The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (4 page)

“What expectations I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities.” It was, he said, as if when someone asked why Socrates was in the courtroom they were told that it was because the muscles and bones of his legs had brought him there. This was only the
how
and not the
why.

This sense of frustration convinced Socrates that while physicists might have something to say about what materials the world was made of—air, ether, or water—and how these forces moved, they could not allay his uneasiness about the meaning of it all. “I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul. . . . I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried to apprehend them by the help of the senses. And I thought that I had better have recourse to the world of mind and seek there the truth of existence.” The best scientists of the day might entertain him with their accounts of the materials of the world and of the beginnings of things, but for Socrates that was not good enough. Socrates turned inward.

Having found that he “had no head for the natural sciences,” Socrates set off on his own way of Seeking—which would be the point of departure, the challenge for all Western philosophy. The miraculous ancient Greeks had already taken a long, slow journey from their glowing world of myth into the world of impersonal causes.

Socrates brought the search for meaning down from heaven to earth. While their myths still live, we also owe the Greeks our descent from Olympus. They marked our first steps on the earthly paths of science and philosophy. They led us from the affairs of Apollo and Venus to the chaste realm of elements and ideas. While Job was wrestling with the intentions of his one all-powerful God, a Greek poet, Hesiod (c. 750-675 B.C.), tending sheep on Mount Helicon heard the Muses call him to sing of the gods. His
Theogony
(Birth of the Gods) told tales of their birth, their sexual frolics and gory battles. He told how Uranus and Gaea had emerged from the primordial Chaos, how the Titans had risen. Kronos had castrated his father, Uranus, and out of his blood came the Furies, the Giants, and the Nymphs of the Ash Trees. From his genitals arose the beautiful Aphrodite. Zeus, born of Uranus and Gaea, enlisted the hundred-handed, fifty-headed monsters to defeat the rebellious Titans, and so he ruled Olympus.

The versatile ancient Ionians, on the islands and shores of western Asia Minor around the Aegean Sea and the eastern coasts of Greece, exercise—and tax—our imagination. To their two Ionian revolutions we owe the origins both of Western science and of Western philosophy. Astonishingly, too, these successive achievements of classical Greece not only were opposite to earlier ways of Greek thought but were quite contrary to each other.

The first Ionian revolution, pioneered by Thales of Miletus (born c. 624 B.C.), boldly dethroned the gods and replaced them with impersonal elements. Instead of the erotic adventures of Kronos and Uranus, Thales sought permanent substances and general causes. “What is the world made of?” For his new question and his answer Aristotle called him “founder” of a new type of philosophy. Celebrated as the first of the “physicists” seeking the basic elements of nature (in Greek,
physis
), Thales offered a simple sensible answer—“that the principle is water . . . getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist and kept alive by it . . . and from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things.” Among other “physicists,” Anaximander imagined a primal mass in everlasting motion, while Anaximenes conceived the principle to be air.

All of them imagined that the different kinds of matter were produced by heat, motion, and other natural processes. This was an epochal axiom of emerging science. Another potent and durable concept was supplied by Pythagoras, an emigrant from the Greek island of Samos to southern Italy (c. 530 B.C.). He saw a Kosmos made of number. The Pythagoreans charmed by their mystic notion of a living breathing universe, by the transmigration of souls, and their cosmology of musical harmony. They took a great leap from the mythic whimsical world of Hesiod to an orderly universe of causes. So they provided a rudimentary vocabulary for science. But only the rudiments.

In contrast to their other spectacular achievements, the ancient Greeks made remarkably little progress in the physical sciences. Though adept at the application of their knowledge to architecture, metallurgy, pottery, navigation, and astronomy, they left a legacy of obsolete theoretical sciences. Since they never divorced science from philosophy, their science remained, somehow, a search for meaning. And it never outlived its birth in philosophy—in the search for wisdom. They never recovered from their proud divorce of theory from practice. And in fact they created a grand enduring monument to that divorce. Plato’s theory of ideas treated the whole world of experience as somehow unreal, by contrast to the pure and changeless ideas, according to him the only real source of knowledge. This first Ionian revolution—from mythology to “physics”—proved a dead end. The Greek physicists had demanded too much too soon. And they were not the substantial source of modern science nor the enduring catalyst of the modern scientific spirit. Instead, they produced what A. E. Taylor calls one of the periodic bankruptcies of science.

A second Ionian revolution—more momentous for the future of a seeking mankind—found Socrates as its leader and symbol. He now made philosophy more intimately personal than ever before. He asked not only what but whether man knew. Socrates left no writing and no dogma. His radically human approach to philosophy was expressed in his life. His historic influence would be not in his answers but in his questions. And he would survive in dialogues—a new literary form of questions and answers, followed by more questions and answers toward still more questions. For him it was the spoken word, the encounter between living people, with the word as the catalyst of thought, that struck sparks. And the spoken word had an enticing elusiveness, not found in writing, which always invited scrutiny. Its meaning depended on memory, which also had a special meaning for him.

The influence of Socrates, then, was not in a school of philosophy but in his person. Historians of philosophy separate the “Pre-Socratics” from the Socratics not because of a new doctrine but for a new emphasis, a new kind of seeking. His iridescence for later Seekers came from his life and the circumstances of his death. Unlike Jesus, Socrates had the misfortune to have his life reported by literary persons—Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle—each with his own ax to grind.

So a halo of ambiguity surrounds the life of Socrates. And his life has become doubly intriguing, because, as Bertrand Russell observed, we really do not know how much we know about the real Socrates. Everything we know about him is reflected in the distorting mirror of another strong personality. The scholars’ “Socrates Problem” allows each of us to have our own Socrates. Beside the biographical memoir Plato had to invent a new literary form—the dialogue—to communicate the meaning of Socrates. No writings of Socrates survived, and his meaning would live in reports of his spoken words.

Plato deftly revealed the suspense of the philosopher’s quest. We are told that Plato began not as a philosopher but as a dramatist. He had written tragedies before he met Socrates, but, according to tradition, he burned them after he came under the influence of Socrates. Then he used his dramatic talent to interpret a philosopher whose message could be carried only in the spoken word. For a philosopher whose mission was the discovery of ignorance, the Socratic dialogues provided a convenient vehicle. The drama of the living search in Plato’s Socratic dialogues was somehow not diminished by their uniformly inconclusive conclusions.

Another subtle Socratic paradox was latent in the dialogues—the idealized art of conversation. Socrates himself repeatedly denied the role of teacher, and he never bores us with the wagging didactic finger. But he did boast the role of midwife. “And like the midwives, I am barren, and the reproach which is often made against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself, is very just—the reason is, that the god compels me to be a midwife, but does not allow me to bring forth. . . . But to me and the god they owe their delivery. . . . many of them in their ignorance . . . have gone away too soon; and have not only lost the children of whom I had previously delivered them by an ill bringing up, but have stifled whatever else they had in them by evil communications.” The very midwifely (“maieutic”) technique by which Socrates revealed the general ignorance suggested that truths lay undiscovered within each person being questioned. So the Socratic technique implied a latent wisdom in everyone.

* * *

There was a real Socrates, born in Athens about 469 B.C. His father probably was a prosperous stonemason or sculptor, and Socrates himself may have begun learning the sculptor’s craft. His early years seem to have been conventional enough. He served as a hoplite, or member of the heavy-armed infantry. These were citizens not wealthy enough to provide themselves with cavalry horses, but able to afford the heavy body armor that we associate with the Greek warrior—a helmet with nasal and cheek pieces, a breastplate and greaves (for the leg below the knee). His chief defense was a heavy bronze shield, circular or elliptical, attached to the left arm. For weapons he carried a short straight iron sword and a nine-foot spear ready for thrusting. Burdened with this heavy armor, well-drilled hoplites in proper formation could resist archers or cavalry. Fighting for Athens in the Great Peloponnesian War, Socrates acquired a reputation for endurance and courage.

It is hard to imagine the squat and diffident Socrates known to historians of philosophy in this belligerent macho role. But it was his feats on the battlefield that first brought him a citywide reputation. “I was with him in the retreat,” his companion Laches reported of him at Delium in Boeotia in 424, “and if everyone were like Socrates, our city would never have come to disaster.” During the expedition to Potidea he saved the life of Alcibiades, who would play a troublesome role for Socrates in the chaotic politics of his maturity. Socrates reputedly refused to take part in politics, for holding office, he said, would require sacrifice of his principles.

As a citizen he showed conspicuous courage. In 406, as a member of the Boule, or legislative council, he alone stood out against popular demand that some accused generals be tried en masse instead of individually, as the law required. Membership on this council was not a political office but only a routine citizens’ duty. Again two years later when the oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants tried to implicate Socrates in their acts of judicial murder, his friends went along, but at risk of his life Socrates stood firm. His independence then would have been fatal if there had not been a counterrevolution the next year restoring the democracy. And this same independence of spirit would lead to his trial in 399 B.C. for introducing strange gods and corrupting youth.

How did the city’s admired model soldier become its insufferable gadfly—and martyr to the independent mind? To answer this interesting question we have no solid autobiographical evidence, and only the tendentious accounts of envious or adoring philosophers and historians. Still, despite the confusing evidence, there is incandescent coherence to the legendary Socrates. We, lay newcomers to the “Problem of Socrates,” must marvel at how the disparate rays of contradictory testimony collect into a brilliant beacon illuminating the philosopher’s endless quest.

If there ever was a man with a vocation, it was surely Socrates, yet how or when he heard the call we do not know. There is no evidence of his being a member of any unorthodox religious sect. But there were legends of his occasionally sensing a divine sign (what he called “the customary sign”) of his daimonion. There is ample evidence that he was not governed only by the prosaic syllogism. When it might have incriminated him, in his final speech to the court, Socrates recalled his periodic mystic experience.

I experience a certain divine or daemonic something, which in fact Meletus has caricatured in the indictment. It began in childhood and has been with me ever since, a kind of voice, which whenever I hear it always turns me back from something I was going to do, but never urges me to act. This is what has prevented me from taking part in politics. (Plato,
Apology,
Jowett trans.)

Among the remarkable qualities of Socrates, Alcibiades recalled that Socrates was never seen drunk, that he had an astonishing fortitude and endurance.

One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon—there he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the evening after supper, some Ionians out of curiosity . . . brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way. (Plato,
The Symposium,
Jowett trans.)

Socrates himself seems to have put great store by this divine inner voice. For at the end of the
Apology,
after his condemnation and his refusal to request a change in the penalty or be smuggled out of the country, he reassures his friends. “Hitherto, the divine faculty of which the internal oracle is the source has constantly been in the habit of opposing me even about trifles. . . . But the oracle made no sign of opposition, either when I was leaving my house in the morning, or when I was on my way to the court, or while I was speaking, at anything I was going to say. . . . It is an intimation that what has happened to me is a good, and that those who think that death is an evil are in error.”