The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (5 page)

By the time Socrates was in his late thirties he seems to have gathered a following of young Athenians intrigued by his person and his quizzical view of life. They were so impressed that one of them, the impetuous young Chaerephon, actually went to Delphi (as Plato and Xenophon report) to ask the oracle, “Is anyone wiser than Socrates?” Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, responded that no one was. The Greek oracles, like the Hebrew prophets, spoke for the god. But, unlike the Hebrew prophets, the Delphic oracle—the Pythian priestess speaking for Apollo—had a reputation for wanting to please its clients. It would leave the suppliant to riddle out his own preferred meaning. The wise worshipper would not jump to conclusions. So, when the Athenians asked how to find safety against an impending Persian invasion, they were advised to seek the safety of a “wooden wall.” After the meaning was debated at length, Themistocles’ interpretation was accepted—that the god meant the bulwark of a strong navy. In Socrates’ case, too, the oracle might have meant the obvious—that Socrates was indeed the wisest of men. Or it might have carried the god’s message that no one was wiser than Socrates simply because wisdom was not to be found among men.

In any event, Socrates called the oracle’s message the turning point in his life. As Plato reports Socrates’ words in the
Apology:

When I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can the god mean? and what is the interpretation of his riddle? for I know that I have no wisdom, small or great. What then can he mean when he says that I am the wisest of men? And yet he is a god, and cannot lie; that would be against his nature. After long consideration, I thought of a method of trying the question. I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I should say to him, “Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said that I was the wisest.” (
Apology,
Jowett trans.)

Literal-minded historians have doubted that Socrates could have reacted in this way, for he hardly showed the respect he professed for the god if he obeyed the god by trying to prove him a liar.

In fact, as Socrates himself explained, it was his effort to disprove the oracle that made him the host of enemies who eventually brought on his fatal trial. He went about interviewing Athenians in all walks of life. He first interviewed a politician who had a reputation for wisdom.

When I began to talk to him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have the slight advantage of him. Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions to wisdom, and my conclusion was exactly the same. Whereupon I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him. (
Apology,
Jowett trans.)

Socrates went to the poets. To his astonishment he found “that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.” When he consulted the artisans he found that they did know many fine things of which he was ignorant. But they fell into the same error as the poets: “because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.” So his inquisitions multiplied his enemies.

But even some of his devoted disciples questioned the effectiveness of his educational technique. An ardent admirer, Antisthenes (c. 445-360 B.C.), founder of the Cynic school of philosophy, embarrassed Socrates. He asked why, if Socrates really believed women to be just as educable as men, he was unable to improve the temperament of his wife, Xanthippe, reputedly “the most troublesome woman of all time.” By this woman whose name would become a byword for the shrew, Socrates had had three sons. Through the wine haze of the symposium, Socrates good-naturedly retorted that it was precisely because of her reputation that he had married her—to test his educative talents. Just as a horse trainer shows his mettle not by handling a docile animal, so, he said, if he could tame Xanthippe he would have proved there was no one he could not mollify.

These interviews persuaded Socrates that he had found the true meaning of the Delphic oracle: “He [the Delphic oracle] is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing” (
Apology
). So it became his vocation to vindicate the oracle by quizzing people of all sorts, and showing them that they were not as wise as they thought they were. And he explained that he had no time for public affairs or for any concern of his own, and remained in poverty by his devotion to the god. Aristotle, perhaps deliberately to discredit Plato’s dramatic tale in the
Apology,
was reported to offer a much simpler explanation. He suggested it was Socrates’ own visit to Delphi, where he was impressed by the inscription “Know Thyself” carved on the temple there, that inspired him to pursue his studies of the nature of man.

*                  *                  *

Whatever may have been the impulse, Socrates’ historic mission was the discovery of ignorance. As a young man he seems to have shared the physicists’ interest in nature. But this interest dimmed as he saw that their cosmologies spawned a chaos of contradictory oversimplifications. And meanwhile the Sophists—like Protagoras and Gorgias and others—prospered not as a school of philosophy but as teachers of the arts of persuasion and the way to success. Protagoras said he taught “virtue,” by which he meant the arts of succeeding in his conventional world. His famous motto “Man is the measure of all things,” which has become a slogan of latter-day humanism, seems to have carried a different message for him. It then expressed his doubts of the authority of the gods, and affirmed a relativism that made it man’s highest duty to obey the prevailing rules of his community. Gorgias was celebrated for developing the arts of rhetoric and persuasive oratory, which burgeoned with the rise of the democratic party in Athens. In these unhappy years of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), the people of Athens suffered a disastrous plague (430-429 B.C.) along with military defeat and the treachery of trusted leaders. With Athens’ decline from the self-confident age of Pericles (c. 460-429 B.C.), the Sophists were only another symptom of cynicism and the distrust of absolutes. The god of success could not satisfy a society that had so conspicuously failed in its long battle for empire. Was there, perhaps, some way of thought, some instrument, some resource, that transcended the whims of the populace or the conceit of politicians? Could the questing mind, cleansed of pride, at least find a way to knowledge that might be the highest, permanent good? Meanwhile, could the seeking itself be a solace?

In later years a number of doctrines were fathered on Socrates. One was the doctrine of forms (or ideas), which Plato attributed to him and on which Plato built his own philosophy. This was the notion that behind every term like beauty or goodness lay the pure and changeless form of an idea, accessible not to the senses but only to the mind. What the senses perceived, then, seemed real only because they somehow participated in that ideal form. Aristotle also made Socrates the founder of logic. “For two things may be fairly ascribed to Socrates—inductive arguments and universal definition, both of which are concerned with the starting point of science.” Still Aristotle himself doubted the applicability of scientific method to ethics. And competing schools of philosophy would grow out of both the doctrine of forms and the methods of Socratic logic. Socrates’ own contribution to these ideas would be long debated and disputed. But Socrates would survive as the discoverer of ignorance, the patron saint of self-scrutiny.

Despite the sanctity of the Word, the Seekers who left the most durable imprint on Western history are those who embodied the mystery of their achievement in their lives—and their deaths. The message of Jesus was less in what he said than in his life and Crucifixion, his martyrdom for human “salvation.” The words of sacred Scripture would be endlessly debated. What preserved a single Christian tradition was a Man on the Cross. Similarly, the message of Socrates was not in what he taught, but in how he urged men to seek, dramatized in his life and martyrdom. Plato was astonished at Socrates’ “absolute unlikeness to any human being that is or ever has been.” His final affirmation at his trial was “that the unexamined life is not worth living.” So he set us on a philosophic path where the effort of thought was justified not by the finding but by the seeking.

This elusiveness justified Socrates’ repeated claim that he, one of history’s most influential teachers, was not a teacher at all but only a kind of midwife. “I have never been the teacher of anyone whatsoever.” The ambiguity of his martyrdom becomes more tantalizing with the centuries. Precisely why was he sentenced to death, and why did he choose death over flight?

The trial of Socrates was embodied in the turbulent Athens of the fifth century. We have already seen enough of Socrates’ life to explain the hostility of powerful Athenians. Socrates was a friend of Critias, the unscrupulous leader of the Thirty Tyrants who brought a reign of terror in 404, the year of Athens’ surrender to Sparta. But Socrates had earned the enmity of the Thirty Tyrants by refusing to go along with their acts of judicial murder. He was also a friend of the traitor Alcibiades, who was thought responsible for the fall of Athens. But he had also been a critic of the democratic constitution, which had now taken over. Socrates was caught in the crossfire. “It was not surprising,” Plato reported, “that in a period of revolution excessive penalties were inflicted by some persons on political opponents. . . . some of those in power brought my friend Socrates . . . to trial before a court of law, laying a most iniquitous charge against him and one most inappropriate in his case; for it was on a charge of impiety that some of them prosecuted and others condemned and executed the very man who would not participate in the iniquitous arrest of one of the friends of the party then in exile, at the time when they themselves were in exile and misfortune.”

The indictment, as Xenophon reports, declared Socrates “guilty of refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the State and introducing other, new divinities. He is also guilty of corrupting the youth. The penalty demanded is death.” The chief accuser, Meletus, was, according to Socrates, “an unknown young man with straight hair and a skimpy beard,” who seems to have been used by Anytus, a powerful democratic politician. But the recent democratic amnesty forbade political charges. Meletus was probably chosen by Anytus for his conspicuous religious enthusiasm. In that same year Meletus initiated another “religious” prosecution with a speech that survives as a rare voice from antiquity of religious fanaticism.

Since Socrates was no enthusiast for democracy, he was a natural enemy of the party in power in 399 B.C., the year of his trial. He denied that he had taught strange gods. But his own speech at the trial explained why he could have been called the “corrupter of youth.”

Young men of the richer classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine others; there are plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing; and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me: This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth! . . . for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected—which is the truth. (
Apology
)

After conviction, the court did not have to accept the penalty prescribed by the prosecutor. The accused himself could suggest a lighter penalty. And the prosecutors seem to have expected or even hoped that Socrates would propose banishment, which the court would have accepted, and so relieved them of the guilt of murder.

Socrates would have none of this, as Plato reports. Instead of asking for mercy, Socrates flaunted his uncanny talent for irritating. Which helps us understand the impatience with his character expressed by acute historians. “The more I read about him,” Lord Macaulay declared, “the less I wonder why they poisoned him.” Socrates demanded a reward for all he had done for Athens. Like the Olympic winners and others who had brought glory to the city, should not he too be given free meals in the Town Hall? Still he would not refuse to pay a fine, which his supporters had already agreed to raise for him. By Xenophon’s different account Socrates showed his contempt by not offering any alternative to execution. He also refused the offer of his friend Crito to help him escape prison and leave the country. He would not think of his own life or his children first, and justice afterward. He would not violate the laws of the city that had nurtured him. “Now you depart in innocence,” Socrates reported hearing the voice of the laws of Athens, “a sufferer and not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws but of men. But if you go forth, returning evil for evil, and injury for injury, breaking the covenants and agreements which you have made with us, and wronging those whom you ought least of all to wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country and us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will receive you as an enemy” (
Crito,
Jowett trans.).