PHIL 310 Lesher

Some Views of Socrates’ Historical Significance

1. ‘Socrates was the first who called philosophy down from the heavens, established her in the cities of men, introduced her even into private houses, and compelled her to ask questions about life and morality and things good and evil.’ (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations V, 4, 10)

2. ‘I have Socrates on my side. It was his labor to turn philosophy from the study of nature to speculations upon life: but the innovators whom I oppose are turning off attention from life to nature. They seem to think we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motion of the stars. Socrates was rather of the opinion that what we had to learn was how to do good and avoid evil.’ (Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, I, 124)

3. ‘He is not only an extremely important figure in the history of philosophy--the most interesting in ancient philosophy--he is a key personality in world history...This is Socrates’ revolution: he puts the self-awareness of each individual, the general consciousness of thought in each individual in place of the oracle. This inner certitude is indeed a new and different god, not the one the Athenians had previously worshipped...’ (G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy)

4. ‘The scene, constrantly repeated, disconcertingly dramatic, must have been marvelous: Socrates, with the smile of a nihilist, ferocious à la Lenin, in the middle of the market place, inflicting a knockout on an illustrious general, a famous politician, a shrewd Sophist. Around the harsh limelight of his dialectics, shaking with delight, the youths of Athens are crowded, stretching their long discus-thrower necks toward that snub-nosed Pan of the bushes...The tricky logic of Socrates who made Greece lose forever the feeling of security. Who will now dare to set out with the ingenuity--which inevitably feeds audacity--on the discovery of cosmic truths, like Heraclitus, like Parmenides, like Democritus, if he feels his own person converted into an unfathomable problem?...An intensified anxiety about salvation begins to paralyze the prodigious curiosity of the Greeks.’ (José Ortega y Gasset, Obras, (1927), III, p. 541).

5. ‘[Socrates and Plato] originated the thought that, like every other part of the practice of life, morals and politics are an affair of science, to be understood only after severe study and special training; an indispensable part of which consists in...sifting opinions, and never accepting any until it has emerged victorious over every logical, still more than over every practical objection.’ (J. S. Mill, ‘Plato’ in the Edinburgh Review, April, 1866)

6. ‘That current customs contradict one another, that many of them are unjust, and that without criticism none of them is fit to be the guide of life was the discovery with which the Athenian Socrates initiated conscious moral theorizing.’ (John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 78)

7. ‘What is the real significance of Socrates in the history of European thought? It was Socrates who, so far as can be seen, created the conception of the soul which has ever since dominated European thinking...that man has a soul, something which is the seat of his normal waking intelligence and moral character, and that...his supreme business in life is to make the most of it and do the best for it.’ (A.E. Taylor, Socrates, 132).

8. ‘A profound delusion entered the world in the personality of Socrates--an unshakable faith that thought, conducted by the guiding thread of causality, can reach down to the depths of being, and that thought is not only able to know being, but even to correct it...whoever brings to his inner presence all this, together with the amazingly high pyramid of our present knowledge, cannot refrain from seeing in Socrates the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy)

9. ‘Well did thou speak, Athena’s wisest son! All that we know is, nothing can be known.’ (Byron, Canto II)

10. ‘Socrates’ infinite merit is to have been an existing thinker, not a speculative philosopher who forgets what it means to exist...On the ‘if’ he risks his entire life, he has the courage to meet death, and he has with the passion of the infinite so determined the pattern of his life that it must be found acceptable--if there is an immortality.’ (SØren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript)