The Socrates that the Stoics appropriated was the intellectualist Socrates, a version of the fertile Socrates. The Academic skeptics appropriated the barren Socrates, and used him to combat the dogmatism of the Stoics.11 The Stoics held that some perceptions, which they called “gripping presentations,” were certain, infallible. The Academic skeptics held that, on the contrary, nothing was infallible: there was no such thing as a gripping presentation. It was always possible to be mistaken. The academic skeptics went further than anything the Platonic Socrates says by advocating a suspension of judgment, epochē, as a result of the uncertainty of matters. This battle over the question of the certainty of our judgments was a major focus of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. Academic skepticism owes its origin to Arcesilaus, who was the head of Plato's Academy from c. 273 to c. 242. Arcesilaus derived his skeptical philosophy from a reading of Plato's Socratic dialogues, and he seems to have been the first philosopher to emphasize the skeptical side of Socrates’ thought.12 Arcesilaus modeled his own life on the life of Plato's Socrates, but he went further than Socrates: whereas Socrates confined his skepticism to ethics, Arcesilaus read Socrates as saying that he had knowledge of just one thing, namely that he knew nothing; and Arcesilaus denied that he, Arcesilaus, knew even that. This understanding of Socratic skepticism became commonplace in later centuries. Arcesilaus wrote nothing; we know about his views because of their description in several sources, most prominently in works of the Roman philosophical writer, Cicero (106–43), himself a proponent of Academic skepticism.
The Christian Reception of Socrates
With the advent of Christianity the conversation about Socrates changes. The strands previously found remain the same: on the one hand, there is a strand that is hostile to Socrates, while on the other there is a strand that is favorable. The nature of the judgments made concerning Socrates change, however: now Socrates is judged, not as a philosopher in the context of ancient philosophy in general, but in relation to Christian thought and morality. One strand of Christian thinking is hostile to Greek philosophy in general: the Christian writer Tertullian (160–230 CE) saw Greek philosophy as the source of false beliefs. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” he asked, famously; “what concord is there between the Academy and the Church? … Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic and dialectic composition … With our faith, we desire no further belief” (Prescription against Heretics, 7). Tertullian traced his attempt to banish Greek philosophy from Christian belief to a remark of the apostle Paul in Colossians 2.8, “see that no one beguile you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men.”
Tertullian was reacting against a Christian tradition of seeing in Greek philosophy a precursor of Christian faith. For numerous early Christian writers, including Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, Greek philosophy was something that could be used to make Christianity seem credible to a Greek audience. Plato was an especially attractive source: his doctrine of the immortality of the soul helped to explain the Christian promise of eternal life, and his account of the creation of the world by a wise and benevolent craftsman deity seemed to resemble the account of creation in Genesis. Then there was the example of Socrates, tried and convicted of impiety and put to death in a way that resembled, in some respects, the trial and death of Jesus. This was a comparison that was to be made over and over again, down through the centuries, and not only by Christian writers. It was common among Christian interpreters to see Socrates as a monotheist, an opponent of pagan religion. Was Socrates to be embraced as a human counterpart of Jesus, a victim of injustice and evidence of the human tendency to reject the truth? Or was Socrates to be seen as a representation of all that was wrong with pagan thought? How did Socrates, the philosophical world's model of a sage, compare to Christian models? Two problems stood out for Christians in the life of Socrates: his homoerotic tendencies and his daimonion, his “divine sign.” Though Plato attempts to make it clear in the Symposium that Socrates’ interest in youths was chaste (Alcibiades’ failed seduction attempt testifies to this, and his remark at 216d that “it couldn't matter less to him whether a boy is beautiful”), still Socrates’ response to Charmides at Charmides 155d attested to his erotic interest in young males, and his pursuit of Alcibiades was well known. Christians disapproved of pederasty. Was Socrates a pederast? And what was to be made of his daimonion, the voice that Socrates confessed came to him on occasion and forbade him from doing certain things, some of minor importance but others of major, such as entering Athenian political life? Was Socrates possessed by a demon? Demons were universally regarded as agents of evil in Christian scripture. Or was his daimonion something more akin to a guardian angel, indicating that Socrates was blessed by God? These issues dominated the Christian discussion of Socrates not just in the ancient world, but in subsequent eras as well.
The Christian concern with the trial, conviction, and execution of Socrates brought about a shift of focus in the way he was treated. Down to this point the focus of the study of Socrates had been on Socrates’ methods and teachings. Was he a dogmatic philosopher or an ignorant inquirer? Was he fertile or barren? This is not to say that the questions surrounding the trial, conviction and execution had been neglected; numerous Apologies of Socrates were composed during this period. In the Christian era, however, it was no longer necessary to look to Socrates, or any other philosopher for that matter, for the content of morality. Christians relied on the teachings of Jesus for that. Instead of dialectic, in the form of the elenchus, Christians relied on the interpretation of Jesus’ words. Reasoned discourse concerning interpretation was not out of place, but it was no longer necessary to argue dialectically in order to reach the fundamental truths of ethics themselves. Those had been declared in the Sermon on the Mount and in other canonical texts. Instead of focusing on the methods and teachings of Socrates, those Christian thinkers who referred to him could focus on his trial, conviction, and execution. Socrates seemed to be a model of unjust punishment, and Christian apologists could use him as a parallel both to the trial and death of Jesus and to the persecution of his Christian followers. Socrates the philosopher declined in importance; Socrates the martyr increased.
Socrates from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
In the period following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century interest in Socrates declined. The revival of philosophy in the twelfth century was spurred by the renewed appropriation of Aristotle's works; though Plato's Crito and Phaedo were available in Latin translation, Socrates was not a focus of philosophical discussion.13 Socrates was understood primarily as he was depicted in Aristotle's works. That is how he is referred to in St. Thomas Aquinas. During the Renaissance there was a great increase in interest in Socrates, first with renewed interest in Cicero's philosophical works and subsequently with the recovery in the West of Plato's works. Plato emerged as a rival to Aristotle as the leading philosopher of antiquity, and his more literary approach to philosophy won the enthusiastic support of humanist interpreters critical of the methods of medieval Scholastic philosophy. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), translator of the Symposium and founder of the Florentine Academy, named after Plato's Academy, saw Socrates as a model of virtue to rival Christian models. The humanist thinkers of the Renaissance did not quarrel openly with Christianity, but they did tend to see classical culture, and Socrates as its exemplar, as worthy of serious consideration in its own right.
This appreciation of classical culture and Socrates continued to concern writers in the Reformation. One thinker of the Reformation era who tried to integrate Socrates and Christianity was Erasmus (1466–1536). Erasmus wrote several works in which Socrates was discussed. There is a charming colloquy, “The Godly Feast,” in which one of the characters utters a line that has been much quoted: “I can hardly refrain from saying, ‘Saint Socrates, pray for us.’”14 Martin Luther, although he makes some grudging remarks in favor of Socrates in various p
laces in his writings, wholeheartedly rejected this attempt by Erasmus to integrate classical culture and Christianity, saying, “even if Cicero or Socrates had sweated blood, that would not make it pleasing to God.”15 Thus he reiterated the claim originally made by Tertullian that only the Christian faith was relevant to the question of salvation.
In the period from the Reformation to the Enlightenment writers, including philosophical writers, continually refer to Socrates in terms that reflect but do not advance much the preceding discussion. As with earlier thinkers, these writers adapt the figure of Socrates to the ideals that they themselves favor. For Montaigne (1533–1592), Socrates is a model of natural virtue. For the freethinker Anthony Collins (1676–1729) he is a model of freethinking. For Benjamin Franklin he was an example for emulation. For Voltaire he was a rationalist opponent of superstition and political oppression. As the demand for freedom from the ancien regime and the dogmatism of the church grew in intensity, Socrates became more and more associated with these popular causes: he remained a saint, as he had been for Erasmus, but a secular one. There is criticism of Socrates in this period too, but by and large the philosophers of this period who are studied today – Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant – do not pay a great deal of attention to him. He is referred to occasionally, but he is not the central figure he was for the ancients. Modern philosophy, with its emphasis on epistemology, does not draw its inspiration from the example or the teaching of Socrates.
The Nineteenth Century
In the nineteenth century philosophical interest in Socrates underwent a remarkable revival. Three major philosophers, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche offered portraits of Socrates that stood in dialectical relation to each other. Each defined Socrates in relation to his own philosophy, as other philosophers have done. Because each had different, often opposed, highly original philosophies, they produced rival appreciations of Socrates. Nietzsche did not know Kierkegaard's work, which was not translated from Danish until the twentieth century, but both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche knew, and in different ways responded to, the interpretation of Hegel. Socrates is important for each of these thinkers; both Hegel and Nietzsche treat Socrates as introducing a new era in philosophy. For Kierkegaard in particular, Socrates is essential to his own response to modernity and to Christianity. If the ancient world produced a “golden age” in the interpretation of Socrates, with rival schools battling for his legacy and offering different interpretations of his thought and influence, then the nineteenth century might be said to be a second golden age in Socrates interpretation.
Hegel
G. W. F. Hegel believed in progress. He thought that the history of the world was a history of ascent from a primitive beginning to the culmination of the present day. He did not think of this progress in materialistic terms, for instance from the discovery of fire to electricity to nuclear power, but in conceptual terms. It is debated whether he saw this progress as the working of a single intelligence, a ruling intellect in control of all of history, which might be called God or Reason, but he thought that history could be described as a series of successive ages, defined by different conceptions of reality. He saw these ages as introduced by revolutionary individuals, whom he described as “world-historical” in their significance. He applied this view of progress to ethics and political philosophy as well as to history, and in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy he applied it to the history of philosophy. These lectures were edited and published after Hegel's death, based on notes he left from his professorship at the University of Berlin.
In Hegel's lectures we hear a voice which is familiar to us today: the voice of the professor. In this case, the professor is a man with a system, which he used to interpret the history of philosophy. Hegel's account of Socrates is one that a modern student of Socrates would find familiar. He deals with many of the points that a modern professor would deal with in discussing Socrates. He does not agree with modern scholarship in every detail, and his discussion throughout is shaped by his big idea, the idea of progress, but one can see in his presentation of Socrates an ancestor of views that can be found today. Hegel and modern students of Socrates are part of a single conversation. Hegel's discussion of Socrates is lengthy and detailed, 65 pages in the translation of E. S. Haldane. Hegel actually apologizes for the length of his treatment at the end of the section.16
Hegel begins his discussion of Socrates by calling him “not only a most important figure in the history of Philosophy – perhaps the most interesting in the philosophy of antiquity, but … also a world-famed personage. For a mental turning-point exhibited itself in him in the form of philosophic thought” (384).17 As opposed to his philosophical predecessors, who, Hegel thinks, thought but did not focus on the nature of thought, Socrates turned his attention inward, to the “I” that thinks. He sees this “I” as the source of morality, which he distinguishes from the customary, traditional ethics of the Greeks, which he calls ”Sittlichkeit.” Hegel thought that Socrates’ fellow Athenians drew their sense of moral obligation from their culture, unreflectively; Socrates drew his sense from within himself: not himself as an individual, but himself as a representative of universal thought. “In him we see pre-eminently the inwardness of consciousness that in an anthropological way existed in the first instance in him, and became later on a usual thing” (391).
Socrates explores the nature of morality by means of dialectic, which he says “has two prominent aspects, the one the development of the universal from the concrete case” (think for example of Euthyphro's initial attempt to define piety in terms of prosecuting wrongdoers such as his father), “and the exhibition of the notion which implicitly exists in every consciousness” (think in this case of the doctrine of recollection), and “the causing of confusion between” the universal and the concrete (think of the perplexity produced in so many of the elenctic dialogues) (398). Socrates represented himself as ignorant, which Hegel refers to as “the celebrated Socratic irony” (ibid.). He “taught those with whom he associated to know that they knew nothing; indeed, what is more, he himself said that he knew nothing” (399). In other words, he behaved like the barren Socrates. But he also elicited from his interlocutors “the thought which is already contained in the consciousness of the individual” (402); that is, he acted as a midwife. This process is individual in that it involves individual interlocutors, but it is also universal, which can be seen when, under Socrates’ guidance, the interlocutor learns how to separate the universal concept from the concrete example in which it is embedded: “the child, the uncultured man, lives in concrete individual ideas, but to the man who grows and educates himself, because he thereby goes back into himself as thinking, reflection becomes reflection on the universal and the permanent establishment of the same” (403). The main tendency of the Socratic dialogues was negative: “to show the bewilderment and confusion which exist in knowledge” (404–5). “Philosophy must,” Hegel says in a famous assertion, “begin with a puzzle in order to bring about reflection; everything must be doubted, all presuppositions given up, to reach the truth” (406). The other side of Socrates’ method, “the affirmative, … is nothing but the good in as far as it is brought forth from consciousness through knowledge … His knowledge for the first time reached this abstraction” (ibid.). With this discovery, which Hegel interprets as the beginning of reflective morality, “the spirit of the world … begins to change” (407).
This discovery of the conceptual, reflective nature of morality, something that is now generally accepted, was perceived as a threat to traditional morality. For the Athenians, tradition and culture, expressed ultimately in the laws of the state, were absolute. Socrates’ response to this was to question the absoluteness of the law. “Consciousness, in the perception of its independence, no longer immediately acknowledges what is put before it, but requires that this should first justify itself to it” (409). As a result, “the State has lost its power … Morals have become shaken, because
we have the idea present that man creates his maxims for himself” (ibid.). This rise of reflective morality produces a crisis, which leads to Socrates' trial. Socrates undermines the validity of the law; he pokes holes in traditional morality by counter-examples that show that the laws of custom are not universal (think here of Socrates showing Cephalus in Republic I that telling the truth and paying one's debts are not always just). Unfortunately, Socrates cannot flesh out his abstract conception of the good; though he rocks the foundations of traditional morality, he cannot point to a morality of consciousness that will replace it.
“The contemporaries of Socrates, who came forward as his accusers before the Athenian people, laid hold on him as the man who made known that what was held as absolute was not absolute … Because Socrates makes the truth rest on the judgment of inward consciousness, he enters upon a struggle with the Athenian people as to what is right and true” (426). Who was right in this struggle? One might expect Hegel to say that Socrates was right, because he had discovered the higher source of morality. What Hegel says, however, is that both sides in the dispute were correct. Aristophanes was justified in portraying Socrates in the Clouds as an enemy of the state; the Athenian people were right to object to his “daemon” as an inward principle of judgment. Socrates threatened the foundation of the state, its religion: “it would undoubtedly in the first place mean the subversion of the Athenian State, if this public religion on which everything was built and without which the State could not subsist, went to pieces” (439); but that is just what Socrates threatened, by placing the individual conscience above the law. Socrates was a threat to the law of the state and its religion. “Is it then to be wondered at that Socrates was found guilty?” (440).
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