Appearance
10.2 — Socrates, and the Method That Got Him Killed
He wrote nothing.
Everything known about him comes from other people — mainly Plato, who is not a neutral reporter; Xenophon, who is duller and possibly more accurate; and Aristophanes, who put him in a comedy and made fun of him.
Athens, roughly 470 to 399 BCE. A stonemason's son, who fought as an infantryman in three campaigns and was noted for his physical endurance and his indifference to cold.
What he actually did
He asked people questions in public and demonstrated that they did not know what they thought they knew.
That is the whole activity.
He would find somebody with a reputation — a general on courage, a priest on piety, a politician on justice — and ask them to define the thing. They would offer a definition. He would produce a case where it failed. They would refine it. He would find another case.
And the conversation would end with the expert unable to define the thing they were famous for.
This is the elenchus, the cross-examination, and its structure is worth having because it is a genuine intellectual tool.
Ask for a definition, not an example. What is courage? — not name a courageous act.
Test the definition against a case. If courage is standing firm, what about a general who retreats to save his army?
Repeat until the definition holds or collapses.
And it nearly always collapses, which is the finding.
The Delphic oracle
The story he tells about how it started.
A friend asked the oracle at Delphi whether anybody was wiser than Socrates, and the answer was no.
He was baffled — he knew he was not wise — so he set out to refute it by finding somebody wiser.
He went to the politicians, the poets and the craftsmen.
And found in each case that they knew some things and believed they knew a great deal more. The craftsmen were the best: they genuinely knew their craft, and on the strength of it believed they understood everything else.
And his conclusion: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us knows anything worth knowing, but he thinks he does and I do not.
Which is the origin of the most quoted line attributed to him — "I know that I know nothing" — and the precise version is better. He is not claiming universal ignorance. He is claiming accurate knowledge of the boundary.
And that boundary is the whole of it. The problem is not not knowing. The problem is not knowing that you do not know, and it is exactly 8.8's moha in a Greek register.
Why they killed him
In 399 BCE he was tried and executed.
The formal charges: corrupting the young, and not believing in the gods of the city while introducing new divinities.
The real reasons are more interesting.
Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War and had been through an oligarchic coup, and several of Socrates' associates had been prominent in it — including Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants, and Alcibiades, who had defected to Sparta. He was, politically, the man who taught those people.
And his activity was genuinely corrosive. He spent decades demonstrating in public that the people running the city could not define what they were doing. A democracy that has just lost a war does not enjoy this.
But the deepest reason is stated in his own defence, and it is the one worth having.
He compares himself to a gadfly on a large, sluggish horse — irritating, and necessary, because the horse needs waking. And he says the city will not easily find another and had better not kill him carelessly.
They killed him anyway, by a fairly narrow margin.
The trial
And what he did at the trial is the reason he is remembered.
He could have got off.
The convention was to plead, to bring your family to weep, to emphasise your service. He refused all of it, and said so — that such displays are a disgrace and that the court's business is to judge, not to grant favours.
After the guilty verdict, the convention was to propose a counter-penalty, and something plausible would usually be accepted.
He proposed that the city should feed him at public expense for the rest of his life, as it did for Olympic victors, on the grounds that he had done Athens more good than they had.
Then he offered a small fine.
The jury voted for death by a larger margin than had convicted him.
And the line from the defence that is his monument: the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.
He also said something else that is usually cut: that he would not stop philosophising even if acquitted on condition of stopping, because he must obey the god rather than them.
The death
He was kept in prison for a month because of a religious festival.
His friends arranged an escape and he refused it, and the argument he gives — in Plato's Crito — is one of the foundational texts of political philosophy.
He imagines the Laws of Athens speaking to him. You have lived here your whole life, taken its benefits, raised children here, and never left. You had the option of persuading us or leaving, and you did neither. To break the laws now, because a verdict went against you, is to destroy the thing that made your life possible.
Whether the argument is good is genuinely debated. It rests on a tacit-consent claim that many philosophers have rejected, and it would justify obedience to a great many bad laws.
And he acted on it. He drank the hemlock.
Plato's account of the death is the most famous scene in philosophy, and its last detail is odd and much discussed: his last words were a request that a debt of a cock be paid to Asclepius, the god of healing.
What is genuinely useful
Three things, and they are practical rather than historical.
The definition test. Take anything you use confidently — fair, professional, respectful, ready, good enough, done — and try to define it without giving an example. Then find a case where your definition fails. The discovery that you cannot define a word you use daily is the whole Socratic experience and it is available in five minutes.
Knowing the boundary. The claim is not that you know nothing. It is that most people cannot locate the edge of what they know, and the craftsmen are the case: real expertise in one area produces false confidence everywhere else. This is a documented modern finding and Volume VI covers it.
And the gadfly problem. The person who keeps asking whether everybody actually knows what they are doing is genuinely useful and genuinely annoying, and organisations get rid of them. Socrates is the archetype and the outcome is the archetypal outcome.
The honest criticisms
Two, and they are fair.
The method destroys and does not build. The dialogues frequently end with everybody agreed that nobody knows what courage is, and no better account is offered. This is a real limitation and Aristotle (10.4) is the correction.
And it can become a technique for winning rather than for finding out. The difference between Socrates and the sophists he attacked is supposed to be that he was seeking the truth and they were seeking the argument — and from the outside the two look identical, which is why Athens could not tell them apart and which is a fair complaint.
What to carry from this page
Define something you use every day without giving an example. Then break your definition. Five minutes, and it is the whole method.
The problem is not ignorance. It is not knowing where your knowledge ends, and expertise in one area makes it worse everywhere else.
The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. Note the qualifier — he is making a claim about what a human life is for, not a boast.
And the gadfly gets killed. If you intend to be the person who keeps asking whether anyone knows what they are doing, know the price in advance.
Next: 10.3 — his student, who wrote everything down and built the first complete system, and whose account of what is really real has shaped two thousand years.