by Paul Johnson
The permeation of Greek thought by Socrates’ notions of life and death, body and soul, which operated through the writings of Plato and Aristotle and others, and which became increasingly perceptible within two or three generations of his departure, was hugely assisted by the story of his trial and self-execution and his superb composure on the threshold of eternity. Socrates became not only the archetypal philosopher and source of ethical wisdom, but the living paradigm of a good man and the perfect example of how the body-soul relationship ought to operate.
Hence when in the first century A.D. St. Paul came to preach the teachings of Jesus Christ to the Greek-speaking world of the Gentiles, he found an audience already prepared, in certain important respects, for his message. It was the combination of Jesus’ inspired Hebrew message of charity, selflessness, acceptance of suffering, and willing sacrifice with the clear Socratic vision of the soul’s triumph and the eternal life awaiting it that gave the Christianity which sprang from St. Paul’s teaching of the Gospels its astonishing power and ubiquity and enabled it to flourish in persecution and martyrdom. The figure of Socrates also emerged unscathed and ennobled from his trial, conviction, and approaching death. St. Paul wrote, “The Greeks ask for a reason, the Jews look for a sign.” Socrates, thanks to Plato’s writings, supplied the reason, while Jesus of Nazareth and his resurrection produced the sign.
It is not profitable to pursue the connection between Socratic thought and Christianity beyond this general point. Socrates was not a Christian precursor, and though, like Jesus, he had a mission, the two endeavors had little in common. “I am the way, the truth and the life”: this was a majestic claim, which only the consciousness of divinity could possibly justify. It was not a prospectus Socrates could ever conceivably have put forward. His one reiterated insistence was that he knew nothing. What he did feel he could do, and what was the essence of his ministry, was to help ordinary humans to think a little more clearly and coherently about what constituted good behavior, worthy of humanity at its best. The success with which he did this, worked out over numerous generations, gave clarity and power to the Greek world’s reception of Christianity and so made it more fruitful. That in itself was an enormous achievement, beside which the work of Plato and Aristotle, important though they were in the establishment of Christendom and so of the Western world that succeeded it, were peripheral contributions.
The second key way in which Socrates furnished or refurnished the mind permanently was in insisting that morality was absolute, not relative. All societies, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, have an inherent, weakening tendency to slip into moral relativism. Greek society as he found it was a crumbling and festering mass of morally relative practices and pseudo-idealistic propositions to justify them. The body of Greek polytheism sweated moral relativism at every pore. It would be hard to find a clear moral absolute in the whole of Homer, and dramatists like Sophocles and Euripides tell approvingly of deals with the gods that subvert the notion of regular moral conduct. Socrates’ great gift to society was that he brought morals from the shifty atmosphere of qua-sidivine bargains, frauds, and compromises into the blazing daylight of ordinary honorable transactions between men and women striving to be honest. To Socrates, morality was absolute or it was nothing. If an act was unjust, it was always and everywhere so and must never be done. Whatever the provocation, a man or woman must never act unjustly. A simple tradesman doing his business in the Agora at Athens, a statesman speaking to the Assembly on issues of peace or war, a general or admiral conducting an army or a galley fleet, or a teacher instructing the young were all subject to the same inexorable moral laws.
Socrates rejected retaliation, however great the offense in the first place, as contrary to justice because it involved inflicting a wrong. The principle—never retaliate, never inflict wrong in any circumstances—applied equally to city-states, however powerful, and private individuals, however humble. Socrates drew no distinction between public and private morality, a point never before made or even considered in the history of Greek ethics—if ethics could be said to have had a history before his time. It might be said that Socrates, in subjecting all actors on the human stage to the same rules, democratized ethics in the same way, though by a different process of reasoning, that the ancient Hebrews made all humans equal in subjection to an omnipotent and universal Yahweh and so produced what Philo of Alexandria, a seer who owed almost as much to Socrates as to Moses, called a democratic theocracy.
Socrates had a favorable opinion of men and women because he saw clearly that they were capable of the highest moral heroism. Their outward appearance was of no lasting significance. Beauty faded with age, and clothes could do little for a man or woman to enhance or detract from what nature had provided. He had no shoes and precious little in the way of garments, and God had made him an ugly man. On the other hand, he was no uglier at seventy than he had been at twenty: a little more bandy-legged, perhaps, and with a paunch. He had no time for Zeuxis, the fashionable painter who had his name embroidered on his cloak in gold letters. What was that supposed to prove? On the other hand, human beings, though not worth adorning, were infinitely worth study. Socrates was fascinated throughout his life by the variety, peculiarities, cussedness, and sheer individualism of human beings. They posed problems he delighted in solving and offered perspectives on the human condition that kept him in constant fascination as he bustled and dawdled about the streets of Athens, sampling its human wares. Asked why he had married such a difficult woman as Xanthippe, he replied that it was precisely her singularities, not to say her angularities, that made her attractive. She was a problem to be solved on which he could exercise his skills, like a horse trainer, he added, confronted by a testing but remarkable animal. Socrates was interested in ideas and concepts, and they form the starting point of all the dialogues in which Plato shows him participating. But the dialogues live and have meaning only in their humanity, only because they deal with real individuals. For Socrates, ideas existed to serve and illuminate people, not the other way around. Here was the big distinction between him and Plato. To Socrates, philosophy had no meaning or relevance unless it concerned itself with men and women. It is worth repeating, and emphasizing, Cicero’s summary of Socrates’ work: “He was the first to call philosophy down from the sky and establish her in the towns, and bring her into homes, and force her to investigate the life of men and women, ethical conduct, good and evil.”
Hence Socrates was ill at ease when by himself. He could not exercise his philosophy as a solitary. He needed people. He needed a city. Above all, he needed Athens. He had to have its human content, of all ages and classes and callings, to call upon and buttonhole, to question and sift, to stir up and provoke. It was as if he were a master chef preparing a celebratory feast of humanity. The Athenians were his prime ingredient, to which by his “examining” he added spice and flavor, substance and body, balance and variety, until he had produced a banquet of the mind and spirit that has given the world nourishment ever since.
Happy among people, Socrates did not seek to turn them into pupils, let alone students. He was not a teacher, a don, an academic. There was nothing professorial about him. He had no oeuvre. As Cicero said, “He did not write so much as a single letter.” There was no body of Socratic doctrine. He spurned a classroom. The streets and marketplace of Athens were his habitat. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, he founded no Academy or Lyceum. The university, with its masters and students, its lectures and tutorials, its degrees and libraries and publishing houses, was nothing to do with him. He was part of the life of the city—a thinking part, to be sure, a talking and debating part, but no more separated from its throbbing, bustling activity than the fishmonger or the money changer or the cobbler, its ranting politician, its indigent poet, or its wily lawyer. He was at home in the city, a stranger on campus. He knew that as soon as philosophy separated itself from the life of the people, it began to lose its vitality and was heading in the wrong direction.
An academic philosophy was not an activity to which he had anything of value to contribute or in which he wished to participate. The notion of philosophy existing only in academic isolation from the rest of the world would have horrified him and probably would have produced ribald laughter, too. “That,” one can hear him saying, “is the death of any philosophy I can recognize.”
For Socrates saw and practiced philosophy not as an academic but as a human activity. It was about real men and women facing actual ethical choices between right and wrong, good and evil. Hence a philosophical leader had to be more than a thinker, much more. He had to be a good man, for whom the quest for virtue was not an abstract idea but a practical business of daily living. He had to be brave in facing up to choices and living with their consequences. Philosophy, in the last resort, was a form of heroism, and those who practiced it had to possess the courage to sacrifice everything, including life itself, in pursuing excellence of mind. That is what Socrates himself did. And that is why we honor him and salute him as philosophy personified.
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FURTHER READING
The handiest collection of texts that form the primary sources for Socrates’ life is On Socrates in the Collector’s Library (London, 2004), with an introduction by Tom Griffith. This gives the seven most important texts of Plato (Lysis, Laches, Charmides, Symposium, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo) the text of Clouds by Aristophanes, and Xenophon’s Symposium. Moreover, it slips easily into the pocket. A more extensive collection of texts is in Socrates: A Source Book, compiled by John Ferguson (London, for the Open University, 1970), which gives much more of Plato, Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, Diogenes Laertius, a good deal of Aristotle, and extracts dealing with Socrates from Cicero and many other Latin secular writers, Plutarch and other Greek writers, and Christian writers on Socrates. Other editions of texts I have found useful include the Penguin Last Days of Socrates (Euthyphro , Apology, Crito, Phaedo), edited by Harold Tarrent, and the Penguin Republic, translated by Desmond Lee with an introduction by Melissa Lane (London, 1987).
Two good, short biographies of Socrates are by A. E. Taylor (London, 1932) and C. C. W. Taylor (Oxford, 1998). Plato, by R. M. Hare (Oxford, 1982), is also recommended. The key book on Socrates is by Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge, 1997). Also useful are the Cambridge Companion to Plato, edited by Richard Krant (Cambridge, 1992); Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London, 2001); Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, The Spell of Plato (London, 2005); and Nickolas Pappas, Plato and the Republic (London, 1996). For art, architecture, and sculpture, I have used Martin Robertson, A History of Greek Art, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1975); K. Papaioannou, The Art of Greece (New York, 1989); and J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge, 1972). For general background, see the Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard (Oxford, 1973) and the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, edited by M. C. Howatson (Oxford, 1993).
INDEX
Acharnians (Aristophanes)
Acropolis
see also Parthenon
Aeschines
Aeschylus
Agariste
Agathon
Alcibiades
death of
Eleusinian Mysteries in charges against
homosexual overtures of
in retreat from Delium
Syracuse expedition led by
Amphipolis, Battle of
amphorae, Attic
Anabasis (Xenophon)
Analects (Confucius)
Anaxagoras
Anaximander
Anaximenes
Andocides
Antheus (Agathon)
Antigone (Sophocles)
Antisthenes
Anytus
Apollo
Apollodorus
Apology (Plato)
Arginusae, Battle of
Aristes
Aristides
Aristophanes
city contests won by
in Plato’s Symposium
satiric plays of
Aristotle
Aristoxenus
Aspasia
Athena
Athens:
annual contests of
bookselling trade in
citizenship rights in
consensus needed by
as democracy
empire of
genocides of
gold reserve of
Panathenaea music festival at
Periclean, see Pericles
periods of ceremonial purity in
Persian sacking of
plague in
population size of
public events in
social mobility in
Socrates’ perambulations of
Socrates’ statue in
traditional religion of
women’s position in
see also Acropolis
Athens, legal system of
Arginusae victory and
executions in
flaws of
prominent citizens prosecuted in
social demoralization and
Socrates’ upholding of
Thirty Tyrants regime and
undifferentiated public vs. private interest in
Austen, Jane
Bevan, Aneurin
Briand, Aristide
British Museum
Callicles
Callicrates
Carpion
Chaerephon
Charmides
Christianity
Churchill, Winston
Cicero
Cimon
city planning
city-states
Cleisthenes
Cleiton
Cleon
Clouds (Aristophanes)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Confucius
Critias
Crito
Crito (Plato)
Critobulus
Damon
Dawkins, Richard
Delian League
Delium, retreat from
Delphi
Oracle of
Democritus
Demosthenes
Diodotus
Diogenes Laertius
Dionysus
Diotima of Mantinea
dithyrambs
drama
actors in
annual contests of
Book of Job as
chorus in
comedy
major playwrights of
religious origin of
tragedy
Egypt
Eleatics
Eleusinian Mysteries
entasis
Ephialtes
Epidaurus
Euripides
Euthyphro (Plato)
Exodus, Book of
Ezra
Frogs (Aristophanes)
genocide
Gladstone, W. E.
Gorgias (Plato)
Great Britain
attorney general of
Bill of Attainder process in
taxation by
Greek language
Hebrews
drama of
language of
Torah of
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Hermippus
Herodotus
Hesiod
hetaerae
Hipparchus
Hippocrates
Hippolytus (Euripides)
Holland, Lord
Homer
homosexuality
hoplites
Ictinus
impiety
Isocrates
Job, Book of
Johnson, Samuel
Jonson, Ben
Julius Africanus
justice
evil and
five principles of
as form of self-interest
moral absolutism of
retaliation rejected in
slavery and
for women
Keynes, John Maynard
Knights (Aristophanes)
Laches (Plato)
Laws (Plato)
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von
Leonidas
Leon of Salamis
Longford, Frank
lyre
Lysander
Lysias
Lysistrata (Aristophanes)
Macaulay, Thomas Babington
maenads
Marathon, Battle of
mathematics
Medea (Euripides)
Megacles
Meletus
Memoirs (Xenophon)
Meno (Plato)
Miltiades
Moore, Henry
Moore, Thomas
moral education
More, Thomas
Munich Gallery of Antique Art
music
musical ethics
musical instruments
Myrto
Mytilene
Nicias
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Olympic games
Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper)
Oracle of Delphi
paeans
Panhellenic games
Parmenides
Parrhasius
Parthenon
entasis of
frieze of
sculptural embellishment of
statue of Athena in
Pasion
Paul, Saint
Pausanias