Socrates: A Man for Our Times (16 page)

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