Greek Philosophers: Socrates
From Early Greek Philosophy by Alfred Benn, 1908.
From: 470 B.C.E. To: 399 B.C.E.
Location: Athens, Greece
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Early Greek Philosophy by Alfred Benn, 1908.
Personality
Socrates is the greatest name in the history of philosophy and at the same time its most popular, most familiar figure. J. A. Symonds tells us how the sight of a hemlock plant recalled the manner of his death to a Venetian gondolier. The charm of his personality is unique. We think of the Greek philosophers before and after him as of so many marble statues, but of him as a living, speaking human figure. Yet this figure is surrounded by a sort of mystery.
It is still a question for what did he live and die. An enigma to his own age, he remains an enigma to us. If Plato may be trusted, he was even an enigma to himself. From that fame and that obscurity one fact at least emerges to begin with: the immense importance of the personal factor in his work, whatever the value of that work may turn out to be.
Sources of Information
Socrates himself never wrote a line about philosophy; and although numerous reports of his conversation have been preserved, it is doubtful whether any two consecutive sentences have been put down exactly as they were uttered. Nor can the numerous busts bearing his name be relied on as faithful copies of an original portrait. It is suspected that they merely reproduce the conventional mask of a Silenus mentioned by those who remembered him, as giving a good idea of the sage's unprepossessing features.
We know that he was born about 469 B.C., and that by family and fortune he belonged to the poorer class of Athenian citizens, his father being a working sculptor and his mother a midwife. But the incidents of his early life are buried in deep obscurity. It would seem that he practised his father's trade for a time and then abandoned it in order to devote himself exclusively to the cultivation of his own and of other people's intelligence.
Before the age of forty Socrates must have already gained a high reputation for wisdom, for we find the beautiful, gifted, and aristocratic Alcibiades frequenting his society as a fitting preparation for filling the highest political offices. Some ten years later Aristophanes, in his comedy The Clouds, already mentioned as a brilliant satire on the new culture, takes Socrates as a type of the whole Sophistic movement, an eager student of physical science, a dishonest atheist, and a corrupter of the youths who come to him for instruction.
Plato, writing long afterwards, puts into the mouth of Socrates an explicit repudiation of ever having been engaged in physical speculations, and in this respect he is fully borne out by the evidence of Xenophon, a fellow-disciple. We may take their word for it, without excluding the possibility that their master had gone into such studies enough to convince himself that for him at any rate they would be a waste of time. He was no less a genuine Athenian than Aristophanes; and except as a fashionable craze for a short period, physics never appealed to the Attic taste, nor did it owe at any time a single discovery to Attic genius.
Like Protagoras, Socrates devoted himself to human interests, but unlike the great agnostic he shared the strong religious faith which nowhere had struck such deep roots as in Attic soil; and this faith stood high among the causes alienating him and his countrymen from the method of Hippias and Prodicus.
Not a Sophist
On the strength of his reputation as a teacher, Socrates was popularly classed among the Sophists. His intimate friends, however, justly insisted on the fundamental difference separating him from them. It consisted, to begin with, in the circumstance that the Sophists took pay and that he did not. Quite apart from the direct evidence of Plato and Xenophon, who only knew him late in life, we may gather as much from the satire of Aristophanes on his poverty-stricken appearance—a fact absolutely inconsistent with his making a trade of tuition.
The profession of Sophist was indeed considered more lucrative than honourable; and an Athenian citizen may well have considered it beneath his dignity to barter wisdom for gold, especially in the case of one's own countrymen, whom it seemed a sort of natural duty to help with advice. Protagoras and the others were strangers, with something of the discredit attaching to foreign adventurers about them.
Socrates never left his native city except on military duty, which he performed as a heavy-armed foot-soldier in three arduous campaigns, on one occasion saving the life of Alcibiades.
Irony
Supposing, however, that the position of the paid teacher at Athens had been not less dignified than that of a salaried professor among ourselves, still it was one that Socrates would have scrupled to assume. It would have been dishonest on his part to take money for teaching, because by his account he had nothing to teach.
Our authorities are not agreed as to what was meant by this profession of universal ignorance—the Socratic irony, as it is called. Plato gives it a strong religious colouring.
According to his story, an ardent admirer of Socrates, one Chaerephon, asked the oracle at Delphi was there any man wiser than he. The Pythian prophetess answered that there was no man wiser. Much surprised at being singled out for such a distinction, and conscious of not in the least deserving it, Socrates went about seeking for someone wiser than himself, but found none even among those whose reputation stood highest. For their pretended wisdom invariably broke down under his cross-examination; while at the same time he could not convince them that they knew no more than he did.
Then at last the meaning of the oracle became plain. Wisdom belongs to the gods alone; no man knows anything, and he is wisest who has come to the consciousness of his own ignorance.
One is sorry to question such a beautiful story; but, like the Athenian celebrities, it breaks down under cross-examination. Socrates could not have got so great a reputation as is here pre-supposed without some more positive achievement than a general confession of ignorance; and as depicted by Xenophon, in this respect a much more trustworthy informant than Plato, it is only about natural philosophy that he professes to know nothing or to hold that nothing can be known, the causes of physical phenomena being, in his opinion, a secret that the gods have kept to themselves. On the other hand, the whole range of human interests lies open to man, and among the rest to himself.
The Dialectic Method
In limiting philosophy to the study of man, Socrates agrees with Protagoras, except that he approaches the subject from a religious rather than from an agnostic point of view. The distinctive originality of the Athenian thinker lies in his creation of a new method. Socrates figures in the history of philosophy before all things as the founder of logic, the first to attempt an organisation of reason as such.
Reasoning of course is as old as language, in a way it is as old as conscious life; the behaviour of the most rudimentary animals is guided by their experience of the past. And long before Socrates the Greeks had learned to distinguish this power from all the lower manifestations of consciousness, to look on it as constituting their own superiority to the barbarians—the secret also of one man's superiority to another in the State.
Then came philosophy, and raised reason to a higher pinnacle still as the cause alike of physical order and of civil law, the ruling power of the world. As such, Anaxagoras had introduced it to Athens under the name of Nous—the one Greek word still known to the most ignorant sporting man among ourselves. Another Greek word for reason, the one used by Heracleitus, is logos, whence comes our word logic, which means the science of reasoning, the analysis of its operations, the systematic exposition of the process by which conception, judgment, and inference, are successfully carried on.
Socrates did not create the science of logic—that was an achievement reserved for his successor, Aristotle—but without his pioneer work it could not have been created. How much he actually did we cannot tell with certainty, for Xenophon, to whom our most trustworthy information is due, had but a feeble hold on pure theory, and Plato's dramatic presentation of the old master gives such an immense extension to his method that the original nucleus cannot be isolated from subsequent accretions.
Definition
We know on the authority of Aristotle, confirmed by the detailed statements of Xenophon, that Socrates first introduced the methods of definition and induction. That is, he took some abstract term, by preference the name of a virtue or vice, such as Courage or Justice, Cowardice or Injustice, and by comparing together a number of concrete instances where those qualities were exhibited, sought to arrive at a general notion of what the word meant, of what we now call its connotation.
According to him, such a procedure was necessary in order that discussions on subjects of general interest might be carried on in a friendly and profitable manner. And not only were definitions necessary in order that people might know what they were talking about, but the definitions themselves were to be arrived at as the result of a search jointly undertaken by the whole company, everybody present helping to the best of his ability in the hunt after truth.
Socrates in fact applied the democratic tradition of Athens to scientific inquiry, not speaking with authority as the Sophists, but as professing to know no more than anyone else; more concerned to ask questions than to answer them; always on the look-out for new facts and new ideas. His method reflected both the deliberations of the sovereign Assembly and the cross-examination to which defendants could subject their prosecutors in the popular law-courts.
Of course Athens, even more than other Greek cities, abounded in persons having a good conceit of themselves; and pretenders to universal knowledge found a merciless critic in the poorly-dressed old man with the thick lips and flat, turned-up nose who, under the appearance of reverence for their superior wisdom and an insatiable thirst for information, by a series of searching questions speedily involved the pontifical charlatan in a mesh of hopeless self-contradiction.
Such scenes no doubt suggested to Plato his imposing picture of Socrates as a divinely-commissioned prophet going about to convince the world of universal and hopeless ignorance, as prophets of another school go about to convince it of universal depravity. But the picture as it stands is not historical; and the real prophet had a message of reasoned truth rather than of reasoned nescience to deliver.
Division
More important even than Definition to clear thinking is the logical process of Division—the distribution of every subject discussed under a number of distinct headings. Descartes, the founder of modern French philosophy, mentions the plan of breaking up difficulties into the greatest possible number of parts as a first step to discovering their solution; and the same method was practised by Socrates two thousand years before him. If, for instance, he were discussing the comparative claims of two rival statesmen to the name of a good citizen he would bring down the question to a specific estimate of their respective services in the various departments of political activity. A good citizen increases the resources of the State, defeats the enemy in war, wins allies by diplomacy, appeases intestine discords by his eloquence.
Reasoning
Definition and division are spoken of in logic as processes subsidiary to Inference—that is the discovery of new truths as necessary consequences of the truths we already know. Socrates was fully alive to this characteristic property of reasoning, and illustrated it in his conversations by starting from principles about which he and his interlocutor were agreed.
Unfortunately Xenophon, on account of his very narrow range of interests, does not quote examples enough to show how Socrates habitually worked out his conclusions. But he gives us the valuable information that no man whom he ever knew was so successful in gaining the assent of his hearers—a fact quite inconsistent with Plato's account of his hero as an exasperating personage, reducing everyone to shame if not to confession by his dialectical skill.
Final Causes
As it happens, the most celebrated instance of Socratic reasoning is one that modern science has shown to be much less convincing than used to be imagined. This is the well-known Theistic argument from design. As the structure of the human body exhibits an adaptation of means to ends such as we find in the works of skilful artificers, the existence of a powerful, intelligent, and benevolent Being is assumed as necessary to explain its origin.
Whatever the argument may be worth, the credit of having discovered it clearly belongs to Socrates, for Anaxagoras, who comes nearest to him as a Theistic philosopher, conceived his Nous as working by mechanical impulse, not by design. And if there is any truth in the story of the oracle declaring him to be the wisest of men, we may suppose that it was due to the impression made on the Delphic authorities by his fame as the contributor of a new reason for believing in the gods at a time when philosophers in general passed for being atheists.
As to the Socratic profession of ignorance, we are now in a better position to appreciate its value. It is a paradoxical way of saying that the logician as such need know nothing that commonly passes for knowledge. By exposing the flaws in other people's theories he may prove that they are as ignorant as he is himself. Or again, by unfolding the implications of the facts supplied to him by other people, while securing their assent to every step in the chain of inference, he may make it seem as if the result obtained did as much credit to their wisdom as to his own. This is the method constantly followed by the Platonic Socrates, who in this respect may reproduce the spirit of the master more faithfully than Xenophon's photographic illustrations.
Socrates as a Moral Reformer
While Socrates interests us chiefly as the creator of logical method, the philosopher himself only valued that method as an instrument of moral reformation. As an Athenian citizen he took a profound personal interest in the good government of his country; and this patriotic motive was alone sufficient to distinguish him from the Sophists, who as paid teachers and foreigners could not be actuated by the same absorbing passion for the public good.
At the same time it is clear that their comparative detachment and wide range of culture gave their ethical ideas a reach, an originality, and an emancipating power that his did not possess.
The Humanism of Protagoras was pregnant with hopes of a higher civilisation than Greece had reached. The Naturalism of Hippias and Prodicus embodied a reaction against perverted appetites from which Greece in less civilised ages had been free.
Utilitarianism
In accordance with the systematising bent of his genius, Socrates seems to have sought for a single principle in ethics, and to have found it provisionally in the idea of utility; that is to say he introduced the method of estimating the morality of actions neither by public opinion nor by individual taste, but by their calculable consequences. We must not suppose, however, that his attempts in this direction amounted to an anticipation of utilitarianism in the modern sense.
As reported by Xenophon, he never commits himself to the assertion that pleasure and the absence of pain are the only desirable things. Nor, assuming that we have discovered in what utility consists—whether pleasurableness or anything else—does Socrates ever make it clear whether the conduct of the individual is to be determined by regard for his own advantage, or for the advantage of the community to which he belongs, or for that of the whole human race.
That these respective claims might, apparently at least, collide was a difficulty first seriously discussed in all its bearings by Plato, who only hoped to solve it by revolutionising public opinion, society, and religion. Socrates habitually appeals to self-interest, as if it were the only available motive; but he seems at the same time to be persuaded that the happiness of the citizen is in the long run identified with the happiness of the State. That, in fact, was not his question, but rather the question how an art of social life could be constructed comparable for systematic completeness to the industrial arts of which a city like Athens offered such multifarious examples.
The Lessons of Town Life
Aristophanes could not see the soul of Socrates, but he has taken a snapshot of the philosopher as he appeared to the man in the street, the accuracy of which is vouched for by Plato, ‘stalking about like a pelican and rolling his eyes.' Nothing escaped those curious eyes, as nothing escaped Mr. Gladstone's, and their inquisitiveness found a rich harvest in a city where every calling was taught and practised with complete publicity.
Now what struck Socrates chiefly was the high value set on expert attainments, and the ready obedience given to professional trainers wherever a special technique had come to be recognised, as in the army and navy, the theatre, the artist's studio, or the gymnasium, compared with the haphazard methods of politics, of the higher education, of social intimacies, of pleasure-seeking among the leisured classes.
That any one should follow for his personal satisfaction a line of conduct which would not be tolerated for a day in the hired occupants of a responsible office, seemed to the philosopher a revolting paradox. Some may call this a bourgeois or Philistine morality. But what makes those names terms of reproach is their association with a slavish deference to custom and tradition. Socratic morality, by reducing life to a fine art, discards convention and opens possibilities of endless improvement.
Virtue as Knowledge
Greek philosophy delighted in paradoxes, and Socrates was credited with two such: first, the paradox of ignorance, which as we saw expressed in a picturesque way the discovery of fact by talking things over methodically,—the evolution by logical processes of the unknown into the known; and secondly, the paradox, that virtue is identical with knowledge, so that he who has the right theory of conduct necessarily does what is right.
Every one, said Socrates; does what he thinks is for his good; if he does wrong that only proves that he is mistaken in his belief and ought to be taught better. Such an idea is closely connected with the interpretation of morality as an art: the artist has in fact been defined as one who does his best. And it might be said that the man who scamps his work has mistaken beliefs about the good of making money or the good of saving time.
The question ends by becoming a verbal one. If my friend tells me that he does what he knows is bad for him, and I observe that, if he really knew that, he would not do it, we are evidently not using the word 'know' in the same sense. Or to put it somewhat differently, the Socratic philosophy which began as ultra-intellectualism ends in what would now be called ultra-pragmatism. Belief does not lead to practice; it is practice and nothing else.
The Divine Voice
Socrates did not succeed in reducing his own life to a work of art capable of being explained and justified as the expression of right theory in right practice. A place had to be left for the free play of unaccountable instincts or intuitions warning him without a reason that certain actions would have bad results. He interpreted these inward monitions as a divine voice accompanying him through life.
By a misinterpretation which goes back to his own time this voice has often been described as a daemon or personal spirit. More recently it has been identified with conscience. But this view is inconsistent with the circumstance, mentioned by Plato, that the monitor always intervened to forbid, never to give a positive command.
Conscience both forbids and commands; while in each instance its promptings can be referred to the known laws of moral obligation.
The Hero as a Philosopher
With Socrates himself to know the right and to do it were the same thing, and no doubt it was from a conviction that what was possible to him was equally possible to all men that he identified virtue with knowledge. For the unflinching performance of duty at all costs he is, so far as our information goes, without an equal in the ancient world. His services as a soldier in the field have been already mentioned. His conduct as a citizen at home is marked by still greater fortitude.
It was his custom—at the bidding as he declared of the divine monitor—to abstain from all political activity. But there came a moment when a civic duty, accidentally imposed on the philosopher, showed of what mettle he was made. Athens had won her last great victory over a Peloponnesian fleet at Arginusse. But to her people the victory became an occasion for mourning and indignation, because through the neglect, as was alleged, of the admirals a number of sailors had been left to perish in the waves, and what seemed still worse, the bodies of the dead were not picked up and brought home for burial.
It was, therefore, resolved that the admirals who returned home, six in number, should be tried on this charge. So far no objection could be taken to the proceedings. The case was altered when the Senate accepted a resolution decreeing that the guilt or innocence of the accused parties should be submitted to a direct vote of the whole people instead of to a regular sworn jury, that they should not be heard in their own defence, and that their cases should be decided in a batch instead of being submitted one by one to the popular judgment, as was prescribed by law.
At first the Prytanes, a sort of municipal Board whose business it was to preside over the deliberations of the Sovereign Assembly, refused to commit the illegality of putting the question to the vote, but eventually all, with a single exception, yielded to the clamour of the multitude. That solitary representative of law and justice was Socrates, whom the chances of the lot had enrolled among the Prytanes of that day. His protest could not be overcome by threats of imprisonment and death, but being eventually passed over, it was powerless to save the unfortunate victors of Arginusse from condemnation and execution.
Two years after these events the democracy that had so abused its power was abolished by a foreign conqueror, and an oligarchy of thirty members imposed on Athens. These men soon inaugurated a reign of terror, killing and plundering to their heart's content. Within the city one voice alone was raised in fearless criticism of their insane violence, this time also the voice of Socrates. Critias, the leader of the terrorists, had been his pupil and was content to let the old philosopher off with a private warning to hold his tongue.
Socrates also braved an insidious attempt of the thirty to make him an accomplice in their crimes. A certain Leon of Salamis, whose only offence was his wealth, had been marked out by them for proscription. Five citizens, of whom Socrates was one, received orders to arrest this man and bring him over to be executed. The other four went on the disgraceful errand; he remained at home.
Trial and Death of Socrates
It was reserved for the restored democracy to commit a crime from which even the cruel and unscrupulous oligarchs had recoiled. In the year 399 B.C. Socrates was prosecuted on a capital charge before the popular tribunal by Anytus, a democratic politician, Lycon, a public speaker, and Meletus, a poet. They accused him of denying the gods whom the State acknowledged, of introducing new gods whom the State did not acknowledge, and of being a corrupter of youth. In short, they represented the greatest and purest religious teacher Greece had ever seen of being an immoral and superstitious atheist.
Athens, as has already been mentioned, was distinguished above all other Greek cities for intolerant bigotry. So far the victims of persecution had been philosophers whose ideas were irreconcilable with the current mythology, such as Anaxagoras and Protagoras, or who openly criticised it, such as Diagoras of Melos. But what makes the habit of punishing people for their opinions so peculiarly poisonous is that sooner or later it victimises originality of every kind, even the originality that finds new arguments for old beliefs.
Socrates incurred the suspicion of atheism simply because he met the atheists on their own ground, encountering reason with reason, and because he betrayed a thorough acquaintance with the theories he set himself to refute. To describe his divinely sent warnings as a new-fangled religion was of course a misconception that a few words of explanation would dispel.
A pamphleteer who renewed the attack on Socrates some years after his death supported the charge of corrupting youth by the examples of Alcibiades and Critias. Both had been his pupils, and both had turned out badly; but as Xenophon truly observes, whatever influence Socrates exercised over them was used to keep them straight, not to lead them astray.
Plato's account of his master's trial and death is a historical romance; but the main facts may be taken as faithfully related. The court which sat in judgment on Socrates consisted of 501 citizens chosen by lot. It seems to have made a bad impression on many of these persons that the old philosopher appealed to their reason instead of humbly throwing himself on their mercy, which in Xenophon's opinion would have insured his acquittal.
Condemned by a small majority, and invited to propose a lighter penalty than the capital sentence demanded by his accuser, Socrates began by suggesting that maintenance at the public expense in the Prytaneum would be the proper recompense for the services he had rendered to the State. Then, waiving this claim as impracticable, he offered to pay a fine of thirty minae (about £122), as his friends would be willing to make up that much money among them. On a second vote the fearless old man was condemned to death, eighty of those who had pronounced him innocent now going over to the side of the majority.
It so happened that the condemnation fell at a time when, owing to the absence of a sacred mission sent to Delos, no capital sentence could be carried out at Athens. This gave a respite of thirty days to Socrates, who, had he chosen, might have profited by the delay to make his escape from prison. Everything had in fact been arranged for the purpose by his friends, but he refused to avail himself of their offers, on the ground that it would have involved disobedience to the laws. Accordingly on the expiration of the fatal term, after a last conversation with his followers, Socrates cheerfully met death in the way humanely prescribed at Athens, by swallowing a draught of hemlock.
We owe it to the method and the example of this heroic sage, first, that philosophy has ever since centred in the study of mind rather than in the study of matter; and also that it has been understood to demand, so far as human frailty permits, a realisation in its teachers' lives of the ideal that their moral theories set up. Hence the later schools of Greek philosophy, while more largely indebted to the Ionian cosmologists and to the Sophists than to Socrates for their speculative principles, exhibit in the character and attitude of their founders and chief representatives the unmistakable impress of his commanding personality.
Benn, Alfred William. Early Greek Philosophy. Archibald Constable & Co, 1908.
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