It’s well-known that Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.), Classical Greek philosopher, who is considered to has laid the foundation for the entire Western philosophy, was convicted and sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and announcing himself having doubts about the democracy as an effective form of government, as well as about the authority of city religious system (C. D. C. Reeve p. ix). Was Socrates an enemy of the state? As far as I understand, enemy is someone not simply opposing generally accepted believes and opinions, not someone proposing the possible need for thinking over how successful and beneficial the present political and religious persuasions are. Being enemy is being hateful, harmful or damaging, competing and fighting against one’s rival. Being an enemy of the state is actually considering your state to be your rival. Was Socrates active and hostile in his striving to establish own ideas as those dictating other people’s lifestyles?  He was indeed a controversial political figure, but his teachings were not rebellious, obviously he wasn’t determined to overthrow democratic leaders that actually represented the “state”, or to persecute people for the religious believes he considered to be questionable; he only wanted to make people think.

While asking numerous controversial questions, he never claimed to know the right answers. His methodology for engaging young citizens of Athens into a philosophic dialog was aimed at making them ponder on widespread opinions that they often accepted without actual thinking. Plato in his “The Apology of Socrates” (C. D. C. Reeve p. 26) presents Socrates’ self-justification speech, in which the philosopher tells his own story of why he is perceived as an enemy. He assigns his accusers’ hatred to the fact that he has made them all look foolish. “Where wisdom is concerned, those who had the best reputations were practically the most deficient, whereas men who were thought to be their inferiors were much better off” he states, referring to his own investigation of whether the men who are considered to be wise are wise indeed (C. D. C. Reeve p.34). In the Plato’s Apology Socrates proved his superiority over other men by acknowledging own lack of wisdom: “It seems that I’m wiser than he in just this one small way: that what I don’t know I don’t think I know” (C. D. C. Reeve p.33).

According to Plato, Socrates’ aim was to establish justice by irritating the ruling bodies of present political system. He was in constant search for goodness, not claiming to know exactly what is truly good. Charge against him is cited by Plato: “Socrates commits injustice and is a busybody, in that he investigates the things beneath the earth and in the heavens, makes the weaker argument the stronger, and teaches these things to others” (C. D. C. Reeve p. 29). The mere formulation of the accusation makes it obvious that there’s no reasonable cause for death sentence. Does being curious make you an enemy of society? Is searching for answers to universal never-ending questions about sense of life a crime? I doubt so.