Socrates

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Socrates was an Athenian of the fifth century BCE who wrote nothing, founded no school, and was tried and put to death by his own city for impiety and for corrupting the young — and who nonetheless became the founding image of the philosopher in the West. Almost everything attributed to him comes from others. He stands at the hinge of Greek thought less as a body of doctrine than as a way of proceeding: relentless questioning in pursuit of how a life should be lived.

The difficulty is that he is known only at second hand, and the witnesses do not agree. Plato made him the speaker of nearly every dialogue, and the Socrates of those works grows steadily into a vehicle for Plato’s own metaphysics; Xenophon drew a plainer, more conventional moralist; the comic poet Aristophanes mocked him onstage as a sophist with his head in the clouds. Scholarship calls this the Socratic problem — the question of how much of any portrait is the man and how much the author. Most historians now grant that a real Socrates is recoverable in outline, while doubting that his exact teaching can be lifted clean from the texts that preserve him.

What the early dialogues consistently show is a method rather than a system. He approached others claiming no wisdom of his own, asked them to define what they took themselves to understand — courage, piety, justice — and by patient questioning exposed the confusion beneath their confidence. This is the elenchus: refutation that clears the ground rather than building on it. He is reported to have held that he was wise only in knowing the extent of his own ignorance, and that no one does wrong willingly, since to see the good truly is to choose it. Virtue, on this account, is a kind of knowledge.

His trial in 399 BCE, after Athens had lost a long war and turned on its own, ended in a death sentence carried out by hemlock. Plato’s Apology gives the defense, and the Phaedo the death scene; both are written, and how far either records what was said cannot be settled. What is not in doubt is the effect. The refusal to flee, the insistence that the unexamined life is not worth living, the calm before execution — these fixed a pattern that later antiquity treated as the philosopher’s own.

Almost every subsequent school claimed him. The Platonists made him the herald of an eternal order glimpsed beyond the senses; the Stoics took him as the model of the sage indifferent to fortune; the Cynics and Skeptics each found their own Socrates in his poverty or his professed not-knowing. Later esoteric and mystical readers absorbed him chiefly through the Platonic and Neoplatonic line, where his turning of the soul toward the good was read as the first step of an ascent. The figure proved endlessly adaptable precisely because he left no text to fix him. He asked the questions, and let others write the answers down.

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→ Related: Plato · Neoplatonism · Gnosis