🏛️ Socrates

Socrates was born around 470 BC in Athens to a stonemason father, Sophroniscus, and a midwife mother, Phaenarete. He served as a hoplite soldier in several campaigns during the Peloponnesian War, distinguishing himself by his composure and endurance. He was ugly by Athenian standards — snub-nosed, pot-bellied, with protruding eyes — and he dressed poorly and went barefoot even in winter. He charged no fees for his teaching, wrote not a single word, and held no official position. In 399 BC, at the age of seventy, he was brought to trial before a jury of five hundred Athenian citizens, found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth, and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock. He is the most famous philosopher in history. Almost everything we know about philosophy begins with him, and none of it he wrote himself.

The paradox of Socrates is that his influence is enormous and his own thought is nearly inaccessible. He left no writings. What we know comes primarily from the dialogues of Plato — who was his student and devoted enormous literary talent to preserving and extending Socratic conversations — and from the Memorabilia and other works of Xenophon, a soldier and writer who also knew him. The problem is that Plato's Socrates and Xenophon's Socrates are very different characters, and scholars have debated for two millennia how much of "Plato's Socrates" represents the historical man and how much represents Plato's own developing philosophy. What we can say with confidence is that Socrates was a real Athenian who walked the agora, questioned everyone he met, attracted devoted young followers, and was eventually put to death for it.

The Socratic method — elenchus in Greek — is his most enduring contribution to intellectual life. It is a form of cooperative inquiry in which a question is posed, a definition or claim is offered, Socrates probes that claim with further questions, and the interlocutor discovers that the definition is inadequate, internally contradictory, or inconsistent with other things he believes. The process typically ends in aporia — perplexity, the acknowledgment that what seemed obvious is not, that what seemed known is not known. Socrates claimed that this was precisely the point: wisdom begins with recognizing the limits of one's own knowledge. His famous declaration — "I know that I know nothing" — is not a counsel of despair but the starting point of serious inquiry. The person who believes he already knows the answer cannot be curious about questions.

He described himself as a gadfly, sent by the god to sting the lazy horse of Athens into wakefulness. He described his role as that of a midwife — like his mother, he helped others give birth to ideas, not by providing answers but by creating the conditions in which genuine thought could occur. He questioned politicians and found that their confidence in their own judgment was not matched by any real knowledge of what was good. He questioned poets and found that they could not explain their own verses. He questioned craftsmen and found that, while they possessed genuine knowledge of their craft, they mistakenly believed this gave them knowledge of other things as well. In every case the encounter ended the same way: the questioner walked away humiliated or enraged; the crowd of young men who followed Socrates around the agora walked away convinced that their idol had won again.

His political views, as reconstructed from Plato's dialogues, were unconventional by Athenian standards. He was skeptical of democracy — not because he favored tyranny, but because he believed that political decisions require knowledge, and that knowledge requires training, and that most people, including most democratic voters, have neither. He was not a partisan of the Thirty Tyrants who briefly ruled Athens with Spartan backing in 404 BC; when they ordered him to participate in the arrest of an innocent man, he refused. But his association with some of the regime's leaders — including the notorious Critias and the glamorous, disastrous Alcibiades, both of whom had been his students — made him politically vulnerable when democracy was restored.

At his trial, as recounted in Plato's Apology, Socrates did not plead for mercy or promise to stop his questioning. He argued that his life had been spent in service to Athens, that philosophy was its highest calling, and that a life without examination was not worth living. He was offered the chance to propose an alternative penalty and reportedly suggested that the city should reward him with free meals for life — an answer the jury did not appreciate. He was sentenced to death by a narrow majority. He spent his final day in prison discussing the immortality of the soul with his friends, as recounted in the Phaedo. He drank the hemlock calmly, assured his friends that no harm could come to a good man in life or after death, and died. He was seventy years old. Athens had sinned against philosophy, and Plato spent his life ensuring that the world would know it.