Before Socrates, the Greek word for soul, psyché, did not designate almost anything of what we associate with it today. It was mostly the breath that animates the body and leaves it at the moment of death, a kind of pale shadow, with no moral weight. It was Socrates who made that word mean something else, and the change is large enough to be called an invention.
What existed before the word changed meaning
In a Homeric world, the psyché is what remains of a warrior after he dies: a faint image, an echo of the body, with no living memory or will of its own. It does not think, does not choose, does not get better or worse. It is minimal presence, almost absence.
Socrates inherits that word and transforms it. With him, psyché comes to name the part of you that thinks and decides, and that gets better or worse depending on what you do. In other words: there is a part of you that matters more than the rest, it grows sick without anything showing on the outside, and it responds to treatment.
An accusation in the shape of a question
Walking through the city, Socrates repeated to everyone he met an accusation disguised as a question. Are you not ashamed, he would say, to care so much about money and honors, and so little about your own soul, so that it may be in the best possible state? The Greek expression for this exhortation is epiméleia tês psychês, the care of the soul, and it is in the Apology, 29d.
The weight of the phrase only becomes clear once you remember where it was said: not in some calm treatise, but in the middle of a trial where the speaker's own life was on the line. Socrates was demanding from others exactly what he was, right there, willing to sustain with his own life.
Why this changes what a person is
If there is something in you that can get better or worse, and that grows sick without visible symptoms, then caring for oneself stops being only about the body, one's wealth, or one's reputation. A second object of care comes to exist, invisible, and for Socrates more important than the other two combined. That is why he could say, without empty rhetoric, that wealth does not produce virtue, but virtue is what produces wealth and all other goods.
The image of the midwife, inherited from Socrates' own mother, Phaenarete, helps explain why this care is never solitary. In the Theaetetus, he describes his own craft in these words: "my art of midwifery has everything else in common with that of women, and differs only in that it attends to souls, and not to bodies" (Plato, Theaetetus, 150b, our rendering from the Portuguese edition translated by Carlos Alberto Nunes, in As Grandes Obras de Platão). The soul that needs care does not examine itself in silence: it needs someone from the outside, asking the right question.
Note that this part of you Socrates describes is not what we would today call personality, nor the set of feelings a person carries. It is narrower and more serious than that: it is the capacity to correctly judge what is good, the same capacity that, according to the Socratic thesis that virtue is knowledge, decides whether a life turns out good or bad. Caring for the soul and examining one's own life, in this sense, are the same gesture described from two angles.
What remained after him
All the tradition that came after, including the Christian one, would work within this idea: that there exists, in every person, something that thinks, decides, and can grow sick without anyone on the outside noticing. The word psyché was born nearly empty, an echo with no weight. It gained the weight it still carries today in the mouth of a man who never wrote a line, barefoot, in an Athenian square, asking strangers whether they cared for themselves.
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What did Socrates mean by care of the soul?
He went around the city asking people whether they were not ashamed to care so much for money and honors, and so little for their own soul. The Greek for this is epiméleia tês psychês, the care of the soul, and it is in the Apology, 29d. The idea is that there is a part of you that matters more than the rest, and that gets better or worse depending on what you do.
How was psyché understood before Socrates?
Mostly as the breath that animates the body and leaves it at death, a kind of pale shadow, with little moral weight. Before him, it was not the place where one thinks, decides, and forms one's character.
What does epiméleia tês psychês mean?
Literally, care of the soul. It is the expression Socrates uses in the Apology to describe his own mission: to make every person he met realize that something more important than wealth or reputation existed within them, and that this something responded to treatment.
Continue: Apology of Socrates: the unexamined life · The Daimonion of Socrates · Saint Socrates, Pray for Us: Erasmus' Praise · Primaticcio painted the end of the Odyssey as a talk
Source class: Sócrates e o conhece-te a ti mesmo: autoconhecimento, virtude e maiêutica