Socrates
c. 470–399 BCE, Athens
Classical Greek
Wisdom starts with admitting how little you know.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
The life
Son of a stonemason and a midwife, Socrates spent his life in the public spaces of Athens rather than a school. He served as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis, and by all accounts was physically tough and indifferent to comfort. He married Xanthippe and had three sons.
He charged no fees, founded no school, and wrote nothing at all. His method was conversation: stopping people in the marketplace and asking what they meant by courage, or piety, or justice.
In 399 BCE, aged around seventy, he was tried for impiety and corrupting the young. A jury of 501 citizens convicted him by a narrow margin, then sentenced him to death by a wider one after he refused to plead for mercy. He drank hemlock rather than accept exile.
What shaped the ideas
Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War, endured the brutal rule of the Thirty Tyrants, and restored its democracy. The city was anxious, defeated and suspicious of anyone who seemed to undermine traditional piety.
Socrates was also easy to confuse with the sophists, travelling teachers who sold rhetorical technique. He detested them, but he questioned inherited beliefs just as sharply, and several of his associates had sided with the Tyrants. His trial was, in part, a defeated city settling scores.
Core arguments
- 01
Socratic ignorance
Knowing that you do not know is a genuine form of wisdom.
The Delphic oracle reportedly said no one was wiser than Socrates. Puzzled, he questioned the people with the strongest reputations and found each one confidently wrong about the thing they claimed to know. He concluded that his only advantage was that he did not imagine he knew what he did not.
- 02
Elenchus
Cross-examination can expose a false belief without asserting a rival one.
Take someone's confident definition, draw out other things they also believe, and show the two cannot both be true. The contradiction is generated from their own commitments, so they cannot dismiss it as your opinion. The result is aporia: an honest dead end.
- 03
Virtue is knowledge
Nobody does wrong willingly; wrongdoing is a failure of understanding.
Nobody pursues what they believe will harm them. Vice damages the person who acts on it. So anyone choosing to act badly must be mistaken about what is genuinely good for them. Moral failure is therefore an intellectual failure, and teachable.
- 04
The examined life
A life without self-scrutiny is not worth living.
What is distinctive about a human being is the capacity to turn reason on itself. Declining to use it means living on inherited opinion, which is to be steered by other people's thinking rather than your own.
Commonly got wrong
- "I know that I know nothing" is a later compression, not a line he is recorded as saying. The Apology says something more careful: that he is wiser only in not thinking he knows what he does not.
- The Socratic method is not asking leading questions to walk someone to an answer you had ready. Genuine elenchus aims at puzzlement, and Plato's early dialogues mostly end without a definition.
- The "Socratic problem" is real: Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes describe incompatible men. Anything you attribute to Socrates is partly an attribution to his authors.
Works
Nothing, by choice n/a
He wrote no philosophy. Everything we have is second-hand.
Plato's early dialogues c. 399–380 BCE
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Laches, Charmides. The fullest portrait, and the least neutral.
Xenophon, Memorabilia c. 371 BCE
A plainer, more conventional Socrates, written to defend his reputation.
Aristophanes, Clouds 423 BCE
A hostile comedy staged during his lifetime, mocking him as a babbling sophist.
Plato's Apology. It is short, it is his defence speech, and it shows the method and the man under maximum pressure.
Why they still get taught
He turned philosophy from speculation about the cosmos to argument about how to live, and made cross-examination the basic move of Western thought. His death made him the standing symbol of free inquiry punished by a frightened state.
Chapters
- The Socratic Method · Ancient Foundations
- Know Thyself · Ancient Foundations