Saint Socrates?

Why did Socrates write nothing? It’s a question that fascinates me. It’s not just that nothing in his own hand survives: we can be confident that he was wary of the written word, because it’s a suspicion with which Plato also struggled. So why? To us, the written word is the lifeblood of thought, and surely Socrates thought highly of that?

Socrates’ concern appears to have been that the written word distracts us from what was for him the primary focus of philosophy, namely life itself. He preferred to talk rather than to read, since conversation emerges out of you, whereas a text asks to be let into you. If your motto for life is ‘Know thyself’, then writing puts the cart before the horse. ‘Get thee a life’, Socrates might retort to the scholar stuck at a desk.

There’s another striking aspect to this aversion. We still remember Socrates. His presence persists in the way Western culture respects argument, principles, sacrifice and (more or less) philosophy. The historical centrality of Socrates, 2,400 years on, is so familiar as to be almost commonplace, which is remarkable, and doubly so when you think that he left no texts. Where would Freud be without The Interpretation of Dreams, Marx without The Communist Manifesto, or Joseph Smith without The Book of Mormon? They would have been forgotten had they not put pen to paper (and you might think the better for that). But Socrates did not write, and yet we remember him. How did he achieve that feat?

He shares this distinction with a tiny handful of others, Jesus and the Buddha being the two obvious examples. The Bible once records Jesus doodling in the sand, although the wind blew his words away. The incident is like a tease: what would Christians give to know the content of his scribbles? The Buddha’s sayings and talks were written down by his disciples, but he himself, following his momentous meditation under a bodhi tree, appears to have concluded that writing was a distraction. One wonders what Gautama Siddhartha would have made of the thousand embellishments that are now part of the Buddhist canon – hindrance or help?

Why we remember these three is no doubt partly due to the irregularity of history. Maybe there were others like the Buddha, Jesus and Socrates who were forgotten, although that doesn’t seem very likely when you think it through. They had converts and followers who could develop their message so that it informed and shaped civilizations. They led lives that possessed a spirit and energy which spoke of what humanity could achieve, and must have touched something deep in people. Conversely, they were prophetic enough to make enemies too – a sure sign they were onto something. All three ending up being rejected: India refused the Buddha’s reforms and remained Hindu; Jesus and Socrates were both executed by the state.

For the religious figures, life itself was primary, and the medium was the message. This is celebrated in the stories that are told and retold about the lives of these founding figures, and also of the saints and bodhisattvas who subsequently embodied the original charisma. So if such reverent biographies are thought extraneous to philosophy today, because it is not lives that are studied and honored, but logic, it was not always so. In fact, until the birth of modernity, the lives of the sages, not only the saints, were freely rehearsed alongside their systems of thought. Their qualities were captured in portraits; their stories portrayed in stained glass. “I consider the lives and fortunes of the great teachers of mankind no less carefully than their ideas and doctrines,” said Michel de Montaigne in the sixteenth century.

It started with the image of Socrates himself, particularly in the symbol of Socrates the martyr: unjustly condemned, bravely accepting the sentence, he confirmed the virtue of the powerless who similarly die nobly for their beliefs. Whether or not the image is justified is another question entirely – what happened when Socrates stood before the jury was contested from early on. This is presumably why Plato wrote not one but three dialogues exploring Socrates’ last days. But the appeal of the image of Socrates drinking the hemlock as he calmly discourses with his friends stems not from its historical accuracy. The image is archetypal. It speaks to a human ideal, which is why it sticks.

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