Socrates

Socrates (Greek: Σωκράτης, 470–399 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher who is widely credited with laying the foundations of Western philosophy.

Life

Most of what is now known about Socrates is derived from information that recurs across various contemporary sources: the dialogues written by Plato, one of Socrates' students; the works of Xenophon, one of his contemporaries; and writings by Aristophanes and Aristotle. Anything Socrates wrote himself has not survived, although some scholars consider Plato's Apology to be a fairly accurate record of Socrates' defense at his trial for treason. Judging by his actions, he considered the rule of the Thirty Tyrants less legitimate than that of the democratic senate who sentenced him to death.

Mysticism

As depicted in the dialogues of Plato, Socrates often seems to manifest a mystical side, discussing reincarnation and the mystery religions; however, this is generally attributed to Plato. Regardless, this cannot be dismissed out of hand, as we cannot be sure of the differences between the views of Plato and Socrates; in addition, there seem to be some corollaries in the works of Xenophon. In the culmination of the philosophic path as discussed in Plato's Symposium and Republic, one comes to the Sea of Beauty or to the sight of the form of the Good in an experience akin to mystical revelation; only then can one become wise. (In the Symposium, Socrates credits his speech on the philosophic path to his teacher, the priestess Diotima, who is not even sure if Socrates is capable of reaching the highest mysteries). In the Meno, he refers to the Eleusinian Mysteries, telling Meno he would understand Socrates' answers better if only he could stay for the initiations next week.

Perhaps the most interesting facet of this is Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daemonic sign", an averting (ἀποτρεπτικός) inner voice that Socrates heard only when Socrates was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics. In the Phaedrus, we are told Socrates considered this to be a form of "divine madness", the sort of insanity that is a gift from the gods and gives us poetry, mysticism, love, and even philosophy itself. Alternately, the sign is often taken to be what we would call "intuition"; however, Socrates' characterisation of the phenomenon as "daemonic" suggests that its origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts.

Satirical playwrights

He was prominently lampooned in Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds, produced when Socrates was in his mid-forties; he said at his trial (in Plato's version) that the laughter of the theatre was a harder task to answer than the arguments of his accusers. In the play he is ridiculed for his dirtiness, which is associated with the Laconising fad; also in plays by Callias, Eupolis, and Telecleides. In all of these, Socrates and the Sophists were criticised for "the moral dangers inherent in contemporary thought and literature".

Prose sources

Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle are the main sources for the historical Socrates; Xenophon and Plato were direct disciples of Socrates, and wrote the only continuous descriptions of Socrates that have come down to us. Aristotle refers frequently, but in passing, to Socrates in his writings. Almost all of Plato's works center around Socrates. However Plato's latter works appear to be more his own philosophy put into the mouth of his mentor.

The Socratic dialogues

The Socratic dialogues are a series of dialogues written by Plato in the form of discussions between Socrates and other persons of his time, or as discussions between Socrates' followers over his concepts. Plato's Phaedo is an example of this latter category. Although his Apology is a monologue delivered by Socrates, it is usually grouped with the dialogues.

The Apology professes to be a record of the actual speech that Socrates delivered in his own defence at the trial. In the Athenian jury system, an Apology is composed of three parts: a speech, followed by a counter-assessment, then some final words. "Apology" is a transliteration, not a translation, of the Greek apologia, meaning "defence"; in this sense it is not apologetic according to our contemporary use of the term.

Plato generally does not place his own ideas in the mouth of a specific speaker; he lets ideas emerge via the Socratic method, under the guidance of Socrates. Most of the dialogues present Socrates applying this method to some extent, but nowhere as completely as in the Euthyphro. In this dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro go through several iterations of refining the answer to Socrates' question: "What is the pious, and what the impious?"

In Plato's dialogues, learning appears as a process of remembering. The soul, before its incarnation in the body, was in the realm of Forms. There, it saw things the way they truly are, rather than the pale shadows or copies we experience on earth. By a process of questioning, the soul can be brought to remember the ideas in their pure form, thus bringing wisdom.

Especially for Plato's writings referring to Socrates, it is not always clear which ideas brought forward by Socrates (or his friends) actually belonged to Socrates and which of these may have been new additions or elaborations by Plato — this is known as the Socratic problem. Generally, the early works of Plato are considered to be close to the spirit of Socrates, whereas the later works – including Phaedo and the Republic – are considered to be possibly products of Plato's elaborations.

Xenophon also wrote a number of Socratic dialogues, though these are of much less philosophical interest. Xenephon's Socrates is a very different person from Plato's; Xenephon is less interested in the philosophy (and much less philosophically able) than is Plato.

Legacy

Almost immediately, the students of Socrates' set to work both on exercising their perceptions of his teachings in politics as well as developing many new philosophical schools of thought.

Influence on Platonism

Some of Athens' controversial and anti-democratic tyrants were contemporary or posthumous students of Socrates including Alcibiades and Critias. Critias' cousin, Plato would go on to found the Academy in 385 BC - which gained so much notoriety that its name Academy became the base word for an educational institution in later European languages. Plato's protege, another classic figure of the Hellenistic era, Aristotle went on to tutor Alexander the Great as well as to found his own school in 335 BC- the Lyceum, whose name also now means an educational institution.

However, whereas Socrates was shown to demote the importance of institutional knowledge such as mathematics or science in relation to the human condition and the self-examination of it in his dialogues, Plato would emphasize it with metaphysical overtones mirroring that of Pythagoras. Platonic and Aristotlean ideas would dominate Western thought well into the Renaissance. Aristotle himself was as much of a philosopher as he was a scientist with rudimentary work in the fields of biology and physics.

Influence on Cynicism

Socratic thought in respect to challenging conventions, especially in stressing a simplistic way of living, became divorced from Plato's more monied and philosophical pursuits but was inherited heavily by one of Socrates' older and diehard students, Antisthenes. He became another originator of a philosophy in the years after Socrates' death - Cynicism. Antisthenes attacked Plato and Alcibiades over what he deemed as their betrayal of Socrates' tenets in his writings with a ferocity that made the word cynic synonymous with criticism and pragmatism.

Influence on Stoicism

The idea of austerity being hand in hand with an ethical life or one with piety, ignored by Plato and Aristotle and somewhat dealt with by the Cynics, formed the core of another philosophy in 281 BC - Stoicism when Zeno of Citium would discover Socrates' works and then learn from Crates, a Cynic philosopher. None of the schools however, would inherit his tendency to openly associate with and respect women or the regular citizen.

During the Middle Ages

While some of the later contributions of Socrates to Hellenistic Era culture and philosophy as well as the Roman Era has been lost to time, his teachings began a resurgence in both medieval Europe and the Islamic Middle East alongside those of Aristotle and Stoicism. Socrates is mentioned in the dialogue Kuzari by Jewish philosopher and Rabbi Yehuda Halevi in which a Jew instructs the Khazar king about Judaism. al-Kindi, a well-known Arabic philosopher, introduced and tried to reconcile Socrates and Hellenistic philosophy to an Islamic audience.

Socrates in the Renaissance

Socrates' stature in Western philosophy returned in full force with the Renaissance and the Age of Reason in Europe when political theory began to resurface under those like Locke and Hobbes. Voltaire even went so far as to write a satirical play about the Trial of Socrates. There were a number of paintings about his life including Socrates Tears Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure by Jean-Baptiste Regnault and The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David in the later 18th Century.

Modern Historical Effects

To this day, the Socratic method is still used in classrooms and law schools as a way of discussing complex topics in order to expose the underlying issues in both the subject and the speaker. Study of the enigmatic self-dubbed "midwife" has occupied countless scholars and academics with as many analyses in both the fields of historical inquiry and philosophical discussion. He is one of the few philosophers to have mentions in pop culture such as the movie Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and a Greek rock band to numerous busts in academic institutions in recognition of his contribution to education.

Criticism

Contemporary Criticism

Evaluation and reaction to Socrates has been undertaken with both historical and philosophical inquiry from the time of his death to the present day with a multitude of conclusions and perspectives. One of the initial criticisms levied against the philosopher was presented at his trial - that he was not the proponent of a philosophy but an individual with a method of undermining the fabric of Athenian society, a charge carried by the 500-man jury of Athenians which sentenced him to death. Although he was not directly prosecuted for his connection to Critias, leader of the Spartan-backed Thirty Tyrants, he was seen as a controversial figure that mentored oligarchs whom became abusive tyrants and undermined Athenian democracy. The Sophist establishment which he railed at in life survived him but was rapidly overtaken by the many philosophical schools of thought that Socrates influenced by the 3rd Century BC.

Criticism of Socrates' actions

Socrates' death is considered iconic and his status as a martyr of philosophy overshadowed most contemporary and posthumous criticism at the time. However, Xenophon attempts to explain that Socrates purposely welcomed the hemlock due to his old age using the arguably self-destructive testimony to the jury as evidence. Direct criticism of Socrates disappears at this point but there is a noticeable preference for Plato or Aristotle over the elements of Socratic philosophy even into the Middle Ages.

Modern Evaluation

Modern scholarship has held that with so much of the philosopher obscured and possibly even altered by Plato, it is impossible to gain a clear picture of Socrates amidst all the seeming contradictions. That both Cynics and Stoics, which carried heavy influence from Socratic thought, was unlike or even contrary to Platonism further illustrates this. This ambiguity and lack of reliability serves as the modern basis of criticism - that it is near impossible to know the real Socrates. Some controversy also exists about claims of Socrates exempting himself from the homosexual customs of Ancient Greece. There are some medieval scholars who write that Socrates did not believe in the Olympian gods to the point of being monotheistic. It is not entirely agreed if this was an attempt by later medieval scholars to reconcile him with the morals of their era. However, it is still commonly taught and held with little exception that Socrates is the founder of modern Western philosophy to the point that any philosophers before him are referred to as pre-Socratic.

See also

• Socrate, a symphonic drama by Erik Satie.
• On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, a treatise on Socrates and Socratic irony by Søren Kierkegaard.

Further reading and external links

• Apology of Socrates, by Plato. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Apology
• Bruell, Christopher (1999). On the Socratic Education: An Introduction to the Shorter Platonic Dialogues. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bruell, Christopher, (1994), “On Plato’s Political Philosophy.” Review of Politics 56: 261-82. Anthony Gottlieb named him the martyr and saint of philosophy (Monk & Raphael, 2000).

• Greek Philosophy: Socrates
• Project Gutenberg e-texts on Socrates, amongst others:
  • The Dialogues of Plato (see also Wikipedia articles on Dialogues by Plato)
  • The writings of Xenophon, such as the Memorablia and Hellenica.
  • The satirical plays by Aristophanes
  • Aristotle's writings
  • Voltaire's Socrates
  • The Second Story of Meno; a continuation of Socrates' dialogue with Meno in which the boy proves root 2 is irrational (by an anonymous author)
• A free audiobook of the Socratic dialogue Euthyphro at LibriVox
• SocraticMethod.net - A Socratic Method Research Portal
• An Introduction to Greek Philosophy, J. V. Luce, Thames & Hudson, NY, l992.
• Introduction to Philosophy, Jacques Maritain
• Greek Philosophers — Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, C. C. W. Taylor, R. M. Hare, and Jonathan Barnes, Oxford University Press, NY, 1998.
• Taylor, C. C. W. (2001). Socrates: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Richard Robinson, Plato's Earlier Dialectic, 2nd edition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1953). Ch. 2: Elenchus Ch. 3: Elenchus: Direct and Indirect
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Socrates (2005)
• Was Socrates right to submit to his punishment?