He was born in Athens in 469 BCE and died there seventy years later. From an external perspective, his life was not particularly interesting. Born into a working family, he remained throughout his life an unassuming man. His physiognomy was plain, if not altogether ugly, his mode of life was simple and frugal, his marriage and children as ordinary as can be imagined, and his death, by hemlock poison as ordered by an Athenian jury, altogether ignominious. He seems to have written nothing. And in his mature years, he appears to have devoted himself to pestering the Athenians in the marketplace (and everywhere else) with impertinent questions about human issues and problems, seemingly hoping to extract from them some bits of wisdom and knowledge. Claiming to be wise only in the sense of acknowledging his own ignorance, he succeeded in confusing those who conversed with him. They, too, knew nothing, but were not aware of their ignorance. Hence, he was wiser than they.
We are told that the Delphic Oracle declared him to be the wisest among humans. Perplexed by this statement, he devoted himself to unraveling its hidden meaning, which, as he told his jurors, was simply this: Human wisdom amounts to little or nothing, with God alone being wise. In his quest, he developed a well-structured method or way to understand the message of the Apollonian oracle, now famously known as the Socratic method, or elenchus. It involved a series of logically arranged questions that led his interlocutors to recognize the vacuity of their own beliefs and assertions, in the hopes that they would eventually begin to search within themselves for some grain of truth.
For Socrates, most human aspirations and goals are misguided and futile as components of a righteous and happy life, which explains why a meaningful and happy life is a rare commodity. Neither wealth, nor power, nor fame, nor the pursuit of pleasure, nor even the storing of bits of information in the mind, nor any similarly common human desires amount to much. More than anything else, they are distractions and dissipations that obscure the mind. For Socrates, the foremost goal of life must be the endeavor to know ourselves, to examine constantly who and what we are, and to understand precisely the meaning of our own existence. “An unexamined life,” he declared during his trial, “is not worth living.”
The summation of Socrates’ thinking can be clearly stated by appealing to Plato’s testimony about him. It can be phrased in a simple equation: Clear thinking leads to righteousness, and righteousness leads to happiness. Reversing it, it amounts to this: A happy life must be based on ethical and moral convictions, and these convictions must be structured in terms of rational considerations. Reason, therefore, must be regarded as the sole agency that should guide human behavior. Everything else must be set aside. Emotions, traditions, whimsical desires, and the army of irrational and senseless motivations that provide the fuel for human behavior must be eradicated as sources of guidance in human life.
Socrates emerges in history as a man committed to a life of self-analysis and rational decisions. This commitment, he believed, can transform any human life and can render it righteous and happy. For this endeavor to succeed, however, a tremendous intellectual strength is necessary. Weakness, not of the will but of the mind, is the necessary condition for a life lived in shambles. All evil, he affirmed, is ultimately the result of ignorance understood in the sense of mental obfuscation. People often live as if in a cloud of stupor, stupefied by phantoms of their own creation and validated by the confused social context in which they live. The light of rational analysis, he insisted, can dissipate even the thickest darkness in the mind. This light can transform an intoxicated monster into a veritable human being.
There is a story recounted by Cicero in which we hear that a famous Persian physiognomist named Zopyrus once came to Athens. He was able to read the characters and minds of people by observing their faces. At the marketplace, Socrates sat before Zopyrus for a reading. After patiently inspecting the philosopher’s face, Zopyrus exclaimed, “Sir, I have never seen a face like yours. In truth, you are really a monster, a mistake of nature!” Calmly Socrates replied, “Sir, what you see is what I was, not what I am.” The point of this anecdote is clear enough. Socrates may have been born a moral monster as the disturbing features of his face revealed. By nature he could have been brutal, bestial, and vicious. That was what he was. In the course of his life, however, and through the Herculean strength of his mind, he succeeded in transforming himself into the opposite of his natural self.
A disturbing statement is attributed to Schopenhauer, the great German pessimist, which tells us that “human life gives every indication of being some kind of a mistake.” Socrates would have agreed. It is a mistake, and a review of our history since his time corroborates this unhappy fact. Yet, Socrates’ optimism led him to the conclusion that the mistake of human life can be corrected and people can transform themselves. This Socratic optimism explains an often neglected feature of the Socratic presence, one which emerged in his last confession, that the one and only thing he truly knew is love. Unlike Schopenhauer, he loved people, every person, everywhere. For this reason, he described himself as a hungry donkey running after a carrot or a bit of green. As if moved by an obsession, he was compelled to find people in order to help them emerge from the cloud of confusion in which they were living. He taught them nothing but engaged them in dialogue, hoping thereby to start them on the path of being born again. He reminded us that he inherited his mother’s profession: She was a midwife whose task was to assist women in the process of giving birth to children. Socrates, for his part, was also a midwife, but his task was to force people to examine themselves so that they could eventually give birth to their other selves.
Was Socrates a successful man in his mission? Did he change the world? Did he accomplish the task of converting people from monsters into true human beings? His execution could lead us to answer negatively. But still, even though he succeeded in small measure even among his friends, the fact remains that his uplifting and refreshing presence in the history of ideas remains alive to this time. And that, I believe, is an incontestable proof of his enduring success.
Dr. L. E. Navia is Professor of Philosophy at New York Institute of Technology. He is the author of many books including Diogenes the Cynic: The War Against the World .