Free Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson

numbers in deciding when to fight a battle, the relative bravery of men in cavalry combat who are experts on horses, and those who are not, the use and misuse of boldness, the kind of bravery needed to pursue an argument, such as this one. Socrates then brings in Nicias, who defines bravery as “the science relating to dread and daring, both in war and in all other things.” Laches: “How absurdly he talks.... He is a trifler.” Socrates: “Let us then teach, but not revile him.” Then they get back to medicine, and on to agriculture, and the fear of dying, and prophecy, and many other matters. The discussion ends without conclusion or rancor but with an agreement to meet the next morning.
    Laches is a characteristic early dialogue, in which Socrates, not Plato, is in charge and animating the whole. When you try to condense and epitomize such a work, you realize how hard it is to understand the dialogue as a whole—that is, presenting a discussion in readable and comprehensible form, which had probably taken place over many hours, perhaps days, and had often been confused, running off at a tangent, irrelevant or at times pointless, and all this without recording devices or, most probably, secretarial help. We must assume that Plato shortened many of the exchanges, and rationalized, clarified, and sharpened the contributions, including Socrates’ own. The wonder is that he still emerges from these early discussions as a definite character and that his purpose in holding them can be grasped. Plato was a great artist, and at this stage in his career was still an artist aiming at verisimilitude.
    What, then, was Socrates’ purpose? It should be understood that there were in his day, have been ever since, and are likely to be in the future two fundamentally distinct kinds of philosophers. The first tells you what to think; the second, how to think. Socrates belongs to the second group, emphatically, though (as we have already seen and shall see again) he had opinions, too. He was interested in people, rather than ideas, and keenly anxious to discover how people think and whether they can be encouraged to think more clearly and usefully. His methods in cross-questioning his subjects demonstrate time and again what he is up to. He wants to show that on almost any topic—not least the big ones he tackles, like justice, friendship, courage, virtue as a whole—the received opinion is nearly always faulty and often wholly wrong. He asks a simple question, gets the usual answer, and then proceeds to show, using further questions springing from a vast repertoire of occupations, history both human and natural, and literature, that the usual answer not only fails to fit all the contingencies implicit in the question but also contradicts analytical reason at its highest or even common sense at its lowest. Socrates was always suspicious of the obvious, and he can nearly always show that the obvious is untrue, and the truth is very rarely obvious. The way he does this is the substance of the discussion and gives it its excitement and dynamism. Reaching a conclusion is not the object. The object, rather, is teaching the people to whom he is talking how to think and, not least, how to think for themselves.
    Each session, therefore, embodies a lesson, and the underlying assumption is that the lesson is learned only when the young men (or others) to whom he is talking can carry on in the same way, on other topics, when Socrates is not around to steer, coax, nag, bully, and guide them. What is particularly liberating about Socrates and is just as relevant today as in the fifth century B.C., is his hostility not just to the “right answer” as to the very idea of there being a right answer. He would have been particularly opposed to the modern system, used in every kind of bureaucratic form-filling and increasingly in examination papers at all levels of the education system, of asking people not to give their answers to a question, but