SOCRATES made his mark by standing around a rock, questioning people. His obsession was the nature of truth, of wisdom, of the good and virtuous life. It was a focus unsullied and undeflected by any desire for money, fame, or material reward. The truth was found by the questioning, the constant questioning of every observation, every premise. To Socrates, knowledge was not something you would merely sit back and absorb, like some mental sponge, but was to be continually tested and questioned. Not as efficient, but more stimulating, and it was the question that provided the motive and measure of truth.
"SOCRATES is a very difficult subject for the historian. There are many men concerning whom it is certain that very little is known, and other men concerning whom it is certain that a great deal is known; but in the case of Socrates the uncertainty is as to whether we know very little or a great deal. He was undoubtedly an Athenian citizen of moderate means, who spent his time in disputation, and taught philosophy to the young, but not for money, like the Sophists. He was certainly tried, condemned to death, and executed in 399 B. C., at about the age of seventy. He was unquestionably a well-known figure in Athens, since Aristophanes caricatured him in The Clouds. But beyond this point we become involved in controversy. Two of his pupils, Xenophon and Plato.
Where they disagree, some believe the the one, some the other, some neither. In such a dangerous dispute, I shall not venture to take sides, but I will set out briefly the various points of view.
Let us begin with Xenophon, a military man, not very liberally endowed with brains, and on the whole conventional in his outlook. Xenophon is painted that Socrates should have been accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth; he contends that, on the contrary, Socrates was eminently pious and had a thoroughly wholesome effect upon those who came under his influence. His ideas, it appears, so far from being subversive, where rather dull and commonplace. This defence goes too far, since it leaves the hostility to Socrates unexplained. As Burnet says (Thales to Plato, p. 149): "Xenophon's defence of Socrates is too successful. He would never have been put to death if he had been like that. "
There has been a tendency to think that everything Xenophon says must be true, because he had not the wits to think of anything untrue. This is very invalid line of argument. A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he understands. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy. We cannot therefore accept what Xenophon says if it either involves any difficult point in philosophy or is part of an argument to prove that Socrates was unjustly condemned."
