by Paul Johnson
Socrates’ use of humor is perfectly illustrated by Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. But follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.” Socrates said almost exactly the same thing. He insisted, “I never jest at the sacred.” But “all the mortal world” was fair game. And he switches from one mood to another without a noisy change of gear. The best way to grasp, and appreciate, Socrates’ methods is to read the texts that have come down to us, especially the score of Socrates’ dialogues recorded by Plato. They cannot give us the pleasure of listening to Socrates’ voice, which was melodious, the essence of courtesy, patience, sensitivity, and calmness, but they do to some extent show how his mind worked, especially its combination of lighthearted flexibility and high seriousness.
He valued words, and the first thing he tried to instill was the need to use them with care. That meant defining them. Aristotle said Socrates was the first to make a point of definitions. What he liked was to take a subject—love, piety, friendship, reason, etc.—and ask someone to begin by defining it. Thus in Laches he tackles courage. Laches thinks this an easy one. “If anyone stands his place, and defends himself from the enemy and does not fly, he is courageous.” Socrates agrees but then asks, “What about the Scythians, who fight just as furiously when they fly as when they are pursuing?” “Yes, but that is cavalry. I was talking about the heavy infantry of Greece, who do as I say, and are brave.” “Except for the Spartans. At Plataea, they were not willing to remain and fight them, but fled. Then, when the Persians broke ranks, they rallied, and fought like cavalry, and thus won the battle.” “True.” “Of course,” said Socrates, “you did not answer correctly because I did not put the question correctly. I should have made it much broader, asking about not only soldiers in battle, but sailors at sea and in storms, and those who show fortitude in sickness, poverty, in politics, against pain or fear—there are surely some men, Laches, who are brave in these things?” “Surely.” “Try again, then, to tell me what exactly is that bravery which is the same in all these?” And so on. Socrates helps him by trying to define the element of swiftness common in running races, playing on the harp, speaking, and learning. Laches eventually tries to define bravery as “endurance of the soul.” But Socrates and he agree that not every kind of endurance involves bravery. Laches also, prompted by Socrates, says that endurance existing in conjunction with what is prudent, admirable, and good, “is more likely to be a form of bravery. But what if bravery subsists with folly? Is not this hurtful and evil working? And can bravery, though seemingly admirable, coexist with folly? Is not what you are saying, that only prudent bravery can be truly admirable?” The dialogue continues, embracing medicine and the treatment of inflammation of the lungs, the estimation of numbers in deciding when to fight a battle, the relative bravery of men in cavalry combat who are experts on horses, and those who are not, the use and misuse of boldness, the kind of bravery needed to pursue an argument, such as this one. Socrates then brings in Nicias, who defines bravery as “the science relating to dread and daring, both in war and in all other things.” Laches: “How absurdly he talks.... He is a trifler.” Socrates: “Let us then teach, but not revile him.” Then they get back to medicine, and on to agriculture, and the fear of dying, and prophecy, and many other matters. The discussion ends without conclusion or rancor but with an agreement to meet the next morning.
Laches is a characteristic early dialogue, in which Socrates, not Plato, is in charge and animating the whole. When you try to condense and epitomize such a work, you realize how hard it is to understand the dialogue as a whole—that is, presenting a discussion in readable and comprehensible form, which had probably taken place over many hours, perhaps days, and had often been confused, running off at a tangent, irrelevant or at times pointless, and all this without recording devices or, most probably, secretarial help. We must assume that Plato shortened many of the exchanges, and rationalized, clarified, and sharpened the contributions, including Socrates’ own. The wonder is that he still emerges from these early discussions as a definite character and that his purpose in holding them can be grasped. Plato was a great artist, and at this stage in his career was still an artist aiming at verisimilitude.
What, then, was Socrates’ purpose? It should be understood that there were in his day, have been ever since, and are likely to be in the future two fundamentally distinct kinds of philosophers. The first tells you what to think; the second, how to think. Socrates belongs to the second group, emphatically, though (as we have already seen and shall see again) he had opinions, too. He was interested in people, rather than ideas, and keenly anxious to discover how people think and whether they can be encouraged to think more clearly and usefully. His methods in cross-questioning his subjects demonstrate time and again what he is up to. He wants to show that on almost any topic—not least the big ones he tackles, like justice, friendship, courage, virtue as a whole—the received opinion is nearly always faulty and often wholly wrong. He asks a simple question, gets the usual answer, and then proceeds to show, using further questions springing from a vast repertoire of occupations, history both human and natural, and literature, that the usual answer not only fails to fit all the contingencies implicit in the question but also contradicts analytical reason at its highest or even common sense at its lowest. Socrates was always suspicious of the obvious, and he can nearly always show that the obvious is untrue, and the truth is very rarely obvious. The way he does this is the substance of the discussion and gives it its excitement and dynamism. Reaching a conclusion is not the object. The object, rather, is teaching the people to whom he is talking how to think and, not least, how to think for themselves.
Each session, therefore, embodies a lesson, and the underlying assumption is that the lesson is learned only when the young men (or others) to whom he is talking can carry on in the same way, on other topics, when Socrates is not around to steer, coax, nag, bully, and guide them. What is particularly liberating about Socrates and is just as relevant today as in the fifth century B.C., is his hostility not just to the “right answer” as to the very idea of there being a right answer. He would have been particularly opposed to the modern system, used in every kind of bureaucratic form-filling and increasingly in examination papers at all levels of the education system, of asking people not to give their answers to a question, but to examine various answers and pick the right one. This denial of independent thought by individuals was exactly the kind of mentality he spent his life in resisting. Of course, by teaching people, especially young men (often from influential families) to think for themselves, Socrates was treading a dangerous path. Athens (for most of the time) was a democracy of sorts and a free, certainly a liberal, society. But its institutions rested on consensus and to some degree were precarious, especially if the consensus was not forthcoming. It was one thing to have the Assembly swayed by rhetoric. Allowance could be made for that. But if each citizen thought for himself, was taught to distrust the received wisdom and even to reject the notion of a correct answer to problems, then getting the consensus, especially the right consensus, would prove to be hard, if not impossible. In my view, this was a powerful consideration, which led to criticism of Socrates’ activities among the young and, in a time of crisis, to his prosecution, conviction, and death.
But we will come to all that later. What is worth observing now is that, even in the early dialogues, when Plato is producing the real, actual, and historic Socrates and recording accurately what he said, the thought was stirring in his mind that there were dangers in teaching clever young men to be intellectually independent. Perhaps already, even when listening to Socrates talk or when first setting it down, there was stirring in Plato’s mind the idea of his Republic, the utopian state that would be immune to such threats because it was protected from rash and impetuous thinking by a powerful consensus of guardians.
We can be in absolute
ly no doubt that Socrates would have disliked and disapproved of the republic Plato wanted to bring into being. Indeed the two men were very different in almost every respect, and it is one of the great paradoxes of history that they came together, the one to found, the other to record, the beginning of true philosophy. In youth, Plato hero-worshipped Socrates; in his maturity, he repudiated him without appearing to do so to the inattentive reader or perhaps without knowing himself what exactly he was doing. Socrates, to begin with, was a conservative radical, while Plato was a radical conservative. Socrates was open to any idea that could leap over the various barriers of logical proof that formed a racecourse in his mind. He was conservative in that he respected old customs concerning gods and heroes and others cherished by the public, for he did not wish to put ordinary people off the essential truths by a foolish desire to demolish inessential myths. He was a conservative radical precisely because he was a moderate, genial, sensitive, and generous human being. Plato, on the other hand, was inclined to transform natural conservative instincts, which sprang from the empirical wisdom of ordinary people, into a specific ideology, which inevitably moved from a humane traditionalism into absolutist dogma. It is no wonder that Karl Popper, in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, identified Plato as the ultimate progenitor of the twentieth-century totalitarian state, even though this argument is open to serious objections. I suspect that if Socrates had been able to read the Republic and to assess its influence through the twentieth century, he might have been even more severe than Popper.
That there was a widening bifurcation between Socrates and Plato is one of the most obvious facts in the history of philosophy. Exactly when it occurred in the Platonic oeuvre and which dialogues can be described as Socratic or mainly Socratic or mainly Platonic or wholly Platonic has been debated by scholars for generations. I prefer a broad-brush approach that makes a general contrast between the Socratic and Platonic mentalities and then counsels the reader to study the dialogues and make up his or her own mind. This, I think, would be the Socratic approach.
Well, then: Socrates was a sensible, practical, down-to-earth man, interested in usefulness, not perfection, and inclined to make allowances for the infinite variety of human nature. He was not a poet but a master of spoken prose. Plato was a poet. Worse, a frustrated poet. He was in parts of his being a visionary, a mystic, a transcendentalist. He believed in the transmigration of souls. He thought the soul was a repository of inherent knowledge, which could be rediscovered. He believed in transcendent forms as opposed to individual objects. Socrates believed in none of these notions.
The great Socrates scholar Gregory Vlastos, who has, in my opinion, written the best book on the subject, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge, reprinted 1997), has listed ten key ways in which the real Socrates differed from the artificial creation labeled Socrates who increasingly figures in Plato’s works. First, Socrates is exclusively a moral philosopher. Second, Socrates does not believe at all in “forms” or “recollections of knowledge.” Third, Socrates insists he has no knowledge/wisdom and goes on seeking it eclectically. Fourth, Socrates has no complicated, tripartite notion of the soul, composed of rationality, passion, and cravings. Socrates takes a simple view of the soul, immortal and unified, which Christians share. Fifth, Socrates is not interested in mathematical sciences, except where they are obviously essential, as in land surveying, and neither possesses nor claims any scientific expertise. Sixth, his view of philosophy is populist. Seventh, he has no political theory as such. He is often critical of the way Athens is run and its manner of doing things, but he prefers it and its laws to those of any other state. Eighth, he rejects homosexual love except at a superficial level. Ninth, Socrates sees piety as service to a rigorously ethical deity, and his personal religion is practical, expressed in action. Finally his philosophical method is to pursue truth by refuting propositions he induces his interlocutors to put forward: He never departs from this strategy, and when he is presented as doing so, he is not Socrates but a hybrid creature I call Platsoc.
On the other hand, the fact that in the course of the dialogues and other writings of Plato, Socrates the man is gradually replaced by Platsoc, or Socrates the ventriloquist’s dummy, should not prevent anyone interested in what Socrates really thought from reading the entire corpus. In many places Socrates and Plato are inextricably intermingled. For instance, in the dialogue Gorgias, named after a famous Sophist from Leontini in Sicily, Socrates asks Gorgias to define what he specialized in teaching, rhetoric. Gorgias was notorious for saying a well-trained rhetorician or legal pleader could find plausible arguments to support any case, however flimsy, in law or politics. He himself taught pupils to speak in short, almost symmetrical phrases, and to balance theses and antitheses in a kind of pulsating rhythm, to play on words and to have audible echoes in the course of a plea. In short, he made a speech seem and sometimes sound like a piece of music. He took great pride in his skills and had some of the style and arrogance we associate today with a highly successful and ingenious advertising executive. He answers Socrates by saying rhetoric is one of the key human activities because the essence of a successful public leader or statesman is not so much knowing what is to be done as the ability to persuade people to do it. You can tell a first-class orator by his gift of getting people to do something even if it is manifestly unjust. Gorgias then retires, being replaced by his pupil Polus, and Socrates then uses his cross-examination technique to get Polus to agree with a proposition that Gorgias would certainly have rejected: that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it, and that if one has done a wicked thing it is better for you yourself, as well as for everyone else and society, to be punished than not to be punished. This is not the doll; it is genuine Socrates. Indeed, it is quintessential Socrates.
Polus, having been argued into repudiating his master’s lifework, is then replaced by a man called Callicles, who produces a variation on Gorgias’s amoralism. Virtue, he says, and therefore happiness, are to be found essentially in self-will, for those with the skill and willpower to exercise it, and this is so whether what is willed is just or unjust. Callicles is voicing a doctrine later to be laid down powerfully by Nietzsche, who was fascinated by the Socratic dialogues—especially when Plato was in charge—and had illuminating things to say about them. Socrates does not actually refute this outrageous proposition but concentrates instead on drawing the distinction between Callicles’ life of action and his own life of philosophy, with an overwhelming preference for the latter: “An unexamined life is a life not worth living.” This last observation is essential Socrates, too, and occurs in different ways elsewhere in his discourse. But, that apart, Socrates is fading and morphing into Platsoc. He contrasts philosophy with the activities of Pericles, Miltiades, and Cimon, denouncing them with a vehemence that is alien to Socrates. The underlying proposition, that the true philosopher does more for the citizens of Athens by encouraging them to become virtuous than by leading them into victories and conquests, may be Socratic, but the context in which the point is made and the passion injected into the argument are ugly and un-Socratic: Platsoc again. Moreover the dialogue ends with a mythical presentation of the soul being judged after death, which is obviously Plato himself speaking.
Gorgias, then, illustrates the huge problem of extracting the real views of Socrates from the labyrinthine entanglements in which Plato—by intention or by the irresistible compulsion of his own powerful spirit, we cannot judge—has confusingly embedded them. It is rather like what happens today when a media democracy goes to war. Indeed the same word is used. Correspondents are “embedded” in active service units, and what they transmit to their TV stations and newspapers is a mixture, sometimes a confusing and contradictory one, of their own views and observations, and what their military mentors, or guardians, wish them to transmit. But at least they can, if pushed too far, protest, even if it means being sent home. Socrates was the innocent victim of Plato’s embedment—which often involv
ed a Procrustean bed, too—and never, of course, knew how his brilliant pupil would use him after his death.
All the same, it is clear what Socrates the real man thought about some important issues, and we can present them plainly. We have seen how he taught. Now we must look at—not so much what he taught, for he had no system and, strictly speaking, taught nothing in the way of dogma—but at what he believed.
V
Socrates and Justice
When the great economist John Maynard Keynes was asked what made a successful capitalist, he replied “Animal spirits, mainly.” This observation applies to Socrates too. There was about him a vigor or animation of mind, a power of cheerfulness, vivacity, and liveliness. Some vital power or energy seemed to flow into and out of him. By “animal spirits,” there is no implication of boisterous irresponsibility, such as we find in an overactive child. Rather, a zest for life and a desire to convey it, by revving up the minds of those with whom he came into contact. And in certain contexts the zest could become formidable. I can well believe the image of him striding across the field of combat, in hoplite armor, carrying his weapons, with the Spartans shrewdly deciding to leave him strictly alone: They sensed a zest for combat they could do without. Socrates compared himself to a gadfly, stinging the massive Athenian horse of state, an elderly cart horse or battle-scarred charger, out of its complacency or comatose inertia.