How To Be An Agnostic
controls his body. However, this seems a somewhat reductive
assessment of the situation. It would imply, Socrates continued:
I am sitting here because my body consists of bones and sinews,
because the bones are hard and are separated by joints, that the
sinews are such as to contract and relax, that they surround
the bones along with fl esh and skin which hold them together,
then as the bones are hanging in their sockets, the relaxation
and contraction of the sinews enable me to bend my limbs, and
that is the cause of my sitting here with my limbs bent.As might be suspected from this shaggy dog story of an expla-
nation, Socrates thinks it foolish. You can imagine the modern
equivalent from neuroscience of neurons, synapses and nerves
fi ring. Science fails to explain his situation in another sense
too. If the body’s chief aim is survival, as might seem reason-
able from a biological point of view, then it would suggest that
Socrates should have escaped prison. According to the scientifi c
worldview, his sinews and bones should have been miles away.
So why am I sat here, he asks again? The answer is only indi-
rectly to do with his body or mind. It is actually to do with
the fact that the Athenians have condemned him to death.
Moreover, Socrates could have escaped and lived. But he has
decided it is right to stay and die. In other words, Socrates is
sat in prison, awaiting the hemlock for a reason that science
does not begin to get a handle on. The ‘cause’ of his predica-
ment is fundamentally moral. He believes this is the right way
to die because it refl ects what he also believes is the right way
to live.
Socrates goes on, speculating that someone might retort, well
that may be true, but, at a basic level, you could not be sitting in
prison without your sinews and bones having moved in certain
ways. That is right, Socrates admits: ‘But surely to say that they
are the cause of what I do, and not that I have chosen the moral
course, is to speak very lazily and carelessly.’ A much better way
of putting it is to say that it is a condition of his sitting that