Free Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson Page B

approach.
    Well, then: Socrates was a sensible, practical, down-to-earth man, interested in usefulness, not perfection, and inclined to make allowances for the infinite variety of human nature. He was not a poet but a master of spoken prose. Plato was a poet. Worse, a frustrated poet. He was in parts of his being a visionary, a mystic, a transcendentalist. He believed in the transmigration of souls. He thought the soul was a repository of inherent knowledge, which could be rediscovered. He believed in transcendent forms as opposed to individual objects. Socrates believed in none of these notions.
    The great Socrates scholar Gregory Vlastos, who has, in my opinion, written the best book on the subject, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge, reprinted 1997), has listed ten key ways in which the real Socrates differed from the artificial creation labeled Socrates who increasingly figures in Plato’s works. First, Socrates is exclusively a moral philosopher. Second, Socrates does not believe at all in “forms” or “recollections of knowledge.” Third, Socrates insists he has no knowledge/wisdom and goes on seeking it eclectically. Fourth, Socrates has no complicated, tripartite notion of the soul, composed of rationality, passion, and cravings. Socrates takes a simple view of the soul, immortal and unified, which Christians share. Fifth, Socrates is not interested in mathematical sciences, except where they are obviously essential, as in land surveying, and neither possesses nor claims any scientific expertise. Sixth, his view of philosophy is populist. Seventh, he has no political theory as such. He is often critical of the way Athens is run and its manner of doing things, but he prefers it and its laws to those of any other state. Eighth, he rejects homosexual love except at a superficial level. Ninth, Socrates sees piety as service to a rigorously ethical deity, and his personal religion is practical, expressed in action. Finally his philosophical method is to pursue truth by refuting propositions he induces his interlocutors to put forward: He never departs from this strategy, and when he is presented as doing so, he is not Socrates but a hybrid creature I call Platsoc.
    On the other hand, the fact that in the course of the dialogues and other writings of Plato, Socrates the man is gradually replaced by Platsoc, or Socrates the ventriloquist’s dummy, should not prevent anyone interested in what Socrates really thought from reading the entire corpus. In many places Socrates and Plato are inextricably intermingled. For instance, in the dialogue Gorgias , named after a famous Sophist from Leontini in Sicily, Socrates asks Gorgias to define what he specialized in teaching, rhetoric. Gorgias was notorious for saying a well-trained rhetorician or legal pleader could find plausible arguments to support any case, however flimsy, in law or politics. He himself taught pupils to speak in short, almost symmetrical phrases, and to balance theses and antitheses in a kind of pulsating rhythm, to play on words and to have audible echoes in the course of a plea. In short, he made a speech seem and sometimes sound like a piece of music. He took great pride in his skills and had some of the style and arrogance we associate today with a highly successful and ingenious advertising executive. He answers Socrates by saying rhetoric is one of the key human activities because the essence of a successful public leader or statesman is not so much knowing what is to be done as the ability to persuade people to do it. You can tell a first-class orator by his gift of getting people to do something even if it is manifestly unjust. Gorgias then retires, being replaced by his pupil Polus, and Socrates then uses his cross-examination technique to get Polus to agree with a proposition that Gorgias would certainly have rejected: that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it, and that if one has done a wicked thing it is better for