 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode? Method Man – Plato's Socrates. Anyone who has spent time in a classroom, whether as a teacher or a student, has probably encountered the Socratic method. It means, of course, teaching someone by asking them questions. Perhaps leading questions, but questions nonetheless. When practiced rigorously, the Socratic method requires that the teacher never say anything apart from questions. This can descend into parody pretty quickly. The student asks for the dates Plato was born and died, and instead of saying that he was born in 427 BC and died in 347 BC, the teacher says, well, when do you think he was born and died? But practiced in moderation, the Socratic method is an excellent way to teach. It forces the students to figure things out for themselves, rather than passively sitting there waiting to be filled with knowledge as if teaching were like pouring wine into the empty vessels that are the student's heads. Socrates was of course a prominent user of the Socratic method, if not its inventor. According to Plato, he had a very good reason for using the method, namely that he had no wisdom of his own to impart anyway. Socrates claimed to be ignorant about the things he was out to discover. The reason he gave for cornering the good people of Athens in the marketplace, and pestering them to tell him what courage or piety or virtue in general might be, was that he himself really didn't know what courage or piety or virtue is. He was desperate to find someone who could help him answer these most important questions, and that became the basis for many of Plato's dialogues. In Plato's Laiches, Socrates asks military men to explain what courage is. In the Euthyphro, he asks a man who is prosecuting his father for murder to explain what piety is. After all, anyone who would prosecute his own father for murder must be pretty confident in their moral judgment. Socrates likes to ask questions more than he likes to answer them. In the Mino, for instance, Socrates is asked whether virtue can be taught, and replies that he can't rightly say because he doesn't even know what virtue is, so he can hardly know whether it could be taught. But perhaps Mino would be willing to help him out, by first saying what virtue is. When faced with Socrates's questions, Mino and the other interlocutors say what they think about virtue, and Socrates gently or not so gently shows them that they have no idea what they're talking about. They contradict themselves, get into logical muddles, and wind up seeing that their ideas lead to outlandish and unbelievable results. Socrates ends up disappointed, and the interlocutors go away, perhaps angry, certainly puzzled, and with any luck, realizing that they don't know quite as much as they thought. This is the classic version of Plato's Socrates as he emerges from a whole series of works which are often called the Socratic Dialogues. These dialogues were probably written early in Plato's career, and many people have thought that they are a faithful record of the real historical Socrates, perhaps even reports of actual discussions Socrates had. As I've said in previous episodes, I'm pretty skeptical about this. I think that from day one Plato was using Socrates for his own philosophical purposes, and that there's not much use in trying to extricate a portrait of the historical Socrates from some supposedly reliable Socratic dialogues. Besides, why should we try to do this anyway, when the Platonic Socrates is so interesting? We can watch as Plato develops Socrates as a character, in dialogue after dialogue, confronting him with various other characters, many of them also based on real people, like generals, poets, sophists, young lovers, scoundrels, politicians, and in the case of the Republic, even Plato's own brothers. Of course, these portraits must have been inspired by the people who are being portrayed. Any resemblance to persons living or dead was not merely coincidental. But as students of the history of philosophy, what we are really interested in is what Plato did with the characters, not how close his versions were to the real people. The best place to start if we want to understand Plato's Socrates is a dialogue called the Apology. As I mentioned last time, Xenophon also wrote a Socratic Apology, and these were not the only two men writing Socratic literature around this time. Socrates had many admirers, and quite a few sought to rehabilitate his reputation after he was executed by the people of Athens in 399 BC. At that time Plato was 28 years old. In his Apology, he has Socrates mention that he, Plato, was there in attendance at the trial. We shouldn't leap to the conclusion, though, that the Apology is therefore an accurate record of what Socrates said. After all, in another dialogue, the Phaedo, we are told that Plato was sick and couldn't be present at Socrates' deathbed, but this didn't stop Plato from telling us what was supposedly said in Socrates' final hour. Nor are these the only two dialogues set in the days leading up to Socrates' death. In fact, many dialogues are set in these days. Between the Apology, in which we see Socrates' trial, and the Phaedo, in which we see his death, there is the Crito, in which Socrates' friend Crito unsuccessfully tries to persuade Socrates to save his own life by escaping and fleeing Athens. The Euthyphro, which I already mentioned, is also set in the days leading up to the trial, as are several more dialogues. By setting so many dialogues in this short time frame, Plato makes sure we don't lose sight of the high stakes we play for when we do philosophy. Socrates is trying to discover how best to live, and he's doing it even as he has only hours left to do any living. But let's return to the Apology, which as I say is a good way of approaching Plato's take on Socrates. The first thing to say is that in it, Socrates is anything but apologetic. It consists mostly of a defense speech, though he does engage in some typically Socratic cross-examination of one of his accusers. The speech he gives isn't so full of swaggering arrogance as the one Xenophon wrote, but Plato's Socrates certainly makes little effort to ingratiate himself with his jurors. He does begin by making one real Apology, namely that he is a poor public speaker. But this, of course, is a classic ploy used by good public speakers, and Socrates goes on to offer a tour-de-force of argument, after claiming to be incompetent in rhetoric. But Plato's point isn't really to show Socrates trying to soften up the jury, it's to dispel the widespread notion that Socrates was a sophist. Socrates alludes directly to Aristophanes' play The Clouds, which as you'll remember from last time portrayed Socrates both as a sophist and as a kind of composite pre-Socratic philosopher. Given the way he highlights the clouds here in the Apology, it seems that Plato blamed Aristophanes for helping to create Socrates' ultimately lethal reputation. Like Xenophon, Plato has Socrates demolish the official accusations against him, that he rejects the gods and corrupts the youth. But there is less focus on these specific charges here than in Xenophon. In Plato's version, Socrates' main theme is the story of how he made himself so unpopular in Athens. The story goes like this. As also reported by Xenophon, Socrates' friend Hierophon went to the oracle at Delphi. What the oracle tells Hierophon in Plato's version is that there was no man wiser than Socrates. Socrates is stunned at the oracle's pronouncement, because he knows that he is not really wise at all. Such wisdom as he has is only human wisdom, the nature of which he doesn't really explain. But he lacks what would be really valuable, namely divine wisdom. This would be absolutely certain knowledge of the most important things, such as virtue. Characteristically, Socrates reacts to this by testing the oracle's claim, much as he might test the claims made by a man he talks to in the marketplace. But of course he can't go and cross-examine the oracle. Instead, he tests it by trying to find someone in Athens who is wiser than he is. He goes to the obvious candidates, the politicians, the poets, and the craftsmen. He finds that they do know some limited things. For instance, the carpenters know how to make things out of wood. But none of these people possess true wisdom, the knowledge of the most important things that Socrates is after. What's worse, they get carried away with a little understanding they do possess, and assume that they must have true wisdom in addition to their little bit of expertise. Their false pretensions of wisdom far outweigh the value of whatever it is they do know. The poets, for instance, claim all sorts of exalted insight, whereas actually, they can't even explain the poems they wrote themselves. Socrates gradually realizes that what the oracle at Delphi meant was that he is the wisest of men not because he is so wise, but because he at least knows that he is not wise. His condition is something we have come to call Socratic ignorance. This ignorance is, paradoxically, a kind of knowledge. It is knowing that one does not know. So now we have a context for understanding what goes on in other Socratic dialogues. In questioning people from all walks of life, Socrates is giving them a chance to show that they do know, for instance, what courage or piety is. Maybe he'll finally strike lucky, and find the man or woman who refutes the Delphic oracle by being wiser than Socrates. But if that doesn't happen, at least Socrates will reduce the interlocutor to a state of Socratic ignorance. He is doing them a great favor, really. He is disabusing them of the impression that they know things they don't really know. As Socrates says in the Apology, he's like a fly who buzzes around a horse annoying it, but in this case the annoyance is helpful and productive. Even though he can't do what some sophists like Protagoras claim to do, namely teach you how to live, he can at least show you that you do not yet know how to live. That will put you in the same boat as Socrates, still looking for wisdom, but until he's purged you of your false pretension of wisdom, you won't even bother looking. Socrates firmly believes, then, that he's been doing the Athenians an important service. After he's found guilty, he is asked what sentence he proposes for himself, and he suggests that he should receive free meals at state expense for the rest of his life. Here it's hard to avoid the impression that Socrates is deliberately goading the Athenians into putting him to death, yet Plato's Socrates does genuinely seem to believe that he ought to be rewarded by the Athenians he has served so faithfully. On the other hand, the question of what Socrates believes is a bit tricky. Alongside Socratic ignorance, another of his trademarks is Socratic irony. For instance, surely when Socrates tries to get a definition of piety from Euthyphro, a man who is about to prosecute his own father for murdering a slave, this is meant ironically? That is, Socrates knows full well that Euthyphro hasn't the foggiest idea what piety is, as shown by the fact that he's in the midst of doing something completely impious in hauling his father before a court. Similarly, Socrates would know that Laihes the general has no clue what courage is, that Mino cannot define virtue. There's nothing to be gained from asking them, really, except to show them that they are ignorant. But it's far too easy to take just about anything Socrates says as being ironic. No doubt experience has taught him that as a rule you don't get a good answer when you ask Athenian citizens to define the virtues, but this doesn't mean he expects to get nothing out of the process for himself. More than once in the Platonic dialogues, Socrates makes an impassioned plea that we never stop inquiring into these questions, and he himself never gets tired of doing so. When accused of always saying the same things, he says yes and about the same subjects. Though reducing people to Socratic ignorance is a genuine public service, Socrates also does it out of self-interest, because he believes that through this constant inquiry he has some hope of reaching true wisdom. We might think, though, that this project of Socrates is a bit odd. Why would anyone think that looking for a definition of virtue is a good way of becoming virtuous? Socrates seems to be after the wrong sort of thing. You could know what football is without being able to play it. Couldn't you likewise know what virtue is without automatically being virtuous? But Socrates would disagree. One of his fundamental assumptions is that anyone who knows what is good will choose it. Why would anyone deliberately choose what is bad? That sounds plausible. But we do think, don't we, that people deliberately choose things, even though they are bad. Maybe even because they are bad, given the perversity of human nature? But for Socrates, this idea was absurd. For him, something's being good obviously implies that it is worth choosing. So for someone to think that something is good is for them to think it worth choosing. To put it another way, it's incoherent to imagine someone thinking, oh, this is good, but goodness doesn't really do much for me. I'm going with what's bad instead. This Socratic position, which he argues for in several dialogues, is usually summed up in the phrase, no one does wrong willingly. If I always want to do what is good, then my doing bad can only be the result of incomplete information. If I steal or kill, I must think stealing or killing is good, when really it is bad. This gets us closer to understanding Socrates' strange way of conducting his search for the virtuous life. For him, vice and wrongdoing are always the result of ignorance, not the benign Socratic ignorance of knowing one doesn't know, but the really dangerous insidious kind of ignorance, where you are utterly convinced you know what is good, but actually you have no idea. Without naming names, you might be able to think of politicians who have displayed this kind of ignorance, and see that Socrates has a point. The next step is obvious. If vice is ignorance, then virtue can only be knowledge. This is why in seeking knowledge of virtue, Socrates can take himself to be seeking virtue itself. He argues for this in other ways too. For example, he points out that anything good or beneficial will be useless, or even harmful, if used without knowledge. Consider medicine. Use it with the guidance of a knowledgeable doctor, and it can save your life. Use it without such guidance, and you'll be lucky to survive the experience. That's why there's such a thing as prescription drugs. The same point applies to anything we might take to be good. For instance, money. Money is very handy, we all agree on that, but only if it is used wisely. If you use money the wrong way, you can do immense harm to yourself and others. Or take health, which looks like an uncontroversially good thing. But is the health of a brutal tyrant really good? No, because the tyrant uses his continued vigor to oppress and exploit the people. In every case, the apparently good thing becomes good only when you add wisdom. So virtue is knowledge or wisdom, and Socrates says that he lacks knowledge and wisdom. He merely knows that he knows nothing. So should we conclude from this that Socrates is not virtuous? In a sense, probably so. If he were already virtuous, presumably Socrates could stop rushing about Athens, asking people to help him find out what virtue is. But his special Socratic brand of ignorance gives him an important advantage over his peers. He at least knows that his beliefs about virtue are deeply fallible. And there's no reason to deny that he does have beliefs about virtue. Perhaps this is what he means by the human wisdom he mentions in the Apology. For example, he believed it was wrong to arrest an innocent man at the behest of the thirty tyrants, and believed it was right to fight bravely against the Spartans at Delium. In fact, for all his efforts to show people that they lack a general understanding of virtue, he's often quite happy to accept their beliefs about particular cases of virtue. For instance, when Mino says that virtue is for a woman, tending the home well and being obedient, Socrates doesn't criticize Mino for being a sexist. He simply insists that Mino gives him a definition of virtue, and not just examples. What the interlocutors lack when it comes to virtue is the big picture. They lack general and consistent knowledge about virtue, even if they often get it right on particular occasions. Plato's Socrates, and Plato himself, worried that such people would also get it wrong on particular occasions, precisely because they lack this general and consistent knowledge. When the chips are down, you want to follow the person who has knowledge, not the person who has some true beliefs. So again, we can ask, why doesn't Socrates make mistakes too, since he too lacks such wisdom? Well, he has another advantage, his divine sign. Plato confirms Xenophon's report that Socrates could hear a divine voice, which would speak up and warn him against those actions which he should not undertake. Socrates then was given a way to cheat his way to virtue. His true beliefs, tempered by the modesty of Socratic ignorance, were augmented by a divine sign, which pointed him towards virtue, or at least away from vice. He was not only the wisest man in Athens, he was also the most blessed. No wonder that Plato took him as the hero for most of his dialogues, especially since this was a man who loved conversation. And as a writer of dialogues, conversation was Plato's business too. Which brings us neatly to one of the central puzzles about Plato himself, one which will occupy our attention soon. The puzzle is, why did Plato write dialogues? Whereas Socrates wrote nothing, Plato wrote nothing in his own voice. He gave us no treatises or discourses declaiming his theories. Instead, he gave us a series of conversations. We'll start to look at those conversations in two weeks when we finally get to Plato. But first, we'll have another conversation of our own, with my colleague Raefel Wolf, who will help us further to examine this most examined of lives. That's Raefel Wolf on Socrates, next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.