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1. His Personal Character.—The new philosophical principle appears in the personal character of Socrates. His philosophy is his mode of acting as an individual; his life and doctrine cannot be separated. His biography, therefore, forms the only complete representation of his philosophy, and what the narrative of Xenophon presents us as the definite doctrine of Socrates, is consequently nothing but an abstract of his inward character, as it found expression from time to time in his conversation. Plato yet more regarded his master as such an archetypal personality, and a luminous exhibition of the historical Socrates is the special object of his later and maturer dialogues, and of these again, the Symposium is the most brilliant apotheosis of the Eros incarnated in the person of Socrates, of the philosophical impulse transformed into character.

Socrates was born in the year 469 B. C, the son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and Phænarete, a midwife. In his youth he was trained by his father to follow his own profession, and in this he is said not to have been without skill. Three draped figures of the Graces, called the work of Socrates, were seen by Pausanias, upon the Akropolis. Little farther is known of his education. He may have profited by the instruction of Prodicus and the musician, Damon, but he stood in no personal connection with the proper philosophers, who flourished before, or cotemporaneously with him. He became what he was by himself alone, and just for this reason does he form an era in the old philosophy. If the ancients call him a scholar of Anaxagoras, or of the natural philosopher, Archelaus, the first is demonstrably false, and the second, to say the least, is altogether improbable. He never sought other means of culture than those afforded in his native city. With the exception of one journey to a public festival, the military campaigns which led him as far as Potidæa, Delion, and Amphipolis, he never left Athens.

The period when Socrates first began to devote himself to the education of youth, can be determined only approximately from the time of the first representation of the Clouds of Aristophanes, which was in the year 423. The date of the Delphic oracle, which pronounced him the wisest of men, is not known. But in the traditions of his followers, he is almost uniformly represented as an old, or as a gray-headed man. His mode of instruction, wholly different from the pedantry and boastful ostentation of the Sophists, was altogether unconstrained, conversational, popular, starting from objects lying nearest at hand and the most insignificant, and deriving the necessary illustrations and proofs from the most common matters of every day life; in fact, he was reproached by his cotemporaries for speaking ever only of drudges, smiths, cobblers and tanners. So we find him at the market, in the gymnasia, in the workshops, busy early and late, talking with youth, with young men, and with old men, on the proper aim and business of life, convincing them of their ignorance, and wakening up in them the slumbering desires after knowledge. In every human effort, whether directed to the interests of the commonwealth, or to the private individual and the gains of trade, to science or to art, this master of helps to spiritual births could find fit points of contact for the awakening of a true self-knowledge, and a moral and religions consciousness. However often his attempts failed, or were rejected with bitter scorn, or requited with hatred and unthankfulness, yet, led on by the clear conviction that a real improvement in the condition of the state could come only from a proper education of its youth, he remained to the last true to his chosen vocation. Purely Greek in these relations to the rising generation, he designated himself, by preference, as the most ardent lover; Greek too in this, that with him, notwithstanding these free relations of friendship, his own domestic life fell quite into the background. He nowhere shows much regard for his wife and children; the notorious, though altogether too much exaggerated ill-nature of Xantippe, leads us to suspect, however, that his domestic relations were not the most happy.

As a man, as a practical sage, Socrates is pictured in the brightest colors by all narrators. “He was,” says Xenophon, “so pious, that he did nothing without the advice of the gods; so just, that he never injured any one even in the least; so completely master of himself, that he never chose the agreeable instead of the good; so discerning, that he never failed in distinguishing the better from the worse;” in short, he was “just the best and happiest man possible.” (Xen. Mem. I. 1, 11. IV. 8, 11.) Still that which lends to his person such a peculiar charm, is the happy blending and harmonious connection of all its characteristic traits, the perfection of a beautiful, plastic nature. In all this universality of his genius, in this force of character, by which he combined the most contradictory and incongruous elements into a harmonious whole, in this lofty elevation above every human weakness—in a word, as a perfect model, he is most strikingly depicted in the brilliant eulogy of Alcibiades, in the Symposium of Plato. In the scantier representation of Xenophon, also, we find everywhere a classic form, a man possessed of the finest social culture, full of Athenian politeness, infinitely removed from every thing like gloomy asceticism, a man as valiant upon the field of battle as in the festive hall, conducting himself with the most unconstrained freedom, and yet with entire sobriety and self-control, a perfect picture of the happiest Athenian time, without the acerbity, the one-sidedness, and contracted reserve of the later moralists, an ideal representation of the genuinely human virtues.

2. Socrates and Aristophanes.—Socrates seems early to have attained universal celebrity through the peculiarities attaching to his person and character. Nature had furnished him with a remarkable external physiognomy. His crooked, turned-up nose, his projecting eye, his bald pate, his corpulent body, gave his form a striking similarity to the Silenic, a comparison which is carried out in Xenophon’s “Feast,” in sprightly jest, and in Plato’s Symposium, with as much ingenuity as profoundness. To this was added his miserable dress, his going barefoot, his posture, his often standing still, and rolling his eyes. After all this, one will hardly be surprised that the Athenian comedy took advantage of such a remarkable character. But there was another and peculiar motive, which influenced Aristophanes. He was a most ardent admirer of the good old times, an enthusiastic eulogist of the manners and the constitution, under which the fathers had been reared. As it was his great object to waken up anew in his people, and to stimulate a longing after those good old times, his passionate hatred broke out against all modern efforts in politics, art and philosophy, of that increasing mock-wisdom, which went hand in hand with a degenerating democracy. Hence comes his bitter railing at Cleon, the Demagogue (in the Knights), at Euripides, the sentimental play-writer (in the Frogs) and at Socrates, the Sophist (in the Clouds). The latter, as the representative of a subtle, destructive philosophy, must have appeared to him just as corrupt and pernicious, as the party of progress in politics, who trampled without conscience upon every thing which had come down from the past. It is, therefore, the fundamental thought of the Clouds to expose Socrates to public contempt, as the representative of the Sophistic philosophy, a mere semblance of wisdom, at once vain, profitless, corrupting in its influence upon the youth, and undermining all true discipline and morality. Seen in this light, and from a moral standpoint, the motives of Aristophanes may find some excuse, but they cannot be justified; and his representation of Socrates, into whose character all the characteristic features of the Sophistic philosophy are interwoven, even the most contemptible and hateful, yet so that the most unmistakable likeness is still apparent, cannot be admitted on the ground that Socrates did really have the greatest formal resemblance to the Sophists. The Clouds can only be designated as a culpable misunderstanding, and as an act of gross injustice brought about by blinded passion; and Hegel, when he attempts to defend the conduct of Aristophanes, forgets, that, while the comic writer may caricature, he must do it without having recourse to public calumniation. In fact all the political and social tendencies of Aristophanes rest on a gross misunderstanding of historical development. The good old times, as he fancies them, are a fiction. It lies just as little in the realm of possibility, that a morality without reflection, and a homely ingenuousness, such as mark a nation’s childhood, should be forced upon a time in which reflection has utterly eaten out all immediateness, and unconscious moral simplicity, as that a grown up man should became a child again in the natural way. Aristophanes himself attests the impossibility of such a return, when in a fit of humor, with cynic raillery, he gives up all divine and human authority to ridicule, and thereby, however commendable may have been the patriotic motive prompting him to this comic extravagance, demonstrates, that he himself no longer stands upon the basis of the old morality, that he too is the son of his time.

3. The Condemnation Of Socrates.—To this same confounding of his efforts with those of the Sophists, and the same tendency to restore by violent means the old discipline and morality, Socrates, twenty-four years later, fell a victim. After he had lived and labored at Athens for many years in his usual manner, after the storm of the Peloponnesian war had passed by, and this city had experienced the most varied political fortunes, in his seventieth year he was brought to trial and accused of neglecting the gods of the state, of introducing new deities, and also of corrupting the youth. His accusers were Melitus, a young poet, Anytus, a demagogue, and Lycon, an orator, men in every respect insignificant, and acting, as it seems, without motives of personal enmity. The trial resulted in his condemnation. After a fortunate accident had enabled him to spend thirty days more with his scholars in his confinement, spurning a flight from prison, he drank the poisoned cup in the year 399 BC

The first motive to his accusation, as already remarked, was his identification with the Sophists, the actual belief that his doctrines and activity were marked with the same character of hostility to the interests of the state, as those of the Sophists, which had already occasioned so much mischief. The three points in the accusation, though evidently resting on a misunderstanding, alike indicate this; they are precisely those by which Aristophanes had sought to characterize the Sophist in the person of Socrates. This “corruption of the youth,” this bringing in of new customs, and a new mode of culture and education generally, was precisely the charge which was brought against the Sophists; moreover, in Plato’s Menon, Anytus, one of the three accusers, is introduced as the bitter enemy of the Sophists and of their manner of instruction. So too in respect to the denial of the national gods: before this, Protagoras, accused of denying the gods, had been obliged to flee, and Prodicus, to drink hemlock, a victim to the same distrust. Even five years after the death of Socrates, Xenophon, who was not present at the trial, felt himself called upon to write his Memorabilia in defence of his teacher, so wide-spread and deep-rooted was the prejudice against him.

Beside this there was also a second, probably a more decisive reason. As the Sophistic philosophy was, in its very nature, eminently aristocratic, and Socrates, as a supposed Sophist, consequently passed for an aristocrat, his entire mode of life could not fail to make him appear like a bad citizen in the eyes of the restored democracy. He had never concerned himself in the affairs of the state, had never but once sustained an official character, and then, as chief of the Prytanes, had disagreed with the will of the people and the rulers. (Plat. Apol. § 32. Xen. Mem. I. 1, 18.) In his seventieth year, he mounted the orator’s stand for the first time in his life, on the occasion of his own accusation. His whole manner was somewhat cosmopolitan; he is even said to have remarked, that he was not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world. We must also take into account, that he found fault with the Athenian democracy upon every occasion, especially with the democratic institution of choice by lot, that he decidedly preferred the Spartan state to the Athenian, and that he excited the distrust of the democrats by his confidential relations with the former leaders of the oligarchic party. (Xen. Mem. I. 2, 9, sq.) Among others who were of the oligarchic interest, and friendly to the Spartans, Critias in particular, one of the thirty tyrants, had been his scholar; so too Alcibiades—two men, who had been the cause of much evil to the Athenian people. If now we accept the uniform tradition, that two of his accusers were men of fair standing in the democratic party, and farther, that his judges were men who had fled before the thirty tyrants, and later had overthrown the power of the oligarchy, we find it much more easy to understand how they, in the case before them, should have supposed they were acting wholly in the interest of the democratic party, when they pronounced condemnation upon the accused, especially as enough to all appearance could be brought against him. The hurried trial presents nothing very remarkable, in a generation which had grown up during the Peloponnesian war, and in a people that adopted and repented of their passionate resolves with the like haste. Yea, more, if we consider that Socrates spurned to have recourse to the usual means and forms adopted by those accused of capital crime, and to gain the sympathy of the people by lamentations, or their favor by flattery, that he in proud consciousness of his innocence defied his judges, it becomes rather a matter of wonder, that his condemnation was carried by a majority of only three to six votes. And even now he might have escaped the sentence to death, had he been willing to bow to the will of the sovereign people for the sake of a commutation of his punishment. But as he spurned to set a value upon himself, by proposing another punishment, a fine, for example, instead of the one moved by his accuser, because this would be the same as to acknowledge himself guilty, his disdain could not fail to exasperate the easily excited Athenians, and no farther explanation is needed to show why eighty of his judges who had before voted for his innocence, now voted for his death. Such was the most lamentable result—a result, afterwards most deeply regretted by the Athenians themselves—of an accusation, which at the outset was probably only intended to humble the aristocratic philosopher, and to force him to an acknowledgment of the power and the majesty of the people.

Hegel’s view of the fate of Socrates, that it was the result of the collision of equally just powers—the Tragedy of Athens as he calls it—and that guilt and innocence were shared alike on both sides, cannot be maintained on historical grounds, since Socrates can neither be regarded exclusively as the representative of the modern spirit, the principle of freedom, subjectivity, the concrete personality; nor his judges, as the representatives of the old Athenian unreflecting morality. The first cannot be, since Socrates, if his principle was at variance with the old Greek morality, rested nevertheless so far on the basis of tradition, that the accusations brought against him in this respect were false and groundless; and the last cannot be, since at that time, after the close of the Peloponnesian war, the old morality and piety had long been wanting to the mass of the people, and given place to the modern culture, and the whole process against Socrates must be regarded rather as an attempt to restore by violence, in connection with the old constitution, the old defunct morality. The fault is not therefore the same on both sides, and it must be held, that Socrates fell a victim to a misunderstanding, and to an unjustifiable reaction of public sentiment.

4. The “Genius” δαιμόνιον of Socrates.—Those traces of the old religious sentiment, which have been handed down to us from so many different sources, and are certainly not to be explained from a bare accommodation to the popular belief, on the part of the philosopher, and which distinguish him so decidedly from the Sophists, show how little Socrates is really to be regarded as an innovator in discipline and morals. He commends the art of divination, believes in dreams, sacrifices with all proper care, speaks of the gods, of their omniscience, omnipresence, goodness, and complete sufficiency in themselves, even with the greatest reverence, and, at the close of his defence, makes the most solemn asseveration of his belief in their existence. In keeping with his attaching himself in this way to the popular religion, his new principle, though in its results hostile to all external authority, nevertheless assumed the form of the popular belief in “Demonic” signs and symbols. These suggestions of the “Demon” are a knowledge, which is at the same time connected with unconsciousness. They occupy the middle ground between the bare external of the Greek oracle, and the purely internal of the spirit. That Socrates had the conception of a particular subject, a personal “Demon,” or “Genius,” is altogether improbable. Just as little can these “Demonic” signs, this inward oracle, whose voice Socrates professed to hear, be regarded after the modern acceptation, simply as the personification of the conscience, or of the practical instinct, or of the individual tact. The first article in the form of accusation, which evidently refers to this very point, shows that Socrates did not speak barely metaphorically of this voice, to which he professed to owe his prophecies. And it was not solely in reference to those higher questions of decided importance, that Socrates had these suggestions, but rather and preeminently with respect to matters of mere accident and arbitrary choice, as for example, whether, and when, his friends should set out on a journey. It is no longer possible to explain the “Demon” or “Genius” of Socrates on psychological grounds; there may have been something of a magnetic character about it. It is possible that there may be some connection between this and the many other ecstatic or cataleptic states, which are related of Socrates in the Symposium of Plato.

5. The Sources of the Philosophy of Socrates.—Well known is the old controversy, whether the picture of Socrates, drawn by Xenophon or by Plato, is the most complete and true to history, and which of the two men is to be considered as the more reliable source for obtaining a knowledge of his philosophy. This question is being decided more and more in favor of Xenophon. Great pains has been taken in former as in later times, to bring Xenophon’s Memorabilia into disrepute, as a shallow and insufficient source, because their plain, and any thing other than speculative contents, seemed to furnish no satisfactory ground for such a revolution in the world of mind as is attributed to Socrates, or for the splendor which invests his name in history, or for the character which Plato assigns him; because again the Memorabilia of Xenophon have especially an apologetic aim, and their defence does not relate so much to the philosopher as to the man; and finally, because they have been supposed to have the appearance of carrying the philosophical over into the unphilosophical style of the common understanding. A distinction has therefore been made between an exoteric and an esoteric Socrates, obtaining the first from Xenophon, the latter from Plato. But the preference of Plato to Xenophon has in the first place no historical right in its favor, since Xenophon appears as a proper historian and claims historical credibility, while Plato on the other hand never professes to be an historical narrator, save in a few passages, and will by no means have all the rest which he puts in the mouth of Socrates understood as his authentic expressions and discourse. There is, therefore, no historical reason for preferring the representation of Socrates which is given by Plato. In the second place, the under-valuation of Xenophon rests, for the most part, on the false notion, that Socrates had a proper philosophy, i.e. a speculative system, and on an unhistorical mistaking of the limits by which the philosophical character of Socrates was conditioned and restricted. There was no proper Socratic doctrine, but a Socratic life; and, just on this ground, are the different philosophical tendencies of his scholars to be explained.

6. The Universal Character of the Philosophizing Of Socrates.—The philosophizing of Socrates was limited and restricted by his opposition, partly to the preceding, and partly to the Sophistic philosophy.

Philosophy before the time of Socrates had been in its essential character investigation of nature. But in Socrates, the human mind, for the first time, turned itself in upon itself, upon its own being, and that too in the most immediate manner, by conceiving itself as active, moral spirit. The positive philosophizing of Socrates, is exclusively of an ethical character, exclusively an inquiry into the nature of virtue, so exclusively, and so onesidedly, that, as is wont to be the case upon the appearance of a new principle, it even expressed a contempt for the striving of the entire previous period, with its natural philosophy, and its mathematics. Setting every thing under the standpoint of immediate moral law, Socrates was so far from finding any object in “irrational” nature worthy of study, that he rather, in a kind of general teleological manner, conceived it simply in the light of external means for the attainment of external ends; yea, he would not even go out to walk, as he says in the Phædrus of Plato, since one can learn nothing from trees and districts of country. Self-knowledge, the Delphic γνῶθι σαυτόν appeared to him the only object worthy of a man, as the starting-point of all philosophy. Knowledge of every other kind, he pronounced so insignificant and worthless, that he was wont to boast of his ignorance, and to declare that he excelled other men in wisdom only in this, that he was conscious of his own ignorance. (Plat. Ap. S. 21, 23.)

The other side of the Socratic philosophizing, is its opposition to the philosophy of the time. His object, as is well understood, could have been only this, to place himself upon the same position as that occupied by the philosophy of the Sophists, and overcome it on its own ground, and by its own principles. That Socrates shared in the general position of the Sophists, and even had many features of external resemblance to them—the Socratic irony, for instance—has been remarked above. Many of his assertions, particularly these propositions, that no man knowingly does wrong, and if a man were knowingly to lie, or to do some other wrong act, still he would be better than he who should do the same unconsciously, at first sight bear a purely Sophistic stamp. The great fundamental thought of the Sophistic philosophy, that all moral acting must be a conscious act, was also his. But whilst the Sophists made it their object, through subjective reflection to confuse and to break up all stable convictions, to make all rules relating to outward conduct impossible, Socrates had recognized thinking as the activity of the universal principle, free, objective thought as the measure of all things, and, therefore, instead of referring moral duties, and all moral action to the fancy and caprice of the individual, had rather referred all to true knowledge, to the essence of spirit. It was this idea of knowledge that led him to seek, by the process of thought, to gain a conceivable objective ground, something real, abiding, absolute, independent of the arbitrary volitions of the subject, and to hold fast to unconditioned moral laws. Hegel expresses the same opinion, when he says that Socrates put morality from ethical grounds, in the place of the morality of custom and habit. Hegel distinguishes morality, as conscious right conduct, resting on reflection and moral principles, from the morality of unsophisticated, half-unconscious virtue, which rests on the compliance with prevailing custom. The logical condition of this ethical striving of Socrates, was the determining of conceptions, the method of their formation. To search out the “what” of every thing says Xenophon (Mem. IV. 6, 1.) was the uninterrupted care of Socrates, and Aristotle says expressly that a twofold merit must be ascribed to him, viz.: the forming of the method of induction and the giving of strictly logical definitions—the two elements which constitute the basis of science. How these two elements stand connected with the principle of Socrates we shall at once see.

7. The Socratic Method.—We must not regard the Socratic method as we are accustomed to speak of method in our day, i.e. as something which, as such, was distinctly in his consciousness, and which he abstracted from every concrete content, but it rather had its growth in the very mode of his philosophizing, which was not directed to the imparting of a system but to the education of the subject in philosophical thinking and life. It is only a subjective technicality for his mode of instruction, the peculiar manner of his philosophical, familiar life.

The Socratic method has a twofold side, a negative and a positive one. The negative side is the well known Socratic irony. The philosopher takes the attitude of ignorance, and would apparently let himself be instructed by those with whom he converses, but through the questions which he puts, the unexpected consequences which he deduces, and the contradictions in which he involves the opposite party, he soon leads them to see that their supposed knowledge would only entangle and confuse them. In the embarrassment in which they now find themselves placed, and seeing that they do not know what they supposed, this supposed knowledge completes its own destruction, and the subject who had pretended to wisdom learns to distrust his previous opinions and firmly held notions. “What we knew, has contradicted itself,” is the refrain of the most of these conversations.

This result of the Socratic method was only to lead the subject to know that he knew nothing, and a great part of the dialogues of Xenophon and Plato go no farther than to represent ostensibly this negative result. But there is yet another element in his method in which the irony loses its negative appearance.

The positive side of the Socratic method is the so-called obstetrics or art of intellectual midwifery. Socrates compares himself with his mother Phænarete, a midwife, because his position was rather to help others bring forth thoughts than to produce them himself, and because he took upon himself to distinguish the birth of an empty thought from one rich in its content. (Plato Theætetus, p. 149.) Through this art of midwifery the philosopher, by his assiduous questioning, by his interrogatory dissection of the notions of him with whom he might be conversing, knew how to elicit from him a thought of which he had previously been unconscious, and how to help him to the birth of a new thought. A chief means in this operation was the method of induction, or the leading of the representation to a conception. The philosopher, thus, starting from some individual, concrete case, and seizing hold of the most common notions concerning it, and finding illustrations in the most ordinary and trivial occurrences, knew how to remove by his comparisons that which was individual, and by thus separating the accidental and contingent from the essential, could bring up to consciousness a universal truth and a universal determination—in other words, could form conceptions. In order e.g. to find the conception of justice or valor, he would start from individual examples of them, and from these deduce the universal character or conception of these virtues. From this we see that the direction of the Socratic induction was to gain logical definitions. I define a conception when I develope what it is, its essence, its content. I define the conception of justice when I set up the common property and logical unity of all its different modes of manifestation. Socrates sought to go no farther than this. “To seek for the essence of virtue,” says an Aristotelian writing (Eth. I. 5), “Socrates regarded as the problem of philosophy, and hence, since he regarded all virtue as a knowing, he sought to determine in respect of justice or valor what they might really be, i.e. he investigated their essence or conception.” From this it is very easy to see the connection which his method of definitions or of forming conceptions had with his practical strivings. He went back to the conception of every individual virtue, e.g. justice, only because he was convinced that the knowledge of this conception, the knowledge of it for every individual case, was the surest guide for every moral relation. Every moral action, he believed, should start as a conscious action from the conception.

From this we might characterize the Socratic method as the skill by which a certain sum of given, homogeneous and individual phenomena was taken, and their logical unity, the universal principle which lay at their base, inductively found. This method presupposes the recognition that the essence of the objects must be comprehended in the thought, that the conception is the true being of the thing. Hence we see that the Platonic doctrine of ideas is only the objectifying of this method which in Socrates appears no farther than a subjective dexterity. The Platonic ideas are the universal conceptions of Socrates posited as real individual beings. Hence Aristotle (Metaph. XIII. 4) most fittingly characterizes the relation between the Socratic method and the Platonic doctrine of ideas with the words, “Socrates posits the universal conceptions not as separate, individual substances, while Plato does this, and names them ideas.”

8. The Socratic Doctrine concerning Virtue.—The single, positive doctrinal sentence which has been transmitted us from Socrates is, that virtue is a knowing—that, consequently, nothing is good which happens without discernment, and nothing bad which is done with discernment, or, what is the same thing, that no man is voluntarily vicious, that the base are such against their will, aye, even he who knowingly does wrong is better than he who does it ignorantly, because in the latter case, morality and true knowledge are both wanting, while in the former—if such a case could happen—morality alone is violated. Socrates could not conceive how a man should know the good and yet not do it; it was to him a logical contradiction that the man who sought his own well being should at the same time knowingly despise it. Therefore, with him the good action followed as necessarily from the knowledge of the good as a logical conclusion from its premise.

The sentence that virtue is a knowing, has for its logical consequence the unity of virtue and for its practical consequence the teachableness of it. With these three propositions, in which every thing is embraced which we can properly term the Socratic philosophy, Socrates has laid the first foundation stone for a scientific treatment of ethics, a treatment which must be dated first from him. But he laid only the foundation stone, for on the one side he attempted no carrying out of his principle into details, nor any setting up of a concrete doctrine of ethics, but only, after the ancient manner, referred to the laws of states and the unwritten laws of the universal human order, and on the other side, he has not seldom served himself with utilitarian motives to establish his ethical propositions, in other words he has referred to the external advantages and useful consequences of virtue, by which the purity of his ethical point of view became tarnished.