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Socrates
Greek philosopher
Table of Contents
Introduction
Philosophical and literary sources
Life and personality
Background of the trial
Plato’s Apology
The public’s hatred of Socrates
The charge of impiety
Socrates versus Plato
The legacy of Socrates
SocratesSocrates, herm from a Greek original, second half of the 4th century bce; in the Capitoline Museums, Rome.© Alfredo Dagli Orti/Shutterstock.com
Socrates, (born c. 470 bce, Athens [Greece]—died 399 bce, Athens), Greek philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought exerted a profound influence on ancient and modern philosophy.
Socrates was a widely recognized and controversial figure in his native Athens, so much so that he was frequently mocked in the plays of comic dramatists. (The Clouds of Aristophanes, produced in 423, is the best-known example.) Although Socrates himself wrote nothing, he is depicted in conversation in compositions by a small circle of his admirers—Plato and Xenophon first among them. He is portrayed in these works as a man of great insight, integrity, self-mastery, and argumentative skill. The impact of his life was all the greater because of the way in which it ended: at age 70, he was brought to trial on a charge of impiety and sentenced to death by poisoning (the poison probably being hemlock) by a jury of his fellow citizens. Plato’s Apology of Socrates purports to be the speech Socrates gave at his trial in response to the accusations made against him (Greek apologia means “defense”). Its powerful advocacy of the examined life and its condemnation of Athenian democracy have made it one of the central documents of Western thought and culture.
Philosophical and literary sources
While Socrates was alive, he was, as noted, the object of comic ridicule, but most of the plays that make reference to him are entirely lost or exist only in fragmentary form—Clouds being the chief exception. Although Socrates is the central figure of this play, it was not Aristophanes’ purpose to give a balanced and accurate portrait of him (comedy never aspires to this) but rather to use him to represent certain intellectual trends in contemporary Athens—the study of language and nature and, as Aristophanes implies, the amoralism and atheism that accompany these pursuits. The value of the play as a reliable source of knowledge about Socrates is thrown further into doubt by the fact that, in Plato’s Apology, Socrates himself rejects it as a fabrication. This aspect of the trial will be discussed more fully below.
Soon after Socrates’ death, several members of his circle preserved and praised his memory by writing works that represent him in his most characteristic activity—conversation. His interlocutors in these (typically adversarial) exchanges included people he happened to meet, devoted followers, prominent political figures, and leading thinkers of the day. Many of these “Socratic discourses,” as Aristotle calls them in his Poetics, are no longer extant; there are only brief remnants of the conversations written by Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, and Eucleides. But those composed by Plato and Xenophon survive in their entirety. What knowledge we have of Socrates must therefore depend primarily on one or the other (or both, when their portraits coincide) of these sources. (Plato and Xenophon also wrote separate accounts, each entitled Apology of Socrates, of Socrates’ trial.) Most scholars, however, do not believe that every Socratic discourse of Xenophon and Plato was intended as a historical report of what the real Socrates said, word-for-word, on some occasion. What can reasonably be claimed about at least some of these dialogues is that they convey the gist of the questions Socrates asked, the ways in which he typically responded to the answers he received, and the general philosophical orientation that emerged from these conversations. Xenophon
Among the compositions of Xenophon, the one that gives the fullest portrait of Socrates is Memorabilia. The first two chapters of Book I of this work are especially important, because they explicitly undertake a refutation of the charges made against Socrates at his trial; they are therefore a valuable supplement to Xenophon’s Apology, which is devoted entirely to the same purpose. The portrait of Socrates that Xenophon gives in Books III and IV of Memorabilia seems, in certain passages, to be heavily influenced by his reading of some of Plato’s dialogues, and so the evidentiary value of at least this portion of the work is diminished. Xenophon’s Symposium is a depiction of Socrates in conversation with his friends at a drinking party (it is perhaps inspired by a work of Plato of the same name and character) and is regarded by some scholars as a valuable re-creation of Socrates’ thought and way of life. Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (literally: “estate manager”), a Socratic conversation concerning household organization and the skills needed by the independent farmer, is Xenophon’s attempt to bring the qualities he admired in Socrates to bear upon the subject of overseeing one’s property. It is unlikely to have been intended as a report of one of Socrates’ conversations. Plato
Plato, unlike Xenophon, is generally regarded as a philosopher of the highest order of originality and depth. According to some scholars, his philosophical skills made him far better able than Xenophon was to understand Socrates and therefore more valuable a source of information about him. The contrary view is that Plato’s originality and vision as a philosopher led him to use his Socratic discourses not as mere devices for reproducing the conversations he had heard but as vehicles for the advocacy of his own ideas (however much they may have been inspired by Socrates) and that he is therefore far more untrustworthy than Xenophon as a source of information about the historical Socrates. Whichever of these two views is correct, it is undeniable that Plato is not only the deeper philosopher but also the greater literary artist. Some of his dialogues are so natural and lifelike in their depiction of conversational interplay that readers must constantly remind themselves that Plato is shaping his material, as any author must.
Although Socrates is the interlocutor who guides the conversation in most of Plato’s dialogues, there are several in which he plays a minor role (Parmenides, Sophist, Statesman, and Timaeus, all of which are generally agreed to be among Plato’s later works) and one (Laws, also composed late) in which he is entirely absent. Why did Plato assign Socrates a small role in some dialogues (and none in Laws) and a large role in others? A simple answer is that, by this device, Plato intended to signal to his readers that the dialogues in which Socrates is the major interlocutor convey the philosophy of Socrates, whereas those in which he is a minor figure or does not appear at all present Plato’s own ideas.
But there are formidable objections to this hypothesis, and for several reasons most scholars do not regard it as a serious possibility. To begin with, it is unlikely that in so many of his works Plato would have assigned himself so passive and mechanical a role as merely a recording device for the philosophy of Socrates. Furthermore, the portrait of Socrates that results from this hypothesis is not coherent. In some of the dialogues in which he is the principal interlocutor, for example, Socrates insists that he does not have satisfactory answers to the questions he poses—questions such as “What is courage?” (raised in Laches), “What is self-control?” (Charmides), and “What is piety?” (Euthyphro). In other dialogues in which he plays a major role, however, Socrates does offer systematic answers to such questions. In Books II–X of Republic, for example, he proposes an elaborate answer to the question, “What is justice?,” and in doing so he also defends his view of the ideal society, the condition of the human soul, the nature of reality, and the power of art, among many other topics. Were we to hold that all the Platonic dialogues in which Socrates is the main speaker are depictions of the philosophy of Socrates—a philosophy that Plato endorses but to which he has made no contributions of his own—then we would be committed to the absurd view that Socrates both has and lacks answers to these questions.