The truthfulness of Socrates

Socrates is an enigma. Like Jesus of Nazareth he never wrote a thing of his own. In such cases it is always advisable to draw on gloves; we cannot know who we are really dealing with and in examining their histories one cannot be sufficiently circumspect. As we shift away the dust and accretions of time, the bold outlines of these figures nonetheless emerge in relief and we are able to discern and identify their types by the outlines of their methods. In the case of Jesus, the method he modelled was a way of living, an extreme egocentrism whereby the inner world is transformed into the kingdom of heaven, the outside world relegated to a painful dream: in short, the heart is sacred, what feels good is good. In the case of Socrates the method he teaches is Scepticism. He is not interested in knowledge of the world as such and disdains the fervour of fellow Sophists for physical philosophy. His concern is the right way of living and he applies scepticism as the basis for moral philosophy. In the same way that through his revolt against the Jewish Church, Jesus goaded the Pharisees into having him crucified, Socrates by using dialectics to discredit the hitherto prevailing knowledge and culture goaded the Athenians into handing him a poison cup. Socrates was found guilty of refusing to recognise the gods acknowledged by the state, importing strange divinities of his own and further of corrupting the young. It is remarkable that in his Memorabilia, Xenophon (a contemporary Athenian historian and our best source for historical facts about Socrates) contests each of these charges, quite incredulous that Socrates should be persecuted for his ideal of the enlightened good man. In this Xenophon characterises himself as a biographer and theorist rather than a psychologist or politician and it is to Aristophanes that we must turn for insight into the cultural and philosophical significance of this sage. The importance of Aristophanes’ testimony cannot be overestimated. This noble and timeless comic genius satirises Socratic wisdom mercilessly, judging the relationship of Socrates not only to society but to truth to be sufficiently wanting in taste to provide material for an entire comedy, The Clouds. None other than Friedrich Nietzsche, – who judged that Greek culture post Socrates is in decline – said the fact they produced an Aristophanes excuses the Greeks (he actually refers to him as holy Aristophanes at one point).
Quoted by Plato in ‘The death of Socrates’ he (Socrates) says “[ I teach ]…not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul…that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private.” Naturally this sort of idealising, armchair philosophizing and process of abstracting virtue and goodness was found contemptible by those actually in possession of power. Aristophanes lampoons Socrates as a man in stasis, hoisted above the ground in a basket, removed from life and suspended in contemplation. He describes Socrates’ disciples as pale and emaciated creatures. The ‘improvement of the soul’ – a truly astonishing inversion of perspectives whereby the value of an action was separated from the consequences of the action and projected onto the soul, the intention, the conscious motives for the action. Hitherto actions had been judged solely for their consequences. A man pays and suffers for his imprudence but the cause of his wrongdoings was to be sought in the gods: to them were attributed the guilt for atrocities and evil, equally the merit for all human achievements and greatness. What freedom of soul such a self unconscious age must have enjoyed, what mysteries and untapped human potential the future must have promised when it was still possible to be seduced, kidnapped, raped, cajoled, deceived and beguiled by a god. The Socratic interpretation of the maxim ‘Know yourself’ was an insult that slammed the door shut in the faces of the gods and marks the end of the ‘pre-moral’ era of western civilisation.
Socrates claimed to be guided in his conduct by an inner voice. Albeit with some embarrassment, practically everyone will recall their own suggestibility; an occasion when their ‘mind has been made up’ regarding a matter, based on some such ‘signs’ or ‘voices in their head’. In all you encounter you seek what is yours, what you alone can make use of, discarding the larger part of what is presented to your senses. The flight or cry of birds, the utterances of others, chance meetings, every coincidence and happenstance merely metaphors, occasions for extending self awareness, for illuminating aspects of your own reality by the light of your consciousness. However, that Socrates before the Athenians should insist to the end that such promptings are ‘something divine’ and ‘the god’ betrays the turmoil of his instincts; that it was the whirlwind that ruled him and not Zeus. It confirmed the effeteness of his self preservative instincts that should have brought him to his senses and silenced the chattering in his head long enough for him to distinguish between reason and reality. The prerequisite for mastery is harmony between reason and instinct. When force is released into activity without resistance or deliberation, the will is inexorable. The mind is a mirror for the body, its purpose to serve and support the body’s will with good reasons, but mind is a product of the body. As an effect of the body mind cannot produce action, it cannot cause anything: what is present in the spirit is an afterglow of events taking place in the senses and the body. People are always saying, intending, or promising one thing and doing another, both before witnesses and themselves alone. By way of explanation, those who believe that reality is spirit and spirit cause say the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak; a clear indication that they understand the world as if it were upside down. The mind conceives the multiplicity of your being as a unity, as ego. To you it seems this unified subject, your ego is the seat of your judgement, but your body rules your mind and prompts the conceptions of your ego. For the game of life a team is assembled within you; many subsidiary competing powers aggregated in the reality of your body to form a perspective for valuation. By this incarnate will you strive to become the person you are. This is all your fate – not enlightenment, but personal empowerment, practical self realisation. Thoughts and feelings, principles, faith – these are all a subtext, a foreground of attitude behind which the instincts actually control activity. Self knowledge is counteractive: this is the revelation of Prince Hamlet, that the serpent of knowledge eats its own tail – its power is self destructive. “O cursed spite! That ever I was born to set it right”. Morality sets the individual an impossible task, it demands the unnatural, the unreal, it negates the actual and lies like a curse upon it. Nature runs its course, it cannot be otherwise. How hollow ring the platitudes of the contemptible chatterer Polonius in such an ignominious death. There are dark pockets of reality just beyond the pale where no precepts suffice, to get lost and flounder about these labyrinths in search of reason induces madness, the stark horror of bottomless pits of absurdity leads to insanity. Xenophon inadvertently hits on the truth regarding Socrates with his observation that this most self-controlled of men can only have been a corrupting influence if the cultivation of goodness is a form of corruption. Through the continuation of Socratism via Platonism and Christianity the concept of the Good was made absolute. God has step by step been distilled into the opposing principle to your actual and irredeemable personal instincts. No small indication of the aforementioned corruption. When self doubt and bad conscience is interweaved with natural inclinations, the disharmony of instincts confers a general agitation over the person; – instability, ill temperedness, inhibition and weakness of will, – one forfeits self assurance, vitality is suppressed, one is surreptitiously made sick with a sinister sickness, with man’s suffering from himself, the heart is transformed into a dangerous wilderness. When Hamlet asks himself, ‘To be or not to be?…Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind…’ we know it is all over with him, he is infected, a shadow, just like Ophelia his innocence is now a dream. What Presocratic Greece shows, what all history shows is that those whose concern is to hold on to power believe in the gods but trust only their own entrails. Why then would Socrates choose self violation, self defilement on principle? Not to rejoice in oneself as a fate, not to learn to shoot the arrow from one’s own bow but to brand oneself with a criticism, a contradiction, a contempt of a soul voluntarily divided against itself. To live in conscious opposition to your natural inclinations and instincts, to live as an actor of life, to continually affect a cheerful temperance through the gritted teeth of self constraint, this heroic disposition is the definition of a life of suffering and a recipe for the dissolution of others. The condition for the value of the unegoistic is the will to mistreat the self. Selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice are the ideals of the cruel heart that pleasures in cruelty to the self. His natural inclinations must have presented him with an even greater danger. He may have been combating an urge for self annihilation; he was teaching that virtue leads to happiness, his suffering must have convinced him of his own evil. He knew the bounty of his instincts was misery, that he needed to calculate his every move, that if he were to stop reflecting for a moment and let himself go, his natural inclinations would bound forth like uncaged tigers and he would be reprehended and ruined by his own conduct. The fateful ignominy of this faithful soldier and servant of Athens would have stirred in him a hatred for the young aristocrats: a desire for revenge on those unprincipled, idiotic, arrogant rich kids who hardly gave a thought to what they did, so high and mighty on their father’s shoulders and horses, so impressively good looking, served hand and foot, conducting themselves with the utmost levity and hardly putting a foot wrong, while he suffered a life of poverty, privation and self denial yet denied honour, regarded with suspicion, notoriety, a spectacle, living within narrow, regular constraints without reprieve from the danger of succumbing to some humiliating and dishonourable indiscretion. How mercilessly he must have gone about hacking down those noble trees – how he must have delighted in their humiliation, confusion and tears. In the marketplace of ideas, where people are prepared to pay for their opinions to prevail and where blood is the strongest currency, the demagogue prevails and the opinions of whoever argues loudest and most impetuously. Here the noble qualities of a man are rendered useless: – will, self control, taciturn reserve and silence are of no avail – here you are under constant assault, it is up to you to prove you are not an idiot, here the unscrupulous smooth talker with a handful of pointed questions can reduce to a confused and stammering wreck even the worthiest giant of courage and noble honesty and completely ruin his credibility. Those who bear responsibility for the future and act with the necessity of fate are mistrustful of argumentation and dialectics; they are aware of their own authority and their will for the future is already determined. Authority does not demean itself by arguing, it does not give reasons, it commands. Among those capable of keeping their word and their promises, it is understood the less doubt the less philosophy. Socrates claims to seek an authority before which to yield but through him we come to know ourselves grossly ignorant – he in fact denies authority as such. The important point about the Sophists is not, as we are told that they resorted to false reasoning to argue their cause, rather it is that against them no reverence could be defended. Socrates before all others knew that whatever reasons were given to justify a morality, he could show them to be sophistical: no matter what point was made against him in an argument, he could deny he was defeated, attain his purpose and convince those who had seen him overcome. At a time when in Greece men were still the fairer sex, his sheer ugliness had even won him such disputes before. Socrates was the most skilful interlocutor in Greece at a time when rationality and the development of the intellect came to dominate higher education while public communication and oratory became increasingly the means and authority whereby power was to be attained and disputed within the institutions of the state. The Sophists as sceptics emerge as the higher teachers of Greece, representatives of a clear sighted, unsentimental honesty that cleared away large tracts of religious dogma and superstition in natural philosophy, focusing and advancing knowledge in many practical subjects. The Sophists are the first to see through morality, to understand that life itself is dispute over value and valuation, the first to actually represent the view that moral prerogatives are the rights taken by the victor. At this point, when what was needed most was solidarity in suspicion of morality itself, to conduct a careful examination of what the relativism of morality means, Socrates instead places the question mark against self determination, he adopts a scepticism regarding himself as a principle. It was least of all for his eccentric and impractical fidelity to ‘truth’ that Socrates exercised such fascination in aristocratic circles. It was their ambition that drew them to him. To be formidable in debate, to be unrivalled in the arts of speech and disputation, greed for gain in the new domain of ideas: even Xenophon is sure this is why Alcibiades and Critias for instance kept company with Socrates and not their love of truth exactly. Through his self effacing example Socrates demonstrates that truthfulness is actually a tendency ultimately inimical to life. He was not a martyr for the sake of intellectual conscience, in the first place the idea is a contradiction. That which your ancestors did and liked doing you too find natural and enjoyable. Socrates was the son of a sculptor; the Greeks were to be his marble – he promised to teach them what is good, what evil. True integrity would have seen Socrates rather turn his back on the city saying, ‘It is better to play dice with children than play politics with you’ as did Heraclitus, who showed by the example of his life that wisdom is set apart from all things and let death take care of itself.