Socrates

When Socrates asks what is courage? or what is piety?, he sets aside the listing of examples and demands the single definition common to every case. Aristotle ascribes two things properly to him, inductive arguments and universal definition, while noting that he did not separate these universals from things, unlike the subsisting Forms Plato would add. To seek the one essence behind the manifold is already to hold the universal to be real.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, XIII, 4, 1078b (universal definitions) · Plato, Euthyphro, 5d-6e; Laches, 190d-192b (the demand for a definition)

Socrates seeks the true not in the observation of nature, from which he has turned away, but in the regulated examination of reasons: one starts from the interlocutor's opinions and follows the argument wherever it leads, to contradiction or to agreement. It is reason in dialogue, not sense experience, that yields the definition; yet there is nothing in him of the doctrine of innate ideas or recollection, which Plato will add.

Plato, Phaedo, 96a-99d (the turn away from natural science) · Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, V, 4, 10 (Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens)

For Socrates, the true misfortune is not to suffer but to act wrongly: it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. Nothing external can reach the good man in what makes his good, his soul; so he meets ordeal, and his own condemnation, with a steadiness that defuses its character as evil.

Gorgias, 469 · Apology; Crito

The Socratic procedure lies entirely in the question what is it?: what is courage, piety, justice? To ask for the definition is to presuppose a single, stable essence behind the diversity of particular cases, one that inquiry must bring out. Knowing this common nature matters more than listing examples.

Plato, Euthyphro · Plato, Laches and Meno

Socrates takes his calling to examine men as a mission entrusted to him by the god, one he cannot desert: he is stationed in Athens as at a post of battle one does not leave. The meaning of his life is thus given by a divine command, and the gods do not neglect the good man: far from a constructed meaning or an absurd universe, a providence watches over it.

Plato, Apology, 28d-29a (the post assigned by the god) · Plato, Apology, 41c-d (the gods' care for the good man)

Before his judges, Socrates declares himself serene: they may kill or banish him, they cannot harm him, for the only real evil is to make one's soul bad, and no one can do that in one's stead. External goods, the body, reputation, life itself, are not in our power and are not the true good; the soul's virtue, by contrast, depends on us. The Stoics would build their dichotomy of control on this intuition.

They may kill me, banish me, strip me of my rights: Anytus and Meletus can do that, but harm me they cannot.Plato, Apology, 30c-d

Plato, Apology, 30c-d (they can kill me but not harm me) · Plato, Apology, 41c-d

To fear death, says Socrates, is to think oneself wise when one is not, for no one knows whether it is an evil. It is one of two things: either a dreamless sleep, and so a gain, or a journey of the soul to the dead, and so a blessing; in both cases the good man has nothing to fear. The proof of immortality will come from Plato; in Socrates the position stays suspended between these two hopes.

To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.Plato, Apology, 29a

Plato, Apology, 40c-41c (the two hypotheses about death)

Master of his appetites, able to bear cold, hunger and wine without giving in, Socrates embodies enkrateia, self-mastery through reason. He neither abolishes desire as the ascetics will, nor celebrates it: he submits it to reason's sorting, holding good only what serves the soul. Reduced need is for him a strength, not a deprivation.

Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 2-3; I, 5 (self-mastery) · Plato, Symposium, 219b-220a (Socrates impervious to cold and wine)

Indifferent to luxury, going barefoot and wearing the same cloak in every season, Socrates does not for all that condemn pleasure: he feasts at the Symposium and can drink all night without drunkenness. His sobriety is not the asceticism that takes the body for an enemy, but a temperance that uses everything without being its slave.

Plato, Symposium, 220a and 223c-d · Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 3, 5-15

The demand for a single definition of justice or courage presupposes that virtue has a nature, the same for all, and not a mere variable convention. Socrates thereby opposes the sophists and their relativism, summed up in Protagoras' saying, man is the measure of all things: if each measures the true and the good as they please, examination would lose its object. The just is discovered by reason, not decreed.

Plato, Theaetetus, 152a and 161c-e (Protagoras' formula, criticized) · Plato, Gorgias, 482e-484c (nature and convention)

For Socrates the criterion of action is neither the reckoning of consequences nor obedience to a law, but the state of the soul the act proceeds from: to act well is to act from an excellent soul. By making virtue the whole of morality and the object of self-care, he opens the tradition of virtue ethics later carried on by Aristotle and then the Stoics.

Plato, Apology, 30a-b; Crito, 47e-48a (the good soul, the only true good)

One does not choose a ship's pilot or a sick man's doctor by lot: ruling is likewise a form of knowledge, a craft requiring knowledge of the good, not everyone's business indifferently. Hence the Socratic critique of selecting magistrates by lot at Athens and of the supposed competence of the many. Plato will draw from it the rule of philosophers; in Socrates it is first the demand that the one who knows should decide.

Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 2, 9; III, 9 (the art of ruling, selection by lot) · Plato, Gorgias, 455b-456a; Crito, 47a-48a (the expert analogy)

If wrongdoing is ignorance, the guilty party is less a villain than someone sick in soul, and punishment should cure rather than return evil for evil. To undergo a just penalty is even a good, since it frees the soul from the injustice that spoils it; punishing for revenge corrects nothing. The sanction counts as care and correction, placing Socrates on the side of a rehabilitative justice.

Plato, Gorgias, 476a-481b (punishment that heals the soul)

Moral intellectualism entails a fairly optimistic view of humankind: if we do evil only through ignorance, no one is bad by nature, and every person can be improved by knowledge. Vice is not an ineradicable wickedness but a failure of knowledge, which makes the human being educable and turns examination into a therapy of the soul.

Plato, Protagoras, 345d-e; Meno, 87b-89a (virtue, an acquirable knowledge)

What decides the worth of a life is, for Socrates, the goodness of the soul and not the brilliance of appearances: ugly as a Silenus but beautiful within, he judges a man by his virtue, not by his looks. Beauty is not thereby despised: in the Symposium, the love of beautiful bodies is the first rung of an ascent that, from beauty to beauty, rises to the Beautiful and then to the Good. But this dialectic of ascent, where sensible eros is only a step toward the intelligible, is already Plato's work; the primacy of the ethical remains, the beautiful being worth only as a path toward the good.

Plato, Apology, 29d-30b (virtue before reputation) · Plato, Symposium, 210a-212a (the ascent of eros, from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself) · Plato, Symposium, 215a-216a (Socrates as Silenus, inner beauty)

Disappointed by the natural philosophers who explain everything by material causes, Socrates recounts having hoped from Anaxagoras that Mind ordered the world for the best, then finding him invoking only mechanisms. What he demands is explanation by the good, the end for the sake of which it is better that things be as they are: a finalism that turns philosophy away from nature toward value.

Plato, Phaedo, 97b-99d (the disappointment with Anaxagoras)