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October 30 - November 21, 2017
Socrates owes his renown to the impression he made on the people he met face to face, and above all to the fact that one of those people was Plato. It is mostly
through the dialogues of Plato that Socrates lives on today. In those dialogues, Socrates appears as one of the great literary characters of the ancient world—humorous, ironic, thoughtful, courageous, seductive, outrageous, and remarkably ugly. His personality stays relatively consistent through the many dialogues in which he appears, but there are also shifts of emphasis and doctrine.
The classic Socratic approach is, of course, to ask questions: what is virtue? What makes a good leader? Do you really think you are justified in what you are doing? Once you answer this first question, you’re done for. Socrates will expose the thoughtlessness of your assumptions—he will show you that you quite literally don’t know what you are talking about.
comic poet Aristophanes, a younger contemporary of Socrates who died in 385 BC. Aristophanes was the greatest writer of comedy in Athens, and makes Socrates an important character in a play called the Clouds.
Aristophanes is making it crystal clear that he thinks Socrates is a sophist. Surely this is wrong? As we’ll see, both Xenophon and Plato show Socrates clashing repeatedly with sophists. But of course, sophists could and did clash with one another. So Aristophanes evidently saw little distinction between Socrates and his sophistic contemporaries. After all, both Socrates and the sophists left their
opponents dazed by raining down arguments on them, and both traded in fine attention to the meanings of words.
Still more confusing is that Aristophanes uses Socrates to represent not only the sophists, but also the Pre-Socratic philosophers.
Xenophon, was out to defend Socrates.
his most famous work, the Anabasis—which means “going up,” in other words, back to Greece.
Xenophon’s Socrates is very different from Plato’s. As Xenophon himself tells us, his primary motivation is not to exploit the philosophical potential of Socrates as a character—as Plato did—but to vindicate Socrates and his way of life,
accusations were twofold: Socrates departed from traditional religion, and he corrupted the youth. Where Aristophanes stoked these slanders for humorous effect, Xenophon strenuously rejects both.
Xenophon also emphasizes Socrates’ hot-line to god. This was Socrates’ famous “divine sign,” something also mentioned more than once by Plato. Socrates could not exactly see the future, but he claimed that the gods would warn him to avoid certain activities when he began to undertake them.
Xenophon agrees with Plato that Socrates did nothing to avoid death once he’d been brought to trial. Far from it: in fact he went out of his way to outrage and offend the jurors in his impromptu defense speech. In both versions, but especially that of Xenophon, Socrates is stunningly arrogant.
Socrates was, it would seem, not trying to save his skin—he was trying to die
as he had lived, with perfect and uncompromising virtue.
Socrates’ supposed corruption of the youth.
these young men liked learning to catch out their elders.
Socrates was also seductive for these young men because they could admire his sort of virtue. His virtue was, in essence, independence and freedom. He was poor not because he had to be, but because he knew that an utterly destitute man can, paradoxically, be more self-sufficient than a man who has to worry about his wealth and hangers-on. For Socrates, the greatest slaves were tyrants, who had many enemies but also friends who might turn on them. As for sophists, they were nothing but whores who sold their supposed wisdom for cash. Socrates took no money for the wisdom he dispensed, and
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Socrates’ total freedom was precisely what they sought, freedom and self-sufficiency, even though they planned to pursue this goal through a political life.
Xenophon shows us how Socrates could use the desire of a young man for honor and political success by showing him that knowledge is the only sure route to these ends.
Socrates is being quite cunning here, because for him, of course, honor and political success were nothing to be prized. For him, it is knowledge itself which is valuable—success as a political leader is something he dangles as bait, to get his young friend to pursue what Socrates offers.
Xenophon gets across the basic point: to do anything virtuously is to do it well, and to act well means to act with knowledge.
But in many other respects Xenophon gives us a very different Socrates from the one we find in Plato. As we’ll see, in Plato Socrates makes a big deal of proclaiming his own ignorance. Plato’s Socrates is puzzled when the oracle at Delphi pronounces him the wisest man in Athens, because he knows that he knows nothing—how can he
be wise? By contrast, Socrates in Xenophon is swaggering with confidence in his own perfection. He tells the jury at his trial that the oracle at Delphi proclaimed him to be the wisest and most free of men, but in Xenophon’s telling this comes as no surprise. It simply confirms what Socrates knew all along, which is that he is the most virtuous man walking the earth. He does add, modestly, that the oracle stopped short of calling him a god.
Instead of claiming ignorance, Xenophon’s Socrates feels free to dispense advice on a wide range of topics. Often Xenophon puts rather banal ethi...
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Some of the ideas I’ve highlighted—for instance, the ideal of self-sufficiency and the focus on virtue as the only thing worth having—will be carried on by the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period, especially the Stoics and the Cynics.
Socrates was of course a prominent user of the Socratic method, if not its inventor. According to Plato, he had a very good reason for using the method, namely that he had no wisdom of his own to impart anyway.
When faced with Socrates’ questions, Meno and the other interlocutors say what they think about virtue, and Socrates gently, or not so gently, shows them that they have no idea what they’re talking about. They contradict
themselves, get into logical muddles, and wind up seeing that their ideas lead to outlandish and unbelievable results.
This is the classic version of Plato’s Socrates, as he emerges from a whole series of works which are often called the “Socratic dialogues.”
Like Xenophon, Plato has Socrates demolish the official accusations against him, that he rejects the gods and corrupts the youth. There is, however, less focus on these specific charges here than in Xenophon. In Plato’s version, Socrates’ main theme is the story of how he made himself so unpopular in Athens.
Socrates is stunned at the oracle’s pronouncement, because he knows that he is not really wise at all. Such wisdom as he has is only “human wisdom,” the nature of which he doesn’t really explain (20d). But he lacks what would be really valuable, namely divine wisdom—this would be absolutely certain knowledge of the most important things, such as virtue.
Thus Socrates sets out to discover the sense in which the oracle’s pronouncement might be true. Since he knows nothing of any value, one would expect it to be easy for him to find someone wiser than he is.
they get carried away with the little understanding they do possess, and assume that they must have true wisdom in addition to their little bit of expertise. Their false pretentions of wisdom far outweigh
the value of whatever it is they do know.
Socrates gradually realizes what the oracle at Delphi meant: he is the wisest of men not because he is so wise, but because he at least knows that he is not wise. His condition is something we have come to call “Socratic ignorance.” This ignorance is, paradoxically, a kind of knowledge: it is knowing that one does not know.
Socrates will reduce the interlocutor to a state of Socratic ignorance. He is doing
them a great favor, really. He is disabusing them of the impression that they know things they don’t really know.
Even though he can’t do what some sophists like Protagoras claimed to do, namely teach people how to live, he can at least show people that they do not yet know how to live. That will put you in the same boat as Socrates, still looking for wisdom; but until he’s purged you of your confidence in false beliefs, you won’t even bother looking.
Alongside Socratic ignorance, another of his trademarks is Socratic irony.1 For instance, surely when Socrates tries to get a definition of piety from Euthyphro, a man who is about to prosecute his own father for murdering a slave, this is meant ironically?
Though reducing people to Socratic ignorance is a genuine public service, Socrates also does it out of self-interest, because he believes that through this constant inquiry he has some hope of reaching true wisdom.
Why would anyone think that providing an account or definition of virtue is a good way to prove you are virtuous? Surely someone could be virtuous without being able to explain virtue? Socrates would disagree.
One of his fundamental assumptions is that anyone who knows what is good will choose it. Why would anyone deliberately choose what is bad? When it’s put like that, this doesn’t sound so paradoxical. But we do think, don’t we, that people deliberately choose things even though they are bad? Maybe even because they are bad, given the perversity of human nature? For Socrates this idea was absurd. For him, something’s being “good” obviously implies that it is worth choosing. So for someone to think that something is good is for them to think it worth choosing.
This Socratic position, which he argues for in several dialogues, is usually summed up in the phrase “no one does wrong willingly” (for instance, Gorgias 475e, Protagoras 358d). If I always want to do what is good, then my doing bad can only be the result of incomplete information. If I steal or kill, I must think stealing or killing is good, when really it is bad. This gets us closer to understanding Socrates’ strange way of conducting his search for the virtuous life. For him vice and wrongdoing are always the result of ignorance: not the benign Socratic ignorance of knowing one doesn’t
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The next step is obvious: if vice is ignorance, then perhaps virtue is knowledge. And indeed, in seeking knowledge of virtue, Socrates takes himself to be seeking virtue itself. He argues for this in other ways too. For example, he points out that things are only good or beneficial when used with knowledge
the apparently good thing becomes good only when you add wisdom.
So virtue is knowledge or wisdom; and Socrates says that he lacks knowledge and wisdom. He merely knows that he knows nothing.
But his special, Socratic brand of ignorance gives him an important advantage over his peers: he at least knows that his beliefs about virtue are deeply fallible.
What the interlocutors lack, when it comes to virtue, is the big picture—they lack general and consistent knowledge about virtue, even if they often get it right on particular occasions.
Plato’s Socrates, and Plato himself, worried that such people would also get it wrong on particular occasions, precisely because they lack general and consistent knowledge.
