In Socrates’s view, any attempt to foster true success and excellence in human life had to take account of the innermost reality of a human being, his soul or psyche. Perhaps on the basis of his own highly developed sense of individual selfhood and self-control, Socrates brought to the Greek mind a new awareness of the central significance of the soul, establishing it for the first time as the seat of the individual waking consciousness and of the moral and intellectual character. He affirmed the Delphic motto “Know thyself,” for he believed that it was only through self-knowledge, through an understanding of one’s own psyche and its proper condition, that one could find genuine happiness. All human beings seek happiness by their very nature, and happiness, Socrates taught, is achieved through living the kind of life that best serves the nature of the soul. Happiness is the consequence not of physical or external circumstances, of wealth or power or reputation, but of living a life that is good for the soul.
Yet to live a genuinely good life, one must know what is the nature and essence of the good. Otherwise one will be acting blindly, on the basis of mere convention or expediency, calling something good or virtuous whenever it conforms to popular opinion or serves the pleasure of the moment. By contrast, Socrates argued, if a man does know what is truly good—what is beneficial for him in the deepest sense—then he will naturally and inevitably act in a good manner. Knowing what is good will necessarily cause one to act on that basis, for no man deliberately chooses that which he knows would harm himself. It is only when he mistakes an illusory good for a genuine good that he falls into erroneous conduct. No one ever does wrong knowingly, for it is the very nature of the good that when it is known, it is desired. In this sense, Socrates held, virtue is knowledge. A truly happy life is a life of right action directed according to reason. The key to human happiness, therefore, is the development of a rational moral character.
But for a person to discover what is genuine virtue, hard questions must be asked. To know virtue, one has to discover the common element in all virtuous acts: i.e., the essence of virtue. One has to take apart, analyze, test the worth of every statement about the nature of virtue in order to find its true character. It is not enough to cite examples of various kinds of virtuous actions and say that this is virtue itself, for such an answer does not reveal the single essential quality within all the examples that makes them genuine instances of virtue. So also with goodness, justice, courage, piety, beauty. Socrates criticized the Sophist belief that such terms were ultimately only words, mere names for currently established human conventions. Words could indeed distort and deceive, giving the impression of truth when actually they lacked solid foundation. But words could also point, as to a precious invisible mystery, to something genuine and enduring. To find one’s way to that genuine reality was the task confronting the philosopher.
It was in the course of pursuing this task that Socrates developed his famous dialectical form of argument that would become fundamental to the character and evolution of the Western mind: reasoning through rigorous dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation intended to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. Socrates’s characteristic strategy was to take up a sequence of questions with whomever he was in discussion, relentlessly analyzing one by one the implications of the answers in such a way as to bring out the flaws and inconsistencies inherent in a given belief or statement. Attempts to define the essence of something were rejected one after another as being either too wide or too narrow, or as missing the mark altogether. Often it happened that such an analysis ended in complete perplexity, with Socrates’s fellow discussants feeling as if they had been numbed by a stingray. Yet at such times it was clear that philosophy for Socrates was concerned less with knowing the right answers than with the strenuous attempt to discover those answers. Philosophy was a process, a discipline, a lifelong quest. To practice philosophy in the Socratic manner was continually to subject one’s thoughts to the criticism of reason in earnest dialogue with others. Genuine knowledge was not something that could simply be received from another secondhand like a purchased commodity, as with the Sophists, but was rather a personal achievement, won only at the cost of constant intellectual struggle and self-critical reflection. “The life not tested by criticism,” Socrates declared, “is not worth living.”
Because of his incessant questioning of others, however, Socrates was not universally popular, and his active encouraging of a critical skepticism among his pupils was regarded by some as a dangerously unsettling influence which undermined the proper authority of tradition and the state. In his painstaking effort to find certain knowledge, Socrates had spent much of his life outdoing the Sophists at their own game, but ironically it was with the Sophists that Socrates was classed when, in the politically unstable period in Athens following the disastrous Peloponnesian War, two citizens accused him of impiety and of corrupting the young. Caught in a backlash against a number of political figures, some of whom had once been in his circle, Socrates was sentenced to death. In such a situation it would have been customary to propose an alternative punishment of exile, and this was probably what his accusers desired. But Socrates refused at every stage of the trial to compromise his principles, and rejected all efforts to escape or modify the consequences of the verdict. He affirmed the Tightness of the life he had led, even if his mission to awaken others now brought him death—which he did not fear, but rather welcomed as a portal to eternity. Cheerfully drinking the poison hemlock, Socrates became an unreluctant martyr to the ideal of philosophy that he had so long championed.
The Platonic Hero
The friends and disciples who gathered around Socrates in his last days were drawn to a man who, to a singular degree, had embodied his own ideal. With its unique synthesis of eros and logos—of passion and mind, friendship and argument, desire and truth—Socrates’s philosophy appears to have been a direct expression of his personality. Each Socratic idea and its articulation bore the mark of, and seemed to have been born of, the very core of his personal character. Indeed, as he was portrayed in the full course of Plato’s dialogues, it was this very fact—that Socrates spoke and thought with an intellectual and moral confidence based on profound self-knowledge, rooted as it were in the depths of his psyche—that gave him the capacity to express a truth that was in some sense universal, grounded in divine truth itself.
Yet it was not only this charismatic profundity of mind and soul that Plato emphasized in his portrait of the master. The Socrates commemorated by Plato also developed and set forth a specific epistemological position that in effect brought the dialectical Socratic strategy to its metaphysical fulfillment. And here we shall extend our discussion of this pivotal figure by drawing on the more elaborated—and more decisively “Platonic”—interpretation of Socrates contained in the great middle dialogues of Plato. Beginning with the Phaedo, and in fully developed form in such dialogues as the Symposium and the Republic, the character of Socrates increasingly voices positions that move beyond those attributed to him in the earlier dialogues and by other sources such as Xenophon and Aristotle. Although the evidence may be interpreted in several ways, it would appear that Plato, in reflecting upon the legacy of his teacher in the course of his own intellectual evolution, gradually made explicit in these more developed positions what he understood to be implicit in both Socrates’s life and his arguments.
As the dialogues progress (and their exact order is not entirely clear), the earlier account of Socrates—pressing hard his demands for logical coherence and meaningful definitions, criticizing all the presumed certainties of human belief—begins to move forward to a new level of philosophical argument. After having investigated every current system of thought, from the scientific philosophies of nature to the subtle arguments of the Sophists, Socrates had concluded that all of them lacked sound critical method. To clarify his own approach, he decided to concern himself not with facts but with statements about facts. These propositions he would analyze by treating each as a hypothesi
s, deducing its consequences, and thereby judging its value. A hypothesis whose consequences were found to be true and consistent would be provisionally affirmed, though not proved, since it in turn could be certified only by appeal to a more ultimate accepted hypothesis.
Finally, according to Plato’s middle dialogues, after exhaustive argument and meditation on these matters, Socrates put forth his own fundamental postulate to serve as that ultimate foundation for knowledge and moral standards: When something is good or beautiful, it is so because that thing partakes of an archetypal essence of goodness or beauty that is absolute and perfect, that exists on a timeless level that transcends its passing particular manifestation, and that is ultimately accessible only to the intellect, not to the senses. Such universals have a real nature beyond mere human convention or opinion, and an independent existence beyond the phenomena they inform. The human mind can discover and know these timeless universals, through the supreme discipline of philosophy.
As described by Plato, this hypothesis of the “Forms” or “Ideas,” though never proved, seems to have represented something more than a plausible result of logical discussion, standing rather as an apodictic—absolutely certain and necessary—reality beyond all the conjectures, obscurities, and illusions of human experience. Its philosophical justification was finally epiphanic, self-evident to the lover of truth who had attained the distant goal of illumination. Plato’s implication seemed to be that in Socrates’s resolute attention to his mind and soul, to moral virtue as well as intellectual truth, the world order itself had been contacted and revealed. In Plato’s Socrates, human thought no longer stood precariously on its own, but had found a confidence and certainty grounded in something more fundamental. Thus, as dramatically set forth by Plato, the paradoxical denouement of Socrates’s skeptical pursuit of truth was his final arrival at the conception, or vision, of the eternal Ideas—absolute Good, Truth, Beauty, and the rest—in contemplation of which he ended his long philosophical search and fulfilled it.
The age of mythic heroes and gods seemed long past for the modern urban Athenians, but in Plato’s Socrates the Homeric hero was reborn, now as hero of the intellectual and spiritual quest for absolutes in a realm endangered by the Scylla of sophistry and the Charybdis of traditionalism. It was a new form of immortal glory that Socrates revealed as he faced his death, and it was in this act of philosophical heroism that the Homeric ideal took on fresh significance for Plato and his followers. For through Socrates’s intellectual labor had been born a spiritual reality apparently so fundamental and all-comprehensive that even death did not dim its existence, but on the contrary served as its gateway. The transcendent world unveiled in Plato’s dialogues—themselves great works of literature like the epic poems and dramas already gracing Hellenic culture—bespoke a new Olympian realm, a realm that reflected the new sense of rational order while also recalling the exalted grandeur of the ancient mythic deities. The Socrates of Plato’s report had remained true to the Greek development of reason and individualistic humanism. But in the course of his intellectual odyssey, critically employing and synthesizing his predecessors’ insights, he had forged a new connection to a timeless reality, one now endowed with philosophical significance as well as mythic numinosity. In Socrates, thought was confidently embraced as a vital force of life and an indispensable instrument of the spirit. Intellect was not just a profitable tool of Sophists and politicians, nor just the remote preserve of physical speculation and obscure paradox. It was, rather, the divine faculty by which the human soul could discover both its own essence and the world’s meaning. That faculty required only awakening. However arduous the path of awakening, such divine intellectual power lay potentially resident in humble and great alike.
Thus stood the figure of Socrates for Plato—the resolution and climax of the Greek quest for truth, the restorer of the world’s divine foundation, the awakener of the human intellect. What for Homer and the archaic mind had been an inseparable connection between the empirical and the archetypal, a connection that was increasingly challenged in the naturalism of the Ionian physicists and the rationalism of the Eleatics, and eliminated altogether in the materialism of the atomists and the skepticism of the Sophists, was now reformulated and restored on a new level by Socrates and Plato. In contrast to the undifferentiated archaic vision, the perceived relation between the archetypal and the empirical had now become more problematic, dichotomized, and dualistic. This step was a crucial one. But the underlying, rediscovered commonality with the primordial mythic vision was equally crucial. In the Platonic understanding, the world was again illuminated by universal themes and figures. Its governing principles were again knowable by the human mind. Divine absolutes once more ruled the cosmos and provided a foundation for human conduct. Existence was again endowed with transcendent purpose. Intellectual rigor and Olympian inspiration no longer stood opposed. Human values were again rooted in nature’s order, both of which were informed by divine intelligence.
With Socrates and Plato, the Greek search for clarity, order, and meaning in the manifold of human experience had come full circle, bringing an intellectual restoration of the numinous reality known in Hellenic culture’s distant Homeric childhood. Thus Plato joined his conception with, and gave new life and significance to, the archaic archetypal vision of the ancient Greek sensibility.
Socrates is the paradigmatic figure of Greek philosophy—indeed, of all Western philosophy—yet we possess nothing written by him that could represent his ideas directly. It was largely through the powerful prism of Plato’s understanding that his life and thought were passed on to posterity. Socrates’s impact on the young Plato was potent enough that the Platonic dialogues seem to bear the Socratic imprint on almost every page, carrying in their very form the dialectical spirit of Socratic philosophy, and making any final distinctions between the two philosophers’ thought virtually impossible. The character of Socrates plays the major role and expresses the central themes in most of the important dialogues, and does so with a large degree of what appears to be faithfully portrayed personal idiosyncrasy. Where the historical Socrates ends and the Platonic Socrates begins is notoriously ambiguous. His self-effacing claim of ignorance seemingly contrasts with the Platonic knowledge of absolutes; yet the latter appears to have grown directly from the former, as if an unconditional intellectual humility were the eye of the needle giving passage to universal wisdom. Certainly Socrates’s lifelong pursuit of truth and order would seem to have implicitly depended on a faith in the ultimate existence of that truth and order.6 Moreover, the character and direction of his arguments, as represented not only in the early Platonic dialogues but also in the reports of others, strongly suggest that Socrates was at least logically committed to what would later be seen to be a theory of universals.
The trial and execution of Socrates by the Athenian democracy left a profound impression on Plato, persuading him of the untrustworthiness of both a rudderless democracy and a standardless philosophy: hence the necessity of an absolute foundation for values if any political or philosophical system was to be successful and wise. On the basis of the available historical and literary evidence, it would appear that Socrates’s personal search for absolute definitions and moral certainty, and very possibly his suggestion of some early form of the doctrine of Ideas, was developed and extended through Plato’s more encompassing sensibility into a comprehensive system. Additional insights were incorporated by Plato from the various Presocratics, particularly Parmenides (the changeless and unitary nature of intelligible reality), Heraclitus (the constant flux of the sensible world), and above all the Pythagoreans (the intelligibility of reality via mathematical forms). Socrates’s more focused concerns and strategies thereby became the basis for Plato’s broader enunciation of the major outlines and problems for subsequent Western philosophy in all its diverse areas—logic, ethics, politics, epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, psychology, cosmology.
Plato expressed that deepening and expans
ion by using the figure of Socrates to articulate the philosophy that he believed Socrates’s life had nobly exampled. For in Plato’s vision, Socrates appeared as a living embodiment of goodness and wisdom, the very qualities Plato considered to be the foundational principles of the world and the highest goals of human aspiration. Socrates thus became not only the inspiration for but also the personification of the Platonic philosophy. From Plato’s art emerged the archetypal Socrates, the avatar of Platonism.
In this view, Plato did not provide a verbatim documentary of Socrates’s thought; nor, in the opposite extreme, did he use Socrates merely as a mouthpiece for his own completely independent ideas. Rather, Plato’s relationship to Socrates appears to have been more complicated, more mysterious, more interpretive and creative, as he elaborated and transformed his master’s ideas to bring them to what he understood to be their inherent, systematically argued, metaphysically articulate conclusions. Socrates often referred to himself as an intellectual midwife, through his dialectical skill bringing to birth the latent truth in another’s mind. Perhaps Platonic philosophy itself was the final and fullest fruit of that labor.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 6