Biography
It is significant to mention that Socrates was born around 469 BC in Athens. Socrates was educated by his father in the art of stone processing in his early years and was even considered a capable sculptor. However, the philosopher soon left his father’s workshop to study rhetoric and sophistic wisdom with the educated Athenian Crito. Socrates was an active figure in Athens; he was never charged money from students for education and lived in simple, ascetic conditions. He spent all his life in Athens and did not surrender to the temptation to travel as other philosophers did. However, during the Peloponnesian War, he went to war and defended his city. Socrates fought near Potidaea, Delia, and Amphipolis and protected the philosophers condemned to death, including the son of his friends Pericles and Aspasia, from unjust judgment. He mentored the Athenian politician and general Alcibiades and saved his life in battle (Taylor, 2019). After the establishment of the dictatorship by Alcibiades, Socrates condemned the tyrants and sabotaged the measures of authoritarianism.
When the dictatorship was deposed, enraged citizens charged Socrates with the fact that the Athenian army abandoned the wounded commander-in-chief. The philosopher was accused of “not honoring the gods the city honored but introducing new deities and being guilty of corrupting the youth (Taylor, 2019)”. As a free Athenian citizen, Socrates was not subjected to the death penalty but accepted poison himself. Information about the philosopher’s personal life is limited. It is essential to mention the personal life of the philosopher; according to Aristotle, Socrates married twice. At first, he married Xanthippe, who bore his son, and then he married Myrtos, the daughter of Aristides, who bore him two sons (Taylor, 2019)
Key Ideas
The Socratic dialogues were a search for proper knowledge, and an essential step on this path was the realization of its absence, the understanding of one’s unawareness. According to legend, Socrates was called by the Delphi Pythia “the wisest of all the wise. This is evidently connected with his statement about the limitations of human knowledge: “I know that I know nothing” (Taylor, 2019). In the method of irony, Socrates adopts the mask of a simpleton, asking him to teach something or give advice. There is always a goal behind this game, to force the interlocutor to discover himself and his ignorance, to achieve the effect of a beneficial shock to the listener.
Socrates addresses the problem of humans, the question of the essence of man, of his nature. Socrates claimed that studying the laws of nature and the movement of the stars is possible, but it is essential to arrive at the same deep truths of knowing human beings (Taylor, 2019). For Socrates, a person is, above all, his soul. By “soul,” Socrates means a person’s mind, the ability to think, and conscience, the moral beginning. If a person’s essence is his soul, then it is not his body that needs special care but rather his soul (Taylor, 2019). An educator’s highest task is teaching people how to cultivate their souls. The soul is perfect and virtuous when virtue makes it perfect. In Socrates, virtue relates to knowledge, which is a necessary condition for good actions.
Theories and Schools of Socrates
In his philosophy, Socrates reduced virtue to knowledge and optimistically believed that all could become moral if they knew what was good. All evil arises only from ignorance of the good; no one is evil by nature or voluntarily (Blum, 2018). These philosophical views of Socrates combined psychological determinism with the idea of the free, creative development of the spirit through acquiring and producing knowledge. It is also important to describe Socrates’ doctrine of God. In the time of Socrates, Greek philosophical thought had already destroyed the old belief in a humanistic Olympian god, and Socrates stood at the pivot of Greek thought to monotheism (Blum, 2018). He was the first to understand deity not as a natural but as a moral force. The identification of God with the idea of goodness and righteousness brought Socrates’ philosophy closer to monotheism and, in some respects, to Christianity.
Society and state are not simply the scene of struggles of individual or group egoisms. They are based on the idea of the whole, some divinely consecrated rational plan (Blum, 2018). In order to rule the state, one needs to understand this plan. It is important to describe the school of Cynics, which had its own postulates. The meaning of life they considered the achievement of virtue, by which they understood the reduction of needs and independence from society and the state (Blum, 2018). The adherents of the Cyrenaics school contrasted the asceticism of the Cynics with hedonism (enjoyment of life). In the Megarian school, the focus was on the problem of the singular and the general in knowledge in favor of the general (Blum, 2018).
The Importance of Socratic Philosophy
It is important to mention the glory of Socrates. Not long after his death, Socrates appeared as a distinguished thinker. The glory of the reformer of philosophy, who constituted an epoch in its development, has forever remained with Socrates. Thus, the whole previous period of its history is termed “pre-Socratic” (Blum, 2018). Aristotle honors Socrates for initiating a scientific methodology in the form of inductive reasoning and general definitions, while Cicero praises Socrates for being the creator of moral and social philosophy (Blum, 2018).
Reasons to Study Socratic Philosophy
Socrates understood the goal of his activity as making people “better,” that is, he wanted to make “better people” in an irrelevant sense, in contrast to the sophists, who understood “better” as people who were capable and adept in practical and political matters (Blum, 2018). Socrates attempted to restore the authority of knowledge that the sophists had destroyed. In questions of ethics, Socrates developed the principles of rationalism. His method of asking questions that presuppose a critical attitude to dogmatic assertions is entitled “Socratic irony (Blum, 2018)”. Dialectic is the art of arguing; in Socrates’ practice, dialectic became the primary method of finding the truth. Socratic irony is a critical attitude to dogmatic statements. In subsequent eras, Socrates became the embodiment of the sage ideal. Socrates introduced the concept of singularity and the general in cognition in favor of the general (Blum, 2018).
References
Blum, A. F. (2018). Socrates, the original and its images. Routledge.
Socrates. (n.d.). History.
Taylor, C. C. (2019). Socrates: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
The life of Socrates. (n.d.).12 min. Web.