Socrates was perhaps the most interesting and influential thinker in the fifth century. He was dedicated to careful reasoning and he wanted genuine knowledge rather than the victory over his opponent. He learned the rhetoric and dialectics of the Sophists, the ideas of the Lonian philosophers, and the general culture of Periclean Athens. Socrates used the same knowledge by the Sophists to get a new purpose, the pursuit of truth. He called everything into question and he was determined to accept nothing less than the truth. He was well known for his skills in carrying on a conversation and his public speaking, but Socrates never wrote a thing.
We learned from his students, mainly Kenophon and Plato, about his methods and results. Plato was a philosopher also, so we must assume he interjected his own thoughts and ideas into the dialogues he gave to the world as discussions between Socrates and other people of that time. Socrates was born in Athens, the son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and Phaenarete, a midwife. He received the regular elementary education in literature, music, and gymnastics. At first, Socrates followed the path of his father. He made a statue group of the three Graces and this stood at the entrance to the Acroplois until the 2nd century AD.
He served as an infantryman in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. He showed a lot of bravery at the battles of Potidaea in 432-430BC, Delium in 424BC and Amphipolis in 422BC. Socrates believed in the power of discussion rather than writing. He spent most of his adult life in the marketplace and public places of Athens. He would engage anyone in dialogue and argue with those who would listen or who would answer questions. Socrates was reported to be unattractive in appearance and short in stature but he was very hardy and he had a lot of self-control.
He enjoyed life and he was known for his ready wit and sense of humor so this made him quite popular. Socrates mostly steered clear of politics, but he did observe the laws and was obedient. He believed that his calling was to pursue philosophy and that he could serve his country by teaching, and persuading the Athenians to learn self-examination and nurturing of their souls. Socrates had a belief that the everyday world is an illusion compared to the world of knowledge. He thought that people were too distracted by money and materialistic things to appreciate truth and reality.
Socrates said, “The capacity for knowledge is innate in each man’s mind. ” This simply meant to him that when one is caught up in superficiality, then the truth does not shine through. He thought that the people that were consumed in the shallow world would only see reality as mere shadows compared to the truth. “The good”, according to Socrates is “the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their being and reality. ” He thought that when the mind is preoccupied with a bad world, it does not see the truth.
Socrates thought that pleasure should not be taken to the extreme, because it will then be unhealthy for the mind and body. He explains that the mind, body, and soul must all be in unison in order to be healthy, then happiness will follow. Many people look for happiness by engulfing themselves in life’s highest pleasures and others look for contentment by over working themselves to be the richest. However, these two extremes will not produce happiness but instead one should find peace by seeking out the truth, and looking inside to find reality and true beauty.
The allegory of the cave illustrates the difference between the materialistic world and the intelligible world. Socrates described a man with his arms and legs chained and with his neck in a brace. This only lets the man see the wall with shadows. This is a metaphor for the man who does not transcend to world of enlightenment. They can only see shadows of what is true and real. The man memorizes these shadows and thinks he is smart, but the truth lies beneath the depths of the everyday world, but this can only be seen when the layers of immateriality are ripped away.
Another way to look at the cave is if the man escapes and sees the light and he can no longer see the shadows. This would cause him to reason that the shadows were truer than the light so the illusion of reality would be real to the man, rather than the truth. The cave also symbolizes the idea that he memorized the shadows and this meant he was intelligent. Man thinks that remembering information is intelligence but this does not involve a thought process and any type of reasoning. Therefore, this means that one is not smart due to a keen sense of memory.
Socrates also believed that “the mind as a whole must be turned away from the world of change until its eye can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities, which is what we call the good. ” He believed this could not be done without a clear mind. Limiting the amount of bad information would allow one the fully appreciate life and nature. It is not enough to observe nature, but one must learn from it to enjoy it. Nature holds many secrets and cannot be seen without awareness and understanding. Socrates believed that every man in part beast and part lion.
He said that “flattery and meanness when they subordinate the spirited element in us to the unruliness of the beast, and when, to gratify the beast’s greed and love of money, they school the lion to put up with insults and turn it into an ape. ” Violence grows within the beast and this causes aggression, which causes disorder. One must overlook the outside influences and search for the truer meaning in life. By surmounting the influence of society, one can withstand the evil and look inside the ordinary in order the find the extraordinary.
Socrates was a patriot and a very religious man but many of his contemporaries regarded him with suspicion. They did not like his attitude toward the Athenian State and the established religion. He was charged in 399BC with neglecting the gods of the state and introducing new divinities, a reference to the daemonion, or mystical inner voice, to which Socrates often referred. He was also charged with corrupting the morals of the young. They thought he was leading them away from the principles of democracy and he was wrongly identified with the Sophists.
He had been ridiculed by the comic poet Aristophanes in his play “The Clouds” in which the master of a “thinking-shop” where the young men were taught to make the worse reason appear to be the better reason. Socrates was condemned to die even though a small majority carried the vote. He made an ironic counter proposition to the court, proposing only to pay a small find because of his value to the state as a philosopher. The jury was so angered by his offer that they voted by an increased majority for the death penalty. Socrates’ friends planned his escape from prison and death but he preferred to go by the law and die for his cause.
His last day was spent with his friends and that evening he calmly drank a cup of hemlock according to the customary procedure. Plato described the trial and death of Socrates in the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo. Plato’s dramatic picture of a man willing to die rather than abandoning his commitment to philosophical inquiry offers up Socrates as a model for all future philosophers. Few of us are presented with the same choice between philosophy and death, but we are daily faced with opportunities to decide between right and wrong and our devotion to truth and reason. How we live our lives determines whether we are philosophical or not.
