Socrates In Brief
Sep. 3rd, 2009 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darishaThis was only meant to be a 1200 word assignment, but somehow it ended up being over 2000 words. I think I got a little carried away ^^;;
The essay assumes some knowledge of Socrates and ancient Athens, so check out my references for more information. Plus there's always Google if there's something you don't understand.
SOCRATES ON TRIAL
Assignment: Why was Socrates executed by his contemporaries but is he greatly admired today? To what extent was the ancient response caused by his ideas?
Purpose: To establish the reasons for Socrates' trial/execution and assess his role in the history of Modern thought.
Socrates was, by birth and upbringing, a man of the great age of Pericles. He was neither handsome, nor rich, and he left behind no written records, yet he is perhaps one of the most famous citizens of ancient Athens. His style of teaching and philosophies on life have made him, for many in the 21st century, a personal, political, and intellectual hero (Wilson, 2007). Through the writings of his contemporaries, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and more notably, Plato, he has shaped the entire history of Western philosophy.
In 399B.C., however, a large jury of Athenian citizens condemned him to death. In his Apology, Plato writes that Socrates was accused of ‘committing an injustice, in that he makes inquiries into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example‘; he is supposedly guilty of ‘corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in supernatural things of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state’.
If true, these charges are grave indeed. But for most of his life, Socrates was but a minor player in Athenian life. It wasn’t until he was in his late forties that the comic poets, Aristophanes and Amipsias, chose to use him as the main topical reference for their satirical plays in 423 B.C.; Eupolis, a third comedian, followed suit two years later (Taylor, 1952). So why did Socrates’ contemporaries wait until he was seventy to condemn him? Socrates himself states in Plato’s Apology that his unpopularity was established long before the charges he now faced in court. His critics “got hold of most of you in childhood” and spoke about him “with such vigour and persuasiveness that their harsh criticisms have for a long time now been monopolizing your ears”.
Athenians were well accustomed to hearing the gods treated disrespectfully by poets in the theatre, and philosophers had been discussing the principles of natural science and metaphysical inquiry long before Socrates (Stone, 1988). Even jokes at the expense of respected politicians were well established and accepted, so why, in Socrates’ case, were they suddenly no longer funny? The accusation that Socrates’ religious views were somehow unnatural was simply a way to divert attention away from the real issues - it was his political, and in part his philosophical views that finally got his in trouble (Stone, 1988).
“I have incurred a great deal of bitter hostility, and this is what will bring about my destruction, if anything does; not Meletus or Anytus, but the slander and jealousy of a very large section of the people.” (Plato, Apology).
An essential characteristic of Socrates is his ‘clear sense of what can, and what cannot, be known, and of the danger of pretending to knowledge whose grounds have never been examined’ (Cornford, 1932). This raised two very important questions: What is truth? And what is knowledge? He believed the two were interrelated and that, if ‘virtue was knowledge, then presumably - like other forms of knowledge - it was teachable’ (Stone, 1988).
Real knowledge, Socrates taught, could only be obtained through absolute definition. If one could not define something absolutely, then one couldn’t and didn’t really know what it was. True knowledge, he claimed, could not be obtained, even by himself. It was the province of the gods and was neither “natural or taught” but obtained “by divine dispensation” (Stone, 1988).
This made Socrates a man of paradoxes. He bullied his fellow Athenians to focus on virtue, but claimed it was unteachable; he identified virtue with knowledge, yet insisted it was unobtainable; and he enjoyed tearing down the preconceived notions of wisdom and knowledge in everyone he met - especially the politicians, poets, craftsmen, and sophists; the more famous they were, the more he seemed to enjoy their discomfort.
According to Plato’s Apology, Socrates’ quest for knowledge was divinely inspired. When the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi declared that he was ‘the wisest man in the world’, Socrates believed himself to be the butt of some cosmic joke. He could not fathom the god’s ‘hidden meaning’ and dedicated himself to finding a wiser man to prove the god wrong. Like Joan of Arc and St Francis of Assisi, Socrates felt called to a higher purpose by the voices of god. He felt compelled to expose and correct ignorance in the highest places of Athenian society and spent the last 20 years of his life fulfilling this duty (Crossman, 1959).
But while he himself knew nothing, he soon discovered that all those he questioned knew even less - they were not even aware of their own ignorance. Socrates appears to use his special kind of wisdom for a specific political purpose - to make the leading men of Athens appear to be ignorant fools (Stone, 1988). His ‘divine mission’ comes across as some sort of ego-trip, his humility as a form of conceit and false modesty. For someone who is well-known for their wisdom to be told that he knows less than a man who cheerfully insists he knows nothing, would certainly hurt many a pride and reputation. This would have been the start of the great resentment against Socrates.
Socrates admits in Apology that in addition to the animosity aroused by his own ‘conversations’, “the young men who have the most leisure, the sons of the richest men accompanying me of their own accord, find pleasure in hearing people examined, and often imitate me themselves, and then they undertake to examine others; and then, I fancy, they find a great plenty of people who think they know something, but know little or nothing… As a result, therefore, those who are examined by them are angry with me, instead of being angry with themselves, and say that ‘Socrates is a most abominable person and is corrupting the youth’.” And so he was. Socrates was, in essence, teaching these young men to make laughing stocks of Athens leading citizens.
Socrates was willing to converse with anyone, but he especially welcomed the company of adolescent boys (Cornford, 1932). In them he found a willing audience, always bursting with new questions. He wanted to know everything that went on inside their heads, and positively encouraged them to think for themselves on every subject, especially about right and wrong. In him they found a man of courage and conviction who would speak to them as equals, and whose sharp intellect and time was always at their service (Cornford,1932); he was a man they could respect and admire, and they soaked up his every word (whether they understood exactly what he was saying or not). In an Athens where social practices and customs were dictated by the state, Socrates’ mission to discover and correct ignorance would have seemed, to the young men who chaffed under the rules of tradition, a welcome expression of rebellion (Cornford, 1932.)
Yet Socrates constantly denied that he was a teacher. There are three possible reasons for this: political, because his views were decidedly undemocratic - his doctrine that ‘the one who knows’ should rule is very oligarchic; philosophical because, while he sought for absolute certainties, he repeatedly found that they were unobtainable - one can’t be a teacher if they have nothing to teach; or personal, because many of Socrates’ pupils - most notably the dictator Critias and the brilliant, unpredictable Alcibiades - caused great harm to Athens. To deny that he was a teacher was to clear himself of responsibility for their actions.
But Socrates should have been for the actions of the youths who tried to emulate his methods. Whether actively teaching or not, Socrates still sought to instil and encourage the growth of knowledge in others; like a midwife, he tried to assist ‘the pregnant mind to bring forth its own ideas’ (Crossman, 1959). His responsibility was to ensure that this knowledge was used correctly and not abused. By telling the youth that, in order to obtain true knowledge and perfection of the soul, they needed to question each and every action of conduct, to judge every moral question for themselves, he essentially stripped away every moral buffer that their parents, and society, had instilled in them (Cornford, 1932). Without these buffers to guide them, the youth were left to create ideals to suit themselves; he gave them the idea of ‘goodness’ and left them to practice it in ignorance. It is no wonder the elders of Athenian society feared and resented the influence of Socrates - he was essentially attempting to undermine and break down the morality of obedience to authority and custom, which all human societies have lived their lives by throughout our entire history (Cornford, 1932).
By these accounts, Socrates was indeed guilty of his accusers’ charges. Yet, if Socrates had wanted an acquittal, he could have easily gotten it. Despite the prejudice against him, the jury was clearly reluctant to convict - “if a mere thirty votes had gone the other way, I would have been acquitted,” (Plato, Apology). Athens was purported to be a shining city of ideas and free speech, but in persecuting Socrates, it was being untrue to itself. But Socrates would not give up his principles. He insisted that he had done nothing wrong, and in fact deserved to be rewarded for his services to the city in the form of free dining at the Prytaneum - an honour usually only bestowed on Olympic champions and great dignitaries. He even went so far as to lecture the jury for their moral ineptitude and lack of virtue; he refused to go in to exile and refused to give up philosophising. For this they gave him death. “It is not a lack of arguments that has caused my condemnation,” he says in Apology, “but a lack of effrontery and impudence, and the fact that I have refused to address you in the way in which would give you most pleasure.”
Yet Socrates’ calm acceptance of death belies, perhaps, his greatest gift to modern philosophy. “I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing,” he says in Apology, “and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil… it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another.”
Socrates held that happiness was to be found in what he called the perfection of the soul - ‘making one’s soul as good as possible’ - and that all other ends which men desire were strictly of no value in themselves (Cornford, 1932). This goodness, he claimed, came from ‘self knowledge‘ - the recognition of that self or soul in each of us whose perfection is the true end of life (Taylor, 1952).
Up until this point, common belief was that body and soul were united. Socrates divided them, demeaning the body and earthly life in favour of elevating the soul. He tells his judges in Apology that his mission is to “go about doing nothing else than urging you, young and old, not to care for your bodies but for the protection of your souls.” Whereas most believed the self to be within the body, Socrates claimed that the self was in the soul and that our consciousness would remain with us after death and into the next life. It is his discovery of this soul and a morality of spiritual aspiration that paved the way for Christian integration in Europe, and earned Socrates his place among the greatest philosophers of our history (Wilson, 2007).
Socrates has always been a controversial figure. He was the first recorded martyr of free speech and free thought, and while his death may not have been morally justifiable, it was certainly politically so - in the eyes of ancient Athens, he posed a major threat to the newly re-established democracy. But whether you admire his intellect and conviction, or despise his arrogance, there is no denying Socrates’ story has shaped the way modern people think, dream, and imagine (Wilson, 2007). The deep impression made by his trial and execution led to the creation of a whole new form of literature, in which his younger contemporaries sought to preserve his memory and immortalise his ideas. ‘The story of Socrates became the inspiration of all who believe in reason’ (Crossman, 1959).
REFERENCES:
Cornford, F. (1968). ‘Socrates’, Before and After Socrates. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, pp 29-53 [ER].
Crossman, R. H. S. (1959). ‘Socrates’, Plato To-Day. Allen & Unwin Ltd, Great Britain, pp 35-66.
Fox, R. (2008). ‘Socrates’, The Classical World, An Epic History of Greece and Rome. Penguin Books, Australia, pp 169-174.
Plato, translated by Tredennick, H. & Tarrant, H. (2003). ‘Apology’, The Last Days of Socrates. Penguin Books, London, England, pp 31-70.
Stone, I.F. (1988). The Trial of Socrates. Little, Brown & Company, The United States.
Taylor, A. E. (1932). Socrates. Peter Davies Ltd., Great Britain.
Wilson, E. (2007). The Death of Socrates. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Dimi's Random Thought For The Day: Forget the association with Jesus, I now place Socrates in the same boat as Hitler - he was too smart for his own good, had weird notions of perfection, and pissed off all the big political powers enough to have him killed.
-
The essay assumes some knowledge of Socrates and ancient Athens, so check out my references for more information. Plus there's always Google if there's something you don't understand.
SOCRATES ON TRIAL
Assignment: Why was Socrates executed by his contemporaries but is he greatly admired today? To what extent was the ancient response caused by his ideas?
Purpose: To establish the reasons for Socrates' trial/execution and assess his role in the history of Modern thought.
Socrates was, by birth and upbringing, a man of the great age of Pericles. He was neither handsome, nor rich, and he left behind no written records, yet he is perhaps one of the most famous citizens of ancient Athens. His style of teaching and philosophies on life have made him, for many in the 21st century, a personal, political, and intellectual hero (Wilson, 2007). Through the writings of his contemporaries, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and more notably, Plato, he has shaped the entire history of Western philosophy.
In 399B.C., however, a large jury of Athenian citizens condemned him to death. In his Apology, Plato writes that Socrates was accused of ‘committing an injustice, in that he makes inquiries into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example‘; he is supposedly guilty of ‘corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in supernatural things of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state’.
If true, these charges are grave indeed. But for most of his life, Socrates was but a minor player in Athenian life. It wasn’t until he was in his late forties that the comic poets, Aristophanes and Amipsias, chose to use him as the main topical reference for their satirical plays in 423 B.C.; Eupolis, a third comedian, followed suit two years later (Taylor, 1952). So why did Socrates’ contemporaries wait until he was seventy to condemn him? Socrates himself states in Plato’s Apology that his unpopularity was established long before the charges he now faced in court. His critics “got hold of most of you in childhood” and spoke about him “with such vigour and persuasiveness that their harsh criticisms have for a long time now been monopolizing your ears”.
Athenians were well accustomed to hearing the gods treated disrespectfully by poets in the theatre, and philosophers had been discussing the principles of natural science and metaphysical inquiry long before Socrates (Stone, 1988). Even jokes at the expense of respected politicians were well established and accepted, so why, in Socrates’ case, were they suddenly no longer funny? The accusation that Socrates’ religious views were somehow unnatural was simply a way to divert attention away from the real issues - it was his political, and in part his philosophical views that finally got his in trouble (Stone, 1988).
“I have incurred a great deal of bitter hostility, and this is what will bring about my destruction, if anything does; not Meletus or Anytus, but the slander and jealousy of a very large section of the people.” (Plato, Apology).
An essential characteristic of Socrates is his ‘clear sense of what can, and what cannot, be known, and of the danger of pretending to knowledge whose grounds have never been examined’ (Cornford, 1932). This raised two very important questions: What is truth? And what is knowledge? He believed the two were interrelated and that, if ‘virtue was knowledge, then presumably - like other forms of knowledge - it was teachable’ (Stone, 1988).
Real knowledge, Socrates taught, could only be obtained through absolute definition. If one could not define something absolutely, then one couldn’t and didn’t really know what it was. True knowledge, he claimed, could not be obtained, even by himself. It was the province of the gods and was neither “natural or taught” but obtained “by divine dispensation” (Stone, 1988).
This made Socrates a man of paradoxes. He bullied his fellow Athenians to focus on virtue, but claimed it was unteachable; he identified virtue with knowledge, yet insisted it was unobtainable; and he enjoyed tearing down the preconceived notions of wisdom and knowledge in everyone he met - especially the politicians, poets, craftsmen, and sophists; the more famous they were, the more he seemed to enjoy their discomfort.
According to Plato’s Apology, Socrates’ quest for knowledge was divinely inspired. When the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi declared that he was ‘the wisest man in the world’, Socrates believed himself to be the butt of some cosmic joke. He could not fathom the god’s ‘hidden meaning’ and dedicated himself to finding a wiser man to prove the god wrong. Like Joan of Arc and St Francis of Assisi, Socrates felt called to a higher purpose by the voices of god. He felt compelled to expose and correct ignorance in the highest places of Athenian society and spent the last 20 years of his life fulfilling this duty (Crossman, 1959).
But while he himself knew nothing, he soon discovered that all those he questioned knew even less - they were not even aware of their own ignorance. Socrates appears to use his special kind of wisdom for a specific political purpose - to make the leading men of Athens appear to be ignorant fools (Stone, 1988). His ‘divine mission’ comes across as some sort of ego-trip, his humility as a form of conceit and false modesty. For someone who is well-known for their wisdom to be told that he knows less than a man who cheerfully insists he knows nothing, would certainly hurt many a pride and reputation. This would have been the start of the great resentment against Socrates.
Socrates admits in Apology that in addition to the animosity aroused by his own ‘conversations’, “the young men who have the most leisure, the sons of the richest men accompanying me of their own accord, find pleasure in hearing people examined, and often imitate me themselves, and then they undertake to examine others; and then, I fancy, they find a great plenty of people who think they know something, but know little or nothing… As a result, therefore, those who are examined by them are angry with me, instead of being angry with themselves, and say that ‘Socrates is a most abominable person and is corrupting the youth’.” And so he was. Socrates was, in essence, teaching these young men to make laughing stocks of Athens leading citizens.
Socrates was willing to converse with anyone, but he especially welcomed the company of adolescent boys (Cornford, 1932). In them he found a willing audience, always bursting with new questions. He wanted to know everything that went on inside their heads, and positively encouraged them to think for themselves on every subject, especially about right and wrong. In him they found a man of courage and conviction who would speak to them as equals, and whose sharp intellect and time was always at their service (Cornford,1932); he was a man they could respect and admire, and they soaked up his every word (whether they understood exactly what he was saying or not). In an Athens where social practices and customs were dictated by the state, Socrates’ mission to discover and correct ignorance would have seemed, to the young men who chaffed under the rules of tradition, a welcome expression of rebellion (Cornford, 1932.)
Yet Socrates constantly denied that he was a teacher. There are three possible reasons for this: political, because his views were decidedly undemocratic - his doctrine that ‘the one who knows’ should rule is very oligarchic; philosophical because, while he sought for absolute certainties, he repeatedly found that they were unobtainable - one can’t be a teacher if they have nothing to teach; or personal, because many of Socrates’ pupils - most notably the dictator Critias and the brilliant, unpredictable Alcibiades - caused great harm to Athens. To deny that he was a teacher was to clear himself of responsibility for their actions.
But Socrates should have been for the actions of the youths who tried to emulate his methods. Whether actively teaching or not, Socrates still sought to instil and encourage the growth of knowledge in others; like a midwife, he tried to assist ‘the pregnant mind to bring forth its own ideas’ (Crossman, 1959). His responsibility was to ensure that this knowledge was used correctly and not abused. By telling the youth that, in order to obtain true knowledge and perfection of the soul, they needed to question each and every action of conduct, to judge every moral question for themselves, he essentially stripped away every moral buffer that their parents, and society, had instilled in them (Cornford, 1932). Without these buffers to guide them, the youth were left to create ideals to suit themselves; he gave them the idea of ‘goodness’ and left them to practice it in ignorance. It is no wonder the elders of Athenian society feared and resented the influence of Socrates - he was essentially attempting to undermine and break down the morality of obedience to authority and custom, which all human societies have lived their lives by throughout our entire history (Cornford, 1932).
By these accounts, Socrates was indeed guilty of his accusers’ charges. Yet, if Socrates had wanted an acquittal, he could have easily gotten it. Despite the prejudice against him, the jury was clearly reluctant to convict - “if a mere thirty votes had gone the other way, I would have been acquitted,” (Plato, Apology). Athens was purported to be a shining city of ideas and free speech, but in persecuting Socrates, it was being untrue to itself. But Socrates would not give up his principles. He insisted that he had done nothing wrong, and in fact deserved to be rewarded for his services to the city in the form of free dining at the Prytaneum - an honour usually only bestowed on Olympic champions and great dignitaries. He even went so far as to lecture the jury for their moral ineptitude and lack of virtue; he refused to go in to exile and refused to give up philosophising. For this they gave him death. “It is not a lack of arguments that has caused my condemnation,” he says in Apology, “but a lack of effrontery and impudence, and the fact that I have refused to address you in the way in which would give you most pleasure.”
Yet Socrates’ calm acceptance of death belies, perhaps, his greatest gift to modern philosophy. “I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing,” he says in Apology, “and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil… it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another.”
Socrates held that happiness was to be found in what he called the perfection of the soul - ‘making one’s soul as good as possible’ - and that all other ends which men desire were strictly of no value in themselves (Cornford, 1932). This goodness, he claimed, came from ‘self knowledge‘ - the recognition of that self or soul in each of us whose perfection is the true end of life (Taylor, 1952).
Up until this point, common belief was that body and soul were united. Socrates divided them, demeaning the body and earthly life in favour of elevating the soul. He tells his judges in Apology that his mission is to “go about doing nothing else than urging you, young and old, not to care for your bodies but for the protection of your souls.” Whereas most believed the self to be within the body, Socrates claimed that the self was in the soul and that our consciousness would remain with us after death and into the next life. It is his discovery of this soul and a morality of spiritual aspiration that paved the way for Christian integration in Europe, and earned Socrates his place among the greatest philosophers of our history (Wilson, 2007).
Socrates has always been a controversial figure. He was the first recorded martyr of free speech and free thought, and while his death may not have been morally justifiable, it was certainly politically so - in the eyes of ancient Athens, he posed a major threat to the newly re-established democracy. But whether you admire his intellect and conviction, or despise his arrogance, there is no denying Socrates’ story has shaped the way modern people think, dream, and imagine (Wilson, 2007). The deep impression made by his trial and execution led to the creation of a whole new form of literature, in which his younger contemporaries sought to preserve his memory and immortalise his ideas. ‘The story of Socrates became the inspiration of all who believe in reason’ (Crossman, 1959).
REFERENCES:
Cornford, F. (1968). ‘Socrates’, Before and After Socrates. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, pp 29-53 [ER].
Crossman, R. H. S. (1959). ‘Socrates’, Plato To-Day. Allen & Unwin Ltd, Great Britain, pp 35-66.
Fox, R. (2008). ‘Socrates’, The Classical World, An Epic History of Greece and Rome. Penguin Books, Australia, pp 169-174.
Plato, translated by Tredennick, H. & Tarrant, H. (2003). ‘Apology’, The Last Days of Socrates. Penguin Books, London, England, pp 31-70.
Stone, I.F. (1988). The Trial of Socrates. Little, Brown & Company, The United States.
Taylor, A. E. (1932). Socrates. Peter Davies Ltd., Great Britain.
Wilson, E. (2007). The Death of Socrates. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Dimi's Random Thought For The Day: Forget the association with Jesus, I now place Socrates in the same boat as Hitler - he was too smart for his own good, had weird notions of perfection, and pissed off all the big political powers enough to have him killed.
-
