A marble head of Socrates in the Louvre

© Darrell Arnold Ph.D.

Socrates’ biography

Socrates was of humble roots. In Nietzsche’s eyes: He was born of the rabble. His father was a stonemason, his mother was a midwife. As a young man, he is thought to have studied Greek natural philosophy. But he found the views of the natural philosophers too obscure and unsubstantiated. He thus, like the sophists, turned against natural philosophy to questions of morality and justice.

In Athens, he lived a life of simple means, married Xanthippe, with whom he had three children. He fought, evidently heroically, in the Peloponnesian war against Sparta. He was known in Athens for gathering and speaking in the Agora, the market place. He was known as unkempt, often unwashed, and for being quite homely … Yet many were attracted to him. He … gathered support from some Athenians who had been members and associates of the Thirty Tyrants, who had early led a bloody coup against the government in Athens and who were bitterly opposed to its democratic government.

According to Plato’s account, he … was motivated to his public discourse by an early Oracle of Delphi, which had indicated that no one in Greece was wiser than Socrates. In what we may take to be an ironic court defense, he maintains that he found this unbelievable so set out questioning the learned in Athens to find someone wiser than himself. In Plato’s account, Socrates’ questioning was unsettling to authorities in Athens, who thought that he was undermining the civic religion of Athens and corrupting the youth. Socrates was thus brought to court, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Socrates’ thus became a celebrated martyr for philosophy.

The examined life

Among the views for which Socrates is most famous is that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The ability to think, in Socrates’s view, is our unique human capacity. To live a life devoid of thinking — where we simply accepted what tradition and authority told us — was thus to live a less than fully human life. But what does an examined life, the fully human life, entail? For Socrates, it entailed questioning especially the moral and religious views of his tradition. In Socrates’ view, this examination is to be done as a form of moral or spiritual development — it is done with the intention of moral improvement both to oneself and ultimately to one’s community.

While it was traditionally thought that the existing laws of a polis were identified with the will of the gods, Socrates questions this. There were hints already in Heraclitus and others of a view like this — that there is another law a law above the city’s laws to which one had a greater alliance. Socrates’ life and death is a testimony to a belief in such a law and to a sensibility that adherence to that other law is imperative.

The clarification of concepts

Socrates is invested in the clarification of concepts, even if he does not always finish the job (or hardly ever does) and provides us with a clearly satisfying definition or description, even if often we need to look to what he does — as a character in Plato’s dialogues — if we want to answer some of the questions he poses.

Socrates engaged in his own self-examination with the clear conviction that he could come to understand truth, and that the means to do so was through the clarification of concepts, achieved not through individual self-reflection but through dialogue. This indeed is so marked in him that Aristotle thought it fundamental to the shift in ancient philosophy from the Presocratics to a new era in Greek thought. We see hints of it in thinkers previous to Socrates who are thinking of metaphysics — Parmenides being the main case in point. But it becomes full-blown and receives a new focus on questions of justice in Socrates. What is justice? What is piety? As individuals, living in a society, we have internalized views about what these things are. [But] Socrates thinks that self-examination involves us in a process of thinking through our own beliefs on these questions …

The Socratic method

Socrates maintained that he did not teach anyone. What he did was facilitate their own self-reflection through public dialogues. The disputational method Socrates used in the public forum led to his reputation as a gadfly, for his logic was often stinging. Taking some proposed general definition to a question like what is justice, he was merciless in criticizing its weaknesses, often indirectly and with irony. And he did not hesitate to embarrass the most recognized of the citizens of Athens.

This dialogical approach, [today] described as the Socratic method, was used not to propose his own views. Socrates was not a guru who answered the most obscure of metaphysical questions and sought adherents to the system he constructs. Rather his method was to engage in an exploration and to get those involved to reflect on their own views, on the culturally accepted views they had largely adopted. It focused on clarifying what the concepts under discussion meant, what presuppositions they entailed. It typically started with a definition of a concept, which would then be analyzed, broke into discrete parts; then on the basis of the analysis, the ideas were synthesized.

In his public dialogues, Socrates appears to be motivated by a faith that the analysis of concepts should lead to positive results. Yet curiously perhaps, Socrates did not develop a set of clear ideas about what justice is, what piety is or the other things that he discussed so enthusiastically. He deconstructs much more than he constructs.

Socratic wisdom

Indeed, this [is] even fundamental to what becomes known as Socratic wisdom. In Plato’s rendering of Socrates’ story in The Apology, when … Oracle of Delphi [told Socrates]  … that none was wiser than him, Socrates [was] skeptically. He claims it inspired him to begin to discuss ideas in public. Not feeling wise at all, he was sure — he says with some irony — there must have been others wiser than himself. In the court case where he discusses this, he notes however that after years of such questioning and public conversation he did come to recognize that there was some truth to the Oracle. He had a kind of wisdom. His wisdom, which others lacked, was simply in knowing the limitations of his own knowledge. Socrates’s wisdom consisted in knowledge of his own ignorance.

It is an interesting paradox perhaps that one of the individuals most celebrated for his wisdom in world history in fact baldly claimed that this wisdom consisted in so little. The fact is that those who have viewed Socrates as wise have never really taken this explicit statement of what his wisdom was to be the complete story. Socrates was trying to clarify concepts, but as a statement even of what his own wisdom was, this is quite incomplete — a negative definition only.

If that is all there were to Socratic wisdom, then we might have imagined this serving as a footnote in Ancient philosophy. But of course, much of what we have taken to be Socratic wisdom has consisted not in what was said, but in what was unsaid. It comes from an examination of how Socrates lived his life. And here there is much more indeed than is summarized in the negative description of wisdom.

Is his statement that he is wise because he recognizes what he does not know simply a case of irony? Is it likely not offered as a definition at all? In any case, if we want to know what Socrates wisdom consists in then an examination of his life offers us something much richer to work with than his negative definition. In his life, … Socrates is someone deeply curious, conscientious about self-examination, which he engaged in as a practice of self-improvement. Socrates is wise because of his care for the soul, because of his questioning whether his own priorities in life were rightly ordered and whether his own life was just and good … when it comes to understanding what he thinks, we have to do more than examine what he says. We must see how he lives.

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