Philosophy of Socrates

Introduction

The traditional belief of the Greeks had been that their cities had received their laws from some divinity, protector of the city, and that good (happiness) consists in conforming one's life to these laws, accepted as divine and eternal. The Sophists shook this faith to its very roots.

As in the case of the problem of knowledge, by defending relativism they ended in Skepticism; so also in the question of morals, by the same subjectivist prejudice they end in utilitarianism and hedonism. Thus, that is good which satisfies one's instincts and passions. The belief in immutable principles upon which ethics may be founded is a prejudice and often an impediment which it is necessary to remove. The good, as experience shows, consists in securing for oneself the greatest possible quantity of possessions, without regard for the means used to attain them; for these goods can satisfy the instincts and the passions in which happiness consists. To strive to strengthen one's personality in order to surpass others in violence and in the contest or struggle for earthly goods -- this is the moral ideal of the Sophist.

The Sophists also violently attack the traditional belief about right -- that derivation from principles based on justice -- and they substitute the concept of force for that of justice. From the moment changed political conditions and the participation of the people in democratic power began to bring about the change of many laws, the Sophists profited from the situation not only to discredit positive and political right, but also natural right as well. They defended natural right, but by nature they did not mean the rational part of man, but his instincts and passions. Hence for them right is that which succeeds in imposing itself through force, or an imposition established by force and violence.

Men by nature are not equal; there are the strong and the weak, and the moment right consists in force it becomes the office of the strong to command and make laws; the weak must obey. The Sophist Thrasymachus, in the first book of Plato's Republic, maintains that natural law "is the right of the stronger." It is the strong man who, despising all laws advanced by the weak in the name of justice, imposes his will, which becomes right, as Callicles maintains in Plato's Gorgias.

Here we are at the same extremism that is indicative of the whole doctrine of the Sophists. Such extremism must have been pleasing to the youth of Athens in the time of Pericles. All young men were anxious to obtain offices which would assure them wealth and pleasure. Sophistic teaching, by battering all the orders of ethics and justice, opened up to men a way that made possible and justified the use of all deception and the most violent passions. Thus is explained the popular favor that surrounded certain Sophists, such as Protagoras, who was received with triumph and entertained as a guest in the homes of the most noted Athenians.

So also is explained the noble mission of Socrates who, to restore the values of a morality sacred and inviolable because based upon reason and not unruly passions, spent his entire existence, and not in vain.

General Notions

The Sophists had turned their attention to man, but they had stopped at sensitive impressions, at empirical data. They logically ended in Skepticism. Socrates moves on the same plane as the Sophists, i.e., the study of man, and raises the Delphic motto: "Know thyself" as the standard of his teaching. He does not stop at sensations, at opiniative knowledge; his investigation tended to scrutinize the more intimate part of man, that by which man is man, his reason. It is in this intimacy of reason that he discovers a knowledge which has the characteristics of universality and necessity: the concept. Behold the great Socratic discovery through which philosophy finds its road and later arrives at the greater systems which the human mind has been able to construct.

Socrates, like the Sophists, was not concerned with metaphysics, but excused himself by saying that nature is under the direction of gods. He concentrated all his attention on the search for moral concepts; he was convinced that the practice of morality must be preceded by a concept of justice, and was opposed to that destructive idea which was the basis of Sophistic teaching.

After the great discover of Socrates the Sophists did not entirely disappear; we find them also during the time of Aristotle, but they lose all their influence and importance.

Life of Socrates

Socrates was born in 470 or 469 B.C.E., in Athens, the son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and Phaenarete, a midwife. He first learned his father's art, but later dedicated himself to meditation and to philosophic teaching without recompense, notwithstanding his poverty. Conscious of his vocation, which he considered to be a divine mission, he did not allow himself to be distracted by domestic preoccupations and political interests. He married an Athenian woman, Xanthippe, to whom legend attributes many strange whims. Certainly, Xanthippe was not an ideal wife, but it must be admitted that neither was Socrates an ideal husband; he forgot his domestic duties out of his extreme interest in philosophy.

Socrates did not take an active part in politics, although as a youth he had been a soldier and had saved the life of the youth Alcibiades in the battle of Mantinea. He believed that it would be better to serve his country by offering himself as an example of a most perfect man, obedient to its laws, even to the point of sacrifice, and by preparing a wise youth in opposition to that egotistic and power-crazed youth which the Sophists had turned loose upon the nation.

But Socrates' critical and ironic attitude and the consequent education imparted by him gave rise to a general malcontent and to popular hostility and personal enmities against him, notwithstanding his probity. Socrates appears as the head of an intellectual aristocracy, opposed to the popular tyranny and even to certain reactionary elements. This hostile state of mind toward Socrates crystallized and took juridical form in the accusation formulated against him by Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon: of corrupting youth, denying the national gods, and introducing new ones in their stead.

Socrates disdained to defend himself and thus made concessions to the vanity of the judges to the point of humiliating himself before them and more or less excusing his actions. He had, before the eyes of his spirit, not an empirical acquittal for his terrestrial life but, rather, the eternal judgment of reason for immortality. He preferred death. Declared guilty by a small majority, he stood with indomitable spirit before the tribunal, and was condemned to death.

Socrates was obliged to remain in prison for a month before execution. (A law prohibited the carrying out of capital punishment during the absence of the sacred ship sent yearly to Delos.) Socrates' disciple Crito came to him and proposed flight to his master. Socrates refused, however, declaring that he did not wish to fail at any cost in obedience to his country's laws.

He passed his time preparing himself for death by spiritual converse with his disciples. Famous above all was his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, which must have taken place shortly before his death and which is recounted with incomparable art by Plato in the Phaedo. Socrates' last words to his disciples, after quietly taking the deadly draught of hemlock, were: "I owe a cock to Aesculapius." Aesculapius, the god of medicine, had delivered him from the evil of life with the gift of death. It was the year 399 B.C.E., the seventy-first of Socrates' life.

The Doctrine of Socrates: Concepts

The doctrine of Socrates can be summed up in two words: concepts, morality -- or better, moral concepts.

For Socrates, the concept is that of which all think when they speak of a thing. In the rational part of every man there exist some notions which are common to all and hence enjoy universality and necessity, and which form the substratum of true understanding or knowledge. The concept of which the Sophists speak is merely an opinion, a fleeting instant of knowledge. Socrates does not undervalue such knowledge, but neither does he consider it to be full; for knowledge should be well enough established to serve as the foundation of science. True science is universal; that is, it is common to all men and to all times; it is objective, and is not subject to the changes of fortune. True science consists in understanding through concepts, which have the same universal characteristics as science itself.

To arrive at an understanding of such concepts, Socrates used the inductive method of dialogue (Socratic method), the principal parts of which were two: irony and maieutics. In general the process was as follows:

• Socrates first posed a question -- for example, "What is justice?" Since he had said that he did not himself know what it could be (Socratic ignorance), he asked his pupils what they thought was justice.

• The pupils, for the greater part Sophists, answered according to the Sophistic method, adducing many examples; e.g., "Zeus is just"; "the gods are just," etc. (Exemplification.) "Oh, how many justices!" answered Socrates. "I asked what is justice, and you answer by bringing me a great number of justices."

• Thus he passed over to a criticism (irony) of the examples adduced, through which he cleared the disciples' minds of prejudices and false notions about the question proposed.

• From irony he passed to maieutics -- the art which Socrates said he had learned from his mother; she helped the parts of the body, he aided those of the spirit. (The word is derived from the Greek "maieutikos," pertaining to midwifery. The maieutic method was Socrates' way of bringing out ideas latent in the mind.) Maieutics was the conclusive part of the dialogue, in which Socrates tried to make his disciples see how, by reflecting upon themselves, they could observe the presence of certain elements common and necessary to all justices (the concept of justice).

• Such elements took concrete form in the definition, which summed up in a few words the characteristics that were judged necessary to the concept of the question proposed.

It is needless to say that the Socratic dialogues did not always succeed in stabilizing the definition. In such cases, the so-called Socratic ignorance which Socrates professed at the beginning of the question was not fictitious. Thus the dialogue was a work of self-criticism, done with the help of the students for the purpose, if possible, of arriving at a concept -- a true understanding of the question proposed.

The Doctrine of Socrates: Ethics

In ethics, Socrates did not surpass the prejudice of Greek intellectualism, which made the practice completely dependent upon theory. It is enough to know virtue in order to be virtuous. Everyone wishes to be happy. If he does not attain happiness, it is because he does not know the way that leads to happiness. Consequently, so-called evil men are in reality only ignorant; the evil is reduced to error. As vice is synonymous with ignorance, so knowledge of the good is synonymous with virtue. Thus it is easy to see why Socrates, who intended to form a virtuous youth, restricted his teaching to the search for moral concepts. It is to be noted that moral intellectualism is present in all Greek thought, not excepting the great ethical systems of Plato and Aristotle.

Minor Socratic Schools

The teaching of Socrates had had two main points: the concept and morality or ethics. However, not all Socrates' disciples succeeded in understanding the profundity of the master's teaching. Many of them had first been at the school of the Sophists or of the Eleatics, and they did not succeed in overcoming their initial positions and in grasping the meaning of the Socratic concept in its purity. They believed that the Socratic concept was not much different from Protagoras' "man -- measure-of-all-things," and that the good was the same as the one of Parmenides. The spiritual heir of Socrates is Plato, who in the Academy carried the doctrine of his master to its highest development.

The others, after the death of Socrates, returned to their native cities and opened schools with a teaching which indicates a return to the Sophistic or Eleatic doctrines. These schools were called Minor Socratic Schools: Socratic, because after the example of Socrates they were interested in the knowledge of morality; Minor, because the thought of Socrates was not expounded for its own good but with inclinations toward former positions.

The Minor Schools are four:

• The Megarian, founded by Euclid of Megara;

• The Elian, founded by Phaedo;

• The Cynic; and

• The Cyrenaic.

We shall explain the principles of the last two. They possess a certain importance since they can be considered as historical and doctrinal antecedents of two other monuments of Grecian thought of major importance -- Stoicism and Epicureanism.

The Cynic School. This school was opened by Antisthenes, who first was a disciple of Gorgias and then of Socrates. He taught in the Cynosarges of Athens, whence the name Cynic. Antisthenes taught that knowledge (cognition) could not pass beyond the data of the senses; and since every sensation is individual, he concluded that only the individual is real. Moreover, as every individual has his own essence and no other, Antisthenes inferred that error is impossible and finally every definition is impossible.

What, then, were the concepts which Socrates had discussed? Simply the names of nouns. In a word, Antisthenes was an empiric nominalist. Of him it is related that in a debate with Plato about concepts, he said: "O Plato, I see the horse, but the horseness -- that I do not see." Plato answered: "You do not see the horseness because you have nothing but the eyes of the body."

In ethics, virtue is not a means to attaining good, but is the good itself. As virtue is the only good, so vice is the sole evil. But in what does virtue consist? In autarchy, i.e., in the possession of one's own reason, that which tells us that pleasures, riches, and everything which is called the civilization of a people is vice, because it is evil to feel the need of them. The Cynic, hence, went apart from society to live as a primitive man with few things, and these few supplied by nature itself. Between nature and society as we know it, with all the comforts of life, there is the same difference as between virtue and vice. To live according to nature understood thus -- such is the model of the Cynic's life.

The most famous Cynic was Diogenes of Sinope. Cynicism is a reaction of the poorer classes against the aristocracy; the reaction was made in the name of nature.

The Cyrenaic School. This school was founded by Cyrene, in those times an enchanting city of Libya, by Aristippus who, before becoming a disciple of Socrates, had heard the lectures of Protagoras.

Regarding cognition, for Aristippus only the subjective sensations are knowable; this implies that the field of knowledge is restricted to the cognition of one state after another which the subject notices in himself as sensations. Thus we are in pure sensism, according to which reality is but a succession of subjective phenomena, with no relation whatsoever to any external object. For Aristippus no metaphysics is possible, since the subject remains closed up in sensations.

Regarding ethics, the Cyrenians, in opposition to the Cynics, affirm that virtue consists in pleasure, and vice in pain. In accordance with their logic, virtue is a pleasing sensation, vice a painful one. The Cyrenians had a theory of sensations: there are three species, pleasant, painful and indifferent. The wise man will seek to keep away the painful or reduce them to the least possible, while he will change the indifferent into pleasant sensations. In a word, virtue consists in procuring for oneself the greatest possible quantity of tender emotions. Hence it is not in the passive, pleasant sensation that virtue consists, but in a supreme effort to secure for oneself the maximum of pleasures. (This is called dynamic hedonism.)

The wise man must preserve mastery over himself while yet living in the midst of pleasures. He must possess them and yet not be possessed by them, as Horace was to say later. In fine, the wise Cyrenian is the happy man who finds a limit only in reason.

The followers of Aristippus developed this rational motive further than that of immediate sensible pleasure and finished by concluding with Theodore the Atheist that nothing exists except pleasure. Others, with Hegesias, the Persuader of death, came to the conclusion that a life is not worth living if it is devoid of pleasure.

Such are two examples of the Minor Socratic Schools. The greatest of the Socratic schools, however, referred to as the Major Socratic School, was the Academy of Plato, which stayed closer to the original intent of the teachings of Socrates.