The Trial and Death of Socrates in Hegel’s History of Philosophy

Abstract

Throughout the history of Western thought, all major contributions to moral and political philosophy have taken a stand in relation to the trial of Socrates. There are good reasons for this. His questioning of the accepted foundations of morality and his equation of virtue with self-knowledge rank Socrates as one of the founders of ethics as a distinct branch of human knowledge. There is, however, another reason why the trial and death of Socrates is important in Hegel’s history of philosophy. This is bound up with one of the most fundamental problems arising out of Hegel’s descriptive method: How is the world mediated through the various conceptual frameworks, or shapes of consciousness, which have appeared throughout human history? Another way of posing this problem is to ask: What is the relationship between philosophy and history? A shape of consciousness can be described as a philosophical expression of a form of life at a certain stage in its historical development. According to Hegel, philosophy is a reflection of human institutions and developments in science and culture. It follows that to speak of a shape of consciousness is to speak of both the philosophy of an epoch and its level of cultural development. In the events culminating in the trial and death of Socrates, we see one of the clearest transitional stages from one shape of consciousness to another acted out in historic reality.