(Excerpts from The Consolations of Philosophy, by Alain de Botton, NY: Vintage. 2000, p. 3-42)
A few years ago... I found myself in a deserted gallery on the upper level of the Metropolitan Museum of Art... when my eye was caught by a canvas which a caption explained had been painted in Paris in the autumn of 1786 by the thirty-eight-year-old Jacques-Louis David.
Socrates, condemned to death by the people of Athens, prepares to drink a cup of hemlock, surrounded by woebegone friends. In the spring of 399 BC, three Athenian citizens had brought legal proceedings against the philosopher. They had accused him of failing to worship the city's gods, of introducing religious novelties and of corrupting the young men of Athens - and such was the severity of their charges, they had called for the death penalty.
Socrates had responded with legendary equanimity. Though afforded an opportunity to renounce his philosophy in court, he had sided with what he believed to be true rather than what he knew would be popular. In Plato's account he had defiantly told the jury:
So long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet ... And so gentlemen ... whether you acquit me or not, you know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.
And so he had been led to meet his end in an Athenian jail, his death marking a defining moment in the history of philosophy....
If the [picture] struck me so forcefully, it was perhaps because the behavior it depicted contrasted so sharply with my own. In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the truth...I sought the approval of figures of authority and after encounters with them, worried at length whether they had thought me acceptable. When passing through customs or driving alongside police cars, I harbored a confused wish for the uniformed officials to think well of me.
But the philosopher had not buckled before unpopularity and the condemnation of the state. He had not retracted his thoughts because others had complained. Moreover, his confidence had sprung from a more profound source than hot-headedness or bull-like courage. It had been grounded in philosophy. Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval...
Such independence of mind was a revelation and an incitement. It promised a counterweight to a supine tendency to follow socially sanctioned practices and ideas. In Socrates' life and death lay an invitation to intelligent skepticism.
And more generally, the subject of which the Greek philosopher was the supreme symbol seemed to offer an invitation to take on a task at once profound and laughable: to become wise through philosophy. In spite of the vast differences between the many thinkers described as philosophers across time... it is possible to discern a small group of men, separated by centuries, sharing a loose allegiance to a vision of philosophy suggested by the Greek etymology of the word: philo, love; sophia, wisdom...
Every society has notions of what one should believe and how one should behave in order to avoid suspicion and unpopularity. Some of these societal conventions are given explicit formulation in a legal code, others are more intuitively held in a vast body of ethical and practical judgments described as 'common sense', which dictates what we should wear, which financial values we should adopt, whom we should esteem, which etiquette we should follow and what domestic life we should lead. To start questioning these conventions would seem bizarre, even aggressive. If common sense is cordoned off from questions, it is because its judgments are deemed plainly too sensible to be the targets of scrutiny... Ancient Greeks had as many common-sense conventions and would have held on to them as tenaciously... We stifle our doubts and follow the flock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown, difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we may turn to the philosopher.
Socrates was born in Athens in 469 BC, his father Sophroniscus was said to have been a sculptor, his mother Phaenarete a midwife.
Socrates was a pupil of the philosopher Archelaus, and afterward he practiced philosophy without ever writing any of it down. He did not charge for his lessons and so slid into poverty; though he had little concern for material possessions. He wore the same cloak throughout the year and almost always walked barefoot... By the time of his death he was married and the father of three sons... He spent much time out of the house, conversing with friends in the public places of Athens... He was short, bearded and bald, with a curious rolling gait, and a face variously likened by acquaintances to the head of a crab, a satyr or a grotesque. His nose was flat, his lips large, and his prominent swollen eyes sat beneath a pair of unruly brows.
But his most curious feature was a habit of approaching Athenians of every class, age and occupation and bluntly asking them, without worrying whether they would think him eccentric or infuriating, to explain with precision why they held certain common-sense beliefs and what they took to be the meaning of life - as one surprised general reported:
Whenever anyone comes face to face with Socrates and has a conversation with him, what invariably happens is that, although he may have started on a completely different subject first, Socrates will keep heading him off as they're talking until he has him trapped into giving an account of his present life-style and the way he has spent his life in the past. And once he has him trapped, Socrates won't let him go before he has well and truly cross-examined him from every angle.
He was helped in his habit by climate and urban planning. Athens was warm for half the year, which increased opportunities for conversing without formal introduction with people outdoors... No more than an hour was needed to walk from one end of the city to the other.... Inhabitants could feel connected like pupils at a school or guests at a wedding... The sandalless philosopher raised a plethora of questions to determine whether what was popular happened to make any sense....
One afternoon in Athens, to follow Plato's Laches, the philosopher came upon two esteemed generals, Nicias and Laches. The generals had fought the Spartan armies in the battles of the Peloponnesian War, and had earned the respect of the city's elders and the admiration of the young. Both were to die as soldiers: Laches in the battle of Mantinea in 418 BC, Nicias in the ill-fated expedition to Sicily in 413 BC.
The generals were attached to one common-sense idea. They believed that in order to be courageous, a person had to belong to an army, advance in battle and kill adversaries. But on encountering them under open skies, Socrates felt inclined to ask a few more questions:
SOCRATES: Let's try to say what courage is, Laches.
LACHES: My word, Socrates, that's not difficult! If a man is prepared in the ranks, face up to the enemy and not run away, you can sure that he's courageous.
But Socrates remembered that at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, a Greek force under the Spartan regent Pausanias had initially retreated, then courageously defeated the Persian army under Mardonius:
SOCRATES: At the battle of Plataea, so the story goes, the Spartans came up against [the Persians], but weren't willing to stand and fight, and fell back. The Persians broke ranks in pursuit; but then the Spartans wheeled round fighting like cavalry and hence won that part of the battle.
Forced to think again, Laches came forward with a second common-sense idea: that courage was a kind of endurance. But endurance could, Socrates pointed out, be directed towards rash ends. To distinguish true courage from delirium, another element would be required. Laches' companion Nicias, guided by Socrates, proposed that courage would have to involve knowledge, an awareness of good and evil, and could not always be limited to warfare.
In only a brief outdoor conversation, great inadequacies had been discovered in the standard definition of a much-admired Athenian virtue. It had been shown not to take into account the possibility of courage off the battlefield or the importance of knowledge being combined with endurance. The issue might have seemed trifling but its implications were immense. If a general had previously been taught that ordering his army to retreat was cowardly, even when it seemed the only sensible maneuver, then the redefinition broadened his options and emboldened him against criticism.
[Click here for a longer excerpt and analysis of this Socratic discussion of courage.]
In Plato's Meno, Socrates was again in conversation with someone supremely confident of the truth of a common-sense idea. Meno was an imperious aristocrat who was visiting Attica from his native Thessaly and had an idea about the relation of money to virtue. In order to be virtuous, he explained to Socrates, one had to be very rich, and poverty was invariably a personal failing rather than an accident....
The virtuous man, Meno confidently informed Socrates, was someone of great wealth who could afford good things. Socrates asked a few more questions:
SOCRATES: By good do you mean such things as health and wealth?
MENO: I include the acquisition of both gold and silver, and of high and honourable office in the state.
SOCRATES: Are these the only kind of good things you recognize?
MENO Yes, I mean everything of that sort.
SOCRATES: ... Do you add 'just and righteous' to the word 'acquisition', or doesn't it make any difference to you? Do you call it virtue all the same even if they are unjustly acquired?
MENO: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: So it seems that justice or temperance or piety, or some other part of virtue must attach to the acquisition [gold and silver]. . . In fact, lack of gold and silver, if it results from a failure to acquire them ... in circumstances which would have made their acquisition unjust, is itself virtue.
MEN0: It looks like it.
SOCRATES: Then to have such goods is no more virtue than to lack them...
MEN0: Your conclusion seems inescapable.
In a few moments, Meno had been shown that money and influence were not in themselves necessary and sufficient features of virtue. Rich people could be admirable, but this depended on how their wealth had been acquired, just as poverty could not by itself reveal anything of the moral worth of an individual. There was no binding reason for a wealthy man to assume that his assets guaranteed his virtue; and no binding reason for a poor one to imagine that his indigence was a sign of depravity.
The topics may have dated, but the underlying moral has not: other people may be wrong, even when they are in important positions, even when they are espousing beliefs held for centuries by vast majorities. And the reason is simple: they have not examined their beliefs logically.
Meno and the generals held unsound ideas because they had absorbed the prevailing norms without testing their logic. To point out the peculiarity of their passivity, Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe could result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one's life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals?
Perhaps because we don't believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other, equally difficult activities look very easy... Socrates encourages us not to be unnerved by the confidence of people who fail to respect this complexity and formulate their views without at least as much rigor as a potter. What is declared obvious and 'natural' rarely is so. Recognition of this should teach us to think that the world is more flexible than it seems, for the established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
The philosopher does not only help us to conceive that others may be wrong, he offers us a simple method by which we can ourselves determine what is right. Few philosophers have had a more minimal sense of what is needed to begin a thinking life. We do not need years of formal education and a leisured existence. Anyone with a curious and well-ordered mind who seeks to evaluate a common-sense belief can start a conversation with a friend in a city Street and, by following a Socratic method, may arrive at one or two ground-breaking ideas in under half an hour.
Socrates' method of examining common sense is observable in all Plato's early and middle dialogues and, because it follows consistent steps, may without injustice be presented in the language of a recipe book or manual, and applied to any belief one is asked to accept or feels inclined to rebel against. The correctness of a statement cannot, the method suggests, be determined by whether it is held by a majority or has been believed for a long time by important people. A correct statement is one incapable of being rationally contradicted. A statement is true if it cannot be disproved. If it can, however many believe it, however grand they may be, it must be false and we are right to doubt it.
1. Locate a statement confidently described as common sense.
Acting courageously involves not retreating in battle.
Being virtuous requires money.
2. Imagine for a moment that, despite the confidence of the person proposing it, the statement is false. Search for situations or contexts where the statement would not be true.
Could one ever be courageous and yet retreat in battle? Could one ever stay firm in battle and yet not be courageous?
Could one ever have money and not be virtuous?
Could one ever have no money and be virtuous?
3. If an exception is found, the definition must be false or at least imprecise.
It is possible to be courageous and retreat. It is possible to stay firm in battle yet not be courageous.
It is possible to have money and be a crook. It is possible to be poor and virtuous.
4. The initial statement must be nuanced to take the exception into account.
Acting courageously can involve both retreat and advance in battle.
People who have money can be described as virtuous only f they have acquired it in a virtuous way, and some people with no money can be virtuous when they have lived through situations where it was impossible to be virtuous and make money.
5. If one subsequently finds exceptions to the improved statements, the process should be repeated. The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is...
It may of course be possible to arrive at truths without philosophizing. Without following a Socratic method, we may realize that people with no money may be called virtuous if they have lived through situations in which it was impossible to be virtuous and make money, or that acting courageously can involve retreat in battle. But we risk not knowing how to respond to people who don't agree with us, unless we have first thought through the objections to our position logically. We may be silenced by impressive figures who tell us forcefully that money is essential to virtue and that only effeminates retreat in battle. Lacking counterarguments to lend us strength (the battle of Plataea and enrichment in a corrupt society), we will have to propose limply or petulantly that we feel we are right, without being able to explain why.
Socrates described a correct belief held without an awareness of how to respond rationally to objections as true opinion, and contrasted it unfavorably with knowledge, which involved understanding not only why something was true, but also why its alternatives were false. He likened the two versions of the truth to beautiful works by the great sculptor Daedalus. A truth produced by intuition was like a statue set down on an outdoor plinth [a tall and slender pedestal]. A strong wind could at any time knock it over. But a truth supported by reasons and an awareness of counterarguments was like a statue anchored to the ground by tethering cables.
Socrates' method of thinking promised us a way to develop opinions in which we could, even if confronted with a storm, feel veritable confidence.
In his seventieth year, Socrates ran into a hurricane. Three Athenians - the poet Meletus, the politician Anytus and the orator Lycon - decided that he was a strange and evil man. They claimed that he had failed to worship the city's gods, had corrupted the social fabric of Athens and had turned young men against their fathers. They believed it was right that he should be silenced, and perhaps even killed.
The city of Athens had established procedures for distinguishing right from wrong. On the south side of the agora stood the Court of the Heliasts, a large building with wooden benches for a jury at one end, and a prosecution and defendant's platform at the other. Trials began with a speech from the prosecution, followed by a speech from the defense. Then a jury numbering between 200 and 2,500 people would indicate where the truth lay by a ballot or a show of hands. This method of deciding right from wrong by counting the number of people in favor of a proposition was used throughout Athenian political and legal life. Two or three times a month, all male citizens, some 30,000, were invited to gather on Pnyx hill south-west of the agora to decide on important questions of state by a show of hands. For the city, the opinion of the majority had been equated with the truth.
There were 500 citizens in the jury on the day of Socrates' trial. The prosecution began by asking them to consider that the philosopher standing before them was a dishonest man. He had inquired into things below the earth and in the sky; he was a heretic; he had resorted to shifty rhetorical devices to make weaker arguments defeat stronger ones, and he had been a vicious influence on the young, intentionally corrupting them through his conversations.
Socrates tried to answer the charges. He explained that he had never held theories about the heavens nor investigated things below the earth, he was not a heretic and very much believed in divine activity; he had never corrupted the youth of Athens - it was just that some young men with wealthy fathers and plenty of free time had imitated his questioning method, and annoyed important people by showing them up as know-nothings. If he had corrupted anyone, it could only have been unintentionally, for there was no point in willfully exerting a bad influence on companions, because one risked being harmed by them in turn. And if he had corrupted people only unintentionally, then the correct procedure was a quiet word to set him straight, not a court case.
He admitted that he had led what might seem a peculiar life:
I have neglected the things that concern most people - making money, managing an estate, gaining military or civic honors, or other positions of power, or joining political clubs and parties which have formed in our cities.
However, his pursuit of philosophy had been motivated by a simple desire to improve the lives of Athenians:
I tried to persuade each of you not to think more of practical advantages than of his mental and moral well-being.
Such was his commitment to philosophy, he explained, that he was unable to give up the activity even if the jury made it the condition for his acquittal:
I shall go on saying in my usual way, 'My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honor, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?' And should any of you dispute that, and profess that he does care about such things, I won't let him go straight away nor leave him, but will question and examine and put him to the test.. . I shall do this to everyone I meet, young or old, foreigner or fellow-citizen.
It was the turn of the jury of 500 to make up their minds. After brief deliberation 220 decided Socrates wasn't guilty; 280 that he was. The philosopher responded wryly: 'I didn't think the margin would be so narrow.' But he did not lose confidence; there was no hesitation or alarm; he maintained faith in a philosophical project that had been declared conclusively misconceived by a majority 56 per cent of his audience...
Socrates understood that he had no chance. He lacked even the time to make a case. Defendants had only minutes to address a jury, until the water had run from one jar to another in the court clock:
I am convinced that I never wronged anyone intentionally, but I cannot convince you of this, because we have so little time for discussion. If it was your practice, as it is with other nations, to give not one day but several to the hearing of capital trials, I believe that you might have been convinced; but under present conditions it is not so easy to dispose of grave allegations in a short space of time.
It must have been difficult to hold this in mind, it must have required the kind of strength accrued during years in conversation with ordinary Athenians: the strength, under certain circumstances, not to take the views of others seriously...
Of course, he might have renounced his philosophy and saved his life. Even after he had been found guilty, he could have escaped the death penalty, but wasted the opportunity through intransigence. We should not look to Socrates for advice on escaping a death sentence; we should look to him as an extreme example of how to maintain confidence in an intelligent position which has met with illogical opposition.
The philosopher's speech rose to an emotional finale:
If you put me to death, you will not easily find anyone to take my place. The fact is, if I may put the point in a somewhat comical way, that I have been literally attached by God to our city, as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of a gadfly... If you take my advice you will spare my life. I suspect, however, that before long you will awake from your drowsing, and in your annoyance you will take Anytus's advice and finish me off with a single slap; and then you will go on sleeping.
He was not mistaken. When the magistrate called for a second, final verdict, 360 members of the jury voted for the philosopher to be put to death. The jurors went home; the condemned man was escorted to prison.