Socrates

(470-399 B.C.E.)

 

Socrates wrote nothing. All our known authorities Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle agree that Socrates was disillusioned with the methods and results of physical inquiry and therefore never discussed the origins of the world. Socrates himself, says Xenophon, only discussed human concerns, what makes men good as individuals or as citizens. Knowledge in this field was the condition of a free and noble character; ignorance left a man no better off than a slave.

Socrates rejected speculation about Nature for two reasons: it was useless and it was dogmatic. By useless Socrates meant useless for what seemed to him man’s main and proper concern - knowledge of himself. If I cannot know the beginnings of life in the unrecorded past, I can, Socrates thought, know the end of life here and now. It was dogmatic because the Ionians had described the origin of the world as if they had been there. These accounts of the nature of things were speculations without proof. This shows a key characteristic of Socrates’ nature as his clear sense of what can, and what can not, be known, and the problems of pretending to knowledge whose grounds have never been examined.

This shift from the search for beginnings to the search for ends naturally coincides with the shift of interest from Nature to man. The physical science from which Socrates turned away was not, like modern science, an attempt to formulate laws of Nature, always with an eye to the prediction of future events and with a the incidental gain of increased control over natural forces. It took the form of cosmology, that is, an inquiry of how the world came to be as it is; and, secondly, it asked what is the ultimate nature of that material substance of which things, now and always, consist. The answer to these questions seemed to lie in the past leading to the present. Science tried to get back to the beginning of things or to the material principles from which things come into being. The future held out no promise of anything different. But as soon as we turn to consider our own lives, our thoughts are nearly always bent upon the future. The past cannot be changed; and the soundest of instincts bids us keep our backs turned to it and face towards what is coming. In the future lies the ends that we desire and hope to encompass by the exercise of will and choice. The future appears as a realm of contingency and freedom, not, like the past, as a closed record of unchangeable necessity.

Socrates thus shifts the search for natural origins to the search for the ends of man. This question - what is the end of life - is one that, as now, was rarely asked. Thus we go from day to day, speculating means to ends, without raising the question whether the ends are worth living for. That is the question Socrates did raise, and asked all others to consider, thereby causing a good deal of discomfort. Thinking about the whole of life, he asked which of the ends we pursue are really and intrinsically valuable, not mere means to something else we think desirable. Is there some one end of life that is alone worthy of desire?

How do you convince anyone that money is not an end in itself? Everyone would agree that he/she wants money for the sake of something else that he/she would call pleasure or happiness. This demonstrates that happiness is the common end, and that other aims are secondary. But what is happiness? Since the time of Socrates, this was the key question that the Schools debated. The philosophers classified mankind by three types as they defined happiness: (1) as pleasure, (2) as social success, honor, and fame, or (3) as knowledge and wisdom. The debate was made on the claims of these three objects of pursuit. Could any of them by themselves constitute happiness, and if so, which one? Or were they all needed in a perfect life; and, if so, how were they related to one another? Socrates presented a solution to this problem.

Socrates believed that happiness was to be found in what is called the perfection of the soul, that is, making one’s soul as good as possible. All other ends which men desire were of no value in themselves. If they were worth pursuing at all, they were only as a means to the perfection of the soul. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates, in his own defense, refuses to accept acquittal at the price of giving up the search for wisdom and his mission he describes there. By "the perfection of the soul" Socrates means what we call spiritual perfection. This was man’s proper concern. For that purpose knowledge of a different kind was needed. This knowledge, of which every man was capable, was a direct insight into the value of the various things we desire. Socrates identified this knowledge with goodness in the famous paradox translated as "Virtue is knowledge". This can also be called "self-knowledge" or the recognition of that self or soul in each of us and its perfection is the true end of life. Socrates’ discovery of the soul and of a morality that is spiritual was to take the place of the morality of social constraint. In order to understand these discoveries we can look at the thought of Socrates’ contemporaries and rivals, the Sophists. The Sophists were not a school, they were individual teachers of various types.

 

F. M. Cornford refers to the Presocratics (the Sixth Century Ionians) as the childhood of the new form of thought having the attitude of a child’s mind from age six to the beginning of adolescence or that period of life when we give up the solipsism of the new born, and stop believing that fairy tales are literally true. Then the child is not only interested in things for practical purposes, but also is genuinely curious and capable of wonder about things in themselves. He has the capacity to enjoy knowledge for its own sake, until that enjoyment is dissipated by what is called education. In the child this curiosity is looking outwards, self-forgetful. Conduct offers no field for independent speculation. All of life is ordered by the authority of nurses or parents, and some authority is accepted as infallible.

Childhood ends in a revolutionary crisis of human life, that is, adolescence. Cornford suggest that this adolescence corresponds to the second phase of Greek philosophy - the age of the Sophists. During adolescence until the age of twenty, the youth are engaged in a second effort of detachment, more conscious and much more painful than the infant’s detachment of the self from the outer world. He becomes self-conscious in a new way. It is now his central concern to detach his individual self from his parents and the family group, and from every other social group attempting to control his will and personality. The individual has to find himself as a moral being that must learn to stand upon his own feet, as a man. This effort is of vital importance; and it might seem that the goal of education should be to help him through it. The education that was offered seems to run counter to this aim. The student is ready to learn many things but he is surrounded by the almost overwhelming pressure of a group of contemporaries demanding absolute conformity to a standard that he should outgrow. The result is a reaction against all authority.

In Greek society, after the Persian wars the first quarter of the fifth century, there is an analogous effort of the individual to detach himself from the social group, that is, the city and its traditional customs. Until that time, the claim of authority to regulate the citizen’s conduct had not been explicitly challenged. However much or little individual conduct conformed to the customs and laws of the society/city, it had been acknowledged that those customs and laws embodied an absolute obligation, beyond dispute. Now in the time of Socrates the Sophists began to cast doubt on this basic assumption with a daring which seemed to some conservative minds to threaten the whole structure of society.

Cornford takes as an example, a fragment of the Sophist Antiphon to illustrate this point, which draws a significant contrast between the laws of Nature and the laws of the state. The law of Nature is declared to be the principle of self-preservation, that is, each individual should seek after what is advantageous to life and that which is pleasant. The laws of the state, on the other hand, enjoin behavior that is unpleasant and therefore unnatural. These laws are contrary to Nature, which is the true standard of right. On what does their authority rest? On nothing more than convention. Legal rules were originally created by human agreement, and they are not naturally binding on posterity who were not parties to the agreement. The practical conclusion is that, whereas the laws of Nature cannot be evaded, the laws of society should be obeyed only when there is a risk of being found out and punished. Nature will always find you out; but, with luck or cunning, society may not.

This contrast between the law of Nature and human law appears here for the first time. It is only now that the Greek mind clearly perceives that the social laws are not divine institutions operating with inevitable sanctions like the penalties of transgression against natural law. The theory of social contract now finds its origins. Individuals, it is alleged, were originally free to seek their own self-preservation, pleasure, and self-interest. For some reason, perhaps for the advantage of mutual protection against hostile groups, a number of individuals agreed to surrender their freedom. But the laws they made have no other source of obligation. The naturally strong man is like a lion entangled in a net of prohibition and constraint. He has a natural right to break loose, if he can, and go forth in his strength to claim his share. This view of the natural right of the stronger is stated by Callicles, the young man of the world in Plato’s Gorgias.

In this philosophy of individual self-assertion parents will recognize something analogous to the spirit of adolescent reaction against the authority of the home. It will not surprise them that the Sophists found eager listeners among the youths who attended their lectures and debates. In the Greek city there were no secondary schools. After adolescence, the state itself was regarded as the educational institution which shaped the young citizen. What was taught him was the established law, a precious legacy of ancestral, or even divine, wisdom. In this public school the only masters were the elder citizens; and in their ears such utterances as Antiphon’s was no less outrageous than it would sound to the public-school master of today. To the youths, on the other hand, it would come as an equally welcome expression of the rebellion against those stupid rules.

What was Socrates’ attitude towards this philosophy of adolescence? In the popular mind he was confused with the Sophists. Aristophanes and the other contemporaries had built up many misconceptions about Socrates. At the age of seventy, Socrates was tried and condemned for "not recognizing the gods of Athens" and for demoralizing the young men. If the charges were entirely false, or do they represent some truth far more profound than the superficial sense they bore in the mouths if the accusers?

Cornford has a passage that describes Socrates interaction with the youth of his day:

"Socrates was ready to converse with anyone but above all he welcomed the company of the adolescent young. They found in him exactly what the youth needs in this phase of reaction - a man whose proved courage they could respect and admire, and whose subtle intellect was always at the service of the youthful passion for argument. He would never silence their crude questionings with the superior tone of the adult experience; he wanted to know all that was going on in their minds, and positively encouraged them to think for themselves on every subject, and especially about right and wrong. He always said that he was himself an inquirer, who knew nothing and had nothing to teach, but regarded every question as an open question. And behind the play of humorous intelligence, they felt the presence of an extraordinary personality, calm and secure in the possession of a mysterious wisdom. Here was one who had found the secret of life, and achieved in his own character a balance and harmony which nothing could disturb. His time was always at the disposal of anyone who would set about discovering that secret for himself - above all, the youth whose obscure but pressing need was to achieve the freedom of self-ruling manhood."

Socrates said that he knew nothing that could be taught to anyone else. But at the same time he declared that human perfection lies in the knowledge of good and evil. Socrates’ knowledge could not be taught like the other kinds of arts because all that another person can teach me is that such and such things are believed to be good, or that that such and such actions are believed to be right, by some external authority or by society itself. Information of this kind can be conveyed by instruction and it forms the background of moral education as commonly practiced. This is not what Socrates would call knowledge. I can not know that this is good or right until I can see it for myself, and that knowledge will put aside what I am told other people believe or think they believe. Knowledge of value is a matter of direct insight. It does not consist of pieces of information that can be handed from one mind to another. Every individual must see and judge for himself what is good for him to do. The individual must become morally autonomous and take his own life into his own control. This is the existential responsibility Sartre speaks of that no individual can escape. He can accept some external authority and treat that authority as responsible for what it has told him to do. But one remains responsible for his original choice of an authority to be obeyed.

Socrates' view assumes that every human soul possesses the necessary power of immediate insight or of good and evil. The soul's vision, like the eye, may become clouded and dim, and it may be deceived by false appearances. Pleasure is mistakenly assumed to be a good when it is not really good. If the eye of the soul does see straight and clearly, then there is no need for an appeal of its decision. In conduct, education is not teaching; it is opening the eye of the soul, and clearing its vision from the distorting fog of prejudice, and from the conceit of knowledge that is no more that second-hand opinion.

It is of no wonder that the elder citizens of Athens, when they  heard that Socrates encouraged the youth to call into question every moral precept, saw no difference between his ideas and Antiphon’s, and concluded that he was demoralizing the young men. Since Socrates asked the youth to question all received moral rules or maxims of conduct and judge every moral question for themselves, then Socrates is cutting away every moral prop and buttress that parents and society have given them. Therefore Socrates was undermining the morality of social constraint - the morality of obedience to authority and of conformity to custom. Socrates was going beyond this morality of constraint and prohibition to a morality of a different kind. The center of this new morality is within the soul itself. It can be called the morality of aspiration to spiritual perfection. If every human soul can see its own good, and if spiritual perfection is the end of life and the secret of happiness, then action cannot be governed by any code of rules imposed from without.

To discover a new principle of morality, and to announce it without fear or compromise, is to incur the resentment of the society living by the morality.  It is also to incur the risk of being misunderstood by the people who are already chafing at the limits, but may not be capable of grasping the new principle in its positive implications. It is dangerous to say "Do that which is right in your own mind," because some of the people will hear that you mean: "Do just as you please" (this is not unlike the misunderstanding of the existentialist when they talk about freedom); and do not grasp the idea that you mean. But first make sure that your mind sees with perfect clearness what is really good. If that condition is satisfied, if you see the truth and act upon it - as you must, when you really see it - you will find happiness in your own soul; but you may find that doing what you know to be right may be anything but pleasant. It may cost you poverty and suffering and, if you cannot avoid a conflict with society, imprisonment and death.

We can now define more clearly what Cornford meant by saying that the achievement of Socrates was the discovery of the soul. When Socrates told the Athenians that the only thing in life worth caring for was not wealth or social distinction, but the soul, he was using language that was very strange to them. The ordinary Athenian thought his soul - his psyche - as an airy unsubstantial wraith or double of his body, a shadow that, at the moment of death, might flit away to some dismal Hades bordering on nonexistence, or perhaps escape as a breath to be dissipated like smoke. If he spoke of his "self", he meant his body, the warm and living seat of consciousness - a consciousness that was doomed to fade and to perish with the body at death. To tell him this his major concern was to care for his "soul" and its perfection, was like telling him to neglect his substance and cherish his shadow.

Socrates’ discovery was that the true self is not one's body but the soul. And by the soul he meant the seat of that faculty of insight which can know good from evil and infallibly choose the good. Self-knowledge implies the recognition of this true self. Self-examination is a discipline constantly needed to distinguish its judgment from the promptings of other elements in our nature, closely attached to the body and its distracting interest. Self-rule is the rule of the true self over these elements - an absolute autocracy of the soul. For this inner judge of good and evil is also a ruler. The true self is a faculty, not only of intuitive insight but also of will - a will that can override all other desires for pleasure and seeming happiness. The soul which sees what is really good infallibly desires the good it has discerned. Socrates held that this desire of the enlightened soul is so strong that it cannot fail to overpower all other desires whose objects the true self sees to be illusory.

This is the meaning of the Socratic paradoxes: "Virtue is Knowledge", "No one does wrong wittingly". People commonly say: "I knew it was wrong, but I could not help doing it". Socrates replies: That is never the truth. You may have known that other people think what you did was wrong, or that you had been told it was wrong; but if you had known for yourself it was wrong, you would not have done it. Your fault was a failure of insight. You did not see the good; you were misled by some pleasure which seemed good at the moment. If you had seen the good then you would have willed it, and acted accordingly. No one does wrong against his true will, when once that will has been directed to its object, the good, by a genuine and clear vision.

The special name given to the true self in the writings of Plato and in Aristotle is nous, a word commonly translated as "reason". To modern readers "spirit" is a less misleading term, because "reason" suggests a faculty that thinks but does not also will. Plato and Aristotle regard this spirit as distinct from the psyche, which is inseparably associated with the body and perishes with the death of the body. For the perfection of the spirit the Greeks used the ordinary word for "goodness", arête, and this should not be translated as "virtue". "Virtue" at all times, means conformity to current ideals of conduct. The virtuous man is he who does what the rest of society approves. The Socratic philosophy dismisses this conformity under the name of "popular virtue". Plato puts the virtue of "the respectable citizen" on the same level with the unremitting pursuit of duty characteristic of bees, ants, and other insects. This is not what Socrates meant by "goodness". The whole content of his mission was to supersede the childish morality of blameless conformity by an ideal of spiritual manhood rising above the commonly acknowledged bounds of human capacity. This was to substitute for a morality of attainable virtue, such as the world respects and rewards, a morality aspiring to a perfection, unattainable except by a few men, who were rejected while they lived, and only learnt too late to worship as heroic or divine. Such was the man of Socrates.

From: F.M. Cornford, Before and After Socrates (1932).