Prateek Tanmay
4 min readUpdated: Jul 26, 2026 08:43 AM IST
Socrates’s life was as remarkable as his death. He claimed to know nothing, walked barefoot, liked being the target of comedians, mesmerised young philosophers and infuriated those in power. His ability to reason had the effect of a sting ray. He described himself as a gadfly and a midwife. He had no ideas of his own but could give birth to the ideas of others. He accepted the death sentence awarded to him by the Athenian court with equanimity. He refused to leave the prison and run away when Crito offered him the chance to do so.
Our knowledge of Socrates is circumscribed by the people who wrote about him. Our information comes from three sources: Xenophon, not a well-regarded historian; Aristophanes, an acerbic satirist; and Plato, who puts his own words into Socrates’ mouth. The three do not necessarily give the same information. One option might be to reconstruct Socrates’ life and write a biography of him, as some have tried. The other is to present the Greek philosopher through the flowing pens of those who wrote about him.
Socrates: The Barefoot Philosopher by Vijay Tankha, former head of Department of Philosophy at St. Stephen’s, uses the latter approach to great effect. It presents Socrates as how his contemporaries and later biographers saw him. The reader is presented with tracts of writing from Diogenes Laertius, Xenophon, Plato and Aristophanes, ordered by first presenting Socrates’s unusual attributes — his marked ugliness, his bravery in battle, his love of Athens, his closeness to the strikingly beautiful man Alcibiades, his ironic stance — and later, by delving gently into philosophical issues. Not only does it present a livelier Socrates but it is also an entertaining introduction to the subject of Philosophy.
Socrates was confident of certain beliefs he held, received with either puzzlement or just amazement by his dazzled interlocutors: that virtue is knowledge, that doing harm is much worse than suffering harm, that we sometimes choose to act against our best interest not because passion misleads us but because we are ignorant, and that no man does wrong knowingly. Socratic argument is troublesome because it uses familiar examples to make a paradoxical belief look obvious. The book, by selecting passages from the dialogues of Plato — Meno, Gorgias, Protagoras, Euthyphro — gives us a flavour of the way Socrates argued.
Socrates’s main target was to show that his interlocutors simply did not know what they were talking about. The admirers of Socrates, not a small crowd, enjoyed this cross examination but the victims did not. The book, thankfully, does not harp much on the Socratic slogan — “Know thyself” — as it can have misleading connotations. Tankha makes it clear that Socrates need not have believed in the immortality of soul, contrary to common perception. The passages from Aristophanes’s The Clouds are delightful, with Socrates being lampooned for his interest in nature and his way with words.
The portrait of Socrates that emerges from this book is one we expected but did not know how to put into words: a Socrates that is endearing, baffling and maddening; one who taught us to love reason, control our passions, and take care of ourselves in that peculiar way that only Socrates knew.
(Bhowmick teaches Philosophy at University of Delhi)
