A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  I have something more to say, at which you may be inclined to cry out; but I believe that to hear me will be good for you, and therefore I beg that you will not cry out. I would have you know, that if you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me. Nothing will injure me, not Meletus nor yet Anytus—they cannot, for a bad man is not permitted to injure a better than himself. I do not deny that Anytus may perhaps kill him, or drive him into exile, or deprive him of civil rights; and he may imagine, and others may imagine, that he is inflicting a great injury upon him: but there I do not agree. For the evil of doing as he is doing—the evil of unjustly taking away the life of another—is greater far.

  It is for the sake of his judges, he says, not for his own sake, that he is pleading. He is a gad-fly, given to the state by God, and it will not be easy to find another like him. “I dare say you may feel out of temper (like a person who is suddenly awakened from sleep), and you think that you might easily strike me dead as Anytus advises, and then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you sent you another gad-fly.”

  Why has he only gone about in private, and not given advice on public affairs? “You have heard me speak at sundry times and in diverse places of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do. This is what deters me from being a politician.” He goes on to say that in politics no honest man can live long. He gives two instances in which he was unavoidably mixed up in public affairs: in the first, he resisted the democracy; in the second, the Thirty Tyrants, in each case when the authorities were acting illegally.

  He points out that among those present are many former pupils of his, and fathers and brothers of pupils; not one of these has been produced by the prosecution to testify that he corrupts the young. (This is almost the only argument in the Apology that a lawyer for the defence would sanction.) He refuses to follow the custom of producing his weeping children in court, to soften the hearts of the judges; such scenes, he says, make the accused and the city alike ridiculous. It is his business to convince the judges, not to ask a favour of them.

  After the verdict, and the rejection of the alternative penalty of thirty minae (in connection with which Socrates names Plato as one among his sureties, and present in court), he makes one final speech.

  And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am about to die, and in the hour of death men are gifted with prophetic power. And I prophesy to you, who are my murderers, that immediately after my departure punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you…. If you think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honourable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves.

  He then turns to those of his judges who have voted for acquittal, and tells them that, in all that he has done that day, his oracle has never opposed him, though on other occasions it has often stopped him in the middle of a speech. This, he says, “is an intimation that what has happened to me is a good, and that those of us who think death is an evil are in error.” For either death is a dreamless sleep—which is plainly good—or the soul migrates to another world. And “what would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die and die again.” In the next world, he will converse with others who have suffered death unjustly, and, above all, he will continue his search after knowledge. “In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier than we are, they will be immortal, if what is said is true….

  “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”

  The Apology gives a clear picture of a man of a certain type: a man very sure of himself, high-minded, indifferent to worldly success, believing that he is guided by a divine voice, and persuaded that clear thinking is the most important requisite for right, living. Except in this last point, he resembles a Christian martyr or a Puritan. In the final passage, where he considers what happens after death, it is impossible not to feel that he firmly believes in immortality, and that his professed uncertainty is only assumed. He is not troubled, like the Christians, by fears of eternal torment: he has no doubt that his life in the next world will be a happy one. In the Phaedo, the Platonic Socrates gives reasons for the belief in immortality; whether these were the reasons that influenced the historical Socrates, it is impossible to say.

  There seems hardly any doubt that the historical Socrates claimed to be guided by an oracle or daimon. Whether this was analogous to what a Christian would call the voice of conscience, or whether it appeared to him as an actual voice, it is impossible to know. Joan of Arc was inspired by voices, which are a common form of insanity. Socrates was liable to cataleptic trances; at least, that seems the natural explanation of such an incident as occurred once when he was on military service:

  One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon—there he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the evening after supper, some Ionians out of curiosity (I should explain that this occurred not in winter but in summer), brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way (Symposium, 220).

  This sort of thing, in a lesser degree, was a common occurrence with Socrates. At the beginning of the Symposium, Socrates and Aristodemus go together to the banquet, but Socrates drops behind in a fit of abstraction. When Aristodemus arrives, Agathon, the host, says “what have you done with Socrates?” Aristodemus is astonished to find Socrates not with him; a slave is sent to look for him, and finds him in the portico of a neighbouring house. “There he is fixed,” says the slave on his return, “and when I call to him he will not stir.” Those who know him well explain that “he has a way of stopping anywhere and losing himself without any reason.” They leave him alone, and he enters when the feast is half over.

  Every one is agreed that Socrates was very ugly; he had a snub nose and a considerable paunch; he was “uglier than all the Silenuses in the Satyric drama” (Xenophon, Symposium). He was always dressed in shabby old clothes, and went barefoot everywhere. His indifference to heat and cold, hunger and thirst, amazed every one. Alcibiades in the Symposium, describing Socrates on military service, says:

  His endurance was simply marvellous when, being cut off from our supplies, we were compelled to go without food—on such occasions, which often happen in time of war, he was superior not only to me but to everybody: there was no one to be compared to him…. His fortitude in enduring cold was also surprising. There was a severe frost, for the winter in that region is really tremendous, and everybody else either remained indoors, or if they went out had on an amazing quantity of clothes, and were well shod, and had their feet swathed in felt and fleeces: in the midst of this, Socrates with his bare feet on the ice and in his ordinary dress marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes, and they looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them.

  His mastery over all bodily passions is constantly stressed. He seldom drank wine, but when he did, he could out-drink anybody; no one had ever seen him drunk. In love, even under the strongest temptations, he remained “Platonic,” if Plato is speaking the truth. He was the perfect Orphic saint: in the dualism of heavenly soul and earthly body, he had
achieved the complete mastery of the soul over the body. His indifference to death at the last is the final proof of this mastery. At the same time, he is not an orthodox Orphic; it is only the fundamental doctrines that he accepts, not the superstitions and ceremonies of purification.

  The Platonic Socrates anticipates both the Stoics and the Cynics. The Stoics held that the supreme good is virtue, and that a man cannot be deprived of virtue by outside causes; this doctrine is implicit in the contention of Socrates that his judges cannot harm him. The Cynics despised worldly goods, and showed their contempt by eschewing the comforts of civilization; this is the same point of view that led Socrates to go barefoot and ill-clad.

  It seems fairly certain that the preoccupations of Socrates were ethical rather than scientific. In the Apology, as we saw, he says: “I have nothing to do with physical speculations.” The earliest of the Platonic dialogues, which are generally supposed to be the most Socratic, are mainly occupied with the search for definitions of ethical terms. The Charmides is concerned with the definition of temperance or moderation; the Lysis with friendship; the Laches with courage. In all of these, no conclusion is arrived at, but Socrates makes it clear that he thinks it important to examine such questions. The Platonic Socrates consistently maintains that he knows nothing, and is only wiser than others in knowing that he knows nothing; but he does not think knowledge unobtainable. On the contrary, he thinks the search for knowledge of the utmost importance. He maintains that no man sins wittingly, and therefore only knowledge is needed to make all men perfectly virtuous.

  The close connection between virtue and knowledge is characteristic of Socrates and Plato. To some degree, it exists in all Greek thought, as opposed to that of Christianity. In Christian ethics, a pure heart is the essential, and is at least as likely to be found among the ignorant as among the learned. This difference between Greek and Christian ethics has persisted down to the present day.

  Dialectic, that is to say, the method of seeking knowledge by question and answer, was not invented by Socrates. It seems to have been first practised systematically by Zeno, the disciple of Parmenides; in Plato’s dialogue Parmenides, Zeno subjects Socrates to the same kind of treatment to which, elsewhere in Plato, Socrates subjects others. But there is every reason to suppose that Socrates practised and developed the method. As we saw, when Socrates is condemned to death he reflects happily that in the next world he can go on asking questions for ever, and cannot be put to death, as he will be immortal. Certainly, if he practised dialectic in the way described in the Apology, the hostility to him is easily explained: all the humbugs in Athens would combine against him.

  The dialectic method is suitable for some questions, and unsuitable for others. Perhaps this helped to determine the character of Plato’s inquiries, which were, for the most part, such as could be dealt within this way. And through Plato’s influence, most subsequent philosophy has been bounded by the limitations resulting from his method.

  Some matters are obviously unsuitable for treatment in this way—empirical science, for example. It is true that Galileo used dialogues to advocate his theories, but that was only in order to overcome prejudice—the positive grounds for his discoveries could not be inserted in a dialogue without great artificiality. Socrates, in Plato’s works, always pretends that he is only eliciting knowledge already possessed by the man he is questioning; on this ground, he compares himself to a midwife. When, in the Phaedo and the Meno, he applies his method to geometrical problems, he has to ask leading questions which any judge would disallow. The method is in harmony with the doctrine of reminiscence, according to which we learn by remembering what we knew in a former existence. As against this view, consider any discovery that has been made by means of the microscope, say the spread of diseases by bacteria; it can hardly be maintained that such knowledge can be elicited from a previously ignorant person by the method of question and answer.

  The matters that are suitable for treatment by the Socratic method are those as to which we have already enough knowledge to come to a right conclusion, but have failed, through confusion of thought or lack of analysis, to make the best logical use of what we know. A question such as “what is justice?” is eminently suited for discussion in a Platonic dialogue. We all freely use the words “just” and “unjust,” and, by examining the ways in which we use them, we can arrive inductively at the definition that will best suit with usage. All that is needed is knowledge of how the words in question are used. But when our inquiry is concluded, we have made only a linguistic discovery, not a discovery in ethics.

  We can, however, apply the method profitably to a somewhat larger class of cases. Wherever what is being debated is logical rather than factual, discussion is a good method of eliciting truth. Suppose some one maintains, for example, that democracy is good, but persons holding certain opinions should not be allowed to vote, we may convict him of inconsistency, and prove to him that at least one of his two assertions must be more or less erroneous. Logical errors are, I think, of greater practical importance than many people believe; they enable their perpetrators to hold the comfortable opinion on every subject in turn. Any logically coherent body of doctrine is sure to be in part painful and contrary to current prejudices. The dialectic method—or, more generally, the habit of unfettered discussion—tends to promote logical consistency, and is in this way useful. But it is quite unavailing when the object is to discover new facts. Perhaps “philosophy” might be defined as the sum-total of those inquiries that can be pursued by Plato’s methods. But if this definition is appropriate, that is because of Plato’s influence upon subsequent philosophers.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Influence of Sparta

  TO understand Plato, and indeed many later philosophers, it is necessary to know something of Sparta. Sparta had a double effect on Greek thought: through the reality, and through the myth. Each is important. The reality enabled the Spartans to defeat Athens in war; the myth influenced Plato’s political theory, and that of countless subsequent writers. The myth, fully developed, is to be found in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus; the ideals that it favours have had a great part in framing the doctrines of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and National Socialism.* The myth is of even more importance, historically, than the reality; nevertheless, we will begin with the latter. For the reality was the source of the myth.

  Laconia, or Lacedaemon, of which Sparta was the capital, occupied the south-east of the Peloponnesus. The Spartans, who were the ruling race, had conquered the country at the time of the Dorian invasion from the north, and had reduced the population that they found there to the condition of serfs. These serfs were called helots. In historical times, all the land belonged to the Spartans, who, however, were forbidden by law and custom to cultivate it themselves, both on the ground that such labour was degrading, and in order that they might always be free for military service. The serfs were not bought and sold, but remained attached to the land, which was divided into lots, one or more for each adult male Spartan. These lots, like the helots, could not be bought or sold, and passed, by law, from father to son. (They could, however, be bequeathed.) The landowner received from the helot who cultivated the lot seventy medimni (about 105 bushels) of grain for himself, twelve for his wife, and a stated portion of wine and fruit annually.* Anything beyond this amount was the property of the helot. The helots were Greeks, like the Spartans, and bitterly resented their servile condition. When they could, they rebelled. The Spartans had a body of secret police to deal with this danger, but to supplement this precaution they had another: once a year, they declared war on the helots, so that their young men could kill any who seemed insubordinate without incurring the legal guilt of homicide. Helots could be emancipated by the state, but not by their masters; they were emancipated, rather rarely, for exceptional bravery in battle.

  At some time during the eighth century B.C. the Spartans conquered the neighbouring country of Messenia, and reduced most of its inhabitants to the condition of
helots. There had been a lack of Lebensraum in Sparta, but the new territory, for a time, removed this source of discontent.

  Lots were for the common run of Spartans; the aristocracy had estates of their own, whereas the lots were portions of common land assigned by the state.

  The free inhabitants of other parts of Laconia, called “perioeci,” had no share of political power.

  The sole business of a Spartan citizen was war, to which he was trained from birth. Sickly children were exposed after inspection by the heads of the tribe; only those judged vigorous were allowed to be reared. Up to the age of twenty, all the boys were trained in one big school; the purpose of the training was to make them hardy, indifferent to pain, and submissive to discipline. There was no nonsense about cultural or scientific education; the sole aim was to produce good soldiers, wholly devoted to the state.

  At the age of twenty, actual military service began. Marriage was permitted to any one over the age of twenty, but until the age of thirty a man had to live in the “men’s house,” and had to manage his marriage as if it were an illicit and secret affair. After thirty, he was a full-fledged citizen. Every citizen belonged to a mess, and dined with the other members; he had to make a contribution in kind from the produce of his lot. It was the theory of the state that no Spartan citizen should be destitute, and none should be rich. Each was expected to live on the produce of his lot, which he could not alienate except by free gift. None was allowed to own gold or silver, and the money was made of iron. Spartan simplicity became proverbial.