Socrates - A Man for Our Times

"My voice and my reason agreed against politics." p. 79 "Socrates occupied himself with ethics, and most of all with nature as a whole." Aristotle Wisdom consists in knowing one's own ignorance. p.83 Socrates' "endless ironizing and jesting." Socrates possessed the ability to slip deftly and almost imperceptibly from seriousness to laughter and back again --the essence of sophisticated communication.p87 "I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. But follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me. I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can." Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice How Socrates' mind worked: courtesy, patience, sensitivity, and calmness, lighthearted flexibility and high seriousness. p.88 Two fundamentally distinct kinds of philosophers: first,those who tell you what to think, and second, those who tell you how to think. Socrates belongs to the second group. He wants to show that on almost any topic...the received opinion is nearly always faulty and often wholly wrong. p.91 The object is teaching the people to whom he is talking how to think and, not least, how to think for themselves. p. 92 "A healthy body is the greatest of blessings." "Leisure is the most valuable of possessions." "Nothing is to be said in favor of riches and high birth, which are easy roads to evil." " ...we know from the business of horse training that owners often like to pick a difficult animal, which poses more interesting problems." "You cannot step twice into the same river." Heraclitus The Obscure ...it could be said that Socrates was the first man in history, in a formal trial, to fall victim of guilt by association. He had been a friend of both Critias and Alcibiades, and though he denied having taught either of them, he would not repudiate the friendship to satisfy the court. So he was judged guilty. The verdict, considering the number of jurors, was a narrow one. A total of 280 jurors voted for condemnation, 220 for acquittal: a majority of 60. p.165 Socrates made a a defiant counterproposal. p.166 Socrates made a grievous misjudgment....Eighty of the jury switched their votes from Socrates to his accusers, and he was condemned to death by a hugely increased majority --360 to 140. p.167 The final dialogue,Phaedo, named after one of his closest followers, who was with him in his last hours, concerns death and the immortal soul. It is Plato's finest work and calls forth all the resources of Socrates' sinuous intellect and the subtlety and beauty of the ancient Greek language. p.173 Socrates told those listening to him that the true philosopher has no fear of death or desire to resist it, because he is willing to die as an affirmation of the principles by which he has striven to live. The philosopher, by whom he meant all those anxious to live and do wisely, knows that after death, the soul of the just man will be in the care of a god who values justice above all things and therefore will ensure that the still living soul of the dead man will be comforted and made secure. Death, then, is not to be feared but to be welcomed as the natural end to our life on earth and the beginning of something infinitely more glorious. pp.175-176 ...Socrates' confidence in the survival of the soul and in the emotional, intellectual and spiritual richness that awaits the souls of the just is so calm, serene, pure, and magisterial as to carry all before it. Socrates does not necessarily remove all the doubts in the mind of the skeptic about the soul's immortality and the afterlife. What he does do, however, is convince us of his own belief in both and of the steadfastness with which he approaches his own departure into the unknown. The supreme lesson of Socrates' life, it seems to me, is that doing justice according to the best of your knowledge gives you a degree of courage that no inbred or trained valor could possibly equal. If there was one particular virtue Socrates possessed, it was courage, shown in all kinds of circumstances, from the battlefiled to the courtroom, and now in his last hour in the sentence of death. Thanks to his incisive arguments in favor of the immortal soul and the life waiting for it after the body departed --arguments that expressed his own total inner convicction --Socrates' own spirits rose and rose during his last hours, until the time death was imminent, they overflowed in a great, staedy, copious fountain of optimism and expectation. He embraced death not as a punishmentbut as a reward, it culminated, crowned, beatified, and made luminous his entire life. As dusk fell, the discussion came to its natural end, and the jailer arrived to announce that Socrates must now take poison....This was composed of hemlock, though Plato does not explicitly say so, and it may have been a mixture more certain to produce death quickly, surely, and painlessly than a simple distillation of the noxious plant. Socrates' last words: "I can still pray that my departure from this world will be beneficent. So I do pray, and I hope my prayer will be granted." With these words he drank the cup, in one long swallow, quite calmly, and with no sign of repugnance. "I planned to die in a revent silence....Pray, be calm, and brave." pp.176-180 Socrates born in Athens, Greece in 470 BC. Ezra, priest and prophet, the leading intellectual among the exiled Jewish community in Persia, born in 491 B.C.(5th or 4th of B.C.E.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra Confucius in Shantung, China in 551 B.C. Socrates - A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2011)