Socrates is such an extraordinary philosopher that the details of his life and biography seem to reveal to us the secrets of his teachings. Even its origin is in a sense symbolic. As the son of an Athenian mason and midwife, the thinker seemed to continue the work of obstetric care, which his mother was engaged in, only in the field of spiritual culture. It is not without reason that Socrates’s method is called maeutics (translated from Greek as “midwife art”). The first Athenian philosopher in history, Socrates was ugly, but he extremely attracted people; From a young age he had a sensual character, but overcame it. According to legend, the philosopher tolerated his quarrelsome wife Xanthippus in order to learn humility. His life passed in a rather stormy era for the Athenian state - the period of the Peloponnesian Wars.
The method of Socrates was presented by him publicly in 399 BC, in the presence of many students. First of all, he quite sharply opposed the rhetoric of the sophists, substantiating the thesis that there is no truth, but there are only different opinions, and claiming that everything is relative. In addition to the fact that “a person measures everything according to his taste”, as Socrates said, there is also an objective factor that is a judge of the subjective - this is Reason. It is thanks to Reason that one can approach the Truth. The guarantor of such an approach is Daimonion (inner voice, conscience), which has a divine origin and represents a divine spark in a person.
We can say that the method of Socrates was embodied by the life of a philosopher. For him, again, unlike the sophists, thinking was not a discourse on wisdom, but love for it (“philo-sophia” in Greek). But this love is embodied in a moral moral life. Therefore, the main thing in philosophy is not ontology, but ethics, not space, but man, not where everything came from, but how to live correctly. Therefore, knowledge for Socrates is primarily ethical. Sophists, according to the thinker, were right in that knowledge in the field of ontology is just opinions. And in this sense, we can safely say that the only knowledge is that in reality a person does not know anything.
Socrates' philosophical views in the field of ethics and epistemology actually came down to one phrase - you need to know yourself. No wonder these words were carved above the entrance to the temple of Apollo in the famous shrine of the ancient world - Delphi. Cognition is the process of searching for the essence, the discovery of the universal, characteristic of diverse things, the method of induction. But it is applicable only in the field of ethics and self-knowledge, because only such knowledge leads to self-improvement and the development of virtues. There are three most important and necessary virtues for a person - restraint, courage and justice. Being a rationalist, Socrates believed that the knowledge of virtues in itself leads to them, because, despite his egoism, man is by nature a moral being, and the common goal of people with a practical mind is an absolute (joint) good.
Socrates' method is a kind of dialectic of the study of ethical problems. A versatile discussion, a debate where a particular problem arises from different, even shocking and unexpected, points of view, ultimately leads to the truth, - said the philosopher. When the interlocutor sees the contradictions, he himself moves in the direction of truth, as if a born child is moving towards the birth of the light. And this truth begins with the definition of a concept. So for the first time in the history of philosophy, it was stated that if there are no clearly defined concepts, then there is no knowledge. Since objective truth and knowledge exist for Socrates only on the moral plane, he concluded that good and evil cannot be considered relative concepts - the difference between them is absolute.
However, most contemporaries did not understand the meaning of the teachings of Socrates. He was often confused with sophists (at least Aristophanes ridiculed him in his comedies), and since the philosopher believed that he was the "gadfly" of Athenian democracy, and often criticized it (by the way, in order to improve it), he was accused in espionage, godlessness and corruption of youth. The result of the trial was a death sentence. The philosopher himself drank the poison prepared for him, saying before his death: “Asclepius I owe a rooster, ” bearing in mind that death is not for him nothing, but a recovery and transition to a better world (in ancient Greece, it was a custom to bring Asclepius to the god of healing thankful sacrifice for getting rid of the disease). The students of Socrates were Plato and Xenophon, and from their works we mainly know information about the life and thoughts of the philosopher - after all, he did not write down his ideas.
