Socrates

Socrates the classical Greek philosopher of Athens (c. 470–399 BC) who is widely regarded as a founder of Western philosophy. He wrote nothing himself and is known through the writings of his pupils, above all Plato and Xenophon. His method of persistent questioning, his refusal to accept conventional opinion, and his execution by the Athenian state made him the model of the philosopher who lives and dies by the examined life.

Life and Historical Setting

Socrates was born in Athens around 470 BC, the son of Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and Phaenarete, a midwife. He served as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War, fighting at Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis, where contemporaries noted his endurance and courage. He spent his adult life in Athens, marrying Xanthippe and raising three sons, and he devoted himself to conversation rather than to a trade or a public career.

He lived through the greatest crisis of the Athenian democracy, the long war with Sparta and the oligarchic revolution of the Thirty Tyrants that followed defeat. In 406 BC he was briefly a member of the council and alone opposed an illegal mass trial of generals; in 404 BC he refused to obey an order from the Thirty to arrest a political opponent. These acts of quiet resistance reveal the consistency between his teaching and his conduct.

The Athens of his day was a society of direct democracy, litigious courts and intense civic pride. In that setting Socrates became a familiar figure in the marketplace and gymnasium, questioning craftsmen, generals, politicians and poets about what they claimed to know. His peculiar combination of irony, persistence and moral seriousness attracted devoted followers and equally determined enemies.

The Socratic Method

The heart of Socrates's practice was the elenchus, a form of cross-examination that proceeds by question and answer. He would ask an interlocutor to define a virtue such as courage or justice, then draw out the consequences of the definition and show that it conflicts with other beliefs the person holds. The aim was not to humiliate but to expose the inconsistency of unexamined opinion and to provoke the desire to inquire further.

He famously described himself as ignorant, claiming that his only advantage over others was that he knew that he did not know. This profession of ignorance, together with his habit of using everyday examples and homely analogies, gave his method an unsettling power. Many interlocutors left the conversation confused rather than enlightened, and some, like the sophists, resented being made to look foolish in public.

Socrates insisted that virtue is knowledge and that wrongdoing is the result of ignorance. If a person truly understood what was good, he argued, that person would do it; the tyrant and the criminal act badly because they mistake the apparent good for the real good. This intellectualism about ethics shaped the entire later tradition, and the question of whether knowledge is sufficient for virtue remains a central issue in moral philosophy.

Trial and Death

In 399 BC Socrates was charged with impiety and with corrupting the youth of Athens. The accusation was brought by Meletus, Anytus and Lycon, and it was probably motivated by his association with controversial figures such as Alcibiades and Critias and by his criticism of the democracy. He was tried before a jury of several hundred citizens and, by a narrow margin, convicted.

At the trial Socrates refused to abandon his way of life. In the speech recorded by Plato as the Apology he declared that the unexamined life is not worth living, and he compared himself to a gadfly stinging a sluggish horse into action. When invited to propose a penalty, he suggested instead a reward, and the jury condemned him to death. He refused to escape from prison, arguing that it would be unjust to break the laws of the city that had formed him.

He died in 399 BC by drinking hemlock, surrounded by friends, as described in the closing pages of Plato's Phaedo. His calm acceptance of death became one of the most celebrated scenes in the history of thought, and it established the ideal of the philosopher who is faithful to reason to the very end. The manner of his death did as much as his teaching to ensure his lasting influence.

Philosophy and Method

Socrates turned philosophy away from the study of nature and toward questions about how one should live. The earlier philosophers had asked what the world is made of; Socrates asked what justice, courage, piety and temperance are, and how a human being ought to conduct himself. This reorientation, sometimes called the ethical turn, determined the subject matter of Western ethics and political thought for the next two thousand years.

His method presupposed that the answers to these questions are objective and discoverable rather than matters of convention. Although he never presented a finished system of his own, his insistence that we should seek definitions that hold universally, and that we should test our beliefs by argument rather than authority, laid the foundations of rational inquiry. He also pioneered the practice of inductive reasoning, moving from particular cases to general principles.

Socrates held that the care of the soul is the most important task of a human life, more important than wealth, reputation or even survival. He criticised the pursuit of money and honour as distractions from self-knowledge, and he urged his fellow citizens to examine their own lives and values. This emphasis on inward moral reflection gave philosophy a practical, therapeutic dimension that it has never entirely lost.

Legacy and Influence

Because Socrates wrote nothing, scholars distinguish the historical Socrates from the figure portrayed by Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes. The problem of disentangling the two, known as the Socratic problem, has occupied historians for centuries. What is clear is that the questions he raised and the method he used passed directly into the work of his pupils and, through them, into the whole subsequent tradition of Western thought.

Plato made Socrates the principal speaker in most of his dialogues, using him to explore metaphysics, ethics and politics. Aristotle, who joined the Academy a generation later, transmitted and transformed this inheritance, and through him Socratic ideas entered medieval scholasticism and the modern university. The Stoics and the Cynics both traced their ancestry to Socrates, each emphasising a different aspect of his life and teaching.

His influence extends far beyond professional philosophy. The figure of Socrates as the martyr for free inquiry has inspired defenders of intellectual liberty from the Renaissance to the present day, and the Socratic seminar remains a model of teaching by question and discussion. He is remembered as the first great moral philosopher of the West and as the embodiment of the conviction that an unexamined life is not worth living.

See also

• Plato
• Xenophon
• Pre-Socratic philosophy
• Trial of Socrates