Read Online Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson - Free Book Online

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