by Paul Johnson
IV
Socrates the Philosophical Genius
The onset and ravages of the plague, the death of Pericles, the decline of his regime and the suspension of his cultural program, the prosecution of his leading followers, and the general malaise in Athens, had a personal effect on Socrates. They forced him to ponder seriously his function in life. He had always been a thinker and enjoyed talking and debating with fellow Athenians. But he had never had a job. Now he began to feel he had a mission. The age of Pericles had been admirable in many ways: It had encouraged architecture and building, painting and pottery, music and the theater, as well as manufacturing and commerce and the useful arts. But there was something missing. It was all very well to reiterate its slogan, “Man is the measure of all things,” and to insist that human beings were not helpless playthings of the gods but masters of their fate. But what sort of a person was man? The Pericleans were eager to improve art and technology in all their aspects, and had to a great extent succeeded in doing so. But what about improving man? Was it possible? And if so, how? It seemed to Socrates that these questions were never asked and ought to be asked.
It was not that clever and thoughtful Greeks were idle. On the contrary. They asked questions all the time. But they tended to concentrate on the world, and the distant worlds—or whatever they were—in the sky. The Greeks called it the cosmos, and enquiry centered on how it worked, cosmology, and how it was originally created, cosmogony. As a young man, Socrates engaged in such questioning himself. He inherited a considerable body of knowledge, or as he came to see, pseudo-knowledge. There were, for instance, a group of wise inquirers in Ionian Greece, to the east, especially in Miletus. Such were Thales, active around 580 B.C., over a century before Socrates, his pupil Anaximander, and his pupil Anaximenes. Thales, who was possibly a Hebrew, or Semitic, was later called by Aristotle the founder of the physical sciences. He used the Egyptian system of land measurement to invent the technique of geometry. He was said to have foretold the solar eclipse that occurred during the Battle of the Halys (May 28, 585 B.C.). He was a polymath who drew snatches of exact knowledge from the accumulated wisdom of the Semitic world, but his conjectures were eccentric. He believed, for instance, that magnets have souls. He thought the earth floated on water.
Anaximander wrote the first treatise on the cosmos, which has survived, though only in fragments. He conceived it as a unity, operating under laws, with the moon and the sun moving in cycles. He was the first to draw a map of the earth. He invented the gnomon for astronomic observation. Like Darwin, he believed that man and animals evolved. He answered the question, “If the earth rests on water, what supports the water?” by answering that it was not necessary because it lay at the center and at equal distance from everything, so was held in tension: everything is in conflict and tension, and this is the principle of universal stability, an argument often described as the first example of a priori reasoning in science. He was aware of the sheer size of things and introduced terms for “unlimited” and “the infinite.” But his follower Anaximenes rejected the water explanation and substituted air, which when dense became fire or winds or clouds and was subject to condensation. Another Easterner, Heraclitus of Ephesus, expanded the tension theory, noting that this was exactly how the bow and the lyre worked, an example of the close observation and shrewd deductions of which these early Greek philosopher-scientists were capable. To him, the principle of tension was signified by the logos, the symbol of eternity. It was also transcendent wisdom and the elemental fire. He was of royal blood but gave over the throne to his brother so he could write his Treatise, dealing with the logos. A fragment reads:
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, plenty and famine, all the opposites which sustain things. Men are foolish creatures who must subject themselves to the logos or law. . . . The people must fight for the law, as for a defensive wall, for all human laws are nourished by the divine, which is one.
He also wrote: “We ought to grasp that war is common and natural, as is justice which is strife, that all things come about in accordance with strife and what must be.” His best-known saying is “You cannot step twice into the same river.” But what does it mean? In antiquity he was known as Heraclitus the Obscure. When Euripides gave Socrates his works, Socrates commented, “What I understand is splendid. What I do not understand may be good too. But it would take a deep-sea diver to get to the bottom of it.”
On the other hand, there were the Greek seers who lived in what is now Italy and were later known as the Westerners. Parmenides and Zeno lived in Elea and were also called Eleatics. They were systematic arguers and were the first to produce the kind of consequential series of deductions that are still in use today in learned circles. Parmenides in particular invented and honed philosophic tools and reflected on the term to be—what can be known must be—and nothing else can be—all expressed in a poem set in hexameters, chunks of which survive. He was between fifty and sixty years older than Socrates. Democritus was Socrates’ contemporary, and his theory that the universe was composed of infinitely small, undifferentiated pieces of matter, which he called atoms, and that their changing positions produce the visible compounds of the world identified by our senses still holds good, in part at least. His work was typical of the way in which the early Greeks identified portions of truth, tension and atomism, for example, but mixed them with speculative ideas we find nonsensical. Democritus, for example, thought the soul was composed of fine, round atoms and was as perishable as the body. Zeno was a superb arguer but thought that, properly speaking, there was no motion and no plurality.
The Greeks had the gift of seeing concrete substances in abstract terms—hence their mastery of geometry and their complex ideas about the universe, achievements certainly denied to the Egyptians and even, on the whole, to the Hebrews. The difficulty was that they possessed neither the instrumentation nor the knack of engaging in empirical investigations. They could observe, but they did not experiment, except by accident. Pythagoras began the systematic study of numbers and, among other innovations, introduced the number ten, and in due course his work became of incalculable value to science. But when Socrates was a young man and explored, as he later said, the limits of scientific knowledge, he could not see any way of pushing them further. The cosmos was mute. It could be seen but could not speak. Above all, it could not answer questions.
That, to Socrates, was the great objection to work on the external world. He was the Great Question Master. His deepest instinct was to interrogate. The dynamic impulse within him was to ask and then use the answer to frame another question. At an early age—in his twenties, most likely—he saw that science, or the investigation of the external world, was, for him at least, unprofitable. But the investigation of the internal world of man was something he could do and wanted to do. He had always been accustomed to walk the streets of Athens, to dawdle in the Agora, to take exercise in its suburban parks and gardens, and always to study the activities of people working in these places: tanners, metalworkers, shopkeepers, water sellers, hucksters, barrow folk, scribes (for in his day professional writers were just beginning to produce scrolls for sale), and money changers. Walking to Piraeus, the port, or in the countryside surrounding Athens, he observed sailors, farmers, horse trainers, and men and women working in vineyards, olive groves, and dairies. All these people had tongues in their heads, and he gradually discovered they were happy to use them. So he asked them questions, and they answered. Neighbors and colleagues joined in. There is abundant testimony that Socrates had charm. He got on with people of all kinds and classes, from lowest to highest. He joked. He smiled. He never got angry. He was polite. He made the people he questioned, and cross-questioned, feel important, and he seemed to find their answers valuable.
Once Socrates found he could do this, his reason told him that it was his work in life. And an inner voice confirmed this. People said, “You seem to have a gift for talking to people, Socrates, and getting their op
inions. You ought to go in for public life, and stand for office.” But his inner voice said no. It never told him what to do, but it was emphatic, he said, in telling him what not to do. It counseled strongly against a political career: “My voice and my reason,” he said, “agreed against politics.” Snatches of his sayings about his work have come down to us. “I believe God ordered me to live philosophizing, examining myself and others.” “To practice philosophy has been indicated to me by God, through divination, dreams, and every other means by which divine orders have told anyone to do anything.” Of the physical sciences, he remarked “I have no share in them.” But philosophy was the theater of reason, and “I am the sort of person who is persuaded by nothing except those propositions which appear the best when I reason.”
Socrates was not the only person practicing forms of philosophy in Athens. Far from it. There was a tribe of persons who engaged in intellectual instruction, some born in Athens but others itinerant, coming from all over Magna Graecia but tending to settle in Athens because there was more money there and more young men of high or wealthy birth to engage their services. These teachers were called Sophists. They charged high fees and some became rich. They taught a variety of skills but chiefly rhetoric or the art of persuasion, equally valuable in the law court or the council chamber or the Assembly. Some were more high-minded than others, but as a class, they were far from popular. Toward the end of the century, when things went badly for Athens, they were blamed for encouraging reckless young men to go into public life and equipping them with skills that enabled them to attract followers and so get the City into trouble. Aristophanes attacked them in Clouds before he got to know Socrates, and when he thought he was one of them, a mistake made by some others. But all those who actually knew Socrates, especially if they engaged in argument with him, realized that he was not a Sophist in any sense. In the first place, he never charged fees. He did not even engage to instruct anyone particularly in anything, and “he never gave a public lecture in his life.” What he had to say he gave gratis, but in any case, as most of his time was spent asking questions, he could not easily be described as a tutor or teacher of any kind. Moreover, the last thing he wanted to impart was the basic stock-in-trade of the Sophists’ worldly wisdom, how to “get on.” What he taught, in so far as he consciously taught anything, was goodness. Aristotle, who knew all about Socrates’ work from Plato, wrote: “Socrates occupied himself with ethics, and not at all with nature as a whole.”
Far from teaching gilded youth how to dominate the Assembly or persuade Athenian voters to elect them strategos , Socrates liked to talk to people of all classes and occupations. He said, “I am a universalist,” using a word just coming into common currency. Cicero, who had read Plato but who also had access to many works lost to us, summed up Socrates better than anyone else. “Socrates,” he wrote, “was the first to call Philosophy down from the skies, and establish her in the towns, and introduce her into people’s homes, and force her to investigate ordinary life, ethics, good and evil.” To this Plutarch added: “He was the first person to demonstrate that life is open to philosophy, at all times, in every part, among all kinds of people, and in every experience and activity.” Of course, as Socrates became known, affluent young men sought him out. He was invited to symposia or dinner parties, which inevitably were attended by the well-to-do. Plato, who knew Socrates during the last ten years or so of his life, when he was a celebrity of sorts and much sought after in rich homes, tends to overemphasize this side and stage of his life, just as Boswell does of Dr. Johnson’s. In reading Plato’s record of Socrates’ dialogues, it is important to remember that Plato, an aristocrat on both sides of his family, did not share Socrates’ spirit of democratic give-and-take and classlessness. It is important to imagine Socrates arguing with ship captains in Epirus, or market-gardeners in the suburbs or men who made swords and shields in the Athenian workshops.
Socrates went about Athens talking to people, mainly asking them questions, all his life. He was always interested in trades and occupations and how they were conducted, not least in trade secrets, as they were, and are, called. No doubt his questions always began with the man’s or woman’s duties and only gradually went on to more complex matters of beliefs and morals and opinions. Like Dr. Johnson, he was extremely interested in how things were done by experts. Craftsmanship fascinated him. He accumulated a good deal of information, like Dr. Johnson, concerning products and processes. We would call this knowledge. But Socrates did not. By knowledge he meant wisdom or insight, and he always disclaimed possessing any. He seems to have felt he knew nothing about the things that really mattered. When his friend Chaerephon, while visiting the Oracle of Delphi, asked if any man was wiser than Socrates, the answer came: “There is none.” When told about this, Socrates was not flattered but puzzled. He eventually concluded that what the Oracle meant was that his wisdom consisted in knowing his own ignorance. Others, including the Sophists, had no more wisdom than he had but would not admit it. The oracular judgment had the effect of spurring him on to continue and extend his inquiries, and engage in them more seriously and systematically. In the Theaetetus Plato has Socrates—who obviously got the idea from his mother’s work—compare himself to a midwife. He cannot teach Wisdom because he has none, and he cannot give birth to Wisdom any more than he can give birth to a child. But if someone else has Wisdom within him, or her, he can assist, by his questioning, and help them to give birth to the truth they carry within their minds and hearts.
Plato called this questioning dialectic, and went on to refine and develop it himself. The usual term is elenchus, the word for the questioning the barrister offered in court to extract information from a witness who might be reluctant to give or, more likely, did not even know he possessed. Socrates’ approach to this process was ironic, a mode he invented or certainly popularized. Irony is one of the most difficult terms to define, but is almost in itself the measure of an advanced civilization: The fact that one of the best-known characters in mid-fifth-century-B.C. Athens habitually used it shows how far the Greeks had already moved in sophistication and subtlety. The Oxford English Dictionary defines irony as “A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt.” That is a fair try but actually less clear, and less succinct, than Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary: “Mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words.” He was following Quintilian, the famous first-century-A. D. Roman teacher of rhetoric: “A figure of speech in which something contrary to what is said is to be understood .” Socrates was the only person he cited as a master of the art. Macaulay, in his essay on Bacon, suggests that to witness irony you should listen to the abuse exchanged in a London traffic jam: “A drayman, in a passion, calls out ‘You are a pretty fellow,’ without suspecting he is uttering irony.” It is one of the fascinating facts about irony that it is often used instinctively by uneducated people unaware of their skill. That does not necessarily mean, unfortunately, that they recognize it when used by others. The great radical politician Aneurin Bevan once said to me, “Never use irony in politics. Whenever I have done so it has got me into trouble. A lot of your hearers always take you literally.” He added, “It makes no difference how heavy your irony is, and how obvious it is to you. It is not obvious to them.”
This was a warning Socrates might have done well to heed, for irony was a critical element in his eventual indictment and condemnation. But of course he would have taken no notice of the warning. Irony was inseparable from his intellectual personality, in public or in private. He could not function as an articulate human being without resorting to it, often. Its commonest form, in his case, was to say, “I am an ignorant fellow. I know nothing. That is why I ask so many questions.” This was a disarming tactic, whether he was in the company of clever young aristocrats or Athenian workmen. They might detect an element of i
rony but they never knew how much, and in any case they took it as a compliment. It was a sure way of getting them to open up. However, although the tactic worked with some, it failed with others. Not that they took Socrates literally. Rather, they thought him deliberately deceptive. They saw the use of irony as low cunning. It is curious that Aristophanes, who used irony himself, unaware that Socrates had started the game, in Clouds, written before he met him, never shows him using irony, except as lying. Plato, in the Republic, shows Socrates violently attacked by Thrasymachus, the Sophist, for his “habitual shamming.” He saw Socrates’ irony as a clever cover for his quite genuine ignorance or confusion and his inability to give sincere answers to perfectly proper questions. Sometimes, too, the irony was censured as mock modesty. Thus in the Gorgias dialogue of Plato, there is this exchange with Callicles. Socrates: “Since by ‘better,’ you don’t mean ‘stronger,’ tell me again what you mean. And teach me more gently, admirable man, so that I won’t run away from your school.” Callicles: ‘You are mocking me.”
Some people found Socrates’ ironic tone puzzling simply because it was part of his apparently lighthearted approach, in which quite straightforward jests and fun played a part. Alcibiades refers to Socrates’ “endless ironiz-ing and jesting.” There is a distinction here, but also a confusion. Socrates seems to have felt that another missing element in Periclean Athens was a sense of humor. Or rather, though the tragedies of the Big Three, and the comedies of Aristophanes (and others), presented the two sides of the human predicament, the distinction was too formal and absolute, as though the impresarios at the Theater of Dionysus were to say to the audience, “Today we are going to make you weep,” or “Today we are giving you a good laugh.” Whereas, Socrates felt, what was required was the ability, which he possessed, to slip deftly and almost imperceptibly from seriousness to laughter and back again—the essence of sophisticated communion.
