Socrates
Socrates wrote nothing down. Not a single text, not a stray fragment, survives in his own hand. Everything known about the ancient Greek philosopher from Classical Athens comes secondhand, through the accounts of people who knew him or wrote about him after his death around 399 BC. His student Plato is the chief witness. So is the historian Xenophon, who was also his pupil. So is the comic playwright Aristophanes, who mocked him on the Athenian stage. These voices contradict one another so sharply that scholars gave the muddle its own name: the Socratic problem. How do you reconstruct a man who left no record of himself, and whose admirers each painted a different portrait? And why, in a city that tolerated skeptics and atheists, was this particular figure dragged before a jury, accused of impiety and corrupting the youth, and sentenced to drink poison? Those are the questions that follow.
Friedrich Schleiermacher launched an attack in 1818, in a work titled "The Worth of Socrates as a Philosopher." His target was Xenophon. Xenophon was a soldier, Schleiermacher argued, and therefore poorly placed to articulate Socratic ideas. Worse, Xenophon was biased, convinced that Athens had treated his friend and teacher unfairly, and so set out to prove a point rather than report impartially. The result, Schleiermacher said, was an uninspiring philosopher. By the early twentieth century, Xenophon's account was largely rejected.
Karl Joel pushed the doubt further, basing his arguments on Aristotle's view of the logos sokratikos. Joel suggested the Socratic dialogues were mostly fictional, their authors simply mimicking certain Socratic traits of conversation. In the mid-twentieth century, philosophers such as Olof Gigon and Eugène Dupréel built on Joel and proposed abandoning the search for a historical Socrates altogether, studying instead the many versions of his character and beliefs.
Gregory Vlastos offered a partial rescue. He argued that Plato's early dialogues fit the other evidence for a historical Socrates better than the later ones, an argument resting on the inconsistencies in Plato's own evolving portrait. Vlastos disregarded Xenophon's account except where it agreed with Plato. More recently, Charles H. Kahn hardened the skepticism, suggesting that only Plato's Apology carries any historical weight at all. The trial, it turns out, is the one event that resists being explained away.
Xenophon admired Socrates for his intelligence, patriotism, and courage on the battlefield, but he was no trained philosopher and could neither fully grasp nor articulate Socrates's arguments. He discusses him across four works: the Memorabilia, the Oeconomicus, the Symposium, and the Apology of Socrates, with another story tucked into his Anabasis. The Oeconomicus recounts a discussion of practical household management. The Memorabilia gathers various stories into a new defense against the charges of corrupting the youth and opposing the gods. W. K. C. Guthrie judged that Xenophon's account portrays a Socrates of "intolerable smugness and complacency."
Plato presents a harder puzzle. He was Socrates's pupil and outlived him by five decades, and the question of how faithfully he represents his teacher remains unsettled. One common account holds that Plato tried at first to depict the historical Socrates accurately, then later began putting his own views into the philosopher's mouth. Under this reading there is a Socratic Socrates of the earlier works and a Platonic Socrates of the later ones, though the boundary is blurred and the chronology rests on little evidence. Set side by side, the two portraits diverge: Xenophon's Socrates is duller, less humorous, less ironic, lacking the famous ignorance and the method of questioning, and leaning instead on enkrateia, self-control.
Aristophanes painted the most hostile picture. In his comedy The Clouds, Socrates is a central character, a caricature drifting toward sophism, ridiculed as an absurd atheist absorbed in natural philosophy. Aristotle stands apart from all of them. He was not a contemporary, but studied under Plato at the Academy for twenty years, and he scrutinizes Socrates's doctrines without the emotional tie that bound Xenophon and Plato to their teacher. Whatever else the sources disagree on, one thing is certain: by the age of 45, Socrates had already captured the interest of Athenians as a philosopher.
Sophroniscus was a stoneworker and Phaenarete a midwife, and their son was born in 470 or 469 BC in the Athenian deme of Alopece, making Socrates a citizen of relatively affluent parents. He inherited part of his father's estate, as custom dictated, which secured a life reasonably free of money worries. His education followed Athenian law and custom: reading and writing, plus extra lessons in gymnastics, poetry, and music. He married twice, the order unclear, wedding Xanthippe when he was in his fifties and also marrying a daughter of the statesman Aristides. He had three sons with Xanthippe, and he served in the Peloponnesian War, distinguishing himself in three campaigns according to Plato.
He was notoriously ugly. A flat, turned-up nose, bulging eyes, a large belly, the kind of face his friends joked about. Socrates was indifferent to material pleasures and to his own comfort. He neglected hygiene, bathed rarely, walked barefoot, and owned a single ragged coat. He moderated his eating, drinking, and sex without practicing full abstention. Though drawn to the young, he resisted that passion, more interested, as Plato describes, in educating their souls than in seeking sex from his disciples.
Leon the Salaminian became the test of his character. As Plato relates in the Apology, the Thirty Tyrants, who began ruling in 404 BC, summoned Socrates and four others to the Tholos and ordered them to arrest Leon for execution. Socrates alone refused, choosing to risk the tyrants' wrath rather than take part in what he considered a crime. He took no side in the rivalry between democrats and oligarchs. He criticized both.
A poet named Meletus brought the charge in 399 BC, demanding the death penalty for asebeia, impiety, joined by two other accusers, Anytus and Lycon. The indictment ran on two counts: corrupting the minds of Athenian youth, and worshipping false gods while failing to worship the gods of Athens. After a delay of a month or two, in late spring or early summer, the trial began and likely consumed most of a single day. A jury of hundreds of male Athenian citizens heard it and found him guilty by majority vote.
The political weather mattered. In 404 BC the Spartans had crushed Athens at the naval Battle of Aegospotami, laid siege to the city, and installed the Thirty Tyrants in place of the democracy. The oligarchs were eventually overthrown and the democrats reclaimed Athens. Socrates had not stood for democracy during the Thirty's reign, and most of his pupils had opposed the democrats. An amnesty granted to Athenian citizens in 403 BC was meant to forestall civil war, yet accusers could still draw rhetorical fuel from events before that date.
Two religious suspicions drove the impiety charge. Socrates had rejected the anthropomorphism of traditional Greek religion, denying that the gods did wicked things as humans do. He also seemed to believe in a daimonion, an inner voice his accusers cast as having divine origin. In Plato's Apology he answers the rumors, denying he is an atheist naturalist or a sophist, and noting the contradiction in being charged with both atheism and worshipping false gods. He calls himself "God's gift" to Athens, arguing the city itself would be the greatest loser in condemning him.
Found guilty, Socrates was invited to propose his own penalty. He could have asked for exile and did not. According to Plato he suggested free meals daily in recognition of his worth, or, more seriously, a fine of one mina of silver, all he had. The jurors declined and ordered death by hemlock. Why Athens convicted him is still argued: some read it as religious persecution, some as political, and a newer view synthesizes the two, noting that religion and state were not separate in ancient Athens. Of all the works written about the trial, only three survive: Plato's Apology, Xenophon's Apology, and Xenophon's Memorabilia.
Elenchus is the engine of Plato's Socrates, the method of refutation, most prominent in early works like the Apology, Crito, Gorgias, and Republic I. It begins when Socrates approaches a supposed expert, often before an audience of young men, and asks for a definition: what is virtue, what is justice, what is courage? As the questions accumulate, the expert's answers begin to contradict the original definition, until the conclusion lands that he never knew it at all. A new definition is offered, and it too falls under scrutiny. Round after round, Socrates and his interlocutor hope to approach the truth, though more often they reveal their shared ignorance. Because those definitions usually represent mainstream opinion, the whole common view is thrown into doubt.
Socrates tested his own opinions the same way, which is why he taught no fixed doctrine, only the search for truth alongside his pupils. Scholars have even questioned whether a single Socratic method existed. In 1982 Gregory Vlastos argued that the method could not establish whether a proposition was true or false; it could only expose that a person's beliefs were inconsistent. That sparked two readings: a constructivist approach, in which Socrates aims to refute a claim and build toward affirmative statements, and a non-constructivist one, in which he merely shows the inconsistency between premises and conclusion.
Definition came first in his practice. He gathered clear examples of a virtue, then sought what they held in common. Guthrie set this against the backdrop of the sophists, who had challenged the meaning of the virtues; Socrates's hunt for definitions was an effort to clear the air of their radical skepticism. Not everyone agreed he held to it. The philosopher Peter Geach, granting that Socrates endorsed the priority of definition, called the technique fallacious, arguing one can know a proposition without being able to define its terms.
"I know that I know nothing" is the saying fixed to his name, drawn from a statement in Plato's Apology and echoed across the early writings. On trial, with his life at stake, Socrates says of a man named Evenus: "Certainly I would pride and preen myself if I knew these things, but I do not know them, gentlemen." Yet elsewhere he claims knowledge outright, telling the same jury, "to do injustice and disobey my superior, god or man, this I know to be evil and base," and assuring Callicles that what his soul believes "will be the very truth."
The contradiction has drawn many explanations. Some read it as irony or pedagogical modesty, a way to make the interlocutor think for himself. Some say Socrates juggles two senses of knowledge: a systematic mastery of ethics he firmly disclaims, and a lower cognition he may accept. Norman Gulley held that he feigned ignorance to draw interlocutors into talking; Terence Irwin insisted his words be taken literally. Vlastos proposed a sharper split: Knowledge-C, the certain and unquestionable, and Knowledge-E, derived from the elenchus, so that Socrates speaks truly both when he disavows the first and when he claims the second. Not all accepted this semantic dualism. James H. Lesher countered that Socrates ties one word to one meaning, and that while he professed no knowledge of the nature of the virtues, he thought people could know some ethical propositions.
Irony shadows all of it. The Euthyphro is filled with it, opening as Socrates meets a man prosecuting his own father for murder and remarks that surely only someone "far progressed in wisdom" could do such a thing correctly, then declaring it "most important that I become your student." Scholars split on the purpose. Some, since the Hellenistic period, see playful bait for an audience's attention; others see a message concealed for those who can sort the ironic from the sincere. Across the debates runs a consensus: admitting one's lack of knowledge is the first step toward wisdom.
With the exception of the Epicureans and the Pyrrhonists, nearly every philosophical current after Socrates traced its roots to him. Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Cynics, and the Stoics all claimed descent, and interest kept rising until the third century AD. Because Socrates handed down no answers about the purpose of life or the nature of arete, the schools diverged wildly in reading him. Antisthenes held that virtue alone mattered and despised material goods, a line the Cynics and Diogenes carried on. Aristippus took the opposite path, accumulating wealth, living luxuriously, and founding the hedonistic Cyrenaic school after returning to his home city of Cyrene. The Stoics leaned on him heavily, using the Socratic method to avoid inconsistency. Arcesilaus, taking over the Academy about eighty years after Plato founded it, rebuilt its doctrine into Academic Skepticism centered on Socratic ignorance, and the Stoics and Skeptics then competed over who was his true heir.
Muslim scholars carried him east. Plato's works were translated into Arabic by figures such as Al-Kindi and Jabir ibn Hayyan, and Socrates was admired for fusing his ethics with his way of living, his doctrines reshaped to argue for monotheism and an afterlife. In the Christian world little of his thought survived directly, though writings by Lactantius, Eusebius, and Augustine were preserved in the Byzantine Empire and returned west after the fall of Constantinople. During the early Italian Renaissance two pictures emerged. Leonardo Bruni translated many dialogues and his pupil Giannozzo Manetti wrote a Life of Socrates, both presenting a civic, republican humanist, censoring passages that hinted at pederasty or that the daimon was a god. The Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, a philosopher and priest, drew instead a holy Socrates, finding parallels with the life of Jesus Christ.
The moderns quarreled with him. Hegel called him a turning point for introducing free subjectivity, yet still justified the Athenian court, since such self-determination threatened the Sittlichkeit of the state. Søren Kierkegaard considered Socrates his teacher and wrote his thesis, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, casting him as a pure ironist whose refusal to write signaled humble acceptance of his ignorance. Friedrich Nietzsche resented him, blaming him in The Birth of Tragedy of 1872 for the decline of Greek civilization and attacking, in The Twilight of the Idols, his equation of reason, virtue, and happiness. After the Second World War, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Karl Popper saw an icon of individual conscience; Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem of 1963, suggested his ceaseless questioning could guard against the banality of evil. The man who wrote nothing still set the terms of the argument.
Common questions
Who was Socrates the Greek philosopher?
Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher from Classical Athens, born in 470 or 469 BC and dead in 399 BC. He is often called the first Western moral philosopher and was a major inspiration on his student Plato, who largely founded the tradition of Western philosophy.
Why did Socrates write nothing down?
Socrates authored no texts of his own, and everything known about him comes from the accounts of others. The chief sources are his pupils Plato and the historian Xenophon, the comic dramatist Aristophanes, and Plato's pupil Aristotle, who was born after Socrates's death.
What is the Socratic problem?
The Socratic problem is the difficulty of reconstructing Socrates's true thoughts because the ancient accounts of him are contradictory. Friedrich Schleiermacher attacked Xenophon's reliability in 1818, and later scholars such as Gregory Vlastos and Charles H. Kahn argued that only Plato's early dialogues, or even just Plato's Apology, carry real historical weight.
Why was Socrates sentenced to death?
In 399 BC Socrates was accused of impiety, called asebeia, and of corrupting the youth of Athens. A jury of hundreds of male Athenian citizens found him guilty by majority vote, and after he proposed his own penalty the jurors ordered death by drinking hemlock.
What is the Socratic method?
The Socratic method, or elenchus, is a process of refutation that proceeds through short questions and answers. Socrates asks a supposed expert for a definition of something like virtue or justice, then through further questions exposes that the expert's beliefs are contradictory, most prominent in Plato's early works such as the Apology, Crito, and Gorgias.
What did Socrates mean by knowing that he knows nothing?
Socrates frequently proclaimed his own ignorance, a stance captured in the saying "I know that I know nothing," attributed to him from Plato's Apology. Scholars debate whether he genuinely thought he lacked knowledge or feigned modesty, but there is consensus that acknowledging one's lack of knowledge is the first step toward wisdom.
How did Socrates influence later philosophy?
Almost all philosophical currents after Socrates, except the Epicureans and Pyrrhonists, traced their roots to him, including Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Cynics, and the Stoics. His influence continued through Islamic scholars, the Italian Renaissance humanists, and modern thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt.
All sources
4 references cited across the entry
- 2Socrates (469—399 B.C.E.)Internet encyclopedia of philosophy
- 3PhaedoPlato