found that the man was not wise, and explained this to him, kindly but firmly, “and the consequence was that he hated me.” He then went to the poets, and asked them to explain passages in their writings, but they were unable to do so. “Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration.” Then he proceeded to the artisans, but found them equally unsatisfactory. In the process, he adds, he made many dangerous enemies. Finally he concluded that “God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.” This business of showing up pretenders to wisdom takes up all his time, and has left him in utter poverty, but he feels it a duty to vindicate the oracle. Young men of the better classes, he argues, having not much to do, like listening to him expose others, and continue to do similar, thereby increasing the number of his adversaries. “For they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected.” So much for the first class of accusers. Socrates now continues to interrogate his prosecutor Meletus, “that good man and true lover of his country, as he calls himself.” He asks who are the ones who improve the young. Meletus initially names the judges; then, under duress, is led, step by step, to remark that every Athenian save Socrates helps the young; then Socrates congratulates the city on its good fortune. Next, he tells out that excellent persons are preferable to dwell with than evil men, and thus he cannot be so foolish as to corrupt his fellow-citizens purposely; but if accidently, then Meletus should teach him, not prosecute him. The indictment had said that Socrates not only denied the gods of the State, but introduced other gods of his own; Meletus, however, says that Socrates is a complete atheist, and adds: “He says that the sun is stone and the moon earth.” Socrates replies that Meletus seems to think he is prosecuting Anaxagoras, whose views may be heard in the theatre for one drachma (presumably in the plays of Euripides). Socrates of course points out that this new allegation of full atheism contradicts the indictment, and then proceeds on to more general concerns. The rest of the Apology is largely religious in tone. He has been a soldier, and has remained at his position, as he was commanded to do. Now “God orders me to fulfil the philosopher’s mission of searching into myself and other men,” and it would be as disgraceful to quit his position now as in time of conflict. Fear of death is not wisdom, as no one knows if death may not be the better good. If he were offered his life on condition of ceasing to speculate as he has done hitherto, he would reply: “Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, * and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting any one whom I meet…. For know that this is the command of God; and I believe that no greater good has ever happened in the State than my service to the God.” He goes on: I have something more to say, at which you may be inclined to cry out; but I believe that to hear me will be good for you, and therefore I beg that you will not cry out. I would have you know, that if you murder such a one as I am, you would damage yourselves more than you will injure me. Nothing will damage me, neither Meletus nor yet Anytus—they cannot, for a bad man is not authorized to injure a better than himself. I do not dispute that Anytus may maybe murder him, or drive him into exile, or deprive him of civil rights; and he may believe, and others may imagine, that he is inflicting a severe pain upon him: but there I do not concur. For the evil of doing like he is doing—the evil of wrongfully taking away the life of another—is greater far. It is for the sake of his judges, he argues, not for his own benefit, that he is pleading. He is a gad-fly, given to the state by God, and it will not be easy to find another like him. “I dare say you may feel out of temper (like a person who is suddenly awakened from sleep), and you think that you might easily strike me dead as Anytus advises, and then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you sent you another gad fly.” Why has he only gone about in private, and not given advice on public affairs? “You have heard me speak at sundry times and in diverse places of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign, which is a type of voice, first began to appear to me when I was a youngster; it constantly forbids but never compels me to do something which I am about to do. This is what deters me from being a politician.” He goes on to say that in politics no honest man can live long. He describes two situations in which he was unavoidably involved up in public affairs: in the first, he fought the democracy; in the second, the Thirty Tyrants, in each case when the authorities were operating unlawfully. He tells out that among those here are many former pupils of his, including fathers and brothers of pupils; not one of these has been introduced by the prosecution to testify that he corrupts the young. (This is almost the only point in the Apology that a lawyer for the defense would approve.) He refuses to follow the habit of bringing his sobbing children in court, to soften the hearts of the judges; such displays, he adds, render the accused and the city both silly. It is his responsibility to convince the judges, not to solicit a favour of them. After the decision, and the rejection of the alternative sentence of thirty minae (in conjunction with which Socrates cites Plato as one among his sureties, and present in court), he makes one final statement. And now, O those who have convicted me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am about to die, and in the hour of death men are blessed with prophetic talent. And I prophesy to you, who are my murderers, that soon after my departure retribution far greater than you have inflicted on me will undoubtedly await you…. If you believe that by killing men you may avoid some one from censuring your wicked lifestyles, you are incorrect; it is not a means of escape which is either conceivable or honourable; the easiest and the noblest path is not to be crippling others, but to be improving yourselves. He then approaches to those of his judges who have voted for acquittal, and informs them that, in everything that he has done that day, his oracle has never opposed him, but on previous occasions it has often stopped him in the middle of a speech. This, he argues, “is an intimation that what has happened to me is a good, and that those of us who think death is an evil are in error.” For either death is a dreamless sleep—which is manifestly beneficial—or the spirit migrates to another realm. And “what would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die and die again.” In the next world, he will converse with others who have suffered death unjustly, and, above all, he will continue his search after knowledge. “In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier than we are, they will be eternal, if what is stated is true…. “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.” The Apology gives a clear picture of a man of a certain type: a man very sure of himself, high-minded, indifferent to worldly success, believing that he is guided by a divine voice, and persuaded that clear thinking is the most important requisite for right, living. Except in this final aspect, he resembles a Christian martyr or a Puritan. In the concluding chapter, where he examines what occurs after death, it is difficult not to sense that he genuinely believes in immortality, and that his stated hesitation is merely pretended. He is not plagued, like the Christians, by thoughts of eternal torment: he has no doubt that his existence in the next world will be a good one. In the Phaedo, the Platonic Socrates presents grounds for the belief in immortality; whether these were the arguments that affected the real Socrates, it is hard to determine. There appears practically any question that the historical Socrates claimed to be directed by an oracle or daimon. Whether this was akin to what a Christian would term the voice of conscience, or whether it seemed to him as a real voice, it is hard to tell. Joan of Arc was inspired by voices, which are a typical kind of insanity. Socrates was liable to cataleptic trances; at least, that seems the natural explanation of such an incident as occurred once when he was on military service: One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon—there he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At finally, in the evening after supper, several Ionians out of curiosity (I should mention that this occurred not in winter but in summer), carried out their mats and slept in the open air that they may watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood till the next morning; and with the return of light he gave up a prayer to the sun, and went his way (Symposium, 220). This type of activity, at a lesser degree, was a typical occurrence with Socrates. At the beginning of the Symposium, Socrates and Aristodemus travel together to the supper, but Socrates slips behind in a fit of abstraction. When Aristodemus comes, Agathon, the host, wonders “what have you done with Socrates?” Aristodemus is astonished to find Socrates not with him; a slave is sent to look for him, and finds him in the portico of a neighbouring house. “There he is fixed,” says the slave on his return, “and when I call to him he will not stir.” Those who know him well explain that “he has a way of stopping anywhere and losing himself without any reason.” They leave him alone, and he enters after the feast is half finished. Every one is agreed that Socrates was quite ugly; he had a snub nose and a substantial paunch; he was “uglier than all the Silenuses in the Satyric drama” (Xenophon, Symposium). He was constantly dressed in dingy old clothing, and went barefoot everywhere. His indifference to heat and cold, hunger and thirst, shocked every one. Alcibiades in the Symposium, describing Socrates on military service, says: His endurance was simply marvellous when, being cut off from our supplies, we were compelled to go without food— on such occasions, which often happen in time of war, he was superior not only to me but to everybody: there was no one to be compared to him…. His endurance in surviving cold was also astonishing. There was a severe frost, for the winter in that region is really tremendous, and everybody else either remained indoors, or if they went out had on an amazing quantity of clothes, and were well shod, and had their feet swathed in felt and fleeces: in the midst of this, Socrates with his bare feet on the ice and in his ordinary dress marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes, and they looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them. His command over all physical desires is continually underlined. He never drank wine, but when he did, he could out-drink anybody; no one had ever seen him drunk. In love, even under the fiercest temptations, he remained “Platonic,” if Plato is speaking the truth. He was the consummate Orphic saint: in the duality of heavenly soul and earthly body, he had gained the entire control of the soul over the body. His indifference to death at the last is the last manifestation of this mastery. At the same time, he is not an orthodox Orphic; it is just the core concepts that he supports, not the superstitions and procedures of purification. The Platonic Socrates predicts both the Stoics and the Cynics. The Stoics argued that the greatest good is virtue, and that a man cannot be bereft of virtue by outside forces; this idea is inherent in the assertion of Socrates that his judges cannot injure him. The Cynics loathed earthly commodities, and demonstrated their scorn by rejecting the luxuries of civilization; this is the same point of view that caused Socrates to go barefoot and ill-clad. It is very evident that the preoccupations of Socrates were ethical rather than scientific. In the Apology, as we saw, he says: “I have nothing to do with physical speculations.” The earliest of the Platonic dialogues, which are often believed to be the most Socratic, are principally involved with the quest for definitions of ethical words. The Charmides is concerned with the definition of temperance or moderation; the Lysis with friendship; the Laches with courage. In all of them, no resolution is arrived at, but Socrates makes it plain that he feels it vital to study such topics. The Platonic Socrates continuously asserts that he knows nothing, and is just wiser than others in understanding that he knows nothing; but he does not deem knowledge unobtainable. On the contrary, he finds the pursuit for knowledge of the ultimate significance. He argues that no man sins wittingly, and so only knowledge is needed to make all individuals totally good. The tight relationship between virtue and knowledge is characteristic of Socrates and Plato. To some degree, it exists in all Greek philosophy, as opposed to that of Christianity. In Christian ethics, a pure heart is the essential, and is at least as likely to be found among the uneducated as among the intelligent. This divergence between Greek and Christian ethics has remained down to the current day. Dialectic, that is to say, the process of acquiring knowledge by question and response, was not developed by Socrates. It seems to have been first done systematically by Zeno, the follower of Parmenides; in Plato’s dialogue Parmenides, Zeno puts Socrates to the same type of treatment to which, elsewhere in Plato, Socrates treats others. But there is every reason to think that Socrates practised and perfected the approach. As we saw, when Socrates is condemned to death he muses pleasantly that in the next world he may continue on asking questions for eternity, and cannot be put to death, as he would be eternal. Certainly, if he employed dialectic in the sort described in the Apology, the animosity to him is simply explained: all the humbugs in Athens would cooperate against him. The dialectic technique is good for certain issues, and unsuitable for others. Perhaps this contributed to shape the character of Plato’s queries, which were, for the most part, such as could be treated within this method. And via Plato’s impact, much subsequent philosophy has been restricted by the limits coming from his technique. Some things are manifestly unfit for handling in this way—empirical science, for example. It is true that Galileo utilized dialogues to support his ideas, but it was primarily in order to overcome prejudice—the positive reasons for his findings could not be incorporated in a dialogue without significant artificiality. Socrates, in Plato’s writings, constantly claims that he is just extracting information already possessed by the one he is interrogating; on this point, he compares himself to a midwife. When, in the Phaedo and the Meno, he applies his approach to mathematical issues, he has to ask leading questions which any court would refuse. The strategy is in agreement with the idea of memory, according to which we learn by recalling what we know in a prior incarnation. As opposing this idea, take any discovery that has been made by means of the microscope, say the spread of illnesses by bacteria; it can hardly be claimed that such information may be retrieved from a previously uninformed individual by the process of question and response. The issues that are suited for treatment by the Socratic method are those as to which we have already enough information to get to a good conclusion, but have failed, through confusion of thought or lack of analysis, to make the best logical use of what we know. A query such as “what is justice?” is eminently suited for discussion in a Platonic dialogue. We all freely use the terms “just” and “unjust,” and, by evaluating the manner in which we use them, we may arrive inductively at the meaning that will best suit their use. All that is needed is understanding of how the words in question are employed. But when our study is done, we have produced simply a linguistic finding, not a revelation in ethics. We may, however, apply the strategy profitably to a considerably broader set of instances. Wherever what is being disputed is logical rather than factual, conversation is a useful technique of obtaining truth. Suppose any one believes, for example, that democracy is beneficial, yet those having particular ideas should not be allowed to vote, we may accuse him of inconsistency, and prove to him that at least one of his two assertions must be more or less erroneous. Logical fallacies are, I think, of greater practical consequence than many people assume; they enable their perpetrators to maintain the comfortable position on every issue in turn. Any logically consistent body of doctrine is bound to be in part uncomfortable and contradictory to existing preconceptions. The dialectic approach —or, more broadly, the practice of unconstrained discussion—tends to enhance logical consistency, and is in this sense valuable. But it is rather unavailing when the purpose is to find new facts. Perhaps “philosophy” can be defined as the sum-total of those inquiries that can be explored using Plato’s techniques. But if this definition is acceptable, that is because of Plato’s effect upon future thinkers.