Socrates Heard a Voice
And it wasn't his conscience
We know this for sure — commentators impose the prevailing orthodoxies of their time on the ideas of other ages or cultures. This is commonly known as the fallacy of presentism.
Related to this fallacy is when the earnest beliefs of one culture are dismissed as false consciousness by another and given a functional or reductive reason for its existence. A devout Muslim will not eat pork because, in Islam, pork is deemed to be impure meat. The secular anthropologist may say the real reason for Muslims not eating pork is that pigs were impractical as livestock for the nomadic societies in which Islam initially flourished. What is lost on the anthropologist is that both ideas can be true.
I see this a lot in modern Stoicism, where Stoic proclamations about the nature of the universe and God are ignored or glossed over to make reductive readings about the “dichotomy of control”, a modern coinage that flattens down Epictetus’s ideas about human agency into a rather vapid self-help lesson.
Besides Jesus of Nazareth, the ancient figure who is most often abused with interpretative sock-puppetry and presentism is Socrates. In every age and culture there is a Socrates that suits a commentator’s narrative. There’s a conservative Socrates, a leftist Socrates, a proto-Christian Socrates, a crypto-atheist Socrates and so on and on.
Socrates is a mysterious figure, much stranger and more mysterious than we commonly assume. He spurned the deep-seated conventions of his society and exhibited extremely eccentric behaviour. He was known to stand for hours as still as a statue and he could endure extreme cold, often walking barefoot in snow. He also — shockingly for his culture — had a high opinion of women. His antics were divisive from the outset, even his comrades in arms were suspicious of his tendency to bear hardship cheerfully when he served in the Peloponnesian War.
But the “strangest” thing about Socrates is his hearing a voice. It’s reported many times by the philosopher, including at his trial, that he heard a voice that helped guide his decisions. The voice would always tell Socrates not to do something before he was about to do it, but never what he should do. If the voice remained silent, Socrates took it as tacit approval of his actions. The voice — to Socrates — was like a guardian, then, a divinity that protected Socrates from making bad decisions, even in trivial situations.
As reported by Plato in his Apology, Socrates says,
“This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.”
I put the word “strangest” in quotation marks above because I wonder if it’s really so strange to hear voices. Many people report hearing voices, from those that psychiatrists would diagnose as schizophrenic, to those having mild aural hallucinations at the moment of dropping off to sleep. The latter is very common, it happens to me often — and happened to the writer Vladimir Nabokov too, so I’m in good company. If you’re curious to know, it’s a pleasant feeling.
Recently I came across a fairly well-written but poorly researched blog post that claimed that the voice that Socrates heard, which Plato describes as a daimonion (which in modern terminology is a divinity, and not a malevolent demon) was really his conscience.
In imposing conscience on what is described as a “divinity”, the author overlooked Socrates’s own proclamations about the voice and its purpose and nature. This takes all the primary sources of Socrates — Plato and Xenophon, both of whom knew Socrates personally — to be wrong or mistaken.
The daimonion in fact bears no resemblance to moral thinking in many cases. According to Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, the daimoneon intervenes to stop Scocrates from leaving a gymnasium seemingly having the foresight that some men will soon join him. It also stopped Socrates “often in mid-sentence”, “even about trifles”, or from leaving a party so that he realised he had time to apologise for being flippant about the god Eros. These anecdotes, taken together, convey the sense that Socrates sincerely believed the voice really was supernatural in origin, one that could perhaps possess precognition.
When Socrates was sentenced to death in court, he accepted the judgement cheerfully because the daimonion hadn’t spoken.
“Hitherto the familiar oracle within me has constantly been in the habit of opposing me even about trifles, if I was going to make a slip or error about anything; and now as you see there has come upon me that which may be thought, and is generally believed to be, the last and worst evil. But the oracle made no sign of opposition, either as I was leaving my house and going out in the morning, or when I was going up into this court, or while I was speaking, at anything which I was going to say; and yet I have often been stopped in the middle of a speech; but now in nothing I either said or did touching this matter has the oracle opposed me.”
Why? Socrates goes on to claim that the daimonion’s silence is an indication that death isn’t such a bad thing, and his death sentence was in fact a good thing. This isn’t a moral conundrum, it’s a judgement that, in the eyes of the divinity, death is nothing to be afraid of.
Socrates goes on to say,
“What do I take to be the explanation of this? I will tell you. I regard this as a proof that what has happened to me is a good, and that those of us who think that death is an evil are in error. This is a great proof to me of what I am saying, for the customary sign would surely have opposed me had I been going to evil and not to good. […] I see clearly that to die and be released was better for me; and therefore the oracle gave no sign. For which reason also, I am not angry with my accusers, or my condemners; they have done me no harm, although neither of them meant to do me any good…”
The famous conclusion that Socrates comes to is that “no harm can come to a good man”. The health of his soul, or character, if you like, was more important than his physical survival. To beg for leniency or compromise his principles in negotiation would have tainted Socrates’s virtue and, by extension, his happiness.
The Abyss of the Conscience
Conscience is a folk concept that’s now generally held to mean a person’s sense of right and wrong. It’s largely mentioned as a nagging sense of guilt when we know we have done wrong (“crisis of conscience”), or to reaffirm our actions we believe to be right (“my conscience is clear”), but also in the act of moral deliberation (“wrestling with my conscience”).
This notion of conscience is trite and practically meaningless. It also reeks of moralism. It’s an idea that works on the assumption that there is objective moral good and moral bad, and our conscience — a thing that presumably resides in the mind — beckons us to do good, yet we are free to take its advice or not. Sometimes people are described as having “no conscience” which presumably makes them less human as well as less humane.
A lot of good has been written about the conscience through the ages, but the vast majority of this writing has sought to define it, not to describe its workings. So we have dozens of conflicting definitions of conscience written by greats like Aquinas and Montaigne.
And that’s the point. That there are so many definitions of conscience is a red flag in itself. “Conscience” is a term people use in day-to-day language to describe ethically-coloured reasoning. Because it’s a noun — a conscience, the conscience, her conscience — people make the mistake of thinking it’s a thing.
While we talk of “a crisis of conscience” (i.e. feeling regret) and “conscientiousness” (i.e. behaving in a more ethical way) in everyday language, we make a category mistake when we think of conscience as a thing. It would be like saying “I bought yellow for a penny”, or “I visited sadness yesterday”.
In metaphorical language, we can blur categories, so saying “I visited sadness yesterday”, which is absurd, could be taken to mean I felt sad yesterday.
This is why “conscience” being treated as a thing is so pervasive, even though it’s obviously a category error. Saying “I wrestled with my conscience” is simply saying you thought about some dilemma in a way that may have been difficult.
But to treat thinking in a certain way as a thing, when it not, is a dangerous game. It’s a dangerous game because it suggests there is some objective truth out there because it’s found in an existing thing. And as we know, all objective claims in non-objective matters are eternally contested, leaving us with no progress.
If you believe in the notion that we have a conscience, but it’s not a thing, then let me show my reasoning — Everyone who is fully human has a conscience that is “right” about right and wrong by definition, since we are always wrong to ignore it. That “always-rightness” of the conscience suggests a distinct and self-possessed part of the mind that accesses objective truth. If we were to say that conscience isn’t always right, then it renders the concept moot and therefore completely useless. Therefore, conscience is either some real discrete thing pointing to an objective truth, or it’s nothing at all, just a muddle of thinking. It can’t be the former, so must be the latter.
Of course, there’s a higher register of reasoning that supersedes on our thinking when we are challenged by a dilemma. But that reasoning isn’t a thing, it’s a process, and it’s a process as unique as the situation and context it emerges within. “Conscientious” is a more adequate term for reasoning in this way (i.e. being dilligent), and as a pattern we which we can call “conscientiousness”.
While this may seem pedantic and trivial, it underscores the most important point that I wish I could teach every child in the world — there are no such things as good and evil. There is our idea of good, and our idea of evil, and those ideas vary wildly from culture to culture, person to person, and situation to situation. There are evils, sure. There’s no evil in a generalised sense, no evil that tempts or seduces us.
Furthermore, there is only what people think of as good in a non-objective sense, as in, “that would be good” (adjective), and not as in “there is good in the world” (noun). And the most important thing to think about is what you define as “good” and whether that good is ultimately good for you.
What I’ve sketched out here is good and evil in virtue ethics, a tradition largely inspired by the words and actions of Socrates. Virtue ethics defines an evil as the absence of a good. If we aren’t courageous, we’re cowardly, and if we aren’t temperent, we’re being greedy, and so on.
Evil intentions are usually a result of misunderstanding what good is. When we attempt to grasp good as something objective and absolute, we are moralists; when we see good only as the satisfaction of our own desires, we are hedonists; when we refuse to acknowledge good, we are nihilists.
Socrates thought evil is ignorance — “nobody does wrong willingly”, and everybody is actually innocent in Socratic ethics, and the good is innate and retrievable. It’s a completely different — alien, even — understanding of morality and agency from how we typically and widely understand morality through the paradigm of conscience that is so prevalent in modernity.
It’s telling that Socrates’ daimonion never told him positively what to do. It gave him no “moral compass” or “conscience”, it merely steered him out of doing things that would hurt or deprive him in some way. It was a servant to good in the sense of personal good.
That personal good led Socrates to his own death, which he submitted to as a matter of principle. Was he right to do so? Who knows. But to him it was good, and that’s all that matters.
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for writing! Always a pleasure reading you, and inspiring!!
Thought provoking, thank you