Socrates

I

Introduction

Socrates (c. 470-c. 399 bc), Greek philosopher, who shaped Western philosophy, although he left no writings of his own. His pupil Plato wrote dialogues purporting to describe Socrates’s views and actions. These are the principal source for Socrates’s ideas and influence, though Plato sometimes ascribed his own views to his master. The historian Xenophon also wrote dialogues involving Socrates, and he is mentioned in other Greek works.

II

Life

Born in Athens, the son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and Phaenarete, a midwife, Socrates was reportedly short and unattractive, but extremely hardy and self-controlled. He received a typical education in literature, music, and gymnastics, and later familiarized himself with the rhetoric and dialectics of the sophists, the speculations of the Ionian philosophers, and the general culture of Periclean Athens. He married Xanthippe, an Athenian woman, with whom he had three children.

Initially, Socrates followed the craft of his father. He also served with the other male citizens of Athens in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, acting bravely as an infantryman at the battles of Potidaea in 432-430 bc, Delium in 424 bc, and Amphipolis in 422 bc.

However, according to Plato’s Apology, his life was given its guiding purpose when a friend asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, to which the oracle answered “no”. Socrates then devoted his life to talking at the public places in Athens with people claiming knowledge, and trying to help them understand their ignorance, as he came to understand his own, for the sake of their souls.

III

Ideas

Although Socrates claimed only to know that he was ignorant, in arguments he developed a number of distinctive ethical views in the form of paradoxes. These included the ideas that virtue was knowledge; that no one does wrong willingly, but only out of ignorance; and that it is better to be wronged than to wrong someone else. These ideas, particularly the last, which bars retaliation, were quite foreign to the conventional public culture of Athens at the time. Socrates emphasized rational argument, concern with one’s soul, and the search for definitions of ethical ideas. As important as these ideas was his method of engaging in argument, which often involved an ironic stance towards the claims of his interlocutors, known as Socratic irony.

These concerns profoundly influenced the next generations of philosophers, however much they differed from one another. Socrates’s pupil, Plato, and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, sought to extend Socratic dialogue while searching for the definitions Socrates never found and allowing for the irrational elements of the soul that he excluded. Antisthenes, a friend of Socrates, may have founded the Cynic school of philosophy, which taught life according to nature and not convention.

Another pupil of Socrates, Aristippus, founded the Cyrenaic philosophy of experience and pleasure, from which developed the philosophy of Epictetus. To such Stoics as the Roman philosopher Seneca the Elder and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, Socrates appeared as the very embodiment of and guide to a life in accordance with wisdom rather than passion.

IV

The Trial

Socrates’s self-described role as the public “gadfly” of Athens made him unpopular with many citizens. He may have been seen as being in some way responsible for the aristocratic revolt against the democracy in 404 bc, which led to a brief reign of terror in which some of his students and friends participated. He was certainly ridiculed as one of the sophists by the comic poet Aristophanes in his play The Clouds, although Socrates himself saw the sophists as dangerous opponents, willing to teach anything for a fee and argue without sincerity.

Perhaps for these reasons, he was charged in 399 bc with neglecting the established gods and introducing new divinities, a reference to the daemonion, or mystical inner voice, which he often claimed guided his actions; and with corrupting the morals of the young. Plato’s Apology depicts Socrates’s own defence at his trial, which sought to vindicate his role in the city and his commitment to philosophy. He was found guilty by only a small majority, and in accordance with Athenian legal practice, was given the chance to propose his own counter-penalty to the death sentence demanded by his prosecutors. However, his proposal that he simply be fined, in view of his value to the city as a philosopher, so incensed the jury that it voted by an increased majority for the death penalty.

Socrates’s friends wanted to help him escape from prison, but in Plato’s Crito he argues with one of them that his commitment to philosophy and his own principles make it better for him to suffer the wrong of execution than to wrong the city. Plato’s Phaedo describes his last day and the calm way in which he drank the hemlock, which was the customary procedure of execution. The manner of Socrates’s life and his death both contributed to making him a model of the rational, enquiring, and fearless philosopher for future generations.