John Stuart Blackie - Four Phases of Morals: Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism

Published by Good Press, 2019

EAN 4057664619310

Table of Contents

As there is no country which can boast the honour of possessing more names of a world-wide significance than Greece, so among those who hold this lofty position there is no name superior to Socrates, concerning whom the Delphic oracle in ancient times, and a great utilitarian authority in modern times, agree in testifying that he was the wisest of the wise Greeks.yet these negative utterances, few and far between, against the fair fame of the father of moral science, have died away almost as quickly as uttered, and are now no more heard in the grand organ-swell of the general admiration of more than two thousand years. Unquestionably if there be any name, after the great Founder of the Christian faith, which is entitled to claim the title of a preacher of righteousness for all times and all places, it is the name of Socrates; and it is with the view of bringing his high merits in tins respect before the general public, in as easy a way as is consistent with scholarly accuracy, that I have undertaken to write the present paper.

The subject is one peculiarly attractive to a thinking man, not only on its own merits, but because of the ample and thoroughly trustworthy materials which we possess for forming a correct judgment. We are not here, as in the case of Pythagoras, sent to fish for fragments of truth among fanciful writers who lived several hundred years after the death of the object of their transcendental laudations; but, as in the gospel history, we have to deal with the intimate disciples and daily companions of the great hero of the story. We gather our knowledge of the life and philosophy of Socrates from Xenophon and Plato, both of whom have reported their intercourse with the philosopher in a tone of mingled admiration and sobriety which leaves no ground for suspicion. Only with regard to Plato we must take with us this caution, that he was both a poet by temperament and by mental habit a system-builder; and, as he chose to set forth his own speculations in a series of dramatic dialogues wherein Socrates is the chief speaker, we must beware of accepting, as standing on one common basis, the facts with regard to the life of Socrates brought forward in these compositions and the doctrines which are put into his mouth. With regard to the former, we may accept Platos evidence as a contemporary authority with the utmost confidence; with regard to the latter, we must be constantly on our guard; and indeed, according to my view, it is wise never to accept any statement of Socratess doctrine from Plato, of which the germ at least does not lie plainly in Xenophon. For Xenophon, just because he was a less original man than Plato, a pleasing and graceful writer, somewhat on the level of our Addison, was for that reason free from the temptation, or rather had not the capacity, to interpolate anything into his account of the philosopher which was not consistent with the actual fact. He was a plain man, with no theories to support, and no pretensions to maintain; and as a faithful contemporary recorder of what he heard and saw, a more capable and trustworthy witness could not be desired. We shall therefore draw our sketch of the life and sayings of the great Athenian preacher mainly from his pleasant little book, introducing the idealist of the Academy only where he cannot be suspected of using his revered master as a mere dramatic engine, or where his superior literary powers have enabled him to paint a more effective picture.

The age of Socrates was the age of Pericles, the culminating epoch of Athenian glory; he was contemporary with Euripides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Aristophanes, Phidias; but, while he shared all the elevating influences of this ascendant age, growing with its growth and blossoming with its blossom, he was not spared the sorrow of quitting the scene beneath the first dark shadows of its decay. That military ambition which is as much the besetting sin of democracy as of autocracy, had precipitated the Athenians, during the latter part of the fifth century before Christ, into a distant expedition which crippled their energies and exhausted their resources; all this, and certain violent revolutionary changes which arose out of it, Socrates had to live through, till at last, a few years before his death, he saw the pride of Periclean Athens laid prostrate at the feet of Lysander and the rude oligarchy of Lacedmon. He was born in the year 469 B.C., eleven years after the naval battle of Salamis which freed Europe for ever from the apprehension of Asiatic servitude, exactly at the time when the brilliant but sober policy of Pericles commenced its long period of happy sway over the fortunes of the Athenian state. At this time Simonides and the other great poets who had seen and sung the glorious victories of Marathon and Salamis were swiftly departing from the scene; but the memory of those patriotic achievements still burned vigorously in every Athenian breast, and conspired, with the birth of new and ambitious intellectual aspirations, to surround the youth of the philosopher with an atmosphere the most favourable to social and intellectual progress. The importance which the achievements of the democracy at Marathon and Salamis gave to the middle and lower classes of society at Athens, broke down the barriers which ancient aristocratic exclusiveness might have raised against the pretensions of mere character without position; so that Socrates, though the son of a stone-cutter, and not, like Plato, drawing his blood from the old Attic aristocracy, seems to have found free entrance into the society of the most distinguished public and literary men of his age. His mother, as he himself took care to inform the world, was a right worthy and worshipful , or lady-obstetrician; a wise woman, as the French say, in matters where it seems most natural that women should be specially wise; her name was Phnarete; but in social position, according to our aristocratic way of talking, she was nobody. What Socratess own profession was, or how he supported himself, a very important point in the history of all public men, we unfortunately do not know exactly; that he practised stone-cutting in his early years is not improbable; and this may have given rise to the belief mentioned by Pausanias, that a group of the Graces at the entrance of the Propyla was his work; but there is not the slightest indication either in Xenophon or Plato that he continued to practise this art, or any other art, in after life. He had therefore no profession; and, as he made no money by his philosophy, we must believe that he had been left some small competence by his father, or some relation, on which he was content to live. That he was extremely poor we know, both from Xenophon and from his own account of himself before the jury at his trial. We know also that his habits of life were remarkably plain and frugal, that he required little money, and coveted none. That he was in a position to have made money if he had chosen there can be no doubt; but he expressly states that he had relinquished all projects for increasing his income, in order that he might devote himself without distraction to the great work of his life. However, with his philosophical notions about mere external grandeur, he seems to have been rich enough to live comfortably with a wife and family. This wife was the noted Xanthippe, not always the most pleasant companion, and, perhaps not altogether without reason, from her point of view, at variance with a husband who showed such utter indifference to worldly aggrandizement and domestic display; but for this touch of sharpness in the temper only, as he argued, the better fitted to be the wife of a philosopher, or to make a philosopher of her husband; for, as men who wish to learn to ride do not choose the meekest and most docile beast that they can find, but the most spirited, so the husband who wishes to rule a wife well should have such an one as it is not easy but difficult to control. This character of the philosophers wife rests on the authority of Xenophon; Plato nowhere alludes to it; and whatever her temper might have been, Socrates certainly did not consider it so bad as to justify his sons in withholding from her the usual love and reverence due from children to their parents; for you may be sure, he said, if she is a little cross sometimes, it is for your good; and there is a reason in her objurgations which a wise son ought to acknowledge.