Socrates

Key ideas

1. Socratic ignorance. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates takes the Delphic oracle’s verdict that no one is wiser as a riddle, and concludes that he is wiser only in not thinking he knows what he does not. Human wisdom, on this view, begins with recognising the limits of one’s knowledge.
2. The elenchus. Socrates tests a claim by cross-examination, drawing out consequences until the speaker’s beliefs contradict one another. The early dialogues usually ask what a virtue is and end in aporia, an impasse, with no definition agreed; Aristotle later credits him with the search for universal definitions.
3. The examined life and the care of the soul. In the Apology Socrates says that daily discussion of virtue is the greatest good for a human being and that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Jowett’s translation). A person should care for the soul above wealth or reputation.
4. Virtue is knowledge. In Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates holds that virtue is a kind of knowledge of what is good, so that no one does wrong willingly: wrongdoing comes from ignorance, not from knowing the better and choosing the worse. Aristotle took up this denial of weakness of will in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics.
5. The divine sign. Socrates reports a sign, a kind of voice, that came to him from childhood and always turned him back from what he was about to do, and never urged him on. He says it kept him out of politics.
6. Justice and the laws. In the Crito, offered an escape from prison, Socrates refuses. One must not return wrong for wrong, he argues, and a lifetime of living under Athens’s laws is an agreement to abide by them. The dialogue is a founding text on political obligation.

Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher who wrote nothing, and whom we know through the accounts of others, above all his followers Plato and Xenophon. He questioned his fellow citizens about virtue, claimed to know nothing of importance himself, and was tried and put to death in 399 BCE for impiety and corrupting the young. He is perhaps the first Western moral philosopher, and his questions about how to live and what we really know are still starting points for ethics and epistemology.

What do we know of his life?

He was born in Athens about 470 BCE (the Stanford Encyclopedia gives 469), the son of Sophroniscus, a stoneworker, and Phaenarete, a midwife. He served as a hoplite, a heavy infantryman, at Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis, and married Xanthippe; they had three sons. In the Phaedo, Plato’s Socrates says that as a young man he was delighted to hear from a book of Anaxagoras that mind disposes all things for the best, and was disappointed by how little Anaxagoras made of the idea.

The sources disagree. Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds (423 BCE) shows a Socrates who teaches sophistry and impiety. Xenophon’s Memorabilia gives a practical, advisory one. Plato’s dialogues make him their chief speaker, and give the richest philosophical portrait. Aristotle reports that Socrates asked what is it? questions aimed at universal definitions and kept to ethics rather than nature. Telling the historical Socrates from these portraits is the Socratic problem. Some scholars, following Gregory Vlastos, separate a Socratic early Plato from later Platonic doctrine by the order of the dialogues; others read each dialogue as a work of its own. What follows is the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues, with the others as a check.

What is the Socratic method?

The method is the elenchus, cross-examination by question and answer, the kind of conversation called dialectic. Socrates asks someone to say what courage, piety or justice is, draws out what follows from the answer, and shows that it conflicts with other things the person believes. The conversation usually ends in aporia, an impasse, without a definition; in the Euthyphro it is piety, and the dialogue gives us the Euthyphro dilemma (read the Euthyphro). In the Theaetetus he calls himself a midwife who helps others deliver their thoughts; the library has the Theaetetus.

What did Socrates claim to know?

In the Apology, his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, and the priestess answered that no one was. Socrates knew that he had no wisdom, “small or great”, and tried to refute the oracle by questioning politicians, poets and craftsmen. Each thought he knew more than he did. Socrates concludes that he is a little wiser because “I neither know nor think that I know” (Jowett’s translation); the famous “I know that I know nothing” is a later summary. He did claim to know that injustice is evil. Read the Apology.

What did he teach about virtue?

The Stanford and Internet encyclopedias attribute to the Socrates of the early dialogues three connected doctrines. Virtue, aretē, is knowledge of what is good, since wealth, strength and beauty harm those who lack wisdom. No one does wrong willingly, because wrongdoing is ignorance of the good. And the soul matters more than the body or wealth: Socrates says in the Apology that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. These doctrines are a root of virtue ethics and of the question what eudaimonia, flourishing, requires.

He also reports a daimonion, a divine sign, “a kind of voice” that “always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do”.

Why was he put to death?

In 399 BCE Meletus, supported by Anytus and Lycon, charged him with not recognising the city’s gods, introducing new divinities, and corrupting the young. A jury found him guilty; he says that thirty votes the other way would have acquitted him. Sentenced to death, he waited in prison for about a month, because, the Phaedo says, the city could carry out no public execution while its sacred ship was away at Delos.

In the Crito a friend offers escape, and Socrates refuses, on the ground that he must not return wrong for wrong and has agreed all his life to abide by Athens’s laws, a classic argument in political philosophy. In the Phaedo he drinks the poison, traditionally taken to be hemlock; his last words, in Plato’s account, ask Crito to pay a debt of a cock to Asclepius.

What came after him?

Plato’s Academy carried his questions forward, and Aristotle used his search for definitions. The Cynics, who looked back to him through Diogenes, and the Stoics, among them Zeno of Citium, Seneca and Epictetus, admired him. Medieval and Islamic scholars studied him, he played an important part in Renaissance humanism, and thinkers as different as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche kept returning to him.

How should you start reading Socrates?

Read Plato’s Apology, Euthyphro and Crito, then the last pages of the Phaedo; the Meno shows his questioning at work. Then read Xenophon’s Memorabilia for a plainer Socrates, and the Clouds to see him as Athenians saw him. All are free on Project Gutenberg.