CHAPTER III
Socrates
I - THE LIFE OF SOCRATES
IN the previous chapter we traced the
rise and fall of Athenian democracy. We
must now turn our attention to the one Athenian of this period of whose
personality we can claim to have intimate knowledge. If we look at the portraits which are
preserved to us of the great politicians and poets of the fifth century -
Aeschylus, Cimon, Themistocles,
Alcibiades - we can admire
their dignity and poise, but we cannot claim that they gave us any
understanding of the men whom they portray.
They are types like the characters in Ben Jonson,
not Shakespearian people. But even a
second-rate copy of an original of Socrates is bursting with vitality. Not even the reticence and austerity of
classical sculpture can prevent his personality from dominating the marble and
breaking the sculptor's rules. We get
the impression of an individual so unique and so vital that he cannot be fitted
into any of the established types.
Who was this
individual whose personality has endured when all the famous men of the period
have become thin and ghostly shades, mere names appended to great events? Socrates was not a famous politician, but an
ordinary Athenian citizen who served his city in the normal routine of peace
and war. He was not a great artist or
poet: though he wrote poems, they are not preserved. He was not even a scientist or philosopher,
in the usual sense; for he made no discoveries, and, if he wrote any
philosophy, not a word of his writings survive.
Socrates was not
famous for anything - except for being Socrates. In a sense he did nothing, and yet he was and
is one of the greatest figures of European civilization. Of him and of a few others - Jesus and St
Francis for instance - it can be truly said that their lives and
individualities have moulded the shape of our innermost being and are still the
inspiration of the best that is in us.
For this reason
it is impossible to write an account of Socrates' teaching or to analyse and
evaluate his philosophy. To understand
Socratic philosophy it is necessary to know the man, and this can only be done
by reading the Dialogues of Plato. For
Plato devoted nearly all his literary activity to the composition of dialogues
in which Socrates is the leading character.
Many of them are highly realistic descriptions of actual conversations
which took place before Plato was born: and to make them true to life Plato
took enormous pains to reconstruct Periclean Athens
and to recapture the spirit of Athenian democracy, which he himself had never
known.
The chief
justification for any description of Socrates is that it may persuade the
reader to go to Plato himself and to read the Apology, the Crito, the Phaedo,
the Protagoras, and the other dialogues in
which Socrates' spirit has been so miraculously preserved. No modern account of Socrates can pretend to
provide any real substitute for reading the dialogues themselves: and in this
chapter there can only be a bare outline of his life, and a bare indication of
the significance of his teaching.
Socrates was
born in 469 B.C., ten years after the battle of
Socrates was
above all things a citizen of Athens. He
loved the city, with its glorious buildings and its thriving port - the
metropolis of the Aegean. He was proud
to claim the privileges of Athenian citizenship and to feel that he was a
living part of the city which was 'the school of Hellas'. Unhindered by aristocratic snobbery or
political prejudices, he mixed with all sorts and conditions of men, and in
democratic Athens he could talk to generals and statesmen, to artists and
craftsmen, to philosophers and scientists, with the easy openness and equality
of which Pericles spoke in his funeral speech. For Athens in the days of her greatness
attracted to her everything that was good in Hellenic culture, and within her
walls a man could learn to know at first hand all the 'glories that were
Greece'.
It is therefore
not surprising that Socrates for most of his life was content to live quietly
in Athens. At first he was probably best
known for his extraordinary appearance.
A small, scrubby man, thick-set and clumsy, with an enormous head, and
eyes sunk deep below a bulging forehead - he was likened by his contemporaries
to an ugly satyr. But if his appearance
was ludicrous he was feared by everyone with whom he talked for his sardonic
humour and his 'Socratic irony', that naive innocence
and apparent ignorance which could with a single simple question explode a
pretentious theory and 'debunk' hypocrisy.
The few who knew him really well loved him for the friendliness which
lurked under his grim exterior and the honesty which made his debunking not
mere cleverness but a genuine effort to sift truth from falsehood.
About 430
Socrates suddenly became a public figure.
The Oracle at Delphi was still respected by all Greece as the voice of
Apollo. Before any important enterprise
every city would send an embassy to discover whether Apollo was favourable and,
for a fee, the Delphic priests would conduct the prophetess to the Holy Chasm,
where, inspired with mysterious fumes, she 'spoke with tongues', and her words
were interpreted by the priests into riddling poems. The embassy would then return home and seek
to elucidate the miracle of the Oracle.
That the Oracle was corruptible had been proved on many occasions. The Alcmaeonidae
had found it useful and had paid for its services by rebuilding the
temple. It had been notoriously
pro-Persian in 480, and in return the Persian invaders had left its riches
untouched. And yet Delphi was still
respected. For its
priests were always well-informed and a 'tip' from the Oracle had often saved
the city or an individual from destruction. It was therefore no small thing when in
answer to a question from one of Socrates' devotees, the Oracle declared him
the wisest man in all Greece.
It is difficult
to analyse Socrates' feelings when he heard the news. For all his rationalism, he was, as we shall
see later, a religious man; and though he may have doubted the motives of the
priests, he must have felt that in some sense God had spoken and declared that
he knew what no other man knew. This
fact gave him a new sense of vocation.
Hitherto he had been content to enjoy the pleasures of Athenian society:
now he became urgently aware of a duty which he must perform and a mission he
must fulfil. No sudden change of life
was demanded of him - to the outside observer he behaved precisely as he had
behaved before - but the life he had led became charged with a new significance
as he perceived that what he had previously done through natural curiosity and
dislike of humbug was something essential to the salvation of the Athens which
he loved.
To understand
the mission to which Socrates from now on devoted his life and in the fulfilment
of which he was finally to die, we must consider the effect of the political
and social upheavals of the previous hundred years upon the life of the
individual Athenian. The democratic
revolution had shaken morality and religion to their very foundations. Not only in Athens, but all over the Greek
world, the destruction of aristocratic authority had brought with it a freedom
of spirit new in the history of mankind, a distrust of authority not only in
the political but in the religious sphere, and a reliance on human reason as
the only proper instrument for the solution of every problem.
To appreciate
this intellectual revolution we have only to consider the effects of the
industrial revolution upon the morality and religion of our own age. Here, too, a new class of manufacturers and
technicians pushed its way into political power: an old technique of production
and distribution was replaced by a new one, and the class-structure of society
was radically reshaped. These political
and social changes were accompanied by an intellectual revolution no less
profound than they. The established
order of scientific and ethical philosophy and the established institutions of
religion were not adapted to the needs of the new industrial society. As liberalism challenged the political status
quo, so Darwinism challenged the dogmas of the Churches. In the triumph of liberalism, it was not only
the statesmen and the manufacturer who were responsible for victory: the
scientist and the philosopher also played their part.
The developments
in Greece were precisely parallel, save that here the revolutionary process was
unprecedented in world history. If we
think for a moment of the great civilizations of Babylon, Egypt and Crete which
preceded that of the Greeks, we shall see that religion and reason were there
kept rigidly apart. Reason or
intelligence was regarded as useful in ordinary life - the craftsman, the
sailor, and the general all applied it to the problems which faced them - but
there was a whole sphere of life where the ordinary man was forbidden to use
his intelligence at all. He must not
dispute how the world came to be, how the gods ruled the world, what was right
and wrong, how sin could be expiated.
These questions were holy and they could be answered only by holy
men. Only the priest had access to the
gods. To the ordinary mortal it was
forbidden. He must be content to accept
the answers which the priests gave him, and he must accept them, not because he
saw that they were true, but because the authority of the priest was
absolute. The Greeks tore down this
dividing wall between religion and intelligence. They challenged the authority of the priest
and set up reason or intelligence was the sole arbiter of what is acceptable
and what is not. In one sense nothing
was holy to them because nothing was left unchallenged by reason; in another
sense everything was holy because they believed everything was intelligible,
finite, clear-cut and amenable to the law of Reason. It is often said that the Greeks were
irreligious people. To say that is to
make religion nothing better than superstition.
True religion cannot forbid the use of reason, or deny the possibility
of truth. It was a deeply religious
feeling which inspired the Greek belief that we can understand the world around
us, and break down the taboos which lurk in every mountain and tree and stream;
it was a profound sense of morality which questioned the primitive religion of
human sacrifice and denied the existence of jealous and licentious gods. The early Greek philosophers were not
free-thinkers or materialists, but pious and devout men who discovered that
reason can free man from fear and hatred, and teach him the nature of reality. Their speculations were at the same time an
analysis of natural and religious phenomena: and thus they were both the first
scientists and the first theologians.
For this reason
we find in the fragments of their writings which we possess a moral exaltation
matched by few passages in the Hebrew prophets.
In the Old Testament we are still for the most part in a world of
jealousy and fear. God is still the
possession of a people or tribe. Ritual
and ceremonial are confused with morality, and symbols take the place of
intellectual concepts. Sublime visions
are dimly seen, but they remain visions, unclarified
by reason or analysis. To turn from the
Hebrew prophets to the Greek thinkers of the sixth century is to move into
another world, remote from our own, and yet far more akin to it. For here are men, conscious
of the reason which distinguishes them from beasts, and resolved to break
through the curtains of symbol and ritual and ceremony, and to see the reality
behind them face to face. The
enterprise is dangerous, but it must be attempted. If man is to follow his divine calling and
become rational, then first of all religion and morality must become rational
too.
How closely this
attack on priestly authority was connected with the social revolution is shown
by the fact that it began in Asia Minor and South Italy in the middle of the
age of tyranny. One after another
thinkers arose to substitute for the myths and cosmogonies, which had
previously been taken on trust, new scientific accounts of the way that the
world came to be. These early
philosophies seem crude and laughable today: Thales,
for instance, declared everything to be water.
But such a theory was in reality an amazing advance of human reason. Thales had observed that ice, which is solid, turns into
water, water into steam; and he had further noticed how the steam or mist often
seems to be drawn up by the sun. He
concluded that there were four prime substances, earth, air, fire, and water,
which were transformed into one another in a regular cyclical process. What is important is not the theory but the
method. He was trying to give an account
of the world which squared with his observations, and he was searching for
substances whose changes could be understood and shown to account for the
observed changes in nature. We have only
to contrast Thales' philosophy with the first chapter
of the book of Genesis or the Greek myths to appreciate his achievement. From this date (about 580) no religion or
theology or myth could satisfy the Greek thinker which had not been tested by
reason and comparison.
Fifty years
later in South Italy the second discovery was made. Pythagoras, half mystic and half scientist,
the vegetarian believer in the transmigration of souls, founded the study of
Pure Mathematics, and may actually have discovered the theorem which bears his
name. Imbued with a profound veneration
for magic numbers and figures, he found that these holy entities had properties
of their own which only pure thought could discern; a worshipper of the
heavenly bodies, he maintained that they moved not in a mysterious but in a
mathematical way; trained to find in musical incantations the way to religious
ecstasy, he discovered that behind the audible melody there lay numerical
ratios, not heard but understood. In the
course of the next half century his followers had laid the foundations of
astronomy, geometry, and harmonics.
These sciences seemed to their earliest devotees in no way contradictory
to religion, but the beginnings of a new theology which must finally disclose
the nature of the supreme perfect Cause whom no eyes could see, the Eternal
Being, rational and immutable, the Pure Intelligible Godhead.
But although the
early Greek philosophers were theologians 'intoxicated with reason', to whom it
was self-evident that truth was the only priestess and reason the only oracle
of true religion, the effect of their teaching on Greek society was
revolutionary. Freed from all the
authority and restraint, Greek thought roamed at large over the universe,
questioning and denying the accepted order of things. The collapse of religious authority confirmed
the political and social collapse of the aristocratic tradition. The first results were therefore not a new
intellectual discipline to replace the old traditions, but intellectual and
social rebellion. Man, it was felt, had
at last been freed from bondage to superstition and from subjection to
absolutism. Since reason and
intelligence were now the standards by which worth was measured, the aristocrat
and the priest could be treated as ordinary men and judged on their
merits. In future no-one's opinion
should carry extra weight because of his family tree or social position or holy
office.
Thus the cult of
reason developed into an individualist and equalitarian philosophy, which
threatened to break up the whole fabric of society. Where each man is as good as his neighbour,
political parties are inevitable; and the Greek city became a whirlpool of
political intrigue. Where there are political
parties there must be propaganda; and rhetoric and oratory became essential to
the citizen of a democracy who wanted to compete for social or economical or
political success. Where rhetoric is
supreme, the decision of the law-courts will be swayed by brilliant argument
and appeals to the emotions; and so in the law-courts it was persuasion, not
truth, which prevailed. A policy, a
point of view, a moral principle or a religion came to be valued not for its
truth, but for its popular appeal, just as the goodness of an article in modern
life is sometimes assessed by its sales.
In the end the substitution of reason for tradition as the supreme
criterion produced not freedom for the individual, as had been hoped, but power
for the few individuals who were skilled in the arts of salesmanship.
Another result
of these changes was the vogue for science and philosophy amongst the leisured
classes. Knowledge and education became
fashionable, and the demand for scientific lectures was satisfied by the
Sophists, experts who travelled from town to town, living on their lecture
fees. They gave courses in medicine,
astronomy, mathematics, civics, theology, and anything else for which there was
a demand. The demand was forthcoming;
for education had become both a fashion and a necessity in the new commercial
society.
Of all the
courses which they provided, the most popular and the most dangerous was
rhetoric, the art of propaganda. In
democratic Athens, with its passion for litigation, rhetoric seemed essential
to any happiness. It brought political
power, wealth, and personal success. For
rhetoric - like propaganda and advertising - was the art of making others agree
to a point of view whether that point of view was right or wrong. Indeed, the falser it was the greater the
rhetorical success in persuading someone else to accept it: and conversely, the
sounder a doctrine or a legal case or a political judgement, the more the skill
required to make it look ridiculous.
Rhetoric, in fact, was the technique of making the worse appear the
better and the better the worse cause.
Its connection with the Sophists is shown by our modern word sophistical, and it rapidly became the most highly
developed science in all Greece.
Such was the
atmosphere in which Socrates grew up. As
a young man he plunged enthusiastically into the maelstrom of new ideas,
reading and listening to the famous lecturers, even arguing with Zeno and
Parmenides, the propounders of the latest paradoxes
of western Greek philosophy. But soon he
began to feel lost in the buzz of speculation and dialectical cleverness.
A whole-hearted
rationalist, he accepted the revolt of reason and its refusal to be bound be
prejudice and by tradition. Greedy for
the new science and philosophy, he participated eagerly in the Athenian
renaissance and welcomed the new education which the Sophists offered. Endowed with an overwhelming sense of the
value of personality and of true self-realization, he could not deny that the
challenge to the established order had left the individual free to develop his
own talents and his own apprehension of truth and that the Sophists provided
the means to this self-development. But
when he examined Athenian society, he began to see that the old superstitions
had been replaced by a materialistic philosophy, and the old education by
lessons in salesmanship and propaganda.
Just as democracy by 430 meant not freedom for all, but privilege and
political power for one class, so rationalism was coming to mean, not the
destruction of all prejudice, but the replacement of one type by another. Education was not valued as an end in itself,
but purchased as a useful weapon for the social struggle.
Up till the
moment when the Oracle was given, Socrates had been an amused and somewhat
cynical spectator of the Athenian renaissance.
He had enjoyed picking holes in pretentious theories and exposing the illogicalities in the arguments of the philosophers, and he
had not resisted the temptation to apply his destructive criticism to
distinguished statesmen and poets. But
he had done this with a light heart. Now
he admitted to himself what he had long suspected. Life in Athens might well be a glorious
adventure, but it was high time to ask precisely where Athens stood, what the
democratic revolution really meant, what the empire really was, and what
freedom of thought really implied. The
last hundred years had been a period of such colossal changes that no one had
had time to stop and consider their significance. The social process had swept Athens along so
fast that no Athenian had had time to see where Athens was going. Each stage had seemed inevitable, and the
pace had been so rapid that there had only been time to prepare for the next
stage without asking too carefully about the direction of the final goal. Now, in Socrates' view, it was time to call a
halt and ask those quite simple questions to which everyone had a ready answer
on his lips, but about which few had seriously pondered.
This, then, was
his vocation, and this was the meaning of Apollo's words. Socrates, the man who claimed that he knew
nothing, was the wisest man in Greece precisely because he alone realized that
the fundamental questions were not being asked by the Sophists and the
statesmen and the 'educated' Athenians.
They thought they knew the answers, when they did not. He at least recognized his own
ignorance. Let us hear his own description of the matter:
'When I heard
the answer of the Oracle, I said to myself: "What on earth can the god
mean by this riddle? I am not conscious
of having any wisdom either small or great.
What can he mean by calling me the wisest of men? He cannot be telling a lie; for that would be
against the law of his nature." For
a long time I pondered what he could mean, and then very reluctantly I decided
to put the Oracle to the proof. So I
went to a man with a great reputation for wisdom, in the hope that I could
thereby refute the Oracle and say to the god, "You said I was the wisest
of men, but here is someone who is wiser than I." The gentleman I approached was a politician -
I need not mention his name - and I examined him very carefully. But the result was that after conversation
with him I realized that, although in his own estimation and in that of many
others he was a wise man, in fact he was nothing of the kind. So then I tried to show him that he thought himself
wise but was not really wise, and the consequence was that I made an enemy of
him and many of those present. So I left
him, saying to myself "I really am wiser than this gentleman. I suppose neither of us knows anything
beautiful and good: but whereas he thinks he knows something when he doesn't, I
do at least realize my own ignorance. In
this single trifling way I suppose I am wise than he." Then I went to someone else with a reputation
even greater than his, but I came to the selfsame conclusion about him. And so I made an enemy of
him too and of many others besides." [See APOLOGY, Chapter 21.]
In this passage
Socrates indicated what he held to be the fundamental weakness of Athenian
society. The democratic revolution had
swept away the old established order.
The authority of priest and noble had been replaced by the autonomy of
individual reason. But reason must not
only destroy the temple of superstition: it must erect a new temple to replace
it, more ordered, more beautiful and more true than
the old. To awaken Athens to this task
was the bounden duty of any patriot.
Socrates devoted
the last twenty years of his life to the fulfilment of this duty - the exposure
of ignorance in high places. The
ordinary Athenian saw in him only a typical Sophist, as he sat, day by day,
surrounded by clever young men, demolishing the pretensions of highly
respectable citizens. But, unlike the
Sophists, Socrates charged no fees.
Disclaiming all knowledge, he declared himself incompetent to teach, and
claimed that he was merely trying to discover the truth. If anyone should pay, it was he, for he was
always the pupil, never the master. This
humility naturally infuriated anyone who had been subjected to the deadly
Socratic analysis and had been forced to realize his state of mental
confusion. For it soon
became clear that no reputation could survive a conversation with Socrates, the
man who knew nothing.
A few of his
closest friends, among them Plato, had some inkling of the meaning of his life:
but the conservative politician soon recognized him as a danger to Athenian
democracy. In 423 the playwright
Aristophanes attacked him bitterly as a scientific buffoon, a dangerous radical
who ridiculed sound tradition and made decent men look fools. Aristophanes' criticism was politically
justified: a degenerate aristocracy hung on Socrates' words and utilized his
arguments to discredit the democracy which they wished to supplant. Alcibiades and Critias and their friends were only waiting their chance to
overthrow the regime and inaugurate the counter-revolution: Socrates' methods
supplied them with fresh ammunition, which they used unscrupulously against
their democratic opponents. They learnt
his dialectical methods and used them, not as Socrates used them to expose
half-truths, but to annihilate truth.
We must remember
that the last thirty years of Socrates' life were lived in a period of almost
unbroken war. Athens was fighting for
her existence, and it was clear that defeat would mean an aristocratic counter-revolution. For this reason the party conflict became
ferociously bitter, and any criticism of democracy was taken to imply support
for the aristocratic opposition. However
scrupulously Socrates avoided taking sides, he could not pretend that democracy
was perfect or veil his contempt for many of its spokesmen. Nor could he deny his association with Alcibiades and Critias, or avoid
responsibility for their chequered careers.
By his exposure of ignorance wherever he found it, he had weakened the
Government and strengthened the opposition.
In 404 Critias and his friends at last made their putsch,
set up the regime of the thirty tyrants, and capitulated to Sparta. Socrates took no part whatsoever in their
conspiracy: and when an attempt was made to implicate him in its crimes, by
instructing him to arrest a wealthy citizen, his refusal nearly cost him his
life. But the fact that Critias was his pupil could not be gainsaid. When the democracy was restored he was
arrested and put on trial ostensibly for worshipping strange gods and
corrupting the youth, actually for aiding and abetting the counter-revolution.
It is probable
that the new democracy was reluctant to push the matter to a conclusion. The legal case against Socrates was known to
be weak; his honesty and integrity were widely recognized, and the temper of
the day was inclined to toleration. But
Socrates was now seventy years old: the Athens he had loved was gone, never to
be rebuilt. Almost deliberately he
seemed to press for a final decision, refusing absolutely to escape from prison
or to accept the various offers of help which came from his many friends. He felt that he had lived his life in the
service of Athens. It was for her sake
that he had exposed the ignorance of her politicians and the corruption of her
social life. But his criticism had been
either unheeded or reviled or perverted, and now he felt sure that only his
death could effect what his life had failed to achieve. If he were prepared to die at the order of
the city which he had served, then perhaps his example would inspire others to
continue the work which he had begun.
And so he
remained in prison awaiting death and talking happily to his friends. Right to the end his loyalty never
wavered. When Crito
urged him once more to escape, he only replied: 'Surely
you must see that your country is something which you must honour and revere
more even than your father or mother or forefathers. In the eyes of God and of men of
understanding it has a higher claim on you than all of these. If it is angry with you, you must behave
towards it with more deference and humility than you do even to your father;
and you must either persuade it that you are right or else you must do as it
commands and suffer as it commands without complaint. If it orders you to be beaten or imprisoned,
if it sends you to war to be wounded or killed - still you must obey. For it has the right to demand this of you,
and you must not flinch or draw back or desert your post. On the field of battle, in the courts of law
and in all your daily life, you must do whatever the city, which is your
country, commands; or else you must succeed in convincing it that you are in
the right. To use force against your
mother or your father is wicked. How much more so against your country!'
[CRITO, Chapter 12.]
At his trial,
too, he deliberately courted death.
Refusing to use the usual appeals ad misericordiam,
he made his speech for the defence into a brilliant and humorous justification
of his whole life. It was patriotism, he
urged, which made it impossible to retract what he had said, or to give an
assurance for the future that he would soften his criticism. Finally, when, according to Athenian
practice, he was asked to assess his penalty, he replied that the only penalty
which he deserved was a free meal daily in the town hall as a reward for his
services. He was condemned by a small
majority to die by drinking hemlock.
The last hours
of his life were spent in conversation with his friends. Plato has preserved for us an account of them
in his dialogue the Phaedo, and had painted
the final scene.
'He took the cup
quite serenely, without a tremor or any change of colour or
expression, looking steadily at the warder with that peculiar stare of
his. Then he said, "What about
pouring a libation? May I?" The warder answered, "We only prepare
just the correct amount." "I
see," said he, "but I may and must pray to the gods that my journey
from this world to the other may be blessed.
That, then, is my prayer. So be
it!" As he said this he raised the
cup and drank it off quite cheerfully and calmly. Up till then must of us had been able to
restrain our tears fairly well: but when we saw him drinking and when we saw
that he had drunk the poison, we could do so no longer. In spite of myself, my tears poured down, and
I put my cloak over my face and wept. It
was not for him that I wept but for my own bereavement. Crito had been
unable to restrain his tears and had got up before me and gone aside. Apollodorus too had
been weeping all the time, and now he cried out loud and his passionate
outburst made us all break down. Only
Socrates remained calm and said, "Come! Come! What are you doing! The chief reason I sent the women away was to
prevent this sort of scene; for I have been told that death should come to a
man in a holy place. Please be patient
and calm." At these words we felt
ashamed and controlled our tears. Then
he began to walk about until he said that his legs were feeling heavy, and lay
down on his back, as the warder instructed him.
The man who had given him the poison every now and then examined him,
pressing his feet and his legs, and then he squeezed his foot hard and asked if
Socrates felt anything. Socrates said
no. So he squeezed his shins and, moving
gradually up the body, showed us that he was growing cold and stiff. Then he pressed hard again and said that when
it reached his heart, he would be gone.
'Socrates had
covered his face with his cloak, but when the chill reached his groin, he
pushed back the cloak from his face and said (these were his last words),
"Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius:
don't forget to pay the debt." Crito said, "Very well, Socrates. Is there anything else?" Socrates gave no answer to this question, but
after a little while he stirred. The
warder uncovered him and his eyes were glazed.
Crito saw this and closed the eyelids and the
mouth.
'So Socrates, our friend, died. Of all the men of his time whom any of us
met, not one was as fine or as wise or as good as he.'
II - THE TEACHINGS OF SOCRATES
Socrates was condemned to death for corrupting the youth
and for worshipping strange gods. From
what we have seen of his life, this charge seems so fantastic that it could
hardly have been seriously put forward.
And yet we shall find that the jury's verdict was politically
justifiable. Socrates, the patriotic
Athenian and the devoted searcher after truth, was partially responsible for
accelerating the Athenian collapse and still further disintegrating the social
life of Athens. His philosophy, because
it was incomplete, was pernicious.
Had this not
been the case Plato might never have written his Republic. For it was the fact that the noblest man whom
he had known had been justifiably condemned to death which first forced him to
realize the tragic dilemma of Greek civilization, and made him take upon
himself the completion of the task which
Socrates had left unfinished. To understand
Plato we must try to see why Socrates was condemned to death. In so doing we shall perhaps perceive
something of the nature of his philosophy.
We have seen
that Socrates was deeply perturbed by the Athenian complacency at the
destruction of the old aristocratic religion and morality. He saw that intellectual freedom degenerates
into mere licence unless the free individual voluntarily subjects himself to a
new rational discipline. The old
aristocratic order had imposed a discipline and an education upon the citizen. It had trained him for war and given him a
rigid standard of right and wrong. It
had provided an education, though not a rational one. Inevitably, therefore, the age of reason must
develop a rational system of education, if it was to bring happiness and not
misery to men.
Socrates called
the new education of which he dreamed philosophy - the search for
wisdom. Athens must be taught not to
accept traditional morality, but to discover rational principles of conduct and
to base its social life upon them. The
old education had consisted in putting into the minds of the young the orthodox
ideas about right and wrong: the new philosophy would try to develop the
individual reason in each man so that he only accepted those ideas which he saw
to be true and rejected all wickedness, not from fear of punishment but because
he understood its folly.
Thus philosophy,
according to Socrates, must be the self-discipline of reason, and it had two
main tasks: (1) to examine and to reject those opinions which it found to be
false, and (2) to substitute for these false opinions a new set of principles
acceptable to reason. The method of this
new education was extremely simple: it consisted of asking for definitions of
everyday words like 'justice' or 'courage' or 'piety' and, by a process of
discussion, sifting the false from the true.
Socrates did not claim that in these discussions he taught anybody
anything at all, but only that he helped others to discover what they really
knew already. He did not provide his
hearers with new and interesting ideas, but like a midwife assisted the
pregnant mind to bring forth its own truths.
In the early dialogues of Plato we can watch 'the midwife' at work. He is usually in conversation with an expert
or a prominent citizen and after a few minutes of desultory talk pounces on
some word which his opponent has used.
What, he asks in conversation with a general, does courage mean
precisely? The general must clearly know
in order to do his job properly. But the
general cannot precisely define it and is caught in a maze of inconsistencies. Various definitions are tried, but even those
suggested by Socrates are found to be deficient and the dialogue ends in a
complete breakdown. The only positive
result seems to be that one more human being realizes that he does not know
what he means by the very simplest words he uses and detests Socrates for
having brought him to this realization.
On first
reading, these dialogues seem entirely destructive. Frequently the argument is unsound and
Socrates is guilty of what looks like deliberate unfairness. The modern reader will sympathize with the
jury who condemned him, and ask what possible use his verbal cleverness can
be. But if we study them more carefully
we shall notice that - however negative the conclusions may be - these
dialogues are in one sense positive.
This method of analysis - the attempt to define precisely the meanings
of common words - is the great contribution of Socrates to modern philosophy:
for if we do not know precisely the meaning of the words we use, we cannot
discuss anything profitably. Most of the
futile arguments on which we all waste time are largely due to the fact that we
each have our own vague meanings for the words we use and assume that our
opponents are using them in the same sense.
If we defined our terms to start with, we could have far more profitable
discussions. Again, we have only to read
the daily papers to observe that propaganda (the modern counterpart of
rhetoric) depends largely for its success on confusing the meaning of the
terms. If politicians were compelled by
law to define any term they wished to use, they would lose most of their
popular appeal, their speeches would be shorter, and many of their
disagreements would be found to be purely verbal. Thus Socrates believed that the first task of
philosophy was to clear away confusion and misrepresentation by defining the
meaning of words.
But that was
only a preliminary. The true task of
philosophy was not to define words but to discover reality. As we have seen, Socrates had studied the
attempts of the scientists and the mathematicians to find in the workings of
nature a rational plan. Mathematicians
had disclosed the possibility of deductive proof and logical certainty. No-one who had understood Pythagoras' theorem
could doubt it or regard it as merely probable: for the mathematician it was
eternally and absolutely true. Socrates
observed that mathematics depended on precise definition of terms, but he also
noticed that it did not consist solely of definitions: it was an ordered and
consistent body of knowledge. It seemed
to him possible to apply to human relations the mathematical method, and he
believed this to be the task of philosophy.
If we could know justice and truth and beauty, understanding their
properties and interrelations as we understand Euclid, then life would be
rational and happy. What the scientists
and mathematicians were doing for the world of nature, philosophy must
accomplish for human society.
The
philosophical discipline is never popular: it is indeed the most exasperating
torture to which the human mind can be subjected. It hunts out our dearest prejudices and shows
that they have no rational foundations, and it exposes what we thought to be a
logical theory as a mass of contradictions.
Although it is directed to the development of the individual, it does
not satisfy our ordinary ideas of self-realization since it calls on each of us
to relegate most of his personal interests to second place. It does not press for the free development of
individual tastes, but demands that the individual should voluntarily regulate
his life by the dictates of reason.
Socrates
believed that this discipline alone could save Athenian democracy from
collapse. Now that the bonds of
tradition had been broken, the individual citizen must forge for himself the
new morality. And education must be
concerned to produce that change of heart which was necessary if he was to be
willing to undertake these great responsibilities. For this reason Socrates was as much opposed
to the type of culture and education which the Sophists were popularizing, as
he was to the point of view of the ordinary uneducated businessman. He saw that education and intellectual
training can be used for purely materialist ends. Men can be naturally clever and highly educated,
and yet totally unphilosophic. They can allow reason to be the slave of
their passions, or of other people's passions: and education can be merely a
useful weapon of self-assertion.
Socrates believed that the teaching provided by the Sophists was little
better than this. It gave to men
techniques for getting what they wanted, and the
Sophists were interested not in the spiritual health of their pupils but in
providing something useful for which people were prepared to pay. Socrates agreed with the conservatives that
such education was no substitute for the old-fashioned discipline of
aristocratic Athens. It put new power
into the hands of the intellectual, but it gave him no principles for the use
of that power. For this reason it
produced a reckless individualism and disregard for the good of the
community. Once the restraints of
morality and religion had been destroyed, the individual citizen was free to do
as he pleased; and education was merely embittering the social conflict instead
of healing it.
This, in
Socrates' view, was the disease from which Athenian democracy was
suffering. Class-conflict and
imperialism were the results of a laissez-faire philosophy of individual
licence; and if Reason could not produce a new self-discipline, then the belief
that might is right would rule in Athens.
As the great war dragged on, it became yearly
more clear that this was happening. For
all its faults, Athens in the age of Pericles had
been inspired by an exalted patriotism and a real sense of pan-Hellenic
responsibility. Now these motives were
being submerged by faction and self-interest.
No impartial observer could deny the terrible decline in the standards
of Athenian life which set in after the death of Pericles.
The most sober
and therefore the most ruthless critic of this degeneration was Thucydides, an
Athenian general exiled for his failure on a campaign, who composed a detailed
history of the great war between
'Athens also
made an expedition against Melos. The Melians are of
Spartan descent and were therefore unwilling to become subject to Athens. At first they remained neutral. Then when Athens committed acts of wanton
aggression, they were forced into open warfare.
Athens sent an expeditionary force but before opening hostilities the
Athenian generals entered into negotiations with the Melians. The following conversations ensued:
ATHENS: We do not intend to waste time making flowery
speeches to justify our Empire on the ground of our services to Greece against
Persia, or to pretend that our present invasion is motivated by any past
misdemeanours of yours. We suggest
therefore that you, too, should omit such arguments. Do not waste time describing how, although
you are of Spartan descent, you have not joined the Spartan alliance against us,
or how our aggression is unprovoked. Let
us negotiate on the basis of our real feelings and of the situation as it
really is. We all know that justice in
this world is only possible between two powers of equal strength. Power extorts all it can: weakness concedes
all it must. We are here to strengthen
our Empire. We wish to include you
within it with a minimum of trouble, in order that your existence in future may
be of profit to us both.
MELOS: You will certainly benefit from conquering us. How should we benefit by accepting subjection
to you?
ATHENS: You would have the advantage of submitting before
the worst occurred: we should gain by not destroying one of our subjects.
MELOS: You refuse then to allow us to remain neutral and on
friendly terms with you?
ATHENS: Yes, in the eyes of our subjects your neutrality is
a sign of our weakness: your hostility will occasion a display of our
strength. Our subjects believe that if
any state maintains its independence the reason is to be found in its strength
which makes us hesitate to attack it.
Your subjection, therefore, would at the same time extend our Empire and
increase our security.
MELOS: But surely your security would be best advanced if
we remain neutral; for if you attack us, you will alienate the sympathies of
all the states which are now neutral.
When they see how you are treating us, they will expect their turn to
come soon. In fact, you will be strengthening
the forces against you and driving anyone who has not yet taken sides into the
enemy camp. Furthermore, if you are
willing to take the risks which you admit are necessary to maintain your
Empire, you must agree that we should show a contemptible lack of spirit if we
do not do everything we can to preserve the independence we still possess.
ATHENS: Not if you take an objective view of the
matter. You have to decide not whether
you should engage in a war between two sides equally matched, but how you can
preserve yourselves against an enemy of vastly superior strength. The question is not one of honour but of
prudence.
MELOS: But we know that victory does not always go to the
big battalions. If we surrender now we
give up all hope; if we fight, there is at least a chance we may
survive.
ATHENS: Hope is indeed very comforting in moments of
danger, and those who have something else to depend on may not be ruined by
accepting her comforts. But do not be
deluded by hopes. Though your position
is desperate, a rational method of self-preservation is still open to you. Do not make the silly mistake of pinning your
hopes in such a situation upon the supernatural and upon the favours of heaven.
MELOS: We recognize the danger we are in. But our cause is just and yours is not, and
in the eyes of God we shall at least find no less favour than you. As for our weakness, it will be compensated
by the support of the Spartans. They are
of common stock with us and cannot refuse us help. Our confidence, therefore, is not so blind as you suppose.
ATHENS: We expect to receive as much favour from on high as
you. Our attitude in religious matters
is scrupulously correct: our mundane aims are not abnormal. There is a law of nature which declares that
every living creature extends its empire to the limits of its power. We know this is true of the human species: we
believe that it applies in heaven as well.
We did not make this law, nor were we the first to implement it. We inherited it from our fathers, we act upon
it in our own lives, and we expect to bequeath it to posterity for ever. We are also aware that you, like everyone
else, would do as we are doing had you at your disposal the forces which are at
ours. So much for the
favour of heaven. As for Sparta,
if you imagine that she will assist you from a sense of honour, we can but admire
your innocence; we do not envy your folly.
Sparta is a country of high moral standards in home affairs: its loyalty
to national institutions is very great.
Of its foreign policy we could say a good deal. Suffice it now to state that it is second to
none in identifying national interests with international honour, national
expediency with international justice.
'The Athenians
left the conference: the Melians after consultation
resolved to persevere in their refusal to surrender. The Athenian delegation then returned to the
army and the generals immediately commenced hostilities. Later on, Melos was
closely besieged and whispers of treachery began to be heard in the city. She therefore made an unconditional surrender
to Athens. The Athenians executed all
the men and enslaved all the women and children. They repopulated the island with five hundred
colonists.'
Thucydides did
not pretend that this was a verbatim account of the negotiations at Melos, or that Athenian statesmen ever talked in this way. It is doubtful indeed if any of them had
analysed their own motives or thought out the principles of their foreign
policy so carefully as the cool objective
spectator. The Melian
dialogue is not literal history, but an attempt to lay bare the real underlying
causes of Athenian imperialism and to show what an Athenian diplomatist would
have had to say if he had been honest enough to think out the implications of
his country's policy. It is certain that
Socrates would regard the Melian dialogue as a fair
analysis.
Thucydides was
an historian: he stated the facts and analysed them without drawing
conclusions. But there were men at
Athens prepared to draw them, and to assert not only that Athenian foreign
policy was ruthlessly imperialistic but that it was right to be so. This school of Realpolitik
was never a popular movement (it was too philosophical for that), but it deeply
influenced the young intellectuals and its slogans were quickly picked up by
the demagogues and popular lecturers. It
maintained (as its modern counterparts maintain) that all politics are and must
be power-politics: state against state, class against class, man against
man. The survival of the fittest is the
only law of human society, and self-interest the only motive of individual
men. Not only international law and
morality, but social morality as well, are tricks and
devices for the enslavement of one group by another. The position is admirably summarized by Callicles, a character whom Plato introduces in his
dialogue the Gorgias to represent the
philosophy of the younger generation.
'I believe that
the laws are framed by the weak and common crowd. They frame them for their own benefit and
according to their taste they concoct the code of moral praise and
censure. They use them to terrify the
few dominant spirits who could stake out a decent claim for themselves: to
prevent them from doing well or getting the better of their inferiors. They are content was a fair or just
distribution of wealth precisely because they are inferior. And so, Law tells us, it is unfair and
disgraceful to try to do better than the common herd, and they tell us it is
morally wrong to do so. But the real
truth is that the better man ought to do better than the worse, and the more
capable than the less capable. There is
plenty of evidence to support this. Look
at the behaviour of animals, look at the history of
cities and of nations. Here you see
Right means that the strong should rule the weak and do better than the
weak. What right had Xerxes to attack
Greece? I believe Xerxes and his like
were doing what is really and truly right; they were acting by the real law of
nature, though they may well have been transgressing the laws we frame. We take the finest of our children and we
tame them like lion cubs, curbing their spirits with moral spells and
superstitions. And so we enslave them,
telling them they must only take their fair and proper share and that fairness
and justice are right is fine and right.
But if a man should arise with a spirit great enough for the task, he
would shake off this morality: he would burst the chains of convention and make
himself free: he would trample underfoot our codes and hypocrisies and
superstitions and all our unreal laws.
The slave would rise up and show himself to be
our master and true righteousness would shine forth.'
This type of
argument was as common in fifth-century Athens as it is today, and then, too,
it seemed overwhelmingly persuasive to a generation which had grown impatient
of the catchwords and speeches of democracy.
Socrates must have heard it almost daily, and recognized in its
triumphant despair of human nature a genuinely revolutionary tone. The young men who revelled in their
immorality and denounced human kindness as a fraud were largely justified in
their contempt for current morality.
Socrates agreed with them that imperialism and class-way were the two
main elements in the politics of their day.
He agreed that most people in their private lives were moral and decent
and righteous only because and so long as it paid them to be so: they kept
their promises, paid their debts and fulfilled the laws from a mixture of fear
and habit and common sense. And finally
he agreed that at bottom the respectable citizen was often actuated by the same
motive as Callicles - self-interest: the one accepted
and the other renounced the social code, but the motive of self-interest was
the same in both cases. But though he
agreed with the Realpolitiker thus far, he
parted company with them when they went on to affirm not only that men did,
but that they should behave in this way.
For here he saw the difference between philosophical and sophistical education.
For the former was concerned to find a new self-discipline based on
rational moral principles: the latter regarded all morality as a brake on
individual freedom. To Socrates the
philosophy that might is right was the inevitable result of neglecting true
philosophy and allowing education to fall into the hands of irresponsible
Sophists. Class conflict and imperialism
had dominated Athenian life because genuine philosophy had never been taught:
and now a spurious philosophy had arisen designed to preserve precisely those
evils which philosophy should suppress. Realpolitik was, in fact, the philosophy of
Unreason, the justification of those false educational ideals which regarded
knowledge and reason as merely useful instruments for the furtherance of
personal of class-interests.
Socrates opposed
this new philosophy of Unreason as firmly as he opposed the Sophists, and many
of his fiercest arguments were directed against it. But the tide was against him. In a period of open class-war it seemed a
hopeless task to educate Athens to moral and intellectual self-discipline: it
was self-evident that in order to survive man must be prepared to fight for
himself and disregard the obligations which reason and common decency alike
imposed. The philosophy of Unreason at
least offered a positive solution of the problems of life. It was concrete, specific, and 'true to
life'. In opposition to it Socrates
could offer nothing clear-cut or definite; his whole philosophy forbade him to
teach a dogma. He could only try to put
others on their way upon the search for truth.
He could show that in the long run 'Might is Right' is self-destructive,
and that the philosophy of Unreason is the denial of all philosophy: but this
was of little use to a generation filled with scepticism and despair.
For this reason
Socrates' philosophy could make no headway against Realpolitik. Its simple patriotism and sense of duty
sounded archaic and naive, and its refusal to offer a ready-made solution of
any problem made it seem nebulous and unworldly. But to the outsider Socrates and his
opponents were much of a madness. For up to a point both philosophies had a
common aim, the exposure of hypocrisy: and where they differed - in the
positive side of their teachings - Socrates' views were obscure and vague. Thus the two conflicting educational ideals
were lumped together by the ordinary Athenian as the
clever revolutionary propaganda of aristocratic intellectuals whose purpose was
the corruption of the youth and the destruction of all respect for the
democratic tradition. This judgement may
have been strictly incorrect, but it showed a certain political common
sense. For, in fact, the products of
Socrates' teaching were not distinguishable from those of the Sophists. Alcibiades was an
unprincipled careerist, Critias a sadistic and
ruthless politician. Looking at them the
man in the street could not be blamed for assuming that Socratic philosophy was
only another brand of subversive sophistry.
To appreciate,
therefore, the tragedy of Socrates' execution, we must realize that it was
politically justifiable. The statesman
must consider the results of a policy or a creed, and not merely the motives
behind it. Looked at from this point of
view, Socrates' guilt was proved up to the hilt. His teaching had inspired the
counter-revolution, and his theology had produced, not a puritan revival, but a
ruthless and cynical gang of wealthy adventurers. The fact that he had denounced their
philosophy of force did not make any material difference. His disciples had welcomed his attacks on
current morality, and disregarded the positive side of his creed.
The
responsibilities of the teacher are great.
He must consider not only whether his teachings are true, but what
effect they will have on his pupils. In
the eyes of the practical politician it is no justification of Socrates as a
teacher to show that he denounced wickedness, if his virtuous teachings, in
fact, promoted it. However blameless his
life and pure his motives, the effects on Athenian life had been
disastrous. When we remember this, we
cannot blame the jury which found him guilty of corrupting the youth.
We have seen how
Socrates failed to impart to his pupils the rational self-discipline which he
himself practised, and we have suggested that this failure was due to his
inability to give any positive content to his notion of Reason which was
acceptable to an Athenian audience. And
yet Socrates had a positive gospel: and it was this gospel which was attacked
in the second part of his charge which accused him of worshipping strange gods.
Here, too, we
are faced with a paradox. Socrates was a
respectable Athenian. There is no reason
to believe that he was ever blasphemous or disrespectful to Athena of the
Acropolis. How, then, could he be
condemned upon this charge? From all
that we hear of him, there is no doubt that he was a deeply religious man. He often talked of his 'inner voice' which
would suddenly forbid him to do something which he had in mind, and he believed
that on those occasions God had spoken.
He was something of a mystic and would sometimes fall into trances. Once when he was serving in the army in
Northern Greece, he was observed in the early morning standing quite still
meditating. There he stood all day deep
in thought. As night fell some of his
fellow soldiers dragged their beds out into the open to watch him. All night he stood there quite still, and
with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun and went on his way.
The inner voice
and the trances were the most obvious signs of a religious sense which
permeated Socrates' whole life. Religion
for most Greeks at this time was a matter of observance and
ceremony. Piety and godliness meant
doing a number of things at the proper time; for the gods were 'powers' to be
appeased by offerings. The respectable
citizen made his offerings, but religion did not demand that he should behave
in any special way in his ordinary life, or offer him any very cheerful
prospect in the next world. Greek gods
were capricious and somewhat mercenary - a bad man, who made the proper
offerings, was pleasing to heaven: a good man, who by some mischance failed to
make them, was punished.
Socrates'
religion was very different. All his
life he had a mystical awareness of the supernatural world, and felt himself a
citizen of the heavenly city. This
otherworldly belief was held by certain sects called Orphics,
which had grown up during the fifty years before he was born. For the Orphic, human life was a vale of woe
to which man had been banished by God, and the body was a tomb in which the
immortal soul had been imprisoned. To
gain true happiness it must be freed from the trammels of the flesh, and return
to its natural dwelling-place in heaven.
But this release could only be achieved if it renounced wealth and power
and bodily pleasure and resolved to live the good life here on earth.
All men alike,
said the Orphic, are banished souls, so all are brothers. Cities and empires and earthly glory are
nothing but vanity. We must renounce
them and renounce our citizenship of this world. For the community of the elect is not bound
by ties of kinship or of nationality, but by the brotherhood of its common
purpose - its resolution to escape the world and seek God. This for the Orphic, religion was no mere
formal observance or empty ritual, but the very life of man. And his morality in the same way ceased to be
the customs of the city he lived in, and became the way of life which the
individual soul must follow if it is to be freed from the prison of the body
and return to heaven.
Orphism often
degenerated into a mystery cult hawked around by quacks and mendicants as a
cheap ticket to heaven. But Socrates met
the very exalted form of it which had been developed by the Pythagoreans. As it permeated their mathematics and made of
them not merely a new science or technique, but a new theology, so it permeated
his new dialectical analysis of the meanings of words and gave it a strange
passion and intensity.
'Perhaps, then,
there is a "narrow way" which leads us to our goal. For as long as we have the body with us in
our search, so that the soul is contaminated by its evilness, we shall never
get complete possession of that truth which we desire. The body must be fed and so it constantly
disturbs us. It is liable to disease and
so it hinders our search for reality. It
fills us with passions and appetites and fears and all sorts of fantasies and
foolishness so that it really never gives us a chance of knowing anything
properly. War and dissension and battle
are all due to the body and its appetites, since every war is fought in order
to acquire wealth, and it is the body which forces us to acquire it. And so we are enslaved to its service, and
are so busy that we have no time for philosophy. But, worst of all, if the body does
ever give us a little spare time and we begin to make some investigation, it
constantly butts in, in the middle of our research, and disturbs and upsets us,
and prevents us from seeing the truth.
It is, in fact, obvious that if we are to gain any pure knowledge, we must
get rid of the body so that the soul by itself can look on reality by
itself. Only then shall we attain that
knowledge which must be the object of our desire, since we claim to be
"lovers of knowledge". Our
argument proves indeed that we shall never know in this life, but only when we
are dead....
'The true
philosophers really practise dying and they are less afraid of death than
anyone. Look at it in this way. They are at loggerheads with the body and
they want to free the soul of all encumbrances.
Wouldn't it be very unreasonable then if they were afraid and upset when
this happened, and were sorry to go to the place where there is a hope of
gaining what they longed for all through their lives, and of ridding themselves
of the companion with whom they were always at loggerheads? Many have been glad to die when the boy or
wife or son whom they loved has been taken from them, simply because they hoped
in the other world to see those whom they longed for and to be with them
again. And so, I suppose, if a man is in
love with knowledge and passionately believes that he cannot really find it
except in the other world, he cannot be upset at dying, but will gladly leave
this world. Surely this must be so if he
is really a philosopher? For he will be passionately convinced that he can only really find
pure knowledge there. If this is
so it would be very unreasonable for him to be afraid of death, wouldn't it?'
In this passage
from the Phaedo [PHAEDO, Chapters 11 and 12.]
we find a clear statement of Orphic religious faith. It can be summarized as follows: (1) The Soul
is immortal. (2) Happiness means the achieving of immortality by renunciation
of this world. (3) All men are brothers whatever their conditions here on
earth. But to these three beliefs
Socrates, under Pythagorean influence, adds a fourth - virtue is knowledge -
transforming Orphism from a mystery cult into a rational philosophy. For now the immortal part of the soul is
Reason, and happiness means freedom for Reason to contemplate reality. At one stroke the new scientific spirit
becomes the instrument of true religion, and philosophical inquiry the proper
method of theology, which alone can satisfy man's rational nature and impose
upon his passions order and restraint.
At first sight
it is not clear why Socrates' religion should have brought him into conflict
with Athenian public opinion. Athens,
too, had her own Eleusinian mysteries - a cult of Demeter and Persephone -
which offered some hope of immortality, though it is doubtful whether the
ordinary citizen regarded it as more than a kind of Freemasonry, a ceremonial
observance which satisfied a deep unconscious craving. Why, then, was Socrates condemned to death
for worshipping strange gods?
There are
several answers to this question. In the
first place Pythagoreanism was an aristocratic creed,
which challenged the sovereignty of the popular will and the authority of the
elected citizen. In South Italy, indeed,
a sort of dictatorship oft he elect had been set up by Pythagoreans, like
Calvin's City of God at Geneva. If
knowledge must be supreme and reason control the
passions, it was easy to see that the freedom which the merchants and town
proletariat had won by a century of struggle would have to be surrendered to a
stricter absolutism of theological kings.
Athens rightly felt that the new puritanism
was essentially undemocratic and that the Pythagorean, who was harmless enough
when he confined his speculations to mathematics and the other world, would
become a menace to the existing order if he applied his analysis to
society. But this was precisely the task
to which Socrates felt himself called - to use the new mathematical method of
reasoning in testing the consistency and the correctness of the current morality
and statesmanship. In so doing he must
challenge the basic principles of Athenian democracy.
Secondly the
Athenian was bound to ridicule the Socratic ideal of practising
immortality. In a city where the
pleasures of this world were so keenly appreciated, it seemed absurd to suggest
that Puritanism could bring happiness.
Socrates spoke constantly of the need to sacrifice all for psyche,
the immortal rational part of the soul.
But to the Athenian the psyche meant the breath of life; and if
he conceived it to be immortal, it was only as a thin shade in Hades craving to
return to the body. For him it was the
things of the body and of this world which brought pleasure and made life worth
living, and he felt repelled by a doctrine which taught that man must lose his
life in order to save it.
Thirdly, the
Socratic theology contradicted what little religion he still had. Athena of the Acropolis and the rest oft he
Olympic throng were for the new theologians myths or
allegories and nothing more. The sun and
moon and stars were physical objects and studied as such by science. Homer, who was almost a Greek bible, was
mercilessly criticized and the sexual foibles of his deities were
denounced. It was unreasonable to expect
that the respectable citizen should distinguish between a theologian who thus
trampled on tradition and a vulgar atheist.
Socrates for him was not only a Sophist and a crank - he was blasphemous
as well.
But all this is
not sufficient to explain why Socrates was brought to trial for his religious
beliefs. Athens was not a modern
dictatorship and her citizens could think what private thoughts they
pleased. It cannot have been Socrates'
theology alone to which objection was taken, but its political effects.
What these were
it is easy to see. Socrates taught that
the religion which was ordinarily practised was merely a myth, a symbol
sometimes of truth, sometimes of falsehood.
He believed that religion no less than morality must be purged by reason
and that, before any real knowledge of God could be reached, the lumber of
superstition and ceremony must be seen for what it was. In his own mind this
exposure of superstition was only a preliminary before the real search for
reality began. But for his pupils the
preliminary stage was quite sufficient.
They were delighted with his ridicule of Homer and all the sacred books
of Greek morality. Rebels against
tradition and orthodoxy, they wanted nothing better than a proof that religion
was nonsense. Socrates gave it to
them. Thus the effect of Socrates'
teaching was not the restoration of true religion, but the destruction of any
little religious feeling which Alcibiades and his
friends still possessed; and the new theology had the same result in Athens as
the new philosophy - it destroyed belief but was unable to put anything in its
place. The young aristocrats may have
picked up a smattering of Pythagorean teaching from their master, but they were
only interested in its antidemocratic bias.
Socrates was the
lover of truth who could only make men sceptics, the lover of God who converted
his pupils to atheism, the patriot whose hearers became convinced that
patriotism was a mere delusion.
Preaching the rule of reason, he taught a technique of argument which
was used to justify the rule of might.
Concerned above all to challenge the selfish individualism of the
Athenian intelligentsia, he produced by his teaching the worst specimens of
that type.
Perhaps we can
now understand why he refused to escape from prison and preferred to court
death. He knew that he had failed in his
life to fulfil the mission which the Oracle had given him. He knew, on the other hand, that his teaching
was sound and that along the way which he had marked lay the only hope of
salvation for the individual and for the State.
For his philosophy was not wrong, but incomplete. He preached the rationality of man and of
God, and he urged that unless we believe in these two things there can be no
sound education or happy society. His life
had shown that this belief is insufficient and that without knowledge of the
principles of human conduct, and of the nature of God, it can become positively
harmful. But he believed that his death
would inspire others to discover those things, the existence of which he could
only take on trust.
We have said
that it is the personality of Socrates, not his actions or teaching, which is
really important. That he was
justifiably condemned to death is true; but it is irrelevant to his
greatness. That he made no important
discoveries is also true and also irrelevant.
What mattered to Plato and what matters to us is his life and
death. In them he showed that a man
could be found who believed so passionately in the cause of truth that he would
follow it whatever its political or social effects. Such people there must always be if civilization
is to be preserved. They are so
uncompromising that they are quite unpractical: so simple that they make wise
men look fools. Oblivious of the
disastrous results of their idealism, they demand truth even where it may ruin
a class or a nation: and if their wickedness is pointed out to them, they
merely reply, 'where truth is concerned, compromise is impossible'. All that is free in our Western culture has
sprung from this spirit, whether it is found in scientists, or priests, or
politicians, or quite ordinary men and women who have refused to prefer politic
falsehoods to the simple truth. In the
short term, they often do great harm: but in the end their example is the only
force which can break the dictatorship of force and greed. Socrates was the first of these men and women
of whose personality history has preserved a record.
For he was the first man who really saw what intellectual integrity
implied and yet preferred it to everything else. He was the spirit of inquiry,
incorruptible, intolerant of sham, greedy for every variety of human
experience, insatiable in discussion, ironic and yet serious. Such a spirit is generally intolerable to any
well-organized community. The statesman
who is responsible for 'carrying-on', the priest who preaches the orthodox
faith, the professor who repeats the traditional dogmas, will all unite to
suppress the free spirit of reason which respects no authority save that of
truth. In the face of completely candid
criticism every established authority must resort to the most irrational of
defences - force. There is no other
weapon against the conscientious objector: and Socrates showed that philosophy
is nothing else than conscientious objection to prejudice and unreason. Perhaps in the last resort it cannot solve
the problems of human right and wrong, and it will have no simple answer to the
questions of the hour. Regarding force
as irrational, it will refuse to use it and ceaselessly demand that those who
are prepared to do so should ask themselves precisely what their purpose and
their motives are. The Athenian
democracy had no answer to this question, and so Socrates died.
Socrates will
always be compelled to die, his death will always be politically justifiable,
and it will always be condemned by succeeding generations, who see so easily in
retrospect that truth is ultimately preferable to any established falsehood,
however efficient it may appear.
Condemning the death of the historical Socrates, each generation kills
its own.