SOCRATES (469-399)

His father was Sophroniscus, sculptor and stone mason; his mother was Phenarete, a midwife. His wife was Xanthippe, whose reputation as a difficult woman was probably invented by the misognist Cynic Antishenes, who said that she was "critical of everything present, past, and future." Cato admired Socrates because he remained with a shrew wife and half-witted kids (old Classics I, p. 251). As Xanthippe was very young, there is evidence that Soc. may have had a previous wife, Myrto. At the time of his death he had two children and one infant (Phaedo 60a). Xanthippe was from an aristocratic background, so this may explain the fact that Socrates survived without working. But perhaps even the wife's money ran out, leading to his later poverty. In the Phaedo 60 Xanthippe is portrayed sympathetically and agrees to leave so that Socrates can talk with his friends.

Socrates never left Athens except for his military duty. He is celebrated for his strength, endurance, and bravery. He went barefoot and wore only a thin cloak even in the coldest weather. He may have been visited by moments, even hours, of ecstatic rapture.

Earliest part of his life he devoted to cosmology, studying under Archelaus (ca. 440), a student of Anaxagoras. This is the Socrates of the Clouds, performed in 423. (But as Reale points out, he is also accused of being a Sophist, too.) He came to his ethical and the elenchus later, but Cleve believes that he practiced the elenchus even before Chairephon went to Delphi. He merely intensified and broadened his elenchtic efforts after that time.

Elenchus, Elenchi, from elencho to disgrace, to put to shame, to dishonor; or to cross-examine, to refute.

Eristic from eristikos: strife, battle; spurious dialect, wrangling, sophistry. According to Ryle eristic moots were performed at the Olympic games and they had time limits (time by water clocks). They originated with Zeno, who set rules for them, and were refined by the Sophists, esp. Protagoras. Plato's contribution was aporia. According to Ryle, Plato performed eristic moots and played the part of Socrates. 50 Stephanus pages (found in the margins of all good translations) seem to be the Olympic time limit.

According to Richard Robinson, the difference between elenchus and eristic is that Socrates always starts with statements which the interloctor believes himself or to which he will assent. Furthermore, Socrates needs the respondent's affirmation or negation at each step of the argument in order to proceed with the argument

Dialectic as dialogue: dia + lego. Is it negative only? Therapeutic effect, daily purging of hubris. Only the gods could stand up to the elenchus? As opposed to the Sophists, Socrates saw an ethical, even spiritual, end to the elenchus, whereas they saw it as a tool of persuasion and rhetoric.

"We must assert that refutation is the greatest and most efficacious of all purifications, and that he who is not refuted, even though he be the Great King, has not been purified of the greatest taints. . ." (Sophist, 230E).

We do have at least fragments from the Pre-Socratics, but we have nothing from Socrates himself. (He was said to have written poetry, but none of it has survived.) It is clear that Plato puts in Socrate's mouth all of his views from early, middle, late-mature, but we may assume that early Plato and Socrates must have much in common. Reale's hermeneutical key: that which is novel, odd, eccentric, ironic, etc. that may well be the historical Soc.

He seems to have followed Gorgias' conclusion that there is a gap between physis and nous, and that cosmology and metaphysics were vain enterprises. The pre-Socratics cancelled each other out, even within their own schools.

Xenophon: "He marveled at their blindness in not seeing that man cannot solve these riddles; since even the most conceited talkers on these problems did not agree in their theories, but behaved to one another like raving lunatics." A touch of Heraclitean hyperbole? To search on the secrets of the universe and the secrets of the gods is blasphemy and hubris. Cosmology and metaphysics distract their practitioners from the real issues confronting humanity.

Vlastos' separation of Socrates and Plato: Soc-E vs. Soc-M (After Nussbaum's review.)

Soc-E is the historical Socrates as Plato tried to truthfully portray him through half fictional dialogues. Plato's studies with Archytas the Pythagorean was the turning point in his own development and the main reason why Soc-M has the views that he does. Mathematical exactness leads Plato to a very different epistemology than the one of the Socratic elenchus, which "now seemed to him a fragile and unrealiable instrument" (Nussbaum).

1. Soc-M is exclusively a moral philosopher; Soc-M is more speculative and interested in metaphysics, cosmology, science, epistemology, etc.

2. Only Soc-M has a theory of the Forms, as separately existing realities.

3. Soc-E has only the elenchus to find knowledge and claims no knowledge of his own. (Socrates does recognize the validity of craft knowledge.) Soc-M uses the hypothetical method (Phaedo) and achieves demonstrative, quasi-mathematical know. "From the Meno on, he replaces the elenchus with the hypothetical method, to bring the certainty of geometry into ethics and politics. Gilbert Ryle makes a tellling point here: the reasons why Aristotle did not learn Socratic dialectic is because Plato had already thrown it out as his philosophical method.

4. Soc-M is the one who has the tripartite theory of the soul, whereas Soc-E has no such theory.

5. Soc-M has a sophisticated knowledge of math and its current developments, whereas Soc-E has no such knowledge.  The geometry of the Meno is not necessarily an exception because the Meno is considered a transitional text, already half way to Plato's "middle" period.

6. Soc-E is a philosophical populist using the elenchus on virtually everyone he meets, whereas Soc-M is a philosophical elitist who restricts his conversions to a few trusted and fawning disciples.

7. Soc-E pursues truth through the elenchus, while Soc-M expounds truth dictactically and arrogantly to relatively passive interlocuters.

8. Soc-E, though critical of Athenian democracy (Cleve questions this), prefers Athens to any other city state. Soc-M belittles democracy and supports the dictatorship of philosophical kings. Plato is the real anti-democrat, not Socrates. He's the one the prefers the company of tyrants such as Dionysus I and II of Syracuse rather than the market crowd and common person.

NB: Cleve: the elenchus is the most democratic tool for besting arrogant no-it-alls and for gaining true knowledge. Because of the dangers of hubris, democracy is the best protection against rule by the conceited, the arrogant, and the dishonest.

Little human wisdom and democracy go hand-in-hand, similar to Reinhold Niebuhr's argument that the Christian, because of original sin, should prefer democracy over more authoritarian systems. Only God can be wise, a phrase both thoroughly Socratic and biblical. Humans must be humble and recognize their incorrigible fallibility. We are all equal in the Body of Christ and the World of the Forms.

The elenchus depended on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. In the elenchus there was truth to be discovered for every single person. Everyone should use the elenchus every day to exercize the soul in the same way that everyone ought to exercize his/her body. In conceding that the craftperson had more knowledge than the poets or politicians, Socrates is siding with the lowest class of people and supporting their right to participate in civil affairs. But they, too, need the necessary purgation of the elenchus.

9. "Both Socrates are interested in eros, especially a homoerotic kind; but Soc-M is alone is praising 'madness,' and in grounding eros in a metaphysical search for the trans. form of beauty." (Nussbaum, but she thinks Vlastos too simple.) In the Symposium it seems as if Socrates resisted the homosexual advances of Alcibiades.

10. Soc-E's religion is ethical, action-oriented, whereas Soc-M is mystical and more contemplative and believes in reincarnation.

11. Only Plato has the gnostic view of the soul, which he still keeps from the Orphics and the Pythag. Socrates' psyche still preserves the unity of the person. Socrates is also agnostic about the afterlife and the immortality of the soul, while Plato of course is anything but agnostic. Socrates' ethical vs. Plato's metaphysical view of the soul.

Theory of Recollection is Platonic, not Socratic.

Reale: Socrates' revolution involved a revolution in the concept of soul. The Orphic and Pythagorean soul was so transpersonal that it ended up destroying the unity of the self. But for Socrates the soul is the conscious self, it is intellectual and moral personhood. But there is no sign of the body as a prison; the gnostic view of the soul which Plato still keeps from the Orphics. But Socrates agrees with Plato that knowledge is virtue and vice versa.

Werner Jaeger: "It is striking that. . . Socrates always uses the word soul with exceptional emphasis, a passionate, a beseeching urgency. No Greek before him ever said it in that tone." "Know your soul" and "take care of your soul." All Apollonian mottos. That humans were to take care of their souls was the divinely appointed duty of Soc. Main point of the Apology. Socrates styles himself as the physician of the soul. The sad result of Socrates' death is that many Athenians will be forever free of his therapeutic services.

The Sophists did not care for the souls of their students and as a result did their students' souls irreparable harm.

Two meanings of the Greek origin of our word: deception and "saying the opposite of what the hearer is to understand." Reale: dissimilation to confuse his interlocutors.

The Delphic oracle was notorious for expressing the second meaning. "If you attack the Persians you will bring down a great empire." (his own!) Or "there is none wiser in Greece than Soc." Oedipus: "Whoever shall kiss his mother (wife) shall become king" (Classics of the Western World I, p. 251).

Socratic irony is riddling but not deceptive. But what does the riddling accomplish? "It relies for its success on the hearer's awareness of a non-literal meaning." (Nussbaum)

Socrates does not bail out his interlocuters, because Socrates "values one thing more than the pupil's grasp of truth: that the pupil should come to see it for himself." Forcing people to be morally and epistemologically autonomous is at the core of Socratic teaching.

Socrates never cheats his interlocuters? Nussbaum and many of us are not quite sure of this. "Some of them he treats with sensitivity and gentleness, giving them at each stage only what they can absorb, while others are tripped up and tied in knots, partly bon account of the elliptical and rapid nature of the argument."

Anthromorphism is rejected, but anthropocentrism is dominant. In Xenophon we find Socrates proposing a teleological argument for God that is centered on the special creation of human beings and a close connection between divine mind and human mind. (Reale, 227) The soul orders the body as God orders the world. God is provident, providing most care to humans themselves, as we in turn care for God.

Nothing philosophical comes from the daimon, for philosophical truth comes from dialectic only, not divine revelation. A negative guide for specific actions only. Therefore, there is a clean separation between philosophy and religion.

THE APOLOGY

Written within 10 years after the trial and is substantially accurate. Polycrates' negative account of the trial was criticized for its inaccuracies, so one would expect a similar response to Plato or Xenophon's account, if they too were inaccurate.

Questions for class: Give examples of irony, if any, in Socrates' defense. What exactly does Socrates know or not know? Is Socrates really telling us the truth about his own religion? In what has Socrates corrupted the youth? (atheism [26b]or elenchus [23c]? If the latter, then Ryle perhaps some credibility.) Does Socreates entrap Meletus? Is the elenchus fair? Is there a hidden, perhaps political agenda, behind the formal charges? The amnesty of 402, instigated by Anytus, would have precluded any formal political charges.

From Cleve, Socrates in the Apology (Hackett Publishing, 1989), pp. 88-94.

1. Meletus considers it a matter of the greatest importance how the youth will be the best possible.

2. It is clear, then that he knows or that he at least cares who makes them better.

3. For, having discovered, as he says, that Socrates corrupts them, Meletus has brought him to trial.

4. Meletus is silent and has nothing to say about who makes the youth better.

5. This is a "sufficient sign" that he has never cared about how the youth will be the best possible. Hence, (1) is false.

Meletus does remedy (4) by answering that all Athenians, with the exception of Socrates, educate the youth to be better (24d11-25a11). But is this true by analogy to other training, such as training horses? No, because we would not entrust the training of horses just to anyone, otherwise our horses would be "corrupted." Here it seems as if Socrates has convicted himself, because he is not a professional teacher, but the jury would then have to convict most Athenians for corruption of the their youth.

But even if Meletus is correct about all Athenians as virtue teachers, Socrates easily produces a reductio ad absurdum: "Happy indeed would be the condition of youth if they had one corrupter only, and the all the rest of the world were their benefactor" (25b7-c1). Socrates must indeed be a magician if he can succeed in corrupting youth that everyone else is striving to improve. Furthermore, wouldn't one expect that at least one of these youths would come forward and charge him personally with their corruption?

1. If Socrates corrupts the youths who associate with him, he must either do it voluntarily or involuntarily (25d5-6).

2. Everyone would rather be benefited than harmed by his associates (25d1-4).

3. Wicked people harm their associates, whereas goods people benefit them (25c7-10).

4. Therefore, anyone who corrupts his associates or makes them wicked runs the risk of being harmed by them (25e2-3).

5. Socrates gets Meletus to agree that no one freely chooses to be harmed (25d).

6. Therefore, if Socrates corrupts his young associates, he does so involuntarily (25e5-26a1).

7. Therefore, Meletus' claim (25d7) that Socrates corrupts the youth voluntarily is false (25e5-26a1).

8. The law does not require that those guilty of involuntary wrongdoings be brought to court, only that they be instructed privately about the nature of their error (26a1-4).

9. Meletus has not instructed Socrates but instead has brought him to court (26a5-7).

10. Therefore, Meletus has irresponsibly brought Socrates to court (implicit; cf. 24c6).

(6) is a problematic statement: it does not follow from the premises. But for (6) to be false, Meletus would have to show, much more than he has done so, that Socrates had a strong motive to corrupt the youth. In response to some critics that there is either paradox (an involuntary crime) or sophistry in this argument, Cleve responds: "All that the argument really presupposes is the much less contentious view that people do not voluntarily runs the risk of being harmed without having a strong motive" (93).

1. Socrates corrupts the youth by teaching them not to believe that there are any gods at all (26b2-c7). Brickhouse & Smith: Meletus is not tricked into saying this, but this was definitely his charge. Association with atheist Sophists and physicists.

2. Socrates corrupts the youth by teaching them to believe in strange daimonic doings (26b8-c7).

3. Anyone who believes in the doings of horses, or flutes, or Xs of any sort must believe that there are horses, or flutes, or Xs (27b3-c2).

4. Therefore, anyone who believes in daimonic doings must believe in daimons (27c1-2).

5. Socrates believes in daimonic doings, indeed, Meletus actually accuses him of believing in them (27c4-8).

6. Therefore, Socrates must believe that there are daimons (27c8-10).

7. Daimons are either gods or the children of gods (27c10-d3).

8. Anyone who believes that there are children of horses, or asses, or Xs must believe that there are horses, or asses, or Xs (27d10-e3).

9. Therefore, anyone who believes that there are children of gods must believe that there are gods (27d9-e3).

10. Therefore, Socrates believes that there are gods (27e5-28a1).

11. Therefore, (1) and (2) contradict one another.

12. Therefore, Meletus' indictment is a self-contradictory riddle, and Meletus is guilty of dealing frivolously with serious matters (27a1-7).

There was a 1,000 drachma fine for frivolous suits, and it was levied if an accuser got less than 20% of the votes of the jury.

Meletus' charge of atheism seems partially to be based on "guilt by association" with Anaxagoras, who believed that the sun and the moon were nothing but stones. But if Meletus had followed Socrates' career carefully, he would have not made such an irresponsible connection. As we know, Socrates rejected Anaxagoras' views, except for possibly a general divine teleology.

Plato thought that the stars were gods. In his Laws he maintains that rejecting the divinity of the stars was tantamount to atheism and made one liable to criminal penalties. Strange, because the state religion did not require worship of the heavenly bodies.

In the Euthydemus, Socrates attests that he had an altar in his house at which he worshipped Zeus, Apollo, and Athena (302-303). In the dialogues he is always swearing by the gods, especially Zeus, even while expresssing skepticism about the stories about them (Euthyphro 6B). Socrates' very last words: "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget." Devout, pious, and orthodox to the very end?

Why have I put myself under the risk of death? The god at Delphi does not lie, so I know for sure that he has commanded me to do the elenchus. I don't know about what lies after death, so fear of death is not as firmly grounded as my knowledge of my mission. I cannot act except on what I know for sure. It would be an act hubris to quit my philosophical post because of an ungrounded fear of death. I would also convict myself of impiety for disobeying Apollo.

"First" accusers did not accuse him of atheism, but of natural philosophy and sophism, making the weaker argument the stronger. There was no law against being either one.

23c: corruption of the youth consists in their examining themselves and others.

29c: your sons will be utterly corrupted by practicing what I teach. Practicing elenchus, not irreligion.

30: If you acquit me, I will still practice the elenchus. No mention made of irreligion, or introducing new gods.

31, 39c: You are killing me to avoid the elenchus--to avoid the task of examining your lives. But what if Apollo sends another like me!? "If you think that by killing men you will stop all censure of your evil lives, you are mistaken."

37d: You cannot endure my discourses and arguments. No mention of atheism.

38a: Life without the elenchus is not worth living.

38, 41: If you ban me, I will continue to do the elenchus in foreign lands; if you kill me, then I will examine people, both men and women, in the afterlife!

Generation Gap: it's OK for the sons to pay for instruction from the Sophists, including elenchus, but it's not OK for Socrates to use the elenchus on the fathers. If it helps

Alcibiades was sentenced to death (in abstentia) for profaning the Mysteries. Diagoras, a Sophist and an atheist, fled Athens with a bounty of one talent on his head. Theodorus, a figure in the Theateatus, drank hemlock. Anaxagoras was fined five talents and was banned. Stilpon and Protagoras were just banished. If Stilpon is Stilpo of Megara, then he used "empty" eristic. He was considered a "minor Socratic." Euripides also charged with impiety? And Pericles' wife, too.

1 mina = 100 silver drachmas = 1 lb. of silver = 1/60 of a talent of silver. $64 in today's silver, but 100 days skilled artisan labor in ancient Greece. Jesus was sold for 30 drachmas?

Actually, Socrates' first offer was not a pittance, and his final offer was one half of a talent, 30 minas, 3,000 skilled artisan days. The fine for a frivilous suit was 10 minas, a thousand days of skilled artisan labor.

WHAT IS THE DAIMON (DAIMONION)?

Is is conscience, the moral part of the rational soul? Or is a form of divine visitation, not part of Socrates' nature?

31d: It is the new god that Meletus ridicules in his indictment.

Appears to be superhuman, first coming to him in childhood, then in frequent dreams, oracles, and "in every way in which the will of divine power was ever intimated to anyone" (33c). Then indirectly from Delphi. Stops him right in the middle of speaking. Conscience does not operate that way. Outside interference. It's like being possessed, as in Steve Martin's "Two of Me."

40b: the internal oracle has divine source outside?

SOCRATES' REFLECTIONS ON THE AFTERLIFE (40cff.)

Very different from the Phaedo, even different from his first more skeptical views (29b). Were the last speeches added by Plato, in order to get a few more noble lines in?

1. It may just be nothingness, unconsciousness.

2. It may be transmigration to another life.

3. It may be an undisturbed sleep. Then "eternity is only a single night."

4. There may be a Last Judgment in Hades, but a good person has no reason to fear that.

If any of these things are true, then we must conclude that death is good.

What did things cost in the 4th Century Athens?

1 mina = 100 silver drachmas (= "pieces" of silver) = 1 lb. of silver = 1/60 of a talent of silver

$64 today's silver, but 100 skilled artisan labor days is a better measure.

A book of philosophy: one drachma = 1 artisan day

A sophist lesson (or course): 5 minas = 500 artisan days

Selling your Messiah: 30 drachmas = 1 month artisan labor