So long, Socrates
Socrates turned relentless questioning into a way of life — and paid for it with his own
If someone at the covered market shuffles up to you bare-foot and asks you whether you know what real courage is, you’d probably make your excuses and hurry on. But 2,500 years ago, in the Agora of Athens, it was this very tactic that forged the most famous thinker of his era — and also killed him.
Born to an Athenian stonemason, Socrates was someone hewn from the hard stuff. While not exactly a model for statuary — with his snub nose, bulging eyes and pot belly — he could play the proper warrior: when Athens and Sparta came to blows in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), Socrates spent his forties fighting as a hoplite and was commended for his bravery and resilience. After all, the name So-krates meant “Safe power”.
His early training as a sculptor led him to appreciate the transformative power of working at something gradually but unremittingly. Soon enough he turned from art to action, spending his days buttonholing the great and the good and publicly picking apart their thoughts. For his “Socratic Method” had only two rules: make no assumptions, and question everything. His famously ironic pose was to claim complete ignorance — of everything, in fact, save for his knowledge that he was ignorant of everything (else). As a man with no professed dogma, he had no teachings to teach, no theories to theorise, no manifesto to manifest, just queries to query.
Socrates conceived of himself as a gadfly — one who would confound the leading statesmen and intellectuals of his day by exposing, through relentless questioning and forensic dissection, the cant, folly and hypocrisy that underpinned most people’s worldviews. Naturally, such a provocateur was ridiculed by the wits of the day: the comic poet Aristophanes mocked him on stage as a pedantic oddball, no different from the other grifting Sophists, who pointlessly pottered about in his so-called Phrontisterion (“The Thinkery”).
This circling of the establishment wagons was unfair, and does nothing to diminish Socrates’ titanic contribution. While most Greek philosophy in the two centuries before his time had scrutinised the natural world for its scientific secrets (What is it made of? What makes it work?), Socrates deliberately turned his attention to human conduct and ethics (How should men live? What do grand concepts such as “justice”, “virtue”, “love” actually mean?)
Here, unfortunately, we hit a real problem: our best source for what Socrates thought also happens to be, on his own terms, the most important thinker in the western tradition. Plato (for it is he) started in the shadow of this great guru, but by founding the Academy, and pursuing his own researches over several decades, he developed his own philosophy far beyond what his master had propounded. Still, it is “Socrates” who acts as the main interlocutor in Plato’s dialogues; where the former ends, and the latter begins, is an enduring — rather, insoluble — conundrum in the history of philosophy.
What we are certain of is that Socrates was a true intellectual optimist: if you know what is good for you, you will always do it. The real challenge, then, is to banish all false ideas of the good, which inevitably lead to bad actions. Without this kind of self-scrutiny, humans have no hope: “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Classical Athens was a uniquely intense experiment in direct democracy – and by no means an unalloyed success, since it was susceptible to collective scapegoating in times of crisis. One such episode came in 399 BC, after the chaotic period of tyranny following Athens’s loss in the Peloponnesian War. The septuagenerian Socrates was arraigned on the twin charges of corrupting Athenian youths (through philosophical dialogue) and not believing in the city’s gods (but heeding his own daimon, apparently a god-given internal moral guide).
His surviving Apologia, or defence speech, is one of history’s great non-apologies. Faced with his uncompromising commitment to how he had chosen to live, 501 fellow citizens serving as jurors for the day voted for his death: 280, against 221. So Socrates gathered his friends, shared his loftiest views on the immortality of the human soul, and drank the hemlock, safe-and-powerful in the knowledge that he had already said quite enough to transcend the state that sought him silenced.
