Socrates: Listening to Divine Voices, Listening Only to Reason, and Tragedy

     Copyright © 2023 Bruce W. Hauptli

Introduction:

In reading Plato’s accounts of Socrates’ views in the early dialogues, a “tension” emerges as the reader attempts to reconcile the character’s commitments to philosophy and to religion.  In the Apology, the Crito, and at a number of other spots, Plato’s Socrates refers to his “daimonic voice”—to a voice which he hears and which he associates with the command of a deity.  As Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith note:

at 31c7-d5 in Plato’s Apology Socrates tells the jury about the ‘something divine and spiritual’...that he has had since his childhood, which warns him away from doing what he should not do.  Both Plato and Xenophon[1] explicitly tie the second charge [against Socrates in the Apology] to this daimonion [divine voice] (Pl., Ap 31c8-d2, Euthphr. 3b5-7; Xen., Ap. 12) to which Socrates refers frequently in the accounts of both men.[2] 

Such passages can easily lead the reader to conclude that Socrates is a fundamentally pious individual—someone who does what he does because he genuinely believes that he is commanded to do so by a [or “the” deity]. 

On the other hand, Plato’s portrait of Socrates [also] clearly shows him to be someone who is primarily motivated by reason.  In his Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Gregory Vlastos offers the following translation of Crito 45b where this commitment is most clearly stated:

not now for the first time, but always, I am the sort of man who is persuaded by nothing in me except the proposition which appears to me to be best when I reason about it.[3] 

In fact, this has been the dominant interpretation of Socrates (and of Plato’s Socrates): he is, as far as it is possible to be, the consummate rational individual, and recommends that all individuals will lead better lives to the extent that they are fundamentally motivated by reason.  In light of the famous passage in the Euthyphro [10a], champions of this view challenge those championing the first one with the following challenge: “Does he believe it is right to follow the gods because they are gods, or because they are morally superior (that is because they better understand what is right)? 

Clearly, some interpretive work is required here! 

Gregory Vlastos’ “Listening Primarily To Reason” View:

Vlastos’ translation of Crito 45b sets the tone for his chapter on “Socratic Piety”[4] which he begins with the following statement:

Socrates’ commitment to reasoned argument as the final arbiter of claims to truth in the moral domain is evident throughout Plato’s Socratic dialogues.[5] 

Yet, as Vlastos notes, this “commitment” seems inconsistent with Socrates’ frequent claims that he is “obeying commands reaching him through supernatural channels.”[6]  Vlastos contends that one can not separate these strands of Socrates’ character and completely remove the religious one:

if we are to use Plato’s and Xenophon’s testimony about Socrates at all we must take it as a brute fact—as a premise fixed for us in history—that, far ahead of his time as Socrates is in so many ways, in this part of his thought he is a man of his time.  He subscribes unquestioningly to the age-old view that side by side with the physical world accessible to our senses, there exists another, populated by mysterious beings, personal like ourselves, but, unlike ourselves, having the power to invade at will the causal order to which our own actions are confined, effecting in it changes of incalculable extent to cause us great benefit, or where they choose otherwise, total devastation and ruin.[7] 

Vlastos notes that there were thinkers of the time who largely omitted the religious element from their view of the world without falling prey to social sanction (or the death penalty):

a succession of brilliant thinkers, from Anaximander [~610-~546 B.C.E.] to Democritus [~460-370 B.C.E.], had solved this problem with the utmost discretion.  From their new picture of the world they had expunged the supernatural quietly, without ever naming it in a critique....They did the job in attending to their own business of physiologia, “science of nature,” by so expanding the concept of nature as to make nature encompass all there is, thereby creating a new conception of the universe as a cosmos, a realm of all-encompassing, “necessary” order whose regularities cannot be breached by interventionist entities outside it because outside it there is nothing.  What room is there for god or gods in this new map of what there is?  For supernatural gods there is none.  For natural ones there is ample room—for gods existing not beyond nature but in it.... 

  Thus in Ionian physiologia the existence of a being bearing that name [deity] becomes optional.  What is mandatory is only that to have a place in the real world deity must be naturalized and thereby rationalized, associated with the orderliness of nature, not with breaches of its order, as it continued to be for the vast majority of Greeks.[8] 

Anaximander, for example, is said to have made the first Greek world map, first Greek star map or celestial globe, and to have invented the sundial.  According to Charles Kahn, he was the author of the first geometrical model of the universe, a model characterized not by vagueness and mystery but by visual clarity and rational proportion, and hence radically different in kind from all known “cosmologies” of earlier literature and myth.  The highly rational character of the scheme...is best indicated by Anaximander’s explanation of the earth’s stable position in the center: it remains at rest because of its equal distance from all points of the celestial circumference, having no reason to move in one direction rather than in another.  This argument from symmetry contrasts not only with all mythic views but also with the doctrine ascribed to Thales: that the earth floats on water.”[9] 

According to Vlastos, however, Socrates is not one of these thinkers.  He does not busy himself with the questions of physilogia, but, instead, confines his inquiries to the moral sphere.  Nonetheless, according to Vlastos, Socrates, like the Ionian naturalists, offered a fundamentally rational world-view of the moral sphere:

the Ionians had rationalized deity by making it natural....Socrates makes a parallel move: he rationalizes the gods by making them moral.  His gods can be both supernatural and rational so long as they are rationally moral.  This, I submit, is his program....be could, and did, produce a moral theology, investigating the concept of god no further than is needed to bring it into line with his ethical views, deriving from his new vision of human goodness norms binding on the gods themselves.[10] 

That is, Vlastos maintains that since for Socrates wisdom and knowledge are to be reflected in practical action (another way of saying that he is a moral thinker rather than a metaphysical one), the deities whose knowledge is to surpass any human knowledge, would, truly, be incapable of immoral action.  This view, no less than those of the Ionian metaphysicians, runs radically counter to the predominant Athenian and Greek views.  The familiar Greek gods are neither paragons of morality nor particularly rational!  As Vlastos notes:

to heirs of Hebraic and Christian traditions this will hardly seem a bold conclusion.  For those bred on Greek beliefs about the gods it would be shattering.  It would obliterate that whole range of divine activity which torments and destroys the innocent no less than the guilty, as careless of the moral havoc it creates, as is, for instance Hera in Greek traditional belief, who persecutes Heracles relentlessly throughout his life beginning with infancy, when she sends snakes to finish his life almost before it is started, and so repeatedly thereafter until the day of his death, when she dispatches Lyssa, the divinity of madness, to unhinge his mind so that he murders his own wife and children in a fit of insanity—all this simply because Heracles has been the offspring of one of her consort’s numerous infidelities: the calamities she contrives for Zeus’ bastard is one of the ways in which she makes the son pay for the father’s offenses....[11] 

Thus, in the Euthyphro, Socrates makes it quite clear that he believes the gods are incapable of the sorts of activities which Hera and the others are generally held to engage in all the time.  In his discussion with Euthyphro, Socrates clearly evinces his view that priests like Euthyphro could, at best, be accidentally right about what piety requires of us, if they don’t employ human reason to inquiry into what course of action is right (e.g., when one contemplates trying one’s father for murder, by appealing to the actions of the deities).  Similarly, in the Apology, when he relates the surprising statement of the Oracle at Delphi, Socrates does not counsel acceptance of the statement without question but, instead, says he subjected it to critical analysis, trying to rationally understand what the divinely-inspired statement might mean.  Vlastos contends that:

for Socrates diviners, seers, oracle-givers, poets are all in the same boat.  All of them in his view are know-nothings, or rather, worse: unaware of their sorry epistemic state [unaware that they don’t have the requisite sort of understanding], they set themselves up as repositories of wisdom emanating from a divine, all-wise source.  What they say may be true; but even when it is true, they are in no position to discern what there is in it that is true.  If their hearer were in a position to discern this, then he would have the knowledge denied to them; the knowledge would come from the application of his reason to what these people say without reason.[12] 

What, then, of Socrates’ own daimonion—does he assign it some privileged status over and above that of reason?  According to Vlastos, it provides

...a “divine sign,” which allows, indeed requires, unlimited scope for the deployment of his critical reason to extract whatever truth it can from these monitions [warnings].  Thus without any recourse to Ionian physiologia, Socrates has disarmed the irrationalist potential of the belief in supernatural gods communicating with human beings by supernatural signs.  His theory both preserves the venerable view that mantic [that is, of or pertaining to divination] experience is divinely caused and nullifies that view’s threat to the exclusive authority of reason to determine questions of truth and falsehood.[13] 

For Vlastos, then, the “tension” noted at the beginning of this supplement is resolved by appeal to a rational theology. 

A number of other scholars of Ancient Philosophy take this sort of position regarding the “tension” we are examining.  In his “The Impiety of Socrates,” M.F. Burnyeat concurs with Vlastos’ view maintaining that if we speak in terms of the conceptions of his contemporaries, then Socrates is, and is clearly, guilty of the charge of impiety:

...indeed...we shall not understand Socrates, or the enormous and permanent impact he has had on human thought, unless we realize that he was guilty of the impiety charge for which he was condemned.[14]  

His “piety,” is not only atypical of his day, but atypical within the Western tradition—it demands that one question the prevailing social mores, and that one accept only what can be rationally supported.  To the extent that this view is religious, it recommends a religion of reason, where the god(s) are rationally and religiously superior—they know and behave more rationally than we do. 

Brickhouse and Smith’s View That the Daimonion Is “Independent of Reason, But Yields Little Wisdom:”

In their Plato’s Socrates Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith maintain that at 46b where Plato’s Socrates maintains he is one who follows nothing but reason he is not claiming

…that he always follows arguments rather than the promptings of his daimonion or some other form of divination.  Divination is not what Socrates has in mind as the alternative here; rather, in this passage Socrates is contrasting the opinion of the many with reason as it is reflected by the “one who knows” and is claiming that one should always reject the former in favor of the later.  Socrates does say that he would be persuaded by nothing but logos, but why must we assume that divination would fall into some category other than persuasive logos, for Socrates and, hence that Socrates would never put his faith in divination unless he had some (other) persuasive logos to do so?  This assumption is not supported by the Crito passage, in which the reliability of justification for divination is not under consideration.  Moreover, the Crito passage in no way excludes the possibility that his daimonion’s promptings would count as a reason for Socrates to be persuaded of something. 

  Second, we must not simply assume that Socrates would consider the monitions [a warning, or caution, an admonition] of his daimonion as non-rational signs.  Indeed, surely Socrates’ responses to the daimonion clearly bespeak his recognition of this “unpredictable little beast” as providing Socrates with absolutely compelling reasons to cease and desist form the actions it opposes.[15] 

Earlier in their work Brickhouse and Smith maintain that:

when Euthyphro does speculate about the grounds for Socrates’ prosecution, he unhesitatingly locates the innovation in question not in Socrates’ moralistic conception [of the gods as thoroughly wise and moral], but rather in Socrates’ claim to have a private divine sign….On this point, the ancient authorities speak in one voice: Plato and Xenophon both clearly identify the charge of innovation as motivated not by Socrates’ ethical transformation of the gods, but rather by his claim to have a private “divine sign”—his daimonion….[16] 

They go on to note that:

Plato’s Socrates is a man convinced that human reason is faulty and that his own wisdom—unsurpassed by any other mortal’s—is “worth little or nothing,” whereas “the god is truly wise” (Ap. 23a 5-7).  This obviously suggests that insofar as Socrates thought that some claim, monition, or command came from the god, it was more dependable than any claim, monition, or command from Socrates himself or from some other human being.  So if we were to find a case in which Socrates was forced to choose between the conflicting directives of the products of his own—or any other human being’s—reasoning, on the one hand, and the monitions of his daimonion, on the other, we should expect Socrates to follow the directive of his daimonion in preference to the products of human rationalization.[17] 

But they also contend that:

once the daimonion has stopped him as he was about to do something, Socrates would plainly count his doing of that action—at the time and place in question—as unquestionably and unambiguously wrong….This leaves a good deal for Socrates to reason about: What about this act-token is wrong, or is it the act-type?  What about the current situation makes it wrong?  In what does wrongness itself consist? and so on.  The daimonion offers Socrates no rules of conduct, no general principles, no moral definitions; its activity seems always to be unexpected and it offers Socrates no explanations of its activity.  However sight the information he has received, it is enough to prevent Socrates from taking so much as another step in the undertaking he was considering.  Socrates may not know the first thing about why he has been stopped, but he seems completely and unshakably certain that he must not do what he was about to do.[18] 

Similarly, in their Socrates on Trial, Brickhouse and Smith maintain that

...when the daimonion warns him away from an action, there are at least four significant gaps in Socrates’ state of cognition: (a) Socrates does not know precisely in which aspect or aspects of the act...the wrongness lies; (b) Socrates does not know which aspect or aspects of the environment of this act...if any, contribute to the wrongness of this act...(c) Socrates does not know what it is about the elements of the act...and environment that make this act...wrong; and perhaps most importantly, (d) Socrates does not understand what it is for a thing to be good or evil, beneficial or harmful.[19] 

Thus they conclude that

once we notice how little information Socrates gets from a diamonic alarm, we can see why Socrates could never be made wise by his daimonion’s alarms.  After all, when the daimonion tells Socrates that he should desist from what he is about to do, he can be completely certain that he must not continue what he was about to do.  But this information tells him nothing about what it is that is wrong, when it is wrong, why it is wrong, and what it is to be wrong.  The god does not lie to Socrates, but does manage to tell him next to nothing through the daimonion.  What Socrates gets from his sign, therefore, is virtually worthless for the pursuit of the sorts of truth Socrates seeks philosophically—truth that explains and defines, and which thus can be applied to judgments and deliberations required for the achievement of the truly good life for men.[20] 

Roslyn Weiss and “The Voice” Is “Dependent Upon” His Reasoning:

In her Socrates Dissatisfied: An Analysis of Plato’s Crito, Roslyn Weiss maintains, somewhat differently, that:

the daimonion is not...a voice independent of Socrates’ own thinking and intuition that instructs him to contravene their guidance but rather a voice inspired by Socrates’ thinking and intuition, by beliefs that are for the moment “subconscious”—if the reader will forgive the anachronism—a voice that gives him the strength to implement these “subconscious” beliefs when he is tempted to do otherwise.  Indeed, when there is no tension between Socrates’ imminent act and his deeper sense of what is right, when Socrates has no reservations, no qualms, about the course he is about to pursue, his daimonion is silent.[21] 

On this reading the “inner voice” doesn’t have to have a religious source, but does have to have a source in rational activity. 

An Alternative Interpretation: Irony and Tragedy:

These authors provide us differing interpretations of “tension” noted above, and I largely adhere to the first sort of view, but I want to try ending this with a discussion of C.D.C. Reeve’s conclusion to his Socrates in the Apology: An Essay on Plato’s Apology of Socrates.  There he maintains that in the Apology Socrates

…presents his elenctic mission as rooted not simply in the search for knowledge of virtue, but also in the desire to serve Apollo by disabusing people of hubris.  The goal of his philosophic mission—the goal of the examined life as Socrates lives it—is not to discover craft-knowledge of virtue (which is all but impossible for humans) but to produce in himself and those he examines the amalgam of epistemic modesty [to not claim to know when one does not know] and overriding concern for virtue and the psyche that is human wisdom, and—wisdom and virtue being one—human virtue. 

  But for all that his mission originates in Apollonian injunctions, Socrates is not primarily a man of faith.  His mission is based in religion, but his religion is based in elenctic philosophy….And it is as a philosopher, albeit a religious one, that we must understand him if we are to make sense of his life as he describes it.[22] 

Partly as a result of his elenchus-based faith in Apollo, however, Socrates does not deal in a forthright way with what—for some of his contemporaries at least—seems to have been a major cause of worry about him, namely, that his young followers learned the elenchus by watching him and had a tendency to become ethical skeptics as a result.  This worry may have been justified, or it may not have been.  Without more knowledge, we simply cannot say.[23] 

Reeve notes that we can not say whether the practice of disabusing fellow citizens of their hubris lead them to the examined life or to a more entrenched dogmatism, but the tendency to focus upon his philosophic influence “is a sign of both how much we are—and how much we are not—his heirs.”[24]  But, Reeve continues, we should note that Socrates does compare himself to Achilles and Ajax (28b9-d4, and 41a8-b4) and

these are not the comparisons we expect, and yet they are curiously appropriate.  The unwillingness to yield even in the face of death, the seemingly extravagant sense of confidence and worth that would be arrogance in lesser men, the capacity to succeed in unending competition, whether brazen or elenctic, mark all three as possessors of “the heroic temper”….Achilles and Ajax are tragic figures, of course, heroes of tragedies.  But this too, is something they have in common with the philosopher who invokes their names.[25] 

As I indicated, I am strongly attracted to Vlastos' response to the tension, but am tempted to merge Reeve's response into it.  I am currently tempted to respond to the tension as follows: remember that the Socrates we have been studying in reading the Euthyphro, the Apology, and the Crito is Plato’s Socrates.  Plato was probably inclined to see what happened to the historical individual Socrates as a tragedy, and surely intended to use the many ironies in these dialogues to promote the Socratic conception of the nature and importance of living the examined life.  But Plato was no fan of relativism—instead he came to believe that the forms, which are independent, objective, unchanging, absolute, and which will also become to be transcendent, [that is, not in the changing world] were knowable, that human beings could come to know them.  If they were not, it would be tragic; and if they were subjective or relative rather than being objective, that too would be tragic. 

     Together these considerations make it plausible that Plato might have intended that the correct resolution of the “tension” to be that the life and death of Socrates was a tragedy which must be responded to by the acquisition of moral wisdom—the message delivered by this tragic hero is that we must continue the quest, acquire the knowledge of virtue, and use that knowledge to lead the good life.  The tragic warrior heroes (Achilles and Ajax) are exemplars of the archaic Geek conception of arête, but Socrates is the tragic hero of a new conception of arête which is to replace both the archaic and the (then) contemporary democratic conceptions.  The proper response, then, to the tragedy is to adopt the view that one must both be “moved only by reason,” and one must acquire the requisite wisdom to “move” oneself. 

     For those who wish to dig into the scholarly discussion I recommend the works cited in the footnotes as well as the papers in Socrates’ Divine Sign: Religion, Practice and Value in Socratic Philosophy, Pierre Destrée and Nicholas D. Smith, eds. Apeiron v. 38 (2005).  The review of the book by Nicholas Pappas in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 10/11/2005 is perhaps a good place to whet one's appetite for the volume (which I have not yet read).