Overview
The Life and Character of Socrates is Moses Mendelssohn’s biographical and ethical portrait of Socrates, written as a companion piece to his philosophical dialogue Phädon, or On the Immortality of the Soul. In Charles Cullen’s English translation of Phädon the piece is printed under this title in the preliminary pages, immediately before the dialogue proper, and it supplies the reader with the life story that the dialogue presumes: who Socrates was, how he lived, why he was brought to trial, and what manner of man he proved to be in the face of death. It is not itself a dialogue and not a technical treatise on the soul, but a continuous account and character-appraisal, drawing on the ancient testimony about Socrates and using him as the pattern of the philosophic life and of a rational, undogmatic piety. The piece belongs to the eighteenth-century enterprise of presenting Socrates not as a pagan curiosity but as a teacher of universal moral and religious truth: Mendelssohn characterizes him, in a phrase that has become associated with the essay, as a “citizen of the world” rather than the partisan of a particular city or cult.
The narrative follows the outline familiar from Plato, Xenophon, and the later biographical tradition. It treats Socrates’ humble origins and his early turn from speculation about nature to the examination of how one ought to live; his conviction that he had been called to the work of philosophizing by a divine mandate, and the Delphic oracle’s testimony to his wisdom; his method of questioning, by which he exposed the pretensions of those reputed wise and drew from his companions, by a kind of intellectual midwifery, the truths latent in them; his poverty, his frugality, his indifference to money and honors, and his refusal to take fees like the sophists; his conduct as a citizen and soldier, and his scrupulous obedience to the laws of Athens; his domestic circumstances; his habitual resort to irony; and his claim to be guided by a private divine sign, the daimonion, which restrained rather than prompted him.
The account then moves to the crisis of his life: the resentment his questioning provoked among politicians, poets, rhetoricians, and men of wealth; the charges of impiety and of corrupting the young brought against him by his accusers; his defense, in which he refused to abandon the philosophical life in exchange for acquittal and declined to beg or to appeal to the emotions of the jury; his condemnation; his refusal, in prison, to escape when escape was made possible for him, on the ground that a citizen owes obedience to the lawful decisions of his city; and finally his death, met with composure and with converse on the destiny of the soul—the scene that serves as the point of departure for the Phädon proper.
Beyond narration, the essay is concerned with character, and its central contention is that Socrates’ virtue was genuine and exemplary. Mendelssohn defends Socrates against the imputation of impiety and of contempt for the religion of his country, presenting him instead as a man of sincere piety whose fault, if any, lay in the ignorance and prejudice of his judges rather than in himself. The portrait holds up Socrates’ equanimity, his moral independence, his courage, his benevolence, and his unshakable devotion to truth as the fruit of reasoned conviction rather than of temperament or of superstition. The Socrates presented here is a philosopher of natural religion and universal morality, whose life and death demonstrate the power of reason to supply both a rule of conduct and consolation at the end of life—and in this way the essay prepares the reader for the conversation that follows, in which Socrates argues for the soul’s immortality.
As a companion to the dialogue, the piece also works as a bridge between ancient setting and modern argument. Mendelssohn is explicit that his Socrates is not a mere antiquarian reconstruction: the Athenian is made to speak as a philosopher of the age of Enlightenment, and the biographical sketch is meant to make that transposition plausible by showing Socrates as a man of reason and virtue rather than as a sectarian figure bound to the particular opinions of his time. The essay accordingly reads less as archival biography than as a moral portrait with a program: it sets out what the philosopher’s life and death mean as evidence for the value of a life guided by reason, and it thereby positions the reader to take up the Phädon itself.
The essay is also source-conscious in a way that serves its moral purpose. Mendelssohn does not simply harmonize the Xenophontic and Platonic portraits of Socrates; he uses their differing emphases to keep the biographical character distinct from the philosophical spokesperson. The man who obeys the laws, serves as a soldier, refuses escape, and dies calmly is presented as historically credible; the arguments about the soul are presented as the philosophical articulation of the hope and piety that this character already embodies. Socratic ignorance is accordingly read not as skepticism but as humility: the recognition of one’s own limits is the beginning of wisdom, and the elenchus is a discipline by which the interlocutor is led to examine his life rather than to acquire a system. Irony, too, is treated as pedagogical and moral rather than as mere dissimulation—it guards the inquiry against dogmatic pretension and keeps conversation directed toward self-knowledge and improvement.
The significance of the sketch lies in this combination of exemplar and argument. It offers the Enlightenment reader a Socrates whose virtue is intelligible without mystery and whose death is a rational act of trust in a providential order, and it makes the Phädon’s speculative conversation appear continuous with a life already shaped by reason and piety. The essay thus functions as more than a preface: it sets the terms on which the dialogue is to be read, asking the reader to see the argument for immortality not as an abstract metaphysical exercise but as the articulation of the hope by which Socrates lived and died.
