Socrates’ life coincides with a period in which various intellectual movements seemed, to conservatives, to mount a concerted attack on traditional values. These movements I will gather under one name, “the new learning,” without meaning to imply that any one person subscribed to all of them. The two elements in the new learning that seem to have troubled traditionalists the most were natural science and forensic argument. Socrates was associated in the public eye with the new learning; this association is one of the few things we know about him with historical certainty. Probably he was part of the movement in his own unique way, although he had little to do with science and was opposed to the teaching of public speaking.

science and argument

The natural science of the day differed from modern science in many ways, but it has this similarity: it sought to displace traditional supernatural explanations with natural ones, and in so doing it encountered resistance (though not so fierce as the modern American resistance to the teaching of evolution). Early cosmologists proposed accounts of the beginnings of things in terms of familiar natural processes, while early anthropologists explained culture as produced by human invention, and one historian explained human events in terms of an empirical theory of human nature. Taken together, these theories leave no room for traditional explanations that appeal to action by the gods. The new learning offered the ancient Greeks cosmology without creation, human progress without divine teaching, and human history without divine intervention.

There are two texts that may be considered as fundamental for the understanding of the Socratic notion of self-examination: one from the Apology, one from the Phaedrus. (In this chapter, I shall restrict myself to discussion of the notion as it appears in Plato, without claiming that Plato gives us the authentic, (i.e., historical) Socratic version – although I know of no evidence that would seriously interfere with such a claim.)

1. Apology 37E3–38A6: Perhaps someone might say “But Socrates – why shouldn’t you be able to leave Athens and keep your mouth shut, living a quiet life?” This is what it’s most difficult of all to persuade some of you about. If I say that living a quiet life is disobedience to the god, and that therefore it’s impossible to do it, you won’t believe me because you’ll think I’m being ironical. If on the other hand I say that it really is a good of the highest order for a human being to spend each day in discussions about virtue [or ‘excellence’, ‘goodness’: aretê] and the other things you hear me conversing about , and examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is unliveable for a human being – if I say that, you’ll believe me even less.

2. …

The way of address has led to a λόγος capable of going down to the things themselves and articulating them according to the way they show themselves. This way to the things themselves is itself rooted already in a kind of perceptive response that grows out of the most rudimentary encounters between living things and the things with which they live. Such encounters involve a logic of cooperation between the powers of the soul and the nature of things. Things express themselves according to a λόγος capable of awakening those natural capacities of living beings by which they first become alive to things. The site of this awakening activity Aristotle calls τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι, perceiving. If we attend carefully to what this middle-voiced infinitive says, it will not be possible to think the activity of perceiving in purely passive terms as the mere reception of sensations. Rather, as Heidegger puts it, “With αἴσθησις [Aristotle] thinks the ‘apprehending’ [Vernehmen] of beings in the natural way, a hearing that is outstanding in that the senses involved thereby are those with which it mediates access.” Apprehending in this natural sense involves a kind of cooperative mediation between the perceiving and perceived.

Ecological justice is cultivated by an ethics of truth: it is nourished by concerned address and attuned response, and it grows over time in and through the attempt to put things into their proper words. The ethics of truth is rooted in a twofold responsibility that conditions the way human-beings in-habit the world. At the surface, this twofold responsibility announces itself in our rudimentary encounters with perceptible things; from the depths, it is heard in our attempts to articulate the intelligibility of things. At the surface, responsibility is twofold insofar as our encounters in perceiving at once lend themselves to our perceptive abilities to respond and awaken us to an insistent unicity that enjoins response even as it remains recalcitrant to human articulation. From the depths, responsibility is twofold insofar as our abilities to respond intelligibly to the coherent integrity of things awaken us to the expression of the whole that presses upon us an obligation to speak in light of the good and the beautiful, however dimly discerned. The human ability to respond thus opens human-being to responsibility from two directions.

In Plato’s Apology, a version of the defense speech that Socrates delivered in 399 when he was charged with the potentially capital offense of introducing new gods and corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates divides his accusers into two groups. On the one hand, there are Anytus and his cronies, who have fi led the complaint and hauled him into court. These men are dangerous enough, he says, but he fears another group, much more: “those who have taken the majority of you in from childhood, persuading you and laying the utterly untruthful charge that a certain Socrates is an intellectual, a theorist about the firmament, an investigator of everything that lies beneath the earth, and one who makes the weaker argument the stronger” (Apology 18A-B). These antagonists are numerous and have been misrepresenting Socrates for a long while, infecting the minds of the jurors when they were still young and impressionable, with no one on hand to raise objections. But the worst of it is that they are anonymous, “save if one of them happens to be a comic poet” (18C). The influence of these ancient accusers, Socrates asserts, is evident in the indictment that has been brought against him, which mentions just such pursuits on his part. For, Socrates tells the jurors, “you yourselves have seen, in Aristophanes’ comedy, a kind of Socrates carried aloft and claiming to walk on air and uttering all sorts of other nonsense, about which I know nothing whatever, neither much nor little” (19C).

In deciding what to do, people often work with a distinction between what is good as a means (to something else) and what is good as an end. If one does x for the sake of y, then one is taking x to be good as a means and y to be good as an end. Some ends – “intermediate ends” – are themselves means to further ends. But if we are to avoid an infinite succession of means to ends – since that would never allow us to act at all – some ends will have to be final ends: single good things for the sake of which everything else in the relevant teleological (means/end) progression is ultimately desired. All three of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle take this ball and run with it. They believe not only that every deliberate action is generated by a desire for a single final end, but, more strongly, that, for humans, this final end is the same in every case: happiness.

True, Plato and Aristotle depart from Socrates in believing that there are some motivated actions which are not deliberate actions. Both believe there are such things as “akratic” actions, generated by irrational desires (for food, drink, sex, and the like). Both suppose that these irrational desires sometimes overwhelm (out-muscle) the deliberate desire for good which would otherwise have produced a quite different action. But not Socrates. Socrates holds that all motivated actions whatever are deliberate actions – that is, actions generated by the desire for a final good or end, happiness, which lies at the top of a means/end structure running all the way down to the actual action done.

Socrates is acknowledged to have been a moral philosopher of the first order: the founder of virtue ethics and the chief exponent of the Socratic Method (the elenctic method of question-and-answer cross-examination). It is, however, also common to underplay the idea that he was very much a man of his own time in respect of the supernatural, assuming in his speech and thought the existence of gods vastly superior to ourselves in power and wisdom, and other such conventional Greek religious commitments. Of course, Socrates’ trial and execution on a charge of impiety further indicates that he did not insulate his religious beliefs from those many other novel ones he had arrived at philosophically. Rather, our texts indicate that Socrates understood his religious commitments to be integral to his philosophical mission of moral examination and rectification; conversely, he used the rationally derived convictions underlying that mission to reshape the religious conventions of his time in the service of establishing the new enterprise of philosophy. The direct legacy of that project is the rational theology of Plato, the Stoics, and others. That, in any case, is the overarching thesis of this chapter. My goal in what follows is to delineate and justify it by offering a sketch of the religious dimension of Socratic philosophy – one that illustrates the way that Socrates both challenged and renewed the religious conceptions of his time.

INTRODUCTION

At the end of the Socrates chapter in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius asserts that out of all the friends and students of Socrates, seven have to be regarded as the most important ones. These are the four Athenians – Antisthenes, Aeschines, Plato, and Xenophon – as well as Euclides from Megara (who must not be confused with the well-known mathematician with the same name, who lived in Alexandria about 100 years later), Aristippus from Cyrene, and Phaedo from Elis. All seven wrote books, but only Plato’s and Xenophon’s are still preserved. Thus, when we talk about the Socratics, we have Plato and Xenophon primarily in mind. The other five were students of Socrates, as much as Plato and Xenophon were. So their writings, if they had been preserved, would stand on an equal footing with those of Plato and Xenophon, and would deserve the same attention as representations of the influence of their common teacher, Socrates. Since these writings have been lost, their place will have to be taken by what can be learned from the texts of various other authors who referred to their writings and doctrines. How much this broadens the spectrum of Socrates’ influence is clear from the very different views that Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Plato hold on the issue of pleasure (hêdonê).

Especially in the modern age, Socrates is sanctified as a defender of free speech, honest and relentless inquiry, and the love of truth. Other philosophers too have shared these commitments. But Socrates stood up for them at the cost of his own life. In enacting his commitments as he did, Socrates became more than a theorist: in some sense, he was also an actor on the political stage.

In light of the enormous difficulties inherent in the effort to locate either the philosophy of the historical Socrates, or a Socratic philosophy about whose content the major ancient authors on Socrates agree, in this chapter I will confine myself principally to the Platonic “Socrates.” When referring to “Socrates,” I mean the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues. I have taken note of several interesting and relevant points of contact with other portrayals of Socrates where doing so is useful to my discussion. While confining myself mainly to the Platonic Socrates, I shall, unless otherwise noted, suspend judgment about the relation between Plato and Socrates.

The things said in this book, itself a second birth, took root in the wake of the births of my two daughters: Chloe Aliza and Hannah Aveline. The appearance of these two beginners was for me an awakening in which the world came to life in new ways as two new lives found their ways into the world. They arrived with a wonderful openness to things, indeed, with the openness of wonder. Listening at first largely by touch, they felt their way into the world. Each was in her own way receptive to the myriad expression of things. As she learned to use her hands, Chloe would slowly, determinately reach out for a toy wooden block that, once procured, released the secrets of its insistent solidity as she turned it over, pressed upon it, dropped and recovered it, and finally, as if its very essence could be tasted, placed it in her mouth. And Hannah, always with an irrepressible smile, would stretch out her hand toward the water dripping from the spigot in the bath, feel its inviting warmth and elusive liquidity, try and fail to grasp it, only then to announce with a screech of pure delight that what you really need to do with this is splash.

Socrates famously claims to lack knowledge or wisdom. This profession of ignorance seems to raise a number of questions. There is the question of what precisely he takes himself to be ignorant of – or, conversely, what categories of knowledge, if any, he takes himself to have. There is also the question of what precisely it means for him to profess ignorance – or, conversely, what conception of knowledge he is presupposing, such that he considers himself not to have knowledge (at least on some subjects). And there is the question of Socrates’ attitude toward his supposed ignorance: is it a matter for regret or despondency, or are there, in his view, positive aspects to being in such a state? While I believe that some progress can be made, and indeed has been made, on these questions, the picture that will emerge from this discussion is not as neat and tidy as are the treatments of this topic by some other scholars.

As with all discussions of Socrates, it is necessary to begin by making clear who is meant by “Socrates.” I shall be speaking almost entirely of the character Socrates as portrayed in a certain subsection of Plato’s dialogues. The Socrates of Xenophon at one point disparages inquiry into the physical world, in part on the basis that neither he nor anyone else can have knowledge of such matters (Memorabilia 1.1.12–15). But Xenophon’s Socrates never professes ignorance about the matters that he mainly discusses, and that he considers it especially important to study, namely ethical matters.

Plato’s Socratic dialogues repeatedly exhibit a distinctive feature of the main character of those dialogues – the so-called Socratic method. Plato highlights this feature of Socrates when he has his main character in the Apology blame his prosecution on his customary method ( 27b2). Aristotle highlights this feature of Socrates when he limits the two things that can fairly be attributed to Socrates to “inductive arguments and defining the universal” (Metaphysics 1078b27–29). Nevertheless, the nature of this so-called Socratic method has been subject to a variety of questions, puzzles, and problems. Indeed, two prominent Socratic scholars have recently been led to proclaim “that there is no such thing as ‘the Socratic [method].’ ” I maintain that such a response to these questions, puzzles, and problems is neither necessary nor desirable. Plato’s Socratic dialogues coherently present Socrates practicing a distinctive philosophical method featuring a common form, a common strategy, and a common epistemological presupposition.

a common form: the elenchos

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates explains at length why he is being prosecuted. Socrates begins his explanation by doubting that he is being prosecuted because he is believed to be guilty of the official charges brought forward by Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon. Rather, he suggests that the jurors will convict him of older accusations brought forward by a variety of individuals to the effect that he “is guilty of wrongdoing in that he busies himself studying things in the sky and below the earth; he makes the worse argument into the stronger argument, and he teaches these same things to others” (19b4-c1; Grube trans.). But Socrates even doubts that these accusations explain his prosecution. Instead, he suggests that he is being prosecuted because of a certain practice he has engaged in at least since Chaerephon visited the Delphic oracle and received the response that no one was wiser than Socrates. This practice that Socrates and his young imitators have employed has angered and embarrassed many men who were reputed to be wise. Consequently, these men have leveled accusations against Socrates that could be leveled at any philosopher. These latter accusations are, however, trumped up as a result of the anger and embarrassment that Socrates and his young imitators have engendered by exposing the ignorance of these men.

In 399 bce, the Athenian citizen Socrates, son of Sophroniscus of the deme (township) Alopece, was tried by an Athenian court on the charge of impiety (asebeia). He was found guilty by a narrow majority of the empanelled judges and executed in the public prison a few days later. The trial and execution constitute the best-documented events in Socrates’ life and a defining moment in the relationship between Greek philosophy and Athenian democracy. Ever since, philosophers and historians have sought to explain troubling aspects of the case: Why was Socrates, the philosophical model of a good man, charged with public wrongdoing? Why was he convicted and why on such a close vote? Was he guilty of impiety or other crimes? Why did he undergo trial and execution, rather than leaving Athens to pursue his philosophical investigations elsewhere? Were his loyalties owed to Athens, to himself, or to the world? And, perhaps most pressing: how did a democratic community, committed to the value of free speech and public debate, come to convict and execute its most famous philosopher-citizen? Because there are no simple answers to these questions the ancient tradition and modern scholarship on the trial and its aftermath are rich and of enduring interest.

In speaking about those thinkers who set down “love or desire among the beings as a source,” Aristotle suggests an approach to Empedocles that is at once presumptuous and condescending. He writes, “For if one were to pursue and take hold of Empedocles' thinking [διάνοιαν], rather than what he said inarticulately [ψελλίζεσθαι], one would find friendship was the cause of good things and strife of the bad.” The presumption lies in Aristotle's suggestion that he is able to discern the genuine thrust of Empedoclean thinking independently of the things he said inarticulately. The condescension is heard in the Greek ψελλίζεσθαι, which suggests the babbling of children. Indeed, at the end of his rehearsal of the positions of his predecessors in Metaphysics I, Aristotle repeats the talk of “baby-talk,” extending it beyond the thinking of Empedocles and suggesting, “The first philosophy concerning all things is like babbling [ψελλιζομένῃ], for it is young and just beginning.” Such statements, however, stand in tension with both the manner in which Aristotle's own philosophical thinking proceeds and the things he himself says about the ancients elsewhere.

introduction

On his way to court, as a defendant against the charges – of not worshipping the city’s gods; introducing new gods; and corrupting the youth – which will lead to his conviction and execution, Socrates meets his officious Athenian compatriot Euthyphro. Euthyphro is bringing a prosecution of his own father for murder, an action that most Athenians would regard with horror as violating the divine obligation of filial piety. To Euthyphro’s boast that he has knowledge of the divine, and of piety and impiety, Socrates replies: “It is indeed most important, my admirable Euthyphro, that I should become your pupil, and as regards this indictment challenge Meletus [one of the three citizen-prosecutors of Socrates] … and say to him … that … I have become your pupil.” (Euphr. 5a-b)

You may find it hard to believe that Socrates is sincere in his admiring desire to become Euthyphro’s pupil. This is a prime instance of the Socratic speeches in Plato’s dialogues which many readers have found it necessary, or desirable, to interpret as spoken ironically: in this case, implying that the smug Euthyphro actually has nothing to teach Socrates. For ‘irony’ is, in a representative definition, “saying something with the intent that the message is understood as conveying the opposite or an otherwise different meaning” – although we must immediately ask, understood by whom? Sometimes, by an addressee who is expected to understand the irony, in which case irony can be a graceful and playful way of conveying meaning.