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 opinions. 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
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 opinions. 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
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