Birth:469 BC
Death:399 BC (Athens)
Main interests:Ethics
Notable ideas:Maieutics, Socratic irony
Influenced by:Anaxagoras of Clazomenes - Prodicos
Influenced:Plato, the Socratics and all Western philosophers
Socrates is an ancient Greek philosopher (5th century BC), considered the father of Western philosophy and one of the inventors of moral philosophy. Having left no written works, his philosophy has come down to us through indirect testimonies (in particular through the writings of his disciple Plato).
Socrates was born in 470 BC (third year of the 77th Olympiad), probably in the month of May (6th of the month Thargelion), near Athens, in the deme of Alopece, a deme which was part of the tribe of Antiochides.
His father, Sophroniscus, was a sculptor, and his mother, Phenaretes, a midwife. Socrates had a brother, Patrocles, son of his mother's first husband.
We know very little of his youth. That he was a slave seems to be only a hypothesis. He probably received a classical education, which Athenian law required a father to give to his son:gymnastics, music (art of singing, dancing[1], learning the lyre[2] and grammar, which involves the study of Homer, Hesiod and other poets). Diogenes Laertius (II, 42) quotes the beginning of a pean and a fable attributed to Socrates:
"Apollo Delian, hail, and Artemis, illustrious children.
Aesop once told the people of the city of Corinth
not to judge virtue by yardstick of the wisdom of a popular verdict. »
Socrates seems not to have been satisfied with this education. According to Maxime de Tyr, Socrates turned to all kinds of masters from his youth. Perhaps remarkable at this time, among his masters, Socrates placed several women:Aspasia, companion of Pericles, famous both for her beauty and for her wit, Diotima, priestess of Mantinea, who taught Socrates the science of love. , but this woman may be a character invented by Plato. According to the same author, Socrates would have learned throughout his life:he says he is the disciple of Prodicos of Ceos, and he frequents the sophists (Protagoras, Hippias of Elis, Polos). He would have learned music from Connus or Damon, poetry from Evénus, agriculture from Ischomachus and geometry from Théodore. He would have been the disciple of the physicist Aechelaus. He said he didn't understand anything about Heraclitus.
However, this information must be considered with caution because the testimonies, on these points as on others, do not always agree. Particular emphasis has been placed on the ironic tone of Socrates when he claims to be someone's disciple.
According to several testimonies, it is possible that Socrates first practiced the profession of sculptor. He is attributed, rightly or wrongly, a statue of the Graces which stood in front of the Acropolis. According to other testimonies, he would have been a banker. According to Demetrius of Byzantium, it was Crito who allowed him to live in a certain leisure to devote himself to philosophy. He seems to have thus disposed of a fairly comfortable fortune. On the other hand, according to Plato, Socrates would have lived in great poverty, and this assertion is confirmed by Xenophon. This point is also confirmed by the nicknames given to him by comedians (cf. Eupolis or Aristophanes):the beggar, the beggar, the barefoot, etc. He was also presented as a tramp, dirty, being beaten by individuals exasperated by his mania for discussion.
It seems that he was first interested in the philosophy of nature and speculations of a physical nature. This interest would have been aroused by the break that the pre-Socratic philosophers maintained with the supernatural and the world of the gods which had prevailed until then. But it seems that he was then disappointed by the purely causal explanations of Anaxagoras and he quickly distanced himself from these physicists, lamenting their materialistic explanation and the limited side of their meditations based only on nature. The Apology of Socrates claims that he was never interested in such research, but in his desire for justification it is possible that Plato omitted certain aspects of Socrates' youth, which were perhaps even unknown to him. . He also seems to have been particularly interested in the art of distinguishing the meaning of words taught by Prodicus, although he sometimes refers to it with irony. He had many disciples:Xenophon, Plato and Alcibiades, his favorite, whom he saved at Potidae, one of the few times he left Athens. He saved Xenophon, at Delion, against the Persians.
Under the tyranny of the Thirty, which lasted eight months, he was forbidden to teach. During this period, he was told to arrest a citizen he considered innocent. He refused to submit to this iniquitous act. Luckily he escaped the purges of the Thirty, the purpose of which was to avoid any sedition.
Socrates married at least once, with Xanthippe, who passes for a particularly cantankerous woman and with whom he had a son, Lamprocles. He may have had a second marriage, with Myrtho, Aristide's daughter, who would have given him two more sons.
Living in poverty, exercising no profession, he walked the streets of Athens dressed more than simply and without shoes, talking to everyone, trying to make them wiser by knowing their ignorance:"I know that I know nothing ". He claims to have received the mission of educating his contemporaries:it was Apollo "who had assigned him the task of living by philosophizing, by scrutinizing himself and others".
And, indeed, the Pythia of Delphi had replied to Cherephon that no one was wiser than Socrates. This divine mission is also expressed by the demon of Socrates, a divinatory sign, a sort of inner voice which reveals to him the acts from which he must abstain.
He teaches, or more exactly questions, for free - unlike the sophists, who teach rhetoric for a high fee. This mission makes him in his eyes the only true citizen, that is to say the only one who seriously questions political life. In this he opposes the demagogic character of the Athenian democracy which he wants to shake up by his action. His mania for questioning does not cease from morning till night, for he is "attached to the Athenians by the will of the gods to stimulate them as a gadfly would stimulate a horse".
The last ten years of Socrates' life are almost completely unknown to us.
The trial of Socrates
Several aristocrats claimed to see in him a spirit perverting traditional moral values and therefore a danger to the social order. In 399 BC. J.-C., Socrates saw himself accused by Anytus, a prominent member of the democratic party, as well as two of his friends, of the following two crimes:
* not recognizing the gods of the city and introducing new deities;
* corrupting the youth.
He was found guilty by just eight votes. As an alternative sentence to that requested by his accusers (death), he had offered to be lodged and fed at the Prytaneum for the rest of his life (cf. Plato, Apologie de Socrate, ). Indeed, to encourage the parties to the greatest moderation, the judges were not to determine their own sentence, but to choose the one which, of the two parties, seemed to them the most reasonable. Socrates therefore had the possibility of proposing a sentence which could be accepted by the judges.
But Socrates saw himself condemned by 281 votes against 278 to drink a deadly poison, hemlock. Having during his imprisonment the opportunity to flee, he refused to do so on the grounds that respect for the laws of the city was more important than his own person (cf. Plato, Crito). A similar spirit will animate Regulus much later.
The death of Socrates
Socrates died on May 7, 399 BC. J.-C., condemned to drink hemlock, after being accused of impiety and corruption of youth, as reported by Xenophon in the Memorabilia:
“I have often wondered by what arguments the accusers of Socrates persuaded the Athenians that he deserved death as a state criminal. The accusation against him went something like this:“Socrates is guilty of not recognizing the gods recognized by the State and of introducing new divinities; he is also guilty of corrupting young people.” »
He spent the days before his death talking to his friends, as evidenced by Plato's writing of the Crito. His last day is told to us in the Phaedo:it is a dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the moral of which is that the sage must hope for a divine stay after death. He affirmed before his death to believe in the Athenian gods as none of his accusers believe, and recommended to Crito, his old friend "we owe Aesculapius a rooster". Aesculapius being the god of medicine, it is possible that this last word means (in the context of Platonic philosophy) "we must thank the god for having given to Men the ability to take care of themselves" (on this ability, cf. Plato, First Alcibiades). Nietzsche gave another interpretation of this saying:"Crito, life is a disease" (cf. Genealogy of morality); seeing in Socrates a philosopher denying the Dionysian character of life.
The rest of Athens, thereafter, took Socrates' condemnation very badly. The Athenians who had participated in his condemnation were banished from the city and a statue was erected to perpetuate his memory. The accounts of Plato and Xenophon on the subject have proved more enduring than this.
In his Letter 7, Plato notes the unjust death of Socrates and declares that "" evils will not cease for humans until the authentic philosophers come to power or the rulers of the cities, by divine grace, put themselves to truly philosophize”.
His character
Socrates was physically very ugly:bald, flat nose, he looked like a satyr or a silenus (cf. The Banquet). Such a face was morally scandalous, because ugliness was considered by the physiognomists of the time as the index of intemperance and vice:
"[...] Do we not know the judgment that the physiognomist Zopyrus once passed on Socrates, who professed to know the temperament and character of men by the sole inspection of the body, the eyes, the face, the forehead ? He declared that Socrates was a fool and a simpleton, because he had no concave throat, because all his organs were closed and clogged; he even added that Socrates was addicted to women; which, we are told, made Alcibiades laugh out loud. »
If this observation informs us about the prejudices that were current in Greece on physical appearance, it also gives us precious information on the character of Socrates thanks to his answer reported by Cicero:
“Zopyre, who claimed to be a skilful physiognomist, having examined him in front of a large company, counted the vices he discovered in him and everyone laughed, because we saw none of this in Socrates. He saved Zopyre's honor by declaring that he was truly given to all these vices, but that he had cured himself of them with the help of reason. »
His violent character is confirmed by one of the most direct testimonies we have, that of Spintharos:his son wrote his memoirs on Socrates, of whom he was a contemporary:
“No one was more persuasive by his speech, by the character which showed on his countenance, and, to tell the truth, by all that was special about his person, but only so long as he was not angry; when this passion burned him, his ugliness was appalling; no word, no act from which he abstained then. »
According to Émile Bréhier (History of Philosophy), this violent nature that he mastered undoubtedly explains the fascination he exerted on men as ardent as Alcibiades and Plato.