Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Plato, Phaedrus
Socrates’ despair for us
Agustín García Calvo (Universidad de Barcelona. Facultad de Filosofía, 03/12/2007)
In history, the man sentenced to death by the Athenian jury in 399 BC, at the age of 70, accused of corrupting the youth and introducing gods other than those of the state.
He came from the lower middle class: his father was a sculptor; his mother, a midwife. He used to say that he had inherited his mother’s trade, because what he did when conversing with his fellow citizens was to help bring to light what was already implicit in their ideas.
His social status did not prevent him from receiving honourable treatment from figures from the most illustrious families, such as those of Pericles and Alcibiades or of Critias and Plato; this was in addition to his other old friends, such as Hermogenes, Aeschines and Apollodorus, who accompanied him in prison on the day he drank the hemlock.
Unlike the illustrious itinerant teachers of his time, he does not appear to have left Athens in his lifetime, save for his military service during the Peloponnesian War.
Amidst the clashes between oligarchic factions and extreme democrats, he did not participate much in politics: on one occasion he was chosen by lot to preside over the Assembly, where he prevented a summary trial against those responsible for the disaster at the Arginusae; and under the Thirty Tyrants he refused to carry out a police duty entrusted to him. And yet, his own condemnation came at a time of democratic restoration, marred by the despondency and need for scapegoats left by the loss of the war.
Neither office nor profit
It is true that his activities bore a resemblance to those of the Sophists, such as Hippias, Prodicus, Polus, Gorgias or Protagoras, who on the one hand taught the sciences and on the other prepared young people for oratory and politics; indeed, tradition even made him a disciple of the physicist Archelaus; and Aristophanes’ The Clouds, premiered in 423, ridicules him as devoting himself in his “thoughtful thoughtlessness” to natural and grammatical investigations. But the fact is that, as he proclaims, according to Plato’s Apology, on the day of his trial, not even his accusers had the audacity to claim that he had ever taken or asked for any payment: “And that this is true,” he adds, “I have a witness, whom I believe to be trustworthy: poverty.”
And indeed, when, having already been convicted, he has to propose an alternative sentence; he can offer to pay no more than one mina as a fine: the equivalent of some 1,800 pesetas today, with perhaps four or five times the purchasing power.
In the same speech, he recalled the question his friend Chaerephon had put to the Oracle of Delphi as to whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, to which the Oracle replied that there was not; and he said that his life since then had been devoted to finding out what such a strange answer might mean; and that because of this pursuit, he had had no free time left to devote to public affairs or to those of his household; “but rather,” he says, “I live in wealthy poverty for the sake of serving the god”.
Consequently, having a wife (perhaps a second one, according to a later tradition) and three children, it is hardly surprising that his marital relations were fraught with difficulty: later anecdotes would delight in elaborating on the scenes of Xanthippe’s invectives, endured by Socrates with patience and that sense of humour which seems an essential trait of his character.
Socrates was both the instigator and the victim of incessant questioning; he created a climate of uncertainty around him and ended up accused of corrupting the youth and introducing foreign gods into the State.
On matters of love
We are told, on the one hand, of his delight in conversing with noblewomen and courtesans: Aspasia herself; Diotima, from whom, in Plato’s Symposium, he claims to have received his wisdom of love; or the courtesan Theodora, to whom, in a chapter of Xenophon’s Anabasis, he offers advice on the practice of her art. And he himself, in Xenophon’s Symposium, defines his own activities as prostitution or pimping.
On the other hand, he appears to us to be quite at ease with the custom, common in the Athens of his time, of men falling in love with and courting young men, whatever the testimonies regarding his continence that Plato and Xenophon convey to us may be.
It seems that for him it was above all a matter of infatuation with and fidelity to youth itself: that is, to the boy in the process of integrating into the world of men. Thus, he is heard to say in the Charmides: “To me, more or less, all those in the prime of life seem beautiful.”
He, for his part, does not seem to have been blessed with conventional good looks: the comedy writers already made light of those grotesque features of his face and figure that can be gleaned from the Symposium: hunched-backed and pot-bellied, a thick head like a satyr’s mask, thick lips, flat-nosed, bulging eyes. And such is the figure that was later popularised by the imagery.
The buzzing of the gadfly
But outside of History, so to speak, Socrates is a perpetually discordant voice within Society, like the gadfly to which he compares himself with regard to Athens in The Apology.
We cannot hear that voice ourselves, and we have no choice but to allow it to be brought back to life, perhaps, through the writings of some of its listeners; first and foremost, the brief Platonic dialogues that we might call “early”, in which there is no conclusion or definitive doctrine (Theages, Lysis, Laches, Charmides, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, the Apology, the Hippias, the Alcibiades; also Hipparchus, the Lovers, along with a few others considered apocryphal; extending to Ion, Menexenus and the first book of the Republic; and of course, Clitophon), supplemented by suggestions from later works such as Parmenides, Sophist, the Statesman, or even Philebus, Cratylus, Theaetetus; secondarily, the Memorabilia (with the Apology) and Xenophon’s Symposium; and the scant fragments of the other Socratics, such as Eschines, Antisthenes and Aristippus; plus some references in Aristotle, and the little that late literature can offer us: the 35 Socratic Epistles, surely from the early Empire, and Plutarch, Athenaeus or Lucian.
But writing, by the very act of fixing the voice, makes it something it was not. Moreover, it cannot help but become confused with the voices of the writers; who, moved by veneration for his memory and a guilty conscience over his death, end up turning their character ‘Socrates’ into a model of wisdom or virtue, and attribute to him the truths or values in which they themselves, with age, came to believe.
Now, if anything is known about Socrates, it is that he knew little and with no certainty; or as he says in the Apology, “that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know”. Thus, the doctrines that appear in Plato’s dialogues on the lips of the character “Socrates” (including some very early ones, such as that of anamnesis in the Meno or that of the Forms and the relationship between body and soul in the Phaedo or Phaedrus) are to be regarded as Platonic; and Socratic, if anything, are the questions to which those doctrines responded.
And likewise, Socrates was not supposed to preach or practise any morality: his perpetual questioning about the good and pleasure, the good and utility, etc., leads nowhere; the only thing they suggest is the confusion between virtue and knowledge, which Aristotle had to reproach Socrates for having carried out radically and without distinctions. Thus, the exhortations to virtue (and indeed almost to the cardinal virtues of Wisdom, Justice, Courage and Temperance) which in Xenophon’s Memoirs appear attributed to the character “Socrates” are to be regarded as Xenophon’s own; and were also motivated by the desire to exonerate Socrates from the accusation of corrupting the youth.
Nietzsche was therefore mistaken in his contempt and invective against Socrates: for Socrates does not preach the morality of the weak either; he simply attacks, too, that of the strong (thus, against Thrasymachus in The Republic, Book I); for among men, the morality of the strongest is also a morality, and not the Nature it claims to be. And if Socrates’ doctrine fades away in the discussion, little remains of Socratic morality other than the desolate observation by the sophist Antiphon (recorded in the Memoirs) that Socrates did not make his friends happy, but rather the opposite.
“At the hour when the square is most crowded, there one could see him,” Xenophon recounts of Socrates. The Socratic dialogue would soon after become a literary device. In one of the earliest published works, Aspasia by Aeschines, Socrates already appeared in dialogue with Aspasia in the Agora.
The dialectic
Perhaps the essence of Socrates’ method or dialectic can be described as follows: taking one of the names or abstract concepts that are significant within the ideological structure of his world (e.g. “courage”, sophrosyne, episteme; or “useful”, “good”, “intentional”; or even philosophy or “to know oneself”); take advantage of the fact that an interlocutor takes on that notion, as if knowing its meaning; allow the notion itself, within the dialogue, to develop its own contradictions with the system of notions to which it belongs.
Aristotle alludes to this, albeit with a twisted interpretation, when he considers the inquiry into “What is” as characteristic of Socrates. Thus the opposition between Socrates and the other is transformed into a contradiction with himself, which in turn is nothing more than the embodiment of the internal contradiction of the idea itself.
It is not, therefore, a matter of the “thesis/antithesis//synthesis” scheme, but of the analysis of a synthesis established in the Order of things.
This method originated in the very dawn of logic with Heraclitus, and through it Socrates is placed within the tradition of Zeno and the Sophists. Later, through his friend Euclid, he inspired the little-known logical school of Megara, where dialectic, it seems, tended to become established as a technique.
But, although Socrates was not alone in devoting himself to reasoning through dispute or the art of eristic (see the caricature of his practice by the two Sophist brothers in the Euthydemus), what is most Socratic must lie in having confused the dialectical method with the actual dialogue between people: the dialectic of the object manifesting itself as a dialectic between subjects.
The targets of attack: Politics, Morality, the Sciences, Poetry, Religion, Pedagogy…
The targets of this dialectic are, in general, the essentials of the dominant ideology. First and foremost, Politics: the pretension to govern men and states is denounced (e.g. in the Alcibiades) as absurd: to understand the affairs of many whilst failing to understand one’s own (oneself); and to possess general knowledge and mastery without mastering specific techniques.
One might say, then, that Politics is criticised by virtue of personal Morality, of the “care of the soul”. But at the same time, the aporias into which moral pretension falls flourish in the dialogue: thus, when in the Charmides, Critias proposes the “Know thyself” from the pediment at Delphi as the essential greeting for one’s own good, Socrates marvels at the strangeness of a knowledge that is not knowledge of anything, but of oneself. And love or friendship (philia) itself comes off badly in Lysis, in a dispute where that notion slips through the net of reasoning time and again.
It is also in the name of the epistemai, or examples of practical knowledge, that the folly of man—whether politician or sophist—who dominates everything and knows everything, seems often to be denounced; yet, in turn, the epistemai fall under criticism for their claim to true wisdom: thus, in the Euthydemus, scientific inquiry or philosophy could not consist in the accumulation of knowledge, but rather in a form of knowledge that merges with dikaiosyne or virtue itself and with political capacity. And so Socrates subjects the specialists in the sciences (as seen in the Memoirs and as he himself recounts in the Apology) to relentless questioning: did the fact that they knew how to do things imply that they knew what they were doing?; with a perpetually negative result. Likewise, among the other arts, poetry, as we see in the Ion: by acknowledging its divine or intuitive nature, it is denied knowledge and consciousness.
This seems to be (despite the pious drivel that Xenophon puts into his mouth in the Memoirs) the Socratic attitude towards religiosity and the idea of Divine Law: the questioning of the notions that underpin it: so in Euthyphro, where the latter’s firm faith (which allows and compels him to accuse his own father of murder) becomes indefinitely entangled in the question: “piety (the “religiously good”)—do the gods love it because it is good, or is it good because the gods love it?”.
As for pedagogy, in most of the dialogues there is a hint of the scepticism and jest with which the nascent higher education of the Sophists is treated. But what of the effects of Socrates’ own company? The manner in which they are discussed in the Theages is probably typical: not a matter of learning anything, but an extremely vague “giving of oneself”, which moreover depends on the chance of whether or not the gods see fit for it to occur. And even more clearly, when in the Clitophonthus Socrates listens in silence as Clitophonthus’s despairing complaint rains down upon him: his words will surely be an excellent stimulus to virtue or to the care of the soul; but, when it comes to practising or knowing what that virtue is, Socrates has nothing to teach.
The world has developed pedagogy (and higher education in particular) precisely as a defence against the potential threat that Socratic questioning poses to the established order: the assimilation of dialectics into the world, in the form of ideas that can be assimilated by individuals.
The process began with the first of the academies, Plato’s Academy, and with Aristotle’s Lyceum and the schools that would eventually lead to the institution of the University and textbooks. This encyclopaedia, for example, is a pedagogical work, and it is a contradiction of Socrates that an article entitled “Socrates” should appear in it.
Socrates considered not knowing oneself to be the closest thing to madness. However, he once said that the “Know thyself” inscription on the pediment at Delphi meant knowing nothing but oneself. Nevertheless, at Delphi (right), the oracle praised Socrates as the wisest man.
… and Philosophy
To speak of Pedagogy is to speak of “Philosophy”, in the modern sense of a “secular and rational explanation of the how and why of things”; such a Philosophy did not exist before Socrates, nor did it exist with Socrates.
It is customary in the History of Philosophy to divide the whole into pre-Socratic and post-Socratic periods: this implies that Socrates stands at the end of a line of critical activity in which thought turns upon its own creations, the dominant ideas: a line that can be outlined as follows: Thales and Anaximander – Heraclitus and Parmenides – Zeno of Elea – the Sophists – Socrates. And it is after Socrates, as a reaction to that revelation of falsehood, and by assimilating Science—which had been developing in parallel—that Philosophy emerges: whether in the Platonic manner, in which knowledge is subordinated to the Good, and thus Philosophy is rather political, or in the Aristotelian manner, in which Philosophy is the knowledge of all knowledge.
Of the post-Socratic attitudes, it is perhaps the Epicurean, on the one hand, and the Sceptic, in a certain sense its opposite, which sought most faithfully to follow the Socratic confusion between the problem of knowledge and that of living.
But positive Philosophy will remain burdened by the eternal sense of guilt that its birth consists in the death of the name “Socrates”. That sense of guilt is already revealed in the fact that in examples of syllogisms the name Socrates usually appears as the particular term; thus in the fundamental form: “All men are mortal: Socrates is a man: therefore…” where, with an ambiguity essential to Philosophy, by granting Socrates the status of an example of a man, he is condemned to death.
The Socratic daimon
Only one positive belief appears in Socrates, according to the concordant testimony of Xenophon and Plato: the daimon or demon, that voice that made itself heard to warn him at times. But the daimon is precisely an essentially negative demon: “when it comes upon me, it always signals me to turn away from whatever I am about to do; but it never urges me to do anything”.
It may also be said that this is a relic of Socratic religion or superstition. But so mysterious and elusive is the daimon that we shall never know whether to take it as a jest or in earnest. If Socrates believed in it as something external, one would have to read his words with irony; if it were for him the voice of his-self (his conscience, as we would say), perhaps one would have to take it seriously. Yet from his allusions it can never be deduced whether the daimon is within Socrates or outside him. And thus the daimon is the visible embodiment of the dissolution of the ‘joking/serious’ dichotomy, which Socrates and his irony exemplify for us.
Socrates’ essential negation
That daimon, among other things, discouraged Socrates from writing (not without due hesitation, which, as recounted in the Phaedo, assailed him on the eve of his death). And yet, his life and death gave rise, like those of Jesus Christ, to the birth of a new literary genre, to which belong, amongst other lost works, the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon.
Following his guidance, we have attempted here to sketch out some features of the figure of Socrates and some echoes of the Socratic voice. But this attempt betrays its failure in the very fact that we have had to speak separately of his life and his words. For surely the essence of the Socratic attitude lies in this repeated negation: “One does not do wrong knowingly”; which was his way of expressing “They know not what they do”. And in this, by noting the separation, it is implied that the separation between action and theory is not accepted.
Drink then, being in Zeus’s palace, O Socrates; for truly did the god pronounce thee wise, being wisdom himself; for when thou didst frankly take the hemlock at the hands of the Athenians, they themselves drained it as it passed thy lips.
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book II, Chapter 5, “Socrates”
Agustín García Calvo: Socrates’ despair for us
Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Plato, Phaedrus
Socrates’ despair for us
Agustín García Calvo (Universidad de Barcelona. Facultad de Filosofía, 03/12/2007)
In history, the man sentenced to death by the Athenian jury in 399 BC, at the age of 70, accused of corrupting the youth and introducing gods other than those of the state.
He came from the lower middle class: his father was a sculptor; his mother, a midwife. He used to say that he had inherited his mother’s trade, because what he did when conversing with his fellow citizens was to help bring to light what was already implicit in their ideas.
His social status did not prevent him from receiving honourable treatment from figures from the most illustrious families, such as those of Pericles and Alcibiades or of Critias and Plato; this was in addition to his other old friends, such as Hermogenes, Aeschines and Apollodorus, who accompanied him in prison on the day he drank the hemlock.
Unlike the illustrious itinerant teachers of his time, he does not appear to have left Athens in his lifetime, save for his military service during the Peloponnesian War.
Amidst the clashes between oligarchic factions and extreme democrats, he did not participate much in politics: on one occasion he was chosen by lot to preside over the Assembly, where he prevented a summary trial against those responsible for the disaster at the Arginusae; and under the Thirty Tyrants he refused to carry out a police duty entrusted to him. And yet, his own condemnation came at a time of democratic restoration, marred by the despondency and need for scapegoats left by the loss of the war.
Neither office nor profit
It is true that his activities bore a resemblance to those of the Sophists, such as Hippias, Prodicus, Polus, Gorgias or Protagoras, who on the one hand taught the sciences and on the other prepared young people for oratory and politics; indeed, tradition even made him a disciple of the physicist Archelaus; and Aristophanes’ The Clouds, premiered in 423, ridicules him as devoting himself in his “thoughtful thoughtlessness” to natural and grammatical investigations. But the fact is that, as he proclaims, according to Plato’s Apology, on the day of his trial, not even his accusers had the audacity to claim that he had ever taken or asked for any payment: “And that this is true,” he adds, “I have a witness, whom I believe to be trustworthy: poverty.”
And indeed, when, having already been convicted, he has to propose an alternative sentence; he can offer to pay no more than one mina as a fine: the equivalent of some 1,800 pesetas today, with perhaps four or five times the purchasing power.
In the same speech, he recalled the question his friend Chaerephon had put to the Oracle of Delphi as to whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, to which the Oracle replied that there was not; and he said that his life since then had been devoted to finding out what such a strange answer might mean; and that because of this pursuit, he had had no free time left to devote to public affairs or to those of his household; “but rather,” he says, “I live in wealthy poverty for the sake of serving the god”.
Consequently, having a wife (perhaps a second one, according to a later tradition) and three children, it is hardly surprising that his marital relations were fraught with difficulty: later anecdotes would delight in elaborating on the scenes of Xanthippe’s invectives, endured by Socrates with patience and that sense of humour which seems an essential trait of his character.
Socrates was both the instigator and the victim of incessant questioning; he created a climate of uncertainty around him and ended up accused of corrupting the youth and introducing foreign gods into the State.
On matters of love
We are told, on the one hand, of his delight in conversing with noblewomen and courtesans: Aspasia herself; Diotima, from whom, in Plato’s Symposium, he claims to have received his wisdom of love; or the courtesan Theodora, to whom, in a chapter of Xenophon’s Anabasis, he offers advice on the practice of her art. And he himself, in Xenophon’s Symposium, defines his own activities as prostitution or pimping.
On the other hand, he appears to us to be quite at ease with the custom, common in the Athens of his time, of men falling in love with and courting young men, whatever the testimonies regarding his continence that Plato and Xenophon convey to us may be.
It seems that for him it was above all a matter of infatuation with and fidelity to youth itself: that is, to the boy in the process of integrating into the world of men. Thus, he is heard to say in the Charmides: “To me, more or less, all those in the prime of life seem beautiful.”
He, for his part, does not seem to have been blessed with conventional good looks: the comedy writers already made light of those grotesque features of his face and figure that can be gleaned from the Symposium: hunched-backed and pot-bellied, a thick head like a satyr’s mask, thick lips, flat-nosed, bulging eyes. And such is the figure that was later popularised by the imagery.
The buzzing of the gadfly
But outside of History, so to speak, Socrates is a perpetually discordant voice within Society, like the gadfly to which he compares himself with regard to Athens in The Apology.
We cannot hear that voice ourselves, and we have no choice but to allow it to be brought back to life, perhaps, through the writings of some of its listeners; first and foremost, the brief Platonic dialogues that we might call “early”, in which there is no conclusion or definitive doctrine (Theages, Lysis, Laches, Charmides, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, the Apology, the Hippias, the Alcibiades; also Hipparchus, the Lovers, along with a few others considered apocryphal; extending to Ion, Menexenus and the first book of the Republic; and of course, Clitophon), supplemented by suggestions from later works such as Parmenides, Sophist, the Statesman, or even Philebus, Cratylus, Theaetetus; secondarily, the Memorabilia (with the Apology) and Xenophon’s Symposium; and the scant fragments of the other Socratics, such as Eschines, Antisthenes and Aristippus; plus some references in Aristotle, and the little that late literature can offer us: the 35 Socratic Epistles, surely from the early Empire, and Plutarch, Athenaeus or Lucian.
But writing, by the very act of fixing the voice, makes it something it was not. Moreover, it cannot help but become confused with the voices of the writers; who, moved by veneration for his memory and a guilty conscience over his death, end up turning their character ‘Socrates’ into a model of wisdom or virtue, and attribute to him the truths or values in which they themselves, with age, came to believe.
Now, if anything is known about Socrates, it is that he knew little and with no certainty; or as he says in the Apology, “that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know”. Thus, the doctrines that appear in Plato’s dialogues on the lips of the character “Socrates” (including some very early ones, such as that of anamnesis in the Meno or that of the Forms and the relationship between body and soul in the Phaedo or Phaedrus) are to be regarded as Platonic; and Socratic, if anything, are the questions to which those doctrines responded.
And likewise, Socrates was not supposed to preach or practise any morality: his perpetual questioning about the good and pleasure, the good and utility, etc., leads nowhere; the only thing they suggest is the confusion between virtue and knowledge, which Aristotle had to reproach Socrates for having carried out radically and without distinctions. Thus, the exhortations to virtue (and indeed almost to the cardinal virtues of Wisdom, Justice, Courage and Temperance) which in Xenophon’s Memoirs appear attributed to the character “Socrates” are to be regarded as Xenophon’s own; and were also motivated by the desire to exonerate Socrates from the accusation of corrupting the youth.
Nietzsche was therefore mistaken in his contempt and invective against Socrates: for Socrates does not preach the morality of the weak either; he simply attacks, too, that of the strong (thus, against Thrasymachus in The Republic, Book I); for among men, the morality of the strongest is also a morality, and not the Nature it claims to be. And if Socrates’ doctrine fades away in the discussion, little remains of Socratic morality other than the desolate observation by the sophist Antiphon (recorded in the Memoirs) that Socrates did not make his friends happy, but rather the opposite.
“At the hour when the square is most crowded, there one could see him,” Xenophon recounts of Socrates. The Socratic dialogue would soon after become a literary device. In one of the earliest published works, Aspasia by Aeschines, Socrates already appeared in dialogue with Aspasia in the Agora.
The dialectic
Perhaps the essence of Socrates’ method or dialectic can be described as follows: taking one of the names or abstract concepts that are significant within the ideological structure of his world (e.g. “courage”, sophrosyne, episteme; or “useful”, “good”, “intentional”; or even philosophy or “to know oneself”); take advantage of the fact that an interlocutor takes on that notion, as if knowing its meaning; allow the notion itself, within the dialogue, to develop its own contradictions with the system of notions to which it belongs.
Aristotle alludes to this, albeit with a twisted interpretation, when he considers the inquiry into “What is” as characteristic of Socrates. Thus the opposition between Socrates and the other is transformed into a contradiction with himself, which in turn is nothing more than the embodiment of the internal contradiction of the idea itself.
It is not, therefore, a matter of the “thesis/antithesis//synthesis” scheme, but of the analysis of a synthesis established in the Order of things.
This method originated in the very dawn of logic with Heraclitus, and through it Socrates is placed within the tradition of Zeno and the Sophists. Later, through his friend Euclid, he inspired the little-known logical school of Megara, where dialectic, it seems, tended to become established as a technique.
But, although Socrates was not alone in devoting himself to reasoning through dispute or the art of eristic (see the caricature of his practice by the two Sophist brothers in the Euthydemus), what is most Socratic must lie in having confused the dialectical method with the actual dialogue between people: the dialectic of the object manifesting itself as a dialectic between subjects.
The targets of attack: Politics, Morality, the Sciences, Poetry, Religion, Pedagogy…
The targets of this dialectic are, in general, the essentials of the dominant ideology. First and foremost, Politics: the pretension to govern men and states is denounced (e.g. in the Alcibiades) as absurd: to understand the affairs of many whilst failing to understand one’s own (oneself); and to possess general knowledge and mastery without mastering specific techniques.
One might say, then, that Politics is criticised by virtue of personal Morality, of the “care of the soul”. But at the same time, the aporias into which moral pretension falls flourish in the dialogue: thus, when in the Charmides, Critias proposes the “Know thyself” from the pediment at Delphi as the essential greeting for one’s own good, Socrates marvels at the strangeness of a knowledge that is not knowledge of anything, but of oneself. And love or friendship (philia) itself comes off badly in Lysis, in a dispute where that notion slips through the net of reasoning time and again.
It is also in the name of the epistemai, or examples of practical knowledge, that the folly of man—whether politician or sophist—who dominates everything and knows everything, seems often to be denounced; yet, in turn, the epistemai fall under criticism for their claim to true wisdom: thus, in the Euthydemus, scientific inquiry or philosophy could not consist in the accumulation of knowledge, but rather in a form of knowledge that merges with dikaiosyne or virtue itself and with political capacity. And so Socrates subjects the specialists in the sciences (as seen in the Memoirs and as he himself recounts in the Apology) to relentless questioning: did the fact that they knew how to do things imply that they knew what they were doing?; with a perpetually negative result. Likewise, among the other arts, poetry, as we see in the Ion: by acknowledging its divine or intuitive nature, it is denied knowledge and consciousness.
This seems to be (despite the pious drivel that Xenophon puts into his mouth in the Memoirs) the Socratic attitude towards religiosity and the idea of Divine Law: the questioning of the notions that underpin it: so in Euthyphro, where the latter’s firm faith (which allows and compels him to accuse his own father of murder) becomes indefinitely entangled in the question: “piety (the “religiously good”)—do the gods love it because it is good, or is it good because the gods love it?”.
As for pedagogy, in most of the dialogues there is a hint of the scepticism and jest with which the nascent higher education of the Sophists is treated. But what of the effects of Socrates’ own company? The manner in which they are discussed in the Theages is probably typical: not a matter of learning anything, but an extremely vague “giving of oneself”, which moreover depends on the chance of whether or not the gods see fit for it to occur. And even more clearly, when in the Clitophonthus Socrates listens in silence as Clitophonthus’s despairing complaint rains down upon him: his words will surely be an excellent stimulus to virtue or to the care of the soul; but, when it comes to practising or knowing what that virtue is, Socrates has nothing to teach.
The world has developed pedagogy (and higher education in particular) precisely as a defence against the potential threat that Socratic questioning poses to the established order: the assimilation of dialectics into the world, in the form of ideas that can be assimilated by individuals.
The process began with the first of the academies, Plato’s Academy, and with Aristotle’s Lyceum and the schools that would eventually lead to the institution of the University and textbooks. This encyclopaedia, for example, is a pedagogical work, and it is a contradiction of Socrates that an article entitled “Socrates” should appear in it.
Socrates considered not knowing oneself to be the closest thing to madness. However, he once said that the “Know thyself” inscription on the pediment at Delphi meant knowing nothing but oneself. Nevertheless, at Delphi (right), the oracle praised Socrates as the wisest man.
… and Philosophy
To speak of Pedagogy is to speak of “Philosophy”, in the modern sense of a “secular and rational explanation of the how and why of things”; such a Philosophy did not exist before Socrates, nor did it exist with Socrates.
It is customary in the History of Philosophy to divide the whole into pre-Socratic and post-Socratic periods: this implies that Socrates stands at the end of a line of critical activity in which thought turns upon its own creations, the dominant ideas: a line that can be outlined as follows: Thales and Anaximander – Heraclitus and Parmenides – Zeno of Elea – the Sophists – Socrates. And it is after Socrates, as a reaction to that revelation of falsehood, and by assimilating Science—which had been developing in parallel—that Philosophy emerges: whether in the Platonic manner, in which knowledge is subordinated to the Good, and thus Philosophy is rather political, or in the Aristotelian manner, in which Philosophy is the knowledge of all knowledge.
Of the post-Socratic attitudes, it is perhaps the Epicurean, on the one hand, and the Sceptic, in a certain sense its opposite, which sought most faithfully to follow the Socratic confusion between the problem of knowledge and that of living.
But positive Philosophy will remain burdened by the eternal sense of guilt that its birth consists in the death of the name “Socrates”. That sense of guilt is already revealed in the fact that in examples of syllogisms the name Socrates usually appears as the particular term; thus in the fundamental form: “All men are mortal: Socrates is a man: therefore…” where, with an ambiguity essential to Philosophy, by granting Socrates the status of an example of a man, he is condemned to death.
The Socratic daimon
Only one positive belief appears in Socrates, according to the concordant testimony of Xenophon and Plato: the daimon or demon, that voice that made itself heard to warn him at times. But the daimon is precisely an essentially negative demon: “when it comes upon me, it always signals me to turn away from whatever I am about to do; but it never urges me to do anything”.
It may also be said that this is a relic of Socratic religion or superstition. But so mysterious and elusive is the daimon that we shall never know whether to take it as a jest or in earnest. If Socrates believed in it as something external, one would have to read his words with irony; if it were for him the voice of his-self (his conscience, as we would say), perhaps one would have to take it seriously. Yet from his allusions it can never be deduced whether the daimon is within Socrates or outside him. And thus the daimon is the visible embodiment of the dissolution of the ‘joking/serious’ dichotomy, which Socrates and his irony exemplify for us.
Socrates’ essential negation
That daimon, among other things, discouraged Socrates from writing (not without due hesitation, which, as recounted in the Phaedo, assailed him on the eve of his death). And yet, his life and death gave rise, like those of Jesus Christ, to the birth of a new literary genre, to which belong, amongst other lost works, the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon.
Following his guidance, we have attempted here to sketch out some features of the figure of Socrates and some echoes of the Socratic voice. But this attempt betrays its failure in the very fact that we have had to speak separately of his life and his words. For surely the essence of the Socratic attitude lies in this repeated negation: “One does not do wrong knowingly”; which was his way of expressing “They know not what they do”. And in this, by noting the separation, it is implied that the separation between action and theory is not accepted.
Drink then, being in Zeus’s palace, O Socrates; for truly did the god pronounce thee wise, being wisdom himself; for when thou didst frankly take the hemlock at the hands of the Athenians, they themselves drained it as it passed thy lips.
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book II, Chapter 5, “Socrates”
Source: Editorial Lucina
Suggested Reading:
Simón Royo Hernández, “Historia de la filosofía anárquica: El Sócrates anarquista”, Redes Libertarias, 28/05/2026