The legacy of Socrates

Socrates’ thought was so pregnant with possibilities, his mode of life so provocative, that he inspired a remarkable variety of responses. One of his associates, Aristippus of Cyrene—his followers were called “Cyrenaics,” and their school flourished for a century and a half—affirmed that pleasure is the highest good. (Socrates seems to endorse this thesis in Plato’s Protagoras, but he attacks it in Gorgias and other dialogues.) Another prominent follower of Socrates in the early 4th century bce, Antisthenes, emphasized the Socratic doctrine that a good man cannot be harmed; virtue, in other words, is by itself sufficient for happiness. That doctrine played a central role in a school of thought, founded by Diogenes of Sinope, that had an enduring influence on Greek and Roman philosophy: Cynicism. Like Socrates, Diogenes was concerned solely with ethics, practiced his philosophy in the marketplace, and upheld an ideal of indifference to material possessions, political power, and conventional honours. But the Cynics, unlike Socrates, treated all conventional distinctions and cultural traditions as impediments to the life of virtue. They advocated a life in accordance with nature and regarded animals and human beings who did not live in societies as being closer to nature than contemporary human beings. (The term cynic is derived from the Greek word for dog. Cynics, therefore, live like beasts.) Starting from the Socratic premise that virtue is sufficient for happiness, they launched attacks on marriage, the family, national distinctions, authority, and cultural achievements. But the two most important ancient schools of thought that were influenced by Socrates were Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium, and Skepticism, which became, for many centuries, the reigning philosophical stance of Plato’s Academy after Arcesilaus became its leader in 273 bce. The influence of Socrates on Zeno was mediated by the Cynics, but Roman Stoics—particularly Epictetus—regarded Socrates as the paradigm of sagacious inner strength, and they invented new arguments for the Socratic thesis that virtue is sufficient for happiness. The Stoic doctrine that divine intelligence pervades the world and rules for the best borrows heavily from ideas attributed to Socrates by Xenophon in the Memorabilia.

Like Socrates, Arcesilaus wrote nothing. He philosophized by inviting others to state a thesis; he would then prove, by Socratic questioning, that their thesis led to a contradiction. His use of the Socratic method allowed Arcesilaus and his successors in the Academy to hold that they were remaining true to the central theme of Plato’s writings. But, just as Cynicism took Socratic themes in a direction Socrates himself had not developed and indeed would have rejected, so, too, Arcesilaus and his Skeptical followers in Plato’s Academy used the Socratic method to advocate a general suspension of all convictions whatsoever and not merely a disavowal of knowledge. The underlying thought of the Academy during its Skeptical phase is that, because there is no way to distinguish truth from falsity, we must refrain from believing anything at all. Socrates, by contrast, merely claims to have no knowledge, and he regards certain theses as far more worthy of our credence than their denials.

Although Socrates exerted a profound influence on Greek and Roman thought, not every major philosopher of antiquity regarded him as a moral exemplar or a major thinker. Aristotle approves of the Socratic search for definitions but criticizes Socrates for an overintellectualized conception of the human psyche. The followers of Epicurus, who were philosophical rivals of the Stoics and Academics, were contemptuous of him.

With the ascendancy of Christianity in the medieval period, the influence of Socrates was at its nadir: he was, for many centuries, little more than an Athenian who had been condemned to death. But when Greek texts, and thus the works of Plato, the Stoics, and the Skeptics, became increasingly available in the Renaissance, the thought and personality of Socrates began to play an important role in European philosophy. From the 16th to the 19th century the instability and excesses of Athenian democracy became a common motif of political writers; the hostility of Xenophon and Plato, fed by the death of Socrates, played an important role here. Comparisons between Socrates and Christ became commonplace, and they remained so even into the 20th century—though the contrasts drawn between them, and the uses to which their similarities were put, varied greatly from one author and period to another. The divine sign of Socrates became a matter of controversy: was he truly inspired by the voice of God? Or was the sign only an intuitive and natural grasp of virtue? (So thought Montaigne.) Did he intend to undermine the irrational and merely conventional aspects of religious practice and thus to place religion on a scientific footing? (So thought the 18th-century Deists.)

In the 19th century Socrates was regarded as a seminal figure in the evolution of European thought or as a Christ-like herald of a higher existence. G.W.F. Hegel saw in Socrates a decisive turn from pre-reflective moral habits to a self-consciousness that, tragically, had not yet learned how to reconcile itself to universal civic standards. Søren Kierkegaard, whose dissertation examined Socratic irony, found in Socrates a pagan anticipation of his belief that Christianity is a lived doctrine of almost impossible demands; but he also regarded Socratic irony as a deeply flawed indifference to morality. Friedrich Nietzsche struggled throughout his writings against the one-sided rationalism and the destruction of cultural forms that he found in Socrates.

In contrast, in Victorian England Socrates was idealized by utilitarian thinkers as a Christ-like martyr who laid the foundations of a modern, rational, scientific worldview. John Stuart Mill mentions the legal executions of Socrates and of Christ in the same breath in order to call attention to the terrible consequences of allowing common opinion to persecute unorthodox thinkers. Benjamin Jowett, the principal translator of Plato in the late 19th century, told his students at Oxford, “The two biographies about which we are most deeply interested (though not to the same degree) are those of Christ and Socrates.” Such comparisons continued into the 20th century: Socrates is treated as a “paradigmatic individual” (along with Buddha, Confucius, and Christ) by the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.

The conflict between Socrates and Athenian democracy shaped the thought of 20th-century political philosophers such as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Popper. The tradition of self-reflection and care of the self initiated by Socrates fascinated Michel Foucault in his later writings. Analytic philosophy, an intellectual tradition that traces its origins to the work of Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell in the late 19th and early 20th century, uses, as one of its fundamental tools, a process called “conceptual analysis,” a form of nonempirical inquiry that bears some resemblance to Socrates’ search for definitions.

But the influence of Socrates is felt not only among philosophers and others inside the academy. He remains, for all of us, a challenge to complacency and a model of integrity.