SOCRATES THE GREAT
There are many reasons why Socrates is still my favorite philosopher. It is, to be sure, important to clarify some things before beginning a tribute to Socrates. First off, we do not know much about him. He is said to have died in 399 BCE and was the teacher of the great thinker Plato. We have no writings of his and Plato’s dialogues, though almost always using Socrates as their spokesperson, were not written by Socrates. It seems reliable that he had been a soldier and a senator in the Athenian government, that he was married to Xanthippi with whom he had three sons, one still a baby when Socrates was put to death by the Athenian leaders. He was retired, probably dead, by the time Plato came to write about him, and he seems to have spent his retirement leading discussions for free with the Athenian youth.
There are a number of reasons why Socrates is my favorite philosopher. First, he worked for free and thus was beholden to no one for what he believed in. Second, in he engaged his friends and students in informal dialogue about some important issue of the day or of the time. Some of the latter were initially raised by some of his philosophical predecessors, but others came up as a result of something someone said or heard someone say. He would often start with a question aimed at his friends, such as in Lysis where he led two young boys who were friends in a discussion of what friendship meant. Other times he would start with a concrete issue and seek to lead others to solve it, as in the case of the Euthyphro where he zeroed in on a friend’s legal case with his father’s negligence.
Because of this unorthodox “curriculum” and methodology, Socrates was suspect among the Athenian upper class. The facts that he did not ask for a tuition fee and that he used the discussion method of teaching made him suspect among the governmental leadership, and soon led to his being accused of “unpatriotic” conduct. Historians tell us that the real reason for his being put on trial was to make him a scapegoat for the terrible defeat recently experienced by Athens at the hands of Sparta. After all, he was “unorthodox” and did not seem to have proper respect for the Gods. So, the Athenian leaders put him on trial for treason.
Rather than seek to defend himself against these trumped- up charges in his self-defense speech, known as his “Apology”, Socrates instead tried to explore, in semi-dialogical fashion, just what it actually was that motivated these charges against him. In a quizzical manner he went after his attackers and sought to meet their charges head-on. He waxed pretty sarcastic and personal during his diatribe against the State, and even appealed to his wife and child as evidence of his loyalty to the Athenian government. Most importantly, Socrates claimed that the rumor he had been chosen as the “wisest man” man in Athens was really a way of spurring him on to find someone wiser than he. He confessed that he had not yet found such a one.
Clearly, Socrates knew that the cards were stacked against him and in his “Apology” he sought simply to rub the Athenian citizenry’s faces in their own hypocrisy. When they came back with a guilty verdict, Socrates had the audacity to suggest a retirement pension as his punishment. Needless to say, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. All of this is recounted by Plato in his dialogue Apology. In his sequels, Crito and Phaedo, Plato recounts how Socrates behaved while in prison and at his slow death by poisonous hemlock. There we see Socrates’ continuation of his acceptance of the trial’s conclusion, as well as his total lack of any fear of death.
In Plato’s Crito Socrates argues against the plan of his friends to escape prison because he does not deserve death. He argues that he has always supported the State and it would be to abscond when its judgement went against him. He says, “Wickedness runs faster than death,” a quotation I have always found as challenging as it is enigmatic. In Plato’s Phaedo while actually dying slowly from the poison, Socrates reminds his friends that he owes a tribute to Asclepius the divine healer, a highly ironic statement since he himself was on his deathbed. Plato concludes that Socrates was, in his estimation, “The bravest, and also the wisest and most upright man.”
It is Socrates’ commitment to the dialogical method of arriving at the truth, involving an honest discussion of all sides of the issues, and the following of reason from start to finish that has always struck me as so very admirable. It is for this reason that right from the start I structured my classes according to a real discussion format, with rotating discussion groups taking the lead of each class. Socrates’ commitment to and trust of the dialogical search for knowledge and truth has always been what has made him “great” in my estimation.