Socrates' Philosophical Mission

One of the most interesting philosophers in the history of classical Greece is Socrates.  Socrates is considered as the wisest man ever lived.  Though this claim is still a matter of debate, but scholars commonly agreed that Socrates together with Plato –his student, and Aristotle are considered as the penultimate in the high-brow culture of the Greeks –that is, philosophy.

Philosophizing is something unique in the Hellenic culture and civilization in ancient times.  The neigboring civilizations like that of the Jews and of the Egyptians were mostly religious.  With philosophizing, the Greeks were able to break their ties from mythical past –the past haunted by beliefs in gods and goddesses intervening human affairs.

Philosophy, then, is understood as an inquiry for the ultimate principle of everything that is in aid of human reason.  In this definition, we can single out two important characteristics of philosophy.  Firstly, philosophy is a search for one ultimate principle of all things that exist.  This sort of inquiry is like putting all diverse things (multi-verse) into one idea/ principle.  This principle will give a clearer picture of all these diverse things.  This picture, then, depicts one meaningful whole of things.  To put it simply, the ultimate principle bears “meaning” of all diverse things –the “uni-verse.”  Of course, Thales is known to be the first philosopher to have thought of one single principle to be the source of life and of all things, and this single principle is water.  This philosophical belief is what drives rover missions to Mars designed and sent by NASA.  For NASA scientists working in these missions, if water element exists in Mars, then it is very possible that life exists in that red planet and it’s highly possible that it will become a human habitation in the near future.  Secondly, philosophizing is a search for an ultimate principle aided only by reasoning.  Before philosophy came into practice, Greeks relied on myths to explain human and natural phenomena.  For example, earthquakes, lightning, typhoons, tidal waves, etc. were attributed to the activities of gods and goddesses.  Without any resort to mythical explanations, philosophers tried to understand the world based purely on reasoning.  Thales, for example, relied on rational demonstration to attribute the origin of everything –even any form of life, to water.  By logical reasoning, he might have thought that the element of water has properties to transform into other material objects.  By empirical observation, we know how water transforms into gas or transforms into solid such as ice.  Yet, Thales went far in concluding that water is the principle that was, is and will be.  It doesn’t change substantially yet change only accidentally.  On the contrary, the Jews established their identity as a group of people in a strong belief in one eternal God.  The Greeks never had this kind of faith.  Their faith is entirely based on human capacity to understand the world and all things therein.

Based on this analysis of philosophy, we can now understand the person of Socrates and the structure of his thought.  Socrates was not a cosmologist like his predecessors such as Thales, Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraklitus among others.  He was rather a sophist.  Not all scholars would agree such though.  He lived in a democratic Athens depicting himself as a gadfly to a fat slow-moving animal –a metaphor Socrates told his audience during his public trial in Athens.  The fat slow-moving animal means the society he belongs.  As a gadfly, he constantly made noise in the animal’s ears for it to move forward.  In the same way, Socrates should exert force to push his society forward to progress since society takes a very slow progress.

Because of this mission in life, Socrates spent much of his life conversing with other people in the polis.  He conversed with students, other sophists, politicians and those who pretended they knew anything.  Like a gadfly, he asked questions to all he conversed until the person he conversed would no longer knew what he talked about.  This method is now known as Socratic dialogue –a sort of dialogue, which created more enemies than friends.  For those he conversed, Socrates’ way of asking questions is irritating since his questioning will lead them to ignorance.  For Socrates, on the other hand, it’s his mission –to be a wisest man is one who knows only one thing –that is, he does not know anything.  That’s why, he asked questions and furthered his questioning.

Socrates died for his mission.  He died a martyr of his philosophy.  He was martyred in a democratic Athens.