by Paul Johnson
In conversation, too, the zest could be formidable. One of his young friends, Alcibiades, compared him to an electric ray, whose bite induced a sense of numb helplessness. But there is a danger this remark may give a wrong impression. Socrates did not exactly bite in argument; he rarely if ever snapped. His practice of philosophy could be defined as “reflection on propositions emerging from unreflective thought.” It is worth repeating his saying “A life without examination is not worth living.” But his examinations, or cross-examinations, were courteous, even genial. A person might think afterward that he had made a fool of himself in dialogue with Socrates, but he is unlikely to have felt that he had been deliberately led into folly. Socrates clearly liked people, the great majority of them anyway.
His philanthropy, or love of his fellow men, was quite unlike the conscious humanism of Pericles and his associates. There was no taint of atheism about it. Socrates was too aware of human weakness and shortcomings to think men could ever substitute themselves for divinity. Socrates believed in God. It was precisely because he believed in God that he devoted his life to philosophy, which to him was about the human desire to carry out divine purposes. He believed he had a command to do this and that by wandering around Athens and talking to people—“examining” them—and examining himself, he was doing as God told him. When accusations were later brought against him, he was charged not with atheism but “not believing in the gods Athenians believed in.” This had perhaps an element of truth in it. Socrates did not believe in the traditional pantheon of Greek religion, with gods specializing in particular services and leading tumultuous lives that were more mythology or fiction than serious religion. When Socrates was at his most devout, he always refers to “god” or “the god,” not “the gods.” He was a monotheist.
Of course Socrates, being a courteous and sensitive man, always deferred to the superstitions of the common people—or the elites, for that matter. He had no wish to offend. He often used the vernacular of popular religion. His famous last words, “We owe a cock to Asclepius,” are an example. Being a practical man, an empiric, he thought popular religion was at worst harmless, at best a calming and ordering factor in society. It was also a consolation to people who led hard and often harsh lives of privation. He was no Richard Dawkins, eager to disabuse the common herd of their illusions in the name of triumphalist rationality. But Socrates, a moderate in all things, always knew when to draw the line. He did not go so far as Pericles, who openly dismissed superstition in public affairs. But having been a soldier, he believed diviners and soothsayers should be kept out of military decisions. One of his friends was the general Nicias, who should have evacuated his army from the plain of Syracuse on August 27, 413 B.C. He was persuaded by a lunar eclipse to remain for the requisite ritual days and lost everything, as Thucydides relates. Socrates hailed Nicias’s courage in the Laches dialogue on the subject. But he also says in it that the diviners must obey the general, not the other way around. He would have advised Nicias to withdraw as fast as he could and so save his army.
The role of religion in public affairs, however, was not Socrates’ principal concern. What he sought was ways in which he could help individual men and women to become better morally. This was the mission God had given him in life, as he truly and even passionately believed. He seems to have felt close to God, in some ways. God communicated with him through a daemon, or spiritual voice, which told him not to do certain unwise things, like become a politician. But if Socrates was a monotheist in essentials, with a strong sense of a personal god, he did not, I think, believe God to be omnipotent, as the Hebrews did. The Greeks in general imposed limitations on divine power. To them, the gap between gods and men was often narrow and could be bridged, by apotheosis, for instance. Their heroic mortals often behaved like gods, and their gods like mortals, exhibiting jealousy, cruelty, and other base emotions. Socrates would have none of this nonsense. He had a careful doctrine of what Leibniz was later to call theodicy, a vindication of the divine attributes, especially justice and holiness, in respect to the existence of evil. He felt no difficulty in the attempt “to justify the ways of God to men.” But he did it by rejecting the notion of divine omnipotence. In book 2 of the Republic (not a text where, in general, the real Socrates speaks, though I think he does in this particular passage) he remarks, “So God cannot be the cause of all things but only of good things. Of evil things he is not the cause.” In saying this, Socrates was rejecting many events and possibilities dear to the Greek mind. But he was also rejecting, for instance, the kind of dramas described in the Book of Job, a text he would have found of the greatest interest though not, in the end, plausible. But there is no sign that Socrates believed in a kind of dualism or Manichaeanism. He left the problem of evil open and concentrated on the good.
Socrates spent much of his time pondering the Good Life and how to attain it. For he believed, and it was the core of his belief, that only by striving to lead good lives did humans attain a degree of content in their existence and happiness in eternity. He had a simple view of the body and the soul and their relationship. The body was the active, physical, earthly aspect of a person and was mortal. The soul was the spiritual aspect and was immortal. The body was greedy for pleasure and material satisfactions, was selfish, and if not kept under control, became a seat of vice. The soul was the intellectual and moral side of the person, which had a natural propensity to do right and to improve itself. It could be, with proper training, the seat of virtue. The most important occupation of a human being was to subdue his bodily instincts and train himself to respond to the teachings of the soul. This training took the form of recognizing, understanding, and learning about virtues and applying this knowledge to the everyday situations of life. Such, to Socrates, was the essence of wisdom. Knowledge, virtue, and wisdom were thus intimately related, and exploring these connections was the object of his “examinations,” of himself and others.
In his personal life, Socrates did everything he could to subdue his bodily cravings. He ate and drank sparingly, even though he attended dinner parties for the sake of friendship. He declined to pursue a lucrative career, like the Sophists, so kept his needs to a minimum. He had no shoes. He wore few clothes. He was content with simple shelter. He declined an offer of freehold land on which to build a house. He had little or no ready cash, though he was pleased to see the rise of a bookselling trade in Athens and reported you could buy new manuscripts there cheaply. There were always friends to help him when he was in real need, which was rare. “I can do without.” “There are so few things I really want.” The great thing was to keep fit and well. A sick man with no money is bound to be a burden. But he was never sick and was perfectly fit when he died at age seventy. With the body under control, and everyone testified to that, he was in a position to cultivate his soul by pursuing virtue. He is said to have remarked, “I have never knowingly harmed any man, or sinned against God.” That sounds like boasting, and Socrates was the last man to boast. But it was almost certainly true.
What is also true is that Socrates’ notions of the body and the soul and of their relationship became, in time, standard. Before his day, the word psyche had existed, had indeed been in use for perhaps a millennium, but meant something quite different and nebulous. In Homer, souls are rather like ghosts and disappear if we try to touch them. They are doppelgangers of the dead and live in Hades on the asphodel meadow. This was probably how most people in Socrates’ day saw the soul, if they thought about it. Within a generation or two of Socrates’ death, however, his idea of the soul—in all its powerful simplicity, unlike the complex and precarious soul of Plato—had been accepted by a wide range of intelligent, educated Greeks. It fitted in perfectly with Christ’s teaching and so passed into the moral conceptions of Christianity and has been the received concept of the soul ever since among civilized people. If you and I say “soul,” we mean what Socrates meant, and he gave it that meaning.
That was a remarkable contribution to t
he moral furniture of our minds. But it was not the only one. Socrates took an optimistic view of human nature. He believed that the great majority of people wished to do well and that wrongdoing was usually the result of ignorance or false teaching. Once a person knew the truth, his instinct was to do what is right. Hence knowledge led directly to virtue, in Socrates’ view. This underlined the importance of education, especially the kind revealed by his examination technique, which was designed to show the individual that he possessed far less knowledge than he thought he did, and thus to encourage him to acquire more.
One vital subject on which knowledge was particularly lacking was justice. All Greeks favored justice. Very few, if any, knew what it was. Worse, Socrates found that what many thought was justice was, in fact, the opposite. If there was one topic on which Greek knowledge of virtue was fundamentally defective, it was justice. Aristotle was right to stress Socrates’ importance in revealing the need for definition of terms, for it is when you begin to study definitions accurately that you start plumbing the depth of ignorance, especially about justice.
In the first book of the Republic, Socrates, who is still himself at this point, disputes with the Sophist Thrasymachus the answer to the question “What is justice?” Thrasymachus answers, “Justice is the interest of the stronger.” In every society, the rules defining what is just and unjust, he says, are determined by the ruling elite, the strongest section of society, in its own interests. Socrates does not accept this, but he does not give his own answer, and book 1 ends inconclusively. In book 2, he ceases to be himself and becomes Platsoc. But what we gather, in this and other places, is that Socrates thinks each issue should be judged on its merits and that the virtuous man has no difficulty in distinguishing between justice and injustice. What he does make plain, again and again, and in the strongest possible language, is that doing justly comes before any other consideration. It is better, he says, to suffer anything, even death, rather than act unjustly. He says in the Apology : “If a man is worth anything, he would give no weight whatsoever to any other consideration—even life itself—rather than act unjustly. All that matters, when he acts, is whether his action is just or unjust, the action of a good or an evil man.” That Socrates’ emphasis on the paramountcy of acting justly was widely adopted is shown by the emphatic statement of Isocrates in Panathenaicus, two generations later: “Victories won in violation of justice are more despicable than are morally righteous defeats.”
It is evident that justice in the abstract did not concern Socrates. What did concern him, always, was action in practice. One common Greek view in his day, as Thrasymachus implied, was that justice was usually a form of self-interest. Asked, “What is a just man?” a Greek would reply, “A man who does good by his friends, and does evil to his enemies.” Socrates would not have this. “A just man is one who does good by his friends, certainly, but also does good to those who have harmed him, thereby seeking to convert an enemy into a friend.” This view appears in several versions, the theme always being to return evil with good. We are close here to Christ’s advice to “turn the other cheek.” Socrates says plainly in Crito, “It is never right to do wrong, or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.” It is this clear view that marks the point at which Socrates turns his back on moral relativism, in any guise or circumstances, and opts firmly for moral absolutism. If you know a thing is wrong, never do it, ever.
This rule led Socrates to cross another historic moral watershed and to repudiate absolutely one of the deepest-rooted maxims of Greek behavior, both by individuals and states—the law of retaliation. Of course retaliation was not peculiar to Greece. It is common to most if not all societies emerging from savagery and tribalism and feeling their way to civilized modes. In the Hebrew Book of Exodus, immediately after chapter 20, in which God gives Moses and the Israelites the Ten Commandments—which seem to have stood the test of time in many if not most societies—there follows a chapter laying down the law of retaliation, in the case of a woman with child, hurt in a struggle, in drastic fashion (Exodus 21:23–25): “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” We do not know when the Book of Exodus was compiled, but one theory is around 700 B.C., which would make the compiler a contemporary of the Greek poet Hesiod, second only to Homer as a moral mentor. Hesiod goes further than Exodus: “If an enemy starts it, saying or doing something harmful to you, you must certainly pay him back twice over.” That is more vengeful than the Hebrew sage, who only demands one eye for an eye, not both: That would be wrong.
Socrates set his face against the entire theory and practice of retaliation. In the Crito he lays down the five principles of his command. We should never do injustice. Therefore we should never return an injustice. We should never do evil to anyone. Therefore we should never return evil for evil. To do evil to a human being is no different from acting unjustly. Socrates was fully aware of the momentous nature of his rejection of traditional Greek morality and justice. For immediately after announcing his five principles, he adds that “few are those who believe or will believe this. And between those who do and those who don’t there can be no common ground. Each feels contempt for the other.”
Socrates’ stand was taken up at a time when the issue of retaliation as a public policy was of vivid and immediate importance. In 431 B.C. Euripides set the scene with his Medea. Socrates was almost certainly in the audience. This horrifying play is a tale of revenge in the name of justice. What Medea does is totally out of proportion to what she has suffered, and it may be that Euripides is making the point that, if retaliation (or revenge) is accepted as a principle of justice, it is extremely difficult in practice to ensure that the retribution corresponds to the offense. Medea says she is exacting “just repayment with God’s help,” but admits afterward that she “has dared to do a most impious deed.” The word impious is significant, for it conveys the implication that the whole notion of “just revenge” may be impious. We know that Socrates helped Euripides with at least one of his plays—“patched it up.” It is possible that he persuaded the poet to insert this line in Medea.
Then, four years later, the whole question came up in the most startling fashion in the real world of war and politics. Athens had to decide what to do about Mytilene, the chief city of the island of Lesbos, which had rebelled against Athens. It had now been occupied by Athenian troops. The question of punishment came before the Athenian Assembly. Such cities were often shown no mercy in the heat of war. Both Sparta and Athens could be ruthless in exacting what they saw as justice. In four cases—Histiaea, Melos, Scione, and Torone—what we would call genocide occurred. But these massacres were carried out by army commanders acting on their own authority. In 427 B.C., the decision was taken by the democratic Assembly of a constitutional state, after full debate. Thanks to the oratory of the demagogue Cleon, a proposal was passed ordering the commander to execute without trial all adult males in Mytilene and to sell into slavery all women and children.
This motion of extermination, or genocide, carried democratically after argument, is unique in Greek history or, so far as I know, in any history. It clearly pleased the majority. But it must have shocked a minority, including Socrates, who I assume was present. I like to feel—indeed, I am pretty certain—that he played a part in what followed. After the vote, Cleon had immediately dispatched a ship to Mytilene to take the Assembly’s decision to the commanding general with instructions to carry it out before the Assembly had second thoughts. But it did have second thoughts. After a night of anxious discussion among the moderates, in which I assume Socrates took part, their leader, Diodotus, appealed to the Assembly the next day to reverse their decision. His arguments were for the most part practical. It was the oligarchy at Mytilene, he said, that had ordered the rebellion, not the demos. Most of the people were on the side of Athens and had fo
rced the city’s surrender to the Athenian troops who now occupied it. To punish them, alongside the oligarchs was obviously wrong, for the oligarchs were guilty, whereas the demos was innocent, indeed on Athens’s side. This injustice would be noted among all Athens’s allies and colonies. Diodotus says, “I think it better for the empire to allow ourselves to suffer wrong than to destroy, however justly, those whom we ought not to destroy.” The last phrase reveals a Socratean thought peering out among the general argument of expediency, and it persuades me that Diodotus allowed himself to be guided by the philosopher, in part at least. He does not go so far as to repudiate the principle of retaliation as justice: He wanted to win the vote. He did so. The decision was reversed, and a fast trireme was dispatched immediately to Mytilene to rescind the instructions to the general. Happily, it arrived in time, and the honor of Athens and its people was saved.
Here we have an episode when the views of Socrates were applied immediately in public action, rather than slowly becoming consensual over generations. And there is strong reason to believe that his personal intervention was decisive in securing this outcome. His voice from God might forbid him to become a politician, but it did not inhibit him from seeking to influence political decisions in the name of true justice, as opposed to the false justice that was the norm of Greek society in the mid-fifth century B.C.
Socrates’ rejection of retaliation was the most important practical event of his philosophical life. It was also one of the most important events in the history of philosophy. The best discussion of it is chapter 7 in Gregory Vlastos’s Socrates (which I strongly advise readers to peruse, if they have the time). What Socrates argued is extraordinarily uncompromising. It is moral absolutism at its most stringent. He is saying in effect: If something you do wrongs somebody else and, a fortiori, large numbers of people, it is so bad in itself, and so bad for you, that nothing of good which it achieves can compensate for the evil. It may win a victory or even a war; it may bring you everything you value, joy, comfort, security, and long life; it may arouse the approval of those you love, your family and friends; it may be necessary, as you think, for their self-preservation and your own; but if it is wrong, then you must not do it. Even if it would win the whole world, you must not do it. Your life itself would not be worth living if you can preserve it only by wronging others.
