The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (6 page)

The inner voice on which he finally relied reassured Socrates in his submission to the death penalty. “This, dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other. . . . Leave me then, Crito, to fulfil the will of God, and to follow whither he leads” (
Crito
).

In this court of random Athenians of all stations, a shift of only thirty votes (Socrates observed) might have brought acquittal. After Socrates’ own statement, reported in Plato’s
Apology,
the court voted the death penalty by an even larger majority.

The irony of the trial and death of Socrates still challenges us. The gadfly of the state, who had repeatedly risked his life in battle for his city and then outraged citizens by asserting the superiority of individual reason over the conventional wisdom, finally gave his life in deference to the laws of his little community. It is no wonder that the trial of Socrates has become a trial of historians demanding answers where Socrates himself saw only questions. To this sanctuary of doubt, Socrates testified in his last words, reported by Plato, which could be an invocation to Western philosophy:

Still I have a favour to ask of the judges. When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing—then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your hands.
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, God only knows. (
Apology,
Jowett trans.)

The Life in the Spoken Word

The grand concepts that for the Western world would define morals, create communities, cement nations, and build empires would be the product of a small city-state. Ten men are too few for a city, Aristotle would say, “and if there are a hundred thousand it is a city no longer.” The great Athenian Empire hardly had the population of a modern city. In Pericles’ day, the whole of Attica had some 250,000 people, and Athens had about 80,000, who were reduced by the Great Peloponnesian War and the plague to as few as 21,000. That so many of the ideas that ruled the Western world should have come from so few is another miracle of classic Greece. Alfred North Whitehead is not alone in describing the tradition of European philosophy as “a series of footnotes to Plato.”

And Plato’s work bore the indelible mark of this small Athenian community. The Way of Dialogue was a special way of seeking. It was the style of the Seeker in a community of the
spoken
word. We miss its meaning unless we grasp this peculiarly fertile role of the spoken word in classic Greece, which left the secondary role to writing. For us the thinker is a writer; for them the thinker was a speaker. As Socrates explained (in Plato’s
Phaedrus
), just as the painting, unlike the living person, cannot respond to questions, so too the written word is lifeless. But the spoken word, “an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner . . . can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.” “The living word of knowledge has a soul . . . of which the written word is properly no more than an image.” So the thinker “will not seriously incline to ‘write’ his thoughts ‘in water’ with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others” (
Phaedrus
).

A thinking person, then, must not take the written word too seriously, for he knows that the true life of ideas is not there. “In the garden of letters he will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write them down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other man who is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be the pastime in which his days are spent.”

Phaedrus.
A pastime, Socrates, as noble as the other is ignoble, the pastime of a man who can be amused by serious talk, and can discourse merrily about justice and the like.
Socrates.
True, Phaedrus. But nobler far is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness.

If Plato believed what he put in the mouth of Socrates, he must have felt embarrassment at having burdened later generations with a score of written dialogues besides more than a dozen Letters. Perhaps Plato saw his writings as a harmless pastime.

In his own person, in the Seventh Letter, Plato disowned any who would claim to have written down his teachings.

Thus much, at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries—that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself. (Seventh Letter, J. Harward trans.)

Plato lived in an age of transition in Athens when the written word was invading the world of learning. And this seems to confirm the warnings (reported by Plato) of the Egyptian god-king Thamus to Thoth, the inventor of writing. “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth . . .” (
Phaedrus
).

In the earlier great age of ancient Greek literature, writing had been mainly an aid to speaking. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
were written down to be memorized for singing or speaking. The “works” of the great tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—were dramas written to be witnessed in ritual competition. A pitifully small sample in writing survives of even the three great tragedians. Most of the Greek tragedians survive only in their names. We are misled because the “literature” that makes the ancient Greeks great for
us
survives as the written Word. So we
read
the words of Demosthenes that were intended to be
heard.

In Plato’s time the relative merits of the written and the spoken word were being debated. Herodotus and Thucydides had produced written histories, and Anaxagoras and Democritus had written works of philosophy. Thucydides apologizes and explains at the outset of his history that his written account can only approximate the evanescent spoken word. But he aims to provide “a possession for all time,” which he describes as if it were a new literary form. Reading aloud was still the common way of enjoying literature. The crucial event in Socrates’ intellectual life (reported by Plato in
Phaedo
)
,
which we have noted, was not his own reading from a book of Anaxagoras, but hearing someone read the book. The rhetorician and Sophist Alcidamas (fourth century B.C.), champion of Gorgias and the old school of Sophists, was still arguing that speeches should never be written down, even for delivery, but should always be improvised. We can better understand the Athenians’ impatience with the written word when we recall the cumbersome form of the written word in their time. The reader had to unroll the papyrus, seeking passages without aid of an index—in an unpunctuated text, without paragraphs or even spaces between words.

Athens, we must remember, was not governed by pieces of paper shuffled among bureaucrats. Government was by a live assembly of citizens, each of whom served as soldier and, in the democratic interludes, as judge and member of the governing body, all in his own person. The idea of
representative
government did not occur to them. In the sovereign assembly the citizens could debate, offer proposals, decide on war or peace, on taxation or other government measures. A smaller body of some five hundred, the
boule
prepared for these meetings, controlled foreign policy, supervised administration, and sat as a judicial body (as in Socrates’ case). These five hundred were chosen by lot for one year, but no one could serve more than twice in his lifetime. Most officials, too, were chosen by lot, and all were directly responsible to the Assembly or the Council (Boule). Participation in Athenian democracy meant being physically present, and saying your piece in your own voice. Being a citizen meant going frequently to the center of government, an automatic limitation on the size of the city-state.

Since political wisdom was assumed to emerge from these encounters of the spoken word, it is not surprising that Athenians thought the fires of philosophic wisdom might be ignited in the same way. “After much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself” (Seventh Letter). What the Assembly and the Boule were to Athenian politics, the Dialogue would be to Athenian philosophy.

It is significant but not surprising that none of Socrates’ writing has survived, since his way of seeking was in the living words. Yet all of Plato’s dialogues that we know about have survived in writing. And nothing is more revealing of Plato’s way of seeking than his chosen vehicle, the dialogue. Just as the exchanges of the living words of citizens would ensure the health of the city-state, so the converse of citizens in dialogue could promote the health of their souls. Socrates, a man of notable physical vigor, and an admirer of medical science, considered himself a doctor of the soul. His conversations were not in a lecture hall, but in an open-air Athenian athletic center. To the gymnasium (from the Greek word meaning “place to exercise naked”) Athenians came for the vigor of their bodies, filling rest periods with conversation. An ancient Greek gymnasium was usually an open court surrounded by columns, with places for running and jumping and a covered hall for wrestling and bathing. This legacy—athletics for body and mind—survived in the names of two great Athenian schools of philosophy, Plato’s “Academy” and Aristotle’s “Lyceum.” Both were names of gymnasium groves near Athens.

The playful interludes and interruptions in Plato’s dialogues remind us that the Way of Dialogue was exercising the mind at play. Plato believed that learning could not be forced, and that to be remembered, lessons should take the form of play. Man must be wary of taking himself too seriously. “May we not conceive each of us living beings to be a puppet of the Gods,” observes Plato’s Athenian Stranger in
The Laws,
“either their plaything only, or created with a purpose—which of the two we cannot certainly know.”

Far from being a textual exercise, the pursuit of philosophy, the love of wisdom—for Plato as for his teacher Socrates—was an athletic activity of minds in converse. The Dialogue as a written work seems to have been an invention of Plato, in whose hands this new literary form flourished. Plato is reputed to have written dramas, which he destroyed. And his dialogues are full of drama. His Socratic dialogues, as Werner Jaeger has observed, revealed “his desire to show the philosopher in the dramatic instant of seeking and finding, and to make the doubt and the conflict visible.” And the dialogue survived as a literary form for Seekers. Though less appropriate to Aristotle’s way of seeking, Aristotle’s own dialogues (most written before the death of Plato) were applauded. They survive only in fragments. The form was to be exploited by Plutarch and Lucian, and the Latin dialogue provided Cicero with the vehicle for some of his most durable ideas.

Plato is rare among the great figures of ancient Greek thought in that the whole of his works seem to have been preserved. Socrates (in Plato’s
Phaedrus
) explained that “lovers of wisdom, or philosophers” were worthy of their name only if they were able to defend their ideas “by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison.” “He who cannot rise above his own compilations and compositions, which he has been long patching and piecing, adding some and taking away some, may be justly called poet or speechmaker or law-maker.” But not a philosopher.

Plato’s Other-World of Ideas

In early life Plato had fancied himself in a political career, but he was turned off by the sordid politics of Athens in the era of the Peloponnesian Wars. He saw the Thirty Tyrants, including his relatives, try to involve his friend, the aged Socrates, in their crimes. When Socrates, “the most upright man of that day,” was sent to his death on fabricated charges, Plato determined to “withdraw from any connection with the abuses of the time.” And so he stifled his “strong impulse towards political life.”

What we know of Plato’s sallies into politics leaves us doubly glad that he saved himself from a longer career of frustration. His naive Sicilian adventure proved him a poor judge of people and of political opportunities. Still, he was not pipe-dreaming when he had thought of a political career. For his distinguished family and the Athenian tradition of civic participation would easily have offered him opportunities for leadership. But we have little reason to believe that he could have been another Pericles, or that he had the conspiratorial talents even to be an Alcibiades.