As one recent scholar (Mark McPherran) has argued, Socrates' religious views threatened many traditional religious practices, since he believed that we cannot buy the gods' favour by means of cult offerings or ritual. We cannot, and should not, expect the gods to be magically influenced on our behalf by prayer, burnt offerings or sac- rifice. This aspect of Socratic theology may have been even more shocking than Socrates' views about the moral char- acter of the gods themselves - since the latter were, as we have seen, paralleled by other thinkers of the time. In questioning the value of ritual and the power of prayer, Socrates threatened the whole structure of religious prac- tice in Athens.
Strepsiades in the Clouds feared that if traditional religious beliefs were lost, morality would also, inevitably, be eroded. Socrates' position in Plato's Euthyphro suggests a strong but subtle response to this non sequitur. He insists that the gods love what is good, but its goodness is independent of their approval. Allowing an external religious authority to guide all decisions is lazy and morally irresponsible. It is even impious, in so far as God or the gods have set us on the quest for ethical truth. If we believe that any action may qualify as holy or good simply because God or the gods approve of it, then God or the gods are morally arbitrary tyrants, and we live in a world where the only right is might. If we imagine that people only ever act 'morally' out of reverence for tra- dition and fear of divine retribution, then we have already denied the possibility of true moral choice.
Religion, Socrates insisted, must be treated as an inspi- ration for independent moral thinking, not as a substitute for it. It is easy to see why his vision of religious authority should have been inspiring to his pupils. It is also easy to see why it would have seemed abhorrent to anybody who thought of religion as the glue that binds citizens, families and communities together.
knowledge and ignorance
Socrates' views about human knowledge, ethics, psychol- ogy and happiness were if anything even more radical than his beliefs about religion.
He believed that thinking and talking about morality were of the utmost importance: virtue was, for him, the central goal of human life and human happiness. But Socrates did not think that simply following traditional moral principles could ever be sufficient to achieve a virtuous life, a good life - or even a properly human life.
He declared, 'The unexamined life is not worth living by a human being.' Students undergoing final exams may some- times believe the opposite: the examined life is not worth living. But the Socratic concept of self-examination is directly opposed to that of the test-taking culture of contemporary Anglo-American education. Academic exams test how well a student remembers and understands the assigned material. A Socratic examiner would want to know why the student valued the assignment at all, and how getting an 'A' would contribute to a life of virtue. For Socrates, 'examining' one's life had nothing to do with the achievement of goals set by society. It meant questioning and testing one's most funda- mental beliefs. He argued that a failure to look honestly at one's own life was to betray one's very humanity.
Socrates appropriated the words that were written over the temple of Apollo at Delphi: 'Gnothi seauton' ('Know yourself'). He showed his contemporaries what a difficult task this might be.
Socrates' life-work was inspired by an oracle given by Apollo at Delphi. A friend of Socrates had asked the god, 'Is there anybody wiser than Socrates?' The oracle said that there was not. Socrates was puzzled and asked himself, 'Whatever does the god mean, whatever is his riddle? For I know that I am not wise, neither very wise, nor even a little bit. So whatever does he mean by saying that I am the wisest?' (Plato, Apology, 2ib). In order to solve the enigma, he went to question all those who had a reputation for wisdom: the politicians, the poets and the tradesmen. If he could find even one person who was wiser than himself, he would be able to prove the oracle wrong. But he found no such person. Instead, as he cross-questioned people, he discovered incon- sistencies in the things they claimed to know. The process has been dubbed by scholars 'the Socratic elenchos' (the word means 'refutation'). The Socratic quest was, paradoxically, a search for ignorance rather than for truth.
Socrates eventually decided that there was more than one different type of wisdom (in Greek, sophia). Many people have 'wisdom' in the sense of technical expertise: they can write poems, lead an army, address an assembly or make a pair of boots. But all such wisdom is not merely inferior, but worse than useless. Expertise, Socrates suggested, is morally dangerous, because it gives people a false, inflated idea of their own knowledge. People think their capacity to practise a particular art also gives them wisdom in other areas where in fact they know nothing. Socrates drew a stark contrast between this 'worthless' human wisdom (which is not really wisdom at all), and 'true' wisdom, which belongs only to the god. His final interpretation of the oracle was, 'The god is truly wise, and by this oracle he is saying that human wisdom has little or no value' (Plato, Apology, 23a). This might suggest that human wisdom is a contradiction in terms: only the god is truly wise.
What, then, of Socrates' own claims to know anything? Socrates is sometimes accused of being self-contradictory or paradoxical in saying that he 'knew' that he 'knew nothing'. But it is quite possible that Socrates included himself in his condemnation of all merely human wisdom. In Plato's version, the oracle never said that Socrates was wise; it said, rather, that 'There is nobody wiser than Socrates.'
Alternatively, Socrates believed that human beings can count as 'wise' in a third, limited sense: if they understand their own ignorance in comparison with divine enlighten- ment. Socrates, in this interpretation, viewed himself as the only person in the world who came anywhere near to divine wisdom.
Perhaps, as Robert Nozick has argued, Socrates genu- inely did not know how to define many evaluative terms, such as courage, holiness, or justice. But he knew more than most people, because he had at least rejected some common false beliefs about these concepts, such as the idea that holi- ness simply means making the guilty suffer, or doing the things the gods like. He knew that most people are wrong or misguided in thinking they know anything about their own systems of belief and value.
socratic irony
Socrates embodied a series of paradoxes. He questioned reli- gious traditions and myths, but out of religious piety. His wisdom was his ignorance. His death was happiness and victory, both unknown and certainly good. The last words he spoke at his trial - according to Plato's account - were an assertion both of supreme confidence and of radical uncer- tainty: 'But now it is time to go away, for me to die, and for you to live. But which of us goes to a better thing is unclear to anyone except the god.'
The tension between Socrates' insistence on his own igno- rance and his assertion of positive (and peculiar) beliefs about ethics and religion is particularly evident in Plato's Defence speech of socrates - which is more commonly known as the Apology. The usual title in English may be misleading since Socrates certainly does not 'apologise', in the usual sense, for any of his actions. Quite the opposite: he justifies his whole career, and indicts the city of Athens for his conviction.
It is difficult to reconcile Socrates' claim to know 'little or nothing of any value' with his confident assertions about ethics. We may well wonder what status any positive claim by Socrates can have, if no human being is capable of true wisdom.