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Was the philosopher Socrates of Athens a hero?
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| No | 29% | 258 votes | Total: 897 votes | |
| Yes | 71% | 639 votes |
No
by Glendon Hubner
Created on: January 09, 2012
Socrates was certainly a great thinker, one whose influence on Western philosopical and political though cannot be underestimated. There are a lot of myths told concerning his life and personality, for instance his seemingly endless capacity to drink alcohol without becoming drunk, his ugliness, his indifference to pain and his capacity to resist physical (especially sexual - see Alcibiades' speech in "The Symposium" for example) temptation. Let's for the purposes of this article assume for a moment that all of this is true (I'm sure some of it is and some of it isn't.)
Do these things, to wit his influence on Western thought and the myths concerning his person, make Socrates a hero? In order to decide if this is so, we first have to define what we mean when we say the word "hero". What is a hero? I'm sure many things spring to your mind as they do to mine, almost instantaneously. Courage in the face of danger, perhaps. Unflagging loyalty to one's principles. Sacrifice for the benefit of others or one's community. These are all qualities that we might consider, in certain circumstances, to be "heroic". If we were to apply these criteria to Socrates, however, we would fall into the trap of being anachronistic - that is, applying the criteria and ideas of today to people and cultures of the past, and judging them by those criteria.
Socrates lived in Athens before, during and after the Peloponnesian War, that is to say, Socrates lived in Classical Greece. The Classical Greeks most certainly were people like us, however they were not us. They thought differently and they had different cultural values and a different way of looking at the world to us. They certainly had a different idea of heroism to us. Look at the classical heroes of Greek literature. Achilles. Hector. Odysseus. Leonidas, Heracles. I won't waste time here listing all the Classical Greek heroes I can think of - I'm sure you could think of some that I might miss. But I'm also sure that we can see a theme emerging, a picture of what it meant to the Greeks to be a hero.
To be sure, some of these values are part of our idea of heroism too, courage, resourcefulness, fearlessness to name a few. But we have to keep in mind that these were different people living in a different time. To the Greeks, a hero was someone who inspired the people. He (yes, most often it was he) led his brothers into battle. He achieved victories agianst near insurmountable odds. He was a great warrior, loved and hated by the gods. Sometimes he was the son of one or other of the gods. Most importantly, a hero was someone who brought the community together, by creating a story that taught you something about what it meant to be an Athenian, a Spartan - what it meant to be a Greek.
Whatever Socrates was, he was not this kind of person. Essentially, Socrates embodied a lot of things that were considered dangerous in Classical Greece. Constant questioning of the established cultural values, in essence questioning the religion that helped hold society together, these were dangerous ideas. The people of Athens could not teach the story of Socrates to their children and say "see, this is what it means to be an Athenian." Yes, by all accounts Socrates was a model citizen who took civic duty extremely seriously. But in the end, despite his protests (in "The Apology" for instance), Socrates represented a corrosive influence, in that he began to question the established cultural norms that made Athens hold together.
Finally, it's important to make the distinction between personal adoration and heroism. The fact that Socrates influenced many people, including some of his contemporaries, does not make him a hero. I look up to people and seek their advice. I try to model my life after them. Some people look up to me in the same way. These people are "heroes" to me, but they are not heroes in the sense that they embody our cultural understanding of heroism. In the same way, Socrates is not heroic simply because Plato revered him.
To conclude, Socrates was a great thinker who has had a profound influence on Western thought. He personally may or may not have embodied some of the characteristics that heroism also contains. He is not, however, a "hero". The Greeks conceived of a hero as being someone who, through prowess in war or great leadership, inspired their societies and embodied what it meant to be Greek. They brought their societies closer together in the bonds of shared culture and history. Socrates did not do these things. Rather, by all accounts, he appears to have caused the opposite of these things, namely the questioning of established values and norms in Athens. In conclusion, then, Socrates was a great man certainly, but not a hero.
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Yes
by Daniel Shnaider
Created on: January 01, 2010
The question of whether Socrates was an actual hero seems simple, but is complicated by the myth that has grown up around this great man. Obviously, if Socrates actually did the things his student Plato attributed to him- standing boldly against a jury of 500, willing to die than betray his convictions, refusing the opportunity to escape even in the face of death- we have no choice but that Socrates was one of the greatest heroes that ever lived, in a pantheon alongside modern giants like Martin Luther King Jr. and Winston Churchill. The real problem is that when Socrates never wrote about himself, and in his time, the sciences of Journalism and Historiography hadn't been established. So while Plato may write that Socrates was hero, we have no way of knowing if he was lying. The Real Socrates could have stolen candy from babies while living with 10 wives and we would have no way of knowing. And because only Plato's probably biased accounts of Socrates life survived, we will have no way of knowing, ever.
Fortunately, while we have no way of knowing for sure what Socrates's life looked like, we can deduce his character from his effects on History. No one doubts, for instance, that Socrates taught Plato, and that Plato was a virtuous philosopher who wrote tirelessly about the need to pursue virtue and justice. In his landmark work, The Republic Plato will attempt to model a soul by modeling a state, and his soul is notable for totally lacking any disorder, vice, or any parts that might work against itself and true justice. It seems unlikely that Plato would be so devoted to virtue if his own teacher was not virtuous. However, his teacher would not have been virtuous if he had not died the way Plato Recorded (If he had taught Plato to pursue virtue and then died without any, he would have been a hypocrite.) Therefore, we can conclude that Socrates lived, and died, heroically.
We can also see Socrates' character by seeing how he dealt with his enemies. One of his worst enemies was Aristophanes, a playwright who portrayed him has a common cheat in his hilarious comedy, The Clouds. But the Clouds was published in 425, almost 26 years before Socrates's execution. This leads to two questions: If Socrates did not possess a heroic character, if he did not seek out virtuous life and instead behaved like a common rogue, why did it take 26 years for anything to be done about him? And if Socrates actually was a rogue, why would he have died honorably at his Trial? The Socrates Aristophanes portrayed, the scoundrel Socrates, would have attempted to squirm out of his punishment and denied any study of Philosophy. Meanwhile, it seems clear that Socrates made no move to attack or discredit Aristophanes (Plato will attempt to in his Symposium, but that work was published long after Socrates's death and so subtle that many don't catch the criticism until the second read.) Again, it seems clear that the real socrates must have conducted himself well, actually died as portrayed by his student, and even treated his enemies with respect.
Finally, even if the real Socrates wasn't a hero, he has definitely become a hero, if not a patron saint, to the humanities. For Socrates did not only die honorably, he spent his whole life, (at least, according to Plato) battling against sophists, liars who would misconstruct the truth for their own gain and taught others to do the same. And those sophists did real damage: the sophist Thrasymmachus, a master of power politics, taught that the strong should force the weak to do their will, indeed, a weak power took a stand against a stronger power was at fault no matter what the issue was. This line of reasoning will lead to a small island being massacred during the Pelleponnesian war, simply because it refused to obey Athens and give her tribute. Then there was Alcibiades, who, while not a sophist himself, was trained by sophists. A consummate politicatian, Alcibiades will betray a total of 3 different sides, and can be held solely responsible for Athens losing her independence to Sparta. Socrates spared no effort in his attempt to isolate and control bad politicians like Alcibiades while proving to the polis what a danger the sophists actually were. One could argue that, even if Socrates was not a heroic figure, he bears a heroic legacy so powerful that it makes him a true hero in his own right.
I believe a hero is one who acts virtuously, even up to his death. Socrates appears to be such a man-even if we can't verify the details of his life, we know from he must have lived virtuously, and died virtuously, from his effects on Athens and Plato. And he will bear a heroic legacy that is still recognized today, almost 2400 years after his death.
Learn more about this author, Daniel Shnaider.
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