Socrates

By Emeka Obi

He wrote nothing, charged nothing, and claimed to know nothing. Athens executed him anyway — and in doing so made him the most famous philosopher who ever lived.

Socrates was born in Athens in 470 BCE, the son of a stonemason and a midwife. He served as a hoplite soldier with noted courage at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis, then settled into the strangest career in antiquity: he spent his days in the marketplace and gymnasia, buttonholing politicians, poets, and craftsmen, and asking them questions. The story he told was that the oracle at Delphi had declared no man wiser than Socrates, and he set out to refute the god by finding someone who truly knew what justice, courage, or piety were. He never found one. What he found, again and again, was that men who sounded certain collapsed under three questions. From this he drew his two great conclusions: "I know that I know nothing" — the beginning of wisdom is confessing ignorance — and "the unexamined life is not worth living."

His method, the elenchus, was cross-examination as a way of life. He compared himself to his mother's trade: a midwife of ideas, delivering not his own doctrines but the thoughts of others, testing whether they could stand. He insisted that virtue is a kind of knowledge — no one does wrong willingly; wrongdoing is ignorance — and that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. He made enemies effortlessly. The Sophists, who charged fees to teach rhetoric, hated his exposure of their emptiness; the powerful hated being shown up by a barefoot man in a marketplace. Aristophanes caricatured him in The Clouds as a fraud who taught young men to cheat their fathers.

In 399 BCE, with Athens humiliated after losing the Peloponnesian War and hungry for scapegoats, three citizens charged him with impiety and corrupting the youth. His defense — recorded by Plato in the Apology — is one of the great speeches of history: he would rather die than stop philosophizing, for "the god has assigned me to this city as a gadfly." Convicted by a narrow vote, he refused the chance to escape prison — to flee, he argued in the Crito, would betray the laws he had lived under. He drank the hemlock calmly, discoursing on the immortality of the soul to the end, as Plato tells it in the Phaedo. He was seventy. He had founded nothing but a question, and the question outlived every answer Athens ever gave.

Impact on civilization

Socrates turned philosophy from speculation about nature into the examination of human life — ethics, as a discipline, begins with him. The Socratic method of rigorous questioning became the template for dialectic, legal cross-examination, and the modern classroom seminar; law schools still teach by "the Socratic method." His students founded the schools that shaped Western thought: Plato's Academy, Antisthenes's Cynicism, Aristippus's Cyrenaicism, and through them Stoicism. His trial established the archetype of the thinker persecuted by the city — the martyr of free inquiry invoked from early Christians to modern dissidents. Above all, he made philosophy a matter of how one lives and dies rather than what one professes, a standard every subsequent philosopher has had to meet. His shadow falls across every later claim that thinking is a private luxury: for Socrates, examining one's life was a public duty owed to the city, and the city that killed him proved his point by the very act. The gadfly's sting has not worn off in twenty-four centuries.