Socrates: the first 'self'
Socrates: the first 'self'
450 years before Christ a Greek pagan had conceived of the salvation of the soul
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Digiselves versus Bioselves; Theocracy versus Democracy; Leonardo da Vinci’s eye
IF YOU WERE wandering the streets of Athens c. 410 BCE, you’d likely encounter a barefoot, bearded old bloke chattering away to a train of fawning disciples. Now and then you’d see him pause to question some Athenian dandy, whose hypocrisy and ignorance he would gently expose.
That old Athenian provocateur would be Socrates, whom the Oracle of Apollo had deemed the wisest man alive. He was also one of the ugliest, with a snub nose, bulging eyes and a pot belly. He rarely bathed, dressed in rags and had little interest in money or power.
‘I go about doing nothing else but urging you, young and old alike, not to care for your bodies or for money sooner or as much as for your soul, and how to make it as good as you can.’
That was how Socrates described his work to the 500 judges at his trial in 399 BCE for ‘worshipping false gods’ and ‘corrupting the minds of the young’ – the punishment for which was death. (Clearly it did not occur to his accusers, most of whom were pederasts, that their own behaviour had irreparably corrupted the bodies of the young.)
Socrates believed it possible to ‘make people good’. He described himself as a ‘midwife’ to the goodness that he saw in everyone but that few saw in themselves. He was a wandering sandwich board for the Oracle of Delphi’s wisest words: ‘Know thyself.’
Of what value were wealth and power if you forsook your soul in their pursuit, Socrates asked. About 500 years later, the apostle Matthew would place similar words in the mouth of Jesus Christ.
Socrates enchanted the young and enraged the elites, who ordered him to stop teaching or face the ultimate punishment. He refused. His wisdom later moved the emperor Julian to write to the philosopher Themistius, around 355 CE:
‘The achievements of Alexander the Great are outdone in my eyes by Socrates . . . Whoever found salvation in the victories of Alexander? . . . Whereas it is thanks to Socrates that all who find salvation in philosophy are being saved now.’
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The philosophy of Socrates reaches us through the dialogues of Plato, his finest student. Three are thought to reveal the authentic Socrates, as distinct from the Socrates to whom Plato gave voice: The Apology (which was Socrates’ defence during his trial), Crito (a dialogue in Socrates’ prison cell) and the speech to Alcibiades in The Symposium. If they weren’t Socrates’ actual words, they are at least believed ‘to preserve a faithful memory of him’, thought the classics scholar John Burnet.
Socrates was born in Athens c. 470 BCE, during the reign of Pericles (495–425 BCE), an era that produced possibly the greatest art and literature in human history; only China’s Han Dynasty, England’s Elizabethan Age and Italy’s High Renaissance rivalled the ancient Greeks for the accolade.
Socrates was ten when Aeschylus wrote The Oresteia, thirty when Sophocles and Euripides were writing their earliest works, and forty-six when Aristophanes caricatured him in the comedy The Clouds. Over the span of his lifetime, Socrates probably saw the building of the new Parthenon from start to finish.
Alas, Periclean democracy was dying, and Socrates was there to witness the death throes of an ideal. At thirty-seven he fought at the Battle of Potidaea (432 BCE), saving the life of then twenty-year-old Alcibiades. But his eccentric habits drew the mockery of his fellow soldiers. Entranced by introspection, he once stood ‘wrapped in thought for twenty-four hours’.
‘Only in times when reality is a hollow, unspiritual, and shadowy existence,’ observed the German philosopher Georg Hegel, ‘can a retreat be permitted out of the actual into an inner life. Socrates appeared at the time of the decay of the Athenian democracy. He dissolved what was established, and fled back into himself, to seek there what was right and good.’
In early middle age, Socrates abandoned his job as a property manager, gave away all he owned and became an itinerant teacher devoted to the moral improvement of his fellow Athenians. He went barefoot and wore rags but ‘never stooped to be a parasite’, according to Burnet. Even so, many Athenians treated him as a pest and an imposter. One critic denounced him as ‘a garrulous beggar’ with ideas about ‘everything except where to get a meal’.
When the oracle at Delphi reportedly declared him the wisest man alive, Socrates replied that he knew many wiser men. That is, Socrates knew what he did not know: he ‘knew he was ignorant, while other men thought they were wise’.
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Socrates’ thoughts on humankind sound so modern that it seems as though he had returned to Athens bearing the wisdom of some distant, future oracle. He conceived of the psyche as ‘something in us which is capable of attaining wisdom . . . goodness and righteousness’.
That had never been said before.
When Socrates spoke of the soul, he did not mean one’s breath or shadow or ancestral spirit or ‘little winged creature’. He meant the essence of human character, the power within us that was both corruptible and improvable.
Nor had that been said before.
To discover that power, Socrates taught his students to turn inwards and look to their hearts and minds, to their moral worth in this life, in the hope of saving their souls in the next.
‘Socrates,’ wrote Burnet, ‘was the first to say that the normal consciousness was the true self.’ The Socratic soul was thus the ‘core’ of the human personality: the psyche of Socrates was ‘I’. It is in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, then, that we discern for the first time a ‘thinking self’ with an interiority, a conscience and a faith in the possibility of something beyond death – something like salvation.
Before Socrates, the strange substance that went by the name psyche had little to do with moral character. It was ‘something extrinsic and dissociated from the normal personality, which was altogether dependent on the body’, Burnet explains. Until then the Homeric soul, as we’ve seen, had had little to do with character or the emotions.
Socrates astonished his friends, however, by insisting that their souls were the forges of character and were ‘never destroyed’, and that the souls of the good most likely travelled to a better place after death.
‘[I]f the soul isn’t destroyed by a single evil,’ Socrates told his friend Glaucon, ‘whether its own or something else’s, then clearly it must always be. And if it always is, it is immortal. Necessarily so.’
The Socratic soul, then, was eternal and lived on after death, in a better or worse place, not as a little bird or ghost or karma-deficient failure, but as the very conscious identity and memory of the individual whose body had died.
It is impossible to overstate the power of that observation, both for people at the time and for those of the future. Socrates’ idea infuriated the preservers of the official Greek religion, for whom the gods alone were immortal. Later, Plato’s Socratic dialogues would form the bedrock of Christian belief in the immortal soul and presage the mind/body dualism of Descartes.
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Let’s hear a few of Socrates’ words (or those Plato gave him) in the Phaedo and The Apology, notably his famous ‘self-defence’ at his trial on charges of impiety and corrupting the young.
‘Socrates,’ his judges told him, ‘we acquit you, but only on condition that you spend no more time practising philosophy, and if you are caught doing so you will die.’
Socrates replied that he would rather die than lose the freedom to teach. He was said to have argued that the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’, choosing death over the punishment of exile, because exile, to him, meant the death of the mind. He ‘would not cease to practise philosophy’.
He would continue wandering Athens, and continue asking the rich and powerful why they were not ashamed of their ‘eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honours as possible’, while failing to ‘give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul’.
Socrates thus condemned himself. The judges found him guilty, 280 to 220, and sentenced him to death. In his last address to the court, Socrates told them that he knew nothing of the gods or the hereafter, unlike his accusers, who claimed to know what became of the soul beyond death.
‘Surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance,’ he said, ‘to believe that one knows what one does not know.’ His parting shot mentioned a single god: ‘The hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god.’
Death might be a blessing, he smiled, for either death ‘is nothing and [we] have no perception of anything; or it is . . . a relocating for the soul from here to another place. If it is complete lack of perception, like a dreamless sleep, then death would be a great advantage.’
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Socrates spent his last hours chatting cheerfully with his friends about the fate of the soul after death. ‘Is [death] anything else than the separation of the soul from the body?’ he asked his old friend Simmias.
He implored his friends to remember that their souls were the font of reason, wisdom, the beautiful and the good, while their bodies offered none of those qualities, only weakness, wants, desires, fears and ‘all sorts of illusions and much nonsense’.
The needs of the body caused all the evil in the world, Socrates believed. ‘All wars are due to the desire to acquire wealth, and it is the body and the care of it to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth . . .’ A man should turn away from the body and, as far as possible, tend to his inner being. Only then would true wisdom be attainable.
Cebes objected that many believed death ‘destroyed and dissolved [the soul] on the day the man dies’.
Not so, Socrates replied. Our souls lived on. They were the repositories of wisdom, compassion and conscience, the crucible of good and evil in us all: ‘I have good hope that some future awaits men after death,’ he said, ‘a much better future for the good than for the wicked.’ Therefore care for your soul, he advised his friends, ‘not only for the time we call our life, but for the sake of all time’. The hope of salvation rested on becoming ‘as good and wise as possible’.
People ‘polluted with vices’ and blinded by debauchery and profligacy, or who had ‘laid detestable schemes for the ruin of their country’, were heading for perdition. Those who remained ‘upright and chaste’ would be saved.
Socrates joked that the ‘impure’ (drunks, gluttons, lechers, criminals and so on) would transmigrate after death, into donkeys or asses, while tyrants would ‘join the tribes of wolves and hawks’. Evildoers would wander alone after death, shunned by all, while the pure would travel to a heavenly place.
Remind yourself that Socrates said these things some 450 years before Christians conceived of Heaven and Hell. In his faith in everyone’s potential for goodness, this extraordinary Athenian pagan anticipated the essence of the Christian life, and the triumph and the tragedy of the world to come.
Socrates ran a bath. ‘It is about time,’ he told his friends, ‘for I think it better to have [a bath] before I drink the poison and save the women the trouble of washing the corpse.’
Socrates held the glass of hemlock ‘quite cheerfully without a tremor, with no change of colour or expression’, said the fictional witness, Phaedo.
Before he drank, he asked his executioner: ‘How say you, is it permissible to pledge this drink to anyone?’
‘We allow reasonable time in which to drink it.’
Socrates raised his glass to the gods: ‘[W]e can and must pray to the gods that our sojourn on earth will continue happy beyond the grave. This is my prayer, and may it come to pass.’
He then drank the hemlock ‘quite readily and cheerfully’, observed Phaedo.
As the poison spread through his body, Socrates uttered what are thought to be his last words: ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Do pay it. Don’t forget.’
‘Of course,’ said Crito. ‘Do you want to say anything else?’ But Socrates fell silent and died.
‘This was the end of our friend,’ said Phaedo, ‘the best, wisest and most upright man of any that I have ever known.’
Socrates, the Roman statesman Cicero would later write, upheld to the last moment the ‘manly freedom’ that was the effect not of pride but of ‘a true greatness of soul’. Even as Socrates swallowed the poison, ‘he spoke with the air of a man . . . ascending to heaven’.
Next Thursday, 17th October 2024: Digiselves v Bioselves
Selected sources and further reading:
Arenson, K. (ed.) (2020) The Routledge Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Bostock, D. (1986) Plato’s Phaedo, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Burnet, J. (1916) The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cicero, M.T. (2015) The Collected Works of Cicero, Oxford: PergamonMedia.
Corcilius, K. and Perler, D. (eds.) (2014) Partitioning the Soul Debates from Plato to Leibniz, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Dorion, L-A. (2011) ‘The Rise and Fall of the Socratic Problem’ in Duignan, B. Ancient Philosophy from 600 BCE to 500 CE, New York: Britannica Educational Publishing.
Hegel, G.W.F. (2019) The Collected Works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hastings UK: Delphi Classics.
Maier, H. (1985) Sokrates: Sein Werk Und Seine Geschichtlichen Stellung, Aalen Germany: Scientia Verlag Und Antiquariat.
Morrison, D.R. The Cambridge Companion to Socrates, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plato and Cooper, J.M. (ed.) Plato: The Complete Works, Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Company.
Robb, K. (1986) ‘Psyche and Logos in the Fragments of Heraclitus: The Origins of the Concept of Soul’, The Monist, 69(3), pp. 315–51.
Shi, X. (2021) ‘Analysis of the Fourth Argument in the Phaedo-Immortality of the Soul’, Academia Letters, Article 1321.
Snell, B. (2003) The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, Mineola NY: Dover Publications.
Solmsen, F. (1983) ‘Plato and the Concept of the Soul (Psyche): Some Historical Perspectives’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 44(3), pp. 355–67.
Wilson, E. (2007) The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, London: Profile Books.