Although the sources
provide only a small amount of information about the life and
personality of Socrates, a unique and vivid picture of him shines
through, particularly in some of the works of Plato. We know the
names of his father, Sophroniscus (probably a stonemason), his
mother, Phaenarete, and his wife, Xanthippe, and we know that he had
three sons. (In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates likens his way of
philosophizing to the occupation of his mother, who was a midwife:
not pregnant with ideas himself, he assists others with the delivery
of their ideas, though they are often stillborn.) With a snub nose
and bulging eyes, which made him always appear to be staring, he was
unattractive by conventional standards. He served as a hoplite (a
heavily armed soldier) in the Athenian army and fought bravely in
several important battles. Unlike many of the thinkers of his time,
he did not travel to other cities in order to pursue his intellectual
interests. Although he did not seek high office, did not regularly
attend meetings of the Athenian Assembly (Ecclesia), the city’s
principal governing body (as was his privilege as an adult male
citizen), and was not active in any political faction, he discharged
his duties as a citizen, which included not only military service but
occasional membership in the Council of Five Hundred, which prepared
the Assembly’s agenda.
Socrates was not well-born or Athenian citizen. When the democratic
constitution of Athens was overthrown for a brief time in 403, four
years before his trial, he did not leave the city, as did many
devoted supporters of democratic wealthy, but many of his admirers were, and they included several of the most politically prominent rule, including his friend
Chaerephon, who had gone to Delphi many years earlier to ask the
oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. (The answer was no.)
The expression of same-sex love was not
unusual in Athens at this time, and Socrates was physically attracted
to beautiful young men. This aspect of his personality is most
vividly conveyed in the opening pages of Charmides and in the speech
of the young and ambitious general Alcibiades at the end of
Symposium. Socrates’ long fits of abstraction, his courage in
battle, his resistance to hunger and cold, his ability to consume
wine without apparent inebriation, and his extraordinary self-control
in the presence of sensual attractions are all described with
consummate artistry in the opening and closing pages of Symposium.
Socrates’ personality was in some
ways closely connected to his philosophical outlook. He was
remarkable for the absolute command he maintained over his emotions
and his apparent indifference to physical hardships. Corresponding to
these personal qualities was his commitment to the doctrine that
reason, properly cultivated, can and ought to be the all-controlling
factor in human life. Thus he has no fear of death, he says in
Plato’s Apology, because he has no knowledge of what comes after
it, and he holds that, if anyone does fear death, his fear can be
based only on a pretense of knowledge. The assumption underlying this
claim is that, once one has given sufficient thought to some matter,
one’s emotions will follow suit. Fear will be dispelled by
intellectual clarity. Similarly, according to Socrates, if one
believes, upon reflection, that one should act in a particular way,
then, necessarily, one’s feelings about the act in question will
accommodate themselves to one’s belief—one will desire to act in
that way. (Thus, Socrates denies the possibility of what has been
called “weakness of will”—knowingly acting in a way one
believes to be wrong.) It follows that, once one knows what virtue
is, it is impossible not to act virtuously. Anyone who fails to act
virtuously does so because he incorrectly identifies virtue with
something it is not. This is what is meant by the thesis, attributed
to Socrates by Aristotle, that virtue is a form of knowledge.
Socrates’ conception of virtue as a
form of knowledge explains why he takes it to be of the greatest
importance to seek answers to questions such as “What is courage?”
and “What is piety?” If we could just discover the answers to
these questions, we would have all we need to live our lives well.
The fact that Socrates achieved a complete rational control of his
emotions no doubt encouraged him to suppose that his own case was
indicative of what human beings at their best can achieve.
But if virtue is a form of knowledge,
does that mean that each of the virtues—courage, piety,
justice—constitutes a separate branch of knowledge, and should we
infer that it is possible to acquire knowledge of one of these
branches but not of the others? This is an issue that emerges in
several of Plato’s dialogues; it is most fully discussed in
Protagoras. It was a piece of conventional Greek wisdom, and is still
widely assumed, that one can have some admirable qualities but lack
others. One might, for example, be courageous but unjust. Socrates
challenges this assumption; he believes that the many virtues form a
kind of unity—though, not being able to define any of the virtues,
he is in no position to say whether they are all the same thing or
instead constitute some looser kind of unification. But he
unequivocally rejects the conventional idea that one can possess one
virtue without possessing them all.
Another prominent feature of the
personality of Socrates, one that often creates problems about how
best to interpret him, is (to use the ancient Greek term) his
eirôneia. Although this is the term from which the English word
irony is derived, there is a difference between the two. To speak
ironically is to use words to mean the opposite of what they normally
convey, but it is not necessarily to aim at deception, for the
speaker may expect and even want the audience to recognize this
reversal. In contrast, for the ancient Greeks eirôneia meant
“dissembling”—a user of eirôneia is trying to hide something.
This is the accusation that is made against Socrates several times in
Plato’s works (though never in Xenophon’s). Socrates says in
Plato’s Apology, for example, that the jurors hearing his case will
not accept the reason he offers for being unable to stop his
philosophizing in the marketplace—that to do so would be to disobey
the god who presides at Delphi. (Socrates’ audience understood him
to be referring to Apollo, though he does not himself use this name.
Throughout his speech, he affirms his obedience to the god or to the
gods but not specifically to one or more of the familiar gods or
goddesses of the Greek pantheon). The cause of their incredulity, he
adds, will be their assumption that he is engaging in eirôneia. In
effect, Socrates is admitting that he has acquired a reputation for
insincerity—for giving people to understand that his words mean
what they are ordinarily taken to mean when in fact they do not.
Similarly, in Book I of Republic, Socrates is accused by a hostile
interlocutor, Thrasymachus, of “habitual eirôneia.” Although
Socrates says that he does not have a good answer to the question
“What is justice?,” Thrasymachus thinks that this is just a pose.
Socrates, he alleges, is concealing his favoured answer. And in
Symposium, Alcibiades accuses Socrates of “spending his whole life
engaged in eirôneia and playing with people” and compares him to a
carved figurine whose outer shell conceals its inner contents. The
heart of Alcibiades’ accusation is that Socrates pretends to care
about people and to offer them advantages but withholds what he knows
because he is full of disdain.
Plato’s portrayal of Socrates as an
“ironist” shows how conversation with him could easily lead to a
frustrating impasse and how the possibility of resentment was ever
present. Socrates was in this sense a masked interlocutor—an aspect
of his self-presentation that made him more fascinating and alluring
to his audiences but that also added to their distrust and suspicion.
And readers, who come to know Socrates through the intervention of
Plato, are in somewhat the same situation. Our efforts to interpret
him are sometimes not as sound as we would like, because we must rely
on judgments, often difficult to justify, about when he means what he
says and when he does not.
Even when Socrates goes to court to
defend himself against the most serious of charges, he seems to be
engaged in eirôneia. After listening to the speeches given by his
accusers, he says, in the opening sentence of Plato’s Apology: “I
was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they
speak.” Is this the habitual eirôneia of Socrates? Or did the
speeches of his accusers really have this effect on him? It is
difficult to be sure. But, by Socrates’ own admission, the
suspicion that anything he says might be a pose undermines his
ability to persuade the jurors of his good intentions. His eirôneia
may even have lent support to one of the accusations made against
him, that he corrupted the young. For if Socrates really did engage
in eirôneia, and if his youthful followers delighted in and imitated
this aspect of his character, then to that extent he encouraged them
to become dissembling and untrustworthy, just like himself.
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