Philosophy Minus Socrates: What If Socrates Had Never Existed?

(The School of Athens by Raphael, minus Socrates.)

One of my favorite comics is Garfield Minus Garfield, a clever derivative of the well-known comic strip Garfield, but with its titular character removed. Although I am a lifelong fan of Garfield, seeing Garfield Minus Garfield reveals some hidden depth to Jim Davis’s original creation, namely exactly how incredibly neurotic the human character of Jon Arbuckle really is upon the realization that Garfield the cat never actually speaks to Jon; all of Garfield’s words are mere thought bubbles. Thus, Jon was talking to himself throughout the entirety of Garfield, a fact which I had never noticed until seeing the hidden weirdness and neurosis of Jon Arbuckle exposed and laid bare for us to see and appreciate by Dan Walsh, the accidental genius behind Garfield Meets Garfield, however derivative it might be of the original Garfield comic strip by Jim Davis.

Reflecting on Garfield Minus Garfield got me thinking about philosophy’s own central figure, Socrates. What would the history of philosophy look like to us today if Socrates had never existed? Although the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales is generally accepted to be the first philosopher, the history of philosophy largely begins, at least for the purposes of the average Introduction to Philosophy course, with Socrates, as recounted in the Socratic dialogues by his student Plato. The central questions of philosophy—questions about metaphysics (the nature of reality), epistemology (the nature of knowledge), and ethics (the nature or morality and virtue)—had been discussed by several pre-Socratic philosophers, but as a matter of historical contingency it happened to have been Socrates, through Plato’s dialogues, who frames those questions in a systematic way in what is generally considered properly philosophical (despite the many misgivings one might have about this narrow view of what counts as philosophical in general).

(The hidden neuroses of Jon Arbuckle are laid bare in Garfield Minus Garfield.)

Unquestionably the entire historical canon of Western philosophy would have been different had Socrates not existed, leaving a philosophical vacuum that perhaps others might have filled. After all, without Socrates there would have been no Plato, no Aristotle (at least not as we know them today), no neoplatonism and its subsequent influence on Christian theologians like Thomas Aquinas, and even no subsequent postmodern/historicist backlash against the philosophical quest for universal ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical concepts, essences, and principles. Needless to say, this hypothetical, counterfactual history of Philosophy Minus Socrates wouldn’t just look slightly different from the actual history of philosophy; it would look radically different, perhaps wholly unfamiliar, to us today.

Interestingly enough, philosophical questions and their potential answers don’t actually depend on Socrates, or so it seems. After all, if at least some philosophical questions have answers that are universally true, then it wouldn’t matter who introduced us to those questions historically, and it wouldn’t matter what some random dirty guy from Athens had to say about those questions 2,500 years ago. It is an interesting question, though, to what extent Socrates helped define philosophical questions themselves and to what extent substantively different philosophical questions would have emerged in his absence, similar to the substantive differences between Western philosophy and various forms of non-Western philosophy as a result of historical and cultural differences that influenced how philosophical questions and issues themselves get framed and approached by philosophers in the various traditions.

One might argue that even if Socrates and Plato hadn’t introduced us to the concept of Forms, for example, someone else would have picked up on this concept from its predecessor, Pythagoreanism, and presented us with a theory of Forms that is similar to Plato’s theory of Forms in substance, if not in style. One could easily imagine this counterfactual history of Philosophy Minus Socrates being not altogether different from the actual history of philosophy but with different figures introducing us to philosophical questions and to the range of possible answers and approaches to answering those questions. Perhaps the field of possible philosophical approaches has been so fully explored, so fleshed out, after 2,500 years that any possible approach to philosophy and any possible answer to philosophical questions have already been explored, would already be familiar to us, at least in principle and in kind.

Is there thus a kind of historical and intellectual necessity to the overall progression of the history of philosophy, a teleology, so to speak, that itself isn’t contingent on the historical figure of Socrates in particular? Socrates himself is likely rolling over in his grave, and Plato perhaps more so, at the thought that all of philosophy hinges on himself, given both Socrates’s and Plato’s disposition to treat answers to philosophical questions as objectively true, and the Forms for Plato as ontologically real, whether or not Socrates himself ever existed. So we have good reason to think that we would have a very familiar history of philosophy even without Socrates’s words and Plato’s dialogues to frame philosophical questions a certain way and to provide us with the concept of Forms as the branching off point for so many other approaches to philosophy, from Aristotle onward.

Perhaps, though, the notion that philosophy as we know it would still exist in some relatively familiar form, even without Socrates as its originary figure, doesn’t do justice to the actual history of philosophy. After all, the history of philosophy is also the history of ever-novel ideas put forth by each notable figure in the history of philosophy, ideas that perhaps couldn’t have been anticipated by any of those philosophers’ forerunners. From Socrates and Plato alone one might never have anticipated or predicted Hegel’s concept of Geist, for example, or Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, or Baudrillard’s concept of the Hyperreal. So it is an open question whether the history and progression of philosophy is one of necessity, being familiar in form and structure even if the historically contingent person of Socrates had never existed, or whether the history and progression of philosophy are the story of emergent novelty to the point where the very nature of philosophy itself might be radically different without Socrates and his champion Plato to frame it in a particular way for us from the very beginning.

Perhaps Philosophy Minus Socrates would have given other branches of philosophy, from Epicureanism to Stoicism to Pythagoreanism to Heracliteanism, a longer time in the sun then they ever had—or could have had!—with the rise in prominence of Socrates and his lot. Would another philosophical guru have risen to the occasion to fill the historical void that would have been left without Socrates to fill it? It’s interesting to wonder why philosophy even needs a guru like Socrates in the first place, especially given Socrates’s and Plato’s own view that the answers to philosophical questions are themselves universal and not historically contingent, especially on any one person, even such a notable person as Socrates. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida points out, this is related to Socrates’s own distaste for writing, which Socrates likens to a kind of drug (see “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination by Jacques Derrida). Perhaps Socrates was aware of the danger of anchoring philosophy to himself in particular, even despite the cunning with which he wrote himself into the history of philosophy by being a philosophical martyr, as commentators like Nietzsche have pointed out about Socrates’s own potential motivations for being so willing to accept his death sentence and to drink the hemlock so gleefully, as recounted in Plato’s Phaedo dialogue.

Perhaps this need for a philosophical guru, some originary figure whose approach to philosophy sets the boundary conditions for all philosophers and all philosophy to follow, has even held back the human spirit, in some Nietzschean sense, as it relates to the inherent novelty one sees peeking through in the actual history of philosophy, sometimes even playfully so. Perhaps without Socrates—still, to this day, chiming in to tell us what philosophy is and is not—philosophy and philosophers through the ages would have had more breathing room to truly explore novel ideas without constantly being reined in by Socrates and Plato from their graves. A figure like Nietzsche, with his emphasis on radical authenticity and radical human creative potential, might thus have entered into the history of philosophy far, far earlier than happened in the actual history of philosophy, some 2,400 years after Socrates.

There is, of course, no way to know what the history of Philosophy Minus Socrates would have been. Yet reflecting on Philosophy Minus Socrates may allow us to learn something genuinely new or revealing about the actual history of philosophy, and about the nature and boundary conditions of philosophy itself, just as Garfield Minus Garfield exposes something new about Jon Arbuckle in Garfield that was not fully appreciated either by its readers or by its own creator, Jim Davis. Just as we learn how neurotic Jon Arbuckle really is in Garfield Minus Garfield, perhaps Philosophy Minus Socrates allows us to better see just how very blind, and perhaps how equally neurotic, philosophers throughout the ages have been to their own acceptance of Socrates the guru and of his stranglehold on philosophy to this very day, even given the diversity and pluralism of philosophical movements and approaches that we have all come to know and love as the actual, historically contingent history of philosophy.

Could we, perhaps, someday, even come to free ourselves from the Cult of Socrates we now know humbly and euphemistically as “philosophy,” and instead begin to explore the hidden, unexplored alleyways in the history of philosophy and human thought?—those other roads that might themselves instead have become the main thoroughfares and directions of philosophy were it not for Socrates the guru as an accident of history having laid the first cobblestones of the superhighway of philosophy that we now march upon with some false sense of philosophical progress because of our persistent gaze, explicit or implicit, back to Socrates the man as the wellspring—and the measuring stick—of what we still call “philosophy,” to this very day.