Socrates
Socrates appears in the history of philosophy after those thinkers whom Aristotle called the natural philosophers: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, followed by Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Socrates was still a youth when Parmenides and Heraclitus were in their maturity. He was a contemporary—and a fierce opponent—of the great Sophists, and became the teacher of Plato as well as of other thinkers and schools now regarded as minor.
It is chiefly through Plato that we possess the deep testimony of Socrates’ thought, for the Platonic Dialogues have Socrates himself as their central figure. It is generally believed that the early Dialogues preserve the genuine teachings of Socrates, whereas in the later works it is Plato’s own philosophy that speaks through the figure of his master.
Socrates was said to be accompanied by a daimon, an invisible presence that at times held him back from certain actions. In the Symposium we are told that he would sometimes fall into long and profound trances, withdrawn from everything, almost cataleptic. Like Pythagoras, Jesus, and the Buddha, he wrote nothing; instead, he taught his fellow citizens directly, urging them—subtly yet with piercing clarity—to abandon their habitual assumptions, both moral and intellectual. At the same time, he helped those willing to listen to “give birth” to a new and genuine understanding of reality. For these reasons, he was called now a troublesome gadfly, now a midwife.
The core of Socrates’ teaching was to awaken the Athenians from their conceited “belief that they knew,” so that they might begin to understand who, or what, they truly were. His two decisive sayings were “I know that I know nothing” (hen oida oti oudèn oida—literally: the only thing I know is that I know nothing) and “Know thyself” (gnōthi sautón), a maxim that in the Greek world had already found, and would later find again, many illustrious interpreters—from the Seven Sages to Plotinus. The search for the true meaning of values—that is, for “what something truly is”—was not, for Socrates, the ultimate goal of inquiry, but rather a means to reveal the emptiness and unreality of people’s prejudices. (Plato would later develop this search into the doctrine of the Idea, while Aristotle took it as the first step in logical reasoning—he extracted from it logic itself, which, fortunately, Socrates had not yet done.) The word prejudice—which Socrates himself never used but which serves to summarize his insight—must be understood in a strong sense. For him, prejudice does not mean what we commonly understand by it, such as the quick assignment of stereotypes like “Italians: pizza and mandolin.” Rather, it means the very structure of one’s personality, the innermost mode of one’s cognition. When Socrates exposes the illusion of “believing that one knows,” he does not aim to show that a particular common opinion is wrong—that would be trivial—but to lead his interlocutor to realize that the very structure of his mind is built upon the belief that he knows. To make this clearer: if we were to bring Socrates into our modern world, he would see the people of the West—indeed everyone—as those who “believe they know.” In comparison with him, every modern person is precisely one who believes he knows. This is the essential point: whoever reads about Socrates’ “belief that he knows” instinctively assumes that Socrates was speaking about others—about some naïve souls of two thousand years ago—while the reader himself, deep down, believes he is a wise and intelligent person who does not believe that he knows. Yet that is exactly the point: he believes he knows that he is not one who believes he knows! (And human nature, of course, has never changed—whether in Athens or today; one need only read Thucydides or the comedies of Aristophanes to see it.)
To grasp the flaw hidden in the “belief that one knows,” we must turn to the second Socratic injunction: Know thyself. Those who believe they know are, quite simply, those who do not know themselves. It may seem that the enigma only deepens instead of clearing, yet the answer is disarmingly simple—and it is the same one proclaimed by sages of every age and culture: the illusion from which we must awaken is none other than the I. Socrates, of course—and no Greek of his time—ever spoke of the “I.” The term would only be named, and thereby brought into existence, many centuries later by Western philosophy. Yet that is precisely what he meant. The I is not the true nature of the mind; it is a fictitious reflection upon the mirror of that nature, born of the mind’s being—as Socrates said—“imprisoned within the body.” The true self is the mind beneath the* I*, and this true self is something other—and infinitely nobler—than the I. For the I is nothing but a small, tyrannical creature, clutching greedily at its own meager desires. Socrates called this deeper self the psychē—a term we should not translate as “soul,” since that word has been too deeply compromised by the egocentric piety of devotional Christianity. The psychē is the immortal element in the human being; it is reborn after death and remains in communion with true reality, beyond the shifting appearances of the phenomenal world (cf. what Socrates says in the Phaedo and in the myth of Er at the end of the Republic). It is the attachments and the coarseness of the I that prevent it from living in that paradisal condition. For Western thought, however, every individual simply is their own I: philosophy, psychologies, and all neurosciences have for centuries believed they know and taken for granted that man is the I, and naturally, Western people believe this. For Socrates, then, “believing that one knows” means, in the most radical sense, believing oneself to be the I. Only by truly knowing oneself can one be freed from this illusion — the very source of human suffering. Such an interpretation of Socrates is, of course, absent from academic scholarship, for scholars believe that he merely wished to correct crude opinions and make his fellow citizens more reasonable. Yet when one reads the Upaniṣad, or the discourses of the Buddha, or the Tantra from the various Indian and Tibetan traditions, it becomes clear that Socrates was saying essentially the same thing as the sages of the East: know the ātman, your true Self — or, as Nietzsche would later put it, become what you are.
From this perspective, the so-called Socratic paradox becomes clear at last: whoever truly knows the good cannot do evil. No one, Socrates says, acts wickedly by choice, but only out of ignorance. At first glance this seems to contradict all experience. Those who commit evil acts do so with full awareness: the murderer or the thief knows exactly what he is doing; he knows he is doing harm, and he chooses to do it. Likewise, in everyday life each of us performs small actions which we would not wish to have done to us, and we perform them knowingly. Reality, then, appears to refute Socrates so sharply that philosophers and scholars have long regarded his claim as paradoxical, unable to discern its inner logic. Yet the meaning of his words is simple and entirely consistent, once we understand what Socrates truly intended when he warned against “believing that one knows” and urged instead that we “know ourselves.” Socrates was calling us to go beyond the I — and what, after all, is the source of every evil if not the I itself? It is the I that makes human beings greedy, angry, lazy, domineering, and false; it is the I that seeks advantage for itself, of every kind and at any cost, regardless of what is right toward others. Egoism is the root of all human evil — the impulse to place one’s own interests, great or small, before everything else, and to pursue them relentlessly. When the* I* is transcended, selfishness vanishes with it. This is what it means to “know the good”: once it is truly known and experienced, evil can no longer be done. Those who act wrongly act through the will of the* I* — because they remain ignorant of the pure consciousness that is their real Self.
The three fundamental sayings of Socrates — “I know that I know nothing,” “Know thyself,” and “Who knows the good does not do evil” — are therefore not three isolated ideas joined by chance or by some superficial resemblance in Socrates’ mind, as philosophers and would-be philosophers suppose, but rather three expressions of one and the same understanding of reality and of human nature.