Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy

Eduard Zeller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317830474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2000. This is Volume X of ten in the International Library of Philosophy in a series on Ancient Philosophy. Written in 1931, this is the thirteenth edition of outlines of the history of Greek philosophy. The author's aim was to provide students with the contents of the different philosophic systems and the course of their historical development which should contain all essential features, and also to put into their hands the more important literary references and sources.

Second Period
The Attic Philosophy: Socrates and the Socratics, Plato, Aristotle

24. THE NEW POSITION AND PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCRATIC SYSTEM

ALTHOUGH Attica had up to now produced no philosopher of outstanding originality, Athens, through the leading part which it played in the Persian war, its growing prosperity and not least the poets who had raised its intellectual life to heights never attained before, had become the intellectual centre of Greece.¹ Anyone who wished to gain a reputation as a thinker had to pass the test in Athens. Yet in the life of Athens and the Hellenes in general, with all their refinement of external form, there were gaps which began to become more and more apparent. The products of the whole world stood at the disposal of the Athenian citizen.² New statues of the gods rose in their splendour, the immortal works of the finest artists. The people listened at the festival of Dionysus to the serious words and songs of tragedy and delighted in the sparkling wit and boisterous antics of comedy. Crowds thronged the lecture rooms of the sophists when they propounded their new wisdom clothed in the seductive cloak of beautiful language and invited young men to become their pupils. The Demos basked in serene consciousness of its power when they sat on the Pnyx and in the courts. All this was well, but there were people who had the impression that all this splendour was not good for the Athenians. They had become indolent, lazy, garrulous and avaricious.³ Actually one thing was lacking; the people received no moral education. Who was there to show the Hellene the path of righteousness, to teach him to distinguish between the values of different goods, to reveal the meaning and end of life? Religion was scarcely more than ritual; it had no sacred writings and could only give the vaguest guidance in moral conduct.¹ The real teachers and educators of the people were its poets, who were at that time still conscious of their function,² Homer being used most of all for this purpose.³ But they could do no more than give occasional hints and with their harrowing tales of human destiny touch the hearts of their hearers and move them to reflection. The waning authority of traditional religion under the attacks of the Ionic physicists and the sophists made this lack of moral education for the people all the more serious.

It was necessary to erect a completely new structure in place of the old. It was to this, the moral education of his fellow-citizens, that Socrates, the first Athenian philosopher, devoted his whole activity. But this demanded in its tum a knowledge of good and evil; and it was his efforts to attain this knowledge that prepared the ground for the discovery of those ideas which provided a new and more secure basis not only for ethics but for knowledge as a whole.

In the minor Socratic schools different sides of his doctrines were emphasised and developed or combined with older theories. Plato continued the work of his master with greater comprehensiveness and deeper understanding. But while Socrates in his complete pre-occupation with the things of this world resembles the Ionic monists and embodies the essential qualities of the Greek people, his philosophy is strengthened in Plato by the addition of Eleatic elements and combined with the dualistic mysticism of the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. It becomes a new system of idealistic character, which for the time being brought the dualistic tendency in Greek philosophy into the ascendant. With Aristotle a reaction set in in favour of natural science, which had been more or less despised by Socrates and Plato. He criticised the crude dualism of Platonic idealism, but retained its basic ideas, although in a new form which seemed to comprehend the whole of reality, so that his philosophy represents the Socratic-Platonic philosophy of ideas in its most consummate form. Apart from this Aristotle took up many of the threads spun by the pre-Socratic physicists and treated many questions of the mental sciences untouched either by Socrates or Plato.

¹ Thuc. II, 41, 1: τη̑ς Ἑλλάδος παίδευσις. Plat., Prot., 337D: τη̑ς Ελλάδος αὐτὸ τὸ πρυτανει̑ον τη̑ς σοφίας.

² Thuc. II, 38.

³ Plat., Gorg., 515 E.

¹ The so-called ἄγραφοι νόμοι Thuc. II, 37, 3; cf. e.g. Eur., Fr. 853.

² Aristophanes, Frogs, 1008ff., 1054ff.

³ Plat., Rep., X, 606E.

I. Socrates

§ 25. HIS LIFE AND PERSONALITY

SOCRATES was born in the year 470 B.C. (apparently on the 6th of Thargelion), or at the latest in the first month of the following year.¹ His father Sophroniscus was a sculptor, his mother Phænarete a midwife.² His early education does not seem to have exceeded either in measure or manner that which was usual at that time. He learnt his father's axt and a group of statues at the entrance to the Acropolis, representing the three Graces, was ascribed to him.³ As a philosopher he was self-taught⁴ and it was only later writers who represented him as the pupil of Archelaus in order to establish a connection (διαδοχή) with the older philosophers. He must have at one time occupied himself with natural philosophy, for it was his dissatisfaction with it that led him to abandon this study.⁵ He had relations too with the sophists, attended their lectures and occasionally even recommended pupils to them;⁶ but urged on by a voice within him which he regarded as divine and encouraged by a reply of the Delphic oracle, he recognised that his mission in life was to rouse his fellow-citizens from their thoughtlessness and lead them to reflect on the meaning of life and their own highest, good. To set man in a wholesome inner unrest— that he thought was his mission, his philosophy, his " divine service".¹ Aristophanes represents him as engaged in this activity as early as the year 423, and Plato before the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. He continued it until his death in the poorest of circumstances, with Xanthippe at his side, with complete self-denial, and without any reward. He allowed neither family cares nor state crises to distract him from his goal. A model of self-sufficiency, purity, integrity and virtue, yet full of human kindliness and social charm, cultured and witty, of unfailing good humour and imperturbable serenity, he became an object of veneration to men of the most diverse rank and character. A son of his people, he performed his duty fearlessly in war as in peace and took part in three campaigns (Potidaea between 432 and 429, at Delion 424 and at Amphipolis 422). On the other hand his principles kept him apart from politics. But when he was drawn against his will into the turmoil of public affairs, he did not flinch. As president of the assembly at the trial of the generals after Arginusse (406 B.C.) he defied the raging mob and some years later refused at the risk of his life to obey the illegal orders of the oligarchic despots.² His criticism of the democratic constitution, his habitual cross-examination of the people with whom he came into contact and the strong and self-conscious contrast which his whole nature presented with that of the average Athenian³ made him many enemies. We find indeed in his character many traits which made on nis contemporaries the impression of oddness and eccentricity, of an " Atopia " which actually was never there. On the one hand a prosiness, a pedantry and indifference to outward appearances which accorded well with the Silenus-like form of the philosopher, but impinged harshly on the sensitiveness of Attic taste; on the other hand an absorption in his own thoughts which sometimes gave the impression of absent-mindedness and an emotional force so powerful that the vague feeling which even at an early age had frequently deterred him from taking certain steps seemed to him to be a " dæmonic " sign, an inner oracle with which he had been gifted, for he believed that in dreams, too, he received prophetic warnings.¹ But all these characteristics, these peculiarities, had their origin in the energy with which Socrates withdrew from the world into himself so as to devote his undivided interest to the problems which arise from man's mental nature. His character shows a remarkable combination of critical shrewdness and a deep religious sense, of sober rationalism and mystical belief. Both these sides, however diametrically opposed they might have been, had their roots in one and the same thing—in the passionate longing which drove him in search of something absolute and unconditioned, which could be apprehended by the intellect and serve as a norm for moral conduct and which he believed to be also the wise and just power that governs universal events.²

§ 26. THE ACTIVITY OF SOCRATES: SOURCES, AIM, METHOD

Socrates himself left no writings behind him, so that those of his pupils, Plato and Xenophon, are the only trustworthy sources from which we can expect to derive any information about his philosophic views. Of later writers Aristotle is the only one who comes into consideration. His short and precise accounts of Socrates are valuable but contain in their essence nothing more than we already know from Plato and Xenophon. The latter pair of writers, however, impart widely different accounts of the Socratic philosophy. With Plato it is possible that he put his own doctrines in their entirety into the mouth of his teacher. With the unphilosophical Xenophon it is questionable whether his Memorabilia, which was written primarily for apologetic purposes, represents the Socratic doctrines unabbreviated in their true sense, and whether his conception of his duty as an historian was strict enough to prevent him from working much of his own into the speeches of Socrates.

The most recent research has shown more and more clearly that the most trustworthy sources for Socrates' own peculiar philosophy are almost exclusively Plato's Apology, his earliest dialogues and the speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium (215 E/222. B). Xenophon and Aristotle only come into consideration as far as they do not contradict Plato's account. But even the above mentioned groups of writings do not yield a completely uniform and coherent picture of the personality and activity of this remarkable man. There arises the difficult question: How could Socrates, with the purely intellectual " philosophy of ideas " which Aristotle ascribes to him and which he pursues in the Platonic dialogues, produce such effects, which Alcibiades declared to be unattained even by the most skilful orators and which are testified also by the Socratic, yEschines of Sphettus, in the remains of his dialogue Alcibiades—the deepest spiritual emotion, humiliation, shame, realisation of one's own failings and longing for improvement, passionate striving against the subordination of one's own ego to the compelling superiority of Socrates, unique personality combined with the irresistible conviction of the truth of his words, which penetrate the soul as the bite of a snake the flesh.¹ It is utterly impossible that an effect of this kind which Socrates produced not only on Alcibiades but on numerous other young people can have been attained by merely instructing them in definition of ideas. The deepest cause lay in the fascinating personality of Socrates, in his power of " making others better" (218E). This was his end and aim: the moral improvement of mankind. This however could not be effected by moral sermons, but only by personal intercourse aqd setting men to work on themselves. The underlying idea here was the self-knowledge which the Delphic oracle enjoined (γνω̑θι σεαυτόν). Thus he arrived at his remarkable method of examination (ἐξετάξειν ἑαυτὸν καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους Ap. 28E., 38A), the so-called dialectic process to which he subjected the people with whom he came into contact, and at his " Maieutik " (Theœt. 149Ef) by means of which he sought to bring forth not so much the idea as the power for good, the better self in man. He felt himself spurred on in this work by his love;² but what had he to offer to others? No complete formulated system which could be assimilated by the intellect; for he knew that he knew nothing.³ All that he could do was to set men in unrest and bring them into embarrassment (ἀπορει̑ν, Theœt., 149A), He often produced this result by pretending to receive instruction from others, whose mental inferiority was revealed in the course of the conversation. This procedure was keenly felt by those who suffered from it, his attitude being felt to be " ironical " In his conversations he was fond of starting from trivialities and truisms, pressing the most commonplace things into service to illustrate his theories—donkeys, smiths, cobblers and tanners, all of which, while seeming ridiculous to the uninitiated, hid a divine meaning which was always directed to the simple goal how to become good and honest.¹ In every activity he insisted on technical proficiency and he too felt compelled to seek after understanding of thd good. He would indeed have been no Greek if he had not sought to fathom the mystery of his own nature. Thus he was led to the " definitory question, what is the good? " To this question he never succeeded in finding a conclusive answer although he spent his life in the attempt. At the age of seventy he still confessed before his judges that he knew nothing.

§ 27. THE SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY

Under these circumstances it is hardly possible to speak of a Socratic " system Socrates laid no claim to authority; he was far more occupied in teaching men to think for themselves. He made no precise formulations of doctrine.² It is on this account difficult to assign him a place in philosophy; yet his importance cannot be ignored. He was a " philosopher " in the original, modest sense of a man who, while recognising the limits of human knowledge, seeks after the truth.³ From a negative point of view it is certain that he rejected natu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• FIRST PERIOD THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY
• SECOND PERIOD THE ATTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCRATICS. PLATO. ARISTOTLE
• THIRD PERIOD HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY. THE STOA. THE LATER CYNICISM. EPICUREANISM. SCEPTICISM. ECLECTICISM
• FOURTH PERIOD THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX