SOCRATES. - One of the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece and one of the greatest personalities of all time. Born in Athens in 469 B.C., to the sculptor Sophroniscus and the midwife Phaenarete, he first practiced his father's art; but the "daimonion" (δαιμόνιον τι), which spoke within him as a divine voice (Plato, Ap., 29-30), suggested to him the "mission" of teaching, confirmed to him by the oracle of Delphi.
To this mission, which he considered divine and inescapable until death, S. devoted his entire life, neglecting everything else, including his wife Xanthippe and his children. He did not keep a proper school but taught by conversing in the marketplaces, in the gymnasium, through the streets of Athens, wherever he met people willing to listen to him, ready for "dialogue." He did not leave Athens, except to fulfill his duties as a soldier (in his youth he took part in the battles of Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis); he abstained from politics, but acted with his word powerfully upon the life of his time. His harsh criticisms of his contemporaries and of the democratic regime earned him the hatred of his adversaries. At the age of 70 three citizens (Meletus, Anytus and Lycon) accused him of corrupting the youth and of teaching beliefs contrary to the religion of the State. Brought to trial, he disdained to defend himself against the accusations, made an apologia for his mission and refused to renounce it. Found guilty by a very narrow majority, he could have chosen exile, but instead, in the debate to fix the penalty, he declared that he considered himself worthy of being maintained in the Prytaneum, that is, at public expense, like citizens of merit. Condemned to death, despite the insistence of friends and disciples, he refused to escape from prison so as not to offend the laws of his homeland and wished to bear witness, by his death, to the justice that throughout his life he had taught others to respect. He drank the hemlock with the serenity of the just man (399 B.C.). To the very last moment he urged the faithful who were present to "take care of themselves," to be good and not to think of him, whom Asclepius, this time a good physician, looking beyond the bodily life, was sending, amid the attentive wonder of disciples and friends, into the empyrean of just spirits (Phaed., 115-18).
Besides the Phaedo, the Apology and the Crito are the dialogues that have immortalized the life and death of S. His personality is exceptional: his way of living, of questioning and answering disconcerted and astonished interlocutors and listeners. S. disturbed minds and generated doubts in them, that is, he forced them to inquiry, to examination of themselves (he made the Delphic motto "know thyself" his own); to philosophize for him is to "dialogue," to examine oneself in relation to others, an examination that is high teaching. Meno, in the homonymous dialogue of Plato (80a), says to S., who questions him: "you bewitch me, you enchant me, you charm me, so that I am all perplexity"; and he compares him to the sea torpedo, "which numbs whoever approaches and touches it." S. unsettles: he inspires in his listeners the resolve to change their lives; his mouth, says Alcibiades (Symp. 218 a), is like a "viper's bite" in the "most painful part," in the soul; and this bite is his "discourses of philosophy." And the same Alcibiades likens him to the effigy of a Silenus that carries divine images within; and to the satyr Marsyas, like him "insolent" and a "flute-player" who, without instruments, by means of bare words alone, produces the same effect: "being violently drawn out of oneself and becoming possessed" (ibid., 215 a-216). His personality dominated men of the stature of Alcibiades and of Plato, who made him the protagonist of all his Dialogues, almost annihilating himself behind the figure of the master. "A man, we may say," one reads in the Phaedo (118 a; cf. Epist., VII, 324 e), "of those whom we then knew, the best, the wisest, the most just." Subsequently the Fathers of the Greek Church hint at a parallel with Christ and see in S. the "witness" of truth, the one who not only preached it but personified it, practiced it and bore witness to it by his death. The Fathers of the Latin Church are not of the same opinion, but St. Augustine, in a chapter of the De civit. Dei (VIII, ch. 3), brings him into Christian philosophy as a sage of high wisdom, contemplated in the light of eternal truth and put into practice in the conduct of life. The Enlightenment (v.), rationalist and anti-Christian, exalts S. as "the saint of paganism," comparing him to Christ in a tendentious manner. An exception is Rousseau (v.), who in a page of the celebrated "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" excessively diminishes the figure of S., but rightly concludes: "yes, if the life and death of S. are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God."
S. wrote nothing, and this is explained in part by his way of understanding philosophy as inquiry and living dialogue and above all by his deep conviction of fulfilling a divine mission. Consequently, his personality and his doctrine must be reconstructed through indirect testimonies, namely the Dialogues of Plato (v.), the Memorabilia of Xenophon and what Aristotle (v.) says of him in the Metaphysics. This has given rise to the problem of the "sources" or the "Socratic question," still not definitively resolved today. There is by now almost general agreement not to accept as a historical source the caricature of the philosopher that Aristophanes gives in the Clouds, with evident polemical intent; to consider insufficient the testimony of Xenophon, incapable of understanding the doctrine and the lofty personality of the master, yet without rejecting it; and to accept with critical prudence that of Plato, so as to avoid attributing to S. what instead belongs to his great disciple. For this purpose the testimony of Aristotle is helpful, who makes S. the philosopher of the "concept," leaving to Plato the entire philosophy of the "ideas."
"I am eager to learn, and the countryside and the trees will not teach me anything, unlike the men in the city." Thus S. to Phaedrus in the homonymous dialogue (231 d). S., in fact, unlike the Presocratics, had no interest in naturalistic inquiry: the object of his speculation is man and human society; hence, "humanism." This places him alongside the Sophists (v.); but the Socratic form of humanism is the radical critique of that of the Sophists. S., therefore, defines himself not "as" a Sophist, but "in comparison" with the Sophists, precisely as Plato does. For the Sophists, man is a subject of sensations; for S., he is a subject, as reason, of an objective order, both cognitive and moral. Knowledge, which for the Sophists is opinion, for S. is concept; practical activity, which for the Sophists is skill, for S. is virtue (62e-63); society, which for the Sophists is individualism (egoism of individuals and the right of the stronger), for S. is "dialogue," "communication," an organic structure of laws that demand obedience and respect. In short, for S., there is a rational principle through which man communicates with an absolute order of truth. To awaken inquiry according to this principle, to help one find the truth, to convince man that the intelligence does not have merely practical aims, to orient him toward living according to the laws of the good and to accustom him to discussion to the very end — these are the aims of his educational mission. Man is not only sense, but also reason, and therefore capable of immutable and universal concepts. To know is to "know through concepts": to have a concept of a thing is to define its essence, by virtue of which all things of that kind truly and really are what they are. S. is the discoverer of the concept, whose essential notes he fixed and defined.
His method involves two moments: irony and maieutics. With the first, the philosopher, almost assuming the attitude of a disciple and declaring himself ignorant (for S. the wise man is he who is conscious of his own ignorance), forces his interlocutors (Sophists and the young men educated by them) to confess their ignorance. Irony is the force of reasoning that pricks and deflates words that are full only of their own emptiness, humbles rhetoric and confounds it, kills ignorance by making it aware of itself, in order to clear the ground for the other subtle and fruitful procedure of maieutics. The art of his mother: skill in childbirth, incapacity to procreate (Theaet., 150 c d), the obstetric power of questioning that, from the depths, calls forth to the life of consciousness the dormant yet fecundating truth. Maieutics furthermore signifies that truth is not learned from outside, but is conquered from within: a laborious generation, whose products must be sifted by reason.
From particulars, prescinding from whatever is contingent in them, through the method of induction (v.), one grasps the essence (v.), that by virtue of which a thing is what it is. Thus S., against the Sophists, vindicates the objectivity of knowing, which also holds as the norm of conduct. To know means to define: and therefore to know the good means to possess the concept. Undoubtedly, according to S., no one feels morally obliged unless he has an "interest" in doing so, but this by no means signifies, as the Sophists taught, that the good resides in utility or in the particular interest of each individual. For S., the good consists in the advantage of all. Man, by acting for the common interest, also gains his own happiness, which resides in the consciousness of acting with justice, with full mastery of himself through reason. The wise man is therefore just, strong and temperate. For S. he who is wise is virtuous: he who knows the good practices it: virtue is knowledge. On the other hand, he who knows the good cannot fail to do it, inasmuch as only he who is virtuous is happy, and all men aspire to happiness. No one, therefore, is wicked voluntarily, and whoever does evil does so through ignorance. To make men virtuous it suffices to teach what the good is, and hence the improvement of society is a matter of education. S.'s morality is eudemonistic, inasmuch as it places the end or good of man in happiness, which is however the acquisition of virtue, which is knowledge of the good. For him the concept is "law of the mind," virtue is "law of life" individual and social; and the "being" of the concept coincides with the "ought to be" of moral action.
His philosophy was also his religious faith. S. always showed himself respectful of traditional religion, reverence for which he counts among the duties of the citizen; his religion, however, is not the worship of the gods, but of the "divinity," that divinity of which, through the daemon, he felt the inspiring sign within himself; and it seems that he identified this divinity with the very principle of the moral order. Before his judges he declares that he "obeys God more" than the Athenians (Apol., 29 d), that is, the God who spoke to him within and to whom he wished to become like; and "one becomes like God by becoming just and holy in the clarity of the spirit" (Theaet., 176 b). On the immortality of the soul too S. had ideas that were not very precise, although he did not exclude its possibility. At bottom, his tendency is rationalistic.
Bibliography11 works
Michele Federico Sciacca
