Is Plato’s Socrates fact or fiction? I suppose we will never know. The Socrates that emerges in Plato’s dialogues is far more wise than your average Joe. And he knows it. And he wants you to know it too. Or Plato does. We can never be sure. Whether it is bashing his Sophist enemies or smartly getting the best of an interlocutor, Socrates always comes off on top. He triumphs in a way that always makes his humbleness seem, if not insincere, a feigned modesty or, perhaps, a modest arrogance.
The dialogues start with the “Euthyphro” and the charges brought against Socrates by Meletus. “He says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who are their corrupters. I fancy that he must be a wise man, and seeing that I am anything but a wise man, he has found me out, and is going to accuse me of corrupting his young friends. And of this our mother the state is to be judge…. He says that I am a poet or maker of gods, and that I make new gods and deny the existence of old ones.” These were serious charges in the Athens of Socrates. The rest of the dialogue is back and forth on the nature of the gods and on the nature of piety. “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved by the gods.” What is man’s relationship with his gods? “But where reverence is, there is fear.” And what is the point of sacrifice to those who already have it all? “I wish, however, that you would tell me what benefit accrues to the gods from our gifts. That they are givers of every good to us is clear; but how we can give any good thing to them in return is far from being equally clear. If they give everything and we give nothing, that must be an affair of business in which we have very greatly the advantage of them.”
In the “Apology” Socrates gets at the nature of truth. He begins by deriding his Sophist opponents. “Unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for then I do indeed admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs!” He opposes his own state of mind with his typical critic. “For he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know…. And so I go my way, obedient to the god, and make inquisition into the wisdom of any one, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and this occupation quite absorbs me.” Socrates next expounds on the good life. “A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong- acting the part of a good man or of a bad…. The greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue…. The life which is unexamined is not worth living.” On the nature of death Socrates says, “for this fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?”
In the “Crito” Socrates begins by discussing popular opinion. “But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many? Good men, and they are the only persons who are worth considering, will think of these things truly as they happened.” Socrates urges restraint from the practice of taking an eye for an eye. “The greater the zeal the greater the evil…. And what of doing evil in return for evil, which is the morality of the many- is that just or not?…. Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him…. Now [I] depart in innocence, a sufferer and not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws, but of men.”
In the “Phaedo” Socrates pontificates on the nature of the soul after death. “While we are in the body, and while the soul is mingled with this mass of evil, our desire will not be satisfied, and our desire is of the truth…. But when returning into herself she [our soul] reflects; then she passes into the realm of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom?” Death releases one from the constraints of the body. “And is not philosophy the practice of death?… Each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, and engrosses her and makes her believe that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and ways, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure…. Let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him, and rather hurtful in their effects, and has followed after the pleasures of knowledge in this life; who has adorned the soul in her own proper jewels, which are temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth- in these arrayed she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her time comes.”
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