Coming face-to-face with Socrates...

Socrates appears to have had some substantive ethical views, but these are few and are not grounded in elenctic argument. We can discern the following moral principles in Plato's account in the Apology and the Crito: 

(1) It is better to suffer harm than it is to inflict harm. 
(2) It is a matter of disgrace to disobey a properly constituted authority or a religious injunction.
(3) A person should always strive to become aware of the things he does not see or understand about himself.
(4) A person should take the state of his or her soul as something much more important than the pursuit of wealth and status.
(5) Disgrace is worse than death.
(6) The wisdom of human beings is something very limited and imperfect.
(7) A good man cannot be harmed by someone who is worse.

Now these things do not amount to a fully-developed moral theory or view of the world, but they do indicate a deep moral seriousness. It is this that is the hallmark of the man we know as Socrates. The most noticeable thing about these principles is that Socrates declares them, but makes no attempt to prove the or demonstrate their truth and appears in places reluctant to even attempt to do that, yet without such justification they cannot by his own criterion be considered as knowledge and therefore as virtue or excellence. 


Still, these are the things that are important to him as an individual. If we look at them, we can see that they do cohere as a unified picture of what, in his view, a life should be. The first puts him squarely in opposition to the general view that 'one should help one's friends and harm one's enemies'. One should also submit to properly constituted authorities, although he appears to have in mind his own unswerving adherence to his god-directed mission. This involved, he thought, constant striving to overcome ignorance about one's own understanding of oneself; in other words, dedicating oneself to dispelling delusion and self-deception. Too may people, he believed, were content with lives spent amassing wealth and status in the eyes of others. He does not say why he thinks these things bad, but it was probably because he thought that the exclusive pursuit of these goals led to a kind of self-satisfaction that is closely akin to self-deception. There could be nothing worse, he thought, than surrendering one's moral status - the person one strives to be - to social pressures, even if these threaten death. Socrates seems to have been convinced that it is our moral status - our character - that determines our identity as human beings, and not our bodies. This would appear to be the reasoning behind his belief that a good man cannot be harmed by a bad person. Attacking or harming your physical person left your essential identity untouched.


He was clearly himself such a man as we may see in the reports of his own behaviour: he was interested in these questions all his life and pursued them not only in questioning others but in the manner of his own life. He was very courageous, fighting in the front rank when he was sixty years old. He refused to obey the commands of the Thirty Tyrants, who had been appointed by the victorious Spartans, thus denying them the implicit moral status of his support. He saved the life of Alcibiades, an older man saving the life of a much younger and stronger man. He was physically tough to an utterly exceptional degree. He often did without a cloak in winter or shoes at any time of the year. Socrates made an impression on his contemporaries that marked him out as an exceptional human being, a man of great strength of character. Since then, people in the European tradition have felt him to be a challenge and the evidence of his work as interpreted by Plato as something that they must account for and perhaps overcome. 


Socrates was undoubtedly a towering figure of moral strength of purpose, yet we all feel a little uncomfortable in his presence. It is worth trying to ascertain the sources of this discomfort - which might of course be due to the uncompromising nature of the option he puts before us and which certainly is unsettling - but other things may also be having an effect on us here. His method is, I think, the thing that disturbs us most. His emphasis on reason - logos  or logical argument and analysis - leads him to assert that someone is wise if and only if they can give an account of wisdom or courage or generosity or whatever other aspect of character you are considering. The assumption is that if you know what wisdom is then you must be a wise person and if you have this wisdom then you will have a humanly successful life. Your life will be 'happy' or eudaimon in the sense that everything will go well with you. There is something of Robocop about this concept of the ideal good life. You will be immune to the accidents that beset more ordinary mortals like ourselves, people who feel that there happiness is vulnerable to accidents of every kind - a car crash that robs us of our ability to earn a living or our sight or of the presence of someone we love dearly. Our lives are exposed to risk at every turn. We are not invulnerable to the blows of bad people or just the accidents of contingency. Socrates would not feel these losses, because these attachments do not form part of his rather odd conception of his essential identity as a moral being.



Who is this man? He appears to be a person of simple and real moral stature, someone who dedicated his life to the pursuit and acquisition of wisdom, still striving without success - in his own estimation - at the age of seventy. He does not know what human wisdom is beyond knowing that he recognizes his own ignorance. He seems to conceive of moral knowledge - knowledge of our qualities and of ourselves - as being something like the knowledge that craftsmen have of their crafts. The sea captain knows all about navigation and can teach it to apprentices and similarly the architect and the potter, but nobody seems to be able to teach wisdom or the qualities of character to the young. It was Plato's development of Socrates' position that sought to discover a way in which these most significant qualities might be taught. That gave us the Republic. And later Aristotle's Ethics and Politics. Socrates himself seems to have been an earlier and simpler figure, probably without the logical sophistication of his successors. He was a unique exemplar of moral seriousness that everyone coming after him has had to reckon with and come to terms with. He gave us the very notion of authenticity before we had a word for it.


How could such a man come to grief in his own city? He felt that his fellow citizens should lead different lives, more devoted to wisdom and the 'perfection of their souls'. Pursuit of this ideal should not have led to his death, no matter how annoying the manner of his questioning. The thing is, I believe, that when the accidental, contingent blows of fate fell upon him he asserted his moral self-sufficiency. He would continue to be true to his own calling, even though it meant his death. Even though it meant abandoning his wife and children to continued and perhaps worse poverty. There is something a little cold and not entirely attractive about his single-mindedness.


Written in great haste. I shall try to find out why people can't enter comments on this blog, but that will have to wait for a few days now. Best wishes for Christmas.